Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1: A Small Ad
A receptivity to happiness or something like that.
What else could explain the unexpected?
Chance meetings destined to make our lives a better place sometimes happen on dreary days, just like that, with no fair warning. We’re improvising our way through the ordinariness of a dull pallid day, anticipating nothing beyond a tomorrow, only too aware of the world’s shortcomings and too unaware of our own enviable circumstances, and then a stroke of good luck dictates that it’s our turn, a peculiar pendulum swing connecting the impact of an event and the improbability of it actually happening.
The walkways in shopping malls are not very elegant places, and the ones in Sallanches are no exception. First, we’re clobbered over the head: a low ceiling of grey squares as if the sky doesn’t exist and we don’t even particularly miss it. Then we’re operated on, white light everywhere, stark as a cranial drill, piercing at first but eventually we don’t feel a thing. Lastly, noise, lots of it, our era can’t deal with silence. Someone—who’s nowhere to be seen—shrieks out recipes for a better life, the same recipes for all of us; you can wander off, hide wherever you like, they’ll find you. Every ten paces, things flash. All the people here are used to it, and I’m one of them. These are places where humanity has relinquished all aspirations to grace, including one of its most steadfast guises: restraint. Places that have no real soul... but where mine will be intensified for ever.
The bar is called the Penalty; it could have been the Corner. On its lettuce-green windows is a goal, a tall, slightly balding dark-haired man in blue, perhaps Zidane, and footballs painted on in Tipp-Ex. You can have a hundred different drinks here, place three-way bets, play the lotto, and buy tobacco products; it offers a wealth of addictions and there’s nothing to stop you indulging several simultaneously. You’re served charcoal-black coffee that the French claim is exquisite, and a chocolate-covered peanut in an individual plastic wrapper. At the bar, voices are raised, discussing suspect geopolitics; finding a single culprit to explain everything seems to make life more comfortable.
I reach for a newspaper. When trying to disguise the fact that we’re alone in a public place, we alight on the first available knick-knack and pretend to have a full life. In 2003, France still had flimsy newspapers full of local ads and named after the regional
département, in this instance the
74. In the corners of the pages, previous readers have scribbled drawings that made sense to them alone and must have made them feel better in some way. These few scant pages discuss everything, and basically nothing. I escape into them, which gives an idea of my ambitions for the day. Some of the ads spill beyond Haute-Savoie, venturing further afield.
I read with no real aim, skipping many entries, drifting from the sublime to the ridiculous without intentionally seeking feel-good items. And then he leaps out at me. Page 6, top left-hand corner, under a small spot of water that makes the words leaky, very near a second-hand Peugeot J5, full
MOT, price negotiable; and Marc, also pre-owned, looking for an adventurous
YM for negotiable activities. Page 6, then; clapped-out machinery, eager men, and him—sitting there, patiently motionless, deaf to all the bustle, already placid.
A dog. One of twelve, all more or less the same, save the order in which they came into this world on 4 October 2003, this world where everything begins with a birth; first appearances are a different matter. Twelve Bernese Mountain Dogs; their poor mother, a heatwave summer, twelve: six M and six F. Twelve in one go, now that’s what you call a litter and, in builder’s terms, the maximum load. I order a second coffee. Up at the bar, a pink woman is clutching a sort of Pekinese, and I still don’t know if the thing can walk.
Thinking I can get away from the noise, I leave the bar for the central aisle, but all that changes is the topic. Facing me is a poster full of white sand, a freakish blue, a sun-baked young woman running with all her teeth on display. The wording goes: “Stop dreaming your life, live your dreams”—people will monetise anything. I’m not sure why—oh, really?—but I dial the number at the bottom of the ad. A call, an urge, a feeling of push and pull, and pushback too. We think we have sudden impulses, but they’ve germinated quietly for so many years, they know us so well that as soon as they’re given some fresh air, they emerge, disguised as a spur-of-the-moment decision or a truth imported from elsewhere.
Madame Château, that’s her name, replies with the promptness of someone who knows why the phone’s ringing. She tells me the puppies are all still available except for one but I can be sure they’ll go quickly. This annoys me slightly. I don’t want to be rushed—I’ve had enough of this constant incitement to act swiftly—not at this stage, when the whole point is to savour the moment. But actually this tiny moment is of my own making—it can fill whatever hole it likes in my life, and at its own sweet pace. I tell her that, at just a month old and barely able to walk, they’re a bit young to be going anywhere quickly, one of those clumsy offerings produced by the socially awkward who use humour to protect themselves from reality, or so they think. She responds with silent indifference as acknowledgement—if any were needed—of my superfluous remark. But I think I understand her, she’s playing her part to perfection: the time has come for her to monetise the nights spent watching over a bitch in pup, the duty vet’s number in her head, known by heart; the day has come to capitalise on the tender feelings we humans have for dogs. People can shamelessly trade in love, it’s quite easy even, because the commodity is so priceless.
I tell her I might drop by over the weekend just to see, if that’s convenient for her. What a joker that word is,
might; I like to think it’s emphatically conditional, but it was stating the indicative with all its might.
Just to see didn’t pop up out of nowhere either, it was almost like the
I’ll see your... whacked across a poker table when someone begs fate, pretty please, to tilt in their favour.
I hang up and return to my wobbly pedestal table in grey faux marble, somewhere you’d want to see Sartre and Platini having a chat. A giddy feeling is waiting for me there, the sort perfectly cooked up by opposing forces of enthusiasm and stumbling blocks. I know what heading off towards Mâcon will mean. It won’t be just a visit. Not a question of finding more elements to consider. Not a delaying tactic. It’s provocation. Making two living beings meet and bringing their life stories together for thousands of days. You can’t lie to budding love. If my white van heads in that direction, it won’t be to have a quick look-see unless it’s to have a look and see a reality already filled with happiness and shortcomings. And I alone will be responsible; as far as I know, neither she nor he made any sort of request.
I’ve already “had” a dog. Ïko, a wonderful companion, a Labrador beige of body and darker of ear. His previous owners (that’s how some people see their connection with these sentient beings—there’s
master too, but what to make of that?) had called him Ivory and then spinelessly abandoned him. He’d just been a trinket like his name, something prized, acquired by force, exhibited and then wearied of. One April morning I went to the animal shelter in Brignais and vacated a cage; a hundred others remained occupied. He was so not ivory that he didn’t suit that gentle name. Ïko was a better match.
That was the start of a luminous relationship whose end I didn’t think to imagine, a relationship in water, snow, and forests, by the fireside, that flourished alongside life, an absolute joy that was well-balanced but not long-lived; one day, not that he made a fuss, his jaw became swollen with blood. I took my parents’ car, the big one, the reliable one, and drove to the veterinary college in Maisons-Alfort, the only place that could do a scan—an investigative tool that’s essential or indecent depending on the place you allocate to animals in your view of a useful world. The vet told me Ïko had only a few months left to live—dogs imitate humans even down to being riddled with cancer. What happened next proved her horribly right; vets, and this is their failing, are rarely wrong.
On the way home, sadness gripped me by the neck and I cried for four hours straight on the A6 until my body ran dry. It’s good to cry, my grandmother used to say, tears kept inside do far more harm and rot your bones. Ïko was asleep on the rear seat and I convinced myself he hadn’t understood a thing, that dogs had no idea of their own mortality; with animals we swear by their clairvoyance or their ignorance, it’s contingent on what will protect our own feelings.
One morning, after a thousand selfish postponements, love won the day over affection. I had to pick up the phone to make an appointment that would steal away one life and puncture another with the same needle, going to the vet together and leaving alone, robbed, with a collar and a handful of hairs as my only talismans. In a few centilitres from a syringe, the future’s wiped out with nothing in exchange. I think Ïko was happy on our earth, we had so many plans to fulfil, and yet we knew that it’s never better to wait till later.
His absence has been with me every day since, and it doesn’t feel completely right to me that life still goes on. Which is why I know. The emotional undertaking involved. I’ve already cried with a name tag in the crook of my hand. Getting a dog means accommodating an imperishable love, you’re never separated from it, life takes care of that, any weakening of it is illusory and its end unbearable. Getting a dog means catching hold of a creature who’s only passing through, committing to a full life that’s bound to be happy, inevitably sad, and in no way sparing. There are no mysteries about the end result of this union, and we can succumb to denial or undertake only to imagine it, but in either instance, sadness lurks, bullying us in a peculiar dance, an everyday pitching and rolling, only for joy to gain the upper hand, eclipsing this inevitable fact.
Biology, the science of life, isn’t especially concerned with inter-species idylls. If your parental love is directed at your own species, the usual process of time means your young will survive you and you won’t have to ravage your own life with thoughts of the end of theirs. When you love a different category of living thing with a shorter lifespan, logic dictates that the day will come when the newborn catches up with your age, exceeds it, and dies. So it’s perfectly illogical, it’s the ultimate and a far-from-pleasant paradox that a dog’s death goes against nature. The fact remains that this happiness has an expiry date, try as you might to spend each day slowing your dog’s life or speeding up your own, those are the facts, there’s no negotiating with chronobiology: dogs perish.
Lovers of the grey parrot have fully grasped this and spend less time dehydrating their corneas. Topstitching your life with a dog’s presence means understanding that the happiness forges the sadness; it means gauging just how insoluble absence is in a sea of memories, however extensive and happy they may be; it means accepting that every minute be lived seven times more intensely than usual; it means banging your head against the seductive and vertiginous intention not to sabotage a single moment and to celebrate life with fervent intensity. For this reality and for the guts it takes to accept it, I deeply admire anyone who adopts a dog.
As I walk out of the Penalty, consumed by these thoughts, it strikes me that it’s high time I reintroduced a dash of this into my life: the courage it takes to love. I pop back in to buy one of those scratch card things; because my horoscope was lacklustre, it’s the only way I can think of to tip the day in my favour.
Outside the shopping centre it’s a beautiful day—who knew?
I call Madame Château back and she picks up just as quickly. Actually, I’ll come today, Saturday; after all, she’s as entitled to her Sunday rest as everyone else. Before starting up my van—a big dog won’t feel cramped within its sheet-metal walls—I look at the mountains. From where I’m parked, the Mont Blanc chain is resplendent, the craggy Rochers des Fiz intimidating, both of them an invitation to bold undertakings. I let my mind wander but, afraid it will come over all practical, I gently suggest it go and check out the dreams department.
Then I pull myself together and employ all sorts of intellectual acrobatics to crack open the true purpose of this trip—a very unequal battle. I delve into rational thinking, which I’m usually scared of. I tell myself Saturday’s a terrible day for making important decisions which could affect the rest of your life. It’s a day full of economic and symbolic vulnerability. The week need only be slightly burdensome, and we want our rightful share of levity, our extra helping of it’s only fair, often more than is strictly necessary, to the point of extravagance.
I even venture into questions of national identity and the inglorious creeping tide of anti-immigrant sentiments. So a Bernese Mountain dog from Mâcon, now there’s a foreign imposture! I’ve been cradled in Alpine mythology since childhood, all St. Bernards, Gaston Rébuffat, and the unattainable edelweiss, so for me to visit the very icon of Berne’s cowherds in the modest undulations of the Saône-et-Loire region smacks of selling off your dreams and dishonouring your roots—a snow-decked Zermatt would have been a more glittering choice. And then back the pendulum swings: I convince myself it’s the exact opposite. If a little distance from Swiss German rigidity infiltrates proceedings... well, that won’t tarnish the eccentric life this dog will be stepping into. The exchange rate of the Swiss franc and my predilection for confluences eventually win me over to the charms of Burgundy. How steerable life is.
I glance at the map. Confrançon. A40. D1079.
It’s not as far as it seems. And who knows, within my reach.
