The Wild Cats of Piran

by Scott Alexander Young

  “I love this system of observing the cats at a distance,” of course sounds completely different in the Rat tongue. Just like Cat, the Rat language is seldom spoken in the presence of humans. Unlike Cat, however, which is a beautiful-sounding language, Rat is an exceptionally unpleasant tongue. Thus, the observation, “I love this system of observing the cats at a distance,” came out as, “Ypkxnf, Jwbnq, Ctgexi!”

  In any case, one of the rats answered the General’s statement with a question completely irrelevant to the matter at hand. This is what Private Rat had the nerve to inquire:

  “What are we going to eat?”

  “What are we going to eat!?” General Rat shouted back in reply, his voice charged with fury. Private Rat looked back at him meekly, trying to smile.

  “I mean, er, when are we going to eat?” Did the private really believe this was an improvement? General Rat’s one working eye narrowed to a squint.

  “I’ll tell you when you’re going to eat,” he said in a quiet voice that was more frightening than if he had yelled. But then, bellowing, he exclaimed:

  “Guards! Seize the prisoner!”

  The General motioned to two of his most fearsome-looking personal guards.

  “Let’s not just eat any old thing at any old place. The private deserves the very best in town, and nothing less will do as far as I’m concerned!”

  The two guard rats grabbed Private Rat and restrained him. He squealed and squirmed under their weight, frightened by the no-doubt grisly fate that awaited him. The General was quite gifted when it came to administering punishment. The other rats rather enjoyed this sort of thing, too.

  “I wonder what’s in store for the private,” one rat said to another in what he thought was a whisper. They would not have long to find out.

  However, you, dear reader, may have to be a shade more patient. Granted, there may be some who prefer a yarn that spins itself undone from the beginning of its thread all the way to the end. But in Piran, in wild cat circles, at any rate, they like to begin their yarns in the middle, make as big a mess as possible, and then find their way to either side. It may be that you have to be a wild cat to understand this. And it may be that you have become one, by the end of these chronicles.

  Stranger things had happened, and were about to again.

  2

  Eight Lives and Counting

  More of the wild cats make their entrance on the stage of Piran, and the history of Felicia’s eight lives is examined.

  It was some time after Felicia and Dragan’s nasty brush with the brutish boy, possibly even later the same night. As clouds flitted over the face of the moon, two feral felines slid down the slippery slope outside the Basilica of Saint George. Coming to a halt, they drew themselves up in front of a hole in the ground. It was a small, dim spot on a shadowy foothold, a place difficult for a human to identify in the daytime, let alone past midnight.

  Felicia and Dragan were outside the little tunnel that was the cats’ secret entrance to a crypt: a subterranean burial chamber underneath the old church. This crypt was indeed the principal secret hiding place for the wild cats of Piran, certainly the one they used most often. Felicia and Dragan emerged from the pitch black into its vast cool chamber. Flinging themselves around in the dim light of the tomb were most of the stray cats that made up their little band. The gang of “Gatti” (Italian for “cats”) made full use of the old tomb’s spaciousness, and of course its members had no trouble at all seeing in the half-light. A few of them were resting on top of coffins; some were hanging from window bars or sprawling on the large cool floor. On the walls of the crypt were painted frescoes of saints and holy men and long-forgotten soldiers from centuries-old wars, all watching over the wild cats of Piran.

  Without a doubt, the loudest voice among all the wild cats belonged to Magyar. Magyar was a large, reddish-orange tabby cat with great, long, curling whiskers. Like all tabbies, he had a distinctive coat adorned with stripes, dots, and swirling patterns. According to certain cat pedigree snobs, a tabby isn’t actually a recognized breed of cat, but you would not have been advised to tell Magyar that, for he might have got upset and given you a good scratch upside the face. Though perfectly placid at some times, he could be quite ferocious at others, and it was always difficult to predict when he would be which. Magyar had an “M” mark on his forehead, which he said stood for his name, but in fact this pattern was common to all tabby cats. As you may know, magyar is simply another way of saying “Hungarian” (in which language it is roughly pronounced mudyar). In another life, as a human being, old Magyar might indeed have been a Hungarian Hussar, riding in the cavalry and wearing a spiffy uniform. He would have been the very ideal of an officer—until an actual war began.

  “It was raining rats and dogs last night,” Magyar was saying when Felicia and Dragan came in. Magyar fancied himself to be the comedian of the group too.

  “Raining rats and dogs, that’s mildly funny,” said Dragan, smiling his eerie smile. Seven pairs of cats’ eyes, all shining in the darkness, turned to look. By way of greeting, Felicia and Dragan rubbed faces with every cat present, and each returned the compliment. Any observant cat owner can tell you how rubbing faces is the ultimate cat “seal of approval.” If a cat rubs your face with its own, caressing its nose against your upper cheek and forehead, it means you have been named an honorary member of that cat’s family. (It’s an honor the wild cats of Piran bestow only on one human. Her name is Signora Fortuna, and we shall meet her in due course.)

  In any case, Magyar welcomed Felicia and Dragan with enthusiasm:

  “Üdvözöljük! (Welcome!)” he called out in Hungarian. “Cat dragged in, look what!” He laughed again at his own, awkwardly uttered joke, but received a shove from the female cat standing beside him. This was Beyza, the fluffy Turkish Angora whom Magyar adored above all the others.

  “We’re late because we almost lost a life on the way here. I had to use Majikat to stop it!” said Felicia. That was enough to stop all other conversation. You see, although none of the other wild cats would be so rude as to mention it, it was a well-known fact that both Felicia and Dragan each had only one of their nine lives remaining. Immediately, the guessing game began.

  “What happened? Is there a wolf out there we didn’t know about?” asked one of the cats. “Or a particularly vicious and well-organized Rat?” queried another, jokingly, knowing little the truth of its jest.

  “If you’ll all quiet down for a moment, I’ll tell you,” said Felicia. “Let’s say, ‘la situazione é gravissima ma non seria’ (the situation is grave but not serious),” she began. The wild cats gathered close to hear all about the attack by the adolescent boy and Felicia’s split-second decision to invoke Majikat. This last revelation caused a bit of tut-tutting and meowing and mewling. The wild cats believed that it was dangerous to use Majikat more than three times every lunar cycle. This was because of some old, unwritten rules.

  In any event, after sharing the details of their attack and escape, Dragan and Felicia were disconcerted to learn that this monstrous boy had been on the warpath before.

  “This time his dog he didn’t have?” asked Magyar. When Magyar was nervous or under pressure—or even just excited—he would speak in this strange back-to-front manner.

  All the other cats’ eyes turned to the Hungarian cat.

  “It’s big, typical German Shepherd dog,” said Magyar. Then, seeing that he had everyone’s attention: “He drools at the mouth a lot. But a bumblebee could outwit him. Thick-skulled, but potentially deadly: I for one didn’t like the look of his front incisors.” Magyar looked particularly pleased with himself after this summing up. He had managed a complete and rather complicated sentence without once speaking backward. But instead of congratulations:

  “Just when were you going to tell us about this, my Hungarian friend?” Dragan said, with more than a tinge of anger in his voice.

  “Him yesterday I only saw: meaning you to tell! Sorry am I. You told have sho
uld I …”

  “Hush, Magyar,” said Felicia. “We know what we’re facing now, that’s all that matters.”

  At the mention of a German Shepherd, a chill had run through the air. They were all pretty fearless felines, but German Shepherds—well, they’re another matter altogether.

  “We’d all better be careful, no matter how many lives we have left. As we know where they live, let’s keep a watch on the villa,” instructed Felicia. All the cats nodded in silent agreement. Well, all except for Magyar, who took it upon himself to repeat the proscription, again in his irregular, backward-speaking manner:

  “Quite right, everyone. On the lookout, watchful; best way to be: all cats house-watching, possible as soon as.”

  In his worldview, Magyar saw himself as the leader of the colony of feral cats in Piran. This was an opinion of his status none of the other cats shared, and one they rarely allowed him to indulge. It was natural therefore that it was Felicia who rose to the occasion with a magnificent speech that rallied all the cats around, purring oaths of agreement.

  “Friends, Piranese, and feral cats:” Felicia began. “It seems that yet another human monster and his brute dog slave walk among us!” There were low murmurings of assent among all the assembled cats.

  “But with life and limb in constant danger, will you ever find a feral cat from Piran quaking in his boots, afraid for however many of its lives he or she has left? No, I say to you!”

  “Hear, hear!” rumbled and burbled the wild cats of Piran in support of this thesis.

  “Look at us. We are, and must remain, as calm as a windless summer’s day on the cobalt blue Adriatic Sea. Calm, but vigilant. Va bene? (Is that not right?)”

  All of the cats there gathered shouted “Hear, hear!” again and the general feeling of electricity went up a notch.

  “After all, my friends,” she went on, “the wild cats of Piran have faced dogs before, haven’t we? Not to mention headwaiters, more than one police officer, and several fishermen, overeager rats, and the occasional predatory bird.”

  The cats were cheering and jeering and generally making noise by this point.

  “Marvelous!”

  “Inspired!”

  “Rousing!”

  They all agreed on this, after such a stirring speech.

  So too they concurred that it was good to be a cat, better yet to be a feral cat, and, best of all, to be a wild cat of Piran.

  SO HOW WAS IT, THEN, THAT FELICIA had become the Queen of the wild cats of Piran, even if it was an unofficial title? Whence did she derive her natural authority? To understand that, you would need to understand something of her past.

  Felicia was born into the first of her nine lives on a summer’s evening in Naples, in the Year of Our Lord 1721. She was the middle kitten of a litter of five. The five kittens were to be brought up as pets in a mansion house, or more accurately, a “palazzo.” This magnificent home had been built for a high-ranking officer in the Neapolitan Navy and his family. Something of this sailor’s spirit had passed from master to domestic animal—namely, the longing to set sail and go on adventures.

  A wandering spirit of adventure was not something conducive to the life planned for Felicia. Although she was a natural aristocrat, sitting around in stuffy, richly furnished drawing rooms listening to chamber music didn’t do much for her. She didn’t particularly care to be waited on by servant boys dressed in powdered wigs and shoes with gold buckles. This was more the type of life her mother Alessandra had wanted for her, not to mention the human mistress of the household, a bundle of nervous energy whose full name and title was Contessa Felicia Monteleone.

  As well as her “given” name, Felicia inherited certain characteristics from the Contessa: her pride, her effortless style, and her ability to get her own way, even when in the wrong. But Felicia’s need to roam the world, which she had inherited from the admiral, was that much stronger, and so one fateful night, stray she did.

  She waited until the human household was asleep, and then told one of her cat sisters, “I’m just going out for a drink.” This was taken to mean she would take a drink of water from the garden fountain. In fact, once outside, Felicia gripped hold of a climbing vine, shimmied up the wall, and disappeared forever into the sultry Naples evening.

  Escape was simple, but saying goodbye was hard, or rather, not saying goodbye. You see, Felicia knew that if any of her family thought she was leaving, they would surely have tried to stop her. It was an early lesson to the very young cat, still little more than a kitten.…

  The lesson was that you sometimes had to be cruel to be kind.

  Felicia had escaped the privilege of her circumstances and everything safe and reliable. At first, her flight from the Captain’s palazzo took her no further than across town to the Spanish Quarter, the poorest of all the poor parts of Naples. Here Felicia learned how to fight and how to steal, and she died the first and second of her nine lives. She emerged stronger and wiser each time.

  After a few more years exploring everything the feline underworld of Naples had to offer, Felicia was off on a journey that took in much of Italy and Sardinia, but also a life—several lives—spent at sea. “Before the mast,” as they used to say.

  She sailed with a Spanish Sardinian merchant ship at first, then later, but not much later, with a legendary pirate captain named Edward England, known as being a comparatively humane pirate, for he tried to kill as few captives as possible. What is not so well known was the part Felicia played in stopping Edward England from executing prisoners. She also persuaded him, using all her feline wiles, to desist from using that hideous whip, the so-called “cat o’ nine tails,” on disobedient sailors. This is just another example of how the influence of cats is so underwritten in the official version of history.

  As a ship’s cat aboard a pirate ship, Felicia had of course thrown her lot in with a band of terrifying desperadoes. But, happily, she was well-liked by them all. She became particular friends with Captain Edward England’s parrot, a very chatty fellow named Desmond. Friendships like this between cat and bird are quite rare. Like Desmond, Felicia slept in her master’s cabin, and together they sailed the seven seas. To Jamaica and then Honduras they went, then past Florida to Virginia and New England. From there it was on to West Africa, before sailing the Cape of Good Hope for the isles of Madagascar, and, later, Mauritius. All along the way Felicia dined on a steady diet of mice and rats and fish, and was considered a good luck mascot by captain and crew.

  When the Fancy, Edward England’s fastest ship and the pride of his fleet, weighed anchor, Felicia would go ashore with the men. She liked nothing better than discovering new tastes, sensations, rhythms, and colors.

  Then one day out at sea, Felicia thought she could make out the Italian coastline. The mere idea of it pulled at her heartstrings. It was all over with the pirate life, as far as she was concerned. She longed to be among animals and even humans whose ways were akin to hers. So, the next time the Fancy pulled ashore, she jumped ship and caught another on its way to Tunisia, whence she sailed first to Constantinople (or Istanbul, as it is known today), and from there to Venice.

  The crew of the Fancy had been right about Felicia: she had brought them good fortune. However, the luck of the pirates aboard the Fancy ran out almost the instant she left. For history does record that Edward England ended his life of crime as a miserable beggar, dressed in rags.

  For decades, Felicia wandered up and down all of Italy, from Palermo to Trieste. She was in Venice, that most serene city, when Napoleon’s troops marched in one day in June 1797. Afterward there was a brief stint with the world’s most famous colony of feral cats. The Coliseum cats of Rome might have seemed like the natural peer group for Felicia, but she had been born to lead, not to follow. The Coliseum cats already had a virtually invincible Queen, whose name was Agrippina. She and Felicia did not get along.

  But she simply could not bring herself to return to Naples. The fact was, Felicia still burned with sha
me whenever she thought of her desertion from the family litter all those years ago. Her memories were sometimes vague, but that particular one remained raw.

  Another of life’s lessons: while pain seems to have no memory, shame most certainly does.

  However, anywhere else in the “old country” would do. It was all “Bella Italia,” and surely that was where she belonged, if anywhere.

  So strange, then, that Felicia should end up just over the border from Italy in the little Slovenian town of Piran. She had traveled to Piran by stowing away under the back seat of a car—an Alfa Romeo Giulietta convertible to be precise. Well, by then it was the 1980s and Felicia was on to her seventh life. She had been intending to visit Piran for only a day or two. One or two other cats had told her how pretty it was.

  Once there, she had roamed about the old town, and took what she wanted from all those outdoor restaurant tables on the waterfront promenade. As greedy as any cat, Felicia strolled about the place until she came across a fellow feline. It was the rather fierce-looking, blue-gray Chartreux we now know as Dragan. At the time she encountered him, he was eating lunch on the terrace of a stout and kindly Italian lady, headfirst into a bowl of fish stew.

  “Ciao micetto (Hello kitty),” she had said, indicating the bowl. Encountering no resistance, Felicia dived in headfirst as well. But Dragan had been so preoccupied by eating that he hadn’t even noticed Felicia. Now he jumped backward, brandished his claws, and hissed. Felicia looked back at the plump but handsome blue-gray Chartreux and simply fluttered her eyelashes. Dragan was no match for that. He in turn smiled his famous, unsettling Chartreux cat grin.