Melodie (4 page)

7

FIRST OUTING

THE DAY OF
the much anticipated first outing finally came. Everything was ready: a little yellow collar, a red leash made of rope, a little walks bag in which there was a bottle of water, a brush and a pile of coloured advertising liftouts, carefully folded in four. She was alert to the unusual sense of agitation that ran through every room of the house. She sat in the front hallway. Her eyes followed each of us as we went from room to room, intrigued. She'd never seen such hurrying on the part of the co-occupants of the familial space.

I picked up the car keys. I put her collar around her neck, I attached the leash, I picked up the little bag, and finally I opened the door. She leapt up in spite of the force—mine—that restrained her. I shouted her name. She calmed down at once and followed me obediently, slowly down the stairs towards the car park. She hesitated at the open door of our old Accord. She didn't know what to do. I helped her up onto
the back seat. She resisted, but once in the car she lay down as if that's what she'd always done. I in turn sat in the car, and we waited for my wife and my daughter.

We headed towards Akiruno, a municipality in the western suburbs of Tokyo, fifty kilometres from where we lived. Lying between the mother, who kept up a constant stream of praise for her good manners, and the teenage girl, who kept stroking her head, Mélodie remained placid and imperturbably motionless during this baptism in car travel. And a few minutes later, helped by the dull vibration of the engine, she fell into a slumber that lasted until we reached the end of our journey.

Akiruno was where the A family, who had taken another of Danna's offspring, which they named Octave, lived. The purpose of the first outing was to bring about a meeting between the brother and sister two months after they'd left the maternal fold. Greetings exchanged, we decided to go together to a big park a few hundred metres away. We walked tranquilly along a narrow street edged with clumps of azaleas and rhododendrons, which promised a bewitching display for spring. Danna's two puppies quickened their steps. When we arrived at the park we were amazed to find it deserted. It was a Sunday. It was almost three o'clock in the afternoon. No children in the sandpit, no old men on the benches positioned in the four corners of the park. Was everyone still at lunch, relaxed and carefree in a Sunday mood? The swings did not stir; the slide stood there like a little, bored giant. The sky
smiled kindly on the two creatures finally released from their period of domestic imprisonment: just lightly hazy and free from the caprices of the wind, the light it sent them was filtered, soft, beneficent. I took off Mélodie's leash; Mrs A did the same with her dog.

Once liberated, the brother and sister presented us with a wondrous display. In one bound Mélodie propelled herself forward like a wild animal seizing its prey and began running with all her might. But after a few seconds she abruptly changed direction; elastically twisting her svelte body, she jumped to the left. Then, with a thrust that carried her high into the air, she caught sight of something that looked like a feather. She turned her head even further to the left before falling back to earth, and once her four paws were set on the sandy ground she rushed to chase the hairy object. Hell-bent on catching it, she pivoted frenetically, round and round, for several seconds. At last she collapsed in a heap, the tip of her tail in her mouth. Octave, who had taken off at the same time as his sister, ran towards her and, without meaning to, hit her full on. She was knocked over, but she got straight back up again and ran full pelt towards the end of the park. Octave, unperturbed by his sister's remarkable agility, immediately sped off, not wanting to be left too far behind. It was an extraordinary spectacle in which the brother and sister, with the vitality and impetuousness of full-blown adolescents, were engaged in a furious, reckless race, seemingly unstoppable. The two bodies passed first under a big hundred-year-old cherry tree denuded of its cloak of foliage, but that still shed shade with its majestically twisted branches. They were like two shooting stars in the dark sky, two silver rockets, one
pursuing the other at dizzying speed. It was like watching a science fiction film in which spacecraft, like beams of white light, flashing and flying, surf over the blackness and finally slip away, swallowed up into the mysterious, far-flung reaches of the universe. They disappeared behind the shrubbery only to reappear instantly in the bright luminosity of the open space. The gap between the two bodies remained unchanged. At last they arrived at the swings, an area surrounded by an iron safety railing. Quick and nimble, Mélodie hurdled the first fence, without lessening her momentum or her driving strength, which were at their absolute peak, while her little brother followed, jumping five centimetres higher than the fence, with his four paws tucked carefully and neatly into the middle of his flat stomach. The benches and the monkey bars suddenly sprang up in front of them like policemen blocking the way. But they deftly avoided them and continued their feverish stampede. They passed behind the sandpit and dodged the little giant. When Mélodie had gone right around the path like this she stopped suddenly and, having taken a few steps sniffing I don't know what lying on the ground, she lay down and looked around her like a she-wolf whose gaze travels far, anxious to protect her cubs from potential enemies; or a general perhaps, surveying from the top of a hill his battalion lined up below him. As for Octave, he slowed his pace seeing that his sister didn't want to go round the park a second time. He retraced his steps; he placed himself delicately beside her and collapsed in a heap as though he'd used every last bit of energy. Then they stayed looking at each other for a long while. Their muzzles, pointed skywards, almost touched. Their big black eyes closed to form a thin thread,
Buddha-like, a sign of their happiness at being together in the gentle sunlight of a December afternoon.

But, a few moments later, the little brother got up again and went nonchalantly to the middle of the park. Immediately, Mélodie followed him. The contest we then witnessed was a magnificent performance. First Mélodie charged into Octave, the violent blow knocking him over. She leapt on him, nibbled his neck, his ears and his muzzle, at the same time sending him into a spiral of somersaults. When they'd covered three metres of ground as a spinning golden ball, they stood up and launched into improvising a new kind of folk dance, standing on their back legs, supporting each other, hugging and murmuring to each other in joyful little squeals, ‘This is so good, we're so happy!' Then they returned to their wild tumbling as if performing elegant dance steps had never held any attraction for them.

Like this, in a succession of frolicking, somersaulting, whirling and enchanting rhythmic movements, a good ten minutes passed at the end of which they collapsed in complete exhaustion. Fatigue overcame the desire to carry on the festivities. They were utterly spent. All at once the tenseness in their muscles relaxed; the two dogs collapsed. At last they lay outstretched and did not move. The only sound was their deep and rapid breathing. We could see their stomachs rising and falling in a wildly accelerated rhythm, which, little by little, became regular again.

The sun was already going down; sometimes it slipped behind the clouds. Slowly, very slowly, the day gave way to night, longer, more soothing, filled with first dreams, first enchanted memories.

8

ARDENT YOUTH

THAT NIGHT MÉLODIE
slept straight through from 7.45pm to 7.10 in the morning. Fatigue had plunged her down into the very depths of the well of sleep. When she woke up, an amazing thing had happened: she was no longer a giddy young girl. From one day to the next she stopped chewing the skirting boards and the chair legs. A whole world, a whole epoch, lay far behind her. In a night she had acquired a degree of maturity. Between the ancient history of childhood and already waning adolescence on the one hand and, on the other, an inexorably rapidly encroaching future, there opened out, as if by a miracle, a time that was immobile, infinitely precarious and fragile, in which ardent youth came fully into its own.

Michèle and Julia-Madoka had gone to bed. I settled myself in the living room, on the sofa. I closed my eyes. My mind's eye was filled by this one image, that of the two
dogs celebrating their keen impatience to live, tasting their inexpressible joy at being together, exalting in their pure pleasure in being alive and spreading their wings to revel in boundless play. I saw in them the expression of ardent youth affirming itself with all its might in the passionate urgency of a present that goes on forever. I was delighting in the happiness of having been witness to theirs. I didn't want to sleep. I wanted to go on experiencing the intoxicating effect of transgressive youth. I didn't want to let the beautiful rose, picked in all its freshness, die, or the fire that was blazing go out or the vital energy gathered up in this privileged instant be used up and destroyed. No, what I wanted was for the sweet imprint of this radiant afternoon to become part of me. I wanted to preserve its quivering trace, the wonder and the mystery.

Suddenly, I don't know why, I thought of the young couple in
Der Rosenkavalier
by Richard Strauss. And deep in my ears there reverberated the music of the beginning of the second act of this opera that I was at the time discovering in the wake of
The Marriage of Figaro
. It was an urgent, unstoppable appeal. An outpouring, a deluge, as sudden as it was strange. In listening to this enchanting music I could materialise and prolong the memory of a Mélodie in the full bloom of her youth, for it seemed to me to respond quite perfectly and wonderfully to the image of these two living beings who were non-human but who could still delight in their present happiness before being thrust into the uncertain future of their short lives.

It was getting late, but I wanted to immerse myself in the magic of Strauss's music. I turned on the DVD player and I watched the whole scene in which Octavian and Sophie
meet for the first time over a silver rose. It is passed from one hand to the other and the two characters, whose youthful desire is expressed by a wonderful interplay of two feminine voices, breathe in ‘a drop of Persian attar' that is contained in it. They remain as if frozen in an emotion at once peaceful and overwhelming that can only be called love.

Diary Extract 2

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

The story of
Der Rosenkavalier
comes to us as a full narrative development of the couple formed by the countess and Cherubino in
The Marriage of Figaro
. Hofmannsthal and Strauss take up the narrative of
Figaro
just when the little page addresses to the lady he loves the song beginning ‘You who know what love is . . .' to imagine a different development of the scenario Da Ponte had conceived. In
Der Rosenkavalier
the love barely hinted at between the countess and Cherubino becomes the centre of the drama lived out by the Marschallin and Octavian. Despite all the differences that separate their work from the Mozart model, Hofmannsthal and Strauss make repeated references to
Figaro
: the disparity of age between Octavian and the Marschallin, between he who is no longer really an adolescent but not fully an adult and she whose status is that of the ‘woman of thirty' abandoned by her husband; the succession of disguises of the young nobleman, the Don Juan-like figure of Ochs, who
must give up Sophie as Almaviva must give up Suzanne . . . That said,
Der Rosenkavalier
, in contrast to
The Marriage of Figaro
, doesn't celebrate the birth of any kind of happy community. What is honoured is just the union of a fairly dissolute boy whose parents are of the nobility and a girl whose parents are of the bourgeoisie, and victim of an oppressive upbringing. The interest of this work of Strauss's therefore resides elsewhere.