Lost Cat

On the third day in Florence I called Martha – the sister I later scolded for being hysterical about a cat – and asked for help. I asked her to communicate psychically with Gattino. She said she would. She said I needed to do it too. ‘He needs reassurance,’ she said. ‘You need to tell him every day that you’re coming back.’

I know how foolish this sounds. I know how foolish it is. But I needed to reach for something with a loving touch. I needed to reach even if nothing was physically there within my grasp. I needed to reach even if I touched darkness and sorrow. And so I did it. I asked Peter to do it too. We would go to churches and kneel on pews and pray for Gattino. We were not alone; the pews were always full of people, old, young, rich and poor, of every nationality, all of them reaching, even if nothing was physically there. ‘Please comfort him, please help him,’ I asked. ‘He’s just a little thing.’ Because that was what touched me: not the big idea of tragedy, but the smallness and tenderness of this bright, lively creature. From Santa Annunziata, Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, we sent messages to and for our cat.

I went into the house to try and comfort Ezekiel, who was sobbing that his mother didn’t love him. I said that wasn’t true, that she did love him, that I could hear it in her voice – and I meant it, I had heard it. But he said, ‘No, no, she hates me. That’s why she sent me here.’ I told him he was lovable and in a helpless way I meant that too. Ezekiel was a little boy in an impossible situation he had no desire to be in, and who could only make it bearable by manipulating and trying to hurt anyone around him. He was also a little boy used to rough treatment, and my attempts at caring only made me a sucker in his eyes.

As soon as I said ‘loveable’ he stopped crying on a dime and starting trying to get things out of me, most of which I mistakenly gave him.

Caesar was used to rough treatment too – but he was still looking for good treatment. When I went to visit him at his new host house, I expected him to be angry at me. He was in the pool when I came and as soon as he saw me, he began splashing towards me, shouting my name. I had bought him a life jacket so he would be more safe in the pool and he was thrilled by it; kind treatment did not make me a sucker in his eyes. He had too strong a heart for that.

But he got kicked out of the new host’s home anyway. Apparently he called her a bitch and threatened to cut her. I could see why she wouldn’t like that. I could also see why Caesar would have to let his anger out on somebody if he didn’t let it out on me.

Ezekiel was with me when I got the call about Caesar’s being sent home. The FAF woman who told me said that Caesar asked her if he was going back to his ‘real home, with Peter and Mary’. I must’ve looked pretty sick when I hung the phone up because Ezekiel asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ I told him, ‘Caesar got sent home and I feel really sad.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ There was a moment of feeling between us – which meant that he had to throw a violent tantrum an hour later, in order to destroy that moment.

After Ezekiel left I wrote a letter to Caesar’s mother. I told her that her son was a good boy, that it wasn’t his fault that he’d gotten sent home. I had someone translate it into Spanish for me, and then I copied it on to a card and sent it with some pictures I had taken of Caesar swimming. It came back: moved, address unknown. Peter told me that I should take the hint and stop trying to have any further contact. Other people thought so too. They thought I was acting out of guilt and I was. But I was acting out of something else too. I missed the little boy. I missed his deep eyes, his clumsiness, his generosity, his tenderness. I called the Fresh Air Fund. The first person I talked to wouldn’t give me any information. The next person gave me an address in East New York; she gave me a phone number too. I sent the letter again. I prayed the same way I later did for Gattino: ‘Spare him. Comfort him. Have mercy on this little person.’ And Caesar heard me – he did. When I called his house nearly two months after he’d been sent back home, he didn’t seem surprised at all.

Gattino heard us too. In the past, when I have left other cats with a sitter for two weeks, on my return the animal acts like it doesn’t know me any more; I have to coax it back. But when Peter and I returned to the veterinary hospital to claim Gattino he purred at the sight of us. When we went back to Santa Maddalena, his little body tensed with wonder when he saw the room we had lived in together; he walked through it as if returning to a lost kingdom. My body relaxed too; I felt safe. I felt as if I had come through a kind of danger, or at least a kind of complex maze, and that I had discovered how to make sense of it. Beatrice was gracious and welcoming; the estate seemed a layered dream of natural beauty and human endeavour.

Peter was swimming in the pool – I had just emerged from it – when Beatrice put down the phone and said, ‘Bad news.’ A mutual friend, a writer I have known since the Eighties, had just lost his young wife of less than a year. They had been swimming in the Gulf of Mexico when a wave picked her up and smashed her on a coral reef. We talked about it for maybe twenty minutes. I went to email him a message of support. Then we continued to lay about the pool. The heat was thick and delicious, the trees and foliage variously textured and gently moving. There were bottles of fizzy water and little cups for espresso placed near our seats. Insects hummed and lilted. The beauty was like a film, a gauze floating over the red coral reef, the man holding the dying woman in his arms, the pain of her broken body entering his. The ocean surging around them, teaming with brilliant life.

The next day we went home. The trip was a two-hour ride to Florence, a flight to Milan, a layover, an eight-hour Atlantic flight, then another two-hour drive. At Florence Peter was told that because of an impossible bureaucratic problem with his ticket, he had to leave the terminal in Florence, get his bag and recheck it for the flight to Milan. The layover wasn’t long enough for him to recheck the bags and make it on to the flight with me, and the airline (Alitalia) haughtily informed him that there was no room on the next flight. I boarded the plane alone; Peter had to spend the night in Milan and buy a ticket on another airline; I didn’t find this out until I landed in New York with Gattino peering intrepidly from his carrier.

And Gattino was intrepid. He didn’t cry in the car, or on the plane, even though he’d had nearly nothing to eat since the night before. He settled in patiently, his slender forepaws stretched out regally before him, watching me with a calm, confidently upraised head. He either napped in his carrier or sat in my lap, playing with me, with the person sitting next to me, with the little girl sitting across from me. If I’d let him, he would’ve wandered the aisles with his tail up. This is very unusual for a cat on an airplane. Like I said, he had guts. More than me. More than most people.

*

The first time I called Caesar, he asked about Bitey; he asked about his life jacket. We talked about those things for a while. Then I told him that I was sad when he left. He said, ‘Did you cry?’ And I said, ‘Yes. I cried.’ He was silent; I could feel his presence so intensely, like you feel a person next to you in the dark. I asked to talk to his mother – I had someone with me who could speak to her in Spanish – to ask her for permission to have contact with her son. I also spoke to his sister Natalia. Even before I met her, I could hear her big, fleshy beauty in her voice – curious, vibrant, expansive in its warmth and longing.

I sent them presents – books mostly, and toys when Caesar’s birthday came. I talked more to Natalia than to her brother; he was too young to talk to for long on the phone. She reached out to me with her voice as if with her hand, and I held it. We talked about her trouble at school, her fears of the new neighbourhood, her mother’s boyfriend in prison, movies she liked, which were mostly about girls becoming princesses. When Caesar talked to me, it was half-coherent stuff about cartoons and fantasies. But he could be suddenly very mature. ‘I want to tell you something,’ he said once. ‘But I don’t know what it is.’

I wanted to meet their mother; I very much wanted to see Caesar and meet his sister. Peter was reluctant, but he was willing to do it for me. We went to East New York with a Spanish-speaking friend. We brought board games and cookies. Their mother kissed us on both cheeks and gave us candles. She said they could come to visit for Holy Week – Easter. Natalia said, ‘I’m so excited’; I said, ‘I am too.’

And I was. I was so excited I was nearly afraid. When Peter and I went into Manhattan to meet them at Penn Station, it seemed a miracle to see them there. As soon as we got to our house Caesar threw a tantrum on the stairs – the scene of his humiliation. But this time I could keep him, calm him and comfort him. I could make it okay, better than okay. Most of the visit was lovely. It is hard to remember now how lovely it was. But the pictures in our photo album say that it was: pictures of them riding their bikes down the street on a beautiful spring day; of them painting Easter eggs. We took Natalia to a riding stable; we have a picture of her getting ready to mount a horse with an expression of mortal challenge on her face; we have another of her sitting atop the horse in a posture of utter triumph.

On the way back to New York on the train, Caesar asked, ‘Do you like me?’ I said, ‘Caesar, I not only like you, I love you.’ He looked at me levelly and said, ‘Why?’ I thought a long moment. ‘I don’t know why yet,’ I said. ‘Sometimes you don’t know why you love people, you just do. One day I’ll know why and then I’ll tell you.’