See, a black barque, like a state funeral; and Puss takes it into his bubbly-addled brain to board her. Tacking obliquely to her side, I rub my marmalade pate against her shin; how could any duenna, be she never so stern, take offence at such attentions to her chargeling from a little cat? (As it turns out, this one: attishooo! does.) A white hand fragrant as Arabia descends from the black cloak and reciprocally rubs behind his ears at just the ecstatic spot. Puss lets rip a roaring purr, rears briefly on his high-heeled boots; jig with joy and pirouette with glee—she laughs to see and draws her veil aside. Puss glimpses high above, as it were, an alabaster lamp lit behind by dawn’s first flush: her face.
And she smiling.
For a moment, just that moment, you would have thought it was May morning.
“Come along! Come! Don’t dawdle over the nasty beast!” snaps the old hag, with the one tooth in her mouth, and warts; she sneezes.
The veil comes down; so cold it is, and dark, again.
It was not I alone who saw her; with that smile he swears she stole his heart.
Love.
I’ve sat inscrutably by and washed my face and sparkling dicky with my clever paw while he made the beast with two backs with every harlot in the city, besides a number of good wives, dutiful daughters, rosy country girls come to sell celery and endive on the corner, and the chambermaid who strips the bed, what’s more. The Mayor’s wife, even, shed her diamond earrings for him and the wife of the notary unshuffled her petticoats and if I could, I would blush to remember how her daughter shook out her flaxen plaits and jumped in bed between them and she not sixteen years old. But never the word, “love”, has fallen from his lips, nor in nor out of any of these transports, until my master saw the wife of Signor Panteleone as she went walking out to Mass, and she lifted up her veil though not for him.
And now he is half sick with it and will go to the tables no more for lack of heart and never even pats the bustling rump of the chambermaid in his new-found maudlin celibacy, so we get our slops left festering for days and the sheets filthy and the wench goes banging about bad-temperedly with her broom enough to fetch the plaster off the walls.
I’ll swear he lives for Sunday morning, though never before was he a religious man. Saturday nights, he bathes himself punctiliously, even, I’m glad to see, washes behind his ears, perfumes himself, presses his uniform so you’d think he had a right to wear it. So much in love he very rarely panders to the pleasures, even of Onan, as he lies tossing on his couch, for he cannot sleep for fear he miss the summoning bell. Then out into the cold morning, harking after that black, vague shape, hapless fisherman for his sealed oyster with such a pearl in it. He creeps behind her across the square; how can one so amorous bear to be so inconspicuous? And yet, he must; though, sometimes, the old hag sneezes and says she swears there is a cat about.
He will insinuate himself into the pew behind milady and sometimes contrive to touch the hem of her garment, when they all kneel, and never a thought to his orisons; she is the divinity he’s come to worship. Then sits silent, in a dream, till bed-time; what pleasure is his company for me? He won’t eat, either. I brought him a fine pigeon from the inn kitchen, fresh off the spit, parfumé avec tarragon, but he wouldn’t touch it so I crunched it up, bones and all, performing, as ever after meals, my meditative toilette, I pondered, thus: one, he is in a fair way to ruining us both by neglecting his business; two, love is desire sustained by unfulfilment. If I lead him to her bedchamber and there he takes his fill of her lily-white, he’ll be right as rain in two shakes and next day tricks as usual.
Then Master and his Puss will soon be solvent once again. Which, at the moment, very much not, sir.
This Signor Panteleone employs, his only servant but the hag, a kitchen cat, a sleek, spry tabby whom I accost. Grasping the slack of her neck firmly between my teeth, I gave her the customary tribute of a few firm thrusts of my striped loins and, when she got her breath back, she assured me in the friendliest fashion the old man was a fool and a miser who kept herself on short commons for the sake of the mousing and the young lady a soft-hearted creature who smuggled breast of chicken and sometimes, when the hag-dragon-governess napped at midday, snatched this pretty kitty out of the hearth and into her bedroom to play with reels of silk and run after trailed handkerchiefs, when she and she had as much fun together as two Cinderellas at an all-girls’ ball.
Poor, lonely lady, married so young to an old dodderer with his bald pate and his goggle eyes and his limp, his avarice, his gore belly, his rheumaticks, and his flag hangs all the time at half-mast indeed; and jealous as he is impotent, tabby declares—he’d put a stop to all the rutting in the world, if he had his way, just to certify his young wife don’t get from another what she can’t get from him.
“Then shall we hatch a plot to antler him, my precious?”
Nothing loath, she tells me the best time for this accomplishment should be the one day in all the week he forsakes his wife and his counting-house to ride off into the country to extort more grasping rents from starveling tenant farmers. And she’s left all alone, then, behind so many bolts and bars you wouldn’t believe; all alone—but for the hag!
Aha! This hag turns out to be the biggest snag; an iron-plated, copper-bottomed, sworn man-hater of some sixty bitter winters who—as ill luck would have it—shatters, clatters, erupts into paroxysms of the sneeze at the very glimpse of a cat’s whisker. No chance of Puss worming his winsome way into that one’s affections, nor for my tabby neither! But, oh my dear, I say; see how my ingenuity rises to the challenge … So we resume the sweetest part of our conversation in the dusty convenience of the coalhole and she promises me, least she can do, to see the fair, hitherto-inaccessible one gets a letter safe if I slip it to her and slip it to her forthwith I do, though somewhat discommoded by my boots.
He spent three hours over his letter, did my master, as long as it takes me to lick the coaldust off my dicky. He tears up half a quire of paper, splays five pen-nibs with the force of his adoration: “Look not for any peace, my heart; having become a slave to this beauty’s tyranny, dazzled am I by this sun’s rays and my torments cannot be assuaged.” That’s not the high road to the rumpling of the bedcovers; she’s got one ninny between them already!
“Speak from the heart,” I finally exhort. “And all good women have the missionary streak, sir; convince her her orifice will be your salvation and she’s yours.”
“When I want your advice, Puss, I’ll ask for it,” he says; all at once hoity-toity. But at last he manages to pen ten pages; a rake, a profligate, a card-sharper, a cashiered officer well on the way to rack and ruin when first he saw, as if it were a glimpse of grace, her face … his angel, his good angel, who will lead him from perdition.
Oh, what a masterpiece he penned!
“Such tears she wept at his addresses!” says my tabby friend.
“Oh, Tabs, she sobs—for she calls me ‘Tabs’—I never meant to wreak such havoc with a pure heart when I smiled to see a booted cat! And put his paper next to her heart and swore, it was a good soul that sent her his vows and she was too much in love with virtue to withstand him. If, she adds, for she’s a sensible girl, he’s neither old as the hills nor ugly as sin, that is.”
An admirable little note the lady’s sent him in return, per Figaro here and there; she adopts a responsive yet uncompromising tone. For, says she, how can she usefully discuss his passion further without a glimpse of his person?
He kisses her letter once, twice, a thousand times; she must and will see me! I shall serenade her this very evening!
So, when dusk falls, off we trot to the piazza, he with an old guitar he pawned his sword to buy and most, if I may say so, outlandishly rigged out in some kind of vagabond mountebank’s outfit he bartered his gold-braided waistcoat with poor Pierrot braying in the square for, moonstruck zany, lovelorn loon he was himself and even plastered his face with flour to make it white, poor fool, and so ram home his heartsick state.
> There she is, the evening star with the clouds around her; but such a creaking of carts in the square, such a clatter and crash as they dismantle the stalls, such an ululation of ballad-singers and oration of nostrum-peddlers and pertubation of errand boys that though he wails out his heart to her: “Oh, my beloved!” why she, all in a dream, sits with her gaze in the middle distance where there’s a crescent moon stuck on the sky behind the cathedral pretty as a painted stage, and so is she. Does she hear him? Not a grace-note. Does she see him? Never a glance.
“Up you go, Puss; tell her to look my way!”
If rococo’s a piece of cake, that chaste, tasteful, early Palladian stumped many a better cat than I in its time. Agility’s not in it, when it comes to Palladian, daring alone will carry the day and, though the first storey’s graced with a hefty caryatid whose bulbous loincloth and tremendous pects facilitate the first ascent, the Doric column on her head proves a horse of a different colour, I can tell you. Had I not seen my precious Tabby crouched in the gutter above me keening encouragement, I, even I, might never have braved that flying, upward leap that brought me, as if Harlequin himself on wires, in one bound to her windowsill.
“Dear god!” the lady says, and jumps. I see she, too, ah, sentimental thing! clutches a well-thumbed letter. “Puss-in-boots!”
I bow her with a courtly flourish. What luck to hear no sniff or sneeze; where’s hag? A sudden flux sped her to the privy—not a moment to lose. “Cast your eye below,” I hiss. “Him you know of lurks below, in white with the big hat, ready to sing you an evening ditty.”
The bedroom door creaks open, then, and: whee! through the air Puss goes, discretion is the better part. And, for both their sweet sakes I did it, the sight of both their bright eyes inspired me to the never-before-attempted, by me or any other cat, in boots or out of them—the death-defying triple somersault!
And a three-storey drop to ground, what’s more; a grand descent.
Only the merest trifle winded. I’m proud to say, I neatly land on all my fours and Tabs goes wild, huzzah! But has my master witnessed my triumph? Has he, my arse. He’s tuning up that old mandolin and breaks, as down I come, again into his song.
I would never have said, in the normal course of things, his voice would charm the birds out of the trees, like mine; and yet the bustle died for him, the homeward-turning costers paused in their tracks to hearken, the preening street girls forgot their hard-edged smiles as they turned to him and some of the old ones wept, they did.
Tabs, up on the roof there, prick up your ears! For by its power I know my heart is in his voice.
And now the lady lowers her eyes to him and smiles, as once she smiled at me.
Then, bang! a stern hand pulls the shutters to. And it was as if all the violets in all the baskets of all the flower-sellers drooped and faded at once; and spring stopped dead in its tracks and might, this time, not come at all; and the bustle and the business of the square, that had so magically quieted for his song, now rose up again with the harsh clamour of the loss of love.
And we trudge drearily off to dirty sheets and a mean supper of bread and cheese, all I can steal him, but at least the poor soul manifests a hearty appetite now she knows he’s in the world and not the ugliest of mortals; for the first time since that fateful morning, sleeps sound. But sleep comes hard to Puss tonight. He takes a midnight stroll across the square, soon comfortably discusses a choice morsel of salt cod his tabby friend found among the ashes on the hearth before our converse turns to other matters.
“Rats!” she says. “And take your boots off, you uncouth bugger; those three-inch heels wreak havoc with the soft flesh of my underbelly!”
When we’d recovered ourselves a little, I ask her what she means by those “rats” of hers and she proposes her scheme to me. How my master must pose as a rat-catcher and I, his ambulant marmalade rat-trap. How we will then go kill the rats that ravage milady’s bedchamber, the day the old fool goes to fetch his rent, and she can have her will of the lad at leisure for, if there is one thing the hag fears more than a cat, it is a rat and she’ll cower in a cupboard till the last rat is off the premises before she comes out. Oh, this tabby one, sharp as a tack is she; I congratulate her ingenuity with a few affectionate cuffs round the head and home again, for breakfast, ubiquitous Puss, here, there and everywhere, who’s your Figaro?
Master applauds the rat ploy; but, as to the rats themselves; how are they to arrive in the house in the first place? he queries.
“Nothing easier, sir; my accomplice, a witty soubrette who lives among the cinders, dedicated as she is to the young lady’s happiness, will personally strew a large number of dead and dying rats she has herself collected about the bedroom of the said ingenue’s duenna, and, most particularly, that of the said ingenue herself. This to be done tomorrow morning, as soon as Sir Pantaloon rides out to fetch his rents. By good fortune, down in the square, plying for hire, a rat-catcher! Since our hag cannot abide either a rat or a cat, it falls to milady to escort the rat-catcher, none other than yourself, sir, and his intrepid hunter, myself, to the site of the infestation.
“Once you’re in her bedroom, sir, if you don’t know what to do, then I can’t help you.”
“Keep your foul thoughts to yourself, Puss.”
Some things, I see, are sacrosanct from humour.
Sure enough, prompt at five in the bleak next morning, I observe with my own eyes the lovely lady’s lubberly husband hump off on his horse like a sack of potatoes to rake in his dues. We’re ready with our sign: SIGNOR FURIOSO, THE LIVING DEATH OF RATS; and in the leathers he’s borrowed from the porter, I hardly recognise him myself, not with the false moustache. He coaxes the chambermaid with a few kisses—poor, deceived girl! love knows no shame—and so we install ourselves under a certain shuttered window with the great pile of traps she’s lent us, the sign of our profession, Puss perched atop them bearing the humble yet determined look of a sworn enemy of vermin.
We’ve not waited more than fifteen minutes—and just as well, as many rat-plagued Bergamots approach us already and are not easily dissuaded from employing us—when the front door flies open on a lusty scream. The hag, aghast, flings her arms round flinching Furioso; how fortuitous to find him! But, at the whiff of me, she’s sneezing so valiantly, her eyes awash, the vertical gutters of her nostrils aswill with snot, she barely can depict the scenes inside, rattus domesticus dead in her bed and all; and worse! in the Missus’ room.
So Signor Furioso and his questing Puss are ushered into the very sanctuary of the goddess, our presence announced by a fanfare from her keeper on the nose harp. Attishhoooo!!!
Sweet and pleasant in a morning gown of loose linen, our ingenue jumps at the tattoo of my boot heels but recovers instantly and the wheezing, hawking hag is in no state to sniffle more than: “Ain’t I seen that cat before?”
“Not a chance,” says my master. “Why, he’s come but yesterday with me from Milano.”
So she has to make do with that.
My Tabs has lined the very stairs with rats; she’s made a morgue of the hag’s room but something more lively of the lady’s. For some of her prey she’s very cleverly not killed but crippled; a big black beastie weaves its way towards us over the turkey carpet, Puss, pounce! Between screaming and sneezing, the hag’s in a fine state, I can tell you, though milady exhibits a most praiseworthy and collected presence of mind, being, I guess, a young woman of no small grasp so, perhaps, she has a sniff of the plot already.
My master goes down on hands and knees under the bed.
“My god!” he cries. “There’s the biggest hole, here in the wainscoting, I ever saw in all my professional career! And there’s an army of black rats gathering behind it, ready to storm through! To arms!”
But, for all her terror, the hag’s loath to leave the Master and me alone to deal with the rats; she casts her eye on a silver-backed hairbrush, a coral rosary, twitters, hovers, screeches, mutters until milady assures her, amidst scenes o
f rising pandemonium:
“I shall stay here myself and see that Signor Furioso doesn’t make off with my trinkets. You go and recover yourself with an infusion of friar’s balsam and don’t come back until I call.”
The hag departs; quick as a flash, la belle turns the key in the door on her and softly laughs; the naughty one.
Dusting the slut-fluff from his knees, Signor Furioso now stands slowly upright; swiftly, he removes his false moustache, for no element of the farcical must mar this first, delirious encounter of these lovers, must it. (Poor soul, how his hands tremble!)
Accustomed as I am to the splendid, feline nakedness of my kind, that offers no concealment of that soul made manifest in the flesh of lovers, I am always a little moved by the poignant reticence with which humanity shyly hesitates to divest itself of its clutter of concealing rags in the presence of desire. So, first, these two smile, a little, as if to say “How strange to meet you here!” uncertain of a loving welcome, still. And do I deceive myself, or do I see a tear a-twinkle in the corner of his eye? But who is it steps towards the other first? Why, she; women, I think, are, of the two sexes, the more keenly tuned to the sweet music of their bodies. (A penny for my foul thoughts, indeed! Does she, that wise, grave personage in the negligee, think you’ve staged this grand charade merely in order to kiss her hand?) But, then—oh, what a pretty blush! steps back; now it’s his turn to take two steps forward in the saraband of Eros.
I could wish, though, they’d dance a little faster; the hag will soon recover from her spasms and shall she find them in flagrante?
His hand, then, trembling, upon her bosom; hers, initially more hesitant, sequentially more purposeful, upon his breeches. Then their strange trance breaks; that sentimental havering done, I never saw two fall to it with such appetite. As if the whirlwind got into their fingers, they strip each other bare in a twinkling and she falls back on the bed, shows him the target, he displays the dart, scores an instant bullseye. Bravo! Never can that old bed have shook with such a storm before. And their sweet choked mutterings, poor things: “I never …” “My darling …” “More …” And etc. etc. Enough to melt the thorniest heart.
Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories Page 24
