Читать книгу The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery - Страница 21

Bacon for the cocker spaniel

In our building there are two dogs: the whippet belonging to the Meurisses who looks like a skeleton covered in beige hide, and a ginger cocker spaniel who belongs to Diane Badoise, an anorexic blonde woman who wears Burberry raincoats and who is the daughter of a very la-di-da lawyer. The whippet is called Athena and the cocker Neptune. Just in case you haven’t yet understood what sort of place I live in: you won’t find any Fidos or Rovers in our building. Anyway, yesterday, in the hallway, the two dogs met and I was fortunate to witness a very interesting sort of ballet. I won’t dwell on the dogs, who sniffed each other’s bottoms. I don’t know if Neptune smells bad but Athena took a leap backwards while Neptune looked as if he were sniffing a bouquet of roses with a huge juicy steak in the middle.

No, what was interesting was the two human beings at the end of each leash. Because in town it is the dogs who have their masters on a leash, though no one seems to have caught on to the fact. If you have voluntarily saddled yourself with a dog that you’ll have to walk twice a day, come rain, wind or snow, that is as good as putting a leash around your own neck. Anyway, Diane Badoise and Anne-Hélène Meurisse (same mould, twenty-five years apart) met in the hallway, each at the end of her leash. What a muddle when this happens! They’re as clumsy as if they had webbed fingers and feet because they’re incapable of doing the only truly practical thing in cases like this: acknowledge what is going on in order to prevent it. But because they act as if they believed they were walking two distinguished stuffed animals utterly devoid of any inappropriate impulses, they cannot bleat at their dogs to stop sniffing their arses or licking their little balls.

So here’s what happened: Diane Badoise came out of the lift with Neptune, and Anne-Hélène Meurisse was waiting right outside with Athena. They virtually threw their dogs one on top of the other and, obviously, it drove Neptune utterly crazy. Here you come nicely trotting out of the lift only to find your nose right up against Athena’s derrière, that’s not something that happens every day. For ages now Colombe has been ranting on to us about kairos, a Greek concept that means roughly ‘the right moment’, something at which Napoleon apparently excelled. Naturally, my sister is an expert on military strategy. Anyway, kairos is the intuition of the moment, something like that. Well, I can tell you that Neptune had his kairos right in front of his nose and he didn’t mess around, he made like a hussar, in the old style, and climbed right on top. ‘Oh my God!’ shrieked Anne-Hélène Meurisse as if she herself were victim of this outrage. ‘Oh, no!’ exclaimed Diane Badoise, as if all the shame were hers, though I’d bet you a chocolate truffle that it would never have occurred to her to climb onto Athena’s rear end. And they both began pulling at their dogs’ leashes but there was a problem, and that’s what evolved into an interesting movement.

In fact, Diane should have pulled upwards and the other lady downwards, which would have released the two dogs but, instead of that, they each pulled sideways and as it’s very narrow in front of the lift cage, they very quickly ran into an obstacle: one of them the lift grille, the other the wall on the left and as a result Neptune, who had lost his balance with the first tug, suddenly had a surge of energy and clung all the more solidly to Athena who was howling and rolling her eyes with fright. At that point the humans changed strategy by trying to drag their dogs away to a larger space so that they could repeat the manoeuvre more comfortably. But the matter was getting urgent: everyone knows there’s a point at which dogs get stuck. So they really stepped on it, shouting simultaneously, ‘Oh my God oh my God,’ pulling on their leashes as if their very virtue was at stake. But in her haste, Diane Badoise slipped and twisted her ankle. And this was the moment of the interesting movement: her ankle twisted outwards and at the same time her entire body swerved in the same direction, except for her ponytail which went the opposite way.

It was magnificent, I assure you: it was like something by Bacon. There’s been a framed Bacon in my parents’ bathroom forever, a picture of someone on the potty, in fact, and in good Bacon style, you know, sort of tortured and not very appetising. I have always thought that it probably had an effect on the serenity of one’s actions but anyway in my house we each have our own toilet so there was no point complaining. But Diane Badoise was completely thrown out of joint when she twisted her ankle, making weird angles with her knees, her arms and her head, and to top it off, her ponytail sticking out horizontally like that – and I immediately thought of the Bacon in the bathroom. For a very brief moment she looked like a disjointed rag doll, her body completely contorted and, for a few thousandths of a second (it happened very quickly, but, as I am very attentive to the movements of the body these days, I saw it as if in slow motion), Diane Badoise looked like a full-length portrait by Bacon. From that sudden impression to the consideration that the thing in the bathroom has been there all these years just so now I could fully appreciate her bizarre contortions, there is only a short step. And then Diane fell onto the dogs and that solved the problem because Athena, crushed on the ground, managed to wriggle free of Neptune. A complicated little ballet then followed, Anne-Hélène trying to help Diane and all the while keep her dog at a safe distance from the lubricious monster, and Neptune, completely indifferent to the shouts and pain of his mistress, continued to pull in the direction of his steak à la rose. But at that very moment Madame Michel came out of her lodge and I grabbed Neptune’s leash and dragged him farther away.

He was so disappointed, poor mutt. And so he flopped down and started licking his little balls, making a lot of slurping noises, which only added to poor Diane’s despair. Madame Michel called an ambulance because Diane’s ankle was seriously beginning to look like a watermelon and then she took Neptune to her place while Anne-Hélène Meurisse stayed with Diane. As for me, I went home and said to myself, OK, a Bacon come to life before my very eyes, does that make it worth it?

I decided it didn’t: because not only did Neptune not get his treat but, on top of that, he didn’t even get his walk.