Thus the man and the woman, always in peril, collaborate simultaneously in the double task of their preservation, and profit from one another; together, they are four eyes, four ears and four nostrils; they are reciprocal and mutual; they live in parallel; they are a pair rather than a couple.
X. The First Words
Being two, they talked.
The need to communicate stimulated the normal exercise of a function that was possible; habit took hold of it without either of them having any notion of it. The cry that emerged from the beast, by virtue of being repeated identically, gained a precise meaning and became a word; four or five of those various cries, and the couple had, unwittingly, invented language.
The woman spoke first. Being the weaker, she was more often alarmed; the hunter, always in quest of some prey, forgot her. Lost in the dense thickets, she emitted a timid and prolonged bleat from the depths of her throat:
“Daâh…âh...”
That bleak cry of appeal remained the only word in the human language for some time:
“Daâh...”
The other sometimes heard it, but scarcely made any response, impatient with the clamor, which warned the prey and caused it to flee. Then she repeated:
“Daâh...”
And little by little, Daâh became the name of the first human.
When the latter consented to reveal his presence, he barked vigorously:
“Hock!”
The imperious monosyllable simply signified: “Here!”
More usual from day to day, however, that brutal announcement of advance ended up signifying the creature to whom it was addressed, with the result that they both had names, without even knowing that they had given them to one another, and in a time when their solitude dispensed them from differentiation.
“Hock!”
The name of the female sounded rudely, having been given by the man.
“Daâh...”
The name of the man, on the contrary, had an almost caressant music, being the invention of the woman.
Educated henceforth to listen to one another, they did not take long to express phonetically the two needs that constituted the double preoccupation of their life: the concerns of eating and of self-defense suggested the two onomatopoeias of mastication and alarm. To announce hunger or offer nourishment, they said:
“Mâh!”
To signal the approach of danger, they said:
“Heûh!”
To those four primordial sounds a fifth was subsequently added; they found it convenient to indicate something that was neither a food nor a threat:
“Ta!”
The word that served them, with a gesture of the hand or the finger, to indicate the location of things had the subsidiary indication of the things themselves; everything was called “Ta,” without distinction, and by turns.
As for the male, he had two war cries of his own. When he launched himself into battle, in order to be more formidable and also to give himself courage, he howled:
“Haâh!”
As he landed his blow, he growled through his closed mouth:
“Han!”
That was all. In addition, they used gestures, and their tongues remained tied, as their thoughts remained obscure.
XI. Exodus
Through the immense virgin forest they plunged ahead, drowned in the verdure. The grass rose up to their necks, the branches scraped their foreheads or striped their breasts. The man cleared the path for them, ready to attack. When he raced away in pursuit of prey, the woman launched forward in her turn, maintaining the double swing of her long teats, and ran after the hunter, not so much to help him as for fear of losing him.
“Daâh... Daâh...”
Her cry of distress was drawn out lamentably between the boles of the trees, rising toward the arches of branches, and the frisson of a sacred fear filled the vaults of the solitude.
“Daâh... Daâh...”
The imprudence of shouting like that attracted malevolent beasts, but the woman preferred anything to the horror of finding herself alone again, as before and forever, in the hostility of the living wilderness.
“Daâh!”
When she had found him she laughed her abrupt laughter, which split the entire width of her face, and she blew heavily, straight ahead, as if to spit out the rest of her anguish.
There was nowhere they could rest; no refuge was durable. Sometimes, exhausted by fatigue or malady, they tried to crawl under some thick bush and shelter there; they twisted or broke branches, forming around their two bodies a kind of nest, the opening of which they sealed with interlaced branches, but as soon as dusk fell, the wild beasts scented the couple and came prowling around; it was necessary to leave. Furthermore, a fixed dwelling would not have contented those nomads, too nervous and too anxious, by dint of insecurity, they were too curious and too mobile to stay anywhere for long.
They set out once again under the perpetual downpour. They did not know that it could ever stop, except for rare brief intervals, and did not imagine that the world might be different, since they always saw it as their eyes gazed upon it. They accepted it without judging.
Always keeping to the heights of the plateaux, they went along the left bank of the Seine, pushing westwards, like the river they were imitating, or like the quotidian Suns.
Perhaps they hoped that, by following those successive stars, they would end up reaching the land where the disappeared globes assembled, along with light and warmth—the good light that reveals dangers and the good heat that aids one to live! Perhaps they were searching, without knowing what they were searching for, moved by a need to act and be elsewhere, by an appetite for wellbeing, carried away by an animal dream of encountering some region where the days were less difficult, the nights less tormented, the predators less numerous, the reptiles less perfidious and the insects less voracious. They did not know themselves. Their dream did not take comfort in any confidence or any expectation; on the other hand, nor did it involve any disillusionment.
Hock and Daâh were never disappointed, since they never counted on anything. They walked. When a tributary of the river blocked their path and obliged them to retrace their steps or veer southwards, they resigned themselves to it without annoyance, for experience had taught them that the downpours were the same everywhere and the dangers always similar. Daâh feared them all, but did not tremble before any of them. In accordance with their threat, he confronted them one after another, with varied tactics but with a constant solidity that was no longer even bravery, so tranquil did he remain.
By force of habit, combat had become his labor; he took it on like a valiant workman who does not shirk his task. Whether the adversary was more powerful than him or weaker, he worked on it with his club, like a woodcutter raising his ax and bringing it down on the trunk of a tree; injury or death being possible eventualities at every moment, risked at every step, he was wary of them without being disturbed by their menace, and he no longer thought about them once a battle was finished, since another battle was bound to recommence.
That energy was not, however, devoid of weaknesses; the man was afraid of mystery. The fury of a bison troubled him less than the sudden quiver of moss when it shifted underfoot. Although he walked straight toward a bear in broad daylight, he no longer knew anything but how to crawl in the twilight, when motionless forms became disquieting and seemed to move: shadows, tree trunks, deep water and viscous bodies frightened him without him being able, or even making the effort, to give him courage. Ancient heredities warned him to dread invisible traps; every abrupt appearance of life made him start. Less by virtue of reasoned prudence than nervous impressionability, he hesitated before unfamiliar forms; the enemies that he had not yet confronted seemed to him to be redoubtable; his anguish paralyzed him, if only momentarily, in the face of those adversaries whose means of defense and offensive weapons were unknown to him.
Most of all, he detested those enemies that entered into the body without one fee
ling it, and treacherously, patiently, sheltered from blows, gnawed away at the belly of their prey. He knew them only too well by the burning bite of their teeth. Very prone to stomach aches, he attributed his torture to the presence of beasts that had taken refuge inside him, and execrated them because there was nothing he could do against them. Raging and grinding his teeth, he hammered his abdomen with blows of his fist to chase away the Rat or the Serpent, and howled at it to frighten it.
XII. Sunshine
The woman’s womb was enlarged. She became enormous. Daâh did not pay any attention to the phenomenon and probably did not even notice it. A variation in the volume of an animal that he would neither have to eat or fight was not of a nature to interest him. The sole particularity of which he deigned to take notice was the slowness of his companion in movement; that aggravation of incapacity augmented his disdain for the inferior creature. When Hock, lagging behind, began to bleat sadly in order to call him back, he returned ill-humoredly, almost angrily.
She began to appear to him to be a hindrance; many a time he nearly abandoned her and kept on walking. But always, when he found himself far enough away from her no longer to be able to hear her, he experienced a kind of nervous anxiety that was neither pity, nor remorse, nor tenderness, nor even the egotistical notion of a personal prejudice, but which probably participated in all those sentiments at once. It was necessary for him, reluctantly, to retrace his steps until he had found her again. Then, furious with her again as soon as he no longer had to worry about losing her, he insulted her with growls and grimaces. She moaned to explain her helplessness.
Often, too, she lowered her head toward her belly with an abrupt gesture, and looked at herself with a surprise mingled with anguish. The teasing beast that she was carrying there, heavier and livelier that all those whose invasion had tortured her previously, was moving too often and for too long. To tame it, she hammered her pelvis with furious punches, in a same manner as Daâh. The latter watched her do it, tranquil and indifferent, in the manner of a connoisseur who has experienced an evil, and cannot be moved on seeing it afflict another.
That summer, the north-eastern wind blew more frequently than usual; the downpour stopped from time to time, and the couple gazed with amazement at the furtive resplendent holes of azure that appeared in the sky.
Hock took pleasure in perceiving them; every time they went across a clearing, she raised her face to the astonishing sky from which the rain was no longer pouring and extended her arms toward it in order to receive the rays of the sun on her breast. Under the warmth of that caress she laughed as she contemplated her illuminated flesh; she was happy about it, almost proud, and she showed herself off.
“Daâh...”
The man enjoyed that rare pleasure almost as much as the woman; in order to savor it more, they came to the edge of the cliff. Crouching in the grass, with their backs turned to the edge of their forest, they had before them the profound extent in which light played upon the river and the islets; the atmosphere, laden with water vapor, vibrated all the way to the distant hills; sheets of diaphanous shadow, alternating with silvery gleams, galloped over the domes of the blue-tinted trees, and the rainbow appeared to them.
That formidable reptile that had suddenly sprung forth over the plain frightened them by virtue of its size; with one bound they recoiled under the trees, uttering cries of terror, but they fell silent immediately, for fear of attracted the monster’s attention. Hidden under the foliage, they observed it, open-mouthed and trembling. The strangeness of its colors, so bright in a uniformly dull world, only rendered it more frightful. They had never contemplated such an enormous being; beneath the curve of its belly it enclosed mountains, forests, half of the river and clouds; compared with it, the rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses wandering on the bank resembled larvae. Its maw hovered over them; a massacre was about to begin...
The colossal serpent did not devour anyone; the round masses of the pachyderms continued to frolic in peace in the mud and the reeds. That lack of fear surprised Hock and Daâh greatly; gradually they were reassured. Their childish souls were mobile, contagious to everything, accessible to the infinite variety of moments; their fear mutated into gaiety when the hippopotamuses licked by the giant became as rosy as flowers, as green as trees, yellow, violet and blue...
Abruptly, their joy evaporated; the rainbow had disappeared. Hock called it back, her arms extended toward the gulf, appealing for it to take its place again.
“Ta…! Ta…!”
But they forgot it immediately, for at that moment, an immense, resplendent Sun whose like they had never seen, surrounded by crepitating points—an irritated sun, menacing and triumphant, was installed in the blue heights.
“Ta! Ta!”
The dazzled Hock pointed at it, blinking her eyes, as if the marvel that had just been revealed were as yet only visible to herself alone. Daâh had straightened up, moved by enthusiasm; with his war cry and his gestures of battle, with great thrusts of his club, he, too, labored to drive away the clouds.
“Haâh! Han!”
He encouraged the star, and shared its triumph.
When he had collaborated fully with that work of splendor, he stopped, streaming with sweat, and blew forwards. Then he resumed his place next to Hock, on the grass where droplets were shining.
In front of him, the enchantment of the joyful islets spread out all the way to the horizon; the sky danced, the earth sang, and the first human couple, side by side, motionless, squinted their little eyes, filled with vast light.
XIII. The Firstborn
Daâh, who could not remain in one place for long, set about roaming around and exploring the vicinity; he discovered a place that delighted him. Toward the tip of one of the peninsulas that formed the curls of the river, there was a shelter under a rock at the top of a steep slope; the rain, by cutting ravines in the humus, had laid the calcareous sediment bare; all the sun’s rays plunged into that redoubt, orientated almost directly southwards; its wall defended it to the north against the cold winds, while the overhanging rock shielded it from downpours. The place was, moreover, relatively secure; the steepness of the cliff rendered it inaccessible from below, and to arrive there from above it was necessary to hang onto roots and the asperities of the cliff.
The shelter had once been occupied by a bear, whose prints the hunter recognized; they were, in any case, quite old, and since the departure of that inhabitant, brambles had obstructed the only passage. Proud of his discovery, he clamored in triumph to summon the woman, but she did not come, and in the distance he heard a lamentable voice imploring help.
“Heûh...”
He scaled the rock, suddenly electrified by the idea of battle, and ran; he thought he would find the bear.
Hock was alone and rolling on the ground. The spectacle annoyed him; the fury of the fighter, which he was bringing against a presumed enemy, turned against the woman. His muscles, full of blows, expended them on her.
“Haâh! Han!”
“Daâh... Heûh, Daâh...”
She begged, shielding herself from the fist that was hammering her head, her belly and her breast. Finally, he stood up; authoritarian, he pointed the way to the shelter; he gave her the order to march:
“Ta!”
She followed him, crawling. He deigned to help her to descend through the brambles. When they arrived under the rock she collapsed on the clay, and brought a son into the world.
Daâh contemplated that prodigy with bewilderment; his arms dangled in front of his leaning body, and his eyes squinted in his motionless face; alternately, he leaned toward the little being and recoiled to inspect the ensemble. The movement and cries of the living thing almost made him afraid. Torn between mistrust of the unknown and his curiosity, he turned round before the woman, two paces away from her, without taking his eyes off the disquieting animal she was holding in her lap.
Almost everything that moves is an enemy; his instinct to kill invited him to murder, but a b
izarre doubt, an apprehension akin to that inspired by gelatinous substances, a carnal repugnance, prevented him from touching the unexpected monster.
Why was the woman holding it between her knees and her arms? Hock’s attitude and his own disgust amazed him almost as much as the appearance of the dwarf. In order to concentrate all his effort in the labor of reflection, he stopped; beneath the double tuft of his eyebrows, his facial muscles moved, stirred by the interior work, and his perplexity caused him to stare with fixed pupils.
Suddenly, he remembered, and understood!
The invisible rodent that sometimes made the female howl by biting her in the entrails was that! The sly beast that had been slowing their progress for so many days because it was hiding inside Hock, the bloodsucking beast against which he had raged without knowing what it was, could now be seen! It had finally emerged—and it was him, Daâh, who had forced it out by beating it through the mother’s skin.
“Heûh!”
Facing the woman, he showed her, with an arm extended to the left, the edge of the cliff; then, approaching with his arms open he mimed the gesture of throwing a mass into the gulf:
Throw it away!
Instead of obeying, the woman contemplated her little torturer as if she were admiring it. With the hollows of her palms and the flat of her tongue she cleaned it; she pressed it to her teat, and rubbed her cheek on the top of its skull, and hugged it so avidly that she almost seemed to want to put it back inside her.
Daâh: The First Human Page 4
