Melodie (8 page)

One day, however, she found herself another, unexpected, spot. I was working at my computer. There is really no separation between my study and my bedroom. From the slightly angled ceiling that follows the slant of the roof, there falls a long
noren
, a kind of curtain, a dark navy blue, two and a half metres wide, on which are painted brightly coloured tools and utensils from Japanese popular culture of the Edo period. Sharp little moans interspersed with hiccoughs could be heard; she was dreaming. A few seconds later she woke up, got straight to her feet and then sighed deeply. She had settled herself not at the entrance to my study on my left as she usually did, but where she spent the night: that is, on the big mauve towel, behind me. I swung around on my chair.

‘What were you dreaming about, my friend?'

She had her ears turned out and folded back. She took a few steps towards me and sat on her haunches, staring at me with her big round eyes filled with gentleness.

‘It's a bit early for the walk. Will you let me keep working a bit longer?'

I was about to go back to my keyboard when Mélodie, hesitant, lifted her front paw, holding it out to me. I took it
in my hands and thanked her warmly for this affectionate gesture. When I began to concentrate again on the screen of my computer she placed herself there on my right and this time put the other paw on my lap. I patted her head without looking at her, absent-mindedly engaging in the semblance of a one-sided conversation with her. It was at that precise moment that she exhibited an unaccustomed, strange, even disturbing form of behaviour. My desk is a large piece of wood fixed to the wall with brackets, under which are stacked shelves holding big books like the volumes of
Treasures of the French Language
and the
Grand Robert
, which means that the space between my legs and the large tomes is extremely limited and tight. But it was into that cramped little spot, naturally very uncomfortable, that my friend wanted to insinuate herself. She lay down first of all, but got up again immediately and stood up straight as a rod on her two hind legs and stared at me …

‘What are you doing, Mélodie?'

She repeated the same gesture: she again gave me her right front paw, imperceptibly tilting her head to the left. I couldn't understand this unusual insistency on her part. To tell the truth, I wasn't really making any effort to listen out for the signals she was sending me so insistently. Oh, my friend! I can imagine your dismay. You could see that I wasn't reacting. We were so close to each other, we could hear each other's breathing. There was nothing between us, no more than a few centimetres. But the suffering you felt was unbearable: a solitude inflicted on you, an enforced abandonment, an imposed state of desertion … for which I can't forgive myself.

Distraught, she lay down again … Then, a few seconds later, she got up and came out of her cubbyhole. Advancing with little steps towards the middle of the room, she bent down and, suddenly, lowered her head towards the floor while her whole stomach began to inflate and deflate at a rapid rate like a pair of bellows being used to rekindle a fire. I understood too late the discomfort she'd expressed for my benefit, standing in front of me, with all the means she had at her disposal. I couldn't do anything other than stroke her painfully undulating stomach with the ten fingers of my two hands. Later, I saw this scene again in dreams a number of times, and I remember having had, in one dream, the disturbing vision of my arms bereft of hands and, in another, even more worrying, of my arms extending into a multitude of hands made of soft plastic that I didn't know how to use.

Finally, with a dull and painfully suffocated cry, which came up from the cavernous depths of her entrails through an involuntary retching, there suddenly spilled out a kind of dark brown gruel, in considerable quantity.

It often happens that a dog will regurgitate what is in its stomach. That's what I learned from the three or four books on canine education that my daughter had read and that I'd looked at myself when I needed to. Mélodie had had this unpleasant experience a couple of times, but without all these persistent, and vain, attempts at communication. What I found disconcerting and at the same time reassuring on each of these occasions was that she ate up again what she'd regurgitated quite happily: it was proof that it was a passing and purely functional disturbance. But that day was not the same as any of these other occasions: she didn't leap upon
the soft, warm food that had just been discharged in front of her. On the contrary, she determinedly backed away a little, throwing me a look that expressed anxiety and helplessness.

I went into the kitchen to get what I needed to tackle the cleaning job like a professional. When I came back she had lain down, her muzzle placed on her front paws on the big mauve towel as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I wiped up the gruel and wrapped it in several sheets of advertising liftouts, which I put away in a garbage bag. I scrubbed the wooden floor vigorously with a towel soaked in detergent. Meanwhile, Mélodie got up and went out of my study, heading nonchalantly for the living room. Now that I'd got rid of the thick porridgey substance, I was trying to quench the warm and overpowering smell with a good dose of coconut detergent. Then I heard Mélodie coming back to me—she was trotting. A kind of continuous squeaking accompanied the sharp little sound that her claws made on the floor. She appeared at last and placed herself in front of me; in her mouth was the little yellow crocodile, squeaking all the while.

While she waved her right front paw in the air as if she were trying to get my attention, she made the little toy go on squeaking with no let-up. I caught hold of the extended paw and said to her, ‘You're feeling better now! You're happy!'

She withdrew her right paw and gave me the other one. Then she went and settled herself on the mauve towel. She delicately released the rubber animal and placed it right next to her stomach with its shining silver fur.

‘Oh yes, so that's what it was!'

At the tip of a pink teat, right beside her baby, sparkled a little pearl, snow white and lustrous.

Diary Extract 4

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

I don't know if you can talk about friendship between a dog and its master. But I perceived in Mélodie's eyes, when she held out her paws to me one after the other to tell me that she wasn't well, something like friendship, in any case a feeling inspired by a sense of complete trust. In the moments of intense outpouring of emotion, when she clung to me as if she couldn't bear there to be so much as a hair's breadth between our bodies, I felt an indestructible bond of attachment between us. Descartes and Malebranche would have taken me for an untutored and happy fool. Rousseau would doubtless have understood me. But the one who would have agreed with me completely is Montaigne.

The age of classicism, with Descartes, saw the advent of a ‘metaphysical and technical humanism' that made man a domineering sovereign exercising his power over the physical world as it was laid out before him. As for Rousseau, as I've said, he rejected the Cartesian doctrine of the animal- machine, but he appears at the same time as
one of the founders of modern humanism in that he emphasises the fundamental superiority of man as a free agent capable of extracting himself from the determinism of the natural world, while animals are condemned to submit to the rules imposed by nature. Perfectible (this is one of the key words of the
Second Discourse
), man becomes the agent of his own history individually as well as collectively, whereas animals do no more than repeat the same behaviours and thereby are unaware of progress, for good or ill.

Montaigne invites us into another world of thought and sensibility. With Montaigne, we are gently soothed by a feeling of reconciliation between mankind and animals. Mankind has not yet been torn from the community of living things. Chapter XII of the second book of the
Essays
, ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond', teems with examples, each one as extraordinary as the next and often taken from ancient authors like Plutarch. This is one that I especially like because behind the image of the two dogs—that of King Lysimachus and that of ‘one named Pyrrhus'—I see that of Mélodie, so friendly and faithful and full of gratitude . . .

As for friendship they (the beasts) have it, without comparison, more vital and more constant than men do. Hyrcanus, the dog of King Lysimachus, his master dead, remained obstinately on his bed refusing to eat or drink; and, the day that they burned his body, he ran and jumped into the fire, where he was burned. As too did the dog of one named Pyrrhus, as he did not move from the bed of his master after he died, and when he was taken away, he let himself be removed as well, and finally threw himself on to the pyre on which his master's body was burning. There are certain inclinations of affection that sometimes arise in us without the
counsel of reason, which come from a chance temerity that others call sympathy: like us the beasts are capable of it.

To read Montaigne, even though it requires some effort to tackle his writing because of its language, which predates the radical break brought about by the rationality of classicism, is like finding a magical balm that soothes the numberless ills inflicted on the animals that are forgotten, left, neglected, abandoned, eliminated, killed, slaughtered massively and industrially, here, there and everywhere, the world over. The French language, which I have embraced and made my own over a long apprenticeship, has come out of the age of Descartes. In a sense it carries within it the trace of this fundamental divide from which it becomes possible to assign the non-human living things to the category of machines to exploit. It is sad to note that my habitual post-Cartesian language somewhat clouds my vision when I contemplate Montaigne's animal world: so abundant, so generous, so benevolent.

15

PUNISHMENTS

THE DAILY WALK
constitutes a vital activity for a dog. It is a form of exercise, an expenditure of physical energy essential to the maintenance and continuance of a healthy life. We used to have two walks a day: in the morning before breakfast, or after, if I didn't go off to work, and in the evening, mostly after dinner.

But to go for a walk with a dog is to introduce it into the world of humans where a social civility prevails, to expose it to their sometimes pitiless stare and judgement. It was therefore necessary to teach Mélodie a minimum of rules of behaviour: to walk beside her master at the pace he set, to relieve herself in the gutter, to wait for the green light before crossing the street, not to bark needlessly when she met another dog … As amazing, as incredible as it seems, she didn't need repeated training to internalise the rules and prohibitions. I don't remember there being difficult or painful
moments in socialising her. The pedagogical satisfaction of this teacher was greater with her than it was with some frankly lazy students who lacked the desire to progress. Twice, however, only twice, did I scold her and hit her mercilessly; I had to force myself to harden my heart, make it impervious to any cry of despair, with a devil's heart.

The first time was right at the beginning. The protection offered by the vaccine had not yet taken effect and she was not able to go out and play in the street. With the stress of this mounting, every day at nightfall, as I've already mentioned, she would suddenly be overcome by the desire to run frantically through the apartment; she would bark her head off, but I was unable to attribute any meaning to the explosion of yelps. The obsessive running around the house would cease, I thought, once we took her out regularly morning and evening. As for her habit of continual yelping, we had to act quickly to nip it in the bud. If not, we imagined that neighbourly good relations would suffer. So I hit the poor creature a number of times on her rump with a sixty-centimetre bamboo ruler that had belonged to my 88-year-old mother and was now part of the sewing kit of my French wife. No doubt Mélodie was astounded to see the mood of her always kindly master suddenly transformed into this incomprehensible satanic rage. But the cruelty of the master's heart of stone made him twist the knife in the wound. He took the dog's tail and lifted up the weight of ten or so kilos, shaking it and inflicting resounding whacks with the ruler as he did so.

After that day the disruptive yelping stopped altogether. The animal never barked again unless she had to tell us something, to deliver an urgent message to us.

The second occasion involving punishment came about in Philosophy Park, which was, in effect, the meeting place for the dogs of our district. Towards six o'clock in the evening, winter and summer, at a time when the passers-by were thinning out, from around and about there came to play a number of dogs of different sizes and ages who had got to know each other. Among them there was a young Labrador called Tom who was an indefatigable chaser of balls. His master would throw the ball as far into the distance as he could and Tom, never tiring, would retrieve it. As for Mélodie, this game, so universal and typically canine had never interested her. But, that day, impressed perhaps by Tom's ardour, she clearly wanted to have fun with her companion's round yellow plaything. The two masters agreed to get them to compete against each other. Tom's master threw the ball a few times in a row. The two animals charged off at once as if the little spherical object, transformed into a magical whirlwind, was drawing them up with extraordinary power. Tom, who read the slightest movement made by his master and therefore guessed the direction of the flying object in a split second, succeeded in catching it before his newly arrived competitor. Tom's master suggested that I now have a turn at throwing the tennis ball. I accepted. But it made no difference; Tom was more skilful and better trained for the task than my dog. It seemed to me that Mélodie ran faster than her rival, but she didn't manage to get herself into the best position in relation to the ball to snatch it up deftly.