I said “surge of the sea” when I should have said “cat”. My apologies for the comparison.
No one knew how or why the cat entered the Caracas. It would wander up and down the stairs, and at night its miaows and laments produced ongoing insomnia. To make matters worse, it scratched the upholstery on the chairs in the excessive entrance hall of the building and even the plastic rubbish bags that were put out at night to be taken away by the dustcarts.
Brandariz’s struggle with the cat started out being rudimentary. It consisted primarily of running after it. All the same, on one occasion, having been cornered, with an impressive display of horror, the cat started snorting and fixed Brandariz with such a ferocious stare the porter had to back down at once.
“Fire was blazing from its eyes. It was frightening how red they were.”
Brandariz was not ashamed of his retreat. Buddha, the Doberman from 8-B – nobody paid any attention to the ban on dogs in the apartments – had endured a similar fate. It also had tried to stand up to the cat, but withdrawn on account of those criminal eyes.
The second phase of the struggle was more discreet. Brandariz put out some food that had been poisoned with a product capable of laying low an elephant (Brandariz was fond of exaggeration). He didn’t say what kind of poison it was, or where it had come from.
“Nothing. The cat was immunized.”
Yes, but was it immunized ab initio (I spent some years in the seminary) or had it immunized itself by taking the poison in small doses? Brandariz didn’t clarify this point.
Nor did he specify what colour it was. Not black, lighter than that, but not white either. That practically left only grey. “Yes, something like grey,” agreed Brandariz with scant conviction, as if not wanting to be more precise. Grey is a colour, or lack of colour, that doesn’t make you commit yourself. It seemed to me that, for Brandariz, this cat could have been likened to any other cat. It was as if the cat’s substantive reality (remember my time at the seminary) prevented Brandariz worrying about unimportant details – after all, the colour of the cat was not the cat itself. And yet this lack of precision about the colour in the porter’s mind might have ended up harming him. It could also be said that his encounters with the cat, as short as they were tense, were hardly suitable for a lengthy observation.
Suddenly, for a period of time, the cat stopped being a nuisance. It disappeared. Brandariz breathed a sigh of relief. That said, he wasn’t confident the animal was dead – he’d seen it several times after he’d given up trying to poison its food and it was always in rude good health. And yet, deep down, Brandariz was sure there would be an inevitable reappearance.
Sure enough, it reappeared in the garage. This was immense, overwhelming, damp, murky, full of pillars and holes in the walls. It had fluorescent tubes that emitted little light and, like the bulbs in the attic, automatically went out a few minutes after they were turned on. For this reason, in his renewed battles with the cat, Brandariz made use of a torch – another insufficient light source.
These battles were bloodless, but highly mobile. Of course, Brandariz didn’t win a single one – that is to say, he never got the cat out of the garage. There were too many hiding places, too much space, and only one exit, which was somewhat complicated. Having said that, I’m quite sure Brandariz avoided any clear opportunity to corner the cat again. He was afraid of the fire in its eyes. But the worst thing was this: let us suppose he did force the cat outside, what would he have gained by doing so? Nothing. It would have been like winning the battle, but not the war. In a while, the cat would have been back inside. It could enter and leave as it pleased. In other words, the only solution was to eliminate it.
Why didn’t he leave it in peace? What harm was it doing down there? Might it not even have been a help in countering the rats, which proliferated in the garage?
According to Brandariz, this cat was a constant menace. Even for cars. Besides, from the garage it would have had no difficulty getting back inside the building. And as for the rats: not only did it not fight them, it actually got on well with them. This was Brandariz’s belief. But first and foremost, the cat was his enemy.
That said, in the end, they reached some kind of tacit agreement and did their best not to coincide. Not to see each other.
Until one day Brandariz discovered that the cat had had five kittens. Down in the garage, surrounded by cars – he mentioned this circumstance with the same mixture of distrust and disgust with which he talked about artificial satellites or that rubbish about a man having landed on the moon. The entente cordiale was over. Brandariz understood this novelty to be an attack of the cat – a new attack in the form of mockery.
OK then. If the cat was going to attack by means of its kittens, he would counter-attack using the same method.
One night, not long after he’d finished his working day, let’s say around ten o’clock, he left the Caracas with the five newborns in a cardboard box. He didn’t explain to me how he’d caught them. Cats defend their kittens with terrible ferocity, and this one in particular would have defended them against Brandariz – also in particular – with every last ounce of cruelty. But nor is it impossible to steal kittens from aggressive mothers, as has been proved to be the case. Aggressive and prolific mothers. They give birth to far too many kittens, and many of us remember left-over cats being thrown into the river shortly after they were born.
The streets were deserted. This meant the miaows from inside the box were heard by almost no one.
Just after the Caracas, the street turns into a little bridge, under which runs another street. Brandariz went down to this other street by means of some steps in the pavement. This took him to a desolate area with few inhabited buildings and several others under construction. In one cul-de-sac, a small, dark, blind alley, he tipped the mewing quintet out of the box, having checked there weren’t any stray dogs in the surroundings.
Brandariz turned around without giving up hope that some of the inhabitants of this new district might collect and adopt these helpless children of his enemy.
But, the very next day, three of the five kittens were back in the garage. This struck Brandariz as a repeated and amplified insult, despite the loss of two units. To a certain degree, his response was also repeated and amplified. He used the same late hour to take the three kittens in the same box and go back down the steps to the lower street, which was deserted as always, especially at this time. But now he didn’t go down the blind alley, he carried on. He kept looking around to check the cat wasn’t following him. The night was clear and a trifle chilly.
He reached an area without any buildings, with plots of land covered in brambles on either side of the street. Brandariz entered one of these clumps of brambles and deposited the three siblings at the foot of a small bush. The chances of their being adopted were practically zero and yet, in spite of everything, such a setting was more suitable for the animals than a garage. This thought comforted Brandariz a little.
He stayed at home all the next day on account of a splitting headache. Actually, his head was full of cats. This meant he could avoid, even if only for a day, a situation he couldn’t help foreseeing with a certain amount of physical unease: a re-encounter with the kittens in the garage.
It could hardly be said to constitute a day of leisure for Brandariz. He kept turning over the only question that occupied his mind. And yet, as those almost delirious hours passed, he glimpsed what could be the final solution for the trio that had survived – he was sure they would have survived. The thing is the mere thought of it made him feel worse than the problem itself, so he did his best to put this final solution out of his mind, albeit without much success.
The following morning, he went down to the garage with the nervousness of a criminal who is about to be sentenced. In effect, over in the selfsame corner, he came across the dreaded scene: the cat with all three kittens. It was a déjà vu that conformed to the strictest reality.
The final solution appeared to him then not as the unhealthy fruit of his delirium, but rather as the only possible exit.
He put it into practice that very night. The three tiny kittens were shipped off in the municipal refuse lorry, Brandariz told me later in a shaking voice, despite the bravest of efforts to display manliness and even a little pride. The repulsion he felt when thinking about the monstrous fate of those tender creatures, who ended up enduring the same treatment as all the tons of urban refuse, prevailed over his sense of satisfaction at having attained the final solution at last.
Final, but not total. Final in the sense that he lost sight of the three siblings. But nothing else. The cat remained.
It disappeared for a while. Several days of apparent normality followed. In the garage, Brandariz encountered no more problems than normal, albeit there were plenty of those. Brandariz, however, was oppressed by the memory of the tiny, living shipment that had been thrown in with all the inert and sickening mass of garbage produced by hundreds of thousands of citizens, and also by fears of a future threatened by the cat.
He was sure it wouldn’t come back as long as it insisted on searching for its kittens in vain. But what would happen when it abandoned this enterprise? What would its next move be? What shape would its revenge take?
