The Name of the Cat

By Sergio E. Avilés

Three very Mexican love stories narrated by fourteen cats.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780984229574

Book preview

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II NUBE

There was no lacking reason to whomever had said such a thing. They are. We are if we widen the specter a little. All females of any species: irreverent bitches.

Even cats.

I had my first litter before I was one year old. The first spring of my life I was already expecting.

For female cats sex is not an instinct. It is a need, really. The hormone shoots up — curiously, it is testosterone — and like the maid of a friend used to say, when the desire desires, the desire decides. Well, the desire was felt and the desire decided.

Sexual pleasure is strange. It is jut in the limit of pain and sometimes it is not distinguishable from it; I could not stand. I meowed grave, deep and guttural. It was a call traveling far and pretended to get to all the cats in the hood, I wanted to let them know I was ready and this time they wouldn’t be greeted with those horrible growls and cries I learned to defend myself with and there wouldn’t be any scratching or biting.

Hahahahahaha. I wanted them to think that. But the greeting would be exactly the same: the same growls and the same sharp claws that had already left a couple of cats one-eyed.

I shouldn’t laugh. To lose an eye is terrible for a cat. He loses tridimensional sight and the capacity to calculate distances, rendering him almost incapable of hunting, risking being run over by a car or fall from a rooftop missing the ledge. To lose an eye is for a cat almost as terrible as burning his whiskers.

Six kittens. One of them black, one white and four gray others. So they say, that was because they were from different fathers… Could very well be.

Nature has it that females, in most of the species, be slow and have complications to enjoy sex. For the male the matter is simple enough, the pleasure point quite concentrated and obvious. He excites quickly and ends so.

Then comes reject. Not that he is ungrateful, only that nature commands him to leave at once in search of another mate and spread his progeny. All for the possibility of having his genes dominating in different neighborhoods; genetics compels them to disperse as the female is moved to protect herself with multiple partners, as did I.

In humans the desire is the same, for many years controlled by a strong and repressive church that promised terrible punishment for transgressors — even when in reality those sanctions were aimed towards women. With the male they turned a blind eye. As a fact, now that the many flaws of such an enormous institutions are being unearthed, women more and more decide to live by themselves instead of chained to a hell of a man. More than shunning his multiple partners, they are trying to avoid economic infidelity.

And it is not to say they see everything in monetary terms, but rather than money is, or should be, a representation of the resources available. All the effort, the capacity, the talent should be wholly represented in monetary terms to allow an adequate exchange.

Let it to society to upset this symbolism, because there are ways to make with the money without the appropriate backing, mainly when men stacks symbolisms upon the symbol, representing money with a plastic card, for example…

I had my kittens under a hidden overlap of two roofs on a afternoon in the fall, with very blue skies and shadowed by a bright red bugambilia shining in the sunset as a hummingbird’s throat. I didn’t quite know what was happening to me, only that I had a great desire to make a nest and lay there. I had a strange fire of life in my entrails, which didn’t fit there anymore and something was coming towards me, uncontrollable as a train without brakes.

It wasn’t that painful. There was a great deal of natural lubricant. I immediately felt the urge to make it all disappear to avoid any aroma that could attract a predator. There were enormous rats in a nearby Chinese pepper tree, bigger than these, my personal rats.

Cats do not know how to smile, but I was happy. Tired; I spent three hours in labor and my heart grew tired of so long a strong beating. Those black little paws with tiny white claws where forever sketched in my mind and since then they are the symbol of life.

The appetite I lost then was found by them. By the time the sun was starting to come out they were suckling, biting hard all of them… but the white one. Something in its disposition made it get away from us, from his family. I could sometimes reach him and pull him in with my paws or bite him on the neck, but he wandered off again and again until he ran out of strength. The second night was upon us when he stopped moving. He stopped breathing after a little while more and I lost my first son.

Cats do not know how to cry. They say it happens to all but in those moments all the pain and anguish that be in the whole world are right there, behind my eyes and inside my broken chest. I would never see growing up that piece of the sky that came out of my womb to insert himself into my heart and was now burnt to my mind: motionless, a silhouette cut off by the light of an orange street lamp, its tiny ears difficult to make out from the leaves of the bugambilia now showing, with the wind, much more life than him.

I do not know what I did with the body. I cannot remember if I went to bury it in the garden or … in extreme situations I would have eaten it, to regain in part at least the effort that meant to grow him, to give him birth. His body draining essential proteins and minerals from mine.

But this was no extreme circumstance. There under my hidden balcony, morning and aft, the homeowner came to visit with his little daughter. She must have been around six and that for a human being is just the start. A mere puppy, she was.

She was a pretty girl, her hair tied to the sides with a couple of bows and a subtle, beautiful smile, the envy of any cat. And she loved animals.

That is something one learns to see soon in humans. There is a special spark in the eyes of those people with affinity to cats: those who intuitively know how to read our code of conduct and learn to hug without suffocating, to let us love them to love us. To understand that if we scratch and break their skin as we play, it’s not because we are or have gone mad; it’s just that their skin is so soft and has such a lack of hair! So rigid it is for our teeth and claws. On the other hand, on every hand our only tool for expressing not love only, but true passion.

The girl had it… of course, yet to come her adolescence and that period in which the hormones make them crazy, when one would finish them off without an ounce of remorse. They are quite a load! And it’d have been easy, now… to kill her.

My double roof was at the end of not a big fall but enough; about 20 feet. But on the route there crossed a high tension electric line, 120,000 volts. A charge from me would have been enough to startle anyone coming in too close to rock in that fatal three wired cradle.

No wonder then that the daddy decided to move me and all of mine into his study, a curious warehouse someone before his time conceived to get drunk with his friends far away from the wives… all of them least his own, for he had the kitchen at a stone’s throw or a holler.

So she would know they had ran out of Tecates.

Now it was the studio. A room full of books and magazines where more than anything there was dust. There, against a corner, he laid some cushions and towels so her daughter could come and see the kittens far away from danger. I let him and accepted my new nest because in those days and since time ago the guy was bringing me food. Juan Carlos, was his name. He called me Nube, and he said it was because I had a cataract in one eye. It had been a scratch on my cornea from a big tom early in my life, and it degenerated in a nebulous growth. I was not blinded but never had a 20-20 vision.

I got to Juan Carlos’ studio because he was a fan of a beef jerky extremely thin and crunchy made only here in Saltillo, they tell me. Its name is Carnisnack and the smell drove me crazy. The minute I heard one of these bags was being opened, a quiet crackle of the metalized polypropylene with humidity barrier, I darted inside the studio by the hole in the broken window and jumped up his desk where he greeted me with a flake which to me was like a full ribeye… it was even marbled, like the meat that I would later get to meet in Múzquiz, Coahuila, the city I was relocated to after the aggression… But that is another story.

III MARIELA

Mr. Rubalcaba, a lawyer, based his defense of Ing. Treviño, accused of killing his wife, in that he tried to commit suicide afterwards.

If he had just solved his problem, What would the use of a suicide be?

As soon as he was free and had access to the deceased’s funds, Ing. Treviño covered his legal fees and also sent as a gift a fabulous motorcycle BMW 1200GS. I enjoyed sleeping on its seat on the afternoons, because the morning’s sun, even though not hitting directly on it, left it irradiating a very agreeable temperature. That I had learned from my grandmother Mariela, the original Mariela, some years back. How I missed her! My mother’s had been her only litter, while she herself was on her fourth, having inherited the more easygoing temple of her father.

She wouldn’t have had none, really, but due to a medical error — did not perform the operation as he should’ve — she was fertile her entire life. But mom was so ferocious she didn’t stand the closeness of any male cat.

The client was really thankful and he kept cultivating the lawyer’s friendship, inviting him to travel with his group to Motorcycle Week in Mazatlán that year, after the Easter vacation. It is a time for peace, licenciado. A whole freedom accentuated by the two-wheeled transport. I truly recommend you accept.

That morning he had received his first invitation in the mail and, after so many years, he doubted if he should accept or reject it. So now he had two reasons to go to Mazatlán and he took it as a sign meaning he should go.

He took riding courses, but did not buy the whole leather suit and protections the others in the group always wore, including his client and now thankful friend. He said he would do with his kaki shirt and jeans, besides the helmet.

He left me in the care of his niece Lorena, who was the biggest cat lover of the two and she adored his redheaded uncle. And, without further ado, he climbed on the bike and left.

He started to enjoy the sensation. The wind on his face, the air forced by the speed into his lungs oxygenating the brain with each breath, the feeling of power concentrated on his one hand over the throttle.

Torreón is an ideal destination coming from Saltillo in the morning, for it is west and the sun is on the back, pushing the traveler with its light and captivating anyone with the apparent emptiness and open spaces of the desert. The wind is cool even in the warmest days of the summer, not to speak around Easter. If there has been some rain, the coachwhip will be flowering, adorned with volatile red tips trying to reach a blue and deep sky, so transparent it let us guess the blackness of the universe beyond it and the stars that will shine come the night.

The sun is not yet fully awake and everything is lovely at that time.

Yet, a part of the trip was not to his liking: fifteen thousand motorcyclists at once, almost all of them men, after the same finite number of girls in Mazatlán, could not be a good idea. They should have chosen other dates to come.

Concerning motorcycles and motorcyclists, they cover every range. Silent and noisy; quick and majestic; agile and heavy; austere and luxurious… It is not an easy group to coordinate nor can it simply be referred to as bikers. There are those who have been left in the Born to Lose era or want back to it, independently of their profession. Characters dressed in rude garments, ponytails on their hair and sunglasses with their biceps — or what is left of them — exposed up to the shoulder and burnt by the sun after many hours on the road. They generally ride Harley Davidson motorcycles and travel in large groups.

Others, speedy hornets dressed in yellow leather to present a lesser resistance to the wind, something made difficult by their imminent forty-something or worse anatomy. They, traveling in small groups, threesomes or any other odd number to protect their idea of masculinity, they like sport bikes. They are still to comprehend that a convex gas tank needs a concave body leading to a relaxing position and for that the foot pegs have to be vertical and not half a meter behind. But in such a way they lower the center of gravity and can thus travel on straight stretches or curves at speeds that would be less than rational even in a closed circuit, not to speak on a road traveled by infinitely bigger, heavier and risk loving vehicles whose chauffers have been driving eighteen hours with no more stops than a quick bathroom visit.

The leather garments for motorcyclists, particularly the bigger sizes, are black with a vivid color stripe down the center, giving from a certain distance the appearance of slender elegance. They have cushioning strategically positioned so it could lead to think it is rather a powerful muscular network, too, particularly in the abdomen.

One also finds very small motorcycles, 250ccs, little more, of people enthused with the idea of freedom and sharing the call of their bigger brothers in their powerful machines. They are recognized because invariably are traveling with an air pump across the passenger seat.

There are those who like to travel with their wives, those who do not like to travel with their wives but do it nevertheless only with the intention of getting their shoulders massaged during the trip and those who travel with a masseuse that is not their wife.

The attractive of the convention is the trip to get there. The road between Durango and Mazatlán is as beautiful as it is dangerous — as is the case with a lot of women. The ingeniero swears it has 3,817 curves, the equivalent of ten for every kilometer, not unlikely. The motorcycle, which is steered by controlling the inertia more than turning the front wheel, has to lean from side to side to take each one of them, sometimes to the extreme of touching the pavement with the engine block or the rider’s knee, who has the feeling he is the director of an orchestra or dancing a waltz and after a while he is not the one moving and rolling, but the earth turning at his feet, at his orders and in complete harmony with his mind, the body, the bike and the asphalt.

In the highest part of the mountain, the place known as the devil’s backbone, there is a mandatory stop. Having left almost with no breakfast, the best gorditas are served here. CHicharrón, cheese and poblano pepper, string and ground beef, ham and eggs. Frugal, for after the second half of the trip there is a stop with La Yegua, a seafood post in Concordia, to eat how and what one should.

Not to undercut the gorditas of the sierra, no. Theirs is a humanitarian task equivalent to the shrimp soup after a day of partying.

But fish and cocktails prepared at La Yegua in Concordia also sing a glorious We have arrived, even when there are still 50 kms. of road ahead.

The first thing the licenciado did once at the hotel was to take his shoes off and let the waves wet his feet. He stood there at the beach until he saw the green ray with which the sun says its farewells everyday at the wet coast. Immobile, thinking about the past, fifteen years back.

But he still could hear Marielena’s voice and the last words she said to him… "if we ever