Melodie (13 page)

‘You were
waiting
for me here! I didn't know! Oh, I'm sorry. How long have you been waiting for me? I've been looking for you for an hour. Which means you've been here for an hour waiting for me? Is that right? Oh, I should have thought of that! Useless as ever!'

She got up and stood on her four legs. Then she grabbed me with all her strength between her two front legs and began to moan softly.

‘Yes … it's OK. It's OK, Mélodie.'

Then she resumed her sitting position, all the time looking up at me. I knelt down; I took Mélodie's head in both hands
and I said to her, ‘I feel reassured again now. Thank you a thousand times over.'

I clasped her in my arms; I pressed my cheek against hers. She did the same to me, licking me furiously. Eventually though, her elaborate displays of affection came to an end. I got up and attached the leash to her collar. We made our way from Philosophy Park. From time to time the sun clouded over. The breeze rustled the soft green leaves of the cherry trees and brushed gently over my forehead.

Suddenly I felt cold.

Mélodie waits. She waits, for example, with the patience of a Tibetan monk before starting the meal that has been prepared for her. I am not one of those people who make their dog wait because they like making it wait. I don't share their enjoyment in such futile contortions that only satisfy the rather sadistic pride of the master. But one day it happened that, quite unwittingly, I made Mélodie wait more than three quarters of an hour in front of her well-filled dish.

Just as I was about to say, ‘Go on, eat!' the telephone rang. I ran to the living room to pick up the receiver. It was an old lady of more than eighty, a neighbour who lived by herself, who was calling me to ask for help. She told me that she needed to replace the blown globes of her ceiling lights; that there was now only one that worked; that she was really afraid of finding herself in the dark one evening; that her son, who usually saw to it, could no longer do it because he had recently moved and now he lived too far away; that she'd
bought the globes herself now, the same ones. Finally, she was brave enough to ask me if it wasn't too much trouble for me to come and put them in, because she was so afraid of falling when she was getting up on the step-ladder. I told her that it wasn't any trouble at all for me and that I was coming over straight away to help her get it all done.

Her little wooden house is two minutes' walk from ours. Equipped with a few tools, I set off without delay. I get to her place and get busy getting the ceiling lights working again. Undo the cover, replace the blown bulbs, put back the cover: it was all fixed in twenty minutes. As a token of thanks the old lady offered me a cup of tea with a delicious little cake. ‘Really, you shouldn't be embarrassed. When you need a globe replaced you call me, Mrs Satoh! OK? You've seen how easy it is for me? How many days have you been here with just the light from one globe? … Be reasonable, Mrs Satoh! Next time call me straight away. Promise? …'

And so the conversation continued over the pleasant aroma of green tea, which blended with the heady scent of the old house.

Then, the sound of garbage collectors in the street …

Suddenly I remembered that I hadn't yet fed Mélodie. ‘I'm sorry, Mrs Satoh, I have to go back. I've left Mélodie at home on her own; I've got things to do, I'm sorry…'

I run. I go up the stairs in a flash. I open the door; I stagger as I take off my shoes; I rush to the kitchen where I'd abandoned her.

What do I see?

Mélodie was lying next to her untouched food bowl. She was waiting.

‘I'm sorry, Mélodie. I'd completely forgotten about you! I'm not a fit and proper master! I feel dreadful!'

She got up straight away and sat on her haunches. She hadn't touched her meal, which had turned into a sort of chestnut purée. With a patience that had conquered her desire to satisfy her appetite while she sat looking at her food, clearly she was waiting for us to resume our ritual of ‘civility', doubtless quite imaginary, but that had the virtue of shaping our life, of imparting a certain rhythm to our daily gestures and, especially, of softening and smoothing our relations and therefore of eliminating from them any element of coarseness and lack of delicacy.

Dogs, unlike wolves, are animals that have been domesticated for more than ten thousand years. They were the first animal to be domesticated, says Alexandra Horowitz, author of
Inside of a Dog
. ‘Domesticated' means that mankind and the society of which it is at once the cause and effect play an important part in the very construction of this animal being. The control over desire (appetite), to which this wait of three quarters of an hour bears witness, shows that, for Mélodie, nature bows before an imprint of a cultural order that stems from the alliance of humans and dogs over ten millennia.

The longest wait that Mélodie endured was that of the first of January, leaving aside the one that we regularly inflicted on her each time we left for France in summer.

The New Year's Day celebration is one that brings together the members of the family who are scattered in different places during the rest of the year. It is one of the occasions
on which, with incontrovertible authority, the power of the family unit to give structure and form to the lives of its members is made manifest. Under no circumstances could one fail to take part in it.

We are in the habit of spending the evening of 31 December with my elderly mother, who lives in Tsurukawa, still in Tokyo, but, even so, more than thirty-five kilometres from our place, to welcome in together, in the invigorating cold of the depths of night, the very first moments of the new year. A little before midnight we will go to a Buddhist temple nearby and, there, with a little wooden hammer, we ring 108 little bells hanging beneath the roof of a gallery that leads to the main shrine. According to tradition, within a man there dwell 108 evil desires that he must drive out before he begins the new year. This takes ten minutes. After the bell-ringing we go and see a very old priest, probably the highest dignitary of the temple, who gives us a quick tap on the right shoulder with a sacred text more than ten centimetres thick. When this ceremony is completed we are served very hot sweet sake. My mother, slightly stooped, gives me her arm so that I can support her while, slowly and carefully, we make our way. On the little pathway separating the shrine from the gallery of bells there are men stoking a big fire around which the sometime pilgrims warm themselves for a moment before going off to have their first dream of the year.

It's a habit that I have taken up again since the death of Mélodie in 2009. When she was with us it was impossible for us to spend the night of New Year's Eve in the way I've described, following this little ritual of ours. I could of course have taken Mélodie to my mother's, and in fact I once did,
but I couldn't bear seeing her in the entry hall, tied up to the base of the shoe stand. Neither my mother nor my brother's family who live next door could get used to the unwonted animal intrusion. It was by definition disturbing and unclean. Her presence among them was not wanted; I saw it at once. Because of that I preferred to spend the night of 31 December away from my mother, with Mélodie. So on the morning of the first day of the new year we'd get up very early to go and partake ceremoniously of the first breakfast of the year, which my mother had carefully prepared according to the traditional rules of her country.

We would leave around half past seven. Seeing us busy getting ready to go, Mélodie would be unsettled. She'd keep at my heels, watching my every movement. When everything was ready I'd ask Michèle and Julia-Madoka to go out first and wait for me in the car. Mélodie would place herself at the entrance, sitting on her haunches. I spoke to her, kneeling in front of her, ‘You'll be spending a long day at home on your own. I'd really like to take you with us. But we can't. You wouldn't be happy there. There are people there who can't really accept you because you're not like us … We'll be back this evening. And we'll have our walk … a bit late, but it'll be the same as usual … All right, Mélodie, goodbye, till this evening.
Gomen ne, Mélodie-chan
' (
chan
placed after a first name signifies great affection in relation to the child who bears it; the translation of this phrase would be something like: I'm sorry, my dear little Mélodie).

I'd close the door very softly; Mélodie's eyes, imploring, disappeared into the space of the door as it closed. I'd leave, with death in my heart.

Not everything stops on the first of January, but the slowing down of normal activity is obvious. Only the more grasping businesses, always ready to rob mindless customers, the consumer addicts, stay open. I enjoy cruising along the almost deserted motorway admiring, when it's fine—and it often is on New Year's Day—Fuji-san in the perfect clarity of a winter's day. When we get to my mother's we greet her as well as my brother and his family more solemnly than usual, with set words and expressions used only on that day. Before we sit down at the table I spend a moment of quiet reflection standing in front of the family altar on which is placed the little wooden funerary stele bearing the Buddhist name of my father. I close my eyes, and, in the darkness of the silent space thus created within me, I call on the soul of my father, who died in 1994. I present to him the projects I am to undertake in the coming year.

Like my father, and my mother and brother, I am a man without religion. My father, who, in a childhood of crushing poverty, had been a trainee monk, deplored the industrial form that the Buddhist religion had come to take in modern Japanese society, while at the same time retaining a sense of the sacred and attributing a transcendental value to prayer. His aversion to the business of death was such that when his own father and mother died he took it upon himself to compose their Buddhist names—the knowledge that his religious education had given him allowed him to do this—names that are ordinarily purchased at exorbitant cost when using the services offered by a firm of undertakers. And so, he
had prevented my brother and me from calling on a religious functionary at the time of his own death. In our family, for funeral rites, there has never been any religious ceremony and certainly no Buddhist priest in attendance. The ceremony, if ceremony it is, is simply a moment of intense remembrance of the deceased by his loved ones. The minutes of reflection that I give myself standing before the little shrine set into the wall of my mother's bedroom, free from any worry about correct form, are therefore devoid of any religious undertones.

The breakfast consists of a soup filled with a rich assortment of ingredients—
mochi
(balls of sticky rice), chicken, bamboo shoots, herbs—and of several small dishes whose names bring to mind the wishes for health and prosperity which the ancestors of the archipelago made long ago. My mother opens the proceedings and wishes that we may all enjoy good health, mutual kindness and success in our work and studies. Next, we take it in turns to share our plans, while praising the talents of she who has devoted herself to the preparation of the breakfast.