Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [77]
who came after. NEANDER: That's what you think. Before that there's my dad… INTERVIEWER: Not only him, but… NEANDER: My gran … INTERVIEWER: And before that? Concentrate now, Mr Neander: your gran's gran!
NEANDER: No.
INTERVIEWER: What do you mean, no?
NEANDER: The bear! interviewer: The bear! A totemic ancestor! As you have heard, Mr Neander considers the forefather of his family tree to have been a bear, no doubt the animal-totem taken as the symbol of his clan, his family!
NEANDER: Your family you mean! First there's the bear, then the bear goes and eats up gran… Then there's me, then I go and I kill the bear… Then I eat up the bear.
INTERVIEWER: Allow me to explain to our listeners for a moment, Mr Neander, the valuable information you are giving us. First there's the bear! how well you express it, asserting with great clarity the precedence of raw nature, of the biological world, which forms the backdrop, isn't that right, Mr Neander?, the lush backdrop to the advent of man, and it is when man steps so to speak into the limelight of history that the great adventure of our struggle with nature begins, a nature that is first our enemy, then is gradually subdued to our will, a process lasting thousands of years that Mr Neander has evoked so powerfully in the dramatic scene of the bearhunt, a myth almost of the founding of our history…
NEANDER: It was me was there. Not you. There was the bear. Where I go the bear comes. The bear is all around where I am, if not, not.
INTERVIEWER: Right. It seems that our Mr Neander's mental horizon goes no further than that part of the world that lies in his immediate field of perception, excluding any representation of events occurring beyond that in time or space. The bear is where I see the bear, he says, if I don't see it, it's not there. This is certainly a limitation one would wish to bear in mind during the rest of the interview, taking care not to ask him questions that exceed, isn't that right?, the intellectual capacities of a still rudimentary stage in the cycle of evolution …
NEANDER: That's you. What are you talking about? What do you know? Food, right? It's the same food I'm after and the bear's after. The best at catching the quick animals is me; the best at catching the big animals is the bear. Right? And then either it's the bear takes them off me or me takes them off the bear. Right? interviewer: Perfecdy clear, I agree, Mr Neander, no need to get worked up. It's a case, how can we say, of symbiosis between two species, one species of the genus homo and the other of the genus ursus; or rather, what we have is a biological equilibrium, if you like: in the midst of the ruthless ferocity of the fight for survival, a tacit understanding is established…
NEANDER: And then, either it's the bear kills me, or me that kills him, the bear…
INTERVIEWER: There we are, the fight for survival flares up again, the best adapted wins, not just the strongest that is -and Mr Neander, despite his rather short legs, is very muscular - but above all the most intelligent, and Mr Neander, despite the concave curve to his almost horizontal forehead, displays surprising mental faculties … Here is the question I've been wanting to ask you, Mr Neander: was there a moment when you feared the human race might go under? You understand me, Mr Neander, might disappear from the face of the earth?
NEANDER: My gran … My gran on the ground …
INTERVIEWER: Mr Neander goes back to this episode that must have been a, let's say, traumatizing experience in his past … Or rather: in our past.
NEANDER: The bear on the ground … I ate the bear… Me: not you.
INTERVIEWER: Precisely, that's another thing I wanted to ask: was there a moment when you had the clear impression of the human race's having won, the certainty that it would be the bear that would die out, not us, because nothing could stop our onward march, and that you Mr Neander would one day deserve our gratitude, I mean the gratitude of a humanity that has reached the highest point of its evolution, a gratitude I now extend to you today from