by Lena Divani
Just so you can appreciate what I was up against, I’m going to make a tiny leap to the future: As was amply proven during the first months of our life together, the Damsel thought the world of her head. She had made herself comfortable in there and refused to come out. She conceived and gave birth to thoughts, probable and improbable, she reared alternative selves, she spun plots, noted debts and underlined omissions, she set up court and issued convictions and acquittals, she regurgitated the past like a goat and stretched it to join the future, she jotted down possible versions, she applied pressure to make it grow more spacious so she could fit in it the whole factory where she constructed her similes and metaphors. No trust in the body whatsoever. A simple accessory. Feet for moving, hands for holding. A tool.
OMG, what a fool! “If I do end up adopting her, I’ll have to start from scratch,” I thought. “Open your arms. Well done, dear. This is called a hug. Very nice. A hug can save you seven thousand words. A good hug can replace every single acquittal issued by your mind-court. See what I mean? Well done, dear!” (Meow No. 667: The Damsel, like all lower mammals, responds well to a reward system.) Anyhow. I’m closing the parenthesis and getting back to the past that all but nearly wrecked my future.
Zooey was growing up, winning over friends of the Damsel, but never managing to win her over. On the other hand, though, she was a handy housemate. She never became cumbersome. She let you be. If you opt for the sad version, you might call that indifference. If you see it more positively—and Zooey seemed a positive lad—you’d call it liberalism. Naturally, she didn’t have him castrated. Naturally, she allowed him to come and go into the street whenever he felt like playing the thug. Cat lovers were warning her that he’d get hooked to the street and would one fine day abandon home life to give himself wholly to the joys of tramping. She herself knew about tramping, knew its attraction. “He can please himself,” she would say. “It’s his life.” (Meow No. 1996: if you discern too much liberalism in love, dears, then you are not loved, unless you are housemates with the Dalai Lama. Then again, there is the exceedingly rare case that you are in fact loved very veeery much . . . ) Anyhow, the Damsel was not the Dalai Lama. What she wanted was to kind of be rid of him, really, via the liberal treatment. She had also foolishly believed all the nonsense in the yellow press, which dog lovers kept confirming: Cats are indifferent to their owners, all they care about is their home ground and their comfort. Cats don’t understand anything. They just look out for themselves. Up yours, you derogatory cads. Everybody understands everything and so do we, in fact, even more so.
I wouldn’t blame you if you wondered what possessed me, after hearing all this, to take it upon myself to get involved with Mrs. I-Don’t-Give-A-Hoot. Just pace yourself. This was the introduction. Now, here comes the main subject. One fine day during the period in which the relationship between Zooey and I-Don’t-Give-A-Hoot may by summarized as follows: “my cat comes in at 6.00 A.M. from the alley, goes straight to his dish, takes care of his hunger, his thirst, drops in for a meow by the desk where I’m sitting and then heads straight back out”; one day, all hell breaks loose. The weather in I-Don’t-give-A-Hoot’s life was tempestuous. She’d become embroiled in the madness of love with a guy who was fantastic but also every bit as mad as her, and there a fully-fledged war was being waged. They were victorious in turns but they shared the same Achilles’ heel: the soft spot each had for the other weakened them and, in the end, turned their heads soft as well. They split up once, made up twice, split up three more times. They were on the heaven-to-hell express shuttle. That fatal afternoon, however, the shuttle had broken down in the pits of hell and the former lovebirds were in the middle of the main street, yelling at each other—what else?—IDON’TGIVEAHOOT!
After the ignominious end of hostilities, the Damsel crawled willy-nilly back to her pad, slammed the door behind her and settled under her eiderdown. This was her ritual therapy: every time her boat crashed against the rocks of reality, she hid in her bed, silently waiting for the warmth of the eiderdown to stave off the arctic cold.
She had spent over three hours in her assumed position of horizontal statue when Zooey traipsed into the room. It was his time. Hers was a small house, he was visible from all quarters. The dude came in through the open balcony door and stood still for a moment. He got wind of it straight off, something wasn’t right. With a summary check, he saw I-Don’t-Give-A-Hoot flat out like a fresh corpse; he then, for the first time, leapt without hesitation on the bed and sat in front of her face, looking concernedly into her eyes. “Zooey, go and eat,” she stammered with difficulty. But Zooey didn’t go to his food or to his drink. Even a naïve cat on its second-to-third life knows that there are moments destined to unfurl the grandeur that the paltry everyday leaves stagnating inside of you. If you let them pass by, you are an embarrassment to the species, better dead by far. So, Zooey stood his ground, in vigil to his pal, heedless of hunger and thirst. He was determined to become the fortification standing between her and the encroaching despair. Throughout the night he tirelessly trained on her his healing, anti-inflammatory gaze, until it was day and she got up to go to work. Mission accomplished, he told himself and devoured the can of tuna with peas that had been waiting for him since yesterday. I bet he felt nine feet tall and mightily accomplished. He had done his race justice. Not to mention that he had laid out the first carpet square for my arrival on the scene.
LOVING TO EXCESS IS THE ROAD TO INSANITY
Between the steak and the beers, the cat talk had really gotten going among the group on the lawn. I was on full throttle myself. I was going all out to be adopted and that was that, wild horses wouldn’t have kept me back. What I heard was enough and more than enough. Her cat experience to date may have been patchy and thin but it had a Hollywood ending with a moral lesson. My colleague Zooey had worked two miracles in one. He not only flabbergasted her with his sensitivity, he also rubbed her face into her own callousness.
There, then, was a Damsel who had been taught a good lesson, and in rough circumstances, too. She, therefore, wasn’t likely to forget it anytime soon. She would never treat me as if I were a fluffy toy that happened to eat and shit without a battery. And she wouldn’t be one of those weird aunties, either, who deify their cats and dogs past all reason, just because they dislike the human race across the board.
You see, I did have bitter experience with this particular brand of pathology. On my third life, cat karma had sent me to the luxury apartment of an aesthete, a Spanish tycoon in Malaga. I was then a girl and my name was Sacha because I was the spitting image of Colette’s Russian blue cat. My deranged owner, who bought me from a pet shop specializing in pureblooded royalties, enthroned me summarily in his home as his life partner, counselor and personal coach. About his children, his wife and his colleagues he couldn’t care less. I and I alone was the apple of his eye. He let his workers starve to death but hired a Thai chef to cook the ocean king prawns with coconut milk that I liked. There was madness there, five fathoms deep, my dears. I would meow and an army of servants would rear up: one suggested clean water from alpine springs, the other smoked salmon with crabmeat, the third a fur toning massage. At first it destroyed my character. I turned fat, lazy and perverted. But then I clicked. That twisted soul could only relate to someone absolutely in his power. So I decided to teach him a little lesson and went into counterattack. He would stroke me and I would tear him to shreds. But his perversity was bottomless: the more I tore him up, the more he worshipped me. I was utterly disgusted. The worst of all was that for a decade, I had to listen to him advertise his sick devotion to me as proof of enormous sensitivity. Get away from me, you psycho. At ten years I had reached the end of my tether. Alright, dear universe, lesson duly noted: I will always make sure to look for what’s hiding under the bed of unconditional adulation. Now, please allow me to get sick and die since that’s the only way out of his clutches.
In any case, the past is past. There
was the future to look after now. So, I took a deep breath, gave myself a pep talk—“Yes, you can, you know you’ve got it!”—and I walked on stage just at the moment when the entire group was turned in the direction of my hideout. I tried an elegant and self-confident walk but unfortunately, being still an infant, I ended tumbling along on the lawn. The fortunate part was that my Perfect Whiteness looked resplendent against the deep green grass.
The first to locate me was the weak link in the chain, Madam Sweetie.
“Ah, there it is, look, it’s come out!” she cried out, clapping her hands like a sixty-year-old infant.
“Why, yes! Look at it run! But where is it heading to?” the others chorused.
The Damsel at long last put down her beer and focused on the fuzzy ball hurtling toward her. The Japanese tactic of surprise attack was very much relevant to my purpose here. It doesn’t pay to leave your target any time to respond. But then, I was a manga kitten in action: I accelerated madly and before she could move, I reached her shoes, stepped on them, and started climbing up her jeans. In zero time I was in her lap, where I feigned a fainting spell! (Meow No. 679: Dear Mohammed, don’t kid yourself. The mountain isn’t moving an inch. If you fancy a panoramic view, you’d better start climbing!)
The gathering was overcome by ripples of enthusiasm. A dozen hands were pulling at me from every direction but I was holding fast to my target’s trousers and wouldn’t budge. “Well, hey, I think it has adopted you,” Madam Sweetie ascertained. The seated Damsel, naturally felt flattered. (Meow No. 98,765: Everybody goes nuts about feeling chosen. Otherwise, pray tell, why would they stand for hours outside the so-called clubs waiting for some muscled geek to pick them out from the hoi polloi and allow them to spend 500 euros on a bottle of suspect whiskey?)
She lifted me up to face level and looked into my eyes. “See that? One is green and the other one blue!” she announced. Thanks, dad, for making me special. I know all about human folly. They want their clothing to advertise its maker loud and clear, they want a car that proclaims to the world their financial well-being. Even those pretending to be above material goods, like the Damsel, are susceptible to prettiness. Which was a bit irksome, but what was I to do? I was looking to be adopted by an ordinary human, not a guru.
“Let me see,” Ziggy then said. And as soon as he saw, “Hey, everyone, he is the spitting image of David Bowie” he summed up his description of me, and won me over once and for all. I knew I was flat-out lucky even if I had no idea who that David person was. I would find out soon enough, anyway. In the future I would hear a thousand repeats of my man Ziggy playing Rock and Roll Suicide on his guitar and singing Time takes a cigarette like there was no tomorrow, accompanied by the Damsel.
MY MOTHER’S SIN
Only, of course, no miracle lasts for more than three days. Madam Sweetie may have outdone herself in persuasiveness (“You’re not leaving this fluff ball behind? This cutie pie? You don’t have the heart, surely?”), Mr. Jean may have been supportive, Ziggy may have been virtually ready to give in, but the Damsel, though clearly she could not get her eyes and hands off me (And how could she? no, not little delectable me!) was being recalcitrant and kept repeating the hateful words, “No can do, absolutely no, not after what happened with the last one, we have sworn we’d never get another animal.” (Now, dear, if you say “animal” in that tone of voice one more time, I’m going to really hit the roof. You mean you are not an animal yourself? Are you not animate? Or have you kicked the bucket and you’re keeping it a secret?)
“Why, what did happen with the last one?” asked a neighbor who had meanwhile joined the party.
And, then, my dears, the bomb dropped: “We killed Boston,” the couple murmured in unison, going red and green at the same time. On their foreheads a neon sign started flashing that said: GUILTY WITH NO EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES.
I really didn’t need to hear that. I was dumbfounded, let me tell you. This was the surprise of all surprises. My hairs stood on end. I was a seventh life cat: how could I have been that far off the mark? Soon enough, however, my peace and calm were restored. As I heard the Damsel confess, Boston was the name they’d given to a pretty colleague of mine that her beau had given her as a gift when she deigned to come back after several months’ sabbatical in Boston. They had loved Boston and had made her a proper member of the family. Thanks be to Zooey who had prepared the ground. No more of the single girl’s one-hour stands with Zooey. They were now an item and fully prepared to give their cat a proper home. Between us, deep down, way deep, Ziggy might have hoped that, by making her a cat mom, she would gradually come to terms with the “terrible responsibilities” and the “unbearable burden” of a two-legged baby. Madam Sweetie who was mad keen on grandchildren, was most certainly hoping that Boston would work a miracle in that direction. As it turned out, the only children Boston brought to the house in the end were her own: Texas, New York, Philadelphia, (North) Carolina and California—all so adorable, thankfully, that homes were found for them on the spot.
The climax came when Ziggy finally talked the Damsel into buying a house of their own. The timing was perfect: their last landlady, a centurion with a plastic kneecap, mad as a hatter, had, after the first month, started sending them eviction notices and calling the police. She believed that an infernal machine they kept in their house was recording her conversations in an effort to drive her insane. The old girl didn’t need any such machine, of course, she was already far gone! So, they packed and left after the tenth eviction notice hoping at least to remain compos mentis themselves.
They moved into a delightful little house near a wooded hill, thinking they’d hit the jackpot. Fat chance! The new landlady had an acute ownership complex: She barged in whenever she pleased to check if they’d hung any pictures on the walls, or whether they were destroying her floors with their dancing. Eventually, she announced to them out of the blue that her daughter had gotten married which, in effect, was a marching order. The Damsel was beside herself with nerves. “You can stuff your private properties and your weddings,” she kept saying. “Tell me that I’m wrong to detest them!”
I need at this point to share with you another one of her great fixations, which gave her poor other half much grief. It wasn’t only children that, to her, were a ball and chain, but private property as well. Any kind of private property. For instance, I bet not even Lenin’s daughter hated private cars like she did. “A thousand times better a bus or a train,” she’d say. “I don’t get sworn at by other drivers and I don’t have to fret over a parking space. I can read my book, listen to my music, and arrive wherever I’m going, calm and collected.” Naturally, she had ruled out country houses as well. (“They are a form of slavery. You stay rooted in one spot.”) She didn’t even want an ordinary house for her own. (“It’s a nuisance. And it’s boring. I prefer getting to know the neighborhoods and houses of other people.”). For the first decade of her adult life she moved every year, like a Palestinian refugee. Except, the more the books multiplied and the harder the boxes became to shift, the longer the periods became during which she could stay put. (Meow No. 980: Ideology may be radical, but reality is more radical still.) She got to a point of spending two and three years in the one house. But when she fell for Ziggy she put her foot in it, as the saying goes, without even realizing it. He was a homebody, with none of her gypsy leanings. And beware of homebodies—they’ll find a way of turning you into one as well; and you’d better be grateful for it! (As a matter of fact, she’s still thanking him. She loved that house so much that, for the first time, she used the word “my” next to the word “house.” She discovered how sweet that “my” could be. And once that starts to happen, you know as well as I do that, afterwards, the sky’s the limit.)
So, they leafed through the classifieds and found an amazing place in the northern suburbs. Its view of the sunset would be the envy of the aficionados of Santorini. It was like a ship, open and breez
y from all sides. Not to mention that right next door lived Polyxeni, a dyed-in-the-wool cat lover with seventeen cats inside the house and innumerable others gallivanting in the sixteen hectares of her orgiastic garden. The birds sang in the trees and they meowed underneath. It was heaven. The folks got all excited, they painted it and fixed it up and then brought in all of their furniture, books and CDs in one day. They let Boston wait at the house by the wooded hill until it was all set up, so she could walk into her new kingdom and find it all spruced up and brand new. So, when they drove back to the old place to pay the landlady the final rent, they asked for the cat to stay in the empty house for a couple of hours, so they could nip downtown and buy new handles for the kitchen cupboards. But the petty-minded ignoramus put her foot down and demanded that they take Boston with them, thinking—would you believe it!?—that they might take off and just abandon her there. The Damsel, who was congenitally averse to human stupidity, grabbed poor Boston up and damned the despicable wrench to hell for thinking she could behave toward a living being as if it was a stool with a broken leg. The problems were: a) they had no cat basket to transport Boston; and, b) the cat was not in the least fond of being moved around, so (the stupid, unthinking) retards found no better solution than to put her in the trunk. The trip wasn’t long but, alas! It was long enough to turn the trunk into a death chamber. Boston suffered heat-stroke and expired on the kitchen tiles of her new home, which was destined to be mine. Sorry, Boston, that’s the name of the game: Your death, my life.
