The Great Sicilian Cat Rescue (11 page)

Silence. I did not hear another word.

‘Words are easy,’ Dorothea Fritz had said. ‘It’s whether they actually do something about it.’

How right she had been. As so often, I turned back to
The Leopard
: ‘It doesn’t matter about doing things well or badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of “doing” at all. It’s not a case of universal apathy: the people who try to do things are invariably checked by those who don’t’.

But I was not prepared to give up. Throughout the winter of 2003 I continued to raise funds and to campaign for the free movement of foreign vets within EEC countries. I even lobbied then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi!

Susan Dale from the Anglo-Italian Society for the Protection of Animals listened to my woes with a sympathetic ear.

‘I wondered if it would be possible for Dorothea Fritz to bring her mobile ambulance from Naples,’ I ventured. ‘I could pay expenses.’

‘That would be a way forward. I’ll talk to Dorothea and see how she is fixed.’

So I called Elke.

‘That’s wonderful news but where are we to operate?’

We had decided it was too risky to use the summerhouse again. Nino’s panic over his wife’s cat, the way word had spread round Taormina in spite of our attempts at secrecy, had more or less put paid to that.

‘Well, if Taormina isn’t interested,’ she said, ‘I’ll talk to the Mayor of Letojanni. I’m on good terms with him.’

She was true to her word and a week later called me to say he had agreed to allow Dorothea’s spaymobile to be parked in a large garage in the little town. Not only that, he offered Dorothea and her two colleagues free board in an apartment
and meals in local restaurants. Catsnip could spring into action again!

I left England on 4 May 2004. My plan was to spend the two weeks prior to Dorothea’s arrival spreading the news of our programme among the local people and locating colonies of cats.

Letojanni is only a short bus ride away but a very different tourist venue from Taormina. Situated on the coast, it has wide shingle beaches, unlike the bay of Isola Bella. It has, in my view, the normal atmosphere of a community going about its business, although tourism is steadily on the increase. At one time it was just a small fishing village. When the railway line and the main road were established in 1866, Letojanni became increasingly important and many influential families moved down from the mountains of Gallodoro to take up residence there. One of these was the Durante family and Francesco Durante was to become a famous ‘son’. His father wanted him to study engineering but Fate took a hand the day he visited the Messina University of Medicine with a friend who was studying there. Amazed at Durante’s comments and obvious scientific bent, a professor urged him to study medicine and he became an outstanding student. Later, the young Durante moved to Rome where, in 1872, he conceived and founded a general hospital. When Messina was devastated by the terrible earthquake of 1908, Durante was there with medical supplies, working with a group of volunteers to create field hospitals. Sicily had called him back as it does so many of its countrymen. His accomplishments were honoured in 1923 when the ‘poor’ of Letojanni erected a monument, a bronze bust by Ettore
Ximenes, celebrated Palermitan sculptor, in what is now called Piazza Durante.

Whenever I stroll in this square I am startled by its grandeur: wide, light and airy and fringed by tall palm trees, it seems as if a giant hand has plucked it from a far larger city and dropped it down here. Bars and cafes surround it, including the Niny bar, famed for its granita and delicious ice cream. When it became too hot to continue my ramblings round the village, I’d sit at one of the outside tables under a huge white umbrella and spoon up the coffee ice crystals topped with whipped cream; served with a brioche it is a favourite summer breakfast among Sicilians. I’d watch the to-ing and fro-ing across this beautiful piazza. On one of these occasions I was intrigued by a tall, dark-haired figure clasping a black document folder, who strode with such presence I was sure he must be a person of some importance, an actor perhaps. Later, I was to discover my guess had not been far from the truth.

After some delay, Elke had managed to secure the prized
permesso
, the official document from the town hall permitting our team to carry out their work with feral cats. This time, there was no need for secrecy or fear of the dreaded
denuncia
. It’s a threat you often hear in Sicily: ‘I’m going to make a
denuncia
to the police,’ an irate housewife will say as you spoon Whiskas onto a plastic plate in the street. The
denuncia
had been a very real threat during our Taormina episode but there was no fear of that this time. Now, I could go public. I contacted a journalist who worked for
La Sicilia
, who found it an interesting human interest story – a change from the usual daily diet of politics and sport. He invited me
to his house in Letojanni and photographed me holding an unwilling cat.

On 23 May, Dorothea, together with Naples vet Anna Maria and cat catcher supreme Teresa, travelled on the night ferry from Naples to Catania. Elke and I waited by the garage to greet them. And there they came, driving in convoy along the road that ran by the sea, the spaymobile followed by a large van. People stopped to stare. Letojanni had never seen anything like this before. By the time they reached the garage there was quite a crowd, curious to know what was going on. Calmly, Dorothea and her team set about unloading cages and traps, more than I had seen so far. They obviously meant business. We organised ourselves in the garage, which housed the two vehicles easily enough with plenty of space around them to set out the cages. Emilia from the Palm Beach Cafe on the other side of the piazza appeared bearing a tray.

‘I thought you could do with some coffee,’ she said.

You could see she too was curious to find out what was going on. Her eyes widened at the sight of so many traps. Dorothea drank her coffee swiftly while she darted questions at Elke and me. What area were we covering? Were there any local people willing to help? No, she wouldn’t stop for lunch.

We’re in for a tough week
, I told myself.

Soon Teresa and I set off on the first of our many cat-catching trips.

Feral cats are very crafty. Several entered a trap and delicately ate the bait while managing not to put a paw on the spring mechanism. We also saw several mother cats pick up and carry away their almost grown-up kittens in their mouths. It was incredible how they seemed to intuit what was
going on! Nevertheless, we caught enough to keep Dorothea and Anna Maria working from early in the morning till mid-evening with scarcely a stop for lunch.

‘They must eat something,’ Emilia protested when she heard Dorothea had decided not to go to the restaurant for lunch.

She packed up large
panini
stuffed with cheese, ham and tomato and sent them over to the garage, where we perched on boxes in the sunshine to eat and relax for half an hour. But it was always only half an hour. I learned a lot from Dorothea, who worked with German efficiency. Her years in Naples struggling with cruelty and the plight of sickly animals had given her a steely resolve, which sometimes made me feel ineffectual. I was still a novice with all the idealism that implied and had a lot of toughening up to do. Even though I knew we were doing it in their best interests, I was finding the capture of these cats an increasingly stressful experience. My heart went out to their cries and frantic attempts to escape and I was always relieved when the time came to release them again.

Every cat we caught was put in a labelled cage ensuring they would return to their own colony. The vets also tattooed each feline to indicate it had been neutered. Only one cat had to be put to sleep; he had an ulcerated tumour in the mouth and was incapable of eating or drinking. All the others (seventy female and forty-five male) recovered well.

Thanks to the local cat ladies, most of the cats were quite well fed but they did suffer from fleas, ticks and worms, which had to be treated. Cats with respiratory symptoms were given long-action antibiotics and eye drops. Follow-up
treatment is impossible; these animals are used to being free so that keeping them in cages any longer than is necessary for recovery from their operations constitutes maltreatment.

Early on in the week a couple turned up at the garage. Cheery-faced Maria Annunciata and her tall German husband Norbert had heard about the spaymobile and were curious to see what was going on.

‘We’ve heard so much about you and the wonderful work you are doing. But what made you come to Letojanni?’ Maria wanted to know.

Dorothea, busy as always and bent over an inert cat, jerked her head in my direction, where I was checking on some of the sleeping cats.

‘Thank you, thank you so much!’ Maria enthused. ‘
Mamma mia
, what a wonderful thing to be doing!’

‘We’d better go outside,’ I said, not wishing to disturb the vets’ concentration.

‘We’d really like to help you, wouldn’t we, Norbert?’ Maria continued. ‘What can we do?’

‘Please, help me find some more cats.’

I was feeling a bit desperate. At the rate Dorothea and Anna Maria were working, we would soon run out. I knew what that meant: with nothing to do, she would pack up early and leave. There was no messing about with Dorothea.

So we spread ourselves wider, Maria and Norbert taking me to parts of Letojanni I had never visited before. These were areas of larger houses with big gardens and plenty of cats. Anxious to keep Dorothea supplied, I trespassed without scruples, wandering among lemon and orange trees, stalking
felines. I was down on my hands and knees crawling in someone’s shrubbery when I heard a voice demand: ‘Who’s there?’ When I emerged with my hair awry and my face streaming with sweat, it took some explaining as to what exactly I was doing there.

On another day a skinny young man in a yellow council jacket turned up in the garage. He hung around the ambulance, fascinated by the two vets at work. The following day he was back. Dorothea seemed to appreciate Alfio’s intelligent questions and didn’t turn him away.

‘I’d really love to have been a vet,’ he told her, ‘but I left school when I was fifteen and started work.’

Alfio was probably in his twenties but his features seemed to belong to another era: a narrow face with a high forehead and dark hair slicked back. He worked as a refuse collector, which seemed to be a job that gave him quite a lot of the day to himself. Dorothea soon enlisted his help and he proved to be a tireless worker, learning quickly what to do. He helped us carry the cats in their cages to and from their colonies and watched, fascinated, over them as they emerged from their anaesthetic.

‘She’s woken up!’ he would call triumphantly. ‘She’s fine.’

I think he would have made a good vet.

It was an exhilarating feeling: Letojanni was rallying round. My journalist friend couldn’t keep away. He kept on turning up at the garage to interview us and we were featured in
La Sicilia
at least three times during that week.

Teresa was a true Neapolitan with the classic looks of an Old Master and a loud, infectious chuckle. As we drove around the countryside on our cat search we became good
friends. One day we were walking past some ramshackle, empty houses when Teresa suddenly stopped.

‘Shh, listen!’

It was the sound of a puppy whining but we couldn’t make out where it was coming from. We retraced our steps until we came to a house where the lower panels of the door were missing. Teresa went down on her haunches.

‘It’s in there,’ she muttered and clambered through the hole. Soon she reappeared and handed up a small white puppy. It was shivering and whimpering.

‘What was it doing in there?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, but it’s too young to fend for itself. It’s coming with us!’

‘What shall we call her?’ Teresa asked as we drove back to the garage.

I mused that the little dog had somehow restored my belief in what I was doing. We were there to help animals live a better life and that would certainly ring true for this one. Teresa had already said she was going to take her home to Naples.

‘What about Speranza?’ I suggested. ‘Hope, in English.’

‘I like it. That’s what we’ll call her.’

It’s good to know that little Hope is now in Naples having a great life with Teresa’s other dogs.

When we began to run out of cats, Elke came to the rescue again, this time taking us further afield to the area around Mazzaro Bay, below Taormina. We drove up into town to catch some of Genoveffa’s colony. She was waiting outside her kitchen and, as we approached, put her finger to her lips and beckoned us inside.

‘Thank you for coming but we have to be careful. There is a neighbour who is spying on me and if she sees us with the trap she’ll go to the police.’

The
permesso
extended only as far as the borders of Letojanni so we had to take care no one saw us. We sat in the
salotta
while Genoveffa hovered in the yard, watching the neighbour’s movements. After about half an hour she came in, smiling.

‘I’ve just seen her go out with her shopping bags. Hurry before she comes back!’

As I have said before, cats take their time but we were able to catch three of them and stow them away in the car before the suspicious neighbour returned.

By early afternoon on the Friday we had to admit defeat; we could find no more cats. For the first time that week we could sit down to a meal at a respectable hour rather than nine or ten at night. We went to Ciao Ciao, my favourite eatery in Letojanni, set right on the beach. It was a wonderfully warm night and we could hear the soft sough of the waves breaking and watch the moon laying its silver path across the water. As all the tensions of the week melted away I realised I was ravenous. I ordered and devoured a huge pizza Siciliana. It was loaded with capers and anchovies and I knew from past experience I would pay for it with a great thirst later on but I can never resist this dish. The others dug into their pasta and pizza, and the wine jug was refilled. With the voices of local people in my ears, on this perfect night I felt at peace with the world. We stayed late, chatting and laughing, high on the success of our amazing week.