The Great Sicilian Cat Rescue (5 page)

A
s the week went by, I was feeling the strain of having a feral cat in the apartment. I missed Andrew’s down-to-earth approach, although we spoke nightly on the phone. There was the daily chore of cleaning out her litter tray and trips to the butcher for mince, which she seemed to thoroughly enjoy. It must have been a welcome change to her normal diet of scraps. She had become less timid of me and came out from under the bed when I was around. But if I made any move to touch her, she darted away – her mother had trained her well.

My stay in Taormina was turning out to be very different from the one I’d planned: the excursions, the interviews for my long-imagined book, all must be abandoned now because of this small feline. But I only had to remember that image of Lizzie with her terrible injury to be content with what I was doing.

One morning, I decided to walk through the backstreets of this little town. Away from the Corso and its nightly street theatre, you step into the world of day-to-day life. In Via Numitorio, a caged bird sang its heart out. I paused to read some of those wry ceramic plaques showing the Sicilian biting sense of humour and pleasure in philosophising. One I knew: ‘A guest is like a fish –after three days he stinks’. Others were less familiar: ‘The viper that bit my mother-in-law died – poisoned’ and even: ‘Eat well, excrete well and you needn’t be afraid of death’. Some builders sang a Sicilian melody as they worked on a new house in Via Giardinazzo.

I stopped at Auteri, the ironmonger-cum-everything else shop that never failed me, no matter what I needed, from glue to a toilet plunger. The two elderly owners gaze at the customer over their glasses and then rummage and produce exactly what she is looking for. I could never fathom how they remembered where it might be among all those boxes and shelves of their cavernous store.

I went up and down flights of steps, up and down. Taormina is not for the lazy walker, if you truly want to know it. In a backstreet I paused outside the kitchen of Cyclopes and heard a chef singing. I sniffed the delicious scent of fish being cooked in the simple way:
San Moriglio
, with parsley, garlic, lemon and oil. A little open-backed van skimmed along, loaded with fennel and red onions.

This might have been Taormina before the tourists invaded. I wished I could have seen it. But beautiful as it is, you still wonder how it has reached these heights of popularity; in August you can scarcely make your way along the Corso. One significant event in its tourist history was the
chance visit of a young German painter to what was then a practically unknown Sicilian village.

When Otto von Geleng set out from Rome to visit Sicily in 1859, there would have been no road linking the village to the coast. His journey through the precipitous ravines from Giardini was on the back of a mule. He stayed in Taormina for two or three months and it must have made a great impression on him because two years later he returned. Soon he was courting the sister of a Sicilian baron; he married her and settled in the town. The natural beauty of the place inspired him and before long he had painted enough oils and watercolours to hold an exhibition in Paris. Scenes of Taorminese gardens aflame with tropical flowers in brilliant sunlight while Etna glittered with snow, painted in the winter months, astonished visitors, who could not believe such a climate existed in Europe. Geleng was surely making it up!

As a kind of wager, Geleng invited three of his most sceptical critics to come and see for themselves this fishing village situated between Catania and Messina. If they did not find it was exactly as he had depicted, he would foot the bill. He knew he was on a safe wicket for, of course, he had not exaggerated. They were enchanted by the exotic colours and beautiful views and wrote back to friends in France until articles about Geleng’s Taormina began to appear in newspapers. In the Place du Tertre, Montmartre, all they could talk about was this unknown fishing village suspended between a turquoise sea and sky, with a smoking volcano, while at the same time there were almond trees in blossom, oranges, lemons and cactuses. Soon Geleng realised that Taormina could flourish if more visitors were encouraged
but the town would have to smarten itself up; there was room for a lot of improvement.

Involving himself in local affairs, he emphasised that, if the foreigner was to undertake the necessarily long journey, he must find decent accommodation and at least some of the amenities he was accustomed to in his own country. At that time there was no hotel or inn in the place, no light or running water, only stone cisterns for collecting rain. Refuse was thrown into the streets and conditions were rather primitive. But Geleng’s forceful personality persuaded the Taorminese to put their house in order. A hotel, the Timeo, was opened in 1873 with a few rooms (later to be enlarged by the redoubtable Florence Trevelyan). The streets were cleaned, running water was introduced and no longer did the tourist have to grope his way through darkened streets at night.

At one o’clock all the shutters in Taormina clang down and everyone goes for lunch, but I wasn’t hungry. I took a left turn and walked down the steps to the old Naumachia, a monumental Roman supporting wall in brick, some 122 metres long, punctuated by huge niches. The name ‘
Naumachia
’ literally translates as ‘naval battles’. In fact, at one time it was believed that the monument was an aquatic circus representing such battles. In reality, it was a huge aqua theatre, a colossal fountain playing water.

I remembered it as a dank, insalubrious place but now I saw it had been cleaned up and planted with flowers. A notice said it was the work of the local gardeners group.

I admired the lilies, roses and marigolds, then caught sight of a black man crouched by the door of the Arcate
restaurant, devouring spaghetti with a dab of tomato sauce. The Taorminese have tender hearts: if they have never been hungry, race memory recalls those who suffered under Sicily’s conquerors. Tender but also passionate, their tempers are easily provoked. Quarrels can break out, insults hurled that would sever an English friendship for life, but not here. You will see the combatants next day strolling along the Corso, arm in arm. They have not forgotten the incident but they do not intend it to create an eternal rift. The Taorminese knows when the moment has come to draw in his horns. He does not commit himself to anything, not even an appointment, always allowing a loophole for escape. It’s foolish to make a man an enemy, he reasons, you might need him tomorrow or the day after.

I hesitated, wondering whether to go inside the Arcate. I had a dim recollection of the last time I saw Turri; that I did not part on very good terms with this sometime acquaintance.

The restaurant was empty. From the kitchen I heard the sound of clattering pans, sniffed the unmistakable scents of Sicilian cooking – the garlic, the basil, the
pesce spada
. I cleared my throat. Turri, an incorrigible Taormina ‘character’, appeared in the doorway, an apron tied round his waist. He stared.

‘Good heavens,
you
!’ was all he said. But he seemed pleased to see me. ‘I’ve just got to finish what I’m doing. Go up to the terrace and I’ll be with you in a minute.’

Beyond the flight of steps was a delightful area gazing out over the rooftops. I could see the care that had gone into creating it – the white awning overhead, fresh flowers on the tables, pretty linen – but it was deserted.

‘I know.’ Turri nodded, pouring wine from the jug into our glasses. ‘I don’t know what to do. It’s the kind of people who come on holiday, these days.’

‘I’m surprised they don’t want to come to a lovely little place like this.’

‘Things aren’t what they were. People don’t go in for proper lunch, these days. They’ll buy a slice or two of pizza or a burger and then go and sit in the Irish pub.’

‘But you can’t hear yourself speak,’ I added, thinking of another pub I had sat in briefly the other day but had to leave, unable to write or think because of the constant loud music.

‘Do you really need pubs here?’ I asked.

‘
Muh
!’

For a moment we sipped our wine and looked back on the Taormina of all those years ago.

‘Not married then?’ Turri demanded.

I pondered aloud on why my romantic dreams have never been realised. How all these years I have come and gone, increasingly drawn to the little town but I have never found anyone who matches my romantic image.

Turri charged me with this: ‘Romantics are always sad. You should forget about romanticism, get on with life!’ And then: ‘Are you going to have something to eat?’

I ordered
arrabbiata
, angry pasta – it went with my mood.

While I waited, I thought about what he’d said. I mused that, whatever foreign women believe, the Italians are practical, earthy people, aware that life is fleeting. I remembered my first Sicilian love Amadeo’s favourite saying: take life as it comes. And if you retort that life is difficult, always ready
to rise up and smack you on the nose, they refuse to know about remorse or recriminations.

If it’s OK, it’s OK, why think about tomorrow? No problem! And if you mention surely actions may have repercussions and responsibilities, how can one live in this fatalistic way, ‘
Muh
!’ they shrug.

Turri came back, set the plate in front of me and refilled my glass. A group of people had appeared and they were sitting round a large table consuming large quantities of wine. Turri’s attention wandered; like mothers, restaurateurs, it seems, have a super sensibility to desires even before they are expressed.

‘So you’re here for good now?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Don’t you miss the cruise ships?’

‘I had a good life,’ he grinned. ‘Girl in every port, but home is home.’

I thought of that song, ‘
La Terra Amara
’ (The Bitter Earth). Many Sicilian villages are abandoned because the young don’t want to work on the land anymore. They’ve left for the cities. And yet, as Turri confirmed, there is this pull to return.

‘What about your wife?’

He shrugged.

I remembered the dissatisfied woman who disliked anything that was not Irish. Marriage has made a cynic of Turri. Though they are often criticised, it is not always the fault of these men. There are foreign women who arrive in the town with only one idea in mind: to have a good time, to be wined and dined and to pay for it with their bodies. Many a young Taorminese in search of his
inamorata
has been met
with: ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? It was just a holiday romance!’

Turri’s marriage was over; he accepted it philosophically, almost passively. Meanwhile, the day was to be enjoyed.
Follow your instincts, feelings may develop or not…

There was something in me that still didn’t want to hear this. I, with my romantic temperament bred out of misty castles and ghostly visitations, could not accept this very present view. On the other hand, they were probably right. That way you cannot be disenchanted because you never had any romantic illusions in the first place. Perhaps it is in their genes, a part of their past; their passive waiting for yet another culture to dominate them, an innate self-preservation.

Take life as it comes… I wish I could.

I
finally called Giulio and asked him to come and give Lizzie a check-up. Her leg was now well in place and we agreed it was time for her to return to her colony in Castelmola. The problem was how to get her into a carrying basket; she had no notion that we were trying to help her and retreated to her usual hiding place under the bed. We were forced to poke her out with a stick. At this she went wild, dashing from cover to cover and finally throwing herself against the open window, almost breaking the mosquito netting. At any moment she would be through and there was nothing to stop her falling many feet onto the garden below. Fortunately, Giulio clad in those strong gauntlets managed to grab her and unceremoniously stuff her into the basket.

As the car wound up the now familiar steep roads to the little village, I gazed out of the car window with a sense
of nostalgia. I looked back to that day Andrew and I had discovered Lizzie and the weeks that followed, sharing her recovery. I’d become attached to my little waif and now I had to let go. My stay in Taormina was almost at an end; once I had deposited this small cat, only a few days remained before I returned to England. I felt altered by the experience, already beginning to view Sicily with a different eye.

We found her street without difficulty this time and, setting the basket on the place where Andrew and I first saw her, opened the door and stepped back. Lizzie shot out, hesitated for a moment and then dashed away.

‘Not even a thank you,’ I said.

‘You don’t need one,’ Giulio remarked. ‘Look what you’ve done for her. Shall we go?’

But I felt I couldn’t leave it at that: I told him I would stay there in Castelmola for a while and return by bus. We shook hands.

‘Thank you.’

He gave me his amused smile. ‘It was a pleasure, Jenny. Call me the next time you are in Taormina.’

I watched him go, swinging the basket. There was no sign of Lizzie. Giulio was right: I’d completed my mission and she was back where she belonged. Maybe I’d go back to Taormina and have a few hours on the beach. Behind me, a door opened and a slender woman wearing a flowery pinafore stood there. She spoke to me in Italian.

‘So it was you who took that poor cat to the vet? She is part of the colony I feed. I looked for her and wondered where she had gone.’ She held out her hand. ‘I am Antonella. Please come in, I would like to offer you coffee.’

Another cat lady! I followed her up a flight of stairs and into the
salotta
. The room was not large but was full of dark and heavy antique furniture. There was a big sideboard crowded with photographs, some of the family and many more of Jesus and Mary. A red velour cloth covered the long table, surrounded by a lot of chairs.

The room had a sense of an old-fashioned parlour, rarely used. Antonella brought small cups of black coffee and a plate of almond biscuits. I sensed a melancholy about her and her smile did not quite reach her eyes.

‘I don’t often sit in here, only when the family visits.’

As I wondered how seldom that might be, I made a pretence of sipping the coffee, wickedly black and strong. Yuck! Sicilians have a lethal relationship with caffeine. Not just a beverage, it is more like a constant companion. They find a way to enjoy a coffee on many occasions throughout the day. It might be meeting a friend for coffee, having a coffee for breakfast, one during a break at work, after lunch or after dinner. ‘
Vuole un caffe
?’ – it is seen as rude not to accept the offer. There is a short story about a man who did the rounds of his Sicilian relatives and politely accepted their offer of coffee. He ended up drinking ten dark espressos and nearly had a caffeine-induced heart attack!

After a while we moved into the kitchen, hung with bunches of oregano picked from the country. It is fashionable in Britain to forage, though we used to just call it ‘picking’, but the Sicilians have been doing it for a long, long time. Nature offers a bounty free for the taking. In summer and autumn they pick thyme and mint, stock up on fennel seeds. From November to April, it’s the season of foraging for wild
greens: borage, bitter chicory, mustard tops, feathery fennel, wild asparagus and prickly nettles. Most of these greens are eaten simply steamed and dressed with olive oil. They’re also used in salads and the pasta dish
bucatini
with wild greens and ricotta cheese.

Antonella wanted to show me how she prepared peppers, aubergines and pepperoncini in oil. Often served as part of an
antipasto
, they are not one of my favourites. But I sampled what she put on a plate and told her it was very good. I suspected that Antonella was one of those housewives who make their own pasta sauce using fresh local tomatoes. It would simmer for hours and probably be served at midday. Lunch is traditionally the most important meal in Sicily. Most shops close for the
pausa pranzo
, the lunch break between 13.00 and 16.00 hours. Typically, it consists of a first course (pasta, rice or similar), a second course (meat, fish or vegetables) and fruit.

Suddenly, all this talk of food took a different turn. Antonella’s longing to confide was almost tangible.

‘I have suffered a lot and sometimes I feel my only reason for being alive is the cats. They rely on me, you see. My husband was an alcoholic but he was told he shouldn’t touch another drop.’ She shrugged. ‘I think when he goes out he does drink. And he smokes. How I hate the smell of smoke! I make him stand on the balcony.’

I gazed round the immaculate kitchen with everything in its place. But there was no soul about it and this woman seemed very lonely.

‘We all used to live in this house,’ she continued, ‘the children, my mother. When Mamma died and I was out, my
husband threw away all the photographs of her. He destroyed some of her furniture, too.’

I sat in silence and listened as all this came pouring out. It was as if she had never had anyone to tell before. Her eyes shone, as she stared around the kitchen. She seemed like a caged animal yearning to be free and to live. At last she was silent.

‘Tell me about the cats,’ I prompted.

‘Ah, the cats!’ she smiled. ‘They are my babies. When I go out into the street with food they all come running. The grey cat is your cat’s mother and the other black and white one, her sister. I have fed them since they were kittens. Poor beasts, so many people here dislike them and wish them harm. But what have they done? All they want is a bit of affection and enough food to eat.’

She paused and eyed me curiously. ‘You paid the vet to treat that cat?’

I nodded.

‘It must have cost a lot of money.’

I named the sum.

She shook her head. ‘That was very good of you.’

‘I can’t bear to see anything suffering,’ I replied. ‘Someone had to help her.’

Antonella’s gaze went to the crucifix hanging on the wall. ‘I too cannot bear suffering,’ she said.

A few days before I left for England I went back to Castelmola. I took the path that I now knew so well and there was Lizzie coming towards me. I opened a tin of Whiskas and she began to eat it. Then her mother, the pretty grey cat, arrived and tucked in. As I stroked Lizzie and took
some photographs, I felt so happy. My little one could now lie and enjoy the sunshine. Her leg might never be the same again, but she was home with her mother and sister. I felt so glad I had restored her. Giulio had been right: she was returned to her world but there was a part of her that I liked to think remembered me, affectionate in her own way. All I could do now was pray she would be safe.

A woman approached with a rather strange-looking dog on a lead. The tips of its ears were missing and its coat was bald in places. She caught my gaze and shrugged. ‘This dog could have been a
signor
,’ she said, ‘but he was badly treated when he was younger and so he is what he is.’

I told her about Lizzie and she said she believed that people who do not like animals like nothing in this world. She moved on. Then I caught sight of the young man who had helped me to find Giulio that afternoon.

He smiled broadly. ‘I thought I heard you return that night to look for her, I saw the light of your torch. I am happy she is well.’

The sun shone down onto that little road and I stayed with Lizzie another half-hour. Those weeks in the apartment had somewhat tamed her and, now she was returned to her small domain, she allowed me to stroke her. I made to leave but came back again – I didn’t want to go. In the end it was she who got up and strolled away down those steps, oblivious to the pain of my parting from her.

‘Goodbye, Lizzie,’ I said. ‘Take care of yourself.’

There were tears in my eyes as I walked away.