Authors: Dominique Fortier
She feels as if she is suffocating, suddenly dizzy inside the brick walls of her house with its too few windows, and only starts breathing again once she’s outside, under the enamel sky, on the mountain of ice, surrounded by dogs, hurrying towards a little man made of stones.
She had never lived with a dog till Damocles. As a child she’d briefly had two mice that disappeared under mysterious circumstances – one morning the cage was found open and empty – and a series of goldfish all named Bubulle that had the unfortunate habit of jumping out of their bowl, drawing graceful and merciless arcs that landed them right on the carpet. But no cat or dog that left messes all over, besides demanding constant care, as her mother kept saying; for good measure she claimed to be allergic to hair, fur, and all woollen materials, aside from soft cashmere, which curiously didn’t set off the terrible attacks of sneezing that the mere sight of a poodle would provoke. None had ever entered the house and it wouldn’t have occurred to her that she was missing anything.
She had spotted him for the first time on the street leading to the
SPCA
, at the end of a leash held by an exasperated-looking young man. With his head thrown back, firmly planted on his long legs, the dog refused to move
forward. He sat down, moaned, then got up again to take three steps and resume his game. The man struggled in vain to cajole him with a biscuit, but the dog stiffened, tried again to sit down, breathing noisily. Pink muzzle, velvet eyes: he resembled a young calf.
When she approached him, the animal had raised his nose slightly and stared at her with brown eyes holding a nameless sorrow. She’d stopped, gently petted the black-and-white head that came almost up to her hips. He relaxed, agreed to take a few steps at her side, then pulled back again when she’d gone by. The man was growing impatient, pulling harder on the leash, which tautened, upsetting the dog without persuading him to advance. He muttered something between his teeth, kicked the ground a few times, and finally fastened the leash around a stop sign before moving on without turning around. Incredulous, she watched him get into his car and drive away at top speed.
The dog had stopped pulling on the leash and had lain down, hind legs unfolded on either side of his flanks, front legs forward like the Sphinx. His chin was on the ground and he watched the car until it disappeared, then closed his eyes, gave a long moan. For a moment she’d thought he was dead. She approached him and sat down at his side. He slowly lifted his neck and rested his enormous head on her elbow.
“What’s your name?” she asked him.
The dog didn’t answer but turned his eyes her way, as if he were the one waiting for an answer.
“Marmaduke? Scooby-Doo?”
No reaction.
“Poochie?”
Raised eyebrows.
“Fido? Médor? Zeus?”
One ear half-cocked.
“Elvis? Victor Hugo? Disaster? Dumbo?”
The animal had leaned his head to one side and let out something that could pass for trumpeting.
“Dumbo, really? I suggest Victor Hugo and you pick the elephant?”
She carefully untied the leash and stood up, hoping the dog would do the same. He didn’t, staying obstinately supine, head turned towards where the car had disappeared a few minutes earlier, like a compass needle that refuses to change course. Resigned, she sat down beside him again, rested her head on his shoulder and waited.
A mother and her young son emerged from the brick building of the
SPCA
. The boy was holding a brand new leash attached to a rumpled little white dog that kept leaping into the air. Child and dog were making shrill cries while the mother glanced back as though wondering if it was too late to change her mind. A couple was
leaving, carrying a small cardboard box pierced with holes that contained a furiously meowing cat.
People brought dogs, kittens, hamsters, rabbits. There was even a pigeon with a broken wing, carried cautiously by a white-gloved policeman. Some were crying on their way inside and dry-eyed when they reappeared, going away with a lighter tread. Others were stoical when they pushed open the door but emerged shattered. Most appeared simply indifferent. As for the animals, they seemed to know where they were being taken and a few steps from the entrance, the cats bristled, tails up, spitting and trying to get away, while the dogs kept moving but with their heads down, looking defeated.
They spent the morning and part of the afternoon sitting in the grass at the foot of the sign. At one point she’d gone to buy a bottle of water, hurrying in spite of herself for fear of returning to discover that the dog had disappeared. But he was still there, enormous, silent, motionless, and when she offered him the bottle he drained it in two gulps, then thanked her with a lick. Evening was approaching when the dog finally got up and, with what seemed like an enormous effort, turned his head away from where he’d last seen the car he had arrived in. She had started walking and he’d followed with no trouble, politely adjusting his long strides to her steps.
Then, unwisely, she said: “We’re going home now.”
The dog seemed to leave the earth, pulling her along in a gliding leap and she was only able to regain her balance thanks to years of experience on a trapeze. Then he was galloping, floppy ears beating the air, and even though she pulled on the leash with all her might, she couldn’t slow him down.
“Dumbo, I’m giving you a new name: Damocles,” she announced, laughing and running at his side.
“And I’ll have to find a way to slow you down,” she added almost at once.
T
HIS MORNING THE FOREST IS CREAKING
, grating, cracking in the wind like a boat in a storm. The wind floats above the woods, coming from all sides at once as if it were the breathing of the thousand trees that sway, stiff, in the gusts, with a hiss like what one hears when pressing an ear against a shell that still holds a memory of the sea.
The sun is a pale disk, its light struggling to pierce a hole in the white veil of the sky. As soon as the church bell of Saint-Germain has sounded noon, the shadows on the mountain lengthen. Trunks and branches draw a tangle of bluish lines on the ground, the light falls at an angle and already there is a sense of the approach of evening. On a tree trunk struck by lightning a few months earlier, now lying by the path, a pileated woodpecker is jabbing away with its beak. Curious, he turns his automaton’s head when he hears the dogs arrive, but doesn’t fuss over such a little thing, merely fans his red crest, perhaps as a warning. His long, strangely disarticulated neck
reminds her of Audubon’s drawings, those winged creatures shot down then suspended from wires in grotesque positions as if the painter, unable to bring himself to choose, had wanted to reveal all in one image the birds’ particularities seen full face, in profile, from the back. The bird continues to hit the trunk from which he doesn’t seem to pull the tiniest worm. Though without much hope, she is waiting until the dogs are busy elsewhere – Doormat has decided to dig a hole into which he disappears almost completely and the others watch, intrigued, as the snow flies up between his paws – to throw a few cookie crumbs at the woodpecker. He turns around slowly and stares at her with contempt, then bends his neck to snatch them up.
The snow has the texture of coarse salt and it rolls underfoot like thousands of transparent marbles. The thawing and melting reveal in successive layers leaves, twigs, seeds, wizened fruit, scraps of bark, bits of grit, cones, maple keys, acorns, leaves of grass that she discovers in the reverse order to that in which they were buried, a tiny, seasonal archaeology whose strata correspond to snowstorms and freezing rain. The dogs are happy to find bits of wood that had disappeared months earlier and apparently have lost none of their attraction. Now and then the loose snow gives way under the weight of Damocles, who
has trouble extricating himself, one long leg after the other, from the icy ground on top of which he remembers walking all winter. At the tips of the maple branches there are slight swellings, not yet buds, reminiscent of scales: oval forms similar to tree-coloured olives.
On the side more exposed to the sun the snow has already melted in the undergrowth and the last hard patches form ephemeral continents separated by seas that can be crossed in one stride. All that remains of the path is a long white strip winding through the trees like a glacier that every day shrinks and recedes some more, leaving in its wake a moraine of small bits of flotsam dragged here by the frost, then abandoned, set down flat on the snow as on the blank pages of a herbarium.
On this day of almost-spring, she discovers on the flat rock in the shadow of the beech tree not a little man made of stones but a boy of flesh and blood, with unruly blonde hair, a heavy checked jacket open over a dirty T-shirt, shapeless jeans, and work boots, deep in a thick book. Right away she feels impatience and a certain disappointment; she realizes that since morning she has been thinking about the statue she will leave on the summit of the mountain at the end of her climb, and she’s annoyed with this intruder for keeping her from this very small daily activity that’s become necessary for her. She lingers for a
while, hoping he’ll go away and leave the field open, pretends to straighten a collar, unnecessarily inspects a paw, looks for non-existent burrs in Lili’s long coat. On the highest branch of the tallest maple two crows are having a complicated dialogue of clicking and cooing, black gossips warming their plumage in the sun.
He didn’t take his eyes off the book at the approach of the dogs and still doesn’t seem to notice them prowling about, noses in the air, at a respectful distance. After a few long minutes he finally gets up, closing the volume – an old library copy, its blue cover with gilt letters reading
The Last Days of St. Pierre: The Volcanic Disaster That Claimed Thirty Thousand Lives
. Then, turning around distractedly he leans across to brush the inukshuk he’d been sitting beside and, in a few seconds, puts together a new stone statue. He gazes at it for a moment after he straightens up. Only then does she see the blue of his eyes.
She turns on her heels immediately to go down without even giving the dogs time to catch their breath, as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t.
F
OR TWO WEEKS NOW SHE HAS BEEN FINDING
him at the summit every day, sometimes busying himself with some invisible task among the tombstones but most often at the foot of the budding tree where he settles down to read. She is now so accustomed to discovering him there that on this day she senses his absence before she is aware of it, the way one knows while pushing open a door that the house one is about to enter is empty.
She sits on the stone where she can see the mountain and the landscape below through his eyes. Then a silhouette appears from behind the shed that she recognizes without needing to turn her head. She is watching the foot of the slope, the ballet of the students hurrying towards the music school, miniature characters some of whom are carrying black instrument cases as tall as they are.
He sits down beside her, scratches Damocles behind the ears when the dog trots over to them. Takes from a backpack a thermos of tea, pours a little of the scalding liquid into a tin cup which he holds out to her without a
word or a glance, then serves himself. The hot drink has a very light aroma of flowers and smoke. The sun, which for days has only trickled through a veil of white clouds, ventures a ray, then another, gilding the landscape with the brightness of the approaching summer.
Once she has drunk the tea, she sets the cup on the stone and gets ready to leave. “Thanks,” she says, and he looks up at her, blinking. She walks away, whistling for the dogs, and he follows them with his eyes for a long time before opening his book and going back to the underground worlds of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
I
N THE 18TH CENTURY, AFTER THE CHANCE
rediscovery of the buried cities, men worked underground like moles, proceeding laboriously through a network of tunnels and galleries they dug as they went along. Most of the passageways linking one site under excavation (bakery, thermal baths, chamber or atrium of a villa) with another (restaurant, mill) weren’t wide enough to let the workers move around, upright or even on all fours, so they crawled like blind earthworms between the rooms and the buildings of what had been, two thousand years earlier, the city of Pompeii. When they reached the outside wall of a new structure, rather than go along it, clearing the way until they found a window, a door, or another opening, they knocked down part of the wall so they could get inside right away. Once they had roughly cleared the room, they would sometimes realize that they had damaged a fresco beyond repair. Still, they uncovered enough mosaics and paintings that they could go on choosing from among them those most worthy of being
brought up to the surface. Grottoes were summarily fitted out, where workers came to show the foreman fragments of their discoveries. If a piece was considered to be of inferior quality or execution, it was unceremoniously chopped into pieces. The more ordinary frescoes, or ones that were so numerous that there was no need to bring new ones into the open air suffered the same fate. The various objects extracted from the hard lava and the volcanic dust that had been compressed until it was hard as rock – amphorae, furniture, urns, even food sometimes found intact on the table where the mistress of the house or a slave, dead soon afterwards, had placed them, like the four miraculous eggs whose thin shells had survived the volcano’s fire and were nearly fossilized – were similarly subjected to a cursory examination. Jewellery and other articles made of precious metals were set aside to be brought up at day’s end and everything related more to curiosity than treasure was rejected at once. In the event that the accumulated deposits in a particular room or building couldn’t be cut into with a pick or a mattock, the unworkable zone was abandoned and the men moved on to another. Once the inventory was drawn up and the valuable objects taken away, labourers quickly filled the rooms again with debris so they could move on without having to remove it from underground. Rather tons of earth, gravel, and blackened lava simply moved from one house to another, following the
workers’ progress so that, aside from corridors along which they could move, no more than three or four houses were ever free of rubble at the same time, as if they had resolved, like Penelope, to undo after nightfall the work accomplished during the day. Thus months after the work had begun, Pompeii was still buried, even doubly: the first time by the volcano, the second by men.