They took me for a cat because I played my part well. Another was a purple grape, or an old man, a lady blackbird. I was a cat.
I’d open my eyes and see before me a whole apple, which was all I needed to fall back asleep; it was just the two of us, me and the apple, and it was only right. I’d close my eyes, and if I opened them again it was purely out of scrupulousness, to say “sure is an apple”—sometimes it’s nice to put yourself to the test, to clear up that doubt that you didn’t have. Later you go forward with your eyes closed, it’s the scent of apple that you smell from up close, from two centimeters away but you’re already in it by now, underneath the taut skin; the apple stays smooth and whole and green, only it’s been flattened with snout on top of paws, and the juice inside turns warm and heavy enough for you to feel it throbbing.
They were sleeps laid out on horizontal surfaces. Without moving, the surfaces replaced each other, one by one, tables which must have been made of plastic or wood, a baby’s changing table, an ironing board, getting larger and more immaterial over time, but always horizontal, and vast, similar to certain views from above, when in the evening above the rooftops you don’t lift or lower your head, but keep square in your pupils the darkening line of the horizon.
The voices, if there were any, or the braking of a car at a turn, were stretched into razor-thin threads inside us, were flattened into the slightest sheets of metal foil that glisten in the light.
You went from one season to the next without even moving, feeling the approaching damp, the scent of apples, and the winter was almost in us, another one of those surfaces stretched on the ground, advancing while we stayed still, even the flowerbeds keeping motionless under the broken branches. You could listen to the chill coming, the old man felt it in his hands, he complained as he showed the chilblain in his frozen mitts.
“Life of the old,” he said. “Now it’s their turn,” and with his hand he’d gesture out there, but they weren’t always out and about.
“We did our part,” he repeated two or three times. “We put in our years.”
He didn’t turn around to speak; he looked straight in front of him the way old people do: it’s their way of looking back.
I listened to him the way I’d listen to the radio: I’d stay close to it, a box twice as wide as the old man, which when it spoke made the voice of the announcer or of the singing lesson; I’d take anything—the woman’s hour, Nabucco—and I’d doze off, they were quiet hours to pass in some way; I wouldn’t have missed a single word for anything in the world, I’d even take the old man’s cough if he was the one speaking. If he stayed quiet, he was a mute radio, which kept company all the same.
3
I was an impartial cat: if they called me, I’d come, whether it was the old man or someone else, so long as there was a reason. Or else I’d wait for them to come to me. I’d wait and say, “Let’s wait and see.”
The announcer called out to check if they were home: if Nabucco or his wife were home, then she could avoid going downstairs. She called out again, shouting, “No one’s home”—but she didn’t get an answer. Then she came down the two flights of stairs and went straight into the kitchen: the coffeepot was ready on the stove, she only needed to light it and wait. She filled my bowl too, lukewarm water mixed with milk, but I didn’t find it enticing—milk at that time of day does nothing for me. She didn’t insist, but looked around the kitchen; she took one of the singing teacher’s shoes and slipped it onto her foot: it was a little big on her, but you could tell that she liked the model, she looked at herself straight on and from the side to be totally convinced. I could only judge from behind; I was sitting in the old man’s spot, waiting for the announcer to turn around: I determined that to switch off the flame under the coffee she’d have no choice but to turn. Now she had picked up both shoes and was twisting them between her fingers to make sure it was good leather; I can’t say if she still found them to her liking, she might have and she might not have: the announcer was the only person in the house about whom I could never be totally sure: I had met her when she was only a little bigger than the sage plant, they had said to me, “Meet the baby girl,” and smelling her knees—hers, but smaller back then—I had asked myself from that first encounter, “It couldn’t be a cat?” Well, in all our years living together, that doubt had never really left me.
The coffee was ready; the announcer was about to bring it to her father, when he came into the kitchen with the toolbox. I hadn’t heard him coming either: with the grumbling of the coffeepot it was hard to pick up the slippered steps. I can’t even describe how nimbly she slid the shoe she was still holding under her shirt the moment the old man appeared. I sat myself on the table behind the sugar bowl in order to give the old man his seat; I was also interested in following the conversation from up close: after all, I was in the know about that superfluous bulge between the announcer’s breasts.
Rarely did the old man drink his eleven o’clock coffee in the kitchen. Usually they brought it to him in his rooms, whichever one he was in, or in the garden—he’d drink it in two sips, absorbed in the work that needed to be finished. He’d say thank you as he put down the small empty mug, say it with his lips wet with coffee, and go right back to looking after the roses or whatever it was he was doing.
In my current position on the table, I had in front of me the face of the old man and his voice with that coffee taste. The announcer’s voice, meanwhile, came at me from behind; every time she spoke, a little bit of shoe spoke too, saying, “You couldn’t let someone give you a hand?”
She slurred her words as she said this, without knowing what work her father had been doing in there.
The old man replied soon after: he didn’t like to answer, especially in the morning; if he spoke, he spoke as if to himself.
“You could hear the racket all the way up there,” the announcer went on.
Up there meant the attic floor: she had lived there since Nabucco had gotten married; but the kitchen was the same for everyone.
The voice in front added something brief; the one behind was ready to go on, but for longer this time. Then the old man spoke again, then his daughter, then I think only the old man spoke; or maybe he coughed without speaking anymore, and I was waking up and regaining my bearings right away: the cough in front, the announcer’s silence behind; I was convinced that my being there did them good.
Now and then the announcer counted my vertebrae, rubbing them with her fingertips, probably without realizing it—I let her do it, it was an unthinking habit like coiling and uncoiling a lock of hair. Her hands seemed fairly clammy, maybe she had just gotten out of bed.
I turned around to smell her face, but what I mostly got was the smell of the hidden shoe, so I roamed around the kitchen aimlessly, the tiles had a clean scent; I calmly headed toward the hallway, maybe to go up to the announcer’s room. The clock pendulum made the sound it always did in front of the hanging overcoats, in front of the umbrellas: you could get lost just looking inside it—not that I was foolish enough to think I could stop its clockwork, an impossible feat from this side of the glass. But to push a snout up against it, there between the brass pendulum and the winder—in those oscillations of time, minute after minute—I saw the essence of things spring forth; I saw the soul of a cat, not body nor breath but a semblance of dark hair and whiskers barely recognizable, the glistening of an iris, I moved away and it moved away; the soul of an overcoat came out of it, not material, not fabric, but the face of motionlessness, the idea of an umbrella, it was there and it wasn’t there, it took less than nothing to make it vanish.
I hurried up the stairs—now I had decided and I no longer looked back. On the second-floor landing I thought I made out someone yawning, I don’t remember, I went straight into the attic: jackpot: she was there, against the lamp, but I couldn’t reach her, I jumped onto the windowsill so I’d be ready, the windowsill was narrow and cluttered with things, and in my haste I knocked over the ashtray; it fell to the ground but I don’t think it broke, and in the meantime the housefly spun three times toward the sink, came back to the lamp, now I was following her from up close, it was a matter of seconds, she looked for a way out, looked for the light of day, flailed against the glass and she was mine; I gave a look around me, I let her go and again she made it to the lamp, more frenziedly this time, and I ignored her, it was a sure shot, I gave a glance at the bed which was still disheveled, I followed her with my eyes, she was on the nightstand and was strolling nonchalantly on the alarm clock; I waited too, I had lain down on the floor, my muscles feeling sluggish, I felt like playing at being the young cat who rolls around on the floor, I took the fly, I wanted to roll around before her eyes, I spat her onto the carpet three centimeters away, she was still alive and I started to lie down and stretch out on my back, I shifted onto my side pushing myself with my paws, I liked keeping those three centimeters of distance, no more and no less; and when I heard the announcer coming up, I popped the fly into my mouth, and it was like a feather in my cap.
