Melodie Read online

  Diary Extract 1

  Fragments that Have Slipped from the Notebook of a Dog’s Companion

  I wonder what images will appear on the screen of my dark inner cinema at the moment of my death. My father died some time during the night of 2 April 1994, alone, far from any familial or familiar presence, in a ward of several beds in a small private hospital of a town named Stork River. He had just been put into hospital. The coming of the Grim Reaper is always sudden. We had prepared ourselves, but we weren’t ready.

  In Literature or Life, Jorge Semprún devotes several pages of shattering beauty to the death agony of the great sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the Buchenwald concentration camp. The Spanish writer notes that, ‘conscious of the need for a prayer’, he recited aloud, for the one who ‘was slowly being emptied of his vital substance’, some lines from Baudelaire: ‘“O death, old captain, it is time, let us weigh anchor! . . . Our hearts known to you are filled with beams of light!”’ ‘A slight quiver’ then appeared ‘on the lips’ of his old teacher. I would have liked to do the same for my father, who lay snugly in a hospital bed. I am not ashamed to say it. I am not Semprún; my father is not Halbwachs; our circumstances are not tragic like theirs. But the need—it is imperative—to say a prayer and to be with the one who is making this decisive leap is the same.

  My father passed away in the nocturnal silence of a hospital ward. No one knew of his dying, apart perhaps from the person in the next bed, who would have noticed some irregularity in his breathing.

  I imagine in vain the thoughts that would have crossed his mind; in vain I picture the familial scenes of times past which he might have replayed in his mind’s eye like a kaleidoscope of images. I remain forever separated from the truth that was lost to silence and ink-black darkness. What do you see when death comes to you? What happens at the moment when consciousness falls into the abyss of nothingness? All the dead know it; the living remain ignorant.

  Part I

  TO BE SENSITIVE, TO BE COMPASSIONATE

  3

  A DOUBLE BIRTH

  IT’S SUMMER. During the day the heat is oppressive, and sometimes it goes on into the night. But on this particular morning we wake up and it is unexpectedly cool. How delightful! So I get up and go for a walk. I like to steal along the peaceful streets of the sleeping town. I do a big loop of the neighbourhood, often walking by the memorial garden of Hyakkannon (Hundred Statuettes of the Merciful Goddess). There are trees there, cherries and maples. I pass people walking dogs who meet in the middle of the street or beneath a maple still covered in greenery to stop and chat for a moment. I run, I stop. I run again. An hour later I return, dripping with sweat. A warm shower revives me.

  A friend calls us around two in the afternoon to tell us that her golden retriever, oddly named Danna—oddly because it’s a Japanese name meaning ‘Master, head of the house’—has just given birth to eight puppies. She knows that my daughter, Julia-Madoka, who has just turned twelve, has been longing to have a puppy for ages. She tells me that she’ll invite us to come and see them when the puppies have grown a little and are ready to leave their mother and the house where they were born.

  Two months later we are in the apartment of Mr and Mrs G, where Danna and her puppies are entertaining a large gathering. A square space, the equivalent of two tatami mats, fenced with flattened cardboard boxes, serves as the puppies’ house, and it’s there that, night and day, the mother feeds them and raises them with unflagging devotion. Two or three puppies are having fun biting and fighting while the others nap. Among those who are awake, the most active one turns its head and notices that three heads have appeared above the very high cardboard wall. It looks at the marvelling face of the schoolgirl who looks back at it. A meeting has taken place. Someone catches the puppy and takes it up out of the house as if they were carrying it by helicopter. Now it is placed on the lap of the schoolgirl who a few minutes before had gazed at it in rapt attention.

  The puppy has fallen asleep. It has been on her little lap for a good hour, without moving a muscle.

  Night is softly falling.

  Our apartment isn’t far from Mr and Mrs G’s. Ten minutes’ walk at the most. But the puppy is too heavy for the twelve-year-old schoolgirl to carry.

  ‘Dad will carry it.’

  She tries to resist but very quickly gives in. It really is heavy. The puppy would be happy to skip along, but it isn’t allowed to walk for the moment; any contact with the ground has to be avoided, as it is swarming with hundreds of different kinds of microbes that are harmful to new puppies not yet vaccinated.

  We get to the house. I put the puppy in the hall on the wooden floor. It moves shyly towards the living room. The radio is on; the puppy is greeted by a passage from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9, known as Jeunehomme. It stops for a moment. It looks all around. The scenery is new, made up of indoor plants, some prints and a number of wooden shelves on which are placed, vertically or horizontally, numerous bound sheets of paper. It squats for a moment and continues on.

  A little pool of yellowish liquid has formed.

  The puppy continues this first exploration of its new environment. It goes into a smaller room where it looks up at a big oval-shaped board held up by four posts. It passes through some wooden uprights—not as tall as the four posts—which, grouped in fours, hold up a little wicker square placed across them. When it has emerged from this makeshift shelter it notices a big mattress covered with a brand-new orange towel. It gets onto it and lies down. It seems to have understood instinctively that this was to be its spot. It rests its muzzle on its front paws and gives a sigh.

  Night comes. The lights go on in the city. The throbbing of the old air conditioners stops. The schoolgirl, who had consulted several books about dog training when she dreamt of having a dog, has placed the little animal on an absorbent napkin three times in the space of two hours, and each time it has produced a few drops. It seems to have understood that it wasn’t to go just anywhere, but only on this white nappy, which, with its three yellow stains, now looks like an old, faded map of the world.

  It is sleeping now, its body in a state of complete and utter relaxation; it breathes as peacefully as can be, far from the noise of cars and far from men’s shouting, but far, too, from its mother’s warm breath, silent and comforting.

  ‘We’ll leave her like that. You go to bed now too.’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Dad, thank you, Mum.’

  ‘Don’t worry about her, my darling. Good night then.’

  We are all whispering.

  We are present, in a state of wonder, at a birth.

  4

  THE PAIN OF THE FIRST NIGHT

  I CLOSE MY EYES. Behind my eyelids images of the day that has just passed follow one after the other. But, little by little, they recede like the waves of a calm sea, drawing me down into the silence and oblivion of my night, just beginning. Just when my consciousness flickers and begins to sink fully into the dark depths, a weak little moan crosses the length of the living room, which separates me from the room occupied by the new inhabitant. I get up and go towards the moans, which are becoming more frequent and intensifying. I turn on the little lamp on the writing desk.

  ‘What’s the matter, little one? You’re sad to be separated from your mum and your brothers and sisters? Is that it? Yes, that’s quite normal. It’s your first big night alone. You really have to get used to it …’

  She is sitting up and looks at me imploringly. My eyelids are heavy with sleep, and I just want to close them again. I crouch down: my eyes are exactly level with hers. We look at each other. She lifts her right paw—it’s so small—and waves it in the air, but she isn’t able to put it anywhere.

  ‘You have to go to sleep now. It’s getting late. Everyone’s in bed. And you need to go to bed too. Tomorrow, everything will be OK. Don’t you think?’

  While I’m talking to her I almost fall asleep again. I take the little golden-coated dog in my arms; I feel some resistance, as
if she doesn’t want to be held prisoner in my embrace. I get up again and go out of the dining room. Already I hear plaintive little whistling noises, and I think I know what they mean: ‘Don’t leave me by myself. Stay here with me.’ The sobbing of this little creature, so abruptly severed from the sacred bond that tied her to the world, persuades me to stay with her.

  I go and get my overcoat, put it on and sit down on the mattress beside her, propping myself against the wall. So she lies down; without the slightest hesitation she puts her head on my lap and immediately drifts off into the deepest of sleeps. As for me, I sleep without sleeping. Waking after a time, aching and stiff, I look at my watch: 3.27am. I feel the discomfort in my neck and buttocks especially. She hasn’t moved an inch. I put my hand on her head. I hear the light snoring of a child who, completely trusting, gives herself up to the deep silence of the night.

  I drop off to sleep again and become submerged in a dream in which a pure-white puppy is racing wildly through a huge forest of bamboo.

  5

  FIRST MEAL

  THE MOMENT WE decided to bring a dog into our home, one of Danna’s litter, her name came to us. This was a house of music, imbued with chords and rhythms, and it was only natural that the little dog’s name should chime harmoniously with music.

  She opens her eyes, quite amazed to be there on her mattress. Was she dreaming of being nestled against the soft, wavy white fur of her mother? She gets up and stretches, quivering all over.

  ‘She’s just woken up’, whispers my daughter.

  I come into the dining room. Our eyes meet, hers revealing how very anxious she is. It’s as if she is asking me a question. A front paw is in the air. With her head tilted to one side, all her attention is focused on me, as if to decipher my expression and my gestures; as if not the slightest of movements will go unnoticed. I would never have imagined that the gaze of a puppy could be as eloquent and interrogating as this.

  I prepare her first meal. A mug of kibble in a pure white bowl. She is sitting there, very well-behaved. How and why has she understood that she is not to leap on her food? I don’t know. In a firm and serious tone I had simply said, ‘No!’ just as she was about to throw herself at her little meal.

  Almost imperceptibly, the anxiety she showed by tilting her head just slightly is there in the impatient look she now gives me. Authoritative, I give her the command ‘Yoshi! (Go on!)’.

  She gets lightly to her feet and puts her muzzle right into the heap of kibble. In a couple of minutes it is all gone. She looks at me again as if she wants something else. The schoolgirl, observing the whole scene, makes a suggestion: ‘What about some water?’

  ‘Yes, good idea.’

  I take a hollow earthenware dish, fill it with water and place it beside the bowl. Her eyes follow my every move. She goes towards the dish and leans over it until she is just brushing the reflecting surface of the water. She sees herself in it, like Narcissus, and is no doubt amazed to see a being that looks like her. She says hello to it, kindly extending her right paw towards the other. The mirror cracks, droplets spatter; she steps back a pace.

  Some moments later a shy little lapping can be heard, a delightful tinkling of water. She gives me a look of contentment. Drops fall from her jaws and sprinkle the floor, beside her wet white paw.

  6

  WAITING FOR THE FIRST OUTING

  THE DAYS PASSED. October flew by. November was colder and rainier than in previous years. The maple leaves turned red; those of the cherries turned bright orange; those of the gingko turned yellow. Then they fell one by one, blown away by the north wind. When the first days of December finally came, dry and filled with light, the bare trees were like great statues, standing there with a haughty air, more vigorous than ever; their outspread, muscular branches seemed to assert that they no longer needed outer garments in flaming hues.

  Danna’s offspring was growing up. When we looked at the photos we’d taken when she’d first come to us, we realised that the life of a dog was thrown into an accelerated developmental process quite unlike that of human beings. The period of confinement after the vaccinations was coming to an end. The schoolgirl was impatient to see her dog quite free to run about in the street. Her parents, for their part, were patiently awaiting the first outing. The space available to Mélodie, that of our apartment, which was by no means minuscule, was no longer anything like the area needed by a dog in full and vigorous growth, for its never tiring body to expend its energy. Once a day, as night was falling, the whole habitable surface of the apartment was transformed into an athletics field; the pure-white juvenile body, sometimes coloured scarlet red by the last rays that came in through the skylight, would run at full speed, doing two or three circuits of the apartment. After that she emptied her bowl, always in a well-mannered way.

  The day often finished with the sudden visit of the Sandman. She was afraid of nothing. Our house was her house. She seemed to have moulded as serenely and naturally as can be into the very shape of our existence. Sometimes she would sleep under the kitchen table, her tummy in the air, in a state of fearless surrender, her nerves completely relaxed, her whole body in a wonderfully trusting state of letting go.

  7

  FIRST OUTING

  THE DAY OF the much anticipated first outing finally came. Everything was ready: a little yellow collar, a red leash made of rope, a little walks bag in which there was a bottle of water, a brush and a pile of coloured advertising liftouts, carefully folded in four. She was alert to the unusual sense of agitation that ran through every room of the house. She sat in the front hallway. Her eyes followed each of us as we went from room to room, intrigued. She’d never seen such hurrying on the part of the co-occupants of the familial space.

  I picked up the car keys. I put her collar around her neck, I attached the leash, I picked up the little bag, and finally I opened the door. She leapt up in spite of the force—mine—that restrained her. I shouted her name. She calmed down at once and followed me obediently, slowly down the stairs towards the car park. She hesitated at the open door of our old Accord. She didn’t know what to do. I helped her up onto the back seat. She resisted, but once in the car she lay down as if that’s what she’d always done. I in turn sat in the car, and we waited for my wife and my daughter.

  We headed towards Akiruno, a municipality in the western suburbs of Tokyo, fifty kilometres from where we lived. Lying between the mother, who kept up a constant stream of praise for her good manners, and the teenage girl, who kept stroking her head, Mélodie remained placid and imperturbably motionless during this baptism in car travel. And a few minutes later, helped by the dull vibration of the engine, she fell into a slumber that lasted until we reached the end of our journey.

  Akiruno was where the A family, who had taken another of Danna’s offspring, which they named Octave, lived. The purpose of the first outing was to bring about a meeting between the brother and sister two months after they’d left the maternal fold. Greetings exchanged, we decided to go together to a big park a few hundred metres away. We walked tranquilly along a narrow street edged with clumps of azaleas and rhododendrons, which promised a bewitching display for spring. Danna’s two puppies quickened their steps. When we arrived at the park we were amazed to find it deserted. It was a Sunday. It was almost three o’clock in the afternoon. No children in the sandpit, no old men on the benches positioned in the four corners of the park. Was everyone still at lunch, relaxed and carefree in a Sunday mood? The swings did not stir; the slide stood there like a little, bored giant. The sky smiled kindly on the two creatures finally released from their period of domestic imprisonment: just lightly hazy and free from the caprices of the wind, the light it sent them was filtered, soft, beneficent. I took off Mélodie’s leash; Mrs A did the same with her dog.

  Once liberated, the brother and sister presented us with a wondrous display. In one bound Mélodie propelled herself forward like a wild animal seizing its prey and began running with all her might. But after a
few seconds she abruptly changed direction; elastically twisting her svelte body, she jumped to the left. Then, with a thrust that carried her high into the air, she caught sight of something that looked like a feather. She turned her head even further to the left before falling back to earth, and once her four paws were set on the sandy ground she rushed to chase the hairy object. Hell-bent on catching it, she pivoted frenetically, round and round, for several seconds. At last she collapsed in a heap, the tip of her tail in her mouth. Octave, who had taken off at the same time as his sister, ran towards her and, without meaning to, hit her full on. She was knocked over, but she got straight back up again and ran full pelt towards the end of the park. Octave, unperturbed by his sister’s remarkable agility, immediately sped off, not wanting to be left too far behind. It was an extraordinary spectacle in which the brother and sister, with the vitality and impetuousness of full-blown adolescents, were engaged in a furious, reckless race, seemingly unstoppable. The two bodies passed first under a big hundred-year-old cherry tree denuded of its cloak of foliage, but that still shed shade with its majestically twisted branches. They were like two shooting stars in the dark sky, two silver rockets, one pursuing the other at dizzying speed. It was like watching a science fiction film in which spacecraft, like beams of white light, flashing and flying, surf over the blackness and finally slip away, swallowed up into the mysterious, far-flung reaches of the universe. They disappeared behind the shrubbery only to reappear instantly in the bright luminosity of the open space. The gap between the two bodies remained unchanged. At last they arrived at the swings, an area surrounded by an iron safety railing. Quick and nimble, Mélodie hurdled the first fence, without lessening her momentum or her driving strength, which were at their absolute peak, while her little brother followed, jumping five centimetres higher than the fence, with his four paws tucked carefully and neatly into the middle of his flat stomach. The benches and the monkey bars suddenly sprang up in front of them like policemen blocking the way. But they deftly avoided them and continued their feverish stampede. They passed behind the sandpit and dodged the little giant. When Mélodie had gone right around the path like this she stopped suddenly and, having taken a few steps sniffing I don’t know what lying on the ground, she lay down and looked around her like a she-wolf whose gaze travels far, anxious to protect her cubs from potential enemies; or a general perhaps, surveying from the top of a hill his battalion lined up below him. As for Octave, he slowed his pace seeing that his sister didn’t want to go round the park a second time. He retraced his steps; he placed himself delicately beside her and collapsed in a heap as though he’d used every last bit of energy. Then they stayed looking at each other for a long while. Their muzzles, pointed skywards, almost touched. Their big black eyes closed to form a thin thread, Buddha-like, a sign of their happiness at being together in the gentle sunlight of a December afternoon.