Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [13]
If the cat wanted to learn, how much could we teach it? But why should it want to learn? A cat is different, a cat is not us, a cat is satisfied to be a cat and speak as a cat.
I’ve known only one cat that seemed to long for human speech, and in this I’m being outrageously sentimental and subjective. His name is Flanagan and he’s one of my sister’s horde, a beautiful cat with the softest blue-gray fur and round yellow eyes with an intense, yearning expression. A cat of passionate moods, when he feels loving it’s not enough to watch a human from across the room and squeeze his eyes shut; laps are not enough. He scrambles straight up toward the face, clawing his way up trousers and shirt and throwing his forelegs around the neck in a desperate hug, his body pressed against the chest, and purrs raggedly and nips and licks the face in a fit of thwarted passion quite awkward for a human to accept from a cat. Even in his less emotional moments there’s something urgent and frustrated about Flannie in his human contacts, and even the most pragmatic among us struggles with thoughts of reincarnation and princes enchanted into toads.
Not that he doesn’t enjoy other cats. He used to come down to my house every day to sing with Sidney. These sessions were enormously satisfying to both cats; he and Sid faced each other off on the porch and yowled and yodeled after the manner of the pregame show of rival tomcats. Both were neutered, and unthreatened, and secure in their territories; it was a combination of concert and the war games of little boys. Flanagan had a fine talent for swelling up, not just the fur but the entire cat, like a blowfish, to astonishing size and weaving his head gruesomely while he yowled. No blows were ever offered. After twenty minutes or so, Sidney would come back inside and Flan would go on home.
Unhappily, after several months Sidney got bored. He stopped going outside when Flanagan gave his invitational calls. He is old, and would rather sleep than sing.
Then Flanagan would hook his paws into the screen door and stare beseechingly in at me, trying to leap out through his own eyes and tell me how badly he wanted Sidney to come out. I would drag Sid from his chair and throw him out the door; Flanagan would moan hopefully, and Sid would turn his back in silence and ask to come inside again. It was very sad.
Then I had to move away from the little house. The furniture left in a truck, the cats and pictures in the car, and the next day I went back with a broom and a bucket for the final cleanup.
Flanagan heard my car and came hurrying down the driveway and across the porch and hooked his paws into the screen door. I let him in. “He’s not here,” I said. “He’s gone.” Flanagan scattered in panic through the empty house and ran around every room and closet, over and over. Nothing. He came back to me and stared up, searching my face.
He wasn’t looking in my face for Sidney; he was looking for an explanation. He was straining to split open his limitations and ask “Where is he?” and understand the answer. Yet how can a cat, who has never heard an explanation, want one so badly?
I could only shake my head and gesture vaguely at the empty room.
There was always something embarrassing in my dealings with Flanagan. Once or twice it flicked across my mind to offer him a pencil and paper: if he couldn’t say it maybe he could write it down. It was hard to fend off the sense that inside that gray fur a frantic human was waving his arms and pointing to the adhesive tape across his mouth.
Able to limp only the smallest distance into the minds of the speechless, we comfort ourselves