Patricia Ratto: Proceed with Caution: Stories and a Novella

Two smartly dressed middle-aged women walk in, cross the room in front of the masked boy, and sit down at a table quite close to the window, and by extension, to me. Then I lower my eyes for a moment so as not to attract attention, pretending I’m going to reorganize the things I’m carrying in my bicycle basket. The blonde server comes over to take their order; she has green eyes and a minuscule piercing, which I hadn’t noticed before, in her nose. She’s very pretty and chats pleasantly with the women, in Japanese I deduce, judging from the movement of her lips. How strange, I say to myself, and I like her even more. Suddenly the Havana Brown gets up, leaps off the counter, walks straight ahead, crosses paths with the blonde server, who’s heading toward the counter to turn in the newly-arrived customers’ orders. With the airiest of leaps, he lands on the women’s table, and sits on something like a round plastic placemat bearing the black silhouette of a cat in the center, also seated, like the Havana’s shadow. The women, one with a round face, the other with a slender one, regard him with joy and astonishment and there the animal remains, calm and erect as a king, or rather a god, ready to receive all the praise they may want to lavish, and in fact are lavishing, on him, with smiles and gentle movements of carefully manicured, beringed hands. Behind the tableau of the women, the red-haired man walks up to the counter on the left, a few meters from the collection of cat books, shows the blonde server the card indicating his time of arrival, takes out his wallet, and pays. The ponytailed sumo wrestler reclines on the carpet, his head resting on the cushion he had been sitting on earlier. The Japanese Bobtail he was petting a few minutes ago and a mixed-breed cat, which I hadn’t noticed before because it was probably asleep in a corner, come up to him, climb on top of his body, and are now walking on him; they march up and down their improvised, padded catwalk, moving their tails sensuously. He laughs and strokes them. The boy in dark glasses, mask, and latex gloves is still sitting at his table in the back, with the open book in his hands; there are no cats around him, and I repeat something I’ve always told myself: I don’t trust people who animals reject or avoid. The couple that was sitting on the sofa with the Ragdoll gets up and walks toward the counter, crossing paths with the redhead, who is heading to the right of me, most likely to the entry hall, to leave his slippers and put on his street shoes. Maybe it’s almost closing time; I should go, too, and yet I stay here watching the blonde server approach the women’s table again, this time bringing a tray with two shakes that she drops off in front of them, and a blue ceramic bowl that she deposits on the placemat beside the Havana Brown, who, stubbornly maintaining his idol pose, doesn’t budge. One of the women, the one with the plump face, pushes the bowl up to the cat’s nose; he sniffs the contents but doesn’t eat, as if he were beyond the needs of any living being. The woman puts the bowl down, exchanges a look with her companion, they both smile, raise their glasses in unison and take a sip of their foamy, white shakes.

The high school students are surrounded by three cats—the Manx and the Ragdoll have joined the British Shorthair they were playing with and who haven’t stopped jumping on and off the sofa where they’re hanging out, stimulated by the ribbons and toys the girls are using to prod them. When a Ragdoll is picked up it has a tendency to loosen its muscles and relax completely, becoming soft and inert like a rag doll, but that can’t be demonstrated here because they don’t let people pick up the cats in their arms. This was once explained to me by a supplier who comes to the office and frequents these places; it’s one of the rules of neko cafés.

The other server goes over to the guy in glasses, mask, and gloves, to take his order, I guess, though I can’t be sure; he refuses whatever she asked him by shaking his head and lowering his gaze toward the book he’s still holding, open to the same page as when he first picked it up, I’ll bet. The server walks away from his table and approaches the beefy wrestler, who, seeing her from the floor, quickly rises, sits, smiles at her; the cats climb onto his lap and he orders something. The server continues on her way to the counter.

Again I focus my attention on the young man in the surgical mask; then he lifts his head and looks in this direction, as if he knows I’m watching him or as if he can read my mind and understand what I’m thinking about him, though to tell the truth, those dark glasses of his prevent me from knowing if he’s fixing his gaze on the women who are finishing their shakes, on the glass window, the now-illuminated street lamps, the vaguely Egyptian profile of the Havana Brown, the maneki-neko , which he’s probably seeing from the back, or on me. He closes the book, stands, takes a few steps; I think he’s going to come over here to intimidate me or call attention to me, or maybe he’s signaling to one of the servers that I’m out here, looking in. Instead, though, he walks over to the library and carefully replaces the book on one of the shelves. Unexpectedly, the Ragdoll, who a few moments ago was playing with the students, is now walking around over there and approaches him; the boy looks at him, barely touches him with the tip of his toe, and just as I’m beginning to doubt my previous suspicions, once more turns his head in my direction: his appearance is so unusual and he acts so strange that I briefly imagine at any moment he might pull out a weapon and kill any animal or human that crosses his path. And everything would become a desperate, human-animal cry that would be extinguished, swallowed by the street noise and its indifferent din, and me, stuck here to this spot, unable to move or to do anything. They would all fall, one after another, like in a Shakespearean tragedy: the sumo wrestler with the ponytail, laid out on the carpet, surrounded by his now motionless cats; the other server with her torso splayed across the counter; the couple a few steps from the front door; the fallen students, one on top of the other, their floppy arms suddenly releasing the little toys with which they so joyfully amused the cats and themselves; the ring-bedecked women, their heads drooping forward beside the overturned, broken milkshake glasses; animals scattered like stains on the dark carpet; the blonde girl, liquid and spilled upon a table, her long, slender white legs, now flaccid as rags. And then will come the abandonment of the print-free weapon on the counter, the dash to the entry hall, the retrieval of sneakers and the quick escape, slippers held in gloved hands and feet wrapped in socks to avoid wasting time or leaving footprints. In the commotion, the door to the place will of necessity be left open so that the Havana Brown, slightly stunned, can escape, and before choosing his route he will stop for a moment on the opaque sidewalk, less trafficked at this time of day, right in front of me, so that at last I can study him, without glass between us, dark and beautiful as the shadow of a cruel god.

ENNIO’S ARRIVAL WAS a miracle, as if someone or something had told him that we needed him in this house. The day before, Señor Esteban, who for years had taken care of the garden, was attacked and beaten and ended up in the hospital, poor thing. Señora Andrea was terribly worried, because you know how she gets when spring is on its way: the plants seem to go crazy, growing and growing relentlessly and taking over everything. She used to tell anyone who was willing to listen that she had moved from the apartment to the house so that she could have plants and be in contact with nature, that it relaxed her when she came home from recording hours and hours of soap operas for TV.