Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [61]
Cats that can find their way across the continent are not likely to get lost around the corner; cars have done for Rusty and Samantha, Tuffy and Tigger, as they went about their catly business and refreshed their ancient spirits under the moon that used to be theirs.
In the city my cats are prisoners. No more the smells of evening or the joys of the chase, no more trees to climb, bushes to nap under, holes to dig, or even strolls down the alley in search of friendship or a fight. The books all say it’s best. The books all say cats adjust to it perfectly well and never miss freedom, learn to watch the world from a window and go to bed at night domestic as a hen.
They’re healthy and as safe as cats can be. They have each other, and they’re fond of me, which may be some compensation, if cats think in terms of compensation, but who can doubt that they’re diminished? Did they come this far, having been worshipped as gods, having saved the world from rats, having survived European Christianity, in order to be ornaments for my couch? The old ones sleep more here; there’s only dinner to wake up for. Morgan paces and whines and searches my face for the answer.
I think about living in a place where cars are as rare as ostriches, and opening the door, and the cats departing one by one across the garden with their tails up, toward the dark woods where only cats and owls can find their way, swaggering like the cat that walked by its wild lone through scentscapes of night and rustlings in the grass.
Everywhere I go along the streets cats behind glass watch me from their windowsills, many of them alone in there all day, and certainly many more without even access to a window and only the motionless furniture to watch. A square of sunlight creeping across the rug. Their minds must be dulled and fogging over, and their spirits shriveling.
Cats are not likely to outlast the car, but cars are not likely to outlast the cat, either, only limit the lives of some and shorten the lives of others. Shortening the lives of strays is a mercy, but the car isn’t going to wipe them out. Nothing will.
The underworld of cats will continue, thanks to their resolute sex life and skill and devotion as mothers. All over the world in their millions cats still slip past the hazards of history and between the ankles of adversity and survive, even if only for a year or two, tenacious of life, searching out what they need to stay alive for long enough to nurse their young. And in the intervals of survival, they find a sunny ledge on which to wash, and contract the pupils of their eyes to slits, drawing the iris like a luminous silk curtain almost closed across what it is they know.
There’s a notion common to many cultures that you can tell the time by looking into a cat’s eyes. Baudelaire looked into his cat’s eyes and said: “Yes, I see the time; it is eternity.”
8
A Choice of Cats
Not so many years ago in America, the purebred cat was considered a snobbish and specialized taste. Even the word purebred was suspect, and smacked of an elitist European reverence for aristocracy. These weren’t real cats, they were designer cats, man-made cats, interior decorator cats, probably fragile and neurotic, owned by a small band of fanatics who exhibited them in shows and a larger group who acquired and discarded them according to the color of their furniture. Among the rank and file there was a distinct feeling that they were artificial somehow, created by genetic meddling to please the kind of show-offs who shouldn’t be allowed to keep cats in the first place.
It’s true that some of the breeds have been produced or at least encouraged by meddling, crosses like the Himalayan, and genetic