My day is ending. I took my dogs out, and they had a field day in this fresh snow. They greeted me as they always do, Belle out of her mind with joy, Zac offering his paw and biding his time. They make a mismatched pair, and yet friends. I am the leader of the pack.
The storm blotted everything out, but the dogs couldn’t have cared less. Their pleasure at being able to run lasts so short a time that they wanted to make the most of it. They didn’t need coaxing to come back in all the same, and I was grateful to them for it. I gave each of them a biscuit and they were happy. I stroked them and they were happy still. Now I leave them in peace and they fall asleep at my feet. Dogs have been dreaming beside the human race for millennia; perhaps they have become the curators of our dreams, catching our anxieties and passing them on to a universal memory. No doubt one day they will speak our language and recount our loves when the race has vanished from the planet, buried under a storm of radioactive snow. Who knows what humanity will be when our sun goes out… It sets me dreaming, and pressing myself to the fur of these animals so they might record my smallest hopes.
It’s late, the city puts out its neon signs and those that stay lit invite you to nothing; no one now dares brave the storm. The metro, at that hour, was almost empty. You get peace at night, in the cars. I nearly fell asleep in it, glad to cross the city without having to face the storm. I knew I had one last effort to make, for the dogs, and that afterward I could take a bath, close the day. The dogs curled up close by; Zac, big beast, would rest his head now and then on the edge of the tub, waiting patiently for a caress from me and, if he could, to lick my wet hand.
What have I left to say? What have I to invent or to weep? Uncertainty speaks for me. The road loses itself now in its ditches. Now that now speaks very slowly, murmuring more than it lives. What have I to think while the night punishes my last spirits, those that haunted my hopes like old Egyptian women stranded upon their pharaoh; these spirits that grazed the walls of my reason, stopped at each painting hung in the corridors, climbed the stairs to go faint away in rooms now sealed; those that, once the day had long slept, went out into the gardens to breathe there the smell of life and of pollens; those very ones that, last night, rummaged the attics to drive the rats out of them?
What have I to show against the army of facts? Only a body that hides its brow with its arms, that bends its back, that braces itself against the gusts of the hard snow of longings. I wait, I count astronomical quantities of time, I blacken pages that then let themselves drop to a disciplined floor. The hours pass and mark time. Everything stains with water, with other words, with mud and a little drunkenness.
I remember a sentence one of my teachers had written on the board at the start of the year: “The world must be better because I have lived.” If by mischance someone erased the sentence despite the warning that preceded it, our teacher, the next day, would grumble and patiently write it out again. Then he would turn to us and look at us with eyes a little empty and questioning, or resigned, as though our silence did not satisfy him. Then he would open his notebook and begin his lesson as if nothing had happened. I think now I understand that look. He was trying to know whether we were better than he was. This, however, is a translation of my memory. The past does not speak the language of the present, and we always read it by substituting, here and there, words that suit us.
The world must be better since we have lived, since we are living. This is perhaps only the gratuitous assertion of a dilettante who still wants to hope. The future of all these perhapses I’ve been writing from the start worries me, for it is beginning to want to come back towards me. They are only stones thrown farther ahead. They pile up, and soon I will be able to move forward only once they have been cleared from my consciousness.
Zac, beside me, snores. Curled against him, Belle matches his breathing. They are together, even in the dream. I dare not move. How long death will seem to me if I do not manage to exhaust, entirely, the song of my life.