Malebranche, heir to the Cartesian theory of animal-machines, goes so far as to declare more clearly still: ‘Thus, in animals, there is neither intelligence, nor soul as we understand it ordinarily. They eat without pleasure, they cry without pain, they grow without being aware of it, they desire nothing, they fear nothing, they know nothing . . .’ Hence a well-known anecdote according to which Malebranche, after kicking a pregnant dog barking at a visitor, had said, ‘It cries, but it has no feeling’. If an animal moans it would therefore not be an expression of pain. It would be a noise similar to the squeaking of a badly oiled or broken piece of machinery.
So it is no surprise that this insensitivity to animal suffering can extend, as Élisabeth de Fontenay points out, to a cruelty beyond telling like that shown by Father Tolbiac, admittedly a fictional character, in Guy de Maupassant’s A Life, who, ‘seeing a bitch whelp in front of some awe-struck children, disembowels her with a kick, then savagely grinds underfoot the puppies only just born and those about to be born’.
Three years before the death of Malebranche, in 1715, Rousseau was born. In 1755 he writes:
. . . as long as [man] makes no resistance to the inner compulsion to compassion he will never do harm to another man or even to any sentient being . . . By these means the old arguments about the participation of animals in the law of nature can be terminated . . . being related in some respects to our nature through the sensitivity with which [they] are endowed, it will be thought that they must also participate in natural law, and that man is liable to some kind of obligation towards them. Indeed, it seems that if I am obliged to do no harm to my fellow, it is less because he is a reasonable being than because he is a sentient being, a quality which, being common to man and beast, must at least give to one of them the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the other.
I am obviously not a Cartesian or a follower of Malebranche. I cannot be, having spent twelve years of my life with a dog that I loved. No, when it comes down to it I’m a follower of Rousseau. The continuity between humanity and animality that was ruptured with incredible violence by Descartes and Malebranche seems in a certain way to be reinstated by Rousseau. This feeling is confirmed, in the Discourse on Inequality, if one reads the passage that the citizen of Geneva devotes to the notion of pity as a principle anterior to reason in the same way as love of self. He draws attention to ‘the repugnance of horses to trample a living creature underfoot’. He emphasises that ‘an animal does not without anxiety pass near to a dead animal of its species and that there are even some who give them a kind of burial’. But, quite clearly, mankind has followed the path of Descartes and not that of Rousseau. It has thereby arrived at almighty technoscience. We live in the age of the industrialisation of animal breeding, and of what is called zootechnics, the science of the exploitation of animal-machines. We can see the infinite distance that separates our present-day sensibility from that of Rousseau when we read the following lines taken from Book II of Emile:
Pitiful man! You begin by killing the animal, and then you eat it, as if to make it die twice over. That is not enough: the dead flesh still revolts you, your entrails cannot bear it; it has to be transformed by fire, boiled, roasted, seasoned with concoctions which disguise it: you need butchers, cooks, meat roasters, people to take from you the horror of the murder and dress dead bodies for you, so that the sense of taste, deceived by these disguises, does not reject what is foreign to it, and savours with pleasure carcasses whose aspect the eye itself would have found it difficult to bear.
Part II
ABSOLUTE FIDELITY: TO WAIT TILL IT KILLS YOU
13
HELP!
THE AUDIENCE WAS plunged into the ink-black darkness of the hall, separated by a big empty pit from the stage, which was lit by a bright light shining down from the black ceiling whose height I could only guess at. I was on stage, in ceremonial dress. Two violinists and a cellist were at my side. The concert was going to begin at any moment. As surprising and absurd as it seemed, I was part of a string quartet, which was going to perform one of the six masterpieces by Mozart dedicated to Haydn. I didn’t recognise the musicians. My anxiety increased. Why was I there? How had I been able to accept an idea as crazy, as deluded, as that of playing the viola myself? In front of an audience! Here, in a place that had all the appearance of a real concert hall! What was I to do? Should I stand up and shout out that there’d been a mistake? ‘Excuse me, I’m not a musician. I can’t do anything … I don’t know why I was brought here, why I was given this instrument that doesn’t belong to me, and this black costume, which I’ve never worn.’ I felt hot flushes spreading over my face and the whole of my body, front and back, was bathed in a cold sweat …
A violent episode of apnoea shook me and dragged me from sleep. How long had I stopped breathing for? I was breathless, I needed air as if I’d almost drowned … I turned to lie on my left side in order to breathe deeply.
I fell back asleep …
It was then that I thought I heard, from beyond this night punctuated by tormenting dreams, a kind of wolf’s howling, which seemed to come straight out of a fantastic story unfolding from beginning to end in a far-off Gothic kingdom that had fallen into decay.
I burrowed under the eiderdown as if to flee from the fear, to protect myself from the exhausting, nightmarish night. Yet the wolf’s howls continued to make themselves heard, muffled though, their sharp, piercing notes smothered.
I emerged abruptly from my half-sleep state. I got out of bed. I was now quite sure where the piercing cries were coming from. I quickly put on my wata-ire (a quilted garment worn inside) and rushed to the living room: it was Mélodie who was howling in the semi-darkness, like a she-wolf howling at the full moon. Her whole body was like a trumpet which the musician points and raises high into the sky.
She’d come out of the cardboard house. I turned on the light furthest from the peacefully sleeping little puppies. She jumped up on me and, excited and quivering all over, energetically licked my hands, which were holding her two front paws. But she quickly and nimbly disengaged from our embrace to go over to one of her babies who was lost amid the chairs and magazines piled on the floor, in the shade of a big pot in which stands a ficus that is about twenty years old.
‘So, it was me you were calling out to? You were howling like that to get me to help. It was an SOS! Oh, I’m sorry. I’m useless … I’m really not up to this!’
Delicately, I picked up the little one and took it back to the house, placing it among its brothers and sisters, who didn’t stir at all despite this slight, unprecedented ruckus. The mother took no exception. She followed me with her eyes, attentive and benevolent. When everything was back as it should be she looked at me for a long time, her head raised. Then, a little hesitantly, she held out to me her right front paw. I crouched down to her level, face to face. I grasped her tenderly extended paw. She licked my face; then she went towards the entrance to the cardboard house. She turned around once before climbing over the little wall. At last she carefully lay down among the puppies. I said to her, ‘I’m going back to bed. See you soon, Mélodie.’ Her big black eyes, quite round and always a little moist, crinkled shut just as I said this, as if to give me her assent. She was soothed, reassured, calm, so calm in fact that she gave the impression she was greeting the light of dawn, which was filtering in through the fanlight.
It was from this event that seemed to date a certain intensification of the bond of affection by which the two beings, the two animals, one human, the other non-human, were already quite singularly attached to each other.
Having returned to bed I didn’t go back to sleep. Again I saw the female dog-wolf howling desperately, the young mother, inexperienced and distraught, who dared not snatch up her lost little deserter to return it to the space of maternal protection. Again I saw all the nerves of her slender body, which she held against me, taut, to shackle me in the close embrace of her two front legs. Again I saw her white paw hovering in the air
in search of a sympathetic hand. Again I saw all the confusion and distress she showed faced with her own powerlessness in a situation beyond her control. Again, finally, I saw utter serenity returning to the mother, who, by casting her conspiratorial gaze upon me, would recover her offspring. Plaintive cries, howling jaw, unhealthily panting breath, eyes winking and blinking, ears suddenly pricking up, tail lowered and fearfully tucked between the two back legs, a distinctly perceptible quivering of the whole body: all of these in fact constituted so many signs she made for my benefit with the firm intention of engaging me, reaching me, touching me. Something, I knew, had passed between us when, in the first light of day, on moving away, I caught sight of her body stretched out in a state of complete relaxation and carefree surrender, together with all of her puppies, now reunited.
When they left the house a few weeks later to live their life beneath other skies, a new era began for both of us: she wanted to be right next to me as often as she could, as long as there was no one in the family who was suffering physically or mentally. Often she would even end up clinging to my legs or my arms, pressing firmly against me as if she found it unbearable for there to be a gap of a fraction of an inch between our bodies. Her shadow merged with mine. The warmth of her belly warmed my perpetually cold feet. Her deep sighs reverberated in my ears. Her warm breath suffused my lungs. Her regular breathing kept time with my heartbeat. We had become inseparable, close, very close, closer than close, to each other.
14
VOMITING
MÉLODIE HAD A number of places of her own in the apartment. In the dining room, right next to the big oval table, she had her bed where she could go to at any time to sleep, to listen to us talking at the table or to have the fur on her paws, her claws and her dew-claws cut. When Michèle said ‘Come on, we’re going to the hairdresser!’ she went, quite naturally, although anxious and trembling a little, and placed herself on her futon, which was stuffed with little bits of wood that smelt good. It was really her home base. When our conversations became animated, heated, fired up even, she liked to move closer to us, to settle herself under the table in order to hear us better. When we relaxed in the living room she always took up a position at my feet, as if this extremity of my body were the sole lifebuoy available to her in case of an emergency or a sort of transmitter for all my sympathetic energy. At night, as I’ve said, she camped in our bedroom, on a big mauve towel at the foot of the bed. If she wasn’t asleep she pressed against the edge of our futon, which was covered in shiny, wavy hair; if she was asleep, fully stretched out, her backbone would be touching it as if she wanted to feel our presence through the warmth radiating from the marital bed. During the day, however, she mostly lay with her back against the wall, at the entrance to my study, which is also the entrance to our bedroom. That way she could see me in profile reading or typing on my keyboard.
One day, however, she found herself another, unexpected, spot. I was working at my computer. There is really no separation between my study and my bedroom. From the slightly angled ceiling that follows the slant of the roof, there falls a long noren, a kind of curtain, a dark navy blue, two and a half metres wide, on which are painted brightly coloured tools and utensils from Japanese popular culture of the Edo period. Sharp little moans interspersed with hiccoughs could be heard; she was dreaming. A few seconds later she woke up, got straight to her feet and then sighed deeply. She had settled herself not at the entrance to my study on my left as she usually did, but where she spent the night: that is, on the big mauve towel, behind me. I swung around on my chair.
‘What were you dreaming about, my friend?’
She had her ears turned out and folded back. She took a few steps towards me and sat on her haunches, staring at me with her big round eyes filled with gentleness.
‘It’s a bit early for the walk. Will you let me keep working a bit longer?’
I was about to go back to my keyboard when Mélodie, hesitant, lifted her front paw, holding it out to me. I took it in my hands and thanked her warmly for this affectionate gesture. When I began to concentrate again on the screen of my computer she placed herself there on my right and this time put the other paw on my lap. I patted her head without looking at her, absent-mindedly engaging in the semblance of a one-sided conversation with her. It was at that precise moment that she exhibited an unaccustomed, strange, even disturbing form of behaviour. My desk is a large piece of wood fixed to the wall with brackets, under which are stacked shelves holding big books like the volumes of Treasures of the French Language and the Grand Robert, which means that the space between my legs and the large tomes is extremely limited and tight. But it was into that cramped little spot, naturally very uncomfortable, that my friend wanted to insinuate herself. She lay down first of all, but got up again immediately and stood up straight as a rod on her two hind legs and stared at me …
‘What are you doing, Mélodie?’
She repeated the same gesture: she again gave me her right front paw, imperceptibly tilting her head to the left. I couldn’t understand this unusual insistency on her part. To tell the truth, I wasn’t really making any effort to listen out for the signals she was sending me so insistently. Oh, my friend! I can imagine your dismay. You could see that I wasn’t reacting. We were so close to each other, we could hear each other’s breathing. There was nothing between us, no more than a few centimetres. But the suffering you felt was unbearable: a solitude inflicted on you, an enforced abandonment, an imposed state of desertion … for which I can’t forgive myself.
Distraught, she lay down again … Then, a few seconds later, she got up and came out of her cubbyhole. Advancing with little steps towards the middle of the room, she bent down and, suddenly, lowered her head towards the floor while her whole stomach began to inflate and deflate at a rapid rate like a pair of bellows being used to rekindle a fire. I understood too late the discomfort she’d expressed for my benefit, standing in front of me, with all the means she had at her disposal. I couldn’t do anything other than stroke her painfully undulating stomach with the ten fingers of my two hands. Later, I saw this scene again in dreams a number of times, and I remember having had, in one dream, the disturbing vision of my arms bereft of hands and, in another, even more worrying, of my arms extending into a multitude of hands made of soft plastic that I didn’t know how to use.
Finally, with a dull and painfully suffocated cry, which came up from the cavernous depths of her entrails through an involuntary retching, there suddenly spilled out a kind of dark brown gruel, in considerable quantity.
It often happens that a dog will regurgitate what is in its stomach. That’s what I learned from the three or four books on canine education that my daughter had read and that I’d looked at myself when I needed to. Mélodie had had this unpleasant experience a couple of times, but without all these persistent, and vain, attempts at communication. What I found disconcerting and at the same time reassuring on each of these occasions was that she ate up again what she’d regurgitated quite happily: it was proof that it was a passing and purely functional disturbance. But that day was not the same as any of these other occasions: she didn’t leap upon the soft, warm food that had just been discharged in front of her. On the contrary, she determinedly backed away a little, throwing me a look that expressed anxiety and helplessness.
I went into the kitchen to get what I needed to tackle the cleaning job like a professional. When I came back she had lain down, her muzzle placed on her front paws on the big mauve towel as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I wiped up the gruel and wrapped it in several sheets of advertising liftouts, which I put away in a garbage bag. I scrubbed the wooden floor vigorously with a towel soaked in detergent. Meanwhile, Mélodie got up and went out of my study, heading nonchalantly for the living room. Now that I’d got rid of the thick porridgey substance, I was trying to quench the warm and overpowering smell with a good dose of coconut detergent. Then I heard Mélodie coming back to me—she was trotting. A kind of cont
inuous squeaking accompanied the sharp little sound that her claws made on the floor. She appeared at last and placed herself in front of me; in her mouth was the little yellow crocodile, squeaking all the while.
While she waved her right front paw in the air as if she were trying to get my attention, she made the little toy go on squeaking with no let-up. I caught hold of the extended paw and said to her, ‘You’re feeling better now! You’re happy!’
She withdrew her right paw and gave me the other one. Then she went and settled herself on the mauve towel. She delicately released the rubber animal and placed it right next to her stomach with its shining silver fur.
‘Oh yes, so that’s what it was!’
At the tip of a pink teat, right beside her baby, sparkled a little pearl, snow white and lustrous.
Diary Extract 4
Fragments that Have Slipped from the Notebook of a Dog’s Companion
I don’t know if you can talk about friendship between a dog and its master. But I perceived in Mélodie’s eyes, when she held out her paws to me one after the other to tell me that she wasn’t well, something like friendship, in any case a feeling inspired by a sense of complete trust. In the moments of intense outpouring of emotion, when she clung to me as if she couldn’t bear there to be so much as a hair’s breadth between our bodies, I felt an indestructible bond of attachment between us. Descartes and Malebranche would have taken me for an untutored and happy fool. Rousseau would doubtless have understood me. But the one who would have agreed with me completely is Montaigne.
The age of classicism, with Descartes, saw the advent of a ‘metaphysical and technical humanism’ that made man a domineering sovereign exercising his power over the physical world as it was laid out before him. As for Rousseau, as I’ve said, he rejected the Cartesian doctrine of the animal- machine, but he appears at the same time as one of the founders of modern humanism in that he emphasises the fundamental superiority of man as a free agent capable of extracting himself from the determinism of the natural world, while animals are condemned to submit to the rules imposed by nature. Perfectible (this is one of the key words of the Second Discourse), man becomes the agent of his own history individually as well as collectively, whereas animals do no more than repeat the same behaviours and thereby are unaware of progress, for good or ill.
Melodie Page 5