A PATH, A STAIR
WHEN WE EMERGED from the cave, we stepped out not between the two flat stone lips into Pierre’s basement, but through a hole shrouded by holly in the side of a steep green hill overlooking the river valley. As we reentered the sun-bright world, we shielded our eyes with our hands. After a moment, Pierre pointed west toward two bare juts of gray rock in the distance, where the sides of the valley came closer together but did not adjoin. “The arch broke and fell,” Pierre explained, “millennia ago.”
Turning to the east as the hillside curved, we saw the Saads’ A-shaped house with a blue roof, like a toy, perhaps a mile away, and the thread of road leading to it. Because the road ended in the cleared space before their home, our taxi from Lyon had turned around to retrace its route.
East and west, in all directions, the sunny openness of the landscape of the south of France made the dark caves seem a product of imagination as much as of memory. Here was the bright reality I loved: topside. I had had the privilege of seeing sacred art; for my own eyes it had emerged from profound darkness—yet I wanted to worship the sun, the days of light and breath it gave me.
Pierre gestured toward a footpath progressing from where we stood across the slope and toward the house. As Pierre began to lead us back, Adam fell in beside him, with Arielle and me following close behind. For a while she and I shamelessly listened to their conversation.
Pierre said, “My father insisted I show you the underworld.” He added lightly, “I still obey my father.”
“Do you?” Adam seemed amazed. “Throughout my youth, my difficult youth, the chief imperative was to escape the domination of my father.”
“Perhaps,” Pierre asked quietly with the voice of a friend, “it’s time for you to accept him?”
“He’s dead.”
Pierre turned his head and smiled at Adam. “I’m not sure that’s relevant.”
“Suppose I told you—” Adam hesitated, found his wording, and said,”—that I have walked and talked with God.”
Arielle’s head twisted abruptly toward me, but I ignored her surprise.
“Who knows?” her father answered, not at all surprised. “Suppose I told you that I am God, and that in walking and talking with me, as we are doing on this hillside, you are talking with God?”
Because the path cut across a slope, Pierre’s and Adam’s eyes were level with one another, though Adam was much the taller man. And younger, and stronger. But there was self-assurance in Pierre’s unmocking brown face. And confidence.
Adam said, “That’s not what I mean.”
“But you could mean it,” Pierre went on comfortably. “Each of us has only his own meanings to offer. But in some sense, I’m sure you can see truth in what I say.”
Silence fell between them, and the four of us simply continued our walking, two by two on the sunny path curving like a low necklace across the bosom of the mountain. With Arielle, I felt warmly companionable. Nearby two birds fluttered into the needles of a pine tree.
“The air smells like ponderosa in Idaho,” Adam remarked. “Why did your father suggest you show us the cave paintings?”
“‘Show your discoveries first to those you love, then share them with the world.’ That was his advice. In France, such treasures belong to everyone by law, that is, to the state.”
“And do you love us?” Adam asked Pierre.
“Certainly, my daughter,” he answered. “But I have hesitated to take my daughter to such a place, to such a deep grave.” I felt that Pierre was purposely ignoring the fact of our presence behind him. He placed that much importance on being direct with Adam.
“You accept that I love my daughter,” Pierre went on. His head was bent, and he appeared to be studying their feet. “But you doubt my love of you and Lucy.”
Adam was silent. I, too, studied our feet moving beside the pathside tufts of grass, beside a fallen pine, past a knuckle of rock emerging from the soil, beside a small gnarled bush with dried orange berries on it. Fellow travelers, we four, at least for the nonce.
“It is a little embarrassing for me to say to you that I love you,” Pierre continued. “And yet it is true of both you and Lucy, though I have known you such a short time. I love you because you have helped me, because you have brought me my heart’s desire, the ancient texts. I know it is a miracle that you have managed to do so.” Pierre was trying hard to read his heart for the truth of the moment. “You have brought a priceless treasure to my house. Who does not love those who give them even the ordinary things they need?”
“The ungrateful,” Adam said, then he tossed his head like a stallion and seemed surprised that he had said the words aloud.
“It is easy for me to feel gratitude,” Pierre said, “and gratitude is the bedfellow of love.”
“Does love have other bedfellows?” Adam asked, but his tone had changed. He sounded like a friend talking to a friend.
“Of course. One of them is desire.”
Adam simply let the idea sink like a stone in water.
“And there is longing,” Pierre added.
Adam touched the back of his neck, feeling the warmth of the sun there. Perhaps he was thinking it was a French warmth, not the white, high-altitude burning that touched the Idaho mountains, not the sizzling heat of sunlight on our skin in the unfiltered Middle East. He said, “Your name, Pierre, Peter, in English means ‘rock.’ Jesus told Peter, his disciple, that he would build his church upon a rock, through Peter’s faith.”
“Your greatest longing,” Pierre said, “is for God.”
“‘In God, we trust,’” Adam answered. He grinned. “In America, it’s written on our money.”
He used a friend’s prerogative to lighten the tone of a serious conversation.
Our curiosity about them satisfied, Arielle and I began our own dialogue, but we let a space open between our voices and their ears. We were glad to walk in the sunshine and to draw the aroma of grass and scattered trees into our nostrils, but we wanted to know each other, too. Walking beside Arielle, I remembered my girlhood friend Janet, and how often we had strolled in some park or boulevard while confiding our thoughts.
“Tell me about Thom, your husband who died,” Arielle said. “You loved him?”
Her question struck me as an insult. Beside my elbow, she was a streak of warmth, tall, young, exotic, a presence unlike myself. Because the only bridge to link us seemed to be an arc of language, I began to send words like so many goats across it. Was this how Adam often felt? Cut off from the world with only breath and words, peculiar words, to send to the Other Side? Perhaps what seemed an insult was really an invitation to commune. “I did love my husband—very much—and I do.”
What should I say to this younger woman, who was doubtlessly filled with real questions about love? Pierre had tried to read his heart to Adam; as the more experienced person, I must try, too. “I don’t know if the Thom I loved really existed, or if it was my idea of him.” My skepticism blurted out like a protrusion in the path. How blandly abstract my words! Yet I felt I was pulling barbed hooks from the red fish of my heart.
“If he was what I needed—I met him when I was eighteen.” My sentence bridge was breaking up into incoherent phrases. I gathered control and said, “I believed in him because I could imagine him to be what I needed.” When Thom came into my life, my ties with women friends had weakened. Regret flamed through me.
“And have you loved Adam?”
Did the young woman actually mean to ask me if I had had sex with Adam?
“Yes,” I said, but because I feared the falseness of a truth so baldly literal, I added, “And no.”
“These answers cancel out each other.”
“Exactly,” I said, but I felt only silly confusion.
Spontaneously, we both trilled with laughter and liked each other a bit better.
“And are you, Arielle, devoted to sculpting?”
“Yes—and no,” she echoed.
“But you don’t mean it in the same way I do.”
We passed another scrawny bush with puckered orange berries growing close to our path. I thought of the orange blossoming of the parachute in the sky, how Adam and I had stood within the rocky overhang and watched the parachute opening. “You mean,” I interpreted, “that you thought you were passionate about your work, and you were, and you are. But now—”
“But now, out of nowhere—there’s Adam.”
“How does he seem to you?”
“Incredibly, fabulously beautiful…. And in some way … wounded.”
“An irresistible combination,” I observed, “for those who need to be needed.” But my scientist husband, established and admired, hadn’t needed me; I chose to be an art therapist partly because I wanted to be needed. When I returned to the States, would I return to my work? I had also chosen the work out of faith in creativity—that which, unfailingly, always, was a positive force. Ars longa, vita breva. Even now, for Adam, seeing what the earliest humans created had been wonderfully affirming of his own artistic impulse. Even their depictions of violence and their fundamental absorption with raw sexuality were human realities he needed to embrace. Mostly, I thought, those artists had wanted to celebrate the beauty of the animals, of the Other.
I touched the memory stick hanging around my neck. Thom had said there were Others out there. Would we find them beautiful? Would we find some reason to kill them? Or them us? Thou shalt not kill—surely the most important of the commandments.
“About Adam,” Arielle continued. “Is it wrong of me—I mean, do you—I feel I shouldn’t go on without—”
“Permission granted,” I replied, and instantly, how light I felt!
Walking ahead of us on the path across the slope, I watched my lover, my Adonis, walking beside Pierre, saw Adam’s straight back and his inky hair burnished blue by the sunshine, but it was as though he had become merely an image. His substance evaporated from my interior landscape and left a vacancy.
Why should I need to love any man now? Why not just feel safe here in the south of France, absorbing this sunlit place with my eyes? After the bleakness of the underworld, the contours of this land comforted my eyes. What other image did I need beyond that of beloved land? The firmness of the very path supported the soles of my feet. Across the valley a number of small stone houses and barns, whitewashed, with red tile roofs, basked in their share of sun. Ripening fields lay in the valley below, and in distant places I could see the blue ribbon of a river. Love the natural world; love being alive, I counseled myself.
Arielle mused, “The men Adam overcame in the jungle, they feared any contradiction of the literal Genesis story?”
“Yes.”
“And were willing to kill you for the codex? Over a question of religious dogma?”
I left the question hanging in the air. Certainly they had been willing to use force.
“Maybe you’ll find someone,” Arielle said. “Someone you really love. In a way you have not loved before.”
I said nothing. I had loved Adam, but that did not mean I could not let him go.
I listened to the twittering of unseen birds.
We all came home happy, refreshed by the newness of our experiences. A beautiful table was spread and waiting for us in the library. None of us spoke of danger; I don’t think any of us believed in it anymore.
Sitting at the head of the dinner table, the old bedouin said, “In the coming days, while my son reads the message of the ancient writing, I shall read the paintings in the cave. If I study them slowly, perhaps the paintings will have a message for me.”
“It’s unsafe to go alone,” Pierre replied, but he meant only that normal care should be taken.
“So it is in life.” His father smiled; his eyes made the circuit of the table.
I knew what he had said even before Pierre interpreted the Arabic.
Apropos of nothing, Adam remarked, “A path speaks horizontal, a stair speaks jagged vertical.”