by Lena Divani
The burden of their guilt blighted the joy of the house that was like a ship. They used to dream of her as she lay breathless on the tiles, with them trying in vain to reverse the damage by applying cold compresses. They damned the landlady, her daughter, their stupidity, their own temper, the cupboard handles. But what was done was done. And the only true punishment they could impose on themselves would be never again to get a cat, since they were incapable of protecting it.
AND WHAT FAULT IS IT OF MINE, DAMSEL?
I listened to her tale and it gave me goose bumps. Yes, they’re only human, imperfect creatures, prone to making mistakes. What scared me the most was the guilt dripping from every word, every stare, every grimace they made. I had peeled my eyes and pricked my ears trying to get a handle on them now that I hardly knew a thing about them. (Meow No. 987: The more you know about someone, the more confused you get. It’s the truth: You know best the one you don’t know at all.) I had learned to fear guilt even more than stupidity. The dumb person might make a middling go of things, but the guilt-ridden is sure to fuck up, precisely because of their guilt. In my fourth life I’d seen a man go under because of his guilt over drinking himself to oblivion and harassing his children. To bear the burden of that guilt, he drank even more until he became a burnt-out alcoholic with his liver shot to pieces. Which is why I’m saying: Guilt is a sly one—you start out feeling sorry for your kids’ not having a proper father and you end up making them fatherless.
And that is exactly how the couple before me were feeling: they were contemplating taking a cat under their care precisely because they felt guilty for not having been able to care for a cat! Go on, you inconsequential creatures, stop deliberating, I was telling them with my tail. It is destined for us to be housemates, make up your mind and get this over and done with! I needed a writer to compile the bon mots of my feline wisdom and I got me two. Come to think of it, Bukowski would have been the ideal candidate! He wouldn’t think twice about it. He’d keep me better than his paramours. Not to mention he’d write my memoirs in English and I’d become an international bestseller, not just a third rate novella for local consumption . . . Ah well . . . Be that as it may, at that given moment, I was gazing upon the freshly mown lawn, while our good man Charles was under it.
“Come now, just take a look at him, he’s such a darling. Look how he’s watching you with those bright little eyes . . . You don’t have the heart to leave him, surely?”
You got it right. Night was coming on and my eyes sparkled as I gazed up at her like she was the center of my existence, and nobody in the whole wide world is indifferent when faced with a pair of eyes in love. (If she knew the first thing about cats, she would know that we have a kind of mirror-like layer on our eyes, the so called tapedum lucidum, which reflects the light so we can see better in the dark. But she didn’t, a fact which allowed any number of interpretations to bloom unchecked in my favor.)
With a little bit of help from looking through the eyes of love, from my irresistible beauty and from the insistence of my bleeding heart advocate, Madam Sweetie, I won the battle. My gumption at so speedily putting myself forward to win a woman’s heart gave me my name: they called me Zach, after a bon vivant of Athens, a well known socialite and famous womanizer. A few months later I had won myself an additional appellative: Sugar. No need for comment here, I was simply as sweet as they come.
THEIR HOME, MY SWEET HOME
They took me home wrapped in a red scarf like an Easter bunny. As soon as I set foot in the hall, I felt that this was my turf. This was where I’d build my kingdom. It belonged to me and I to it. But since the human couple living there before me also surely possessed the proverbial grandiosity of their species, I couldn’t afford to waste any time. I needed to make my terms perfectly clear right from the beginning. Because, my friends, as Meow No. 3456 will reveal, the deck is stacked right at the start. The casting of roles in the play to be enacted takes place very early on—one needs, therefore, to be vigilant . . .
First of all, I went about the place scouting. The house would prove more forthcoming than either of my new housemates. I sniffed out every inch of the bedroom: The books had long overflowed from the bookshelves and were scattered in profusion on dressers and on the floor. On her side, especially, a red dresser like a piece of kindergarten furniture was packed with two or three piles of unread books: It was her mini bookshop from which she nightly chose a reading that suited her mood.
I noted with interest that the Damsel had converted the spare (and ideally isolated) room into an office for herself, leaving Ziggy to set up his writer’s nest in a corner of the (actually fairly large) living room next to the stereo and across from the TV. I struggled to decide whether she was being unfair to him or whether she was indulging him. I never did manage to settle that particular question. Ziggy proclaimed himself hard done by but, on the other hand, I saw how he itched to listen to this or that piece of music or steal a look at the television. “I write about the cinema and television,” he’d argue. “I need to know what is on.” As you might guess, he was having himself on. He shared that particular defect with me: He loved to waste time. In the mornings, he made his coffee, turned on the PC and played Tetris for about an hour, as a warm-up. After that, he played a few games of patience for good luck, answered his emails, made some more coffee because he was done with the first one and then he started thinking about how on earth to begin the first chapter of his first novel. Just as he became lost in contemplation, the rival thought would occur to him that he had a deadline to meet for his first script which meant he needed to stop thinking about his novel at once and start thinking about the script. He experienced a significant bout of stress. To counter it, he played another game of Tetris. Humans are an intriguing species and writers even more so. I still wonder where so many well turned out phrases managed to fit in among all the Tetris blocks.
To be sure, with time I understood what the devil it was he liked about that game. Managing to fit the colored blocks in the available spaces in the time allotted gave, him a temporary sense of orderliness. If they found their places, so too would his life: the scripts would be delivered on time, his ideas about novels would turn out to be great successes. In the meantime, he postponed for the time being the hardest test: turning into reality what his imagination had envisioned. Because reality does have that one damn disadvantage: It always ends up less. And it is paralyzingly real.
The Damsel was of a different variety. When she had to write, she wrote. She sat her ass down and applied herself, as the expression goes. She sat in front of the screen and pressed the keys. An exemplary worker of the alphabet. She wasn’t enough of an imbecile to allow herself to be paralyzed by the thought that her novel wasn’t The Idiot. (Besides, Dostoyevsky himself didn’t know that he would be writing The Idiot when he was writing The Idiot—not that she was such an imbecile as to think that she would someday write The Idiot.) So, then, she focused on one target and pursued one thread. She didn’t answer any phone calls, she didn’t pay any visits, she didn’t entertain irrelevant thoughts. She only got up for the fridge, the bathroom and the coffee machine. As you gather, dears, crazy things happened in this house. The inside turned the outside inside out. The sitting Ziggy turned into a spinning top and the Spinning Top stayed glued to her chair until she’d made it through her daily schedule. And, naturally, each fought the other’s habit. Every so often, she would delete from his hard disk the damn games; he would invade her office at intervals and say to her, “Come now, let’s take a coffee break, you hard-boiled protestant, talk to me a little, you factory worker.” They were fun.
You could see why they were together; it made perfect sense. Opposites attract, it’s common knowledge—especially if deep down they are actually the same. Those two, at all events, had achieved a kind of balance. It was now up to me, as a new member, to infiltrate the balance of the household and give it a new twist in my favor, without unbalancing it. Fir
st of all, I needed to set it out perfectly clear right from the start that I was no pet, I was a housemate with equal rights. Particularly, that is, the Damsel who had a sad record on the matter, from what I overheard. Tu casa es mi casa, senora. If you harbor the illusion that you can imprison me in a room or a balcony, then you are gravely deluded. Because I am here in order to teach you to share. Unfortunately for you, you have still to cotton onto the fact that I am a wise teacher in his seventh life disguised in a two-month-old fur ball, or else you wouldn’t have let me into your castle so easily. You see, my dears, human beings are incredibly attached to their foibles. I hate hairs, says the lady. So, what of it? And I hate seeing you smoke like a chimney but I don’t make an issue of it, as deleterious as it is to my health. Did you hear me comment on it? Did I make any faces? Did I meow disconcertedly? No, I accepted it. You have some small parts that I adore, other small parts that compel my interest, ones that bore me, and you have some small parts that I detest as much as water on my pelt. The sum total, nevertheless, is you, and it’s you I have chosen; therefore, all those parts too. Now, why do you insist on putting me on a butcher’s block and cutting me up into fillet and mince? I am here, in front of you, all of me, and I am going to teach you to either love the other person as a whole or, finally, retreat into the wilderness like the Prophet Elias, because only those who aspire to sainthood are so selfish!
And the struggle was under way! The Damsel’s first move was to close the door of the hall which divided the house in two. I was overcome with shock and awe. Heeeeeey! We cats hate doors, didn’t she know that? No matter how philosophical I tried to be, it was impossible to stomach the fact that I was under house detention in one half of the apartment, which someone more superficial than me might have called a paradise: The kitchen with the treats, the living room with the fluffed up pillows and the fireplace, the veranda with the flowerpots and the view to Madam Polyxeni’s cat kingdom. Yet this sly female intended to cut me out of her more personal spaces: Her bedroom and her office. Meaning, where she thought, where she wrote and, most important, where she slept and dreamt.
I imagine you are familiar with the age-old tradition of my species: a cat never ever sleeps with its back turned to someone. Especially during our first lives, when we like to advertise our smartness and savvy, we are constantly on the alert. Don’t let it fool you that we roll on our backs leaving our tummies exposed. Our four well-armed paws are always in warlike readiness. The slightest suspect move will result in prompt laceration. If we do fall asleep with our back to someone, it means we are giving them the highest acknowledgement in terms of trust and selfless love. I had in mind to offer that acknowledgement but also, mind you, to receive it! I knew it wasn’t going to be at all easy but a seventh-life cat disdains what is easy. Damsel, it might take me the fifteen or twenty years that I have available but I, Sugar Zach, will eventually tame you!
WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING
No sardonic smiles, if you please. I know what I’m talking about. We domesticated you, you highfalutin species, not you us. Your delusion that you are masters of the universe has become plain ridiculous, already. Let’s get this straightened out once and for all: Our forefathers derive from the early mammals that survived mighty dangerous conditions and did so better than even the high and mighty dinosaurs, precisely thanks to the sharpness of their wits. That, my dears, is called adaptability. Not meaning to brag but my family tree is full of stars: I have jaguars, I have leopards, I have panthers, I have pumas—what don’t I have! All you have is a bunch of apes—nothing you would call a libro d’oro, really.
You might well ask what possessed us, indomitable felines, to get involved with the likes of you. It doesn’t have to do with love, I’m afraid, as much as with need. My great great grandmothers in Northern Africa made the decision to approach you seven thousand years ago, not because they admired your “civilization,” but because that way they could get a meal with less toil and less risk. In Egypt, you see, humans had learned how to cultivate crops and the mice were holding feasts in their storehouses. They’d hidden in there and were gnawing away day and night, undisturbed. Mice, though, were in turn our mainstay, so our grandmothers smelt them and they were tempted. The more sensible ones were intimidated and didn’t dare come close to the human settlements. Better safe than sorry, they thought. But the less inhibited and daring started slowly to converge on the storehouses. Whoever’s on the prowl gets more variety out of life, they figured. So they storm the mice party, get their fill and get a taste for the easy life. Having it easy is no small thing, my dears—it changes you into a different kind of cat!
There were, however, reciprocal benefits. You found us quite handy yourselves. Smoothly and inexpensively, you got rid of the rodents fouling your crops. Well, these were the lines along which the marriage took place, like all marriages: A contract based on mutual advantage. Every so often, we would give a demonstration of fetching and depositing at your feet a rat or a snake, just so you knew how conscientious we were about our duties and would not drive us away from the storehouse feast. It was kind of fun, and the reflex that some blue-blooded cousins exhibit, when, on occasion, they present their housemates with a dead cockroach, making them wonder whatever possessed that chic pet to make such unappetizing presents, dates from precisely that period.
So, then, my dears, slowly and unobtrusively we eventually managed to occupy your homes. In the beginning, we only came in to hunt the mice and then went back out to the beat. Fast food may be nice but roaming the streets and fields is in our blood. However, the cities you’ve managed to create, which are nothing short of purgatories, have made things rather tough. If we roam those battlefields freely our life expectancy is no more than a couple of years. Cars run us over, we get intentionally poisoned by unbalanced characters, bullies torture us for sport. You call all that kind of thing an advance in civilization! We, nevertheless, happen to be realists. If the outside is a living hell, then we make sure we have access to the inside. That is how we end up in the safety of your living rooms. And you now openly plead with us to accept living alongside you. On occasion you pay good cash to own us. Nowadays, you kill mice and cockroaches by yourselves with sprays, only you have an even bigger problem. You have made your life unlivable. You subvert, badmouth and abuse one another. You’ve become suspicious. You are scared to stroke humans in case they bite your arm off. You are friendless. And, thus, you have need of us. Whereas we once approached you for food, now you beg us for some sustenance for your deprived soul. You will do anything for a caress that doesn’t involve risk.
But let’s not kid ourselves, all things have a price. From the moment we turned exclusively into salon pets, we also turned into wusses. A huge part of our intelligence disappeared along with our enemies. (Meow No. 562: Enemies keep you in shape. So, don’t complain if your good luck is up. It’s highly likely that it’s thanks to this very fact that you are still on your feet.) If you aren’t on tenterhooks about where the next disaster is coming from, you don’t have adrenaline enough to keep you vigilant. Likewise with camouflage. What do you need swift reflexes for, when you are cozily ensconced in the Damsel’s arms, fast asleep? Is the tuna going to try and escape from the tin can, for you to chase after it?
Do you now see, my dears, how I, the proud feline, found myself in the position of claiming my rights as a housemate to all of her domicile (pardon me, our domicile)? Now, she, herself, needs to understand that she ought to spend time with me in order to be able to properly write down my story. I am in no mood whatsoever to be the lead in one of those saccharine pulp fictions that come a dime a dozen.
WAR IS THE FATHER OF ALL THINGS
I don’t mean to brag but I happen to be a very methodical cat. An expert in warfare. As such, I decided to prioritize my aims. Number one was, of course, the door to the hall, that despicable construct designed by humans to carve up their vital space so as to create the illusion of independence. Forgive me, Damsel
, but if you expect a door to make you independent, you are pitiful . . . May I also remind you that your vital space is also my vital space. I am therefore obliged to declare your move a casus belli and declare war forthrightly.
But let me take this from the beginning. The first day, you see, my dears, I was taken aback to see her leave the kitchen where they were having breakfast, saying to her beau, “I’m going to write now.” At last, we’re getting down to work, I thought, and happily followed her. As soon, however, as madam saw me following her, she pulled a sour face, ran off and closed the hall door behind her. I was left frozen on the spot, looking alternately at him and at her door. “Never mind her, Zach, come over here,” Ziggy told me. I was such a wreck that the kind fellow took pity on me. He put me on his lap, gave me some milk for breakfast (with no preservatives, if you don’t mind) and then let me explore the pillow heaven in the living room. But it was eating at me. I had a mission, I couldn’t afford to waste my time. So I took up position next to the door in the hall. I felt weak and small. I didn’t yet have a whole lot of ammunition available. So, I sought refuge in the weaponry of the weak: sniveling. I meowed insistently and cried for hours in front of the hateful door. I couldn’t get my head around such coarseness. Didn’t this woman know that we are sensitive to a fault? That we get anxious even if you change the brand of our cat litter? That if we lose someone close to us, we are adversely affected to the point where we are at risk of dying ourselves? Did she not appreciate that hapless me had left all relatives behind for the privilege of ascending to her fifth floor? These were the thoughts going through my head as I lay there wailing and drenched in my own tears.