Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [76]
I make a sign for her to shush and point down with my hand in the air as though to warn her that the spell could break any second, then I make a circular gesture as if to say it's all the same, and what I mean is that through me a black Pluto is reaching up from the underworld to carry off, through her, a blazing Persephone, because that's how that ruthless devourer of living substances, the Earth, starts her cycle over again.
She laughs, revealing two pointed young incisors. She's uncertain. The search for oil deposits in California has brought to light skeletons of animal species extinct these fifty thousand years, including a sabre-toothed tiger, doubtless attracted by a stretch of water lying on the surface of a black lake of pitch which sucked the animal in and swallowed it up.
But the short time granted me is over: the flow stops, the pump is still, the embrace is broken off. There's a deep silence, as if all engines everywhere had ceased their firing and the wheeling life of the human race had stopped. The day the earth's crust reabsorbs the cities, this plankton sediment that was humankind will be covered by geological layers of asphalt and cement until in millions of years' time it thickens into oily deposits, on whose behalf we do not know.
I look into her eyes: she doesn't understand, perhaps she's only just beginning to get scared. Well, I'll count to a hundred: if the silence goes on, I'll take her hand and we'll start to run.
Neanderthal Man
INTERVIEWER: I'm speaking from the picturesque Neander valley, near Diisseldorf. Around me lies a contorted landscape of calcareous rocks. My voice resounds against the walls both of natural caves and man-made quarries. It was during work on these stone quarries that in 1856 one of the oldest inhabitants of this valley was found, someone who settled here about thirty-five thousand years ago. Neanderthal Man: that was how they agreed to call him, after the valley. I have come to Neanderthal to interview him. Mr Neander — I will address him with this simplified appellation throughout our interview - Mr Neander, as you may know, is somewhat diffident by nature, bad-tempered even, partly it's his old age, and he doesn't seem particularly impressed by the international fame he enjoys. Nevertheless he has politely agreed to answer a few questions for our programme. Here he comes now, with his characteristic rather lolloping gait, looking me over from beneath the prominent arch of his eyebrows. This immediately prompts me to ask him a somewhat indiscreet question out of a curiosity doubtless shared by many of our listeners. Mr Neander, did you expect to become so famous? I mean: as far as we know, you never did anything remarkable in your life: then all of a sudden you found you were a very important person. How do you explain this?
NEANDER: That's what you say. Were you there? Me yes, I was there. You no.
INTERVIEWER: Agreed, you were there. Well, do you feel that is sufficient?
NEANDER: I was already there.
INTERVIEWER: That's a useful point I think. Mr Neander's great merit isn't so much the simple fact of being there, but of having already been there, having been there then, before so many others. Precedence is a quality no one would wish to deny Mr Neander. However much… even before that, ks further research has demonstrated - and as you yourself can confirm, isn't that right, Mr Neander? — we find traces, many traces and on a number of continents, of human beings, ye^, already human humans …
NEANDER: My dad …
INTERVIEWER: Right back as far as a million years before…
NEANDER: My gran … interviewer: Hence your precedence, Mr Neander, no one can deny you, though it would seem to be a relative precedence:
let's say that you are the first… NEANDER: Before you anyway… interviewer: Agreed, but that's not the point. What I mean is that you were the first to be believed to be the first by