After some delay, Elke had managed to secure the prized permesso, the official document from the town hall permitting our team to carry out their work with feral cats. This time, there was no need for secrecy or fear of the dreaded denuncia. It’s a threat you often hear in Sicily: ‘I’m going to make a denuncia to the police,’ an irate housewife will say as you spoon Whiskas onto a plastic plate in the street. The denuncia had been a very real threat during our Taormina episode but there was no fear of that this time. Now, I could go public. I contacted a journalist who worked for La Sicilia, who found it an interesting human interest story – a change from the usual daily diet of politics and sport. He invited me to his house in Letojanni and photographed me holding an unwilling cat.
On 23 May, Dorothea, together with Naples vet Anna Maria and cat catcher supreme Teresa, travelled on the night ferry from Naples to Catania. Elke and I waited by the garage to greet them. And there they came, driving in convoy along the road that ran by the sea, the spaymobile followed by a large van. People stopped to stare. Letojanni had never seen anything like this before. By the time they reached the garage there was quite a crowd, curious to know what was going on. Calmly, Dorothea and her team set about unloading cages and traps, more than I had seen so far. They obviously meant business. We organised ourselves in the garage, which housed the two vehicles easily enough with plenty of space around them to set out the cages. Emilia from the Palm Beach Cafe on the other side of the piazza appeared bearing a tray.
‘I thought you could do with some coffee,’ she said.
You could see she too was curious to find out what was going on. Her eyes widened at the sight of so many traps. Dorothea drank her coffee swiftly while she darted questions at Elke and me. What area were we covering? Were there any local people willing to help? No, she wouldn’t stop for lunch.
We’re in for a tough week, I told myself.
Soon Teresa and I set off on the first of our many cat-catching trips.
Feral cats are very crafty. Several entered a trap and delicately ate the bait while managing not to put a paw on the spring mechanism. We also saw several mother cats pick up and carry away their almost grown-up kittens in their mouths. It was incredible how they seemed to intuit what was going on! Nevertheless, we caught enough to keep Dorothea and Anna Maria working from early in the morning till mid-evening with scarcely a stop for lunch.
‘They must eat something,’ Emilia protested when she heard Dorothea had decided not to go to the restaurant for lunch.
She packed up large panini stuffed with cheese, ham and tomato and sent them over to the garage, where we perched on boxes in the sunshine to eat and relax for half an hour. But it was always only half an hour. I learned a lot from Dorothea, who worked with German efficiency. Her years in Naples struggling with cruelty and the plight of sickly animals had given her a steely resolve, which sometimes made me feel ineffectual. I was still a novice with all the idealism that implied and had a lot of toughening up to do. Even though I knew we were doing it in their best interests, I was finding the capture of these cats an increasingly stressful experience. My heart went out to their cries and frantic attempts to escape and I was always relieved when the time came to release them again.
Every cat we caught was put in a labelled cage ensuring they would return to their own colony. The vets also tattooed each feline to indicate it had been neutered. Only one cat had to be put to sleep; he had an ulcerated tumour in the mouth and was incapable of eating or drinking. All the others (seventy female and forty-five male) recovered well.
Thanks to the local cat ladies, most of the cats were quite well fed but they did suffer from fleas, ticks and worms, which had to be treated. Cats with respiratory symptoms were given long-action antibiotics and eye drops. Follow-up treatment is impossible; these animals are used to being free so that keeping them in cages any longer than is necessary for recovery from their operations constitutes maltreatment.
Early on in the week a couple turned up at the garage. Cheery-faced Maria Annunciata and her tall German husband Norbert had heard about the spaymobile and were curious to see what was going on.
‘We’ve heard so much about you and the wonderful work you are doing. But what made you come to Letojanni?’ Maria wanted to know.
Dorothea, busy as always and bent over an inert cat, jerked her head in my direction, where I was checking on some of the sleeping cats.
‘Thank you, thank you so much!’ Maria enthused. ‘Mamma mia, what a wonderful thing to be doing!’
‘We’d better go outside,’ I said, not wishing to disturb the vets’ concentration.
‘We’d really like to help you, wouldn’t we, Norbert?’ Maria continued. ‘What can we do?’
‘Please, help me find some more cats.’
I was feeling a bit desperate. At the rate Dorothea and Anna Maria were working, we would soon run out. I knew what that meant: with nothing to do, she would pack up early and leave. There was no messing about with Dorothea.
So we spread ourselves wider, Maria and Norbert taking me to parts of Letojanni I had never visited before. These were areas of larger houses with big gardens and plenty of cats. Anxious to keep Dorothea supplied, I trespassed without scruples, wandering among lemon and orange trees, stalking felines. I was down on my hands and knees crawling in someone’s shrubbery when I heard a voice demand: ‘Who’s there?’ When I emerged with my hair awry and my face streaming with sweat, it took some explaining as to what exactly I was doing there.
On another day a skinny young man in a yellow council jacket turned up in the garage. He hung around the ambulance, fascinated by the two vets at work. The following day he was back. Dorothea seemed to appreciate Alfio’s intelligent questions and didn’t turn him away.
‘I’d really love to have been a vet,’ he told her, ‘but I left school when I was fifteen and started work.’
Alfio was probably in his twenties but his features seemed to belong to another era: a narrow face with a high forehead and dark hair slicked back. He worked as a refuse collector, which seemed to be a job that gave him quite a lot of the day to himself. Dorothea soon enlisted his help and he proved to be a tireless worker, learning quickly what to do. He helped us carry the cats in their cages to and from their colonies and watched, fascinated, over them as they emerged from their anaesthetic.
‘She’s woken up!’ he would call triumphantly. ‘She’s fine.’
I think he would have made a good vet.
It was an exhilarating feeling: Letojanni was rallying round. My journalist friend couldn’t keep away. He kept on turning up at the garage to interview us and we were featured in La Sicilia at least three times during that week.
Teresa was a true Neapolitan with the classic looks of an Old Master and a loud, infectious chuckle. As we drove around the countryside on our cat search we became good friends. One day we were walking past some ramshackle, empty houses when Teresa suddenly stopped.
‘Shh, listen!’
It was the sound of a puppy whining but we couldn’t make out where it was coming from. We retraced our steps until we came to a house where the lower panels of the door were missing. Teresa went down on her haunches.
‘It’s in there,’ she muttered and clambered through the hole. Soon she reappeared and handed up a small white puppy. It was shivering and whimpering.
‘What was it doing in there?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, but it’s too young to fend for itself. It’s coming with us!’
‘What shall we call her?’ Teresa asked as we drove back to the garage.
I mused that the little dog had somehow restored my belief in what I was doing. We were there to help animals live a better life and that would certainly ring true for this one. Teresa had already said she was going to take her home to Naples.
‘What about Speranza?’ I suggested. ‘Hope, in English.’
‘I like it. That’s what we’ll call her.’
It’s good to know that lit
tle Hope is now in Naples having a great life with Teresa’s other dogs.
When we began to run out of cats, Elke came to the rescue again, this time taking us further afield to the area around Mazzaro Bay, below Taormina. We drove up into town to catch some of Genoveffa’s colony. She was waiting outside her kitchen and, as we approached, put her finger to her lips and beckoned us inside.
‘Thank you for coming but we have to be careful. There is a neighbour who is spying on me and if she sees us with the trap she’ll go to the police.’
The permesso extended only as far as the borders of Letojanni so we had to take care no one saw us. We sat in the salotta while Genoveffa hovered in the yard, watching the neighbour’s movements. After about half an hour she came in, smiling.
‘I’ve just seen her go out with her shopping bags. Hurry before she comes back!’
As I have said before, cats take their time but we were able to catch three of them and stow them away in the car before the suspicious neighbour returned.
By early afternoon on the Friday we had to admit defeat; we could find no more cats. For the first time that week we could sit down to a meal at a respectable hour rather than nine or ten at night. We went to Ciao Ciao, my favourite eatery in Letojanni, set right on the beach. It was a wonderfully warm night and we could hear the soft sough of the waves breaking and watch the moon laying its silver path across the water. As all the tensions of the week melted away I realised I was ravenous. I ordered and devoured a huge pizza Siciliana. It was loaded with capers and anchovies and I knew from past experience I would pay for it with a great thirst later on but I can never resist this dish. The others dug into their pasta and pizza, and the wine jug was refilled. With the voices of local people in my ears, on this perfect night I felt at peace with the world. We stayed late, chatting and laughing, high on the success of our amazing week.
The following day the ambulance and van were packed up ready to leave. In those few days the intensity and accomplishments of our work had drawn us close together; we hugged and kissed and a few tears were shed.
Before I left for England once again I discovered the identity of the figure I’d watched strolling in Piazza Durante. His name is Mario and he has acted and directed in the theatre for many years of his life. I was talking to the man in Letojanni’s Internet shop when Mario came over to join us. He seemed delighted to find someone who spoke English and we went for a coffee.
‘I’m sorry, it’s time to leave,’ I said.
Mario smiled. ‘You’ll be back.’
And 2005 had scarcely begun before I was indeed back in Taormina. I really should have learned by now that proposals by Sicilian authorities are delusive as will o’ the wisp, offering false hope, which is never fulfilled. Nevertheless, there I was in chilly January, staying in a damp apartment and awaiting summons to the city of Messina for a meeting with Sicilian vets. And waiting; I called Mario and caught the bus to Letojanni. We met for tea at Il Gabbiano cafe. I was curious to know why he continued to live in this small village where he obviously didn’t belong spiritually, among people who didn’t understand him.
‘You understand, dear Jenny? It seems I might be an agent of the British Secret Service!’ He noticed my quizzical expression. ‘I mean it, that is how they see me here in Letojanni.’
But I didn’t know whether he was joking or not. I glanced down at the black and white photographs scattered over the cafe table: Mario’s theatrical history, the plays he’d acted in all over Europe, taking him further and further from his Sicilian roots into the world of Brecht, Theatre of Cruelty, Theatre of the Absurd. There were some reviews written in English spanning the nine years he lived in London.
As he had explained to me during this short winter’s afternoon, that was his most serious false step. He went against his better judgement to move from Rome to Norwood, where there was nothing to do in the evenings but go to the pub – his reason: a summer affair with an Englishwoman, which was prolonged because she found herself pregnant.
‘The moment she was back in England, she changed. She went back to her work as a lecturer and I was left floundering, a fish out of water. I stayed for the sake of my daughter – until she was old enough to understand. Then we separated but, you understand, I’d lost all my theatrical contacts.’
Now he was ‘exiled’ in Sicily, in what he called a miserable trap. It was nearly a year since I’d met him in the Internet shop, checking his emails as if it were a lifeline.
I thought of the figure I saw striding towards me as I sat waiting outside Il Gabbiano, enjoying the winter sunshine. He had swept along the street, his long, dark overcoat flapping, dark glasses, film-star good looks. Mario was tall and handsome in a slightly sinister way. His eyes were dark and intent, his smile wry. He had the most wonderful gravelly voice and spoke Italian beautifully. More indefinably he had the elegance of another age; his manners were delightful. You could imagine Mario belonging to some Mittle-europe cafe society seated in one of those Grande Caffes you see in Turin, his constant companions wickedly dark coffee and a smouldering cigarette. Come to think of it…
‘Well, you do look rather like a secret agent,’ I said.
Mario laughed and shook his head. He refilled our cups. I stared at the translucent liquid with a momentary longing for a comforting English brew, something to warm me. The conversation on the bus as I rode to and from Taormina for these teatime rendezvous with Mario centred on the normally Anglo-Saxon subject of weather. No one had ever known Sicily to be as cold as it was this January. The elderly woman muffled from head to toe in coat and scarves leaned over to offer the driver a sweet, speaking in a high keening voice about ‘il freddo’. And he – taking one hand off the wheel to accept it – commiserated: ‘Da fa morire.’ (I smiled to myself. Enough to kill you. Hardly!)
‘Come on!’ I wanted to say. ‘It’s not that bad. Look out the window, see the sun on the sea, you’re not snow-bound like North Italy.’ We were swinging down the curving roads towards Letojanni, past stone walls covered with bougainvillea. ‘Cold? What kind of blood have you got in your veins?’
The driver’s mobile phone rang and he answered. A friend, it seemed, who wanted to meet up that evening. ‘Dependere del tempo (It depends on the weather),’ he sighed.
I knew about the truly freezing weather in northern Italy because I’d been watching the RAI news every night, sitting in my damp apartment with a glass of red wine. I was grateful I’d brought warm pyjamas and a hot water bottle with me.
Taormina was dead at this time of year; the bars closed at 20.30, a few people scuttling along the empty streets like crabs on the bottom of the ocean. There was nothing to do but go back to the apartment, eat and watch television until it was time for bed.
I can’t see you doing this fifteen years ago, I told myself. If you were tucked up cosily in bed then, it would be a matrimoniale, a huge double bed, with a Sicilian lover. Certainly not cuddling a hot water bottle in my narrow, not very comfortable bed, which must stand away from the wall because of the damp. Surreal.
Several times over these last two weeks I’d asked myself, What am I doing here? although I knew the answer. I was awaiting a meeting with the head of veterinary services in Messina – a meeting that should have happened the week I arrived.
‘Pazienza,’ Sergio, president of the National Canine Defence League (Taormina branch), told me. ‘The boss is very busy, he has people coming to see him every day.’
‘Doesn’t he know that I’ve come all the way from England to see him?’ I complained.
Sergio gave an expressive Sicilian shrug: ‘Muh!’
I was trying to be patient because there was so much at stake. The meeting was to discuss the necessity for a permanent clinic for feral cats in Taormina. If I succeeded with this, the next part of my plan, it would be an enormous breakthrough in what had otherwise become a gridlock situation. But on nights like these, watching people in Milan and Turin struggling through snow, hearing a kidnapped Italian
journalist pleading for her life, I lost heart. That’s why I escaped to Letojanni to have tea with Mario, when we could at least commiserate together.
Every time we entered Il Gabbiano, heads turned. I knew they were trying to work out whether we slept together – indeed, why we were together at all. Already they’d found this lengthy stay of Mario’s mysterious and then he turns up with a foreign woman – just what was going on? I imagined them asking each other as they turned back to their tables and leaned their heads together.
What they didn’t know was that we were linked by a common sense of exile, a kind of existential waiting. I, the meeting in Messina; Mario, confirmation of a drama workshop he had proposed at nearby Roccalumera. If he didn’t do something concrete, he said, he would go mad.
But with Mario there was a mutual reticence, a tacit understanding that our conspiracy should remain at this cerebral level. Hard to explain, a sense I didn’t understand myself: taboo. Of course, I had had my initial fantasies – I wouldn’t be Jenny if I hadn’t. But there was an actor’s narcissism about him, which warned me that any involvement would be a disaster. A complicity of attente then but we were both aware that it was probable nothing might occur. This was Sicilianita as the author of The Leopard, Tomasi di Lampedusa, confirmed in the voice of the Prince of Salina:
The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders, whether so by origin or, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing.
Mario passed me the plate of dolce and I took a cannoli – a kind of cream horn. Then I regretted it because they are squishy things to eat.
‘Here you are watched and checked every day, whom you frequent, where you take your coffee, with what linguistic vocabulary you express yourself, who you are, politically based on country and tribal; politics and so on. It’s tragic and grotesque.’
The Great Sicilian Cat Rescue Page 11
