PROLOGUE

Visiting the grandparents

Some years ago, I went to visit the archaeological site at Atapuerca, and when I got home and was asked where I had been, I said: “Seeing the grandparents.”

The experience changed my life. I came back convinced that between the supposedly remote inhabitants of that renowned prehistoric settlement and myself, there was an extraordinary physical and mental proximity.

It felt to me like a wound.

The centuries that separated us were as nothing next to the millennia that connected us. As human beings, 95 per cent of our history is actually in prehistory. We have only just landed, so to speak, in this briefest of lapses we call history. This means that writing, for example, was invented only yesterday, though it has been around for five thousand years. If I closed my eyes and reached out a hand, I could have touched the old inhabitants of Atapuerca, and they could have touched me. They were in me now, but I was already in them before.

The discovery unsettled me completely.

It wasn’t just that prehistory was not confined to the past, but rather that there was a real currency to it, which moved me. The events of that period were more relevant to me than those of my own century because they explained it better. I therefore furnished myself with a basic library on the subject and started to read. As usual, the more I learned, the broader my ignorance became. I read tirelessly because the Palaeolithic was a drug and the Neolithic was two drugs and the Neanderthals were three drugs, and I found myself on the verge of multiple drug addictions when I understood that, given my age and my intellectual limitations, I would never come to know enough to be able to write an original book on the subject, which had been my intention since the visit to Atapuerca.

What kind of book?

Who knows? At times, it was a novel; at times, an essay; at times, a hybrid of novel and essay. At times, a piece of reportage or a long poem.

I quit my plan, though not the drugs.

Meanwhile, things happened. I published a novel, for example, which I was invited to present at the Museum of Human Evolution, linked to the Atapuerca settlement, in Burgos. There I met the palaeontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga, who was the museum’s scientific director and co-director of the site. Arsuaga was kind enough to give me a guided tour of the institution he ran. Some of his books had been part of my rudimentary library on prehistory and evolution, and I had read them greedily, though not always getting the full benefit of them, because the palaeontologist made few concessions in his writing. In other words, I wasn’t always able to be the kind of reader who was up to Arsuaga as a writer.

As an oral storyteller, on the other hand, I found him daring, seductive, agile. I would listen literally dumbstruck because with every second or third phrase he would hit yet another nail on the head with something perfectly expressed. I dearly wanted to take possession of that speech, which in some way was also mine. I noticed, too, that in order to talk about prehistory, he alluded to the present; just as, in order to refer to the present, he talked about prehistory. In short, he erased the outrageous boundaries between these two periods that mainstream education has installed in our heads and, albeit without realising it, he reinforced my sense of closeness to our ancestors. I realised, as I listened to him, that there was a continuum between the two, a continuum in which I was emotionally trapped, but which I struggled to articulate in any rational way.

Another year went by in which I carried on reading and reading until I had succeeded, I think, in opening up some cracks in the thin pane of glass that separated me from my prehistoric ancestors.

The glass that separated me from myself.

I published another novel and arranged matters so I would once again be invited to present it at the Museum of Human Evolution. I also asked my publishers whether they could organise, if at all possible, for me to have lunch with Arsuaga.

We had lunch.

During the second course, thanks to the bravery conferred on me by three or four glasses of Ribera del Duero, I decided to get right to the point.

“Listen, Arsuaga, you’re a brilliant storyteller. For ignorant people like me, you explain things better when you talk than when you write.”

“That’s down to teaching,” he said. “It forces you to come up with all manner of tricks to stop the students from falling asleep.”

“The thing is,” I went on, “you and I could join forces to talk about life.”

“Join forces how?”

“Like this: you take me someplace, wherever you like: to an archaeological site, to the countryside, to a maternity hospital, a morgue, wherever you like, a canary exhibition …”

“And?”

“And you tell me what it is we’re looking at, you explain it to me. I’ll then make your speech mine. I’ll digest it, select material from it, articulate it, and commit it to the page. I think we could build a great story about existence.”

Arsuaga poured himself a glass of wine and sat saying nothing for a few moments, and we then went back to eating and talking about life: about our plans, our likes and dislikes, our frustrations … I thought my proposal hadn’t interested him and he was pretending not to have heard it.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll just have to keep at it on my own.

But when the coffee came, he looked straight at me, smiled rather enigmatically, and struck the table with the palm of his hand: “Let’s do it.”

And we did.