I was sobbing.
It was dirty, the very dirty, thick, disgusting, translucent and transparent desperate sobbing.
My living-room feels like it's made for one person, less than one person. It bothers me. I always ask myself if I shouldn't move everything around and make way for some kind of coffee table, coffee tables presume people sitting around them. My living room is a line. I paced this tiny line of a living room, and sobbed, loudly. Sometimes I wondered if the neighbours - the couple and two children, the dog - could hear me, and then I remmembered always hearing them scream at each other. I take sobbing over screaming at each other any day of the week. So I sobbed louder. My eyes , then, fell upon the dog. Not the neighbour's dog, my dog. My porcelain dog figurine.
It had belonged to my mother, many years back. No idea how many, one day the little blond girl had finaly worked up the courage to ask: can I have it? I had always wanted the dog for myself, and I had thought of it as something precious, some kind of treasure my mother owned and was lucky to own. I had thought of it as hers, and as her property and her right, and I had loved it deeply for years, or at least what seemed like years for a small child. I had loved it in secret, or so I thought, even when I played with it in public, along with other less important objects (pens and boxes) on top of my mother's bedside table. Her table was ornate with japanese or chinese drawings of two women, a bridge, and a house. I sat in her bedroom for hours creating stories on top of her bedside scenario. The dog crossed the bridge, next to the pen, who was obviously a woman or a man... The dog was the only one you didn't need to imagine, he was a dog. Yes, he was a he, he had always been a he. As I played there I was watched by the distracted eyes of the man and the mermaids in the painting on the wall above my mother's bed. They were mysterious and magic, just like the table. The man was bathing in a pond, and three red-haired women came to him, naked, pulling him into the lake. It was beautifull, and haunting. But the dog was my favorite of all of these mysterious characters. I loved it in silence, and I put it back. Not that he had such a specific place, nor that my mother expected me to care for him so much, I cannot recall this ever happening. I do recall thinking he was special, fragile, and not mine. So one day, I don't remmember when or where (if we lived in the first house, or in the first country), I worked up the courage and asked her. She said yes, or of course, like it wasn't a big deal at all. I was surprised, happy of course, but a little put off: wasn't this dog the most speacial thing in the world?! Wasn't it her treasure? Should she be giving it away to me just like that? How could she be so generous? or... why didn't she care?
Why did I care? What was it about the dog that wrapped so tightly around my heart? Looking at it now on my small living-room shelf, I thought his charm was actually quite obvious: the missing ear. Ever since I can remmember, he had a missing ear. (Or did he? Had he fallen? Did I see that? Did I cause it? Here memories, imagination and logic mix, and I'm not quite sure.) But in my crude memory, he had always missed one ear, and that was one of the reasons I loved him. It was his charm. He was small, very tiny indeed, and soft to the touch, and he missed an ear. Also, he was thin, athletic, and he was running. He was a running beautifull porcelain dog who missed an ear. So I got him, as a gift. But it was more, and less than a present: it was something I asked for, something that belonged to someone else and I decided to ask for myself, and they had said yes. In a way, he had been conquered, he had been decided, he had been won, like a prize, or, he had been won over, like a love conquest. On the other hand, why had it been easy? Putting it into words now I can see how hard it is for me to explian why this dog was not only my love, but a mystery, throughout my childhood. We had, later, a real dog, with flesh, teeth and two ears. She had almost the same colors of my porcelain nameless dog, she had a similar body structure, and once or twice I remmeber voicing their similarity (and right afterwords, thinking it wasn't true). He wasn't her, he was something else.
As a teenager I once imagined this short science fiction film. The story was about a girl who meets a woman for only one day, and later finds out this woman was herself, when older, who had gone back in time. Her face would only be revealed in the last scene, and I was trying to figure out how that would work. As was already my style at that age, I never got down to actually writing the script, but I imagined most scenes in detail. One of them had the woman going into the girl's house and finding, on our old yellow shelf, the little one-eared dog. It was supposed to be a metaphorical scene, and it was supposed to be deep and meaningful, and very european-cinema-like (in my teen head), and I never -quite- knew why it was so meaningful. I still don't. Symbols are more liquid than they are obects, they are tricky, vague like memories, and they hide. And maybe if you unveil them you will see nothing, but the veil itself, falling at your feet.
I kept the dog as I grew up, I took the dog where I went, to all the houses where we lived. He never fit. Eventually he lost a leg, I can't even remember how. It didn't matter, he could still stand, as far as figurines go, and still look like he was running, and eventually he lost his tail. I cared less for the tail, and less for the leg, than I ever had for the ear I had never seen (or had I?). I cared less for him, as hard as it was to admit. He was becoming, more and more, an obbligation. Not to anyone, but to myself, to my old love for him, to what I could maybe call integrity, authenticity, coherence, consistency. I wanted to be consistent with my love and my choices, and yet he looked back at me finaly with the eyes of a real mystery. Real mysteries are not loved, real mysteries are problems waiting to be solved, forgotten, or passed on to the next generation.
The mess I had made of myself on that phone-call (hence my sobbing in the living room, and not in my bedroom, which is the appropriate place for sobbing, even if you live alone), the mess I had made of the strings given to me by all sides, by both sides, by third parties, by the dead and the living, by the relatives I met only in black and white pictures, the mess was huge, clear, obvious, infuriating. I had no one to blame, although I could point my finger at infinite agressors, I had no one to scream at, although I knew they could all be declared guilty. I couldn't face lying again about my own pain, and I had, finally, become angry at myself for allowing it. I'd be lying if I said I had "finaly understood". I haven't, to this day, understood, I don't intend to understand. I just finaly felt. All of it. The weight, the haste, the pressure, the solitude, the fear, the need, the anger, the empty house on sale, the open door at night, the white curtain flapping, the big dinner table and the screams around it, the line gone wrong, the two women, the two men, the baby, the boy, the iability to cut to the chase.
I kept the dog all those years as a reminder, as something in the back of my mind, as a scratching sound coming from the basement. The dog with the missing ear, of the missing years. This was not love, not any longer. This was a reminder. He stared at me. One eared, three legged, tail-less, and small. He stared at me, the left over image, the dog-ear in the right page of the book. Come back, read this.
I took it in my hands with haste. I could hold it between two fingers, it was insignificant. It was no longer a he, or I didn't want him to be. He was only still a he because he stared, because he stood and scratched the trap-door. I walked to the kitchen and took the hammer in my other hand. When my grandfather died, I took the hammer from his house. Just like the dog, I took it, and it had belonged to someone else. I don't remember asking for the hammer, though, and I don't remember thinking it was special. I took a cutting board with me, and proceded to the halway floor. My line-shaped tiny living room made for less than a person is visible for all of my neighbours, and the execution had to be private.
I was certain, I was secure, I was angry and I felt no love. This should be easy, I thought. But no execution is easy, for someone who built a life-time belief in peace as an absolute value. I placed the dog upon the board, I held the hammer in my right hand. It was so small, it had always been so very small. I remembered the dream, so vividly as if I had fisicaly experienced it:
standing on my bed and asking desperately for the sledge-hammer, rats running around the floor, taking the hammer and banging it with more strenghth than I had ever had on the glass window, until I was much too tired to continue. Then, realizing the window was not the window in my rrom, but the beautifull big window in our first house's living room, and it was not made of glass, but of ice. And as I realized it, I let go of the hammer and touched the thick block of glass, pushing it strongly, until I too was sliding out of the window, into the garden, where water poured from plants, where it rained, and opening my mouth I drank and I drank and I drank.
With the hammer in my hand I remembered the dream, but I did not remember the ending, and I would never be able to push through the glass. I needed more. It became harder, my conviction faltered for a second and I sobbed even more desperately, now that my hand was risen, now that I was ready. I felt sorry, so desperately sorry, and I felt afraid it might break into two pieces and still look like a mutilated body, and it might still look precious, broken, deserving of love and care. The anger was gone, the noise of the scratching from the basement was gone, there was only that rest of love, the pitty, the need and the fear of losing whatever was left of it all. He now looked sweet, and he now looked like a he, poor creature. But I had decided, and I must've had decided for a reason, even if I didn't quite grasp all the consequences or motives. It was already done, I just needed to... do it. And so, sobbing and muffling a scream, I dropped the hammer, with one quick, painfull and straight motion, into his head. My fear vanished: it smashed into thousands of tiny little pieces. There was no body, there was no mutilation, there was nothing left. There was relief, for a few seconds, and no, it didn't hurt, not for me. I quickly picked up the tiny pieces, cleaned the floor, washed the cutting board, and threw it all in the trash, outside my apartment.
The freedom lasted for maybe even a little over an hour. The noises in the basement left, and I was a righteous executor. But a symbol is a symbol. It is stronger than some actions, more straight-forward than many words, and more powerful than a thousand departures... But it is never quite all of it. Alexandre the Great, after cutting the Gordian knot still needed horses and men to conquer Asia.
