Melodie (17 page)

In short we lived, Mélodie and I—and to a lesser extent all of us in our little family—a life characterised by an admirable constancy and remarkable regularity, which were those of Mélodie's inner temporal rhythm. It was quite clear that her repetitive and circular temporality was not that of humankind, which is essentially linear, and, as well as that, more and more accelerated and fleeting in our liberal democratic societies in the advanced stage of total capitalism—time always goes too quickly, we are all conscious of it, so that we are forever using the terrible word ‘already': I'm already sixty; it's already two years since Mélodie left us …

Mélodie therefore lived in a world of marvellous stability, sheltered from change, and, by that very fact, she was terrified when something unexpected happened or there was an accident. So, for example, she made unaccustomed growls of suspicion when, in Philosophy Park, she first saw an old man doing exercises in which he walked backwards, doubtless to fight against the premature aging of his body. She was like
another female dog, Niki, an unforgettable character in Tibor Déry's novel, who stood there ‘petrified' when for the first time she saw the miner Jegyes-Molnar, the friend of Janos Ancsa, her master, make ‘his ears move, first up and down, then backwards and forwards'.

Mélodie, like Hachi, like all of her kind, whether famous or unknown, lived in an eternal present that spread out across time from the most distant past to the infinitely remote future, without a hiatus, without interruption. This was no doubt the secret of her fidelity, her constancy, her incredible ability to wait—qualities she'd been endowed with but which we humans lack, for better and for worse.

A dream: I was having a private conversation with Mélodie. On the narrow footpath of a busy Parisian street I had just crossed the path of a very beautiful woman in mourning dress who bore an extraordinary resemblance to Chiara Mastroianni—perhaps it was her. I was disturbed by the sudden apparition of this beauty before me as well as by the look she'd given me for a split second just when our bodies brushed against each other as they moved along at a regular pace in opposite directions. I returned home, in a state of fear like that of a thief who has just committed a robbery and is afraid of being pursued by the police. The apartment was suffused by the peacefulness of a graveyard (which meant that I was passing from the Parisian street to the Tokyo apartment: borders are permeable in dreams). Mélodie came to meet me.

‘What's the matter, Mélodie? You seem anxious.'

‘…'

‘I'm so hot! I'm perspiring …'

‘…'

I took off my sopping wet tee shirt. ‘You see, it's sopping wet.'

‘But you're the one who seems anxious.'

‘Oh, really?'

In the next scene, I told her of my furtive encounter with the beautiful woman.

‘You know what, Mélodie, I'm disturbed. You can see that I am … You're not to tell Mum about it. I've just met a very beautiful woman, an incredibly beautiful woman … Our eyes met for a fraction of a second … My heart has fallen victim to her charm, I couldn't help myself … And anyway, it's not the first time it's happened to me …'

‘…'

‘You won't say anything to Michèle.'

‘No.'

‘You don't understand me.'

‘No, I don't understand you. But you said that the idea of divorce has never occurred to you …'

‘No, it hasn't, not ever. I swear it …'

In silence, Mélodie gave me her paws one after the other.

On waking up, I told my dream to Michèle, who was lying in my arms enjoying the last seconds after emerging from sleep. It made her laugh. At that moment Mélodie leapt up and came to give us her morning greeting … She held out her left paw to Michèle, who took it and patted it; putting her left paw down again on the tatami, she held out to me her
right paw. First I kissed it and then I shook it several times as a mark of affection.

Another day, just like those before it, was beginning.

Diary Extract 6

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

If I find Hachi's absolute fidelity so unsettling, if it continues to haunt our imagination at the very heart of Tokyo's tumultuous lives, it's because it represents the impossible. We are not like Hachi, not by a long way. But if the tale of this dog who fretted away until he died from his sad and interminable wait for his master moves me to tears, if the memories of Mélodie plunge me into a rather dangerous melancholic state, it's because there is still within me a fragment of canine sensibility, like a trace, a faint echo of a distant time when our ancestors were still not completely disconnected from the wider community of living things. Man invented literature in order to set down in it the marks left by the pain he felt at the crucial moment in which he became aware of his condition as a man—undoubtedly as a
modern man
—an awareness which came out of this fundamental schism.

Around me couples are made and unmade, bursting apart like bubbles. When I write to a friend (of either sex) to whom I haven't
written for more than a year or two the thought crosses my mind: ‘Are they still together?' Westerners have taken a long time to free themselves of the religious conception of marriage. It was only in 1974 that divorce by mutual consent became possible in France. The Revolution had instituted a divorce law that was exceptionally subversive, relying only on the individual will of the man or woman. But this arrangement was too far ahead of its time and only lasted a short while. Today men and women are free to come together and to separate as they decide without the gods and priests having anything to do with it. We have dispensed with the religious illusion of the unchangeable, the constant and the eternal . . . Nothing is unchangeable. Everything is subject to change. We are in time that passes . . . in a becoming perpetually subject to Time that erodes, alters and transforms . . .

The Princess of Cleves
(1678), disparaged by a former President of the Republic,
*
bears witness to the terror of men and women before the devastating force of Time, at the very moment when they seize the individual right to love and to act as they intend, without concern for the demands and constraints of the members of the family or lineage. Madame de Clèves, when the death of her husband finally makes possible her marriage with the man she loves, paradoxically refuses to take this path dictated by passion precisely because she does not believe in the unalterability of romantic love: ‘I know that
you are free', she declares, ‘that I am and that things are such that the world would perhaps not have cause to censure you, nor me either, if we each made an eternal commitment to the other. But do men retain their passion in such eternal commitments?' This woman who withdrew ‘into a retreat and into occupations more holy than those of the most austere convents', was, ultimately, a kind of sacrificial victim immolated on the altar of History. And from this sacrifice have emerged all the more or less ephemeral couples over generations. Today we live in a world in which a talented author (Frédéric Beigbeder) can write a novel entitled
Love Lasts Three Years
.

According to Hans Robert Jauss, in
Julie, or the New Heloise
(1761), French literature of the classical era underwent a kind of
auto-da-fé
, which was incredibly wide-reaching: Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld do not withstand the implacable literary judgement of Rousseau. With one exception, though:
The Princess of Cleves
, which he would like to be a pair with Book IV of
Julie
. If
The Princess of Cleves
kills the passion of the heroine at its source by shutting her away in a monastic life based on repetition,
Julie, or the New Heloise
does the same—hence the exceptional treatment given to the novel of Madame de Lafayette—by preventing the passionate relationship between Saint-Preux and Julie from coming to fruition, and conversely by attempting to realise the happiness of the woman in a durable and permanent state—like that of the retreat of Madame de Clèves—that marriage to the wise and impassive Wolmar guarantees. The terror of men and women before natural law, according to which everything is worn away, has also left a remarkable imprint on this work. ‘There is no passion', Rousseau declares,

that creates such a strong illusion in us as love: we take its violence as a sign of its lasting; the heart that is laden with such
sweet feeling extends it so to speak into the future, and as long as this love lasts we believe that it will not come to an end. But, on the contrary, it is its very ardour that consumes it; it becomes worn away with youth; it is effaced with beauty, it is extinguished beneath the icy wastes of age; and since the world began two white-haired lovers sighing for each other is a sight that has never been seen.

Don Juan is the unfaithful one
par excellence
. Mélodie remains in an eternal present, which occupies, from the past to the future, the whole duration of time. But Don Juan lives in a temporality radically opposed to Mélodie's: he lives in a present disconnected from both the past and the future. The donjuanesque existence is that of the seducer who, thumbing his nose at the authority of the past and the promise of the future, gives himself up wholly to the exclusive pleasure of the present. It is a discontinuous existence, made up of fleeting moments of sensual delight. At the end of Molière's play (1665)—or Mozart's opera (1787)—Don Juan—or Don Giovanni—is punished by divine power represented by the statue of the Commander: he is struck down and swallowed up into the dark abyss. In the direct contrast between the discontinuity of unstable desire and the permanence of the divine order, between the fleeting present of carnal pleasure and the untouchable immobility of the dinner guest of stone, between the empty volubility of the dissolute son and the sacred word of the inflexible Father, between the modern and the ancient, it is the ancient who ultimately annihilates the modern by a radical condemnation. But it is precisely this radical condemnation, in some way fully purged, that we moderns have put aside, without shame or embarrassment, under the new guise of a super seducer addicted to the maximum intensity of moments with no tomorrow. The damnation of Don Juan,
in the same way no doubt as Madame de Clèves in her monastic life of exemplary austerity, paved the way for the birth of all the Don Juans in the centuries to come.