A Cat Named Darwin (6 page)

At some point I realized that the old torn had not appeared for several weeks, and I never saw him again. What became of him, driven from his home, growing older, weaker, slinking through a life of trespass on the land of the ever younger and stronger toms who tracked and attacked him without mercy? How did he die?—for almost certainly he had. Youth had been served. I shuddered to think of Darwin condemned to such an end and appreciated a bit more clearly the prospects he was facing when we met.

What emerged was a lesson in the power of simple, undiluted persistence. Even though outgunned and getting the worst of each encounter, the young torn licked his wounds and promptly set out after the old torn again, implying to his foe that unless he was physically disabled or killed, he would never stop. He persisted his way to the top, and I could see the demoralizing effect of this never-ending harassment over the course of hostilities. In fact, early in the skirmishes, I could
feel
the dominance passing from the old to the young. In this case dominance was not to the bigger and stronger physique, but to the tougher and more ruthless will. Youth was also a factor, and perhaps the young cat could sense that this old warrior was running on old batteries, unable to recharge and recover as fast as his young challenger, thus vulnerable to a long campaign.

Another lesson was the remarkable sense of geography by which the cat assesses the world. In stalking quarry, you need a mental map of the land to tell you where your quarry is likely to go, and this allows you to pick a place to lie in wait. Cats were masters of the ambush; I observed this mastery almost daily.

Darwin, too, displayed a fine sense of spatial setting. Once he batted a golf ball under the couch, where it disappeared. A dog encountering this dilemma for the first time usually tries to get directly at the object; it might reach under with a paw and, failing in that, course back and forth in front of the couch in growing frustration; finally, having rounded the corner in its ever-extending dashes, it discovers where the ball lies. On the next occasion, the dog remembers this route to success and proceeds immediately around the corner to get the ball, but its behavior gives little evidence of topographic comprehension.

Darwin, however, wasted no time in useless pacing. He sized up the situation in a long glance, stood up and, without hesitating, walked around the end of the couch to retrieve his errant toy. He knew exactly where he was going.

Another time, as I walked back from the post office and approached my flat, I saw Darwin sitting on the sidewalk in front of my landlord's house (behind which stood the garage and the two second-story flats). This was the first step in a ritual we had evolved in which he would wait as I approached and, when I was within about twenty-five feet, turn and scamper down the driveway to wait for me at the foot of the stairs.

There were two routes to my flat. Approaching from the north, I could walk past the landlord's house and down the driveway, which ran along the south property line, or I could turn off before the house and walk along the narrow passageway between the wall and the north line. The two routes were parallel.

The devil was in me that day, and out of sheer perverseness he decided that I should have some fun at Darwin's expense, justifying it in the spirit of science. I decided to see how thoroughly a cat could comprehend the layout of his land.

When I approached the house, I could see Darwin preparing to dash ahead as I turned down the driveway in the choreography of our daily ritual. Then I began the experiment. Instead of proceeding to the mouth of the driveway, I stopped at the north property line, turned right, and walked toward the passageway between the house and the rotting fence. Without hesitating, Darwin turned and dashed down the driveway in the same direction I was going toward the flat. Clearly he understood that his course ran parallel to my own on the other side of the house and he intended to meet me when I emerged from my alternate route.

Then I added another twist. Instead of continuing along the north passage, I stopped and traced my steps back to the street. Then I walked to the driveway, turned right, and proceeded back to the flat as I normally would have done. I passed the rear of the house, looked north, and there sat Darwin, his back toward me, waiting for me to arrive there, as my fake move had indicated I would.

***

Darwin got into relatively few fights, and when he did, they were not the savage brawls that true toms are fated to endure. He grew more and more mellow, spending much of his time slumbering away in various nooks he maintained here and there around the immediate backyards. Some were rather ingenious, and one in particular stood out. My landlord's son had dry-docked an old Volkswagen in the space between the house and the garage, draping it with a Cadillac cover whose extra folds sometimes caught the breeze and billowed out. It took several months, but one day I realized that the fat, smooth bulge in the cloth below the front bumper was not billowing the way a billow ought to billow. On prodding it with the point of my shoe, I discovered that the billow was filled not with air, but with the prosperous body of whom we speak. Somehow, in his daily rounds, Darwin had discovered that the fold was also a hammock and it became his favorite bed for many months.

S
UMMER WAS NOW DRAWING
to a close, and
I
received a ten-day assignment to cover a wildlife film symposium in England. Ten days is a relatively minor trip, and in the past I had simply gone off. Now, to my consternation, the matter of Darwin's welfare came to mind. And it came to mind again and again. I could not enter a private thought without Darwin creeping in a few minutes later, gazing up at me with a kink of expectation in his tail and that earnest, guileless calm in his stare. He now depended on me for food, and whether I liked it or not, I could not flick away the notion that I was obligated. As if to underscore the point, he began following me across the street to my friend Doug's flat, an act whose significance I could not ignore. By following me, Darwin was leaving his territory and entering enemy ground, and this meant he was depending on me for protection. I had, in Darwin's eyes, become his mommy. Not his daddy, because male cats do not participate in the rearing of their young, but his mommy.

The irony was not lost on me. I was acting more and more like an animal lover, although my values and perspective had been adjusted to reflect the changes. Besides, there was nothing wrong with caring for an animal, just as long as you didn't care too much, and even though I had not officially renounced my decision to find Darwin another home, I could not throw Darwin back to the streets, even for ten days, no matter how intimidating his tendency to bite and no matter how insignificant he was in the grand overview of human society.

The southern California weather now became a point of consolation. We could expect a monotonous queue of beautiful, sunny days, and that, coupled with the fact that Darwin was an experienced, street-sawy cat, helped to stifle my worries. He really ought to be all right for ten days. Which left me with the matter of finding someone to set out food and water twice a day. Even once would do, but the food dish
would
have to be set in a tray of water to prevent ants from taking over.

The neighbor across the hall was the logical choice, and had Diana still lived there the choice would have been ideal, even if she did think Darwin's brain was damaged. Diana was honest and responsible and led an orderly life. Every night she came home from work and every morning she left for work, and to place food and water outside the door would have fallen neatly into her routines.

She had, however, moved away shortly after Darwin co-opted my flat, and a young woman named Berdy moved in. Berdy was a strange, elfin little creature whose eyes appeared permanently dilated. She scurried to and from her flat with head down and face averted, and even though she responded with warmth and verve when hailed directly, she never initiated conversation and never spoke more than a few perfunctory words. In her late twenties or early thirties, Berdy appeared to hold a job of some sort, but she still depended for emotional support on her parents, who lived across the street, and it was clear to everyone in the neighborhood that she was not quite normal. This conclusion was strongly reinforced by the one glimpse I caught of her flat. Papers, trash, food wrappers were strewn everywhere, which left me wondering if she could manage an extra daily chore.

The fact was, I had little choice in the matter, for no one else in the neighborhood was available. When I asked Berdy if she'd be willing to feed and water Darwin, she agreed brightly. I did not sense the irony at the time, but her parents were retired missionaries, all three embraced Christianity with fundamental faith, and I had asked them to care for Darwin.

***

Arrangements made, I went off to England, expecting to forget the shuffle of domestic life, immerse myself in the art of wildlife filmmaking, and absorb some civilizing English culture. For the first few days I did just that, enjoying the wonders of modern wildlife films and the earnest company of wildlife filmmakers. In the evenings I reveled in the mythical ethos of Roman baths, the charm of cobbled streets, the rows of Georgian buildings crafted from stone, the music of the dialect with its round, rhotic
arm.
My life in California ceased to exist.

It ceased to exist, that is, until Darwin arrived. Most of the symposiasts were staying in the dormitories at the University of Bath, the school term not having begun, and we took meals in the cafeteria. On the third day Darwin appeared under the breakfast table, sitting between my feet. I could almost feel his plump little carcass pressing against my leg. It was time for his breakfast and there he was, gazing patiently up at me. Considering his skill at infiltrating my life, I should have known that he would stow away in my mind, and there was nothing, apparently, to be done about it. Furthermore, he had license to interrupt my life and he followed me about the symposium, showing up in front of me whenever he wished, often during lulls in conversation, sometimes in the middle of intense dialogue.

Then one night an incident occurred that removed any doubt how deeply Darwin had burrowed into my mind, into my soul. Probably the first thing that struck me on arriving in England was the precision and grace and casual certainty with which the English use English. They are masters of it. To watch and listen as English symposiasts arose one by one in a packed auditorium and spoke without notes or rehearsal for minutes on end was a wonder to behold; you could almost see the sentences proceed from their mouths fully parsed, clauses and phrases trailing from their proper antecedents—whole blocks of argument flowing by in stately paragraphs like the opening of a motion picture—and I found myself glancing around now and then, looking for the teleprompter: no one could speak that well.

This precision and grace reached its highest form in what could be called the surgical insult, a skill that appeared to be practiced as a form of recreation. Contestants would meet, often in some chance social encounter, and without warning one would calmly sever his opponent's aorta with a vicious insight to his personal deficiencies. Without blinking, the opponent would just as calmly insert a devastating comment into his opposite's liver, then remove it.

At first it was breathtaking, almost exhilarating, to observe these English sophisticates revel in their skills. How could people
think
of such brilliant, cunning repartee in the heat of battle, how did they find such discipline to refrain from offering knuckle sandwiches, as would be the response in American society. But very soon it became clear that you wanted to watch these displays from a safe distance because nothing was more desirable to these English masters of the verbo-martial arts than the wide-eyed American. And nothing was more terrifying to the American than realizing there was nothing between us and an English man, or woman, gripping in each fist a twelve-inch sarcasm with a serrated edge. We marched, we Americans, in cringing flocks to the slaughter at this wildlife film festival. The letting of blood took place on the third evening, in the form of a Hooley.

The word "Hooley," which had been coined at an earlier symposium in Ireland, is one of those onomatopoeic words whose rhythms and tones somehow express its sense. This Hooley was supposed to be a lighthearted celebration in which the participants cast modesty to the wind, aided and abetted by significant amounts of beer and wine, and performed whatever it was the performer felt shameless enough to do. Musical instruments, songs, poetic recitals, theatrical skits—all were welcome.

As it turned out, theatrical skits were the most popular choice, probably because the majority of the symposiasts were English and resorted reflexively to their cultural tradition. The skits were necessarily of a primitive, farcical nature, some of them impromptu, and were performed in a cavernous, dimly lit cafeteria where the amplified merriment echoed in screeches and booms from the bare walls and dark corners. It soon became clear, however, that this particular Hooley was not to be the innocent, lighthearted affair advertised, because the topic of main interest was American culture or, rather, what the English participants perceived as the lack of it. The method of celebration was going to be satire. Relentless, bellowing, nasty satire.

Now I am no knee-jerk defender of all things American. I shake my head in resignation at the growing vulgarity of our society and the deification of money. Money has become morality. Whatever makes money is right, and good, even spiritual. But whatever our cultural flaws, I discovered that night that the country of my citizenship is my identity. No matter how enlightened and decently different I fancy myself to be, in the eyes of other people I am still American. There is no choice in the matter. It is my country, right or wrong.

At first I was able to shrug off the snidery in the spirit of objectivity, even good-natured joshing, but gradually the atmosphere began to nettle the skin. Then it began to draw anger. Finally, having neither the confidence nor the skill to take the stage and rebut the aggressors in a civilized, sophisticated manner, I took my metaphoric dollies and stalked from the hall with hoots and yawps of cultural derision ringing in my ears, and retreated to my dormitory room, determined to sulk and feel sorry for myself.