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The only thing I wouldhave wished is that Teresa and you had stayed with me, had matched me. Yes, I would have liked it had you been with me the evening it came.”
    It was the first time in almost two years that Morand had heard him mention Teresa, as if until that moment she had been somehow dead for him, but his manner of naming Teresa was hopelessly antique, it was Greece that morning when they’d gone down to the beach. Poor Somoza. Still. Poor madman. But even more strange was to ask oneself why, at the last minute, before getting into the car after Somoza’s telephone call, he had felt it necessary to call Teresa at her office to ask her to meet them later at the studio. He would have to ask her about it later, to know what Teresa had been thinking while she listened to his instructions on how to get to the solitary summerhouse on the hill. He’d have Teresa repeat exactly, word for word, what she’d heard him say. Silently Morand damned this mania for systems which made him reconstitute life as though he were restoring a Greek vase for the museum, glueing the tiniest particles with minute care, and Somoza’s voice there, mixed with the coming and going gestures of his hands which also seemed to want to glue pieces of air, putting together a transparent vase, his hands which pointed out the statuette, obliging Morand to look once more against his will at that white lunar body, a kind of insect antedating all history, worked under inconceivable circumstances by someone inconceivably remote, thousands of years ago, even further back, the dizzying distances of the animal, of the leap, vegetal rites alternating with tides and syzygies and seasons of rut and humdrum ceremonies of propitiation, the expressionless face where only the line of the nose broke its blind mirror of insupportable tension, the breasts hardly visible, the triangle of the sex and the arms crossed over the belly, embracing it, the idol of beginnings, the primeval terrorunder the rites from time immemorial, the hachet of stone from the immolations on the altars high on the hills. It was enough to make him believe that he also was turning into an imbecile, as if being an archaeologist were not sufficient.
    “Please,” said Morand, “couldn’t you make some effort to explain to me even though you believe that none of it can be explained? The only thing I’m definitely sure of is that you’ve spent these months carving replicas, and that two nights ago …”
    “It’s so simple, Somoza said, “I’ve always felt that the flesh was still in contact with the other. But I had to retrace five thousand years of wrong roads. Curious that they themselves, the descendants of the Aegeans, were guilty of that mistake. But nothing’s important now.
Look, it goes like this
.”
    Close to the idol, he raised one hand and laid it gently over the breasts and the belly. The other caressed the neck, went up to the statue’s absent mouth, and Morand heard Somoza speaking in a stifled and opaque voice, a little as if it were his hands or perhaps that nonexistent mouth, they that were speaking of the hunt in the caverns of smoke, of the number of deer in the pen, of the name which had to be spoken only afterwards, of the circle of blue grease, of the swing of the double rivers, of Pohk’s childhood, of the procession to the eastern steps and the high ones in the accursed shadows. He wondered if, in one of Somoza’s lapses of attention, he could manage to telephone and reach Teresa and warn her to bring Dr. Vernet with her. But Teresa would already have started and be on the way, and at the edge of the rocks where The Many was roaring, the master of the greens struck off the left horn of the handsomest buck and was handing it to the master of those who guarded the salt, to renew the pact with Haghesa.
    “Listen, let me breathe,” Morand said, rising and taking a step forward. “It’s fabulous, and furthermore I have a terrible thirst. Let’s drink