Year: 2009

I realize I’m talking about cats most of the time. What to do? Cats are owning my brain.
I was taking a walk earlier, and I always take the same route, because there’s not great variety of available choices here. There’s always this big white cat outside a wooden door near home I like to observe whenever I can, and this cat is beautiful but it it also looks very miserable. It’s an albino, with one blue eye and the other green, but so very pale it’s not easy to tell they’re not the same color, at least if you don’t look carefully. The nose and the inner part of the ears and also the paws are of a lovely fair pink that make it seem they’re made of confetti. The expression the cat has is just amazing: a mix of resentful and astonished, with just a hint of pitiful. I cannot tell if it’s a she or a he, as the cat doesn’t trust strangers enough to let them check… Well, to tell the truth, today it demonstrated a little bit of friendliness and for the first time ever it came closer, but it’s still not friendly enough for more. Anyway, this cat is awesome, it’s so big and it has the thickest bushiest wildest fur ever attached to a feline specimen. But the poor thing has seen better days. Months ago I remember it was as clean and as white as a plush before you get it out of the toy store. Now it’s quite some time that I always see it wandering in the courtyard of the house where I suppose it lives, but it always stays on the outside, on the doorsteps or behind some vase, it doesn’t look like somebody actually gives a damn where it is or what it does. And the fur looks weird. First of all it’s dirty in several points. The craziest spot of grey dirt is on the forehead, like somebody rubbed a piece of charcoal on it, and it makes the cat look like it has a mohawk or something. Also, some patches of fur are hanging down the animal’s body like they’re going to fall down at any moment, so the animal looks a bit like a trashy carpet somebody has thrown away. I just wonder… what transformed a cat whose looks were like those of a TV commercial into some wrecked creature? And it looks so malnourished when it used to look the symbol of all feline luxurious life. I was tempted to give it some food, but what if the owners get mad? What if I make things worse? What if the cat is actually a crazy thug, hence its pitiful look and mohawk and everything else? And most importantly, why can’t I mind my own businesses just for once?

Magna is gone. She’ll be missed. What I regret is I probably never treated her fairly. Nobody at home did, apart from my father. She simply wasn’t the kind of cat to be always around to please people. She was creepy, she looked retarded. her expression was dumb and her tongue sticked out most of the time. She was not pretty nor particularly cute. She was always hungry to the point of voraciousness, like she could not be complete unless she stuffed her stomach till it exploded. Chicken was her favorite: she like roasted chicken like no other. Some of her teeth were missing because of her sickness, she had ungraceful voice. She lacked any kind of feline charm, she looked rather a bizarre mix of a vulture and a monkey than a cat, with her big chubby body and humpy back, with her disproportionate long legs and weird face. Her fur was so soft and her ears so beautiful though, like they were parts taken from another specimen of cat. I never took pics of her because she didn’t like it and I didn’t feel like it mattered. My selfish self is sort of regretting it now. I feel she didn’t understand it – she was actually very affectionate and sweet when she felt like it – but she wasn’t treated as my other cats, who were always smart and cute and anybody wanted to caress and touch and cuddle to no end. Anybody can enjoy that kind of pet. But her case was different. She wasn’t like that at all. She was dark and shadowy and clumsy and totally inadequate, all the time. But this doesn’t mean I didn’t love her. She’s resting in a cardboard box with three withered roses and a red ribbon. My mother says she looks beautiful and unusually quiet. Tomorrow she’ll be incinerated and her ugly, lovely features will turn to ashes.

My old Magna has Feline Immunodeficiency Virus – aren’t scientific names awesome? How they can turn anything personal into something completely neutral! Anyway, FIV is the feline equivalent of AIDS. I can’t say how long Magna will live, it can be from ten days to… nobody knows. She’s all swollen and skeletal, her fur is scruffy and opaque, while she used to be such an mighty cat, so incredibly full-bodied, with a silky luminous coat like an ocelot’s. When did she contract the virus? I don’t know, presumably many years ago. She’s is nearly eleven years old.
Feeling anguish is natural. It’s not a matter of responsibility. I don’t feel guilty for her disease. It’s not that I really feel I could have done anything to prevent it. You can’t really prevent a virus like this in a cat living among other cats. It’s that it would actually be sort of reassuring to know where the responsibility lies – it wouldn’t change anything, of course, but it would just be circumscribing facts into a more approachable domain.
Right now the cat is resting behind an armchair. She’s mad at me for bothering her for making her take her medicine. I can hear her hoarse inhaling and exhaling coming from behind the armchair’s back, I can see her tail moving nervously. Though I can only think she’s being silly for not actively cooperating to her health’s sake to the point of hostility, I can see feeling that bad and having to suffer these kinds of abuses without understanding what’s going on must be quite terrible. To a person in full possession of faculties you can try to explain – though I know from experience many sick persons show no more cooperation than a cat, maybe less, even when you give them reasonable explanations. But a cat only understands nature, and syringes and bad tasting medicines are not nature to them, they are nothing but cruel tortures. All for granting survival for another month in a pitiful state, maybe a little more? Not to mention that every thread of comforting support results to be broken in the middle. Does she understands, does she not? Her purring makes me feel she does to a certain extent. There are times when lack of communicating skills from a species to another is painfully inconvenient.