Melodie (16 page)

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.

‘What's the matter, Mélodie? It's too early …'

I turned on the bedside light. It was after three … The dog was there, wide awake, her head tilting perceptibly to the left, questioning, as she would often do at times like that …

‘Ah, Ségolène …'

I leapt out of bed and turned on my computer. I don't remember now which site I went to. In any case I was able to listen live to Ségolène Royal's speech, which, among other things, drew the attention of the listeners to the historical significance of the female candidature for the office of president, while recalling the landmarks in the history of women since Olympe de Gouges.

During all the time that I turned my ear to this ever so slightly nasal voice, perhaps prematurely tinged with a fatal fragility, Mélodie, supremely peaceful, stayed near me, her
eyes closed, her muzzle resting on my left foot. Throughout her life of twelve years and three months, she woke me on several occasions at unaccustomed times, but each time was either to tell me about a physical discomfort she was suffering from or to alert me to some emergency I had to deal with. That night it was neither of those. She had detected in me a desire, an expectation—but how? that is the unfathomable thing that bound me to this animal—in relation to a political speech that could stir the conscience in a society very far from the place of its delivery, a society structured in a way that is essentially homosocial. For how else are we to understand Mélodie's strange nocturnal greeting?

22

EAT ME!

IT IS NOW
more than 850 days since Mélodie died; my father passed away eighteen years ago. Shadows—sometimes like the animal and sometimes like the man—move through my dreams. Mere wraiths now, Mélodie and my father stubbornly return in the world of my nights. They are like crutches on which I lean to go forward; they are like blazing torches that reconcile me to the spreading gloom.

I was lying on the ground on a black rug in a little room I didn't recognise, a room without furniture, windows or doors, far from any human habitation. The bare walls were of wood, chalet-style. I wasn't wounded; I wasn't suffering. My body was there, whole. It belonged to me. But I was dead. I felt that I was dead. Or rather, alive, I was already in the skin of
someone who was dead—and that someone was me. Silence reigned. Even so, I could hear Mélodie's little footsteps. She had stayed there, with me. All the others had disappeared from my horizon. Mélodie was my sole companion in this enclosed space, which was clearly forgotten by the rest of the world. Sometimes she stood up on her back legs; sometimes she came right up to me to stand over me: her head, above me, was watching me; her muzzle sniffed my face; now and then her tongue licked my cheek. In this way time seemed to slip by without reckoning.

But all of a sudden the scene darkened, and I was struck by Mélodie having become excessively thin. I was dead and there was no one but me with her. No one was feeding her. No one was looking after her. And I couldn't do anything, because I was dead. With nothing to eat Mélodie kept getting thinner. Sad, powerless, I saw that she was becoming visibly weaker. Her coat, which had been pure-white, was now a brownish colour.

Starving and emaciated, Mélodie painfully put one foot in front of another. I could hear her hesitant footsteps, spaced out and irregular. She came to see me nevertheless, and she repeated the same gestures: she watched me from above, she sniffed my face, she licked my cheek. I gathered all my energy to tell her to eat me.

‘Eat me, Mélodie! Eat me! Go on, what are you waiting for? Eat me. Go on, quickly!'

I shouted and screamed in vain; as soon as the words had come out of my mouth they vanished as if sucked into a hole without leaving any trace of sound. The dead man's voice wasn't reaching the ears of the dog. She then flopped down
lethargically. She lay down outstretched, not wanting to get up again. A few moments later she closed her eyes; then she turned quite grey. At the same time the outline of her body blurred little by little, like the white smoke issuing from the tall chimney of public baths.

I woke up, suffocated. I was sobbing, the tears spilling from my eyes destabilising my vision of the world before me.

This took place in a park like Philosophy Park: I was in the area where the sandpit, the slides and the swings were. Dogs, a great number of them, appeared and one after the other they began running towards me, in a state of frenzy, a little like the amusing scene in Charlie Chaplin's
A Dog's Life
(1918) in which the starving tramp desperately protects little Scraps, whose food the other dogs, starving too, like him and the tramp, try to take from him. They came galloping towards me, but they didn't seem to be asking me to feed them. They were of different breeds, but, strangely, without exception all had Mélodie's head. To each dog that threw itself upon me I shouted ‘Mélodie!' But none of them responded to me, none of them stopped. They ran past me and as they overtook me they threw me a doubtful, questioning, if not indifferent, look. Then they disappeared. A blonde stranger, patting her dog, a deep-brown golden retriever, gave me a puzzled, even distrustful, look. Finally she spoke to me, ‘Mélodie, is that your dog's name?'

‘Yes … But she died two years ago … Well, she's living somewhere else …'

As I replied to her I found my answer bizarre. And I saw, beneath my feet, through a kind of windowpane, a buried golden retriever. She was encased in a huge glass box as clear as crystal, like those that are suggested in some enigmatic paintings of Francis Bacon's. She wasn't moving. You'd have said that time had frozen in the box. But Mélodie's body was not completely vitrified: her hairy skull emerging from the box was exposed to the refreshing cold air that I was breathing. I could touch an exposed patch of Mélodie's still-warm fur barely larger than a circle of ten centimetres in diameter.

Mélodie was there, in front of me, as alive as she was when she was in the flower of her youth, except that she remained petrified in the deathly immobility of a statue. I saw her in close-up in luminous clarity, as if I were myself in the crystal box that enclosed her, as if I could cling to her, lose myself in her. But, in fact, I was cruelly and definitively separated from her by the clear box beneath my feet without entry or opening and that, consequently, prevented me from joining her no matter what I did.

23

TO BE CONSTANT OR TO WAVER

MY THOUGHTS HAVE
again returned to Hachi who waited ten years, until his last breath, for the impossible return of his dead master. If he'd lived five years longer he would have waited another five years. If he'd lived ten years longer he would have waited another ten years. Hachi's existence was an existence removed from change, from the power of time, which wears away at everything. His attachment to Professor Ueno was never worn away.

Mélodie's attachment wasn't worn away either. It didn't lose any of its strength with the passing of time. In fact it intensified.

Morning and evening, we would go for a walk together. Our walks followed the same path, with a few possible variations that added to our enjoyment. Often it was Mélodie who chose the variation to our route. When it was fine we went at a slower pace in order to taste—in my case especially
by sight and in Mélodie's unquestionably by smell—the beautiful things and the surprises that the gradual passing of the days and months held in store for us, the subtle transition from one season to another. When it started to rain we would hurry to get home and wait until it had stopped. When it snowed heavily it was a celebration. She explored every inch of the snow-filled Philosophy Park where no one dared to wander, running about gleefully in every direction. The time to leave the park was virtually fixed. When I ignored it she let me know by a warning look that was innocently reproving. Each departure was a little ceremony with a real conversation in which only the human voice could be heard; each return was also a genuine ritual that finished with a short session of brushing that she must really have enjoyed as she got herself into the right position without me having to tell her.

At home we stuck together like glue. In the morning I allowed myself another moment of ritual when, before starting her meal, Mélodie looked at me for a long time until I wished her ‘
bon appétit
', her impatience a disconcerting patience suffused with tenderness. When I sat working at my computer, most of the time she dozed at my feet, as peacefully as could be, or she might be in one of her favourite spots from which she could hear music playing uninterruptedly throughout the day, the volume fluctuating, with the radio tuned to a station that specialised in opera and chamber music. Her taste was my taste. Or rather, my taste had become hers.

I would go off to work for the day promising to see her again before night started to fall. Whether the promise was kept or not, without fail I found her in the front hall, sitting on her back legs, to celebrate the happy return of her master.
Drunk with joy, she jumped up to his shoulders. She held him in her front legs until she could no longer stand on her back legs; then, in a paroxysm of ecstasy, she rolled onto her back so that he could pat her stomach, which she displayed with complete trust. Actually, I think she guessed he was home again first from the sound of the car that he was parking in the garage and then from that of his footsteps echoing on the balcony tiles, which were made of some synthetic material.

When I went to France with my family we would spend periods there of from two to four weeks, and being so far away from her I lived in a state of great impatience to see her again. And when I did see her again I was met by frenetic licking and endless demonstrative jumping, which could only be stopped by the soporific effect of the shuddering rhythm of the car.

This is how the first six or seven of my years with Mélodie passed by, interspersed with periods in which I was with her every day and others, of varying length, in which she was deprived of my continuous presence. The thing that I noticed after each return, after each temporary separation that with a very human casualness and anthropocentrism I made her endure, is that the bond between us strengthened and tightened still more; she showed me—as well as, secondarily, and no doubt through me, my wife and my daughter—an attachment that was greater and deeper every day, which meant that she came to bear my absence less and less, whatever its length. She seemed truly to suffer from my departure, my disappearance from her world.

And that is why in the end I put aside any plans for a long trip and extended absence so that I would have to leave
Mélodie as infrequently as possible. In summer I deliberately denied myself the possibility of holidaying in France. If I went away it was only for a week or ten days at the most for reasons of work that I couldn't avoid. She was no longer a young dog that you could imagine in all her vitality, beyond the reach of the ravages of time. She was showing signs of aging, which only became more pronounced without our paying them any special attention: her teeth had lost the whiteness of her early years; her face, particularly around the eyes, was covered in lighter hair than that of her golden coat, which, seen from a distance, gave the impression that she was wearing glasses with white frames.