Even asleep, the little greyhound trailed after her madame, through a weave of green stars and gas lamps, along the boulevards of Paris. It was a conjured city that no native would recognize—Emma Bovary’s head on the pillow, its architect. Her Paris was assembled from a guidebook with an out-of-date map, and from the novels of Balzac and Sand, and from her vividly disordered recollections of the viscount’s ball at La Vaubyessard, with its odor of dying flowers, burning flambeaux, and truffles. (Many neighborhoods within the city’s quivering boundaries, curiously enough, smelled identical to the viscount’s dining room.) A rose-and-gold glow obscured the storefront windows, and cathedral bells tolled continuously as they strolled past the same four landmarks: a tremulous bridge over the roaring Seine, a vanilla-white dress shop, the vague façade of the opera house—overlaid in more gold light—and the crude stencil of a theater. All night they walked like that, companions in Emma’s phantasmal labyrinth, suspended by her hopeful mists, and each dawn the dog would wake to the second Madame Bovary, the lightly snoring woman on the mattress, her eyes still hidden beneath a peacock sleep mask. Under the coverlet at night, Charles’s blocky legs tangled around Emma in an apprehensive pretzel, a doomed attempt to hold her in their marriage bed.
II. A CHANGE OF HEART
Is there any love as tireless as a dog’s in search of its master? Whenever Emma was off shopping for nougat in the market, or visiting God in the churchyard, Djali was stricken by the madness of her absence. The dog’s futile hunt through the house turned her maniacal, cannibalistic: She scratched her fur until it became wet and dark. She paced the halls, pausing only to gnaw at her front paws. Félicité, the Bovarys’ frightened housekeeper, was forced to imprison her in a closet with a water dish.
The dog’s change of heart began in September, some weeks after Madame Bovary’s return from La Vaubyessard, where she’d dervished around in another man’s arms and given up forever on the project of loving Charles. It is tempting to conclude that Emma somehow transmitted her wanderlust to Djali; but perhaps this is a sentimental impulse, a storyteller’s desire to sync two flickering hearts.
One day Emma’s scents began to stabilize. Her fragrance became musty, ordinary, melting into the house’s stale atmosphere until the woman was nearly invisible to the animal. Djali licked almond talc from Emma’s finger webbing. She bucked her head under the madame’s hand a dozen times, waiting for the old passion to seize her, yet her brain was uninflamed. The hand had become meaningless pressure, damp heat. No joy snowed out of it as Emma mechanically stroked between Djali’s ears, her gold wedding band rubbing a raw spot into the fur, branding the dog with her distraction. There in the bedroom, together and alone, they watched the rain fall.
By late February, at the same time Charles Bovary was dosing his young wife with valerian, the dog began refusing her mutton chops. Emma stopped checking her gaunt face in mirrors, let dead flies swim in the blue glass vases. The dog neglected to bark at her red-winged nemesis, the rooster. Emma quit playing the piano. The dog lost her zest for woodland homicide. Under glassy bathwater, Emma let the hours fill her nostrils with the terrible serenity of a drowned woman, her naked body as still and bright as quartz in a quarry. Her fingers circled her navel, seeking an escape. Fleas held wild circuses on Djali’s back as she lay motionless before the fire for the duration of two enormous logs, unable to summon the energy to spin a hind leg in protest. Her ears collapsed against her skull.
Charles rubbed his hand greedily between Emma’s legs and she swatted him off; Emma stroked the dog’s neck and Djali went stiff, slid out of reach. Both woman and animal, according to the baffled Dr. Bovary, seemed bewitched by sadness.
This strain of virulent misery, this falling out of love, caused different symptoms, unique disruptions, in dogs and humans.
The greyhound, for example, shat everywhere.
Whereas Emma shopped for fabrics in the town.
On the fifth week of the dog’s fall, Charles lifted the bed skirt and discovered the greyhound panting up at him with a dead-eyed calm. He’d been expecting to find his favorite tall socks, blue wool ineptly darned for him by Emma. He screamed.
“Emma! What do you call your little bitch again? There is something the matter with it!”
“Djali,” Emma murmured from the mattress. And the dog, helplessly bound to her owner’s voice—if no longer in love with Madame Bovary, still indentured to love’s ghost—rose and licked the lady’s bare feet.
“Good girl,” whispered Emma.
The animal’s dry tongue lolled out of her mouth. Inside her body, a foreboding was hardening into a fact. There was no halting the transformation of her devotion into a nothing.
III. WHAT IF?
“If you do not stop making poop in the salon,” Félicité growled at the puppy, “I will no longer feed you.”
In the sixth month of her life in Tostes, the dog lay glumly on the floor, her pink belly tippled orange by the grated flames, fatally bored. Emma entered the bedroom, and the animal lifted her head from between her tiny polished claws, let it drop again.
“If only I could be you,” Emma lamented. “There’s no trouble or sorrow in your life!” And she soothed the dog in a gurgling monotone, as if she were addressing herself.
Dr. Charles Bovary returned home, whistling after another successful day of leeches and bloodletting in the countryside, to a house of malcontent females:
Emma was stacking a pyramid of greengage plums.
The little greyhound was licking her genitals.
Soon the coarse, unchanging weave of the rug in Emma’s bedroom became unbearable. The dog’s mind filled with smells that had no origin, sounds that arose from no friction. Unreal expanses. She closed her eyes and stepped cautiously through tall purple grass she’d never seen before in her life.
She wondered if there might not have been some other way, through a different set of circumstances, of meeting another woman; and she tried to imagine those events that had not happened, that shadow life. Her owner might have been a bloody-smocked man, a baritone, a butcher with bags of bones always hidden in his pockets. Or perhaps a child, the butcher’s daughter, say, a pork chop–scented girl who loved to throw sticks. Djali had observed a flatulent malamute trailing his old man in the park, each animal besotted with the other. Blue poodles, inbred and fat, smugly certain of their women’s adoration. She’d seen a balding Pomeranian riding high in a toy wagon, doted on by the son of a king. Not all humans were like Emma Bovary.
Out of habit, she howled her old courtship song at Emma’s feet, and Emma reached down distractedly, gave the dog’s ears a stiff brushing. She was seated before her bedroom vanity, cross-examining a pimple, very preoccupied, for at four o’clock Monsieur Roualt was coming for biscuits and judgment and jelly.
A dog’s love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one’s ability to hold that one’s interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion—from dogs we presume an eternal adoration.
In the strange case of Madame Bovary’s greyhound, however, “forever” was a tensed muscle that began to shake. During the Christmas holidays, she had daily seizures before the fireplace, chattering in the red light like a loose tooth. Loyalty was a posture she could no longer hold.
Meanwhile, Emma had become pregnant.
The Bovarys were preparing to move.
On one of the last of her afternoons in Tostes, the dog ceased trembling and looked around. Beyond the cabbage rows, the green grasses waved endlessly away from her, beckoning her. She stretched her hind legs. A terrible itching spread through her body, and the last threads of love slipped like a noose from her neck. Nothing owned her anymore. Rolling, moaning, belly to the red sun,
she dug her spine into the hill.
“Oh, dear,” mumbled the coachman, Monsieur Hivert, watching the dog from the yard. “Something seems to be attacking your greyhound, madame. Bees, I’d wager.”
“Djali!” chided Emma, embarrassed that a pet of hers should behave so poorly before the gentlemen. “My goodness! You look possessed!”
IV. FREEDOM
On the way to Yonville, the greyhound wandered fifty yards from the Bovarys’ stagecoach. Then she broke into a run.
“Djaliiiii!” Emma shrieked, uncorking a spray of champagne-yellow birds from the nearby poplars. “Stay!”
Weightlessly the dog entered the forest.
“Stay! Stay! Stay!” the humans called after her, their directives like bullets missing their target. Her former mistress, the screaming woman, was a stranger. And the greyhound lunged forward, riding the shoals of her own green-flecked shadow.
In the late afternoon she paused to drink water from large cups in the mossy roots of unfamiliar trees. She was miles from her old life. Herons sailed over her head, their broad wings flat as palms, stroking her from scalp to tail at an immense distance, and the dog’s mind became empty and smooth. Skies rolled through her chest; her small rib cage and her iron-gray pelt enclosed a blue without limit. She was free.
From a hilltop near a riverbank, through an azure mist, she spotted two creatures with sizzling faces clawing into the water. Cats larger than any she’d ever seen, spear-shouldered and casually savage. Lynx, a mated pair. Far north for this season. They were three times the size of the Bovarys’ barn cat yet bore the same taunting anatomy. Analogous golden eyes. They feasted on some prey that looked of another world—flat, thrashing lives they swallowed whole.
Gazehound, huntress—the dog began to remember what she’d been before she was born.
Winter was still raking its white talons across the forest; spring was delayed that year. Fleshless fingers for tree branches. Not a blade or bud of green yet. The dog sought shelter, but shelter was stony and cold this far out, always inhuman. Nothing like the soft-bodied sanctuary she’d left behind.
One night the greyhound was caught out in unknown territory, a deep valley many miles from the river. Stars appeared, and she felt a light sprinkling of panic. Now the owls were awake. Pale hunger came shining out of their beaks, looping above their flaming heads like ropes. In Tostes their hooting had sounded like laughter in the trees. But here, with no bedroom rafters to protect her, she watched the boughs blow apart to reveal nocturnal eyes bulging from white faces; she heard hollow mouths emitting strange songs. Death’s rattle, old wind without home or origin, rode the frequencies above her.
A concentrated darkness screeched and dove near her head, and then another, and then the dog began to run. Dawn was six hours away.
She pushed from the valley floor toward higher ground, eventually finding a narrow fissure in the limestone cliffs. She trotted into the blackness like a small key entering a tall lock. Once inside she was struck by a familiar smell, which confused and upset her. Backlit by the moon, her flat, pointed skull and tucked abdomen cast a hieroglyphic silhouette against the wavy wall.
The greyhound spent the next few days exploring her new home. The soil here was like a great cold nose—wet, breathing, yielding. To eat, she had to hunt the vast network of hollows for red squirrels, voles. A spiderweb of bone and fur soon wove itself in the cave’s shadows, where she dragged her kills. When she’d lived with the Bovarys, in the early days of their courtship, Emma would let the puppy lick yellow yolks and golden sugar from the flat of a soft palm.
Undeliberate, absolved of rue and intent, the dog continued to forget Madame Bovary.
Gnawing on a femur near the river one afternoon, she bristled and turned. A deer’s head was watching her thoughtfully from the silver rushes—separated, by some incommunicable misfortune, from its body. Its neck terminated in a chaos of crawling blackflies, a spill of jeweled rot like boiling cranberries. Its tongue hung limp like a flag of surrender. Insects were eating an osseous cap between the buck’s yellow ears, a white knob the diameter of a sand dollar. A low, bad feeling drove the dog away.
V. REGRET
Regret, as experienced by the dog, was a frightening disorientation—she turned in circles and doubled back, trying to uncover the scent of her home. Some organ had never stopped its useless secretions, even without an Emma to provoke them. Hearth and leash, harsh voice, mutton chop, affectionate thump—she wanted all this again.
There was a day when she passed near the town of Airaines, a mere nine miles from the Bovarys’ new residence in Yonville; and had the winds changed at that particular moment and carried a certain woman’s lilac-scented sweat to her, this story might have had a very different ending.
One midnight, just after the late April thaw, the dog woke to the sight of a large wolf standing in the cave mouth, nakedly weighing her as prey. And even under that crushing stare she did not cower; rather, she felt elevated, vibrating with some primitive species of admiration for this more pure being, solitary and wholly itself. The wolf swelled with appetites that were ancient, straightforward—a belly hunger that was satisfied nightly. An old wound hid beneath a brittle scab on its left shoulder, and a young boar’s blood ran in torrents from its magnificent jaws. The greyhound’s tail began to wag as if cabled to some current; a growl rose midway up her throat. The predator then turned away from her. Panting—ha-ha-ha—it licked green slime from the cave wall, crunching the spires of tiny amber snails. The wolf glanced once more around the chasm before springing eastward. Dawn lumbered behind her, through the pointed firs, unholstering the sun; and the wind began to howl, as if in lamentation, calling the beast back.
Caught between two equally invalid ways of life, the greyhound whimpered herself toward sleep, unaware that in Yonville Emma Bovary was drinking vinegar in black stockings and sobbing at the exact same pitch. Each had forgotten entirely about the other, yet they retained the same peculiar vacancies within their bodies and suffered the same dread-filled dreams. Love had returned, and it went spoiling through them with no outlet.
In summer the dog crossed a final frontier, eating the greasy liver of a murdered bear in the wide open. The big female had been gutshot for sport by teenage brothers from Rouen, who’d then been too terrified by the creature’s drunken, hauntingly prolonged death throes to wait and watch her ebb out. In a last pitch she’d crashed down a column of saplings, her muzzle frothing with red foam. The greyhound was no scavenger by nature, until nature made her one that afternoon. The three cubs squatted on a log like a felled totem and watched with grave maroon eyes, their orphan hearts pounding in unison.
Still, it would be incorrect to claim that the greyhound was now feral, or fully ingrained in these woods. As a fugitive, the dog was a passable success, but as a dog she was a blown spore, drifting everywhere and nowhere, unable to cure her need for a human, or her terror at the insufficiency of her single body.
“Our destinies are united now, aren’t they?” whispered Rodolphe near the evaporating blue lake in a forest outside of Yonville that might as well have been centuries distant. Crows deluged the sky. Emma sat on a rock, flushed red from the long ride, pushing damp wood chips around with her boot toe. The horses munched leaves in a chorus as Rodolphe lifted her skirts, the whole world rustling with hungers.
In the cave, the dog had a strange dream.
A long, lingering, indistinct cry came from one of the hills far beyond the forest; it mingled with Emma’s silence like music.
VI. A BREAK
The dog shivered. She’d been shivering ceaselessly for how many days and nights now? All the magic of those early weeks had vanished, replaced by a dreary and devoted pain. Winter rose out of her own cavities. It shivered her.
Troubled by the soreness that had entered her muscles, she trotted out of the cave and toward the mu
ddy escarpment where she’d buried a cache of weasel bones. Rain had eroded the path, and in her eagerness to escape her own failing frame, the mute ruminations of her throbbing skeleton, the dog began to run at full bore. Then she was sliding on the mud, her claws scrabbling uselessly at the smooth surface; unable to recover her balance, the greyhound tumbled into a ravine.
An irony:
She had broken her leg.
All at once Emma Bovary’s final command came echoing through her: Stay.
Sunset jumped above her, so very far above her twisted body, like a heart skipping beats. Blood ran in her eyes. The trees all around swam. She sank farther into a soggy pile of dead leaves as the squealing voices of the blackflies rose in clouds.
Elsewhere in the world, Rodolphe Boulanger sat at his writing desk under the impressive head of a trophy stag. Two fat candles were guttering down. He let their dying light flatter him into melancholy—a feeling quite literary. The note before him would end his love affair with Emma.
How shall I sign it? “Devotedly”? No…“Your friend”?
The moon, dark red and perfectly round, rose over the horizon.
Deep in the trench, nostalgias swamped the greyhound in the form of olfactory hallucinations: snowflakes, rising yeast, scooped pumpkin flesh, shoe polish, horse-lathered leather, roasting venison, the explosion of a woman’s perfume.
Orange World and Other Stories Page 9