‘Mélodie! Mélodie! Where are you? Come back, please come back! Mélodie!’
So there I was, dashing around frantically, looking in all the out-of-the-way corners of the park where a lovable dog, all atremble, might be hiding. In my right hand I held the red leash, and in the left, the little walks bag containing the bottle of water and some advertising liftouts. I was hot. I was bathed in sweat; big drops of perspiration ran down my cheeks and down my back the whole length of my spine. I looked at my watch. It was past ten o’clock. That meant we should have been home more than an hour ago. I was exhausted. I sighed despondently.
It was then that a woman in her forties, who was holding a Shiba on the leash, spoke to me. Seeing me in the state of panic that showed I was a master looking for his dog, in this highly visible state of distress, no doubt she felt sorry for me:
‘Are you looking for your dog? I don’t know if it’s yours, but there’s a dog over there, on the footpath, near the entrance.’
‘What does it look like? Is it a big dog? Is it a golden retriever?’
‘Yes, it is, it’s a golden retriever. It was sitting, looking towards the entrance … It looked like it was waiting …’
‘Thank you, madam.’
Having stammered these few words of thanks, I strode off at once. I headed straight for the exit. ‘Oh, so you’d decided to go back home, you little rascal!’ I said to myself. ‘Well, I didn’t think of that!’ I arrived at the exit, I hurtled down the stairs, I leapt onto the footpath of Nakano Avenue. And yes, there I found the frightened runaway. She was sitting on her back legs, straight as a rod. As soon as she saw me, she bowed her head forward a little, as if she was embarrassed and felt a sudden rush of uneasiness.
‘You were waiting for me here! I didn’t know! Oh, I’m sorry. How long have you been waiting for me? I’ve been looking for you for an hour. Which means you’ve been here for an hour waiting for me? Is that right? Oh, I should have thought of that! Useless as ever!’
She got up and stood on her four legs. Then she grabbed me with all her strength between her two front legs and began to moan softly.
‘Yes … it’s OK. It’s OK, Mélodie.’
Then she resumed her sitting position, all the time looking up at me. I knelt down; I took Mélodie’s head in both hands and I said to her, ‘I feel reassured again now. Thank you a thousand times over.’
I clasped her in my arms; I pressed my cheek against hers. She did the same to me, licking me furiously. Eventually though, her elaborate displays of affection came to an end. I got up and attached the leash to her collar. We made our way from Philosophy Park. From time to time the sun clouded over. The breeze rustled the soft green leaves of the cherry trees and brushed gently over my forehead.
Suddenly I felt cold.
Mélodie waits. She waits, for example, with the patience of a Tibetan monk before starting the meal that has been prepared for her. I am not one of those people who make their dog wait because they like making it wait. I don’t share their enjoyment in such futile contortions that only satisfy the rather sadistic pride of the master. But one day it happened that, quite unwittingly, I made Mélodie wait more than three quarters of an hour in front of her well-filled dish.
Just as I was about to say, ‘Go on, eat!’ the telephone rang. I ran to the living room to pick up the receiver. It was an old lady of more than eighty, a neighbour who lived by herself, who was calling me to ask for help. She told me that she needed to replace the blown globes of her ceiling lights; that there was now only one that worked; that she was really afraid of finding herself in the dark one evening; that her son, who usually saw to it, could no longer do it because he had recently moved and now he lived too far away; that she’d bought the globes herself now, the same ones. Finally, she was brave enough to ask me if it wasn’t too much trouble for me to come and put them in, because she was so afraid of falling when she was getting up on the step-ladder. I told her that it wasn’t any trouble at all for me and that I was coming over straight away to help her get it all done.
Her little wooden house is two minutes’ walk from ours. Equipped with a few tools, I set off without delay. I get to her place and get busy getting the ceiling lights working again. Undo the cover, replace the blown bulbs, put back the cover: it was all fixed in twenty minutes. As a token of thanks the old lady offered me a cup of tea with a delicious little cake. ‘Really, you shouldn’t be embarrassed. When you need a globe replaced you call me, Mrs Satoh! OK? You’ve seen how easy it is for me? How many days have you been here with just the light from one globe? … Be reasonable, Mrs Satoh! Next time call me straight away. Promise? …’
And so the conversation continued over the pleasant aroma of green tea, which blended with the heady scent of the old house.
Then, the sound of garbage collectors in the street …
Suddenly I remembered that I hadn’t yet fed Mélodie. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Satoh, I have to go back. I’ve left Mélodie at home on her own; I’ve got things to do, I’m sorry…’
I run. I go up the stairs in a flash. I open the door; I stagger as I take off my shoes; I rush to the kitchen where I’d abandoned her.
What do I see?
Mélodie was lying next to her untouched food bowl. She was waiting.
‘I’m sorry, Mélodie. I’d completely forgotten about you! I’m not a fit and proper master! I feel dreadful!’
She got up straight away and sat on her haunches. She hadn’t touched her meal, which had turned into a sort of chestnut purée. With a patience that had conquered her desire to satisfy her appetite while she sat looking at her food, clearly she was waiting for us to resume our ritual of ‘civility’, doubtless quite imaginary, but that had the virtue of shaping our life, of imparting a certain rhythm to our daily gestures and, especially, of softening and smoothing our relations and therefore of eliminating from them any element of coarseness and lack of delicacy.
Dogs, unlike wolves, are animals that have been domesticated for more than ten thousand years. They were the first animal to be domesticated, says Alexandra Horowitz, author of Inside of a Dog. ‘Domesticated’ means that mankind and the society of which it is at once the cause and effect play an important part in the very construction of this animal being. The control over desire (appetite), to which this wait of three quarters of an hour bears witness, shows that, for Mélodie, nature bows before an imprint of a cultural order that stems from the alliance of humans and dogs over ten millennia.
The longest wait that Mélodie endured was that of the first of January, leaving aside the one that we regularly inflicted on her each time we left for France in summer.
The New Year’s Day celebration is one that brings together the members of the family who are scattered in different places during the rest of the year. It is one of the occasions on which, with incontrovertible authority, the power of the family unit to give structure and form to the lives of its members is made manifest. Under no circumstances could one fail to take part in it.
We are in the habit of spending the evening of 31 December with my elderly mother, who lives in Tsurukawa, still in Tokyo, but, even so, more than thirty-five kilometres from our place, to welcome in together, in the invigorating cold of the depths of night, the very first moments of the new year. A little before midnight we will go to a Buddhist temple nearby and, there, with a little wooden hammer, we ring 108 little bells hanging beneath the roof of a gallery that leads to the main shrine. According to tradition, within a man there dwell 108 evil desires that he must drive out before he begins the new year. This takes ten minutes. After the bell-ringing we go and see a very old priest, probably the highest dignitary of the temple, who gives us a quick tap on the right shoulder with a sacred text more than ten centimetres thick. When this ceremony is completed we are served very hot sweet sake. My mother, slightly stooped, gives me her arm so that I can support her while, slowly and carefully, we make our way. On the little pathway separating the shrine from the gallery of be
lls there are men stoking a big fire around which the sometime pilgrims warm themselves for a moment before going off to have their first dream of the year.
It’s a habit that I have taken up again since the death of Mélodie in 2009. When she was with us it was impossible for us to spend the night of New Year’s Eve in the way I’ve described, following this little ritual of ours. I could of course have taken Mélodie to my mother’s, and in fact I once did, but I couldn’t bear seeing her in the entry hall, tied up to the base of the shoe stand. Neither my mother nor my brother’s family who live next door could get used to the unwonted animal intrusion. It was by definition disturbing and unclean. Her presence among them was not wanted; I saw it at once. Because of that I preferred to spend the night of 31 December away from my mother, with Mélodie. So on the morning of the first day of the new year we’d get up very early to go and partake ceremoniously of the first breakfast of the year, which my mother had carefully prepared according to the traditional rules of her country.
We would leave around half past seven. Seeing us busy getting ready to go, Mélodie would be unsettled. She’d keep at my heels, watching my every movement. When everything was ready I’d ask Michèle and Julia-Madoka to go out first and wait for me in the car. Mélodie would place herself at the entrance, sitting on her haunches. I spoke to her, kneeling in front of her, ‘You’ll be spending a long day at home on your own. I’d really like to take you with us. But we can’t. You wouldn’t be happy there. There are people there who can’t really accept you because you’re not like us … We’ll be back this evening. And we’ll have our walk … a bit late, but it’ll be the same as usual … All right, Mélodie, goodbye, till this evening. Gomen ne, Mélodie-chan’ (chan placed after a first name signifies great affection in relation to the child who bears it; the translation of this phrase would be something like: I’m sorry, my dear little Mélodie).
I’d close the door very softly; Mélodie’s eyes, imploring, disappeared into the space of the door as it closed. I’d leave, with death in my heart.
Not everything stops on the first of January, but the slowing down of normal activity is obvious. Only the more grasping businesses, always ready to rob mindless customers, the consumer addicts, stay open. I enjoy cruising along the almost deserted motorway admiring, when it’s fine—and it often is on New Year’s Day—Fuji-san in the perfect clarity of a winter’s day. When we get to my mother’s we greet her as well as my brother and his family more solemnly than usual, with set words and expressions used only on that day. Before we sit down at the table I spend a moment of quiet reflection standing in front of the family altar on which is placed the little wooden funerary stele bearing the Buddhist name of my father. I close my eyes, and, in the darkness of the silent space thus created within me, I call on the soul of my father, who died in 1994. I present to him the projects I am to undertake in the coming year.
Like my father, and my mother and brother, I am a man without religion. My father, who, in a childhood of crushing poverty, had been a trainee monk, deplored the industrial form that the Buddhist religion had come to take in modern Japanese society, while at the same time retaining a sense of the sacred and attributing a transcendental value to prayer. His aversion to the business of death was such that when his own father and mother died he took it upon himself to compose their Buddhist names—the knowledge that his religious education had given him allowed him to do this—names that are ordinarily purchased at exorbitant cost when using the services offered by a firm of undertakers. And so, he had prevented my brother and me from calling on a religious functionary at the time of his own death. In our family, for funeral rites, there has never been any religious ceremony and certainly no Buddhist priest in attendance. The ceremony, if ceremony it is, is simply a moment of intense remembrance of the deceased by his loved ones. The minutes of reflection that I give myself standing before the little shrine set into the wall of my mother’s bedroom, free from any worry about correct form, are therefore devoid of any religious undertones.
The breakfast consists of a soup filled with a rich assortment of ingredients—mochi (balls of sticky rice), chicken, bamboo shoots, herbs—and of several small dishes whose names bring to mind the wishes for health and prosperity which the ancestors of the archipelago made long ago. My mother opens the proceedings and wishes that we may all enjoy good health, mutual kindness and success in our work and studies. Next, we take it in turns to share our plans, while praising the talents of she who has devoted herself to the preparation of the breakfast.
The end of this morning meal, a real feast, is the beginning of a long day that follows a set pattern. There is not a great deal to do other than have a walk, which takes us to two temples, one Shinto, the other Buddhist (different from that of the 108 bells), two places that are particularly tranquil in keeping with the serenity we seek that day. I make the most of this walk of an hour and a half in which I take my mother’s left arm in my right and keep our arms firmly linked, just to be able to chat with her about this and that. I’m especially eager to spend time with her like this since I haven’t been able to accompany her the previous day for the ritual of ringing the 108 bells driving out the same number of evil desires …
Once she is back home, my mother, helped by her two daughters-in-law, busies herself with dinner, for which she has asked her fishmonger to prepare a fine array of sashimi and her butcher to cut several slices of beef of excellent quality. My brother splurges on a bottle of champagne, and I do likewise, although I don’t have a drop of it: in three hours’ time I’ll be driving home again (when I’m driving I make this a strict rule, knowing that half a glass of beer makes my violinist brother lose the perfect control of his fingers).
Dinner goes on into the night hours, but on the stroke of ten I announce that we have to go home as it’s getting late. The long day of the first of January concludes with repeated thanks and the promise, at once vague and sincere, to get together again soon.
It’s past eleven when we get home. The car stops. The gate of the car park, activated by remote control, opens slowly, making a metallic clinking like the grinding of teeth.
The sound of the engine revving and then suddenly stopping. The sound of car doors being closed, like sharp, muffled explosions … Then voices back and forth …
Mélodie, her muzzle resting on her two front legs, submerged in the half-light of the study, right next to my chair, instantly pricks up her ears.
The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.
She leaps up and goes straight into the hall. She waits.
At last I get to the door. I put the first key into the lock at the top, then the second into the lock at the bottom.
At last the door opens. A man’s shadow appears. It moves forward and goes into the hall.
‘How are you, my friend? We’re back late. Forgive us. Today’s a bit special. But it’s over! We’re home again!’
Mélodie would be standing on her back legs and trying to grab me with her front ones, to put them around me, as she liked to do. She was almost as tall as me; she’d manage to lick my face. While she was putting her front legs back on the floor and starting to lavish me with affection all over again, I’d put my things down and turn on the lights in the hall. When I squatted down on my heels she’d roll over on to her back, making little moans of joy, and uninhibitedly reveal her pinkish-white belly to me. I’d stroke her along the full length of it. And so, softly, softly, calm would return …
But one year something quite unexpected happened and rather upset the ritual of our homecoming reunion on New Year’s Day. When I stroked Mélodie lying stretched out on her back she suddenly turned back over and jumped straight up, making a getaway movement, as if she had no wish to stay where she was …
A little pool of yellow liquid had appeared on the wooden floor. It reminded me of my fright at seeing the reddish urine …
She’d been waiting for our return for fourteen hours. Bursting with joy, the certainty of
no longer being abandoned was more than enough to make her lose control of her bladder. That was quite normal. Little children everywhere will wet their pants when, bursting with infantile exuberance, their father tickles them in a Sunday-evening game.
‘Do you want to go for a walk?’
As soon as I opened the door she rushed out on to the balcony and, reassured that I was following her, went down the stairs as fast as she could. Once out in the street she went straight to her own little spot on the big thoroughfare of Nakano Avenue. She could finally relieve herself and was freed from the prison of that interminable fourteen-hour wait that I’d inflicted on her. She walked three metres ahead of me off the leash, almost skipping sometimes. It was getting late. Now and then cars drove past. A man in a suit was quickening his steps to get home. A couple of young late-night revellers were walking on the opposite footpath, beneath the thick branches of the bare cherry trees. The laughter of the woman echoed in the night.
Now I could give myself up to the pleasure of finally being able to respond to Mélodie’s unfailing fidelity; for a long time I strolled along with her at my side through the city lying deep in sleep.
Diary Extract 5
Fragments that Have Slipped from the Notebook of a Dog’s Companion
Once there was a dog that was changed into a statue for having waited in the same place, at the same time, in an immutable and always identical position. He was called Hachiko (or Hachi, as a kind of diminutive). He was an Akita, a dog that came from the department of Akita in the province of Tōhoku.
On 14 January 1924 an Akita puppy had been sent from the mountainous hinterland of Akita to the house of Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor of agronomy at the Imperial University of Tokyo, who lived in the district of Shibuya in Tokyo. The puppy travelled more than twenty hours by train to get to Ueno’s station. Hidesaburo gave him the name Hachi and began to feel a deep affection for the animal. He took the train at Shibuya Station to go and work at the university, and Hachi would often go with him to the station. But a year and a few months after Hachi had come to Professor Ueno’s house the professor died suddenly. It was 21 May 1925. He had taken the train as usual at Shibuya. Hachi had gone with him as usual. That evening, at the time his master returned, Hachi, faithfully at his post, waited for him at the station exit. But Professor Ueno did not reappear. He had died at the university, as a result of a brain haemorrhage. Hachi did not give up his vigil; he stayed at the station until late. But when night fell he went back home. People went about preparing for the funeral in a state of general upheaval. For Hachi this separation was too brutal, beyond his understanding. Well away from the scrutiny of the men and women who kept bustling about, he went on looking for his master and everything that was a reminder of him. At last, in a dark little corner of the big house, he found some things that belonged to him. He remained there glued to them for three days without eating.
Melodie Page 9