Melodie (19 page)

Finally, I went to sleep, my right hand placed very lightly on her neck, its protruding lump like the sign of an unassailable morbidity.

The next morning when I woke up I found myself in exactly the same position. My hand hadn't left Mélodie's body, which was relaxed and yet very ill. She hadn't moved an inch either.

It was Wednesday, 2 December 2009. Michèle and I had to hurry because we both had an early morning start.

‘Come on,
Mélodie-chan
, we're going for a little walk', said Michèle in her clear voice.

I helped to get her up. I slipped her two-sleeved jacket over her back. She began to walk, slowly, putting one foot in front of another, hesitant and uncertain. Really she was just staggering along. I remembered my father, who, in the last days of his life, wasn't very clear about the order in which to put his clothes on. After a few tottering steps Mélodie couldn't hold on any longer: she peed, just a little, in the hall. This was the first time she'd had a problem with incontinence if we don't count the accidents that occurred when her joyful outbursts got the better of her.

She started walking again. While Michèle cleaned the yellow liquid from the tiles, I went with Mélodie towards the lift, which we'd been using for several weeks now to go down to the ground floor from the first floor. Once in the street, contrary to her usual habit of waiting for her mistress, she started off straight away. She went thirty metres and stopped
on the edge of the footpath on Nakano Avenue. Then she passed all the remaining urine into the gutter. She looked at me, tilting her head imperceptibly to the side in the way she had. It was a look of pleading. I understood that she couldn't or wouldn't go any further.

‘I understand, Mélodie. We'll go home, we'll take it very easy.'

I took two or three steps. But Mélodie didn't follow me. ‘So we're not going home?'

Mélodie threw me a second pleading look, one of infinite, heart-wrenching sadness.

She was completely exhausted. She couldn't go any further.

I picked up her body which, having given up completely, seemed heavier than when I'd had to lift it two months before when I took her to Mr K, the vet. With Mélodie in my arms I walked with quick, jerky steps. Without meaning to I pressed against the bulging area on her shoulder. She cried out as if she'd felt a surge of sharp pain. Michèle came to meet us.

‘She can't walk any more, poor thing. Well, she's in a lot of pain … I'm trying not to touch the lump but it's still hurting her …'

I reached the house at last. She groaned with every step I took, but she calmed down completely as soon as I put her on her four feet in the little lift that took us up to the apartment. We had to hurry. I rapidly swallowed a piece of bread and butter and set to preparing Mélodie's bowl of food. To the usual kibble I added some slices of beef, some
natto
(she loved these fermented soya beans) and some boiled cabbage to stimulate her appetite. I put the meal, more elaborate than
usual, down in front of her, now she'd gone to lie down on the bath towel at the foot of the bed of her master and mistress. She didn't get up; she showed no interest in what I'd given her. For the first time she didn't want to touch her food. I put a little bit of cabbage and
natto
on the palm of my left hand and put it under her lips. To no avail, she wasn't interested. I wanted to look at her tongue; I was struck by the pale colour of her gums, which had always looked bright pink to me in contrast to the yellowish white colour of her teeth.

‘You don't want to eat? It's good, really it is.'

‘…'

‘You aren't well. I know. I have to leave you, I'm afraid. I'll come back as soon as I can, when I'm finished. You'll wait for me. OK?'

‘…'

‘Michèle has to go too. But she'll be back soon, before me. You'll be on your own, but don't worry. It'll be all right. You'll look after the house for us, won't you?'

I didn't know what to say. The day, its every second waiting to crush me beneath its great burden of worry, was beginning.

Michèle, now ready to leave, said goodbye to her in turn. Mélodie watched us moving away from her, impassively. I picked up my briefcase, and we went out. We kissed each other in front of the house and went our separate ways. Michèle went down the street to the subway, I took my bicycle.

When I reached the end of the street that runs into Nakano Avenue I stopped for a moment. My eyes turned towards the edge of the still-wet footpath. I wanted to retrace my steps. I went back. I opened the front gate, I went up the
stairs, I put the key in the lock. Mélodie wasn't in the hall. In fact she hadn't budged. She was on her bath towel, her muzzle on her swollen legs the size of two little tree trunks.

‘It's me again,
Mélodie-chan
… I came back to tell you to have a good day. I don't think I said that to you just now … I'll see you this evening.'

I rubbed my cheek against hers, the right and the left. I could feel that they were colder than usual.

25

CREMATION

MÉLODIE LEFT US
on 2 December 2009 at 5.37pm. It had begun to rain in the afternoon, and the rain, accompanied at times by a howling wind, kept falling until dawn.

She'd spent the whole day without moving, or changing her position. All she did was wait for the return of her master and mistress, in an aching, drowsy impatience. The wait wasn't over for her until Michèle, first of all, had come back to her around three o'clock. She had rushed home when her work was finished, and Mélodie licked the hand that her mistress held out to her. Michèle stroked her head. Mélodie seemed to give in completely, with no resistance, to the sleepiness that was flooding over her.

Close to five o'clock, Michèle, busy at the other end of the apartment, went to see Mélodie. Much to her surprise, Mélodie had shifted position. She was no longer on the big bath towel at the foot of our bed. She'd gone back to the spot
I'd made for her the previous night after her lacerating howls, settling just next to my side of the big marital bed. With her eyes closed, she put her tired muzzle on the edge of the bed as if she were breathing in all the smells of my body that impregnated the bedclothes.

The rain became heavier; the wind blew wildly. Michèle was afraid that the bad weather would turn into a real storm. She wanted to go to the closest shop and get a few things that she needed to prepare the dinner. She put on her yellow rain hat and opened the wardrobe to get her coat, putting it on as she went to the kitchen to turn off the gas, a habit she'd gotten into through living here for many years, in a country subject to violent earthquakes.

Mélodie heard the sound of the wardrobe opening and closing. She made an incredible effort to get up and, especially, to move from where she was so that she could see her mistress, who was getting ready to brave the wind and the rain. When she planted herself in the living room in front of Michèle, who was coming back from the kitchen, she was out of breath. She collapsed, throwing a despairing glance at the one who was going to abandon her for a time.

‘Oh, good heavens, you've got up,
Mélodie-chan
? I was coming to see you and tell you that I was going out to do some shopping …'

‘…'

‘I'll come straight back.'

‘…'

Looking up at her, Mélodie's eyes, candid and intense at the same time, clear, moist and utterly beseeching, pierced Michèle's heart. She'd got the message at once. Everything in this infinitely weak and weakened being, vulnerable and made vulnerable like an abandoned child, everything about her, from the superhuman effort to get up, to her gaze brimming with tenderness and fear, said to her: ‘Stay, please. Don't go.'

With her coat and hat still on, Michèle knelt down beside the dog. Mélodie stretched out fully, then gave a first death cry. Then, a few seconds later, a second one.

A heavy silence fell.

‘No, Mélodie, please …'

Finally, the body of the dog stiffened convulsively in the last death throes. That was all.

On Sunday, 6 December, I had to conduct an in-conversation session with my film director friend Malek Bensmaïl about the film
China Is Still Far Away
that he'd just made. On Thursday, 3 December, in the afternoon, I had a meeting with the technical team for the event to familiarise myself with the venue and the electronic set-up for the projection of the sequences I'd chosen in agreement with Malek. So all in all the end of the week was looking very full. For this being, this dog, this animal who'd just died and who'd been with us for twelve years, we promised ourselves long days of mourning and remembrance; for this life that was moving into the distance we needed an intense time of prayer, away from anthropocentric religions and denominational allegiance. Michèle and I had therefore decided to have Mélodie's cremation the day after the event of 6 December.
Until then, for four whole days, we had to preserve Mélodie's body and slow down the process of decomposition and putrefaction. For this purpose we bought up bags of ice blocks in considerable amounts. In four days we had gone through the stocks of the supermarkets in our neighbourhood. A young man at the till smiled and said to me, ‘You're often having parties, I'm envious!'

‘No, no, there's nothing to be envious about. It's no joke, I can tell you …'

Mélodie's body had been placed in the dining room, on her mattress, which in the end she only lay on from time to time during the day. It was surrounded by some dozens of bags of ice and a number of bunches of brightly coloured flowers that Michèle had herself carefully chosen from her florist. To conceal the very commercialised ugliness of the ice bags covered in advertising we'd used navy blue
furoshiki
with floral patterns, which created a striking contrast with the red of the anemones and the orangey yellow of the carnations. On a thin Japanese cushion (
zabuton
), Michèle had collected together all the toys and objects recalling the departed animal's presence among us. A little candle in a candleholder in the style of an old-fashioned European lamp sparkled in the semi-darkness. It was a tomb. A true tomb.

The four days passed slowly. Each evening, following the numbing hours spent with humans, we resumed our moments of secret intimacy in the company of the inanimate body of the dog. The presence of the dead animal may not have taken
away the fatigue of the day but at least it allowed us to forget it for a time.

On the morning of Monday, 7 December, we went to the crematorium attached to a Buddhist temple next to Philosophy Park. Thanks to a big billboard that I looked at without paying it any particular attention, I knew that there was a cemetery for pets on the other side of the wall that looks down over Shin-Ome Avenue. When I was out walking with Mélodie, there'd been a few times that I'd said to myself that we might go there one day, but this barely hinted-at possibility was pushed back down again into the dark and hidden corners of my mind. But that morning that was precisely where we were going …