TWO

Everything here is Neanderthal

I met Arsuaga again a couple of weeks later. In the meantime, the thought that I might be dead came and went; but when it came, I kept it from my family and everyone else around me. I played the part of a man alive, I led a normal life and went on sending my articles to the papers I write for. Many were written as if from the great beyond, though no reader ever pointed this out to me. I must say, existence took on an uncommon light during those days; everything felt more meaningful than usual.

The palaeontologist had picked me up outside my house shortly before noon, and we were now travelling in his Nissan toward the mountains surrounding Madrid.

“I’ve got a surprise for you.”

He was doing the driving so that I could take notes in a small exercise book, with red covers, which I had bought years earlier in a bookshop in Buenos Aires, and which I had been saving to write a brilliant poem in that seemed due to arrive at any moment, but never in fact arrived. I’ve now stopped expecting it to.

We were silent for a while, listening to the radio, where they were scotching a rumour about some well-known figure that had been going around.

“As a species, we love rumour,” said Arsuaga, picking up on the news story, “although rumour suffers by association with gossip, when actually they’re quite different things. The point of gossip is to control those in charge; when one of the people in charge does something that goes against convention, against the normal way of thinking, they become the subject of gossip. How do you think evolution managed to do away with hierarchies based purely on who was the strongest?”

“I haven’t a clue,” I said.

“Stones. We’re the only species capable of throwing objects with precision. Prehistoric Man developed this capacity, which chimpanzees don’t have. Being a good shot has been essential in our evolution. It helps in the development of both the nervous system and musculature. The reason chimpanzees can’t carve objects is nothing to do with their cognitive abilities; it’s that they lack the necessary physical coordination.”

The palaeontologist turned and looked at me as if to check that I was following. I made a slight gesture toward the road to remind him that he was driving. When he turned back to the wheel, I noticed how birdlike his profile was, with the nose prominent. Some time back, I think it was on the radio, I had heard somebody say that a protruding nose is a feature specific to the human face. It’s flat on the other primates. Ever since then, I’ve always observed that appendage on people — as well as my own in the mirror — with a certain surprise. It is, if you really look at it, a most curious addition: a protuberance in the middle of the face. Arsuaga’s nose, as I was saying, lent something bird-like to his appearance. His teeth, which were something of a jumble, contributed to this effect. And then there was his hair, which was white and dishevelled like the crest of certain tropical birds.

The palaeontologist sighed, smiled nostalgically, and went on: “Historians haven’t taken sufficient account of this stone-throwing ability. Hit a hyena in the head with a stone, and you kill it. Dogs run at the sight of us reaching down for a stone, because if one hits them in the mouth they end up without any teeth. The throwing of stones is of signal importance. It’s no good having the greatest brute strength if everyone else in the group knows how to throw stones.”

Something occurred to me. “David against Goliath,” I said.

“There you have it. Politics took the place of brute strength, all thanks to stones. Gossip is our way of throwing stones. A way of damaging somebody’s reputation and disqualifying them from assuming the mantle of leader.”

“And rumour?”

“Rumour is a form of coercion that impedes deviation from certain norms. It’s a very oppressive thing, particularly in small communities. Now look at all the broom around here — the rockrose has given way completely.”

We entered the Lozoya valley, with the river of the same name flowing through it, in the Guadarrama mountains, to the north-west of the Community of Madrid.

“The Guadarrama range,” he said, changing tack, “is neither the highest nor the most beautiful, but you could say it is the most high-brow. All the regeneracionismo poets and thinkers wrote about it. The regeneracionistas weren’t a class of café writers: they were tied to nature. And they are the best that came out of twentieth-century Spanish culture. After the Civil War, the countryside and sport got a bad name. An intellectual, after Franco, wouldn’t be seen dead in the countryside. Now, look over there: that’s Peñalara.”

I looked to my right and as I did, furtively glanced at my watch. It was already time for lunch, but the palaeontologist showed no signs of heading for a restaurant. When I don’t eat at the right time, the drop in my blood-sugar levels or my carbs — I’m not sure which — the drop in something in my endocrine system puts me in a bad mood, so that I find it hard to listen to what people are saying.

But at that moment, after we left a small village called Lozoya behind us, we quite literally entered paradise.

A place appeared before my eyes, a place that is not of this world.

Further proof that we had died?

The sun, which was at its peak, unleashed a huge gush of light that thrilled the senses, giving rise to a perception as if of augmented reality. I opened the car window, and when I breathed in, I breathed in light, I sweated light, the light entered my pores, reached my bones, passed through their marrow, came out my back, and continued on its way down to the centre of the earth, where it would perhaps become a dark light that, inversely, would illuminate the earth’s entrails. There was nobody around: no cars, no motorbikes, no bicycles. From time to time, a shadow in the shape of a bird tore through the silent matter of which the air was made.

“Are we in the Secret Valley?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “the valley of the Neanderthals. ‘Secret’ because of how isolated it is.”

He had talked to me about it the previous time we’d met, promising that one day he’d take me to see it. To me, this meant a visit to the grandparents’, because I am a Neanderthal myself. I’ve known this since school because the Sapiens kids — real bastards, the lot of them — always used to give me strange looks. It took a heroic effort to hide my Neanderthalness, and I used to spend my whole life observing them so as to imitate their behaviour, leaving me no time to devote to my studies. I put everything on hold, which only served to make me, if anything, even more Neanderthal. To look at, you wouldn’t think my family was Neanderthal, which led me to believe I was adopted — an adopted idiot, of course — until I stumbled on a TV program about Neanderthals and recognised myself in the main character, who looked like a copy of me (or I was of him). My parents didn’t notice a thing. Dad, who was a Sapiens through and through, said it was just as well humankind had moved on from all that.

“Why?” I’d asked.

“Because the Neanderthals,” he said, “lacked symbolic capacity.”

I didn’t dare ask what symbolic capacity was, but I consulted the encyclopaedia and learned what a symbol was. Flags, for example. I thought they were pretty poor symbols, but I pretended to take an interest in order to pass as Sapiens. We were surrounded by symbols. My mother’s Majorica pearl necklace, to give you an example, was another symbol (a status symbol). I likewise established that the Neanderthals and Sapiens had exchanged all kinds of materials, genetic material included. At first, Sapiens gave Neanderthals crystal necklaces in exchange for food, because Sapiens liked gastronomy while Neanderthals were fascinated by shiny things. Lacking in symbolic capacity as they were, I thought, they were unaware of the meaning of that sparkle, and yet were still dazzled by it. The fact was, from so much exchanging of objects, and since regular contact breeds affection, the Neanderthals and the Sapiens wound up in bed together. The Sapiens, being the smart ones, did it out of vice, while the Neanderthals, who were more naïve, did it out of love. And that’s where the genetic exchange began.

My being a Neanderthal meant I had a very tough adolescence, since I didn’t want girls for their money (the lack of symbolic capacity prevented my appreciating the value of banknotes), but for their sparkle. But they liked boys who had symbolic capacity — that is, the ones who understood the meaning of owning a Renault. There was no chance of exchanging genetic material with any of them. They would accept my invitations to tea, but when I offered them a helping of my semen, they’d run a mile.

It was hard; it still is. I still go around pretending I understand Sapiens, that I’m one of them, but the truth is that I suffer like a dog because they have taken their intellectual capacities to extremes that have become hard to imitate.

The palaeontologist, in short, had brought me home. That was the surprise, I suppose, that he had been referring to when we’d set off.

The sight took your breath away. It was like a platonic valley, an archetypical, hyperreal valley.

It looked like THE VALLEY.

“Beggars belief, doesn’t it?” he murmured, shutting off the engine.

We got out of the car, neither of us saying anything. The palaeontologist had brought an umbrella, which he opened to shield himself from the sun, and he started up a shallow incline in search of a place from which to view the land.

“Look,” he said, showing me a plant, “this is burdock. People once used it to fish with. They would drop it in a deep pool, like the one formed by the river down there, and the fish would float to the surface half-dead. And look at the briar. And the poppies. Poppies. The poppy is my flower. That red … it’s beyond explanation. Don’t forget to take a look at the jarilla flowers either.”

As he named the plants, he caressed them gently with the fingertips of his left hand, still holding the umbrella in his right. As for me, I had previously only appreciated an undifferentiated mass of vegetation; now, in addition to burdock, briar, and poppies, I saw snapdragons and honeysuckle and pale flax, from which I deduced that the word, as I had long suspected, is an organ of sight. And my vision, in this case, was amplified, because wherever I looked I discovered an uncommon splendour. A simple bee, with its head buried in the depths of a flower, became an extraordinary biological exhibition.

“We in the West understand nothing,” I heard Arsuaga say, more to himself than to me.

The man with the umbrella was climbing birdlike toward a bare patch of rock that protruded like the top of a poorly buried skull. It put me in mind of a sea of stone.

“Limestone,” he said, reading my thoughts. “That’s why there are so many caves around here. Limestone.”

“What altitude are we at?”

“One hundred thousand metres. This is a tectonic valley, not a fluvial one.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Rivers mould to the course of a tectonic valley, because it was orogeny and tectonics — rather than the river itself — that created it. This whole mountain range, the Sistema Central, drains down into the Tagus and the Douro. They are what’s called transversal valleys, carved out by the two rivers, which descend to their respective plateaus. That’s how the fluvial network is formed. We say this valley is invisible because it can’t be seen from anywhere in the sierra. That over there’s the Malangosto pass; the Archpriest of Hita used to walk that way in medieval times, Sotasalbos being his parish. That’s where the old poem comes from about the bear you have to lie with in order to carry on past. That was the toll. There used to be bears here.”

We moved across the sea of stone, over the lids of the skulls, in direct sunlight, Arsuaga protected by his umbrella. Each pit contained a prehistoric site.

“Here,” he said, “there’s been great biodiversity because you’ve got water and you’ve got various layers of vegetation. Look carefully: there are ash trees by the river; there are the oaks; then you’ve got the pine trees; and above that, a layer of alpine brush. And at the top, the alpine grass. Going up though a defile like this is akin to traveling toward one of the Poles. This is called an Arctic-Alpine disjunction.”

We reached the prehistoric site, the dig areas covered in huge plastic sheets that looked like shrouds.

“It isn’t the time of year yet for excavating,” said Arsuaga. “That’s why everything’s covered over.”

I asked him whether we could lift up the plastic and go into one of the caves whose interiors could just be glimpsed underneath it, to which the answer was a reproachful no.

“There was so much going on in these caves,” he went on. “We’ve found the remains of lions in the settlements. The lion was at the top of the food chain, meaning that where you had lions, you had bison, horses, deer, aurochs, boar … you name it. Everything. Humans did well here, because the animals had no way out. You could corral them. The worst thing for hunters was the open steppe, unless you knew how to mount a horse. In those days, Castilla was the Gobi desert.”

“And how do the Neanderthals figure?”

“Everything here is Neanderthal. Look, a cave without a roof, although it had one once. This is going back fifty thousand years. We’ve found the teeth of a Neanderthal girl here, and the skulls of horned animals that were really trophies; the way they were conserved is not like everyday objects, but like those used in ritual.”

“Symbolic behaviour?”

“There’s no other way to explain it.”

I wonder: so where the hell did my dad get the idea that Neanderthals lacked symbolic capacities? I became a writer so as to pretend I had them, and it turned out I really did have them all along.

In a burst of excitement, I was about to tell the palaeontologist about my Neanderthalness, but I restrained myself because we’d only met a couple of times and I didn’t want to spook him this early on.

Just then, we stopped beside some rocks that looked like they had emerged from a landslide. He explained: “The rock ledge above served as a shade, a cornice, and it made for an awning like a bus shelter. As you can see, that collapsed, and these rocks are what was left. Beneath it, right where we’re standing, was a Neanderthal settlement. Seventy thousand years ago, we’re talking about. They made fire here, they consumed their food. They would strip their kills to the very last calorie. A bison would be reduced to a pile of bones. Stone knapping also took place, using a fairly complex method known as the Levallois technique.”

While he gave a very precise description of the method, to which, self-defensively, I did not pay too much attention, I looked around, and for a moment I could see the Neanderthal settlement in all its detail. I would have seen it even if my eyes had been closed, because the scene occurred at the same time both inside and outside my head. The first thing I noticed was that under that ledge that serves as their shelter there is no Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, not even Sunday afternoons — how wonderful! There is no January or February or March, nor any Christmases, of course. Nor is it midday or three in the afternoon, because hours have not been invented yet; they’ve got plenty to occupy them in making fire, tanning the hides that protect them from the cold, and preparing tools for the hunt.

There is a group of men and women of all ages. Old ones, young ones, babies, middle-aged people. Influenced by my reading of a book by Arsuaga himself, I focus on an adolescent Neanderthal girl who is trying to extract the marrow from the bone of a herbivore. She puts the bone down on a flat stone, which she uses as an anvil, and she strikes it with a round one. At first, bone and stone slip, but after a few attempts the femur (if it is a femur) of the bison (if it is a bison) shatters, and the girl gains access to its marrow, which contains a fierce calorie hit.

The palaeontologist’s voice pulled me out of my reverie: “A good deal of hunting took place here, but there wasn’t any flint around to fashion weapons, so they made do with what they had, which was quartz. Quartz really isn’t much good for anything, but they did a great job with it, using the knapping technique I was just telling you about.”

“Right,” I agreed exaggeratedly, to cover for the fact I hadn’t been listening.

“And now,” he said, “we’ll head to the Cotos pass, get some beans from the farm, and go for fried eggs at my friend Rafa’s restaurant. Then we’ll head down the other side of the sierra, completing the circuit.”

I’d forgotten my hunger, but when he spoke of beans I could see them, too, in my head, as well as the eggs, to which of my own accord I added some fries.

As we made our way down toward the car, I asked him when I’d be able to go into one of the sites.

“What you still haven’t realised,” he said, with his African umbrella over his head, “is that prehistory does not exist in the settlements — that’s what ignorant people believe. Prehistory hasn’t gone away; look about you, it’s here, it’s all around. You and I carry it inside us. The only thing the settlements contain is bones. Prehistory lies in the animal that passes by like a shadow.”

The beer is cold, and the beans just right.

“What is it that defines a species?” I asked.

“First, ask yourself why there are species.”

“Why are there species?”

“There are species because you say so. In nature, everything flows; nothing’s static.”

“But there must be some scientific consensus, I’m guessing, about what we call a species.”

“If you insist: we call that which is recognised as distinct, not hybrid, a species. But then, in nature, you do get coyotes and jackals mating.”

“Is Homo neanderthalensis a different species from Homo sapiens?”

“Well, that’s down to you. So, are these beans good or what?”

“How am I meant to decide?”

“When does a town become a city? When does a hill become a mountain? What’s the difference between a small wave and a big wave?”

“OK, but is the Neanderthal a species or not? What’s your view?”

“If you insist: I say that it is. Let’s get another beer.”

“And yet, it hybridised with Homo sapiens.”

“Spanish is not Arabic, but the language is littered with Arabic words. ‘Almohada’ for ‘pillow’; that’s a loan word. Genetic loans are like linguistic loans. Hybridisation is not the same as a loan.”

“Right.”

“Really. Nature is not made for human categories. There were animals before zoologists came along, little though a zoologist would like to accept it. We spend our lives categorising. Ah, here come the eggs. They’re delicious here, you’ll see.”

The palaeontologist leant back in a gesture that sought to encompass the landscape, since we had found ourselves outside, on the terrace of his friend Rafa’s restaurant, in the shade of a pine tree.

“Isn’t this the life?” he said, with a wicked smile.