Mrs A offered to disinfect the wounds. I had to clench my teeth while she mercilessly rubbed them with alcohol-soaked cotton. The culprit for her part never took her eyes off me, looking through the French door of the living room and sitting up on her bottom in a state of anxious immobility similar to the one I’d observed five weeks earlier.
Night began to fall. The first signs of autumn could be heard in the incessant quivering of the leaves. In the garden a scattering of figs had now ripened. Nothing seemed to be hurrying us to leave behind this feeling of wellbeing … But we had to bring ourselves to leave.
‘Let’s go home, my friend’, I cried.
‘Come on then, we’re going’, said Michèle.
In a flash she’d positioned herself in front of the car door. Her whole body was trembling, and she seemed to be making a point of saying that she was definitely coming with us. I didn’t have to tell her what to do: she jumped in straight away and lay down. And she didn’t move again until we reached our house.
That night Mélodie couldn’t bear being on her own; she wouldn’t let us leave her by herself on her mattress. She didn’t stop howling until I gave in and finally opened the door of our bedroom. She came and settled herself in our intimate space as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She dug in at the foot of our bed and didn’t budge from there. From that time on she abandoned her mattress at night.
All the world’s nights are not the same, but after that it was there that hers, invariably, would be repeated. There were, however, two exceptions: the two weeks that were a little out of the ordinary that I shall recount presently and the two days before her great journey. During these two episodes, which were different in length but equally intense, she wanted to lie alongside me, close to me, to nestle right into me.
11
THE PUPPIES
SHE TURNED FOUR in August 2001. At once discreet and demonstrative, she had become a soothing presence; the energy she provided was healthy, invigorating and restorative. She was always there, with me, next to me, between us, among us. Imperturbably herself, she was like a mysterious barometer of the family atmosphere, of what each of us carried within us and brought back from the world around us, be it precious or pitiful. She’d become more than a companion, more than a friend, a being who could make us ill with worry, a creature for whom a word like animal or beast was not suitable, or tolerable, those terms too often being associated with the contempt that we express for human beings who are depraved and noxious and indeed infinitely more harmful to the general harmony of the world of human and non-human living beings than the animals and the beasts themselves. She was like a child resulting from an act of love, from the passionate lovemaking performed by my wife and me in our desire to bring a child into the world. She was my daughter, a daughter incarnated in a dog, whom I had had—in a fabulous story of some unknown civilisation—from intercourse with my wife while we were both changed into dogs. Among billions of possible dogs, it was she who’d been given to me—this is something of a miracle, as miraculous as the birth of a child, the fruit of a unique encounter, of that one night, that long night, of a man and a woman who make love.
One day I learnt of the death of one of Danna’s offspring from the same litter. It had been taken by an illness of a violent nature that the vet had been unable to explain. It had vomited to the point of exhaustion and nothing had been able to stop this hellish reflex from taking hold of its body. I realised that dogs do not live as long as humans; my daughter was therefore aging six or seven times faster than I was. It was a scandalous situation. Of course the gap between the canine species and our own as to life expectancy constituted a basic fact dictated by the laws of nature, but I couldn’t come to accept it.
So the idea came to me to perpetuate her life by asking her to leave descendants. We had a lot of trouble finding her a good match. But, finally, a suitor presented himself; the union took place at his house. And, one December day, she brought nine puppies into the world, one of which was stillborn.
To whelp—I cannot get used to this expression which seems to be inelegant, even ugly: why does French make a strict distinction between the act of giving birth to an offspring in the case of animals and the act of bringing a child into the world in the case of humans? The whelping, then, began towards midnight. We had asked for the assistance of Mrs A, who was the person closest to Mélodie outside my little family. She is a masseuse by profession, and quite familiar with what to do in this situation. She had already worked as a midwife, if I can put it like that, when Danna had given birth to her puppies four years earlier. As for me, an excruciating herniated disc condemning me to immobility, I was as useless as a folding umbrella in a raging typhoon.
An area equivalent to two tatamis fenced with sturdy cardboard had been prepared to serve as a delivery room. The mother-to-be was lying on old newspaper that had been spread out in readiness for the first contractions. Mrs A, seated facing Mélodie, placed her hands on her round belly. Each time that she stroked them right along her body from the neck to the rump Mélodie closed her eyes and, a few seconds later, stared at the masseuse with a gentle, pleading expression in her eyes.
The first one, dark brown, showed no delay in arriving. It was wrapped in a kind of gelatinous, translucent membrane, which the young mother tore and removed by licking it vigorously. This gesture was essential. The puppy would other wise have been unable to breathe as it changed from one mode of existence to another. The schoolgirl took it upon herself to put around the neck of each new arrival a little collar of coloured wool so that we could tell one from another. She also had to write on the cardboard wall the name of each puppy and the time of its birth. We agreed to call the first one Malek, after a dear friend of the same name. Once the birthing process was underway the other puppies followed at fairly regular intervals. After four or five births there was a pause. We wondered if that mightn’t be it. Mrs A stopped her massaging. She needed to rest. But Mélodie lifted her head, which was resting between her two front paws, and looked at the masseuse with a disconcerted expression. Her look was perfectly eloquent. Our friend from Akiruno quickly resumed her role as a midwife.
The second one was called Gatsby because the teenager was at the time reading The Great Gatsby with much enjoyment; the third, Jazz, the fifth, Tosca, the sixth, Amati, the seventh, Amélie, the eighth, Lulu, and, lastly, the ninth, Bartók. Mrs A continued to practise her skills in shiatsu on the belly of the birthing mother. The two hands stroked slowly in the direction of the growth of her fur. Eight little bundles of flesh of a darker or lighter sandy colour stirred as if attracted by an invisible force. When the two magical hands, pressing firmly, moved again towards the new mother’s rump, she suddenly got up and gave her coach a complicit look.
‘It’s finished, I think.’
There was a long silence, accompanied by sighs of relief. Then some timid applause …
‘Gokurosan! (may all your pain be blessed)’, I said automatically.
I was stretched out, paralysed by pain in my lower back, not far from the space defined by the cardboard. I heard it all through the chaos of bodily sensations.
‘Are you saying that to me? Or to the young mother?’ asked the masseuse in an amused voice.
‘To the mother of course, but to you too …’
‘Is it truthful, this lie?’
There were peals of laughter. Barely had the start of a laugh taken hold of me than I felt a stab of pain splitting my back. I forced myself to keep my mouth shut.
But the puppies needed to be watched. Were they attaching well to their mother? Night was gradually fading. The teenage girl, who’d gone to bed long ago, had noted, in her careful handwriting, the names of the puppies until the arrival of the third, Jazz. Her mother had taken over from there.
‘For the fifth one, what shall we choose?’
We didn’t really know. We decided by default on whatever sounded more or less like a dog name among the music and cinema references that
came to mind. Why Amati, for example? Because Mrs Suzuki, the violin teacher whom my brother had just met up with again after thirty-five years in which neither had made any contact with the other, played on a wonderful Amati. And Bartók? Julia-Madoka was working on several pieces from Mikrokosmos. Amélie obviously came from the film of that name, which she adored. Tosca from Puccini’s opera, Lulu from that by Alban Berg, but also after a happy and cheerful aunt of Michèle’s.
The fourth one, not named, was stillborn. Mrs A saw straight away that it wasn’t alive. Hastily, she took it and wrapped it in newspaper to put it out of the mother’s sight.
When the task was completed and all the little ones had begun to suckle peacefully, the mother licked them one after the other. She did the rounds of the whole litter several times, determinedly. Mrs A, exhausted after the night she’d spent tirelessly massaging the dog, finally got up and told us that she was going to take the first train home. Michèle thanked her cheerfully for her dedication and darted a furtive glance at the mother surrounded by her eight newborns. She was astounded to see her baring her fangs for a brief couple of seconds, looking up at the face of the masseuse from below. Mrs A hadn’t noticed it.
Day was breaking. The intermittent sound of the newspaper deliverer’s motorbike could be heard as he moved further and further away, stopping and starting. The jug boiled, the toaster’s timer made a tic-tac sound as it went off. Breakfast was being prepared in the kitchen. I’d passed the rest of the night in the same place, that is to say on the floor of the living room next to the sofa. I noticed that I was covered with a big blanket that wasn’t there two hours before. So I must have slept a little. I called out a pained hello to Michèle, who came over to see how I was. It was then, throwing a quick glance at the little cardboard house, that she realised that the puppies, in the absence of their mother, were snoozing on their own. ‘Where is she? Where’s she gone? What’s happening?’
I sat down in some pain. I rested back against the sofa. Suddenly Michèle’s voice came from the other end of the apartment.
‘What are you doing? Aren’t you looking after your little ones?’
Scarcely had Michèle’s voice reached me than I saw Mélodie appear through the open glass doors of the living room. She was holding in her mouth a little toy made of yellow rubber in the shape of a crocodile. She came towards me, making little moans. She lifted her right front paw to give it to me. ‘So, what have you got there, my little one?’ I asked her. She let go of the toy while looking me straight in the eye. Then she began to lick my face as if she were telling me something, as if she wanted to wipe from my face the signs of a night of pain that had been endured.
‘Thank you, thank you, my friend.’
She picked up her crocodile again and went slowly towards the cardboard house. She stepped over the little low wall of about thirty centimetres we’d made as an entrance for her. She lay down near her offspring and gently placed the yellow plaything among them. Finally she put her muzzle between her dazzling white front paws and gave a deep sigh.
From that day, until the departure of the puppies and the complete demolition of the cardboard house, the yellow crocodile never again left the maternal fold.
12
PITY
ONE DAY, at the end of a period of intensifying lower back pain, I was crippled by ghastly shooting pains through my loins.
I was conducting oral exams at the university. It was a Saturday afternoon. When the last candidate had left I marked his performance and jumped up from an acute pain in my lower back. Too late. In a flash I was literally floored by what seemed like an electric shock of maximum voltage. I was lying on my back, as if paralysed. What to do? First I had to get back to my office and call my wife or an ambulance. I gathered all my remaining strength in order to get up. To start with I couldn’t even turn over. Finally, with the help of a chair on which I’d sat during the orals, I managed to stand up … I don’t know how long I took to perform this simplest of movements that normally only takes a fraction of a second. Drops of sweat beaded on my brow. A sensitive ear would have picked up the sound of my teeth chattering in pain. I started to walk … But I wasn’t able to … Still I walked … I walked … or, rather, I attempted something resembling human steps. I leaned against the wall of the dark corridor to put my legs one in front of the other. I sensed their proud and painful presence so strongly that it was as if they no longer belonged to me. After thirty never-ending minutes, experiencing a level of torture like nothing I’d ever known in my life, I nonetheless reached my office and succeeded in opening the door. With my left hand I reached for the telephone … Suddenly a kind of black curtain dropped in front of my eyes.
An MRI scan revealed a severely herniated disc. After a large anaesthetic injection, which only gave me a few hours’ relief, the doctor explained that I would need the patience of a player of Go and that I’d have to wait until the gelatinous core of the intervertebral disc was back in place and no longer pressed on the roots of the sciatic nerve. There was only one thing to do: stay in bed and not move. I left the hospital. It was the first time that I’d walked with a stick. An old lady stood up for me on the bus. I accepted without shame and sat down.
I returned home a little before midday. I took the prescribed analgesic medications, but they didn’t take effect for some time. The pain put a complete stop to anything I felt like doing. Sitting on a chair I hated the chair; lying on my back or my side I loathed the mattress and the tatamis. Whatever position I found for myself, the aching discomfort pursued me, assailing and tormenting me without respite. Indescribable radiating pains made me writhe in my bed. I no longer knew where to put my feet. Then I heard the sharp little sound made by Mélodie’s claws when she walked on the wooden floor. The distinctive click-clack came nearer. Then, suddenly, I heard nothing more. I was lost in the dormant rage of my bruised nerves …
… I was slowly coming out of a state of blessed torpor when she gave a deep sigh. I felt her warm breath. She had lain down beside me; she had rested her muzzle on the edge of the mattress that was placed level with the tatamis. Clearly, she was waiting until I woke up. I was in darkness. I switched on my bedside lamp. It was almost seven o’clock. The happiness of having forgotten the existence of my own body was already behind me. I patted her head.
‘Thank you, Mélodie, thank you.’
You could see how pregnant she was. A week later, when I was still not recovered, she would bring into the world a litter of puppies brimming with vitality.
I got up and started to walk painfully in the direction of the kitchen from which came the sound of the meal being prepared. She got up in turn and followed me.
Michèle told me that Mélodie had passed the whole afternoon next to my sick and suffering body, motionless, like a stone statue guarding the entrance to a temple. During dinner, interrupted several times by sharp pains that made me feel quite crazed and forced me to sprawl over or try desperately to find a position that, if not soothing, at least didn’t produce this stabbing sensation, she remained right next to my chair, being careful not to touch my feet, which didn’t really know whether they wanted to be placed on the wooden floor or to remain dangling in the air. Every time I left the table to stretch out on my back or stomach, those big round black eyes of hers stared at me from a sideways angle, without her head moving even the slightest. Then she stood up at once, her ears pricked, when I let a cry of pain escape from my mouth.
I stayed prostrate for more than two weeks, wracked with pain. I only got up to eat and to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t do anything else. I did read in bed to stop myself from getting bored when I was in a little less pain thanks to the medication, but I found the continual inactivity difficult to bear. What diverted me and even succeeded in lifting my spirits a little was Mélodie’s constant presence and empathetic gaze: she was there at my side night and day except at the time of her two daily walks, which Michèle and Julia-Madoka took on throughout this period. While it was stil
l daylight she remained lying at the foot of the big marital bed, staring at the sick man each time he stirred or muttered a few ill-tempered, incomprehensible words. When night came she placed herself just next to me, the position she only took up again on the last two nights of her existence.
I wasn’t going to die. But I was suffering dreadfully. Mélodie, her whole being having now become a sympathetic ear, heard the tears and my body crying out in pain. So much so that sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would make dreadful cries as if she too were being subjected to this torture.
‘Don’t worry, Mélodie.’ Michèle’s sleepy but crystal-clear voice quietly penetrated the deepening night.
Diary Extract 3
Fragments that Have Slipped from the Notebook of a Dog’s Companion
It is well known that for Descartes animals were nothing more than automatons, mere machines. The Cartesian I think, therefore I am brings about a real rupture by distinguishing man from the other living things. Endowed with reason, thought and speech, man uproots himself from the world of living things and indeed from the world itself to take possession of it, to appropriate the position of master and possessor of the whole of nature. In a famous passage from the fifth part of the Discourse on Method, Descartes writes:
If there were machines of such a kind that had the organs and aspect of a monkey, or of some other animal lacking reason, we would have no way of knowing that they were not in all respects of the same nature as these animals; whereas, if there were machines that resembled our bodies and mimicked our actions morally as much as it were possible, we would always have two very sure means of recognising that they were not on that account true men.
The first means of making this distinction is language, the second, the activity of thinking.
Melodie Page 4