Free Melodie by Akira Mizubayashi

while the latter, disappointed by his failure,became angry and wanted to get possession of the coveted object. The winner would not back down. As a result the scene suddenly turned to one of hostility, which neither I nor Tom’s master was expecting. The female dog yelped violently, showing her fangs. Tom did the same. And the two animals began to fight unrestrainedly. I was gripped by a growing sense of terror. Without giving it any thought, I was impelled to intervene in this brawl, which had every chance or mischance of degenerating on both sides into a sad and costly visit to the vet. I forcefully separated my dog from Tom, whipping her with all my strength with the rope leash the colour of blood. Tom, perhaps frightened by my sudden appearance, had taken off like a little rascal. His master was trying to catch him but he had given him the slip and was now running around the water point. As for the conqueror of the yellow ball, her whole body was trembling before her kind protector who had suddenly turned into a cruel and implacable overlord. He didn’t weaken, however. The stinging lashes with the leash continued. He didn’t let up. He only stopped when she’d abandoned her booty. Piercing cries of pain could be heard. Beneath the assumed mask of a twisted tyrant, Mélodie’s master hated himself and wept. He begged a thousand pardons of his non-human friend for whipping and torturing her like that.
    Finally the ball fell and rolled to the ground.
    The instrument of torture was abandoned.
    I crouched down and removed my mask. I brought my face close to hers, stroking it over and over again, arrested in this attitude of reconciliation. Palpating her as if I were a master magician, I kept repeating the words ‘
gomen ne
,
gomen ne, gomen ne …
(forgive me, forgive me, forgive me …)’, infantile words which sounded like the refrain of a prayer. Like an open wound, the feeling of the red leash, suddenly transformed into a whip, and striking Mélodie’s back, has stayed with me, a scar that has never healed.

16
    WALKS
    MÉLODIE HAD INTERNALISED the rules of behaviour through the education I’d given her, the only possible way for the canine species to live in harmony with humans. It’s not part of my thinking that dogs must be left to go free … Natural and absolute freedom for animals, as for humans, would lead to the law of the strongest, to anarchy, to a state of permanent war, latent or real: in short, to the very impossibility of life. The theory and the fiction of the social pact as Rousseau conceives of and elaborates them start from an acknowledgement of this fact.
    Men are free and equal in the state of nature. They enjoy natural and absolute freedom, natural law if one prefers, because there is no power that transcends them, that is placed above them. However, in this state, sooner or later, ‘the obstacles that are harmful to their preservation’ finish by overcoming ‘the forces that each individual can employ’ toremain in it. So, says Rousseau, ‘this primitive state can no longer persist, and the human species would perish if it did not change its way of being’. The state of nature, the reign of natural law, is fragile in itself and necessarily ends in a generalised fratricidal war. Hence the necessity of adopting another way of living, radically different, through this artefact that is the social pact. The state of nature is a state without law, or rather a state in which natural law only prevails as a potentiality because of the absence of any public force outside of individuals capable of giving it effect. Society, constructed by men brought together by means of a social contract, sets out to actualise natural law or, in other words, to produce a common space in which men find their liberty at the higher level of civil life.
    The freedom regained in civil life resides, then, in learning the limits imposed on each individual,