When he raised his head, Father’s gaze fell upon the line of stones gently climbing toward the setting sun. Resting his arms on his knees, like a soccer player in the front row of a group photo, in his mind’s eye he seemed to be following the flight of the bird above the alignments. The golden light soon forced him to lower his eyes. He shook his head pensively, and, as if he had been afraid of abandoning us, as a way of getting us to share his impressions, he said, “Even so, it does look very much like a cemetery.”
Whereupon he stood up again, and kept our attention with a wink. He took the tape measure out of his pocket, measured the distance between the last two menhirs in the line, and at the same distance from the one at the end of the row made a mark on the ground with the toe of his shoe. He bent over again, and with his penknife, a stainless steel knife that he took everywhere and which had two blades plus a spike and a corkscrew, dug a hole as deep as a fist at the spot marked, cut a cardboard rectangle out of his cigarette pack, slid it under the bird’s body, and deposited the whole in the little grave with all the caution of a porcelain salesman. Now that his cigarettes were loose in his pocket, he removed the silver paper they were wrapped in and used it as a luxurious shroud to cover the little victim.
After a rapid survey of the surroundings, he spotted a stone at the bottom of a clump of broom at the side of the field, carried it a few yards, and planted it vertically above the improvised tomb, thus completing the work of the long-gone gravediggers.
While we were silently attending the funeral ceremony, we didn’t need to confer with one another to know that we were all thinking the same thing — the mound at the bottom of our garden under which the body of our last dog lay. A magnificent German shepherd whose love was exclusive, who used to lie on the mat inside the shop door, and whenever he was on his own put all the clients to flight: all he had to do was get to his feet, his head hunched up between his shoulders, his shoulder blades sticking out. If the person persisted, a low-frequency growl completed the message. There was, however, an Open Sesame. If he was called by his name he stopped his threats and lay down again heavily. Habitues cautiously pushed the door open a crack, called “Varus” in an uncertain voice, and he would even go up to some of them and beg to be caressed. There was great pride among those whom the big wolflike dog admitted into his inner circle. There was great relief when they buried their fingers in the beautiful animal’s thick fur, patted his flanks, or massaged his throat, not without drawing on whatever reserves of courage they could find within themselves.
There were great difficulties for the shop, which already found it hard enough to get new customers, even though at the time the great majority of them were local residents — including the gypsies, also known as Bohemians, who had settled on some wasteland on the outskirts of the village. The women in their long dresses in definitely unfashionable colors yelled as they pushed the door open: “Tie that dog up!” and while they were cursing and swearing a few knick-knacks that happened to be handy would get tucked under their thick skirts — simply for the beauty of the gesture, because we would often find them in a ditch, where they’d been tossed with a magnificent contempt that we found insulting to our beautiful crockery.
With our Cerberus at the door, the household was well guarded. As Varus grew older, his love for all of us who belonged to him became more intense, but that only made him more unreasonable. Since our old Marie didn’t live with us, she remained on the periphery of his affection. Her little house in the garden gave her the special status of a permanent guest. She didn’t have to make herself known to the big dog, she could come and go freely without having to use his name as a password, but owing to her awkward ways with both animals and children, she didn’t quite seem to be one of us. One afternoon in late summer while she was planning to take us for a picnic in the country, she intimated to the big dog that he was to stay at home, but he couldn’t allow the children for whom he felt answerable to be thus removed from his care. So, as we were getting ready to leave, he jumped up at the old schoolmistress’s arm.
The return of the responsible father was tragic. Our little aunt, her arm in a sling, tried hard to intervene, arguing that it wasn’t serious, just a few stitches, and she’d hardly felt a thing. Father went upstairs, opened a drawer in the chest, grabbed his wartime gun — the one with which (a famous episode in our family mythology) he had forced his way through a German roadblock — and led the dog out to the bottom of the garden.
Later, he told anyone who could bear to listen, that his arm had faltered when he saw the animal’s imploring gaze, with all the incomprehension in the world concentrated in the dark pupil staring at him — So this is my reward for all the love I’ve lavished on you — and then incomprehension turned into revolt, his gaze became ferocious, he bared his teeth, his growl rose in a crescendo, but just as the dog was about to spring Father’s hand became steady again and he pressed the trigger. The explosion echoed around the tall brick walls. “Tres de mayo” in our garden. The gun, which had remained silent throughout the war, had claimed its first victim.
When we were back in the car after the solemn burial of the bird, Father opened the guide to Brittany at the page describing the alignments and, as it reported 874 standing stones, he took his pen, crossed the number out, and wrote above it: 875. He turned around to us. And winked.
The next trip was fatal to the Dyna. This time we had been promised a surprise. The collector of ancient stones had shrouded in mystery the brass-headed stud stuck in the heart of Brittany. At that spot, there was nothing on the map, or at least on what we could read of it — the red main roads, the yellow secondary ones, the green-bordered ones of particular interest to tourists — to indicate anything special. It wasn’t even a hamlet, it was just a place in the remote countryside near the narrow loop of a river, the Blavet no doubt, where the old granite substratum forces the streams into erratic detours. We stopped halfway for lunch at one of his favorite restaurants in which, after he had made a point of announcing our presence, we were served a meal that corresponded less to the day’s menu than to his preferences. Thus, when the people at the next table coveted our chocolate mousse, they were told with some glee that it didn’t exist. And, menu in hand: “Plum flan, apple tart, sherbet — where did you see mousse?” This kind of favoritism was a little disturbing, because it implied that during the week other women danced attendance upon him and that there were a lot of cooks along his way who prepared his favorite dishes, whereas it seemed to us that this role belonged to Mother alone. Everywhere in his wake we were welcomed as the emperor, his wife, and the little prince and princesses. He seemed pleased to introduce us, to allow us to benefit from his fame, convinced that it reflected back on us, which was quite true, as we realized after his death, although then it didn’t do us any good, but at the time we would have preferred less partiality and more anonymity. Everything that conspired to make him an illustrious man — his strength of character, his sunny nature, his feeling for words — reminded us of the difficulty we experienced in growing up in his shadow. For other people, he was the man whose next visit they looked forward to, a promise of spring, a bird of passage. For us, he was the master of the house.
To reconstruct this weekday life of his that he led so far away from us, all we had were the names with which he peppered his stories: names of people, places, hotels that, in the absence of any reference points, took on mythical dimensions in our eyes. He reigned over a fabulous geography: Pont-Aven, Vannes, Quimper, Peaule, Roscoff, Rosporden, Landivisiau, Hennebont, Loudeac. The tiniest village took on an exotic charge when he spoke of it. On our trips with him, the illusion remained. As if by his mere presence he had the power of aggrandizing everything. And yet we were in a position to maintain that the towns we drove through were pervaded with a sense of boredom and sadness, that the hotels were modest, and that hotel cooking wasn’t always as good as Mother’s.