Melodie (10 page)

I took the wheel, and immediately turned into the still freely flowing motorway. We reached home before night fell. I climbed the stairs four at a time. As I turned the key in the lock I could see, through the front door's little pane of reinforced glass, Mélodie's tail, wagging furiously. I crossed the threshold and went into the apartment. She stood up on her back legs and took me between her front ones just as she'd done when I left. I squatted down to make her feel at ease. She rolled onto her back, her vulnerable belly displayed without care or fear, and I stroked it gently all along its length. The joy at regaining her master got the better of her self-control; all the tensed muscles let go at once: she could no longer stop herself from urinating. Amazed or embarrassed by this moment of incontinence, she got up again quickly and moved a few steps away. I was struck by the reddish appearance, a little like rosé wine, of the little puddle of water. ‘That's blood', I said to myself. The women came over to me. I was worried and I said, ‘She couldn't hold on, she was so happy. But there's blood in her pee.'

‘Is it serious?' asked the teenage girl.

‘No, I don't think so', said her mother. ‘But we'll have to phone Mr D to see what he thinks.'

So I telephoned Mr D, the vet who knew her from the first vaccinations. I gave him all the information about the situation. He told me that it was probably because of the stress of the painful separation of half a day that we'd put her through.

I clasped Mélodie in my arms and said to her in a deliberately upbeat tone, ‘We'll go for a walk while it's still daylight!'

She reacted immediately by jumping up. Then she positioned herself at the entrance, ready to leap forward as soon as the door opened. She saw that the whole family was getting ready. We heard then for the first time little repeated moans of impatience that sounded like a baby's babbling.

No wind. Mild temperature. The fine weather was continuing. The four of us departed in the fading, fleeting light of dusk. She walked briskly on my left, off the leash. We went the same way as we had that morning. From time to time she allowed herself to get a few yards ahead, but it was to stop at a particular spot to tell us that it was just there that she wanted to stop. Again she sniffed the branches of the cherry trees in bud on the Katayama Bridge. Thanks to her and this stop that she insisted on making, we became aware of the subtle arrival of spring, as the fragrance that heralds its arrival was not yet really perceptible. When she reached the canal, where the path divides, she repeated the same gesture: this time she went further ahead, ten metres or so, and watched us catching up to her, keeping quite still and attentive. Day gave way to night. The straight pathway by the canal was now lit by street lamps spaced at regular intervals of about thirty metres.

‘We'll go along by the canal, if that's OK with you', I said to my walking companions.

‘Yes, let's head home. I have to get on with the cooking …'

We had started making our way along the canal walkway and had already gone about ten metres when I turned around to check if Mélodie was following us. But she wasn't. She was still in the same place, still not moving, except that now she was sitting.

‘What are you doing, my friend?'

She got up again and turned her head towards the street leading to the Hyakkannon memorial garden of Numabukuro. It was obvious that she was indicating the direction she wanted to go in.

‘You want to go that way! You're enjoying this walk together as a family and you want to keep it going, is that it? And quite right too!'

An angelic smile spread over the face of the teenage girl. Her mother, tenderly complicit, put up no resistance to what the young girl and her animal sister both wanted. We were amazed at this way of letting us know what she wanted, and happy, too, knowing that she felt and showed joy in this family walk at nightfall. We continued our evening stroll into an adjoining neighbourhood, namely that of Numabukuro, which is perceived as not quite ours, given that in this country the geographical imaginary is basically constructed around the closest railway or subway station.

The garden of the Hundred Statuettes of the Merciful Goddess was closed. During the day the children from the preschool next door come there to play, but once night falls no one dares to venture into this dark zone inhabited by the dead. So we made our way towards the vibrant, bustling station, which was disgorging a mass of men and women,
many of whom were accompanied by children. We crossed at the level crossing. Far from being frightened by the forest of moving legs, Mélodie went along calmly beside me. Given the crowd, I'd taken the precaution of putting her on the leash, but since she was walking at the same pace as me, she almost didn't need it. Ascending the broad slope that leads to the heart of the district, we reached the entry to the Park of the Peaceful Forest. We entered the park without hesitation, as if the blue silence of the giant trees was tugging at us and pulling us in. With the earbuds of their iPods in their ears, a few joggers, running with their shadows around the dimly lit 400-metre oval track, seemed to amplify the burden of urban solitude that was their constant companion.

‘It's a bit like the atmosphere of
My Neighbour Totoro
, Dad.'

‘Oh, do you think so?'

‘Look! Look at Fuji-san! It's so beautiful!'

The mother was an unfailing admirer of the magnificent mountain, for her the provider of invigorating energy. It excited her to see its silhouette, enlarged, quite black, which stood out against the last red rays of the setting sun. Taking her daughter with her, she went to climb the little hillock from which the sacred mountain can be seen more clearly. I followed them with Mélodie. Three human beings and one non-human stood clasped together and formed just a single shadow.

On returning to the house, Mélodie slept deeply. She didn't wake up during the night. She didn't growl; she didn't dream. The next morning her urine was copious, and it bore no traces of red.

17

THE SHOWER

MY WALK WITH
Mélodie was a daily activity that I didn't allow myself to forgo, because for her it was an absolute necessity—whether it was good weather or bad, hot or cold, raining or snowing, it was my unvarying habit to get out with her at least for a short stroll. But the task of showering her arose from a different imperative, namely the human need to maintain the family space in a certain state of cleanliness.

These days, it is a fairly well-known fact that the Japanese take off their shoes in the entrance before stepping into the private interior domain of domestic space. The cleanliness of the inside, or more precisely the feeling they have about it, is affirmed not only by the way the doors and windows are so tightly sealed, but also by the more or less significant difference in level of the clean living environment in relation to the dirty ground. The ground floor of a Japanese house in
its traditional conception never being at street level, there is a quite marked difference in level of twenty to thirty centimetres between the concrete floor of the entrance and the wooden floor of the hallway. In Japan, instead of entering a house you go up into it. And it's in this movement of going up that you take off your shoes. That is why shoes are not part of the clothing of the Japanese in the strict sense, because when they are in the house, the domain of cleanliness, they go about barefoot, or rather, I should say, they are scrupulous in avoiding walking with their shoes on as they are, necessarily, dirty.

As for dogs, naked from top to toe, so to speak, they have no shoes to take off. It is that, doubtless, which causes them to be thought unworthy of crossing the threshold to go up into the house and enter the space of familial intimacy. Usually they remain in their kennel, placed, as can be seen, for example, in Seijirō Kōyama's film
Hachi-ko
(1987), near the
engawa
, the open walkway that leads directly into the garden.

For us the situation was different. We didn't want Mélodie to remain alone outside, deprived of freedom of movement, whether tied up or shut in. We judged that she had the right to the inside as a fellow team member in the life we all shared. For that it was necessary that her paws were perfectly clean. So a ritual became established: instead of removing the shoes that she didn't have, we cleaned or even washed her paws in the front hall after each outing, each walk.

As it happened, though, the demand for cleanliness applied not just to her paws, as the tatamis, the cushions, the walls she leant against, in fact anything and everything that
was in her path, became dirty, visibly blackened from contact with her unwashed body. Hence the idea of showering her regularly, once every three weeks.

Our bathroom, like that of any Japanese house, is a space equipped with a shower and a big bath, all set up in a room that is closed by a sliding door of frosted glass, an area of around two by one and a half metres. We get undressed in the corner next to the ablutions area, where the washbasin is and all the bath things are kept. I could have taken a bath with her as, in the past, my father or mother would take a bath with my brother and me when we were little. I used to sit submerged up to the neck in the warm water that filled the big bath. It was made of cypress and gave off a strong fragrance. And I often played with a water pistol as I talked with my father, his scarlet face perspiring with big drops of sweat as the steam wafted up to the ceiling in a shimmering mist. It's one of the oldest and happiest memories of my childhood—no hint of anxiety, no thought of the future.

Sharing the same bath water is a mark of the greatest familiarity, the greatest affection, the greatest tenderness. A scene from
There Was a Father
(1942), directed by Yasujirō Ozu, comes to mind: it is in the waters of the big bath of a country inn that the son reveals to his father his long repressed wish to live with him. More than once I'd thought of taking a bath with Mélodie, but, fearing that I'd shock my wife, I didn't dare … However, the idea is perhaps not as ridiculous as it seems: in
Hachi-ko
, which I mentioned earlier, we see Professor Shujiro Ueno (played by Tatsuya Nakadai) and his dog Hachi-ko immersed in a warm bath, which gives them a deep sense of closeness and wellbeing.

Throughout Mélodie's life, washing and showering her was a task that always fell to me, except just once when I could not do it because of the herniated disc that had immobilised me.

When a session in the shower had been decided on, I undressed and, stark naked, went into the bathroom a few minutes before her, first to get warm and then to assemble everything that was needed for grooming her. I called Mélodie when I was ready for her. Michèle brought her to the bathroom. She came hesitantly; her head was always slightly lowered, no doubt to show that she really didn't want me to perform this systematic and methodical washing of her entire body. But she would hear my insistent call and resign herself to it in the end. Once she'd finally stepped inside the shower alcove I closed the door and began spraying her. At the beginning she stood on her four feet. But very quickly she sat down and didn't take her eyes off me, keeping them half closed. I lathered her copiously with shampoo, twice, from the neck to the tail via the stomach where her coat, milky white, was especially thick. To rinse her off I needed her to stand up again on her four legs; keeping the showerhead in my right hand, I slid my left hand under her belly. She got up again at once to make it easier for me.

A couple of times in the course of the session she would feel the need to shake herself vigorously like a dog that gets out of the water after a mad dash into a river. As a result she sprayed me liberally with the drops of water she shook off her coat. At the end of it all I was as soaked as she was, as if I'd washed myself completely at the same time. That's why I'd stopped wearing my underpants. My role was not simply that of an employee of a dog grooming business; rather, I shared,
in my naked state, the same bathwater as companion or fellow partaker of the shower, if I can put it like that. Yes, I was naked, nude before the one who never stopped looking at me. I was looked at, I felt myself looked at by my dog throughout this process of common and reciprocal ablutions, particularly as, sitting on a little wooden seat that allowed me to be on the same level as she was, I was facing her and my penis was exposed to her gaze. She never looked at my genitals, but by lowering her head she could easily see them and, in any case, see them she did. But I had no sense of embarrassment at that moment, sitting there naked; I had no shame about my nudity facing an animal that wasn't nude precisely because it was nude from the very first and for always. As you might have suspected, what comes to mind for me is the incredible book by Jacques Derrida
The Animal That Therefore I Am
. At the starting point of his philosophical meditation on the question of animality/humanity, Derrida notes the critical experience of the feeling of embarrassment or modesty aroused by the fact of having been seen nude, naked, by his cat. In my case, I felt no modesty, no embarrassment in the strict sense of the term. I carried on the grooming of my dog in all tranquillity: we were situated, symmetrically, in a state of nudity that, after all, wasn't one, either for her or for me.

On the other hand, it wasn't the same thing with my wife and I when we felt the stirring of desire and wanted to make love. Each time, without fail, I was overcome by a paralysing sense of modesty. To make love in Mélodie's presence or to be seen by her making love was unthinkable. We had to ask her to go out of the bedroom if she was there. If she was somewhere else we had to shut the door, which, most of the time, was left
wide open. And just the sound of the door being closed (even though it didn't make an excessive squeaking sound) aroused Mélodie's attention and prompted her to come and lie down in front of it. During our silent lovemaking, when we forgot the world, I sometimes thought that I could hear the sighs of the dog languishing on the other side of the door.