Doris Lessing - On Cats

I am saying that this cat could count, and if she was not thinking, one, two, three, four, five, then she knew the difference between five and seven. Most scientists would dispute this, I’m pretty sure. That is, as scientists they would, but as owners of cats, probably not. It is interesting, watching a scientist friend talking about cat capacities that he would officially deny. His cat is always in the window waiting for him to come home, he says, but wearing his other hat, says animals have no sense of time, they live in an eternal now. He may go on to say that if he is not expected home, the cat is not there, but this takes him into regions he finds intolerable. The fact is, any observant careful cat owner knows more about cats than the people who authoritatively study them. Serious information about the ways of cats, and other animals, is often in magazines with names like Cat News , or Pussy Pals , and no scientist would dream of reading them. There you will find tales like this: a farm cat, whose kittens as they were born were always taken from her, leaving one, surprised her owners after many litters by giving birth to only one kitten. Tactful of her, they thought, but she had carried four kittens up to the attic, one by one, and there she went to feed them, secretly, spending her time ostensibly with the one permitted kitten. The farmer and his wife heard the scampering upstairs, discovered their cat’s clever deception–and it would be nice to think they found a good home for the kittens and had their poor cat spayed.

Susie seemed pleased enough to find a willing helper in her bossy kitten, but there was some ambivalence there too. This kitten’s weak point was that he often coughed, or seemed to find an irritant in his throat. His mother then went to him, sat, and took his neck and lower head in her big jaws. If she tightened those jaws she would kill him, but no, she held him, for half a minute, a minute, and I wondered if there was a nerve or a pressure point, and she knew how to stop his spluttering and coughing. He did stop, not at once. Later, when he was grown, and he coughed, I did what Susie had done, clamp my fingers as she had her jaws. He does stop coughing, after a bit.

This kitten was bigger than the others, and we called him Butch in joke, because it was ridiculous, this tiny thing, this blob of a kitten, becoming the kindly tyrant of the nursery. We intended to drop the name, this boring unimaginative name, that half the male cats in the country get called, and dogs too, Butch, Big Butch, but the name stuck, though softened, first because of his kitten status, to Butchkin, and then Pushkin, or Pusskin, Pusscat, Pushka–all the variations on the ppsssk psssh puss sounds that for some reason seem to fit with the reality of Cat. You would never call a cat Rover, though he may wander further than a dog. The honorifics this cat had earned, El Magnifico being only one, are for special occasions, as when he is being introduced. ‘What is he called?’ ‘General Pinknose the Third’ (for he is not the first cat whose tiny pink nose in some lights and poses seems gently to mock the pretensions of the imposing beast). What a fine cat, says the visitor, disconcerted, imagining that we call the full name into the garden, or even ‘General! Where are you?’ There are some names that refer not to this particular cat, but to the owners’ history with cats. But El Magnifico suits him best, suits him, because he truly is such a magnificent cat.

He was a lithe and handsome black and white young cat, and he and his brother, a tabby, a tiger, were a fine pair, but El Magnifico had to grow into his full glory, dramatic black and white, and then you thought, awed, this creature, this magnificence, has evolved from basic moggy, from your ordinary London cat-stuff, the product of hundreds of years of haphazard matings–or at least that have no concern at all for pedigree–between run-of-the-mill puss and cat-as-catch-can, between black cats, and black and white cats, and tabbies, and marmalades and tortoiseshells and the result is just an ordinary black and white cat–and what could be more common than that? And yet, at his best, visitors could walk into a room where he lay stretched out, an enormous lordly beast, a harlequinade of black and white, and stop and exclaim, ‘What a marvellous cat’, and then, unable to believe this beast was just mogg-stuff, ‘But what is he?’ ‘Oh, he’s just an ordinary cat.’

Fourteen years old, and in full health, and there was a lump on his shoulder. To the vet he went. Cancer of the bone of his shoulder. Now the whole front leg had to come off, that is, the whole haunch, shoulder and all.

The humans went into shock. This cat a three-legged cat? Surely he would not endure the ignominy of it. But the day was fixed, and El Magnifico, complaining at the top of his voice, for he has never been one to suffer in silence, was driven to a famous cat surgeon, and there left in the care of a nurse. We were assured he would manage perfectly well with three legs. He must stay several days with them to recuperate. This in itself must be hard for him to bear, for he had lived his entire life in this house, where he was born. Out of it he wailed and mourned. It must be confessed that there is a bit of a babyish streak in our cat. Compare him with his mother Susie, whose hard life had made her a brave and stoical beast. Or the cat we nursed for a couple of years, Rufus, who, to survive at all had to be cunning and clever. No, as in many people, here was a contradiction: Butchkin was, still is, proud, intelligent, the most intuitive cat I’ve known, but like some people who have never had to fight for their food or their place in the world, he has a soft place in him. And, too, inside that great handsome beast lurks another surprising persona: he is sometimes histrionic, an actor of the old-fashioned kind, all the stops out, to make outrageous emotional scenes. When he feels he is being ignored, not given his due, he lets us know it, and sometimes his humans, overcome with laughter, have to go hastily into another room, for he is so funny, but of course we would not let him see us laugh, he would never forgive the insult.

When we left him at the cat surgeon’s, his miaowing was certainly not for effect. He had had to starve, and then he had injections, and then a large area of him was shaved. We heard the operation was a success, and he was now a three-legged cat. That morning he had lain stretched out on my bed in the sun, one long elegant paw negligently over the other, and I had stroked the leg that would soon not be there, and caressed the paw that curled up to hold my finger, when I inserted it, as I had when he was a kitten, the tiny paw crisping around the tip of my little finger. It was unendurable that the furry limb would be thrown away into an incinerator.

We kept telephoning, we were reassured, yes, he was eating, yes, he was fine, but he must stay with them for some days. And then they rang to say they thought it best if we took him home, for he was not doing well in confinement, was trying to climb the walls of his cage and–yes, we could imagine what earsplitting yowls were doing to the nerves of the nurses.

They told us we must put him in a room with the door tight shut, and not let him out for a week, because of the stitches in that dreadful wound, and because of infection. We brought him home and he cried all the way. He was a shocked cat. His friends, his family, and particularly the friend on whose bed he slept, and who had adored him all his life, had put him in a basket, which he hated, and about which he had always strongly expressed his views, and then he was driven he didn’t know where, but it was a longer journey than he had ever endured, and there he had been surrounded by strange voices and smells, and carried down to an underground place smelling strongly of unfriendly cats, and there he had been shut in, his family suddenly not there, and needles were stuck into him, and they cut off his fur, and then he woke up, very sore, very weak, and one of his legs had gone, and he kept falling on his face when he tried to walk. And now these so-called friends were carrying him upstairs in his own house, the stairs he had been rushing up and down all his life, and, as if they had not betrayed him, were petting him and caressing his good shoulder. At the top of the house, before we could shut the door on him, he tore himself out of the arms that held him, and flung himself down all seven flights of stairs, rolling, falling, jumping, getting down them any way he could. At the cat flap into the garden we caught up with him, and carried him into the garden, and put him on a blanket under a bush. He was afraid of being shut up again, imprisoned. And though this great wound was only a couple of days old, he was creeping about the garden, and even went through the fence to next door, and then to the fence at the bottom of the garden. It looked as if he was making sure he could escape if he had to, away from the people who had inflicted these terrible insults, and this wound. We brought him in at night, shut him up, fed him, gave him medicines, talked to him, but he wanted to be out, and for the next few days every morning I carried him to his bush, with a bowl of water, and went out to commiserate, and stroke and reassure. He was polite. One day, hearing a howl from him I had never heard before, I looked out and he was balancing on his three legs, and he was lifting his head to howl. This was not one of his histrionic efforts, but from the heart, a cry of anguish, and when he had dispersed the tension, the pain, the bewilderment, the disgrace of his absent leg, he lay down for a while, but then got himself up and cried. It made my blood run cold, made me frantic with frustration, because he was living through a nightmare and he could not understand it and I could not explain it to him.