He had found in his own cave a small disc of black obsidian that had a cross grooved into its surface. His daughter, he wrote, had shown it to an archeologist from Bordeaux who said it was fifty thousand years old and certifiably Thal. Despite knowing its impressive heritage, Bruno had no plans to submit it to official state registries. He would not allow bureaucrats to requisition the beautiful palm-sized obsidian acrostic and relegate it to a museum for tourists, such as the hideous “cité troglodyte” up in the Périgord, with its Disnified prehistory. He said the evidence and study of our ancestors must be protected from such outcomes.
We need scholarship of prehistoric art, Bruno said, but mindful scholarship, and we do not have mindful scholarship.
In its absence, he could deduce the following precepts, pertaining to ancient art:
—The Homo sapiens was a copier. Despite his virtuosity in drawing animals and scenes of hunting, he depicted what was already there.
—The Neanderthal was a conjurer, and this act, Bruno said, to bring into being something new, was the fundamental kernel of true art.
To render the unseen seen: that is what an artist does, Bruno said.
And so the Neanderthals were artists. While the Homo sapiens were absolutely, definitely not artists.
They were frauds.
OUR HOTEL, THE RICHELIEU, was not a luxury establishment but happened to be, unlike all the other hotels in this part of Marseille, on the correct side of the Corniche—the waterfront side. The crew for Lucien’s film had taken over the place.
Lucien’s cinematographer and closest collaborator, Serge, and Serge’s Italian boyfriend, Vito, were there when we arrived, but our rooms were not yet ready. Serge sat in dark glasses on a chair in the lobby.
I’d established something like a friendship with Vito, who was an extrovert, unlike Serge. As the two partners of the two artists, Vito and I had in common leisure time and a jokey attitude about the self-seriousness of our boyfriends.
Vito didn’t do much. He was studying to be a Jungian analyst. Serge was the essential one. Our friendship had been forged from a shared understanding that we were inessential and therefore free. Vito didn’t know anything about me, but I used aspects of my real self with him, and this came as a relief. I genuinely liked him.
I said I was hungry, and Vito chimed in that he was too. He wanted to go to the nearby Chez McDo’, as he announced to Serge, who would never use that nickname for McDonald’s, or eat at one.
“They’ve got a new ad campaign,” Vito said as we walked in. The walls of this McDonald’s were covered in slogans about tradition and family and togetherness. “We should take notes for our husbands.”
(Despite acting like they were riding the crest of the new wave, Lucien and Serge accepted a lot of commercial jobs in between feature films.)
A woman with platinum upswept hair and diamond earrings sat eating french fries, daubing each slender fry in ketchup as if dipping a sable brush into a dollop of red paint.
“Oh my God,” Vito whispered, squeezing my arm, “it’s Zsa Zsa Gabor.”
“That’s just a Russian lady,” I said. “They all look like that.”
Vito announced that I had trampled on his dream.
I told him that’s what dreams are for.
We brought our food back to the hotel. Serge complained that we made the whole lobby smell like McDonald’s.
Lucien was more annoyed than I was about the rust-colored splotches on the walls and curtains of the room they gave us at the Hotel Richelieu.
The splotches were the dried blood of previous guests, who had been bitten by mosquitoes and had smashed them.
Mosquitoes tormented Lucien. They have never bothered me. I’ve always attributed this to character, and to the idea that it’s sensitive people who get targeted. But the fact that mosquitoes are interested in some and not others might have to do with antigens and blood type, rather than weakness and strength.
Then again, it could be that blood type is connected to character. In Japan they have a system of personality traits that go with each blood type, which seems more interesting to me than the astrology that some depend on—women, usually—for life guidance. Blood personalities were developed by a professor in 1930s Japan. The Japanese military took up his theories as useful for discipline. Later, those who read about their own blood traits began to exhibit those traits by the power of suggestion. That professor either made the whole thing up or was inspired by the Nazis. In Japan there is still a problem with bias and judgment of blood type in the competition for jobs and romantic partners. A number one bestselling book there is called A Handbook for Blood Type A. Most Japanese people, thirty-eight percent, are type A. I’m O. Our handbook is not number one, but O has some winning traits: ambitious, intelligent, passionate, and independent. But also cold, arrogant, and conniving.
I opened the windows of the hotel room, which swung on hinges to reveal a panorama of misty blue, a horizon line intersected by a white ferry that flashed in the sun. Its horn sounded, a basso profundo that filled the room. Something about that horn, the white ferry splicing the blue, the huge window, sea air stirring the bloodstained curtains, which swelled like apparitions, the sound of water lapping the rocks of the jetty, in the ferry’s wake, it all gave me a sense of calm, a feeling that everything was going to work out. I’d invested more than a year in this job, and the critical time was now: the next six weeks.
I lay down on the bed and opened the Marseille crime novel on which Lucien was basing his movie.
“This book,” I said, “is written in short. Very short. Sentences. Pieces of thought. Phrases. Some, just a word. A single word.”
Lucien was trying to assemble one of those little plug-in mosquito things.
Those don’t work, I didn’t say. Instead, I read out loud from the crime novel.
“ ‘She tightened her robe. The robe that covered her body. The body he wanted. Under the robe. He pushed aside that thought. A thought that was new, but also old. Timeless. To want. To resist. So many memories. From before. Her smell. Her hair. Her skin. He reached under the pillow. He touched what was there. The gun. She’d left it. For him. And he knew. It was time. Time to kill.’ ”
“That’s why it’s ideal for adaptation,” Lucien said. “The language doesn’t carry abstract meaning. It tells you where the action goes.”
Lucien showered and lay down, said he was taking a nap. I put on my bathing suit and a pair of shorts, intending to walk over to the nearby beach, the Plage des Catalans, take in the scene, and read some encrypted messages that had just arrived.
Lucien intervened, put his hands around my thigh.
I tried to pull away. He did not let go.
“I thought you were going to sleep.”
I was never in the mood to have sex with him, so mood wasn’t the issue. I tried to limit sex with him to times when there was no escape from it.
“I am,” he replied, as he bent down to remove my sandals.
Couples and their routines.
We’d been together only a few months, and he knew nothing about me. He was in a couple with a woman who didn’t exist. But still, we, they, that couple, she and he, they had their way of doing things. The removal of shoes was one of Lucien’s.
