Seven Lives and One Great Love, Memories of a Cat

by Lena Divani

  And the sum total of my efforts? A big, fat, round zero! The Damsel was stewing so thoroughly in her own creative juices that it didn’t even cross her mind to spare any time for me. The only thing she did was to cry out every so often from a distance, “Shut up, little Zach, you’re being a royal pain!” It was a bitter new knowledge, acknowledging her writerly disdain for everything that didn’t directly relate to her own interests.

  I also realized that for the time being, our relationship was awfully unequal: She was a meter and seventy one centimeters tall and I was a dwarf. She can avail herself of words in which to frame her arguments at great speed (“I need to concentrate, Zach, enough with your mewling in my ear already. I’m going to throw you out, I’m warning you. You’re going out on the veranda. I said, shuddup!”) and I only have a “meow” to express a thousand words. Let it be noted that our forefathers in the jungle didn’t utter a single sound. They went about their business haughty and silent. Ever since getting involved with you humans, we too started waffling on and meowing redundantly. But that isn’t enough, either, because apart from being thick, humans are also tone-deaf and can’t figure fundamental nuances such as between an “I’m-scared” meow and an “I’m-hungry” meow.

  What with one thing and another, I got stubborn. What I lacked in size I made up in brains. And, Damsel, beware of smart cats. A colleague of mine who lived with the deceased novelist E.H. Gonatas had evolved to the point of lifting the lid from the pot, stealing the chicken that was cooking and then replacing the lid to avoid detection! I wasn’t far behind that. I would observe and I would figure out how that devilish construct worked.

  Now I am going to stoop low and gossip a little because she’s irritated me. The Damsel was so dumb that, though we lived together for a full fifteen years, she never did realize just how smart I really was. Only after I was dearly departed did she come across an article in one of those cat magazines titled How clever is you cat? and she started grading me by assigning 1 to 10 to the following phrases:

  My cat is independent and can look after himself. (Sure I am, but be careful: That doesn’t mean you can abandon me to my own devices!)

  My cat tries to influence me in order to get what it wants. (You can’t imagine to what extent!)

  My cat shows an interest in everything. (This is a seventh-life cat we’re talking about, Damsel. It goes without saying that I am interested in everything. From the way ants toil to the reactions of the cornered mouse. Everything, all things, all the time.)

  My cat understands my feelings and my reactions and responds to them. (You, on the contrary, don’t have a clue about its feelings, you thick-skinned brute!)

  My cat is self-confident and self-assured around house visitors. (Words are redundant. I’m not called Zach for nothing. The man I was named after was as worldly as they get.)

  My cat recognizes its name and comes when I call him. (Even when I was having my favorite catnaps in my favorite flowerpot, I would jump to it like a skittish recruit as soon as I heard you call out—that’s how stupid I was!)

  My cat can solve a variety of problems, such as opening a drawer. (Why, yes, my dear. Which is precisely why that door of yours is not going to stand in my way!)

  I got a total of seventy points which meant that, according to the specialist, I was a genius. Except, you, Damsel, weren’t. You don’t call someone clever who needs a specialist’s certificate in order to understand their mate.

  End of gossiping session. Return to action: I spent a great many working hours snivel-meowing before her closed door, checking: a) how long she could take my persistence; and, b) how exactly that thingamabob works called a door handle. Soon enough I got it. You needed to exert some pressure on one end of the handle in order to open the door. As you well know, I possessed no hand. Nor did I possess the necessary height to reach the handle and push it down with my paw. What was there left to do? Gain some speed, leap and throw all of my weight on the end of the handle. YES!YES!YES! That’s it, I got it, I’m a Nobel candidate! So I did gather speed and I did leap, but it was all in vain, dears. I fell flat on my face without even getting as high as half a meter. I was still a baby, god damn it to hell! I needed more centimeters before I could leap to that height. And I needed more weight in order to push down on the handle effectively. Which is to say, I needed time to grow. In the meantime, I would restrict myself to weapon number one: sniveling. It was easier now, because my entire body hurt from throwing myself around. One thing, though, was for sure: There are some who, when defeated, will not fight again, so as not to be defeated a second time. Well, I wasn’t one of those.

  FOOD FOR THOUGHT

  Hours went by, days went by, months went by, waiting. I ate my food passionately because I was in a hurry to grow up, with the end result being that I grew fat and greedy. But let me take things from the beginning.

  I discovered that the Damsel was fiercely devoted to cooking. She kept bringing in weird contraptions (a wok from China, a bamboo-shoot steamer from the Philippines, a crepe-maker from Paris and so on). She also collected exotic condiments in her travels (chili and mole from Mexico, garam masala from India, green curry from Thailand, charissa from Morocco. Every so often, she would find a pretext to invite friends over for a meal. (I finished the article I was writing, it’s Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, it’s the spring equinox today, and suchlike.) While she owned a huge collection of gourmet recipe books, arranged on a kitchen bookshelf, she rarely made use of them. At most, she might steal a glance to get the general idea and after that, she pretty much did whatever came into her head. Improvisation upon improvisation. Some outcomes were happy, others of her experiments committed suicide inside the pot.

  To be frank, I was very much impressed by the unheard of trouble humans took over their meals. Our forefathers, sober minimalists that they were, taught us that to keep ourselves alive, we require meat. So, then, as soon as hunger strikes, we go on the beat, hunt for the prey, tear it apart, sate our hunger and that is it. If we get hungry again, we just go back out. Nature, see, has blessed us with living in the present. Whereas you, stuck in the past and therefore unceasingly anxious about the future, are unaware of the redeeming freedom of the present tense. I am hungry, therefore, I hunt and eat, is what we say. Keep things simple. I will be hungry again, given that I was hungry before, so I will need to make provisions as I am very much afraid of going without in the future, is what you say. (Oh dear, just writing this down made me all anxious!)

  So you started storing food at a feverish pace for afterwards and for after afterwards. You built storehouses and you heartlessly imprisoned sheep, cows, chicken and pigs so you’d have them at your disposal. You stuffed them with garbage to fatten them quickly and cheaply. And here are the sad consequences: Sixty-seven million animals slaughtered yearly so that you can grow fat, dears. You don’t even let the fish be. A trillion murdered in your frying pans each year unfailingly! The richest amongst you have developed even kinkier vices—you indiscriminately gnaw through everything: horses, frogs, sharks, reindeer. You will not desist even before species threatened with extinction. We are more merciful. I, myself, took into my protection an animal facing extinction, an old homeless guy who found shelter by reading in the public library. You, I am afraid, would gladly shoot him, if there weren’t the legal consequences to reckon with.

  And worst of all? During breaks, to lighten your chronic anxiety, you grab your rifles and go murdering in cold blood thousands of partridges, hares and wild boar, for your entertainment. Yours alone, as we are not in the least entertained.

  Admit it, my dears: Abundance hasn’t done you any good. You started out by cooking meat so that it would be better digested and you ended up marinating it in truffle oil and papaya seeds to then simmer in a wok, with baby corn and Asian bean shoots. Oh please! I mean, will you get over yourselves already!

  Pardon me, I got carried away. What I meant to state was the following
: you’d expect that with the Damsel’s constant preoccupation with cooking, I would have eaten like a king. Hardly! You couldn’t touch her concoctions! I needed meat and she prepared tortillas with guacamole. Thank you kindly, madam, but I’ll pass!

  She asked the doctor (unfortunately she had a useless one, the kind that winds up a vet after failing to become a proper doctor) who happily recommended that I only eat canned and dry cat food. “Only there will your kitty find all the necessary vitamins,” he declared. Is that so? Then why don’t you also restrict yourself to canned fish instead of ordering fresh sea bass on the grill? Anyway, the point is that financial interests, ignorance and lassitude drove me into the unhealthy embrace of the industry that was going to kill me slowly and pleasurably. Thankfully, the housemates were no misers. They bought for me the top gourmet canned goods: tuna, rabbit with vegetables, duck pâté, and my all-time favorite, ocean shrimp with trout. That once brought down the wrath of the Damsel’s mother who went haywire as soon as she found out the price of the can: “People are going hungry out there and you’re feeding this mongrel ocean shrimp?” she said, piqued. (Whom are you calling a mongrel, missus? God keep me from opening my mouth.)

  The Damsel, on the contrary kept feeding me all the time. She liked big fat cats. Quite fat ones. Bear cats. So, she made me fat and then that’s what she called me. (“Come here, fatso! Don’t step on my tummy, fatso! You’ve put even more weight on, fatso!” and so on and so forth.) Poor innocent, she had no idea that she was digging her own grave. One fine morning, at the exact moment when the lady retired into her private quarters, closing the hated door behind her, I marshaled all of my eight kilos and leapt at the door handle. Following the thump of my body’s impact, the handle bent, the locking mechanism released and the door to paradise opened at last. She got up from her desk gawping in amazement, grabbed me and threw me straight out again, murmuring, “You rascal, fatso.” In vain, of course. Whether you like it or not, dearest, Carthago delenda est!

  THE CAT AS MUSE IS A FIB

  According to my calculations, I must have thrown myself upon the hateful door handle at least eighty-seven times. The Damsel met my willfulness with equal amounts of her own. “Go away, you, what’s it this time! Can’t you see I’m writing?” she would yell, and throw me out again. (It really made me wonder, hadn’t she be told by any of her colleagues that the cat is the writer’s muse? Is it possible she could be so uninformed?) She would chuck me out, back in I would sneak. Let’s see who manages to wreck the other’s nerves first, mademoiselle. Finally, the two of us combined did the door in. The handle came unstuck, the hinges loosened and a peace treaty was signed, confirming my victory. It was the happiest day of my life. The Damsel was writing away, wrathful, and I was urgently looking for a way to get introduced into her book. My theory was that this was a job to be accomplished in stages. First, I would enter as a secondary character in one of her books at least, then start upgrading until I became the lead hero in my own memoirs. Fiendish, no?

  For a start, I stuck my mug right next to the keyboard. I spent endless hours at just that spot. Our working days started at about twelve in the morning (middle of the day, for others) and ended at about five in the morning. Fairly quickly I understood why writers and cats were an item, as the saying goes. Because they were una faccia una razza.

  To make my meaning plain: They sit as we do, for hours and hours on end in the same spot, unmoving, unspeaking, undoing. They are thinking, they claim. I very much doubt it. I think that they eventually get abstracted from all the thinking and fall asleep inwardly, the way we do. I don’t want you to misunderstand me, I count this in their favor. Doing nothing is, in all seriousness, one of the hardest things in the world. Plato and Aristotle even pointed out to their students that the principle of nonaction is one of the most spiritual in the world.

  They are loners and misanthropes. They want their peace and quiet and so do we. They keep you at a distance and they come to you only when they choose. We aren’t accountable to anyone as a matter of course. They, for their part, merely throw out the phrase “I’m working now” and they are done. In actual fact, of course, they may be contemplating the possibility of whether their current significant other is cheating on them.

  Their schedule is deranged and incoherent. Every normal person gets up in the morning, goes to work, comes back, has lunch, engages in some form of recreation and as soon as it is night, they go to sleep. Not so with writers. They wake up at any time, they eat whenever, they have their fun and games no matter when and at nights, they circulate sleepless, like ghosts (some in bars and nightspots, some at their office). It’s quiet at night, they say, and you have a better chance of working. Ergo . . . ! We are nocturnal animals, as everyone knows. We are mightily in favor of you also burning the midnight oil, so that there’s some activity on, no matter if everyone else thinks of you as good-for-nothing scroungers.

  They are curious and observe everything, just like we do. We merely keep our conclusions to ourselves. (When the Damsel speaks on the phone, she gets irritated. Therefore, it’s better if I don’t even go near her as soon as I hear the phone ringing.) They record theirs and then sell them off as products of their imagination.

  They spend a lot of time at home. The saying “My home is my castle” was made up with them in mind. We do likewise. Once we claim a spot for ours, wild horses can’t move us. What are we, crazy, to mill about in the cold and damp? In the blazing sun and the smog?

  They are usually too self-absorbed to notice a thing. They seem to be there but they’re really not. They let you be. I, personally, have taken a crap—if you’ll pardon my language—in seven flowerpots, clawed to shreds the red leather armchair in the living room and torn up endless kitchen paper rolls, completely undisturbed. When the Damsel gets up from her desk and I fear my trespasses will be found out, I merely hide under the couch until her swearing subsides along with the hurtling in my direction of slippers and assorted petty objects. I then emerge, as winsome and charming as ever. Nothing lasts, my dears. Thankfully, that goes for her anger as well. When you, egocentric creatures, become self-absorbed, that’s the end of that. Only, there is a dark side to this. Not even a fire brigade siren can rouse you. Experience has taught me there are two approaches to getting the attention I want when I want it: Either pretend to be nice and cute, which is boring and slightly demeaning, or become a menace, which is easy and pleasant, though unfortunately, risky. For the sake of a well-rounded education, I have ended up alternating the two.

  The issue was that the Damsel seriously made up her mind to ignore me, which severely hampered my mission. Whether I was in her office or not, it was all the same. In the beginning, I impersonated a beguiling feline. I laid myself out at a strategic position next to the keyboard and yawned, meaning: I’m settled just fine, your ladyship, you just go on with your business and never mind me. After some time passed and I saw she was ignoring me, I moved my paw a little to the left, coming dangerously within range of her field of action. She pushed me away. In five minutes I moved it again, reaching a few centimeters farther than the last time. I was overcome by anxiety. How on earth would I ever manage to get in her book? Should I possibly touch the keyboard? As soon, however, as I dared touch one of the keys, a redundant A appeared on the screen. “Aaaah! What have you done, you fat monster! I’m going to throttle you!” she screamed. She grabbed me and threw me on the floor without as much as blinking. This is a sorry state to be in, Zach, old boy, I thought, meowing dispiritedly. What gall she has to humiliate your Perfect Whiteness in such a manner! What importunity, dashing you from the pristine heights to ground level.

  I decided, nevertheless, to temporarily make peace with my debased status. A question of strategy, my dears. I ascertained on that occasion that the carpet was thick and blue, pretty much the color of my right, and prettier, eye. I made myself comfortable on her right foot. It was warm and it was bare—thankfully, as I detest shoes. “Ge
t away from there, silly cat, you’ll get stepped on,” she cried out again. Well, that was the end of my patience right there. I, too, started hollering in irritation. Enough is enough, I’m a cat, not a dressing table figurine! The Damsel remained coolly indifferent. She spat out a “Shut up, already, I’m trying to think!” and went back to her work. I was by this stage wildly rattled. What on earth was going on here? According to absolutely credible sources, all writers, great and small, talented and mediocre, have been good friends to us. They were well and truly fond of us. Edgar Allan Poe, Colette, Balzac, Patricia Highsmith, Emmanuel Roides, even the demented Philip K. Dick, they all drew inspiration from us. This is not a figment of my imagination, madam, it is variously recorded that we have always functioned in the role of muse. Could it be that it’s all a fib? Or have I crossed paths with an impostor impersonating a writer?

  THE CAT WHO TURNED INTO A DOG

  WHO TURNED INTO A HUMAN

  Naturally, the truth was more complicated. But do let’s take things from the start. Antonio Porchia, a friend of mine from the beaux jours of the Great Library, once wrote the following phrase which caused me a great deal of perplexity: He who can be who he is, is so very little for him who cannot be who he is. Despite the advantages of the experience of six lives, I could not fully fathom his meaning. On a diet of ocean shrimp, who couldn’t be who he is? That is really what it’s about, isn’t it? Are you kidding us, Mr. Porchia? For eleven years running, I regurgitated it better than if I were a goat but, to be frank, I never did actually get the full meaning. Now, with the wisdom of the seventh life and the sorrow of rejection, I am beginning to understand the dear Antonio: Most creatures on the face of this earth are like Russian dolls; you see one but there’s another half dozen lying in wait under the skin.