Look, Papa!

Santander, Spain

1902

María pulled the menu she’d jotted down out of her apron pocket, and the kitchen staff set aside their tasks expectantly. Before she could start to list the tasks for the second half of the day, the door burst open.

Emilio held a briefcase and a printed clipping out to his wife. “María, María, you have to see this!”

She kissed him on the cheek. They had been married for four years and could let the service see that level of affection.

“Why don’t you use the front door, the way the master of the house is supposed to?” she scolded playfully.

“Because it’s noon. I knew you would be here.” He grinned. “The real question is, why does the lady of the house come down to supervise the kitchen, when she has plenty of staff to do it for her?”

“Let’s go to the drawing room, dear.” They removed themselves to a more private location.

He couldn’t expect her to sit looking out the window or fiddling with lace all day, not with her childhood. He knew her father had been an amateur archaeologist who had let her tag along on local expeditions. Together they’d dug through mounds, with María’s stiff dresses always suffering with the grime of the ages. They fished out things like Visigothic fibulae and Roman nails. The earlier, the better, so of course the Altamira cave should’ve been the crowning achievement of Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola.

Papa had been poking around in the cave for a few years before her mother let María go. María’s eyes were sharp at eight years old, and her papa wanted to see what she could find that he wasn’t. He was certain something awaited discovery in the cave that would be called Altamira, and couldn’t understand why it continued to elude him.

Covered in green grass and shrubs, with no outward indication that anything was underneath, the cave seemed like a fairy’s cavern, probably stuffed with buried treasure. Papa let her have her own lantern, but he insisted he always go first in case there was danger of collapse or even just slipping on the uneven surface. She was to follow close behind so they never lost each other.

Mostly she saw her papa’s back as he hunched through tight spaces and scanned the cave floor again and again.

“Here is where I found the little bowl full of ochre pigment I brought back last year. So there are probably handprints or stick figures somewhere around here,” he whispered, eyes on the ground.

Ancient men probably wouldn’t have painted on the ground any more than modern ones did, thought María. So why was Papa always looking down? It wasn’t a matter of sharp eyes, but the direction of one’s gaze.

And she saw them. Up above, a crowd, a herd, a stampede, of red—ochre, Papa would say—bulls with shaggy black outlines. They grazed, and ran, and even slept along the undulating surface of the cave roof. She raised her lantern closer to their narrow faces and glistening necks, and they moved right along with her, so vivid, she almost heard them bellowing.

Papa didn’t hear their distant call from right above him.

She didn’t say it because she wanted to be famous or because she thought she’d found what her papa was looking for. She said it because those bulls were there, and her papa didn’t see them, and to deny their presence would condemn them to oblivion forever.

“Look, Papa! Bulls!”

Papa was so happy at first. He was certain those bulls—or rather, prehistoric oxen, it seemed—and deer had been painted with the ochre pigments he’d found, thousands of years before. Before the Visigoths, before the Romans. Before everything, he’d explained to María. She helped him make the sketches look like the originals, pointing out details on tails, hooves, and ears.

But he took his evidence to Paris, and the doctors of archaeology guffawed. They said the bulls were modern graffiti, that they were too exquisite to be thousands of years old, and even that Papa had painted them himself when he’d combed over the cave and found it empty of other treasures.

Papa returned to Santander, chastised. Although the laughing French men hadn’t convinced him he was wrong, he was unable to present scientific evidence ever again. His family was ashamed and barely lived down the public embarrassment enough to make a good match for María.

And of course, her status as discoverer was discounted. She was just a little girl who went into a boring cave once with her papa.

But Emilio was a good husband, and when he’d seen the article, he’d clipped it and brought it straight to his wife. It was an article in French, and her papa’s name was at the beginning. She scanned it, and it seemed a man called Émile Cartailhac was apologizing for every bad thing he’d ever said about Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola. He presented new evidence from other caves that confirmed Papa’s theories, and included an apology.

“He’s saying Papa was right!” María exclaimed.

Emilio embraced her. “It’s more than that. He’s saying Altamira was the most important discovery in prehistory. Isn’t it wonderful? Your father is redeemed in the eyes of science!”

María stayed in the embrace, overcome. She wept into her husband’s shoulder.

Papa would be beside himself to see the retraction. But he had passed away fourteen years before.