Hard facts

Today was the last full day of our amazing month in Spain.  As it happened, we heard that Andrew's mum - who had been rushed to hospital from her care home - was perhaps now dying. So what we had planned as a leisurely indulgent final part of our holiday was partially transformed into a series of phone calls, texts, anxieties, guesses.... helping ourselves and family members back at home deal with the possible crisis.  Life and death.

So, while we headed to the paleolithic cave and art of the Altamira Cave, driving past the astonishing mountains of the Picos de Europa, we were also thinking about whether we should cut our holiday short, put Andrew on a plane to get home to his mother... or whether she might just continue to be the tough old thing she is and get through it all.

We went to the museum - which, like the others I have recently written about for you, is an absolutely superb example of how to explain and manage a technical, academic and difficult subject for an adoring and paying public. In fact the whole world wants to see this cave and its paintings, and that is a lot of people.  Each person, each scrap of modern material introduced to the caves, brings a highly increased risk of contamination.  We saw how some panels of paintings were amended by people painting their initials over them. Pillars of wood which were put in to help prop the ceiling up brought fungus.

The answer, brilliantly managed, was to construct an entirely new, artificial replica of the whole thing. It is made of fibre-glass and polystyrene, and you go through in timed groups having previously wandered round the introductory galleries which explain the evolution of 'man' and how - at different periods relevant to the cave's history - mankind made all the necessary things for his survival - tools, clothes, weapons, etc.  It is absolutely amazing, how they have presented all this.  I don't necessarily agree with what they say, even though I am not an expert in any way whatsoever... but their gender bias, and general glossing over of some points which seem quite important to me.... well, maybe that is for another blog. 

The cave - the real one - seems to have been used by early mankind, and then by bears, and then (thousands of years later) by more people... and then there was a rockfall which sealed it all up.  In the 19th century, a local amateur (inspired by the great Paris exhibition) started to explore, and his little daughter aged 8 (or 9) went with him and she was the first to set eyes on the astonishing flat undulating ceiling covered in paintings. She took her papa to see them, and he started to publicise them, only to be villified and reviled as a fake.... Only after his death was it finally decided that these images were genuinely paleolithic. His great critic wrote a book, called 'Mea culpa...'   



Hordes of visitors proved to be too damaging, and so just a few years ago they decided to make a facsimile of the whole thing and that is what we saw today. It's good enough for me.

It woke up in me a great turmoil of thoughts from this trip. How I have been mesmerised by the mountains, the rocks. I have tried to paint them, and found it almost impossible.

      

I recall the prison at Broto in the Pyrenees - how the hapless prisoners scratched images into the blackened rock walls of their cell, and how luminous these images are. You, my faithful reader, will remember what I thought when I saw them - it was only 3 weeks ago.   

I am thinking of my attempts - yesterday! - to paint some of the huge rocks around here. I am thinking of our visit last year to the caves at Ribadesella, just 5 miles away, and how those caves are adorned with images of vaginas....   

I am thinking of the hard facts of my relationship with my mother-in-law, sleeping peacefully tonight I hope, in her care-home in England - how men love her, but women find her very difficult.  She is 97 years old.  The lifespan of the people - quite possibly female - who made the astonishing images on the low ceiling of the cave at what is now called Altamira, was probably barely more than 30 years.  That is not much time to pass on skills, knowledge, family stories, tribal messages.  They would not have thought it possible to live to 97.    The texts in the museum have the grace to put the word 'marriage' into inverted commas - but the truth is, it was the capacity of females to have babies and get them to survive those harsh and wonderful times, which eventually led to our modern world.  Sex, life and death, in a landscape of rocks and mountains, was the whole thing.  How and why they decided to paint those magnificent animals, in charcoal and ochre, on the low ceiling of their cave is really a mystery.  The whole thing is about the size of a tennis court. It was about five feet or so up from the floor beneath it. There is little or no lamp smoke to obscure the images.  It is one of the wonders of the world.