ULISSES WAS AN eccentric mongrel acquired by the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector after her divorce, when her sons had left home. “I needed to love a living creature that would keep me company,” she told an interviewer. “Ulisses is mixed-race, which guarantees him a longer life and greater intelligence. He’s a very special dog.” Elsewhere she confessed, “I and my dog Ulisses are mutts.”
In her children’s story Almost True, Lispector’s smart mongrel introduces himself in his own voice. “I’m a little impolite,” he admits. “I don’t always obey. I like to do whatever I want. I pee in Clarice’s living room.” His eccentric mistress was not one to recoil at such behavior. Her dog, Lispector told an interviewer, “smokes cigarettes, drinks whisky and Coca-Cola. He’s a bit neurotic.” According to Benjamin Moser, author of a biography of Lispector, Ulisses had the habit of stealing cigarette butts from ashtrays and swallowing them, even when they were still smoldering. Guests to the house would be baffled when their half-smoked cigarettes seemed to disappear; Lispector, they said, would point out the guilty party, but would never punish him. She “calmly let him do whatever he wanted.”
In another book for children, The Woman Who Killed the Fish, the author recalls how she acquired an earlier dog from a beggar woman in a Naples street. “One look at him was all I needed to fall in love with his face,” she writes. Lispector took the mongrel home and fed him, and “he looked so happy to have me as his owner that he spent the whole day looking at me and wagging his tail.” She christened him Dilermando, “a rather grand name which aptly described the wise expression and knowing ways which made him so endearing.” When Clarice learned that the dog’s original owner used to beat him, she vowed to treat her new pet with extra kindness. The love was mutual: “Dilermando liked me so much that he almost went crazy when he smelled with his snout my woman-mother scent and the scent of the perfume I always wear.”
Lispector had been living in Naples for some years when her husband, a Brazilian diplomat, was posted to Switzerland and she had to face the heartbreak of leaving Dilermando behind (she’d been informed—inaccurately, as it turned out—that the Swiss didn’t allow dogs in hotels). The separation was terribly painful, and for a long time Clarice couldn’t stand to see a dog in the street. “I don’t like to look at them,” she wrote to her sisters. “You don’t know what a revelation it was for me to have a dog, to see and feel the material a dog is made of. . . . Dilermando was something of my own that I didn’t have to share with anybody else.”
I know just how she feels. Although I’m never jealous of Grisby’s affection for others, there’s a way in which I want him to myself. The things we most like to do together are ordinary things—taking walks, exploring, driving to our dirty beach—but they’re things we enjoy in a private way, special to the two of us. Today, for example, I spent about twenty minutes blowing soap bubbles and watching Grisby try to bite them. Every time a bubble burst, he seemed confused but triumphant, as though he’d conquered an enemy without quite knowing how. If anyone else had been there, I’d have continued our game, but part of my attention would have been on the other person’s presence in the room—his expectations, her needs, the conversation—making my focus on Grisby less singular. But when we’re alone together, he and I share a special kind of closeness. At these moments, I can turn myself over to him, see things from his point of view, and let his way of doing things become my way.
As a kind of confession (and, perhaps, expiation) of her guilt at leaving Dilermando behind, Lispector wrote “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor,” a story that was published in a Brazilian newspaper in 1945. In this tale, a man abandons his dog to travel abroad with his family. Everyone accepts his decision; no one blames him for leaving the dog behind; but many years later, the professor realizes the enormity of his crime, and the terrible suffering he so thoughtlessly inflicted on the animal. What’s especially horrible about his transgression is that it can’t be forgiven—not because it’s such a dark sin but, on the contrary, because it’s not a sin at all: a dog’s life is irrelevant to God. The sinner, then, can’t be consoled. “There are so many ways to be guilty and to be lost forever; I chose to wound a dog. Because I knew it wasn’t much and I couldn’t be punished for it,” thinks the professor. “Only now do I understand that it really is exempt from punishment, and forever.”
It’s ironic that Clarice Lispector named her dog Ulisses (the Roman version of Odysseus), because although Homer’s Odysseus is considered a great hero, he also cruelly abandons his dog—an act of callous disregard that, like the crime of the mathematics professor, is treated neither as a transgression nor as a character flaw. Yet even when we leave our dogs in good hands, as Lispector left Dilermando, they may still suffer deeply, sometimes even fatally. In The Odyssey, Homer informs us that Odysseus bred Argos himself, and as a young man, he used to take the dog out hunting (“there was not a wild beast in the forest that could get away from him when he was once on its tracks”). After his master abandons him, however, Argos is subsequently neglected by the women of the family and finally even by the servants, until twenty years later he is discovered, neglected and “full of fleas,” lying “on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors.”
The much-vaunted “reunion” between master and hound is not, in reality, a reunion at all. Poignantly, Argos recognizes his disguised master after twenty years, and in joyful anticipation, “he dropped his ears and wagged his tail.” But Odysseus is on the other side of the yard. Argos is unable to approach him, and Odysseus can’t acknowledge the dog without giving himself away, although Homer informs us that Odysseus does shed a secret tear. Argos, after waiting twenty years to see his master again, dies after a single glimpse.
Ulysses was also the name of the Saint-Germain pointer belonging to the French journalist Roger Grenier, the author of The Difficulty of Being a Dog. According to French Kennel Club rules, purebred dogs must have names that begin with a certain letter according to their year of birth. When Grenier’s dog was born, the year’s letter was U. The author claims he dismissed the name Ulysses as too popular and banal and, after considering various alternatives (Ulric, Ursus, Uriel, Ugolin, Uranus), decided he wanted to call the dog Ubu, after Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi. It’s unclear why the dog ended up being called Ulysses after all. Significantly, the French title of Grenier’s memoir translates as “The Tears of Ulysses,” so perhaps the author named his dog in honor of the ancient hero who weeps at the sight of his faithful old hound. Odysseus’s suffering makes him heroic; Penelope is also heroic in her fidelity. Argos is just as faithful, but his ordeal has no payoff. No one considers Argos to be heroic. He’s just doing what dogs do—waiting at home for his master.
Those twenty years must have seemed interminable to the neglected pet. Ironically, the more deeply we love a dog, the more quickly its life seems to pass. Grisby turned eight this year (according to How to Raise and Train a French Bulldog, the life span of the breed is between eight and twelve years). While he’s still healthy and active—yesterday we walked about two miles together in the woods, then cooled off with a dip in the river—he definitely tires more easily and has the beginnings of osteoarthritis. I tire more easily, too, but I’m still not too old to be struck, at the sight of certain expressions on Grisby’s face, by thunderbolts of adoration that make it impossible for me to resist bending down to kiss him on the face and snout, to caress his beautiful ears.
Dogs don’t age the way people do. They may slow down and grow bad-tempered, but the physical changes aren’t as always obvious. Humans grow small and wrinkled, but Grisby’s always been that way. At eight, he’s still cute, and I’m not the only one to think so. People often assume he’s a puppy, and are surprised when they learn he’s eight years old, not eight months. He hasn’t grown into a scruffy hound, as some older dogs seem to do. Or perhaps he has; perhaps I’m simply blinded by love, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who, when she looked at the fourteen-year-old, overweight, aging Flush, saw the same endearing dog she knew and loved, with all his charming ways. But others had a different—perhaps a more objective—opinion. In one of her husband’s poems, Flush appears as an “old dog, bald and blindish” that accompanies the poet on his evening walks, and one of Elizabeth’s friends in Venice recalled Flush as “an old mangy creature, an uncomfortable fellow-passenger in a vettura.”
In Behind the Bathtub, Colette Audry remarks how strange it seems to see chic, perfectly accessorized Parisian women accompanied by senile, incontinent old dogs—yet, she adds, this isn’t by any means an uncommon sight. We keep our dogs to the very end, she observes, even when they are “mange-ridden, scabbed with eczema, half-paralyzed, cataracts in both eyes—not to mention that dreadful old dog smell.” We continue to love our dogs, Audry explains, even when they’re old wrecks, “slobbering, overweight, rheumy-eyed,” because our love for them isn’t contingent, as it often is with human partners, on physical well-being and strength of mind. Dogs adore us steadily and without change until the end, which makes it easy to love them back the same way. The “slobbering mongrels you see trailing along the sidewalk, with their bandy legs and raw rumps,” observes Audry, “are by no means the least-loved members of the canine community.”
Nonetheless, even animal lovers have a hard time appreciating that in some cases the loss of a pet can be as painful as the loss of a parent or child. “Why get yourself in a state?” people say. “After all, it’s only a dog. You can get another.” How such comments must hurt! You’re mocked if you give your dog a lavish send-off (like Billie Holiday, who had her poodle cremated in her best mink coat). Psychologists suggest that it’s normal to grieve deeply for a week after the loss of a beloved dog, and to feel a lingering sadness for a month or two more. After that, you should pull yourself together and move on. If you can’t, your grief is considered excessive, inappropriate, pathological, or misdirected—in other words, you’re “really” mourning for something else.
These days, I often catch myself wondering how much longer I’ve got with Grisby. I see danger everywhere for a small bulldog: careless drivers, reckless pedestrians, discarded needles, toxic trash (to imagine such disasters is, I realize, a superstitious way of warding them off). I try to be sure Grisby gets plenty of exercise, but am I keeping him fit or wearing him out? He loves to go out in the sun, but will he get overheated? If I inadvertently cause his death, could I ever forgive myself? Would he haunt me from beyond the grave? Will I hear the ghostly sound of his jingling collar, hear his nails clicking on the wood floor in the dead of night?
Will I recover from Grisby’s death in time to own another dog, or will I be too old? “When you love a dog and it loves you, the lack of synchronization between human and animal life is bound to bring sorrow,” writes Roger Grenier, who was in his sixties when he lost his Ulysses—the same age as Princess Marie Bonaparte when she lost Topsy, her famous chow. “A dog’s life is so short,” observed the princess; “to have one, to love one, is, if one is still young enough, gratuitously to invite Death into one’s house.” Yet Grenier describes receiving a phone call from the author and comedienne Madame Simone to inform him that her dog had just died, and to inquire where she might get another. “She was 95 at the time. What optimism!” remarks Grenier. “Perhaps she was right, since she lived to be 107, some say 110. So she still had just about the duration of a canine existence before her.” I like this method of calculation. By this measurement, I have at least three dogs ahead of me.