Melodie (21 page)

To live with Mélodie was for him, more than anything, the chance to learn to step back, somehow to separate himself from himself, to see himself as a complete stranger, to strip himself, in his imagination, of everything that made him exist as a man living in society with all that that entailed in terms
of practices, habits, expected forms of behaviour, in short of what perhaps sociologists call the
habitus
.

The relationship that his dog had with him was based solely—does this need to be said?—on what he was outside all the social attributes that were ascribed to him, all the social garments that he wore selectively in life's different situations. We can invoke once again the Rousseauian image of the social man compared to that of Glaucus, the divine statue disfigured by ‘time, the sea and storms'. The author of the
Second Discourse
wrote in 1755,

… the human soul altered in society by a thousand causes ceaselessly reborn, by the acquisition of a mass of learning and a multitude of errors, by the changes that have come about in bodily constitution, and by the continual shock of the passions has, so to speak, changed its appearance to the point of being almost unrecognisable; and all that one now finds there, instead of a being acting always according to sure and unchanging principles, instead of this celestial and majestic simplicity that its creator had stamped upon it, is, in unnatural contrast, passion which thinks it can reason and understanding in a state of delirium.

Mélodie, by her animal constitution, was only able to see in her companion his naked self, stripped of all external attributes. In the presence of a dog who was not naked because she was naked, he had become naked because, without being naked, he had the feeling that he existed in his nakedness. Like Argus, the dog of Ulysses, King of Ithaca, who, after twenty years of being apart from him, recognises his master
despite him looking like an old beggar, or like Rainbow, the little dog of Joe Wilson (played by Spencer Tracy) in Fritz Lang's
Fury
(1936), who throws himself into the arms of his master who has been unjustly imprisoned and is the victim of an arson attack by a crazed lynch mob, Mélodie demonstrated her affection to her walking companion, an affection that was based on nothing external to the affection he felt towards her and to the attention he constantly paid her. The fact that he was an ordinary man now on the threshold of old age and worried about halting his incipient baldness, that he was a university lecturer, that he was the author of several books, that he was sufficiently comfortable to have quite a big house in Tokyo and so on, Mélodie was clearly supremely indifferent to all of this. Is there any human being alive capable of detaching themselves to this extent from the social situation occupied by the person with whom they are conversing?

A memory comes back to me.

A young man had just been appointed to a lectureship in a private university in Tokyo. One day he needed to check a couple more details in a rather rare book held only in the library of another university at which, in fact, he'd done his Masters and doctorate. And so, armed with a letter of recommendation from the university at which he worked, he presented himself to the Arts Faculty office in his original university, which was to provide him with a reader's card for the library. For this he had to see a clerical officer of about thirty. Doubt less Mélodie's walking companion still looked like an older undergraduate or a young PhD student: the clerk treated him with technocratic arrogance. The young lecturer
was particularly shocked by the haughty manner in which he had almost flung him a student card to fill in. He pointed out that he was no longer a student at this establishment, but that he was now teaching at the University of M. A look of amazement and embarrassment came across the clerk's face; his manner changed completely. After that things proceeded quickly. Comfortably sitting in a reading room reserved for teaching staff, Mélodie's lecturer-cum-future-companion was able to look at the rare book in question.

He remembers another occasion. At one time, in Tokyo, he worked for a very large Japanese import-export company, NSI, as interpreter-translator. He did not yet have a position at the university, so it was important for him to act as an interpreter as often as he could to earn himself some income. A minister of an Arab country was making a courtesy visit to the board of directors of NSI. Mélodie's walking companion was first greeted by a man who, from his big office, reigned as absolute and undisputed master over the fourth floor of an imposing building belonging to the company. He explained to the sometime interpreter that the meeting with the minister was to take place on the twentieth floor, where the office of the chairman of the company was situated. They went up in the lift. The door opened. A dozen rather elderly men, all wearing grey or navy blue suits—swaggering, acting like VIPs—were there in a kind of reception hall. A curious spectacle was then played out in front of the interpreter. The man who reigned as absolute and undisputed master on the fourth floor noticed that the shoes of one of the big directors had a little dust on them. He made his way towards his superior—someone who for him was ‘above the clouds', as the saying
goes in his language—rubbing his hands together as he did so. Keeping his back bent, he was like an ape and reminded me in his posture and gestures of the frightful character of the sheriff in Akira Kurosawa's extraordinary film
Yojimbo
: at the end of the film the righter of wrongs, a man not bound by any ties, tells the sheriff to disappear from the world by hanging himself. The man from the fourth floor said a few words to the big director and, crouching down, began to clean his shoes with a towelling cloth that he'd taken from his pocket. The task completed, he disappeared.

From when I was a child I've always had an aversion to those like the clerk at the university or the little director from the fourth floor. Their common denominator is this very human skill in adopting a superior attitude or, conversely, a submissive one, according to the social status of the person they happen to be with. But since meeting Mélodie this aversion has turned into horror. I have come to hate these chameleons who are flatterers with the powerful, and tyrants, if not sadists, with the weak. That is why I especially like the passage from Milan Kundera's
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
that I have used as an epigraph at the front of this book. Kundera speaks of the ‘fundamental débâcle' of mankind in the context of the image of Tereza stroking the head of Karenin, her dog. Because how many men and women are there who would get a satisfactory mark if they sat for ‘mankind's true moral test' as defined by the novelist? And what if the one who obtained the highest mark were Nietzsche? At the cost of
his legendary madness, which Kundera himself refers to and comments upon in these terms:

… Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman's very eyes, put his arms around the horse's neck and burst into tears.

That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.

Two stray dogs that I met and loved in my Tokyo childhood stay in my memory. The first is the one I've already mentioned, the Snowy who seemed lost and helpless under a driving rain, the little dog I'd brought home with me to offer him the hospitality of a night.

The second was an abandoned white puppy that I must have found somewhere or other. I was older than I was at the time of the first episode. So I knew that the puppy would not find a refuge at my house. Then I had the idea of bringing him up in secret, with a few friends from the neighbourhood, in a bamboo grove not far from home where I played with them every day. There were three or four of us in our gang. I recall the dog's face but not those of my friends. Was my affection for the puppy stronger than the childish friendship that joined me to them? Undoubtedly.

First we built a kennel of thick cardboard so that he could shelter, more or less, from the sun, the rain and the wind. And we tied him to a shrub with a little rope long enough for him to have some freedom of movement. So, for a few weeks, we had the joy of having our dog close by and seeing him grow up more quickly than us. I didn't say anything about him to my parents, or rather to my mother, because my father didn't involve himself in such matters. I was afraid that my mother would forbid me having any part in it; that she would force me to part with the dog; that she would prevent me from giving him the previous day's rice and other leftovers, which I secreted away without her knowing. I was a bit like the young Katsushiro in
Seven Samurai
, who goes without a second bowl of rice to go and offer it to Shino, the beautiful young girl of the village who is kept hidden and with whom he is secretly in love …

But I wanted to give our puppy something other than cold rice—I don't remember the name we'd given him, or perhaps we hadn't given him a name. Was he simply called Shiro (White) from the colour of his fur?—For that I needed money. My pocket money—10 yen per day—was not enough. So what did I do? I stole. It's the only time in my entire life that I've experienced the guilt of stealing. My first and last theft was due to the love I had for a lost white puppy, a little dog without a home or support or protection. I must have stolen several times for Shiro, but all the scenes of theft merge in my mind to form just one, of which I've kept a vivid image: acting stealthily so that no one saw me, I was bold enough to open the drawer of the little kitchen cupboard with the intention of taking my mother's purse. I took from
it several 10-yen pieces, just enough to buy milk and bread … I don't know if my friends did the same, but my life with the white puppy carried along like this with great regularity until the day when, suddenly, he was no longer there in our beloved bamboo grove.

He had disappeared. Completely. No trace of him remained. As if he'd vanished into thin air … A great sadness flooded over me and almost prevented me from breathing. I couldn't get over this loss. This sadness, well preserved in the depths of my emotional archives, is like the big raised scar that I have above my navel, many years after the removal of my gall bladder. It still hurts when you press on it. But the weeks went by; the months flew past … In the end I no longer thought about my puppy.

Five or six months later, when I passed in front of a big white house with a garden looking on to the street that was fenced by a bamboo hedge in the middle of which there was an iron gate, I saw a grey-white dog that reminded me of my puppy. I stopped dead. It was him. I said to him, ‘Oh! What a surprise! What a surprise to find you here! Is it you? Do you recognise me?'

‘…'

‘Are you happy here? Is everything all right?'

He stared at me, all the while furiously wagging his tail. At that moment someone came out the front door. I went away without being able to say a proper goodbye to my dog.

The next day I went back again. I couldn't see him. For several days I kept passing in front of the big white house. But my white puppy who'd turned into a handsome grey-white dog wasn't there again.

Maybe it was just a dream? The trace of a dream that I'd retained? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the image of that white puppy has never been erased from my memory.

Leaving aside the two dogs from my childhood, Mélodie was the weakest, the most fragile being I'd known, the being most completely reduced to a state of constant powerlessness. And through this extreme vulnerability, throughout her existence, which was interwoven with mine, she held the position of teacher and I that of pupil. She was like a grand master of a traditional Japanese art whose teaching consists of saying nothing about his art and leaving his pupil to make out its quintessence. Certainly I taught her many things, among them a number of very strict rules of behaviour with the intention, as I've already pointed out, of granting her the greatest possible freedom in the world of human beings (she was practically never tied up; except for rare occasions she was always off the leash). But once this initial period of apprenticeship had passed, as a general rule it was she who tested me, asked questions of me without being aware of it, it was she who put me on the path of morality, if we understand morality to be, as Kundera seems to suggest, empathy and compassion felt towards the powerless, if not suffering beings, the ability to protect those who are defenceless, the categorical refusal to consider them as inferior beings comparable, following the Civil Code in the case of animals, to things to be used as one chooses.