The Saga of Kitty, Part 2

She did what every friend should do: tell me the truth that I needed, but didn’t want, to hear.

“Why are you going to do that to that cat,” said Lady, after I had sobbed out the information that the vet would take a blood sample, which would reveal that Kitty, our eighteen-year old cat, was in renal failure. Then what would happen? They’d have to give him intravenous fluids, and keep him overnight or, more likely, overnights while he huddled in a cage in fear of the dogs barking nearby.

“Let him stay at home, in peace,” said Lady. “Celebrate his life, and let him die in your bed.”

Has anyone ever explained why—even though we are completely resistant to it—we recognize that someone has just told us the truth? It’s one of those things, like sensing that someone is looking at you from behind. At any rate, I knew: I wasn’t going to take that cat to the vet.

Nor was I going to stop sobbing, so it was time to go home and look for Kitty where he should have been but wasn’t. So then I sat down—after more sobbing—and thought: how do I tell Raf? For Raf has been dreading the day, the day we all knew would come.

“I have a fucking post-doctoral in grief, and it’s fucking not fair,” I was wailing to myself, while I girded myself to call Raf at work. And Raf, unfortunately, cannot do what I do, which is wail, let it out, feel better, eat something, and go stoically on. “And I could do it for my mother, dammit, and fight the medical establishment and let her die peacefully at home, but I could do it because she asked. But what do I do about a cat who can’t speak?”

Or was he?

Because I had drifted through the house, and was he anywhere he normally is? No, which meant that he had found a corner, solace under a couch or behind a chair. So taking him to the vet? Couldn’t do it…

Then it occurred to me—hiding is how cats tell you they want to die. When all is well, a cat will be on the chair or sofa or rug that he has decided is his. But when a cat decides to die? They go someplace quiet, sheltered, alone.

And so he had told me, and did I have the energy, after so much worry and weeping, to go all through a very large house, looking for the cranny he had chosen? And though old, Kitty can move with surprising speed.

He also knows perfectly well when the hand stretched out to him is offering a caress or an impending grab. Nor does he—like the other cats—need to see the cat carrier to know that a trip to the vet is imminent.

And so I called Raf, and told him what Lady had said: he was sad, but he agreed. And then I called my brother, since….well, somebody in the family had to know. And in a way—though only the smallest way—he was responsible for Kitty’s being with us.

John and Jeanne and their son, Tyler, had visited us shortly after Kitty arrived, and I had announced to Raf that Kitty’s stay in the house was completely transitional: the cat was on strict probation. It was utterly impossible to assure continued residence of the cat until all of the paperwork had been completed. I then went on to invent increasingly ridiculous roadblocks.

“The alleged cat has failed to comply with a Friday, four PM, deadline providing his certification as a mouse catcher grade three or above,” I would tell Raf.

“How can we grant residency if the alleged cat has failed to apply in writing for a temporary evaluation period, during which time his skills and talents as an entry level cat can be assessed?”

“The alleged cat has refused to sign even the acknowledgement of receipt of The Cat Handbook: Rules and Regulations Guiding Feline Behavior which was provided to him immediately after his provisional entrance into this domicile.”

Raf, of course, had paid utterly no attention to all this; John, a lawyer, would furl his brow, look grave, and murmur, “hmmmmm.” And so it went on, a standing joke between Raf and me, when Tyler, with the impetuosity of an 8-year old, decided to force the issue.

“Let’s vote!” he cried, “All those in favor of rejecting Kitty’s residency request raise your right hand!”

My hand shot up; significantly, John raised his as well.

“John,” said Jeanne, horrified, “how could you?”

“Just felt it was the right thing to do,” said John.

“Who cares!” cried Tyler, “raise your hand, everyone who wants Kitty to stay! It’s three against two! Kitty wins!”

“Just a moment,” I told him, “may I see some legal identification establishing your majority of age?”

So it was disputed—officially—though somehow Kitty eluded the long arms of the immigration authorities for years. Until yesterday, when Raf came home, and said, almost in tears, that he felt incredibly guilty: two days ago, when Raf was cooking, Kitty came into the kitchen and yowled for food.

Look, even if you love them, there is nothing more grating than a cat begging for food. So what had Raf done? Screamed at him.

“So now he’s upset with me, and refusing to eat,” said Raf. And you think a cat would stage a hunger strike in protest? You little know cats.

I took my sore eyes—remember all that crying?—off to play Rummikub, after telling the iPad that look, it had been a lousy day, but do you think it let me win? So I was more than annoyed when Mr. Fernández called me, since he always interrupts me when I’m playing Rummikub, and it’s usually for some stupid question like, “have you seen the refrigerator?”

What was it?

Kitty and Raf in bed, and Raf was beaming and Kitty was…

…eating.      

 

An Approaching End

It doesn’t seem like a day that holds much promise. Consider: a beloved cat, Kitty, has stopped eating, and for anyone who has had a cat, and who has heard the veterinarian say, “it’s his kidneys,”—well, you know how the movie ends. You will spend large sums of money providing the cat with the feline equivalent of filet mignon. You will sit with the cat—in the evenings—or lie in bed with the cat—in the mornings—and shoo away the other cats who are rapturous to eat the food the ailing cat is lacklusterly eating. And the cat will go on, pulled by the strength of your love, and because, well, the life of a housecat is not so difficult. How hard is it to spend a day lying in the sunlight on the floor?

The day will come. Or rather, the night, since it was at about three in the morning when Raf told me, “I think Kitty is dying.” I said what you say—we’ll see how he eats in the morning, and I’ll take him to the vet if he doesn’t. Yes—that sentence was badly cast, but that’s how you speak at 3 AM.

He’s always been Raf’s cat, though it was I who was on my stomach, beside the parked car on which Kitty had—not too intelligently—taken refuge. But on second thought, perhaps it was intelligent after all. How was he to know that the dark, warm, and especially hidden shelter would roar, spin, crush him? And he was smart enough to yowl, in inverse proportion to his size.

Forget crying babies—it’s that feline distress sound that gets us every time. “There’s a cat who needs help,” I will tell Raf, and he’ll prick up his ears. And then we’ll open up the tuna fish that somehow we never eat, but that we always seem to have.

Let no one tell you that he or she has selected a cat: they select you. OK—there are some disordered individuals who actually go out and buy a cat—probably a Persian or Siamese—but no true cat-lover would think of it. Ours is to wait until the call comes—either from under the car or from a friend.

That’s how Madame came—the only female cat we’ve ever had, and so-called because she was a calico, which meant that she could teach imperiousness to an opera diva. There was only one way to sell her on us, and the “friend,” seized on it.
“Marc says he wants her,” said the friend to Raf. “Raf says he wants her,” said the friend to Marc. And Madame sailed in the door.

So they arrive, and we take them in. They have been astonishingly beautiful and ordinarily ugly. They have—mostly—been stupid as posts, though in the case of Kitty, Raf is convinced that Kitty could talk—and discuss Kierkegaard—if the necessary anatomy were there. They allow themselves variously to be petted, and shed copious amounts of fur.

Not able to have children, we got into the habit of always having four cats. And so, when I take Kitty to the vet in half an hour, the familiar ritual will begin. Or rather, it has just begun, since I have just called the vet.

One of the odd things about learning a language because you’re living it instead of because you’re studying it is that you develop a special vocabulary and set of tasks. And so I knew what to do—say “salud” when the receptionist sneezed over the phone—and tell her that Kitty was bien viejito and having trouble with his kidneys. This elicited the classic response in Puerto Rico: dito!

It can be used variously, this “dito” which is as common as a horn in a traffic jam. Here, it was quite sincere—“aw, poor thing.” But with a sarcastic intonation, it becomes, “yeah, sure…” In any case, I hung up the phone—though how one hangs up a cell phone I can’t quite tell you—with that strange feeling. To the receptionist, I am one more call, one more task to get through her day. But at 3:30, I will be a parent, with a sick cat, with the prognosis quite sure, and with the certainty that the lab results will be bad, and that “hospitalization” will be necessary. Not so bad for dogs, I will think, since after all, aren’t they the ones barking? But how will it be for Kitty?

Worse, how will it be for Raf, who will “visit” Kitty after work? Our nerves are already frayed from a street festival that took place underneath and a little to the right of us, in addition to the worry about Kitty. Now, Raf will be standing next to a bank of cages, in one of which will be Kitty, whom Raf will be stroking. He can do this; I cannot.

Paradoxical, really, since I am the “strong” one in these matters, or so my reading of the dynamics of our relationship goes. But however often it has been I who said, after an imploring look from Raf, to the vet, “yes, we think it’s time,” I cannot stand—in either sense—next to a caged pet and comfort him. Raf is the greater of the two of us.

It may be in a day, or we may get lucky and have another month or two. Kitty, however, is completely misnamed, since he has to be near twenty years old. And that, for a cat, is long in the tooth indeed.

It will be worse for Raf than it will be for me. Also, it will be worse for me than it will be for Raf, since to see someone grieve acutely as you grieve slightly less is painful. And yes, that word “grieve” stands: I have had two parents die on me, as well as four or five cats. And the experience, if not the same, is similar. What’s different?

No one in the world would dispute the justice of a writer quietly crying in a corner of a café, as I am, if the tears were for a dying parent. But the work of growing up means that we keep a certain distance, physically, from our parents. In the week before my mother’s death, I had a lingering wish to crawl into the hospital bed in which she was lingering and hold her. Did I? No, though why I can’t say.

But this cat, this Kitty who is not Kitty, has jumped into bed every day of his life with us, to be stroked by Raf even as Raf sleeps, to be fed in the morning as I struggle not to wake, and especially not to smell his food. Raf will leave, and Kitty will remain, sleeping on Raf’s pillow.

Why am I crying?

This time, it’s Kitty who will leave….

         

The Governor and the Singer

OK—in some places reality tends to be a dull, cold, lumpish thing: the existential version of a mild hangover. But here, in Puerto Rico? It’s a bird of paradise, flaunting one brilliant plume after another, flashing through trees, and at times disappearing altogether. So I can tell you that the island has been watching the governor fight for la crudita, which will raise the tax on petroleum from 9.25 to 10.50 per barrel. And that, of course, drew near panic on the island: what would it do to the price of gasoline? The governor assured us: it would increase the price by just 16 cents more a gallon. Did anybody believe him? Of course not.

So the Highway Authority was broke, and that meant that the bus system was broke, and then the governor said there was no money to pay the bus drivers, so tough luck, you 35,000 to 50,00 users of the Metropolitan Bus Administration—find yourself a ride to work or your medical appointment. If la crudita didn’t pass, he was taking his bus off the streets and locking them up—so there!

Chantaje! Or blackmail, cried the opposition, but the governor was adamant. Then the Feds wrote and pointed out that they had given funds to operate the buses, as well as to do some projects—and if those things weren’t happening? Well, completely unreasonably, they wanted their money back! Can you imagine?

And our dear governor was facing asps even in his own party, which controls the legislature and should therefore be a trifle more rubber-stampish than they turned out to be. There were three of such snakes, but at last, the governor was able to address the island on Sunday evening, and assure the anxious populace that all was well, the votes were there, la crudita was a certainty hovering on the horizon.

Well, was that good enough for the press? Of course not—ever eager to find and pick nits, the press called the three senators, all of whom said “no, I haven’t changed my vote!”

So Monday, would there be buses? Would the crudita pass? What deals were being struck in the Casa de las Leyes, or the House of Laws? So the crudita got modified and then sent to the other side of the House, and that got batted around, and the Independence senator alleged that the whole thing was illegal, and the opposition party murmured darkly about going to court. A normal state of affairs, in short.

In sails the mayoress of San Juan, and guess what? She’s against the increase too, and probably a little annoyed that she had to drop every and cook up a scheme to rent school buses and find drivers and try to get as many people around as possible. So the governor, having hallucinated the support of three senators, got it into his delusional head that Carmen Yulín Cruz was on board too. So Carmen Yulín whipped out the cell phone and showed everybody the text messages she had sent out to the three senators, urging them to remain steadfast in their opposition.

The island was busy watching—and commenting on—all this, when tragedy struck: Topy Mamery died! And that’s terrible news, because Yolandita is destroyed—utterly and fatally destroyed—and has vowed: the show is over, and never will she sing again!

Here—with all the operatic intensity of a Maria Callas—are her words:

"Quiero que ustedes lleven el mensaje que parte de la prensa de este país me lo mató. Ellos saben quiénes son y los quiero felicitar porque se salieron con la suya. Lo mataron a él y me mataron a mí, porque yo no canto más. Este circo se acabó. Yo me llevo de aquí (Puerto Rico) a mis hijos. Me voy. Yo estoy muerta".  

(I want all of you to take the message that part of the press in this land killed me. They know who they are and I want to congratulate them because they succeeded. They killed him and they killed me, because I will sing no more. This circus is over. I will take myself from here (Puerto Rico) to my children. I’m going. Now, I am dead.)

Right—so who are these people, and what had the press done?

“How do you say artista in English,” my students used to ask.

“Artist,” I initially said, only to discover that Ricky Martin was the example par excellence of the artista.

“Entertainer,” I then changed it. And Yolandita is such an entertainer, having sold out at the coliseums and appeared on Broadway and been nominated for a Latin Emmy. And Yolandita had been about to celebrate her 25^th anniversary with Topy Mamery, who had a massive heart attack while taking a shower in their home.

Fortunate, that, since the press had been publishing photos of—allegedly—Mamery in an “intimate encounter” with a model and television personality, who learned of the death while at the television station, and immediately fled, overwhelmed, strickened, utterly unable to go on.

“Yolandita’s never going to sing again,” I told Sunshine at the café.

“Bah, she’ll be out with a new album, Ahogada en Luto, or Drowning in Grief, in three months, and it’ll make her a couple more millions. Then she’ll find a guy twenty years younger and fly off to Spain with him….”

“Yolandita’s never going to sing again,” I told Elizabeth in the shop.

“Está completemente en choque,” she said, and went on to tell me that Yolandita was under 24 / 7 medical attention, and heavy sedation, since there was every likelihood—nay, probability—that she would kill herself, were she to realize the full horror of what had happened.

Farándula—or celebrity gossip, and it’s one of our minor talents on the island. So Yolandita’s voice has been muted, and she will leave the island of her birth, never more to return to a land where tongues become daggers, the moment one person—through sheer talent and immense hard work—managed to crawl out of the mediocrity and shine!  

Don’t cry for her, Puerto Rico!   

31 Out of 175--Not Bad!

There’s an old saying here: Puerto Rico is an island surrounded by mirrors, and even when we try to look at the rest of the world, all we can see is ourselves.

So that means that the entire island is talking about the article in the local rag, in which it is announced: Puerto Rico entre los Países menos Corruptos del Mundo. And the whole island is sniggering—hey look, we beat out Venezuela and Mexico! Cool!

OK—we’re not quite up there with Denmark (where apparently anything rotten was removed years ago), New Zealand or Finland, but we came in a respectable (well, sort of) 31 out of 175.

Well, if that’s true, the whole island is saying, then the world is in serious trouble, since every day brings a new scandal. In fact, what story seems to have bumped the corruption story off the main screen of the New Day? The news that the FBI has arrested the treasurer of the Highway Authority. Here is is!

 

So now we have another crooked public official, but that’s no news, since last week is was this:

In short, we do corruption as well as the Russians do alcoholism. And because of the intensely partisan mood on the island each party is convinced that the other party could teach a passel of new tricks to the devil himself.

Maybe it’s part of our collective schizophrenia, because what happens when that wonderful, kind guy hops into his car? You know, the one that dropped everything to take your mother to the hospital, even though he’s never met her, and all your siblings—and you—were off the island? Well, that man is now veering through traffic at 80 miles an hour, cutting people, and swearing so hard a drill sergeant would blush. Then he gets out of the car and helps little old ladies across the street.

And so the man who would give you everything turns out to be the man who will take anything, and why? Because we are the most personal people in the world, and friendships? We do them supremely. Systems? Err, not so well.

And does anybody believe in the system? Could anyone, if you read a lead like this from CNN of 2002?

     A former Puerto Rican education secretary,

                 the Chamber of Commerce president and 15 others were charged in an

                 alleged scheme of stealing federal funds, extortion and money laundering,

                 U.S. prosecutors said Wednesday.

Read on, and you’ll find out that the education secretary, Victor Fajardo, had kicked back about four million bucks to the party favoring statehood. And where is Fajardo now? He’s out of prison, and working to repay the money he stole. And guess what? He’s got a job!

Carlo confirmó que Fajardo  trabajará en una empresa privada cuyo nombre no reveló. Agregó que el exsecretario de Educación de la administración de Pedro Rosselló dio clases de español y matemáticas en la prisión federal.  

(Simple version: Fajardo’s lawyer said that Fajardo is working for a private company which—duh!—will be nameless, and that he had taught classes in the slammer…)

Later in the article, it’s stated that Fajardo had as a condition of his parole that he could not prepare proposals for federal money or for the education department. But in another article—which of course I can’t find now—he’s working as an advisor, helping to prepare…proposals.

Is it true? Did I make it up? In a sense it doesn’t matter, since what does matter is that even if he were teaching cleanliness to a whistle, nobody would believe him. So saturated are we with corruption that it has become the white noise of our lives.

“It’s a kleptocracy,” I once heard a man say, and since my computer didn’t know it, you may not either. But that’s what you get when you combine kleptomania with democracy; a government of thieves, and almost all of us are guilty, or complicit. That guy who charged you one dollar for the bottle of water, and the seven-percent sales tax? Well, those seven cents add up at the end of a day or year, and are they in the government’s coffers? Of course not—who’s going to look into the finances of a hot dog vender?

Or a doctor, since the blue moon shines more frequently than you ever get a receipt from a doctor? Oh, and that deductible? Cash only, please!

Well, Bill Bennett wrote about it, about how nobody could work themselves into much of a moral sweat about Bill Clinton getting a blowjob from a girl roughly his daughter’s age. But we’ve gone well past that: to ask where the outrage is is to be aware of outrage, aware that a social code exists and has been broken. For us, here in Puerto Rico?

If we ever had the concept of personal rectitude in public affairs, we lost it years ago.