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I
was unaware that for some years now, in Italy as in other countries,
February 17th has been celebrated as “Cat’s Day”, with shows, round
tables and a variety of events.
It
seems that ours is a happy time for cats. A lot of the old superstitions
and devilries have been set aside, a segment of the food industry provides
for their nourishment, and it is quite normal to see them in television
advertising spots as they roll balls of wool, demonstrating a skill
equal to that of the great champions of football.
Again
in TV advertising, the cat is filmed walking on the keys of a piano
before it lowers its mouth to the bowl. This confirms me in my conviction
that by nature the cat is a pianist. There has always been a relationship
between cats and music, as was demonstrated by Flemish painter David
Teniers (1610-1690) who painted a “concert of cats” with a full score,
and by Corrado Govoni (1884-1965), a poet who adored metaphors and equated
“epileptic violins” with their night cries. It is difficult to write
about cats. Like the moon, stars, clouds, flowers and swallows, the
domestic cat is a well-known figure in literature.
The
risk is that of repeating what are by now stock images: from the “sphinxes
stretched out at the base of solitude”; the “mystic pupils that secrete
atoms of gold”, as Baudelaire chants in the “Flowers of evil”, to the
sixteenth century panegyrics of Pierre de Ronsard, “The cat has something
of the supernatural”. And then Théophile Gautier (“it is the tiger of
the poor”), Apollinaire (“I would like to have in my home / a reasonable
woman / a cat that touches the books...”), Carlo Dossi (“the hand warmer
of poor old women”), Umberto Saba (“Do you not feel the cat vibrating
like a heart”) and many others.
There
is also the example of the “Gattomacchia” by Lope de Vega (1562-1635),
a delicious burlesque poem of almost three thousand verses. It is astonishing
that the Spaniard’s verses have not established a cult among the friends
of the cat, that no females are called Zapaquilda and no males Marramaquiz
or Micifuf. T. S. Eliot has spoken the truth: giving a name to cats
is an enterprise doomed to failure. Only the cat knows its true name,
recorded in who knows what inaccessible registry.
The
great Eliot, fascinated by the poetic play of this intuition, suggests
a hypothesis: when we see a cat “immersed in profound meditation”, it
means that its mind is lost in contemplation “of the thought of its
name”. But I believe that it is possible to escape from the metaphysical
circle within which we have so far remained. I recall an image that
has struck me since in my youth I read Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions
of an Italian, “An old tabby cat grave as a councillor”.
Well,
if I think about the tabby that was in my house for many years, when
in memory I see it again motionless on the television set or on the
arm of a chair, I find that it was truly “a councillor” to me. It taught
me at least two virtues: silence and patience. Two virtues that have
become rarer than the “atoms of gold” that shone in the depth of its
eyes. Entire libraries of books testify to the fascination and interest
the domestic cat has always aroused. At times, when I see the cats that
live in the city, I think that their secrets are linked to a lost idea
of the fireplace, of burning firewood, of warm ashes. The truth is that
it is probably not possible to penetrate fully into the feline mind.
Before us, there always opens an insurmountable no-mans land, covered
by banks of mist.
What
can we do? According to some students of cat behaviour, the safest road
is that of resigned irony. Resigned in the sense that cats are said
to be neurotic and that the causes of feline neuroses are ourselves.
That is, we lovers of the cat, we its faithful subjects, we its devoted
custodians, we its poets, incapable of accepting any small commandment
essential to cohabitation. For example, what has been expressed in these
few simple words “The greatest gift a cat gives to its owner is the
grant of its presence. One has to learn to content oneself with that”.
Let us cease from knocking at the doors of your secrets, from wanting
to understand, from psychoanalysing your eyes, from stretching you out
on Freud’s couch. You are the proof that “the true mystery of the world
is the visible, not the invisible”.
(Traduzione:
Interpres sas - Giussano)
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