The house was sold. Mrs Ueno, who was not legally the wife of Hidesaburo, had no right to the estate. She had no other choice, to survive, than to return to the place where she was born, to her own people. As for Hachi, she was not in a position to take him with her, and he was entrusted to a cloth merchant of whom she was a distant relative. But he was soon sent away on the pretext that he jumped up on the customers and frightened them. He was then handed over into the care of other people: he went from suburb to suburb, from house to house. No arrangement was really a happy one. And all the while Hachi did not stop thinking about his missing master. He ran away more and more frequently. He would often pass by the old house of the Ueno family to see if his master had returned, but most often he went to the station of Shibuya at the end of the day to see if he was among the passengers leaving the station. Some of those who worked at the station, accustomed to him being there regularly, no longer shooed him away. The man who sold chicken skewers from his mobile shop next to the exit marvelled at the dog’s faithfulness and befriended him. He would regularly give him something to eat.
Day after day, month after month, went by like this. And, in the monotonous regularity of city life, almost ten years passed without a single day going by that Hachi did not take up his position at the exit to the station. Always in the same place, always at the same time, always in the same position (namely sitting, his attentive gaze fixed on the ticket gate), he waited tirelessly, indefatigably, inexhaustibly for Professor Ueno. And during that time the gap inexorably widened between Hachi’s rapidly aging body and his inner image of his master, which did not age at all. Finally that gap could grow no wider. Time swept everything away, obliterated everything. Hachi gave up the ghost on 8 March 1935 in a Shibuya laneway situated on the other side of the station, a part of town he rarely used to visit.
Beating away somewhere in my adult’s sixty-year-old body there is the heart of a child, which is moved by the tale of this dog and his absolute fidelity. Something that is very ancient, no doubt, which goes beyond the context of recollections and individual memories, is awoken in us by this story. You feel the need to preserve its imprint and to make it tangible. Hachi’s stuffed body is now to be found in the Museum of Agronomy of the University of Tokyo, where Professor Ueno had taught, while his flesh and bones, reduced to ashes, lie in the cemetery of Aoyama alongside the remains of his master. Hachi’s body, in another way, has been petrified so as to undergo no further change. At Shibuya station, unrecognisable today because of its vastness and the mass of people who pass through it and swarm around it day and night, there is now a statue of a dog sitting on its hind legs: in a position of waiting. There are always a great many people, young and not so young, hailing from different cultural and geographic backgrounds, who have taken up their positions around Hachi thus immortalised in bronze, and who themselves are waiting for those they are meeting there. When I go to this part of town, which is now one of the liveliest and busiest shopping areas of Tokyo, and where, ultimately, people do no more than just pass through, I am seized by a strange feeling of disquiet, doubtless due to the contradiction, crystallised around the statue, between the infinite waiting of the faithful dog and the ephemeral moment of the meetings of the passers-by and the passengers engaged in perpetual and never repeated movements.
The fact remains that we love Hachi’s story as we love our long-gone childhood, an enchanted world that has disappeared forever, the truth of another time dimension, like the founding myth of a beautiful, forgotten country whose distant memory we have nevertheless retained. The story is so well loved in fact that two films have been made about it: firstly, Hachi-ko by Seijirō Kōyama, from 1987. Then a remake of it in 2009 by the American director Lasse Hallström, Hachi: A Dog’s Tale. I don’t think that they’re masterpieces from a cinematographic point of view. But in both films I find the poignant contrast (or perhaps simply the idea of that contrast) between the shortness of the life of the dog and the infinite waiting that he is able to take on quite shattering.
To wait is to believe in the other’s return. Hachi did nothing but wait for his master’s return. He believed in his return. Clearly he was unable to see Professor Ueno, but that extraordinary and incredible capacity for waiting convinces me that Hachi had a kind of unalterable inner vision of his master. If not, why wait? Why use all the time remaining to him in waiting? I think I understand why the two filmmakers felt the need, at the end of their films, to have the ghost return. Some will criticise them for it, accusing them of cheap sentimentality. I can understand their viewpoint, but it’s not one I share.
Hachi was not fortunate enough to see his master again. But Argus did. The famous episode in the Odyssey of Ulysses’ dog is one we are all familiar with. Roger Grenier quotes it at the beginning of his fine book, The Difficulty of Being a Dog. J-B Pontalis also talks about it in Elles, when he describes his recollections of his dog, Oreste. I in turn cannot resist the pleasure of presenting this central moment. Ulysses, or Odysseus, King of Ithaca, returns. After twenty years away he reaches his island, disguised as a miserable old beggar. Only his dog Argus recognises him, and dies then and there.
Stretched on the ground close to where they stood talking [Odysseus and Eumaeus the swineherd], there lay a dog, who now pricked up his ears and raised his head. Argus was his name. Odysseus himself had owned and trained him, though he had sailed for holy Ilium before he could reap the reward of his patience . . . There, full of vermin, lay Argus the hound. But directly he became aware of Odysseus’ presence, he wagged his tail and dropped his ears, though he lacked the strength now to come any nearer to his master. Yet Odysseus saw him out of the corner of his eye, and brushed a tear away . . . As for Argus, he had no sooner set eyes on Odysseus after those nineteen years than he succumbed to the black hand of death.*
Argus’s longevity surprises me. Hachi only lived for thirteen years; Mélodie for twelve years and three months. Ulysses’ dog waited for his master for twenty years; Hachi for almost ten years. That ‘black hand of death’ that suddenly followed the reappearance of his master is telling about the emotion that overwhelmed the old dog. It was as if he lived on his waiting, as a source of desire and of vital energy. What were the last moments of Hachi’s life like, in that sad Shibuya alley? At the back of his eyes, on that dark inner screen, did he see Professor Ueno returning? Did he see his ghost? How did life, so nonchalant and cruel, leave Hachi’s body? As for Mélodie, happily, she didn’t experience such a torture of waiting. Still, wasn’t she waiting for me—because that is in fact what she was doing, as short as the wait was—the evening of 2 December 2009, before she gave up her last breath?
But what, more than anything else, moves me so deeply each time that I return in the Odyssey to the scene of Argus’s discreet reunion with Ulysses is the fact that his appearance, his outward form as a miserable old beggar, which makes him unrecognisable to human eyes, has absolutely no influence over the attitude and attachment of Argus. What the old dog sees in Ulysses, whether he is a king or a beggar, is his being, after his historically constituted or artificially constructed outward appearance has been stripped from him. That alone is what Argus perceives. Ulysses’ being, to which only Argus is sensitive, makes me think of the statue of which Rousseau speaks in the Discourse on Inequality, that of Glaucus, ‘which time, the sea and storms had so disfigured that it was more like a wild beast than a god’.
In the Nazi death camps the prisoners as we know were no longer considered human beings; their status was that of commodities, and as a result their persecutors referred to them, and addressed them, by a number. How had they come to that? In the system of the concentration camps, as unlikely as it may seem, the Nazi torturers had lost the ability to see humanity on (or underneath) a person’s face. According to Emmanuel Levinas, who recalls his memories of Bobby in ‘The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights’, it was just this stray dog who could recognise the prisoners’ humanity:
The other men, described as free, w
ho came into contact with us or who gave us work or orders or even a smile—and the children and the women who passed by and who, sometimes, would lift their eyes to look at us—stripped us of our human skin, we were only a kind of quasi-humanity, a troop of monkeys . . .
And then, around the middle of a long period of captivity . . . a stray dog happens to come into our lives. One day he came and joined the motley crew when, under guard, it was returning from work. He managed to survive somehow in some wild corner in the vicinity of the camp. But we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as befitting an adored dog. He turned up at the morning assemblies and would be waiting for us on our return. Jumping about and barking gaily. For him—there was no question about it—we were men.
This headspinning realisation: humanity denied by men but felt and shared by an animal.
One day on television, a report about Berlin’s policy regarding the protection of dogs showed a homeless young woman of about thirty who had two magnificent big dogs. The thirty-year-old woman—she looked twenty years older—was a former drug addict who had come out of it thanks to the responsibility, the word she herself chose, that she took on in relation to her dogs. She said that she was fulfilling her duty as a citizen in paying the municipal tax for the dogs and that she spent half of her income on feeding her companions. As she answered the interviewer’s questions she radiated a certain kind of beauty and that special glow that comes from having regained one’s health. The two dogs, sitting impassively at her side and supremely indifferent to the stares of the passers-by who hurried along glancing furtively at the ménage à trois, were as handsome as athletes of ancient Greece in full possession of their strength.
Hachi, turned to stone, made into a statue, lives at the very heart of the mad urban bustle of Tokyo, as a symbol of absolute fidelity, of an unwavering attachment, of an indestructible love, unattainable for the unhappy humans, in essence, as a memory of an elysian world lost forever, like the two lovers in the The Devil’s Envoys (1942)—Gilles and Anne—who are turned to stone and whose hearts, triumphing over time, keep on beating.
* Homer, The Odyssey, trans. EV Riev.
Part III
‘YOU ASK THAT I FORGET YOU? FEAR NOT, MY BELOVED.’
(WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART, K 505)
21
TO WAKE OR NOT TO WAKE?
ONE SUMMER NIGHT during the holidays of 2005, Mélodie, who was no longer a young dog, was sleeping as usual at my feet in our bedroom. I say ‘at my feet’ because I’d stayed in Tokyo on my own, while Michèle and Julia-Madoka went to France for a month so that Michèle could see her elderly mother again and Julia-Madoka could experience French life both among family and socially. The heat and humidity that had penetrated the bedroom did not yield to the cool air mutely circulating through the apartment thanks to the air-conditioning. I had gone to bed early so that I could rise early. There was no question of walking Mélodie in the heat of the bitumened streets, blazing hot after eight o’clock in the morning.
I’ve been a light sleeper since the birth of my daughter. I’d acquired the habit, unwittingly, of sleeping very lightly so that I could get up at the slightest sound coming from the baby’s bedroom. The open doors of the bedrooms, hers and ours, meant that we could respond to the little girl whenever she called out and go to her—if we needed to—in a flash. Julia-Madoka having now grown up, her place was taken by Mélodie, who of course was not growing up in the same sense. I’d become attuned to all the nocturnal signals made by this elderly infant.
That night the heat, really quite unbearable, was causing me discomfort. I had over me neither a blanket nor sheets, but the ambient heat, close to my body temperature, had first warmed the mattress before assailing me on all sides. I was like a fish thrashing around on a hotplate. I couldn’t get to sleep. Nonetheless, before dawn, I’d disappeared into the folds of night, and it was the first glimmers of day, still quite pale, that little by little prised me from sleep. It must have been about half past four. I heard the sharp little noise made by Mélodie’s claws on the wooden floor, which meant that she was suddenly getting up for some reason I tried to identify. Was she suffering from the heat as I was? Very likely, as this humid, oppressive heat was no doubt unheard of in Scotland, the country of origin of the golden retriever. Was she going to have a drink from her bowl, which was always left in the kitchen at the other end of the apartment? I was listening for her movement, my hearing still only half awake. She took just a few steps and flopped down as if to go to sleep again. She could doubtless no longer bear being on the floor where it had become burning hot from contact with her outstretched body, and wanted a cool spot, if possible exposed to the slight draught coming from the fanlight of the entry hall.
But, a few moments later, Mélodie got up and started moving purposefully towards me. Then she stopped dead. A silence broken by panting. She was completely still. Then she started to walk again. In my state of semi-sleep, I was aware of the sheer weight of my closed eyelids. Even so, my attention was turned towards the dog, sensing her hesitant concentration. Finally she made up her mind and came closer to me. Her warm, heavy breath brushed my forehead. Gradually I emerged from my summer sleep. But I kept pretending to be asleep, turning on to my left side. Was she trying to tell me that she was ready for a good long walk? I was expecting her tongue to lick me to wake me up. I could still feel her warm, heavy breath, which had just tickled my face.
But no, Mélodie didn’t lick me. Ten centimetres from my cheek, she sniffed my salty perspiration; her tongue, pink and moist, was hanging out and was on the verge of touching my skin. But, at the last minute, she refrained from licking me. She preferred to let me sleep a little longer. I don’t know how she came to this decision to resist doing what she wanted to do. She knew how to say to me things like, ‘Well, isn’t it time for our walk?’ When I found it difficult to tear myself away from my computer screen because of a sentence I couldn’t get right, Mélodie would come up to me with her head tilted, questioning, urging me to come. But that morning, although her temptation to wake me up was pushed to the limit, she didn’t give in to it. She decided to leave me in peace; that much was clear.
The following year something occurred that was both similar and dissimilar. In autumn 2006 the political tension was gradually rising in France in light of the presidential election of April–May 2007. Far from the Hexagon, I was still paying attention to what was going to happen with the Socialists in their presidential primary.
Opposing Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the latter still alive on the political scene, an elegant woman was positioning herself to contest the presidency of the Republic. In a European country like France, with its long patriarchal tradition, wasn’t the smiling presence of Ségolène Royal in a cohort of political men an event in itself? To me in any case it seemed to be the culmination of a certain historical process and at the same time the sign of a change that was starting to penetrate deeply into the social fabric. Finally, on 26 November, at the Socialist Party’s extraordinary Congress of nomination, the victory of Ségolène Royal was officially proclaimed. The Socialist candidate for the presidential election was then to deliver her nomination speech. What would she say when facing the men who’d been set aside and who might not be able to rid themselves of a certain secret frustration despite their jubilant mien? Over meals Michèle and I spent a lot of time talking about the emergence of a woman Socialist candidate for the presidency and therefore of the real possibility of a woman president of the Republic, which, beyond what that implied in our profession as teachers of French abroad, had considerable significance at the other end of the world where a Minister of Health brazenly dared to say that, when it came down to it, women were only machines for giving birth.
In Tokyo—which is eight hours ahead of France in winter—if you wanted to listen to Ségolène Royal live over the internet you had to get up in the middle of the night. I decided against it given my to-do list the following day. The speech would be published at
length. You would be able to download it; it would be available in its entirety on YouTube. So despite the temptation to wait up, we went to bed at a reasonable hour.
A few hours later I was woken by a little restlessness on the part of Mélodie, who’d got up suddenly. She came up to me and sat on her back legs. I just wanted to stay hidden away in sleep, taking refuge in the night, and my response was to burrow down even further under the futon. But she persisted. She didn’t back off. Instead she came close and leant over my head, which was emerging from the futon. Finally she licked her master’s cheek with her rough tongue as if to force him out of his hiding place.
Melodie Page 10