Melodie (11 page)

Once washed, she had to be dried with a towel. When she'd shaken herself for the last time I wrapped her in a big bath towel, which I rubbed against her skin as I used to do with my daughter when she was three or four years old. When no more drops of water fell from her coat I opened the glass door of the bathroom to let her go out. This she did without me saying anything to her. And, inevitably, she shook herself one more time with all her strength, as if the water that had penetrated down to the roots of her fur was an irritating foreign body, like a tiny grain of rice lodged between the teeth.

The bath things tidied away, I stayed under the shower for a few minutes more to get warm, except in summer. When I came into the living room, dressed or bare-chested with just a towel around my waist, I saw her lying down, relaxed, near the big table, next to the bay window, especially when it was fine in winter. I sat down in the sun as well to dry myself and dry my hair.

‘Well, did that make you feel good? You smell so nice now!'

I held my hand out to her. She raised her right paw, a little clumsily. I took it. She licked my extended hand, slowly, carefully.

The next day and for several days after the shower the whole floor was strewn with golden hairs, which shone in
the sun. Sometimes they clumped into balls of fluff. We would vacuum twice a day, but our socks would still be covered in this golden fur when we took them off at night before going to bed.

Now that she's no longer here the fur has completely disappeared. Immediately after Mélodie died, taking the advice of the vet who was amazed that our dog had remained beautiful up until the end, Michèle cut and knotted together two little strands of her hair as a kind of memento. At first they remained next to the candleholder, but after the cremation they were placed with her red collar, the metal part now quite rusty, on the big square box containing the urn.

One day, at the bottom of the holey pockets of the worn green Loden cape that I'd bought in Montpellier a good many years before, a coat I only wore in winter for my daily outings with Mélodie, I found a pair of navy blue woollen gloves that I thought I'd lost forever. They were very dirty and mud-stained. But what disturbed me were the coarse hairs that had collected on them and that I'd never really noticed. I removed the hairs one by one and carefully put them together. Then I made a strand of them and tied it together with a little red ribbon. I put it beside the two others.

Night was falling. I lit a little candle that shone on the large photo of Mélodie that faced her urn.

18

A STILLBIRTH

IT IS SAID
that Japanese dogs—Shiba or Akita
—
have the characteristic of really only becoming attached to their master. Exclusive affection for one particular being signifies indifference, distrust, if not aggressiveness, towards others. I've read somewhere that the Akita, for example, might show no interest in strangers in the street or guests to the house.

This was not the case with our golden retriever. At home, with us, she was calm and serene, like an autumn sky after a typhoon, so much so that we sometimes forgot she was there. The discreet sound of her footsteps, the occasional sighs or plaintive little cries brought on by dreams and often accompanied by slight convulsive shudders of her legs reminded us of her pleasant and enlivening company. But as soon as someone rang at the door and was greeted as a faithful and trustworthy friend, she suddenly turned into a demonstrative ball of energy. Her master and his family came first in her show of affection, but her inexhaustible need to express the
warmth of her feelings would, if need be, take her beyond the tight-knit family circle.

It was a summer day at the end of an afternoon that made you hope for the general cooling brought about by elderly neighbours who, wanting to carry on the tradition of old times, would copiously water the street. A midwife paid us a visit. We'd become close through a French woman who'd chosen to have a home birth, far from the heavily medicalised structures of the big hospital centres. Having agreed to run a midwives' training course in Madagascar, she had come to talk over her concerns about communication barriers with the trainees. She was accompanied by her son, who was in the midst of swotting for his exams and who, she said, loved dogs.

We went and sat in the living room. On the glass table there was an old edition of
I'm Expecting a Baby
, which had been given to us many years ago by a woman friend of ours, a psychoanalyst, when we learnt that Michèle was pregnant. Another more austerely scientific book that I'd found in a corner of my library,
Practical Manual of Sophrological Preparation for Motherhood
, was also on the table. These were all that we could lend the midwife. Michèle told her that she'd found valuable information in some of the pages of these two books, which both had a wealth of illustrations and photographs. The midwife asked her if she had any other children apart from the girl she'd seen two or three times on one of our evening walks with the dog. The hostess replied that she'd had nothing but unhappy experiences after the birth of her daughter and confided in her that if she'd known her at the time of her second and third pregnancies her family life might perhaps have been different.

Through the windowpanes of the door that separates the hall from the living room we could see the dog sitting on her back legs. From time to time she tapped delicately on the door. We could hear the scratching sound made by the hesitant and halting contact of her claws with the glass. The midwife suggested to Michèle that she let her come in. As soon as the door opened she charged straight in and was all over the guest who'd liberated her.

‘OK, OK … Calm down … Calm down!'

The college student, who hadn't said a word up until then, took the two paws from his mother's lap, said to her that she was going about it the wrong way and explained how to pat the dog and avoid all that licking. Mélodie turned to the teenager—and began licking his face vigorously.

The unexpected meeting between the midwife and the exuberant dog who'd brought eight puppies into the world naturally led Michèle to recount the story of the stillborn puppy and the yellow crocodile that the mother adopted as a needed imaginary substitute.

‘That's quite normal. The little puppy shouldn't have been hidden from her. In fact someone should have shown it to her … It's like a woman who's had a miscarriage …'

I was only half listening to the female conversation. But a little shiver ran through me when the midwife uttered the word
miscarriage
. I looked at my wife, who wasn't looking at her guest. It seemed to me that, for a moment, she was in another world.

It was raining that day. The huge door of the delivery room slid open slowly. A midwife in her fifties came towards me. She held something in her hands, wrapped in a pure white cloth.

‘It was a boy … You know, when it rains like it is today there are twice as many births … But your baby came out much too soon … unfortunately. I haven't shown him to your wife. Do you want to see him?'

‘Yes.'

It was a human baby, almost completely formed, but tiny and extremely fragile, like a baby doll, about fifteen centimetres long. He seemed to be sleeping in the outstretched hand of the midwife, like a child who dreams while sleeping in the hand of a great Buddha, tenderly held open like a huge orchid. The white cloth covered the little naked body. Then he disappeared behind the big door.

Michèle stayed in hospital for several days, long enough to accompany the child back to the kingdom of souls and to return again.

Meanwhile I went to see my parents to tell them about what had happened. My father took out his calligraphy things. He began to rub the charcoal stick on the ink stone whose hollow was filled with water. When he'd prepared the Chinese ink, he wrote, with a little brush, four ideograms, which were arranged vertically:

Immaculate child of a dream star
. It was the name (a little Buddhist in flavour) that, as an experienced monk, he had devised for the child who had been born prematurely and was no more. The name Jean-Emmanuel that we'd thought of one day, Michèle and I, in the beguiling vision of a rose-coloured future, has remained with us forever in our memory as a couple. My father, a little flushed from a quickly swallowed cup of sake, held out to me the calligraphied sheet of paper, which, on my return, I put away at the back of one of the drawers of my desk like a hidden treasure. Then life went on again with the return of the bereft mother. Some years later, when my father had left us, I finally had the courage to show Michèle the magical, stellar name that he'd given to our stillborn baby boy. I remember the absent and distant look she gave me at the time.

I wondered if the word
miscarriage
hadn't reopened the old scar, if it didn't make the mother dream about her
immaculate child of a dream star
, the child she hadn't seen and who, all things considered, should have been shown to her lying in the compassionate hand that served as his bed …

The dog kept up her warm welcome to the midwife and her son. It seemed she made no distinction between her master and his guests in her show of affection. This rather extraordinary ability is far from being shared by all human beings, and it was demonstrated brilliantly during an evening party that was a little special, an occasion we'd wanted our daughter to enjoy at the time when she was coming of age.

19

AN EVENING PARTY

TO CELEBRATE TURNING
fifty a Parisian friend had the idea of getting some friends together in the country house he'd inherited in Normandy and that, as a Sunday handyman, he'd been enjoying spending his time patiently renovating over many months. The renovations were still far from finished, but he sent out more than a hundred invitations to friends all over the world, and about eighty people replied that they were coming. Working at the other end of the planet, all we could do was write him a long letter to congratulate him on this happy undertaking. The party, where men and women of I don't know how many different cultural backgrounds mixed together, was a wonderful occasion, my friend told me later.