Melodie (7 page)

I wasn't going to die. But I was suffering dreadfully. Mélodie, her whole being having now become a sympathetic ear, heard the tears and my body crying out in pain. So much so that sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would make dreadful cries as if she too were being subjected to this torture.

‘Don't worry, Mélodie.' Michèle's sleepy but crystal-clear voice quietly penetrated the deepening night.

Diary Extract 3

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

It is well known that for Descartes animals were nothing more than automatons, mere machines. The Cartesian
I think, therefore I am
brings about a real rupture by distinguishing man from the other living things. Endowed with reason, thought and speech, man uproots himself from the world of living things and indeed from the world itself to take possession of it, to appropriate the position of master and possessor of the whole of nature. In a famous passage from the fifth part of the
Discourse on Method
, Descartes writes:

If there were machines of such a kind that had the organs and aspect of a monkey, or of some other animal lacking reason, we would have no way of knowing that they were not in all respects of the same nature as these animals; whereas, if there were machines that resembled our bodies and mimicked our actions morally as much as it were possible, we would always have two very sure means of recognising that they were not on that account true men.

The first means of making this distinction is language, the second, the activity of thinking.

Malebranche, heir to the Cartesian theory of animal-machines, goes so far as to declare more clearly still: ‘Thus, in animals, there is neither intelligence, nor soul as we understand it ordinarily. They eat without pleasure, they cry without pain, they grow without being aware of it, they desire nothing, they fear nothing, they know nothing . . .' Hence a well-known anecdote according to which Malebranche, after kicking a pregnant dog barking at a visitor, had said, ‘It cries, but it has no feeling'. If an animal moans it would therefore not be an expression of pain. It would be a noise similar to the squeaking of a badly oiled or broken piece of machinery.

So it is no surprise that this insensitivity to animal suffering can extend, as Élisabeth de Fontenay points out, to a cruelty beyond telling like that shown by Father Tolbiac, admittedly a fictional character, in Guy de Maupassant's
A Life
, who, ‘seeing a bitch whelp in front of some awe-struck children, disembowels her with a kick, then savagely grinds underfoot the puppies only just born and those about to be born'.

Three years before the death of Malebranche, in 1715, Rousseau was born. In 1755 he writes:

. . . as long as [man] makes no resistance to the inner compulsion to compassion he will never do harm to another man or even to any sentient being . . . By these means the old arguments about the participation of animals in the law of nature can be terminated . . . being related in some respects to our nature through the sensitivity with which [they] are endowed, it will be thought that they must also participate in natural law, and that man is liable to some kind of obligation towards them. Indeed, it seems that if
I am obliged to do no harm to my fellow, it is less because he is a reasonable being than because he is a sentient being, a quality which, being common to man and beast, must at least give to one of them the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the other.

I am obviously not a Cartesian or a follower of Malebranche. I cannot be, having spent twelve years of my life with a dog that I loved. No, when it comes down to it I'm a follower of Rousseau. The continuity between humanity and animality that was ruptured with incredible violence by Descartes and Malebranche seems in a certain way to be reinstated by Rousseau. This feeling is confirmed, in the
Discourse on Inequality
, if one reads the passage that the citizen of Geneva devotes to the notion of pity as a principle anterior to reason in the same way as love of self. He draws attention to ‘the repugnance of horses to trample a living creature underfoot'. He emphasises that ‘an animal does not without anxiety pass near to a dead animal of its species and that there are even some who give them a kind of burial'. But, quite clearly, mankind has followed the path of Descartes and not that of Rousseau. It has thereby arrived at almighty technoscience. We live in the age of the industrialisation of animal breeding, and of what is called zootechnics, the science of the exploitation of animal-machines. We can see the infinite distance that separates our present-day sensibility from that of Rousseau when we read the following lines taken from Book II of
Emile
:

Pitiful man! You begin by killing the animal, and then you eat it, as if to make it die twice over. That is not enough: the dead flesh still revolts you, your entrails cannot bear it; it has to be transformed by fire, boiled, roasted, seasoned with concoctions which disguise it: you need butchers, cooks, meat roasters, people to take from
you the horror of the murder and dress dead bodies for you, so that the sense of taste, deceived by these disguises, does not reject what is foreign to it, and savours with pleasure carcasses whose aspect the eye itself would have found it difficult to bear.

Part II

ABSOLUTE FIDELITY: TO WAIT TILL IT KILLS YOU

13

HELP!

THE AUDIENCE WAS
plunged into the ink-black darkness of the hall, separated by a big empty pit from the stage, which was lit by a bright light shining down from the black ceiling whose height I could only guess at. I was on stage, in ceremonial dress. Two violinists and a cellist were at my side. The concert was going to begin at any moment. As surprising and absurd as it seemed, I was part of a string quartet, which was going to perform one of the six masterpieces by Mozart dedicated to Haydn. I didn't recognise the musicians. My anxiety increased. Why was I there? How had I been able to accept an idea as crazy, as deluded, as that of
playing
the viola myself? In front of an audience! Here, in a place that had all the appearance of a real concert hall! What was I to do? Should I stand up and shout out that there'd been a mistake? ‘Excuse me, I'm not a musician. I can't do anything … I don't know why I was brought here, why I was given this
instrument that doesn't belong to me, and this black costume, which I've never worn.' I felt hot flushes spreading over my face and the whole of my body, front and back, was bathed in a cold sweat …

A violent episode of apnoea shook me and dragged me from sleep. How long had I stopped breathing for? I was breathless, I needed air as if I'd almost drowned … I turned to lie on my left side in order to breathe deeply.

I fell back asleep …

It was then that I thought I heard, from beyond this night punctuated by tormenting dreams, a kind of wolf's howling, which seemed to come straight out of a fantastic story unfolding from beginning to end in a far-off Gothic kingdom that had fallen into decay.

I burrowed under the eiderdown as if to flee from the fear, to protect myself from the exhausting, nightmarish night. Yet the wolf's howls continued to make themselves heard, muffled though, their sharp, piercing notes smothered.

I emerged abruptly from my half-sleep state. I got out of bed. I was now quite sure where the piercing cries were coming from. I quickly put on my
wata-ire
(a quilted garment worn inside) and rushed to the living room: it was Mélodie who was howling in the semi-darkness, like a she-wolf howling at the full moon. Her whole body was like a trumpet which the musician points and raises high into the sky.

She'd come out of the cardboard house. I turned on the light furthest from the peacefully sleeping little puppies. She jumped up on me and, excited and quivering all over, energetically licked my hands, which were holding her two front paws. But she quickly and nimbly disengaged from our
embrace to go over to one of her babies who was lost amid the chairs and magazines piled on the floor, in the shade of a big pot in which stands a ficus that is about twenty years old.

‘So, it was me you were calling out to? You were howling like that to get me to help. It was an SOS! Oh, I'm sorry. I'm useless … I'm really not up to this!'

Delicately, I picked up the little one and took it back to the house, placing it among its brothers and sisters, who didn't stir at all despite this slight, unprecedented ruckus. The mother took no exception. She followed me with her eyes, attentive and benevolent. When everything was back as it should be she looked at me for a long time, her head raised. Then, a little hesitantly, she held out to me her right front paw. I crouched down to her level, face to face. I grasped her tenderly extended paw. She licked my face; then she went towards the entrance to the cardboard house. She turned around once before climbing over the little wall. At last she carefully lay down among the puppies. I said to her, ‘I'm going back to bed. See you soon, Mélodie.' Her big black eyes, quite round and always a little moist, crinkled shut just as I said this, as if to give me her assent. She was soothed, reassured, calm, so calm in fact that she gave the impression she was greeting the light of dawn, which was filtering in through the fanlight.

It was from this event that seemed to date a certain intensification of the bond of affection by which the two beings, the two animals, one human, the other non-human, were already quite singularly attached to each other.

Having returned to bed I didn't go back to sleep. Again I saw the female dog-wolf howling desperately, the young mother, inexperienced and distraught, who dared not snatch
up her lost little deserter to return it to the space of maternal protection. Again I saw all the nerves of her slender body, which she held against me, taut, to shackle me in the close embrace of her two front legs. Again I saw her white paw hovering in the air in search of a sympathetic hand. Again I saw all the confusion and distress she showed faced with her own powerlessness in a situation beyond her control. Again, finally, I saw utter serenity returning to the mother, who, by casting her conspiratorial gaze upon me, would recover her offspring. Plaintive cries, howling jaw, unhealthily panting breath, eyes winking and blinking, ears suddenly pricking up, tail lowered and fearfully tucked between the two back legs, a distinctly perceptible quivering of the whole body: all of these in fact constituted so many signs she made for my benefit with the firm intention of engaging me, reaching me, touching me. Something, I knew, had passed between us when, in the first light of day, on moving away, I caught sight of her body stretched out in a state of complete relaxation and carefree surrender, together with
all
of her puppies, now reunited.

When they left the house a few weeks later to live their life beneath other skies, a new era began for both of us: she wanted to be right next to me as often as she could, as long as there was no one in the family who was suffering physically or mentally. Often she would even end up clinging to my legs or my arms, pressing firmly against me as if she found it unbearable for there to be a gap of a fraction of an inch between our bodies. Her shadow merged with mine. The warmth of her belly warmed my perpetually cold feet. Her deep sighs reverberated in my ears. Her warm breath suffused
my lungs. Her regular breathing kept time with my heartbeat. We had become inseparable, close, very close, closer than close, to each other.

14

VOMITING

MÉLODIE HAD A
number of places of her own in the apartment. In the dining room, right next to the big oval table, she had her bed where she could go to at any time to sleep, to listen to us talking at the table or to have the fur on her paws, her claws and her dew-claws cut. When Michèle said ‘Come on, we're going to the hairdresser!' she went, quite naturally, although anxious and trembling a little, and placed herself on her futon, which was stuffed with little bits of wood that smelt good. It was really her home base. When our conversations became animated, heated, fired up even, she liked to move closer to us, to settle herself under the table in order to hear us better. When we relaxed in the living room she always took up a position at my feet, as if this extremity of my body were the sole lifebuoy available to her in case of an emergency or a sort of transmitter for all my sympathetic energy. At night, as I've said, she camped in our bedroom, on
a big mauve towel at the foot of the bed. If she wasn't asleep she pressed against the edge of our futon, which was covered in shiny, wavy hair; if she was asleep, fully stretched out, her backbone would be touching it as if she wanted to feel our presence through the warmth radiating from the marital bed. During the day, however, she mostly lay with her back against the wall, at the entrance to my study, which is also the entrance to our bedroom. That way she could see me in profile reading or typing on my keyboard.