Melodie (20 page)

I had arranged and settled everything for the manner and conduct of Mélodie's cremation in a phone call I'd had with a woman who was an employee of the crematorium. There was to be no reading from some sacred text by an ecclesiastic. No religious ceremony. No pointlessly luxurious casket that only serves to make a temple that is already wealthy wealthier still. I especially didn't want to be part of the buying and selling of sacred posthumous names: I therefore politely declined the purchase of a mortuary plaque with a Buddhist name engraved on it, something that had been suggested as if it were for a human being. In all of this I remained faithful to my father, who, anticipating old age, had so often repeated to me: ‘No monks—above all, no monks—when I die. Do you hear me? Everything comes down to the market and everything is marketable, even death … I don't agree with it …' The repulsion my father felt in relation to Buddhist priests and which he didn't hide—I return to it again—was very
much in my mind. Mélodie's death didn't cost us a lot: a small sum covering the cremation expenses, a bunch of flowers and a quarter of an hour of reflection in a tiny chapel that we'd wanted to give ourselves in the presence of Mélodie's now completely stiff, cold body, just before it was reduced to smoke and ashes.

We had laid Mélodie out on a big
furoshiki
. This enabled us to carry her easily and to put her down slowly and carefully as if she were lying on a stretcher. I noticed that her tongue had escaped slightly from her mouth, its involuntary distension frozen. I felt that death inhabited her body now, once and for all. When we got to the garage we placed her in the boot of the car, which I'd cleaned in readiness.

Five minutes later we were at the crematorium. A young woman dressed in black was waiting for us. I opened the boot of the car. Two men in funeral dress came forward and bowed to the remains of Mélodie, laid out on the
furoshiki
. Then they put her into a coffin of reinforced cardboard. The young woman in black said a few words to us about what was to follow, while the coffin moved away from us in the direction of a little pavilion by the cemetery. She first showed us into the front office to give us some paperwork about the cremation; then without hurrying she took us to the little pavilion, the chapel where we were invited to say our goodbyes to Mélodie in the presence of her inanimate body, which we were looking at for the last time.

We entered the little chapel. The cardboard coffin was already placed on the altar. Just next to Mélodie's head Michèle put the bunch of anemones and carnations that had kept her company over the past four days. She added
to it two single flowers, pure white, which she'd picked from our garden a few minutes before we left that morning. Beside the coffin there was a pedestal table on which were placed a lighted candle, an incense holder with three sticks of burning incense, a brass bell in the shape of a cup that is rung once or twice with a little stick to begin the prayer and, finally, an identification label for the animal. It read: ‘Mélodie Mizubayashi deceased 2 December 2009'. I noticed that Mélodie's name was placed conspicuously next to that of Mizubayashi. It was the first—and last—time that our dog was called
Mélodie Mizubayashi
. This joining together of the two names, unexpected but in fact completely normal, unsettled me: it made me aware of the fact that Mélodie had never existed, in reality, except as a
thing
named Mélodie, and that as such nothing distinguished her, for example, from a soft toy, a little monkey, to which Julia-Madoka, as a school girl, had given the name Zephyr. I am a human animal, a living being and a human being, and, as a result, legally speaking, I am part of the category of persons as they are defined in the Civil Code. But in Mélodie's case, she is a non-human animal, a living being but not human. And this status of ‘non-human' is decisive and is sufficient for her to be considered as a thing even though she lives, or an asset belonging to a person even though, endowed with life, she is, quite clearly, more than a simply material asset. Mélodie, in fact, has never had the place she deserves in our world, which is built on the exclusive dichotomy of Persons and Things. A great philosopher once said, ‘Animals perish, man dies'. Does this mean that Mélodie was merely a perishable thing? And did she in fact perish? I cannot think so.

In this respect one thing is perhaps worth noting. There are languages, like Japanese, which still have echoes, however weak they may be, of a distant time in which men, still having no conception of a Civil Code, living in proximity with animals, thought that they formed one and the same community with them. Thus while French reserves for humans the use of nouns like face, mouth, nose, foot and the verb for giving birth, for example, Japanese uses these terms for humans and beasts alike without marking any clear dividing line between them. As for the word for beast, which signals that the speaker of French, in using it, can only be associating the animal with stupidity, I won't hide my reluctance to use it. Having said that, I must admit that I'm uneasy about the Japanese word for stupid,
baka
, which is written with two ideograms meaning horse and deer. But let me return to Mélodie.

We remained in front of the coffin for a good quarter of an hour. We prayed. I put my hands together and closed my eyes as I do, on occasion, at the grave of my father at the Kodaira Cemetery as well as at my mother's house, before the family altar in which memory of the ancestors is preserved by means of a number of miniature steles erected in their honour. I had never felt this need to pray as intensely since the passing of my father. A man without faith, without religion, I don't know if the word
pray
is appropriate to the sudden eruption of this inner call that filled me with emotion, that obliged me to prostrate myself before the inert body of the animal, an inner call that prompted me to gather up inside me the whole of my attention, the whole of my energy of remembering to merge with the flow of images that would soon replace the quite extraordinarily intense presence of the beloved being.

I looked at Mélodie's eyes. They no longer looked at me, they no longer spoke to me; her soul had departed some where through these weakly open windows. I pressed my cheek against hers—it was icy cold—for the last time. Michèle did the same. We couldn't bring ourselves to turn and go. But we had to. I signalled to the young woman in black. We left the chapel, death in our soul.

We had to wait several hours for the cremation to be completed. We waited at home for the call from the crematorium. Towards five o'clock the telephone rang. It was over … We went to pick up Mélodie's ashes. We were given a big box containing the urn. It was a silver-coated box just like that used for a human being.

I opened the box; I removed the lid of the urn. I saw the skull almost intact and some large pieces of bone: ribs, vertebrae, tibias. At the bottom there were bones that were now just crumbs and powder.

So Mélodie had once and for all entered the kingdom of the dead. I was utterly crushed and ground down beneath an unbearable, nameless block of sadness bearing down on me. I had fallen to the bottom of an abyss of infinite dejection with no hope of being able to climb out of it again. More than anything else, I was obsessed by the thought that I hadn't been able to be at her side and to take her in my arms just as she breathed her last. I couldn't get over it, just as I'd never been able to get over the fact that I hadn't been at my dying father's side fifteen years before. I couldn't get over having missed the very last meeting, of having been deprived of the chance to thank her for all the good things she'd given me.
I would have recited love poems to her, flooded her ears with bewitching music. The one consolation was to know that she had passed away under Michèle's infinitely tender, kind and compassionate gaze.

What did you see, my friend, in the last moments of your life, just before passing to the other side of that line? What are the images that were projected onto the screen of your heavy eyelids? What were the moments of your existence that came back to you at the very instant you were about to pass into the other world? For I believe in your existence. Having lived so intensely in your company I know that you had a true, individual, singular and irreducible existence made up of moments differentiated according to the feeling of wellbeing, or its opposite, that you experienced throughout your life. One day, do you remember, in an imaginary conversation I had with you, I asked myself the same questions about my father who passed away in the nocturnal solitude of a modest Tokyo hospital. Of course, these questions will never be answered. No one, not my father, nor you, nor any other being whether human or animal, can give us their answer about what they saw during their fall into nothingness. But the unfortunate living will always ask these questions; they'll ask them of themselves, ceaselessly, tirelessly, because it is the very uncertainty and unknowability of these questions—the whole imaginary space that they discreetly allow to be opened up—that, undoubtedly, attaches the living to the dead whose memory they need to perpetuate if they are to continue to live. All that I know, or rather all that I can imagine of the last moments of your existence and that of my father,
is the progressive diminution of consciousness, the erasure of the visible, the audible gradually fading to extinction, the dark shadows flooding in, the loss of all things, then finally nothingness … Who could come up with a more fitting, more profound and more moving expression of this than in the last bars of the final movement, the stunning ‘Adagio, Very Slow and Restrained' of Gustav Mahler's
Ninth Symphony in D Major
, the last of the symphonies if we leave aside the
Tenth
, which remained unfinished?

I rediscovered this music eight months after Mélodie's passing. Claudio Abbado performed it at the Festival of Lucerne on 19, 20 and 21 August 2010. He had enthralled me, as I've said, with Mahler's
Fourth
, which he had conducted the previous year in Lucerne. A few days later I was able to listen to the live recording of one of these concerts over the internet (I thank God for the internet). It was an epiphany, an illumination, a revelation. At the end of the work, whose performance lasted more than eighty minutes, the notes stretched out, gradually dying away until finally they had become nothing more than a kind of breath, an exhalation, barely audible. The last four notes played
pianissimo
by the violas, following the composer's notation—‘
ersterbend
(dying away)', literally destroying themselves. Slowly, very slowly, the music gave way to silence, a silence that lasted more than two minutes, like a prayer for eternal life, and there was not a breath or the merest stifled cough that dared disturb it … The tears kept flowing down my cheeks. At the edge of my consciousness there appeared two faces: Mélodie's and my father's, superimposed …

More than two years after Mélodie's death, the silver box containing her urn is still in the same place, as if it couldn't be uprooted, as if I'd erected her tomb in the dining room just where her mattress bed used to be. I haven't dared and still do not dare to ask my mother to take Mélodie's remains into the vault of the family grave at Kodaira, just beside those of my father. I'm afraid of what she'll say. But I tell myself at the same time that Mélodie will be better off here, in this apartment, our apartment, or in our tiny garden, next to the vigorous quince tree Michèle planted a long time ago now. She lived here, she died here. She will remain here.

Mélodie, my friend, I shall not forget you. How could I forget you? How could I possibly forget you? Suddenly a concert aria by Mozart for soprano, piano and orchestra comes back to me. It is ‘You ask that I forget you? Fear not, my beloved.' It is the one he composed in 1786 for Nancy Storace, the creator of the marvellous role of Suzanne in
The Marriage of Figaro
performed on 1 May 1786, in Vienna. This aria was performed, they say, during a farewell concert for her in Vienna on 27 February 1787. It was of course Mozart who accompanied her on the piano. He loved Nancy Storace. The music says so. If I could play the piano, and if I'd been
with you just at the moment this odious cancer bore you away, I would perhaps have had the mad, extravagant idea of getting you to listen to even just the few bars, infinitely tender, where the piano enters the
rondo
. To know that you were accompanied in your walk towards death by this wonderfully gentle piece of music would have helped me to bear the unbearable.

I shall long keep in my personal box of treasures your name, and all the images, and all the music that it awakens in me.

26

MÉLODIE AND HER COMPANION

MÉLODIE OCCUPIES A
considerable place in the life of her walking companion. It isn't because she lived with him and close by him for a little more than twelve years. Is twelve years of life shared a short time or a long one? That depends. But here the actual duration is not really a consideration. If the dog occupies a considerable place in the life of her companion, it is because, after having accompanied her throughout her existence, he feels that he learnt something important from her, that he received lessons from her that make the life he leads even just a little better, a little more worthy, more self-aware in any case than if he hadn't known her.