Melodie (14 page)

The end of this morning meal, a real feast, is the beginning of a long day that follows a set pattern. There is not a great deal to do other than have a walk, which takes us to two temples, one Shinto, the other Buddhist (different from that of the 108 bells), two places that are particularly tranquil in keeping with the serenity we seek that day. I make the most of this walk of an hour and a half in which I take my mother's left arm in my right and keep our arms firmly linked, just to be able to chat with her about this and that. I'm especially eager to spend time with her like this since I haven't been able to accompany her the previous day for the
ritual of ringing the 108 bells driving out the same number of evil desires …

Once she is back home, my mother, helped by her two daughters-in-law, busies herself with dinner, for which she has asked her fishmonger to prepare a fine array of sashimi and her butcher to cut several slices of beef of excellent quality. My brother splurges on a bottle of champagne, and I do likewise, although I don't have a drop of it: in three hours' time I'll be driving home again (when I'm driving I make this a strict rule, knowing that half a glass of beer makes my violinist brother lose the perfect control of his fingers).

Dinner goes on into the night hours, but on the stroke of ten I announce that we have to go home as it's getting late. The long day of the first of January concludes with repeated thanks and the promise, at once vague and sincere, to get together again soon.

It's past eleven when we get home. The car stops. The gate of the car park, activated by remote control, opens slowly, making a metallic clinking like the grinding of teeth.

The sound of the engine revving and then suddenly stopping. The sound of car doors being closed, like sharp, muffled explosions … Then voices back and forth …

Mélodie, her muzzle resting on her two front legs, submerged in the half-light of the study, right next to my chair, instantly pricks up her ears.

The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.

She leaps up and goes straight into the hall. She waits.

At last I get to the door. I put the first key into the lock at the top, then the second into the lock at the bottom.

At last the door opens. A man's shadow appears. It moves forward and goes into the hall.

‘How are you, my friend? We're back late. Forgive us. Today's a bit special. But it's over! We're home again!'

Mélodie would be standing on her back legs and trying to grab me with her front ones, to put them around me, as she liked to do. She was almost as tall as me; she'd manage to lick my face. While she was putting her front legs back on the floor and starting to lavish me with affection all over again, I'd put my things down and turn on the lights in the hall. When I squatted down on my heels she'd roll over on to her back, making little moans of joy, and uninhibitedly reveal her pinkish-white belly to me. I'd stroke her along the full length of it. And so, softly, softly, calm would return …

But one year something quite unexpected happened and rather upset the ritual of our homecoming reunion on New Year's Day. When I stroked Mélodie lying stretched out on her back she suddenly turned back over and jumped straight up, making a getaway movement, as if she had no wish to stay where she was …

A little pool of yellow liquid had appeared on the wooden floor. It reminded me of my fright at seeing the reddish urine …

She'd been waiting for our return for fourteen hours. Bursting with joy, the certainty of no longer being abandoned was more than enough to make her lose control of her bladder. That was quite normal. Little children everywhere
will wet their pants when, bursting with infantile exuberance, their father tickles them in a Sunday-evening game.

‘Do you want to go for a walk?'

As soon as I opened the door she rushed out on to the balcony and, reassured that I was following her, went down the stairs as fast as she could. Once out in the street she went straight to her own little spot on the big thoroughfare of Nakano Avenue. She could finally relieve herself and was freed from the prison of that interminable fourteen-hour wait that I'd inflicted on her. She walked three metres ahead of me off the leash, almost skipping sometimes. It was getting late. Now and then cars drove past. A man in a suit was quickening his steps to get home. A couple of young late-night revellers were walking on the opposite footpath, beneath the thick branches of the bare cherry trees. The laughter of the woman echoed in the night.

Now I could give myself up to the pleasure of finally being able to respond to Mélodie's unfailing fidelity; for a long time I strolled along with her at my side through the city lying deep in sleep.

Diary Extract 5

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

Once there was a dog that was changed into a statue for having
waited
in the same place, at the same time, in an immutable and always identical position. He was called Hachiko (or Hachi, as a kind of diminutive). He was an Akita, a dog that came from the department of Akita in the province of Tōhoku.

On 14 January 1924 an Akita puppy had been sent from the mountainous hinterland of Akita to the house of Hidesaburō Ueno, a professor of agronomy at the Imperial University of Tokyo, who lived in the district of Shibuya in Tokyo. The puppy travelled more than twenty hours by train to get to Ueno's station. Hidesaburo gave him the name Hachi and began to feel a deep affection for the animal. He took the train at Shibuya Station to go and work at the university, and Hachi would often go with him to the station. But a year and a few months after Hachi had come to Professor Ueno's house the professor died suddenly. It was 21 May 1925. He had taken the train as usual at Shibuya. Hachi had gone with him as usual.
That evening, at the time his master returned, Hachi, faithfully at his post, waited for him at the station exit. But Professor Ueno did not reappear. He had died at the university, as a result of a brain haemorrhage. Hachi did not give up his vigil; he stayed at the station until late. But when night fell he went back home. People went about preparing for the funeral in a state of general upheaval. For Hachi this separation was too brutal, beyond his understanding. Well away from the scrutiny of the men and women who kept bustling about, he went on looking for his master and everything that was a reminder of him. At last, in a dark little corner of the big house, he found some things that belonged to him. He remained there glued to them for three days without eating.

The house was sold. Mrs Ueno, who was not legally the wife of Hidesaburo, had no right to the estate. She had no other choice, to survive, than to return to the place where she was born, to her own people. As for Hachi, she was not in a position to take him with her, and he was entrusted to a cloth merchant of whom she was a distant relative. But he was soon sent away on the pretext that he jumped up on the customers and frightened them. He was then handed over into the care of other people: he went from suburb to suburb, from house to house. No arrangement was really a happy one. And all the while Hachi did not stop thinking about his missing master. He ran away more and more frequently. He would often pass by the old house of the Ueno family to see if his master had returned, but most often he went to the station of Shibuya at the end of the day to see if he was among the passengers leaving the station. Some of those who worked at the station, accustomed to him being there regularly, no longer shooed him away. The man who sold chicken skewers from his mobile shop next to the exit marvelled at the dog's faithfulness and befriended him. He would regularly give him something to eat.

Day after day, month after month, went by like this. And, in the monotonous regularity of city life, almost ten years passed without a single day going by that Hachi did not take up his position at the exit to the station. Always in the same place, always at the same time, always in the same position (namely sitting, his attentive gaze fixed on the ticket gate), he waited tirelessly, indefatigably, inexhaustibly for Professor Ueno. And during that time the gap inexorably widened between Hachi's rapidly aging body and his inner image of his master, which did not age at all. Finally that gap could grow no wider. Time swept everything away, obliterated everything. Hachi gave up the ghost on 8 March 1935 in a Shibuya laneway situated on the other side of the station, a part of town he rarely used to visit.

Beating away somewhere in my adult's sixty-year-old body there is the heart of a child, which is moved by the tale of this dog and his absolute fidelity. Something that is very ancient, no doubt, which goes beyond the context of recollections and individual memories, is awoken in us by this story. You feel the need to preserve its imprint and to make it tangible. Hachi's stuffed body is now to be found in the Museum of Agronomy of the University of Tokyo, where Professor Ueno had taught, while his flesh and bones, reduced to ashes, lie in the cemetery of Aoyama alongside the remains of his master. Hachi's body, in another way, has been petrified so as to undergo no further change. At Shibuya station, unrecognisable today because of its vastness and the mass of people who pass through it and swarm around it day and night, there is now a statue of a dog sitting on its hind legs: in a position of waiting. There are always a great many people, young and not so
young, hailing from different cultural and geographic backgrounds, who have taken up their positions around Hachi thus immortalised in bronze, and who themselves are waiting for those they are meeting there. When I go to this part of town, which is now one of the liveliest and busiest shopping areas of Tokyo, and where, ultimately, people do no more than just pass through, I am seized by a strange feeling of disquiet, doubtless due to the contradiction, crystallised around the statue, between the infinite waiting of the faithful dog and the ephemeral moment of the meetings of the passers-by and the passengers engaged in perpetual and never repeated movements.

The fact remains that we love Hachi's story as we love our long-gone childhood, an enchanted world that has disappeared forever, the truth of another time dimension, like the founding myth of a beautiful, forgotten country whose distant memory we have nevertheless retained. The story is so well loved in fact that two films have been made about it: firstly,
Hachi-ko
by Seijirō Kōyama, from 1987. Then a remake of it in 2009 by the American director Lasse Hallström,
Hachi: A Dog's Tale
. I don't think that they're masterpieces from a cinematographic point of view. But in both films I find the poignant contrast (or perhaps simply the idea of that contrast) between the shortness of the life of the dog and the infinite waiting that he is able to take on quite shattering.

To wait is to believe in the other's return. Hachi did nothing but wait for his master's return. He believed in his return. Clearly he was unable to see Professor Ueno, but that extraordinary and incredible capacity for waiting convinces me that Hachi had a kind of unalterable inner vision of his master. If not, why wait? Why use all the time remaining to him in waiting? I think I understand why the two filmmakers felt the need, at the end of their films, to have the
ghost return. Some will criticise them for it, accusing them of cheap sentimentality. I can understand their viewpoint, but it's not one I share.