Invisible Love (8 page)

I sensed where she was trying to lead me. Like me, like the villagers, she was wondering about the importance of the dog, wondering if it was the accident that had led to her father's desperate act. I didn't dare mention the subject myself, assuming that, for a daughter, such a suspicion must be a source of great suffering.

She was staring at me, urgent, demanding, trusting. I finally stammered, “Miranda, what was your relationship with your father's dogs?”

She sighed, relieved that I had finally gone to the heart of the matter. Finishing her coffee, she sat back in her chair and looked at me. “Daddy only ever had one dog at a time. A Beauceron named Argos. I'm fifty now and I knew four of them.”

“Why a Beauceron?”

“No idea.”

“And why Argos?”

“No idea either.”

“And what did you think of them?”

She hesitated, not very accustomed to formulating these feelings, but wanting to do so. “I loved them all. Really loved them. First of all, they were good dogs, lively, affectionate, devoted. And besides, they were my brothers, my sisters . . . ” She broke off for a moment to think, then went on, “They were my mother too . . . And my father, a little . . . ” Tears welled up in her eyes. She had surprised even herself.

I tried to help her. “Brother or sister, Miranda, that I can understand, because the dog obeyed your father and became your companion. But . . . your mother?”

A faraway look came into her eyes. Although she was staring down at the floor, it was obvious from their opaque stillness that, inside, they were focused on memories.

“Argos understood me better than Daddy did. If I was sad, or angry, or ashamed, Argos would sense it immediately. He knew all my moods. Like a mother . . . He would tell my father. Oh yes, there were lots of times when Argos interceded with Daddy to remind him that he should be paying attention to me, listening to me, getting me to open up. At those moments, when Daddy obeyed him, Argos would sit upright between us, watching both of us, making sure that I was telling my father, in the complicated language of humans, what he, a dog, had immediately grasped.”

Her voice had become both softer and more high-pitched, and her hand shook as she put her hair back in place. Without realizing it, Miranda was reverting to the little girl she was talking about.

“And it was Argos that I got all the hugs and kisses from,” she went on. “Like a mother . . . Daddy was always very reserved with me. The hours we spent, Argos and I, lying side by side on the carpet, dreaming and talking! His was the only body I touched, and the only body that touched me. Like a mother, don't you think?”

She was questioning me like a lost little girl who wanted confirmation that she was correctly defining what she had lacked.

“Like a mother . . . ” I echoed approvingly.

She smiled, reassured. “I had often had Argos's smell on me. Because he'd jump on me. Because he'd lick me. Because he'd cling to my legs. Because he needed to prove his affection. In my childhood, Argos had a smell, and Daddy didn't. He would keep his distance, he didn't smell of anything, or else he smelled clean. I mean, he had a civilized smell, the smell that comes from bottles, eau de cologne or antiseptic, a man's smell, a doctor's smell. Only Argos had a smell all his own. And I had his.”

She looked up at me, and I said in her place, “Like a mother . . . ”

A long silence followed. I didn't dare break it, guessing that Miranda was remembering all the happy times in her past. She was about to enter a period of mourning. But whom was she mourning? Samuel or Argos?

She must have read my thoughts because the next thing she said was, “I can't think of Daddy without thinking of Argos. One never went without the other. Daddy knew his own limitations, so he relied on his dog to grasp what escaped him. I often had the impression he consulted him, depended on his decisions. Argos was like part of Daddy, the physical part, the empathetic part, the sensitive part. Argos was a little bit my father and my father was a little bit Argos. Does what I'm saying sound crazy?”

“Not at all.”

I made some more coffee. We didn't need to talk: we had reached that degree of calm that we reach not when we have discovered the truth, but when we come close to a mystery.

As I poured the coffee, I asked, “Do you think the last Argos had something more than the previous ones?”

She quivered, grasping that we were approaching the main subject of the day. “He was remarkable and unique. Like his predecessors.”

“Did your father love him more?”

“My father was more of a recluse.”

We both sat there openmouthed. Each of us wanted to talk, but neither dared.

“Everyone here thinks he killed himself because of the dog,” she said at last, looking me straight in the eyes. “Don't they?”

“It's absurd, but . . . yes,” I stammered. “Given that we don't have enough information, that we didn't know your father well, we can't help linking the two events.”

“He would have hated people to say that.”

I almost corrected her by saying, “You hate people to say that.” Luckily, a vestige of tact held me back.

She leaned forward. “Help me.”

“I'm sorry?”

“Help me to understand what happened.”

“Why me?”

“Because Daddy liked you. And because you're a novelist.”

“Being a novelist doesn't mean being a detective.”

“Being a novelist means being fascinated by other people.”

“I don't know anything about your father.”

“Your imagination will make up for that. You know, I've read your books, and I've noticed that when you don't know something, you fantasize. I need your genius for hypotheses.”

“Hold on a minute! I write what I like because my stories don't have consequences. I'm not looking for truth, just entertainment.”

“Why should the truth be any uglier than silence? Help me. Please help me.”

Her big green eyes were imploring me, her flaming red hair blazed with anger.

I liked Miranda so much that, without thinking, I agreed.

 

*

 

That afternoon, I joined her at her father's house, where we undertook to go through his papers in the hope of finding something.

After two or three futile hours, I exclaimed, “Miranda, your father's dogs all came from the same place. A kennel in the Ardennes.”

“What of it?”

“In the last fifty years, the contracts have been signed by one person, a man named—”

At that moment, the doorbell rang. Miranda opened the door to the Comte de Sire, an elderly man in riding boots, dressed with archaic refinement. Behind him, his horse, tied to the gatepost, neighed when it saw us.

His family, which had once owned several farms and three châteaux, now lived on an estate some seven miles away.

He had come to offer his condolences, and was hopping from foot to foot, red-faced with embarrassment.

Miranda showed him in and indicated one of the high armchairs that formed a semicircle in front of the fireplace in the drawing room. He stepped forward humbly, looked around the room, and thanked her in a muffled voice, as if she had allowed him to enter the holy of holies.

“Your father was . . . an exceptional man. I've never in my life known anyone else who was so humane, so kind, so perceptive about other people and their misfortunes. He grasped everything without explanation. He was truly gifted with enormous compassion.”

Miranda and I exchanged looks of surprise. Although we would have liked to boast of Samuel Heymann's qualities, those weren't the ones we would have chosen, because, in our opinion, he didn't have them.

“Did he ever mention me?” the Comte de Sire asked Miranda.

She made a face as she searched in her memory. “No.”

The count blushed and smiled: this omission was yet more evidence of the dead man's virtues.

“Were you friends?” Miranda asked.

“I wouldn't say that. Let's put it this way: I'd done everything to be his enemy, but thanks to his generosity of spirit, I wasn't.”

“I don't understand.”

“We shared secrets. He's taken his with him. I shall soon do the same with mine.”

Irritably, Miranda struck the armchair with the flat of her hand. “That's just like my father: a nest of secrets! I can't stand it.”

At this violent outburst, the count's lower lip dropped, he foamed a little at the mouth, his eyelashes fluttered, then he emitted a few rumbling noises that were meant as words of comfort to Miranda, although he was not very good at comforting.

She went up to him. “Does this have any connection with my mother?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Your quarrel with him! The thing he forgave you! Was it to do with my mother?”

“No, not at all,” he hissed, conclusively. He was offended that Miranda could have thought such a thing. In his eyes, she had crossed the threshold of vulgarity.

“Don't you have anything else to tell me?” Miranda insisted.

The man fiddled with the gloves he had laid across his knees and coughed two or three times. “Yes!”

“Well?”

“I'd like to pay my respects to your father. Will you allow me to arrange his funeral?”

“What?”

“I'd like to offer him a ceremony worthy of him, noble, dignified. Let me spend some money, organize the ceremony, put flowers in the church, bring singers and an orchestra, hire a luxurious hearse drawn by horses from my stable.”

He was already in a rapture over the scenes he was imagining.

Miranda threw me a glance that meant, “This old bird is crazy.” Then she shrugged. “I should answer: Why? But I'm going to say: Why not? Agreed! Organize away, monsieur, I'll provide the corpse.”

The man raised an eyebrow, shocked by Miranda's insolence. But he refrained from reacting and contented himself, as he walked back to the front door, with thanking her profusely.

Once he had left us, Miranda gave free rein to her astonishment. “The Comte de Sire! He shows up and behaves like his best friend, even though Daddy never mentioned his name to me! Secrets . . . Nothing but secrets.”

I returned to the documents I was holding in my hand. “Miranda, I insist. If I were you, I'd go to the kennel where your father chose his dogs for the past fifty years.”

“Why?”

“I suspect he was capable of telling a Beauceron breeder what he hid from you.”

“All right. When do we leave?”

 

*

 

After three hours' driving, we hit the Ardennes. The roads wound through windswept forests. Houses became sparser, and we had the feeling we were entering a world apart, a purely vegetable world. The spruces, their trunks attacked by fierce lichen, were neither high nor close together, but they stood there in numberless ranks, forming an impenetrable mass, like an army ready to attack. Their branches were heavy with rain and drooped low over our car. I dreaded breaking down in this hostile region.

At last we got to the kennels of Bastien and Sons. Sur­rounded by the sounds of barking coming from several buildings, we had difficulty in persuading the young man who had approached our vehicle that we didn't want to buy a pedigree dog, or leave one there, but only to see Monsieur François Bastien, who for fifty years had sold Beaucerons to Miranda's father.

“I'll take you to my grandfather,” he said, skeptically.

We entered a low-ceilinged room, its walls laden with brass pans. The tables were strewn with embroidered doilies and pewterware, a veritable treasure trove for an antique dealer, a heap of old bric-a-brac to Miranda and me.

François Bastien, the dog master, came toward us. When we had explained the situation, he offered Miranda his condolences and invited us to sit down.

Miranda admitted to him that coming here might seem bizarre, but she loved her father and knew too little about him. Could he help her?

“My God, the first time I met your dad was after the war. He'd just lost his dog. He showed me a photograph of it so that I could find a Beauceron that looked like it. It wasn't difficult.”

“Do you think he'd always had a dog? That they were fond of Beaucerons in his family?”

I had started, without realizing it, to put together various hypotheses, trying to give his behavior some logic: the Beauceron might have been the element that linked the orphan to his past, symbolizing that lost connection. Hence his irrational attachment . . .

François Bastien destroyed my speculations immediately. “Oh, no, the Beauceron he'd just lost was his first dog, I'm certain of that. At that time, Monsieur Heymann knew as much about animals as I knew about knitting, and I had to give him advice.”

I modified my theory. “Was it the dog he'd adopted when he was hidden?”

“Hidden?”

“Yes, my father was hidden in a Catholic boarding school during the war,” Miranda said.

The man rubbed his chin, producing a dry, rasping sound. “Hidden? That's strange . . . I was sure he'd been a prisoner.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A prisoner.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“No. Now, how did I get that idea in my head?” The weary-looking François Bastien searched in his memories. “Oh, yes! It was because of the photograph. The photograph of him with his dog. In it, he was wearing a kind of uniform. And there was barbed wire in the background. Yes, that's it, barbed wire.” He sighed. “When I first met him, your father was just starting to study medicine. Frankly, all credit to him, because he didn't have a cent, and at the time it was hard to get food if you didn't have a family in the country. He worked as a night watchman to pay for his studies. At first, I refused to sell him the dog: he wanted to spread the payment over several months! ‘Don't buy an animal,' I told him. ‘It's hard enough for you to feed yourself. Plus, a Beauceron's a big eater. Better to keep the old one in a photograph in your pocket than feed a new one.' You know what he said? ‘If I don't get another dog, I'll die.'”