Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Page 24

  But, to my shame, the famous death-defying triple somersault en plein air, that is, in middle air, that is, unsupported and without a safety net, I, Puss, have never yet attempted though often I have dashingly brought off the double tour, to the applause of all.

  ‘You strike me as a cat of parts,’ says this young man when I’m arrived at his windowsill. I made him a handsome genuflection, rump out, tail up, head down, to facilitate his friendly chuck under my chin; and, as involuntary free gift, my natural, my habitual smile.

  For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff’s pillow – we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quiet Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it’s been fun or it’s been not. So all cats have a politician’s air; we smile and smile and so they think we’re villains. But, I note, this young man is something of a smiler hisself.

  ‘A sandwich,’ he offers. ‘And, perhaps, a snifter of brandy.’

  His lodgings are poor, though he’s handsome enough and even en déshabillé, nightcap and all, there’s a neat, smart, dandified air about him. Here is one who knows what’s what, thinks I; a man who keeps up appearances in the bedchamber can never embarrass you out of it. And excellent beef sandwiches; I relish a lean slice of roast beef and early learned a taste for spirits, since I started life as a wine-shop cat, hunting cellar rats for my keep, before the world sharpened my wits enough to let me live by them.

  And the upshot of this midnight interview? I’m engaged, on the spot, as Sir’s valet: valet de chambre and, from time to time, his body servant, for, when funds are running low, as they must do for every gallant officer when the pickings fall off, he pawns the quilt, doesn’t he. Then faithful Puss curls up on his chest to keep him warm at night. And if he don’t like me to knead his nipples, which, out of the purist affection and the desire – ouch! he says – to test the retractability of my claws, I do in moments of absence of mind, then what other valet could slip into a young girl’s sacred privacy and deliver her a billet-doux at the very moment when she’s reading her prayerbook with her sainted mother? A task I once or twice peform for him, to his infinite gratitude.

  And, as you will hear, brought him at last to the best of fortunes for us all.

  So Puss got his post at the same time as his boots and I dare say the Master and I have much in common for he’s proud as the devil, touchy as tin-tacks, lecherous as liquorice and, though I say it as loves him, as quick-witted a rascal as ever put on clean linen.

  When times were hard, I’d pilfer the market for breakfast – a herring, an orange, a loaf; we never went hungry. Puss served him well in the gaming salons, too, for a cat may move from lap to lap with impunity and cast his eye over any hand of cards. A cat can jump on the dice – he can’t resist to see it roll! poor thing, mistook it for a bird; and, after I’ve been, limp-spined, stiff-legged, playing the silly buggers, scooped up to be chastised, who can remember how the dice fell in the first place?

  And we had, besides, less . . . gentlemanly means of maintenance when they closed the tables to us, as, churlishly, they sometimes did. I’d perform my little Spanish dance while he went around with his hat: olé! But he only put my loyalty and affection to the test of this humiliation when the cupboard was as bare as his backside; after, in fact, he’d sunk so low as to pawn his drawers.

  So all went right as ninepence and you never saw such boon companions as Puss and his master; until the man must needs go fall in love.

  ‘Head over heels, Puss.’

  I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygienic integrity of cats, one leg stuck in the air like a ham bone; I choose to remain silent. Love? What has my rakish master, for whom I’ve jumped through the window of every brothel in the city, besides haunting the virginal back garden of the convent and god knows what other goatish errands, to do with tender passion?

  ‘And she. A princess in a tower. Remote and shining as Aldebaran. Chained to a dolt and dragon-guarded.’

  I withdrew my head from my privates and fixed him with my most satiric smile; I dared him warble on in that strain.

  ‘All cats are cynics,’ he opines, quailing beneath my yellow glare.

  It is the hazard of it draws him, see.

  There is a lady sits in a window for one hour and one hour only, at the tenderest time of dusk. You can scarcely see her features, the curtains almost hide her; shrouded like a holy image, she looks out on the piazza as the shops shut up, the stalls go down, the night comes on. And this is all the world she ever sees. Never a girl in all Bergamo so secluded except, on Sundays, they let her go to Mass, bundled up in black, with a veil on. And then she is in the company of an aged hag, her keeper, who grumps along grim as a prison dinner.

  How did he see that secret face? Who else but Puss revealed it?

  Back we come from the tables so late, so very late at night we found, to our emergent surprise that all at once it was early in the morning. His pockets were heavy with silver and both our guts sweetly a-gurgle with champagne; Lady Luck had sat with us, what fine spirits were we in! Winter and cold weather. The pious trot to church already with little lanterns through the chill fog as we go ungodly rolling home.

  See, a black barque, like a state funeral; and Puss takes it into his bubbly-addled brain to board her. Tacking obliquely to her side, I rub my marmalade pate against her shin; how could any duenna, be she never so stern, take offence at such attentions to her chargeling from a little cat? (As it turns out, this one: attishooo! does.) A white hand fragrant as Arabia descends from the black cloak and reciprocally rubs behind his ears at just the ecstatic spot. Puss lets rip a roaring purr, rears briefly on his high-heeled boots; jig with joy and pirouette with glee – she laughs to see and draws her veil aside. Puss glimpses high above, as it were, an alabaster lamp lit behind by dawn’s first flush: her face.

  And she smiling.

  For a moment, just that moment, you would have thought it was May morning.

  ‘Come along! Come! Don’t dawdle over the nasty beast!’ snaps the old hag, with the one tooth in her mouth, and warts; she sneezes.

  The veil comes down; so cold it is, and dark, again.

  It was not I alone who saw her; with that smile he swears she stole his heart.

  Love.

  I’ve sat inscrutably by and washed my face and sparkling dicky with my clever paw while he made the beast with two backs with every harlot in the city, besides a number of good wives, dutiful daughters, rosy country girls come to sell celery and endive on the corner, and the chambermaid who strips the bed, what’s more. The Mayor’s wife, even, shed her diamond earrings for him and the wife of the notary unshuffled her petticoats and if I could, I would blush to remember how her daughter shook out her flaxen plaits and jumped in bed between them and she not sixteen years old. But never the word, ‘love’, has fallen from his lips, nor in nor out of any of these transports, until my master saw the wife of Signor Panteleone as she went walking out to Mass, and she lifted up her veil though not for him.

  And now he is half sick with it and will go to the tables no more for lack of heart and never even pats the bustling rump of the chambermaid in his new-found maudlin celibacy, so we get our slops left festering for days and the sheets filthy and the wench goes banging about bad-temperedly with her broom enough to fetch the plaster off the walls.

  I’ll swear he lives for Sunday morning, though never before was he a religious man. Saturday nights, he bathes himself punctiliously, even, I’m glad to see, washes behind his ears, perfumes himself, presses his uniform so you’d think he had a right to wear it. So much in love he very rarely panders to the pleasures, even of Onan, as he lies tossing on his couch, for he cannot sleep for fear he miss the summoning bell. Then out into the cold morning, harking after that black, vague shape, hapless fisherman for his sealed oyster with such a pearl in it. He creeps behind her across the squa
re; how can one so amorous bear to be so inconspicuous? And yet, he must; though, sometimes, the old hag sneezes and says she swears there is a cat about.

  He will insinuate himself into the pew behind milady and sometimes contrive to touch the hem of her garment, when they all kneel, and never a thought to his orisons; she is the divinity he’s come to worship. Then sits silent, in a dream, till bed-time; what pleasure is his company for me?

  He won’t eat, either. I brought him a fine pigeon from the inn kitchen, fresh off the spit, parfumé avec tarragon, but he wouldn’t touch it so I crunched it up, bones and all, performing, as ever after meals, my meditative toilette, I pondered, thus: one, he is in a fair way to ruining us both by neglecting his business; two, love is desire sustained by unfulfilment. If I lead him to her bedchamber and there he takes his fill of her lily-white, he’ll be right as rain in two shakes and next day tricks as usual.

  Then Master and his Puss will soon be solvent once again.

  Which, at the moment, very much not, sir.

  This Signor Panteleone employs, his only servant but the hag, a kitchen cat, a sleek, spry tabby whom I accost. Grasping the slack of her neck firmly between my teeth, I gave her the customary tribute of a few firm thrusts of my striped loins and, when she got her breath back, she assured me in the friendliest fashion the old man was a fool and a miser who kept herself on short commons for the sake of the mousing and the young lady a soft-hearted creature who smuggled breast of chicken and sometimes, when the hag-dragon-governess napped at midday, snatched this pretty kitty out of the hearth and into her bedroom to play with reels of silk and run after trailed handkerchiefs, when she and she had as much fun together as two Cinderellas at an all-girls’ ball.

  Poor, lonely lady, married so young to an old dodderer with his bald parte and his goggle eyes and his limp, his avarice, his gore belly, his rheumaticks, and his flag hangs all the time at half-mast indeed; and jealous as he is impotent, tabby declares – he’d put a stop to all the rutting in the world, if he had his way, just to certify his young wife don’t get from another what she can’t get from him.

  ‘Then shall we hatch a plot to antler him, my precious?’

  Nothing loath, she tells me the best time for this accomplishment should be the one day in all the week he forsakes his wife and his counting-house to ride off into the country to extort more grasping rents from starveling tenant farmers. And she’s left all alone, then, behind so many bolts and bars you wouldn’t believe; all alone – but for the hag!

  Aha! This hag turns out to be the biggest snag; an iron-plated, copper-bottomed, sworn man-hater of some sixty bitter winters who – as ill luck would have it – shatters, clatters, erupts into paroxysms of the sneeze at the very glimpse of a cat’s whisker. No chance of Puss worming his winsome way into that one’s affections, nor for my tabby neither! But, oh my dear, I say; see how my ingenuity rises to the challenge . . . So we resume the sweetest part of our conversation in the dusty convenience of the coalhole and she promises me, least she can do, to see the fair, hitherto-inaccessible one gets a letter safe if I slip it to her and slip it to her forthwith I do, though somewhat discommoded by my boots.

  He spent three hours over his letter, did my master, as long as it takes me to lick the coaldust off my dicky. He tears up half a quire of paper, splays five pen-nibs with the force of his adoration: ‘Look not for any peace, my heart; having become a slave to this beauty’s tyranny, dazzled am I by this sun’s rays and my torments cannot be assuaged.’ That’s not the high road to the rumpling of the bedcovers; she’s got one ninny between them already!

  ‘Speak from the heart,’ I finally exhort. ‘And all good women have the missionary streak, sir; convince her her orifice will be your salvation and she’s yours.’

  ‘When I want your advice, Puss, I’ll ask for it,’ he says; all at once hoity-toity. But at last he manages to pen ten pages; a rake, a profligate, a card-sharper, a cashiered officer well on the way to rack and ruin when first he saw, as if it were a glimpse of grace, her face . . . his angel, his good angel, who will lead him from perdition.

  Oh, what a masterpiece he penned!

  ‘Such tears she wept at his addresses!’ says my tabby friend.

  ‘Oh, Tabs, she sobs – for she calls me “Tabs” – I never meant to wreak such havoc with a pure heart when I smiled to see a booted cat! And put his paper next to her heart and swore, it was a good soul that sent her his vows and she was too much in love with virtue to withstand him. If, she adds, for she’s a sensible girl, he’s neither old as the hills nor ugly as sin, that is.’

  An admirable little note the lady’s sent him in return, per Figaro here and there; she adopts a responsive yet uncompromising tone. For, says she, how can she usefully discuss his passion further without a glimpse of his person?

  He kisses her letter once, twice, a thousand times; she must and will see me! I shall serenade her this very evening!

  So, when dusk falls, off we trot to the piazza, he with an old guitar he pawned his sword to buy and most, if I may say so, outlandishly rigged out in some kind of vagabond mountebank’s outfit he bartered his goldbraided waistcoat with poor Pierrot braying in the square for, moonstruck zany, lovelorn loon he was himself and even plastered his face with flour to make it white, poor fool, and so ram home his heartsick state.

  There she is, the evening star with the clouds around her; but such a creaking of carts in the square, such a clatter and crash as they dismantle the stalls, such an ululation of ballad-singers and oration of nostrumpeddlers and Pertubation of errand boys that though he wails out his heart to her: ‘Oh, my beloved!’ why she, all in a dream, sits with her gaze in the middle distance where there’s a crescent moon stuck on the sky behind the cathedral pretty as a painted stage, and so is she.

  Does she hear him?

  Not a grace-note.

  Does she see him?

  Never a glance.

  ‘Up you go, Puss; tell her to look my way!’

  If rococo’s a piece of cake, that chaste, tasteful, early Palladian stumped many a better cat than I in its time. Agility’s not in it, when it comes to Palladian, daring alone will carry the day and, though the first storey’s graced with a hefty caryatid whose bulbous loincloth and tremendous pects facilitate the first ascent, the Doric column on her head proves a horse of a different colour, I can tell you. Had I not seen my precious Tabby crouched in the gutter above me keening encouragement, I, even I, might never have braved that flying, upward leap that brought me, as if Harlequin himself on wires, in one bound to her windowsill.

  ‘Dear god!’ the lady says, and jumps. I see she, too, ah, sentimental thing! clutches a well-thumbed letter. ‘Puss-in-boots!’

  I bow her with a courtly flourish. What luck to hear no sniff or sneeze; where’s hag? A sudden flux sped her to the privy – not a moment to lose.

  ‘Cast your eye below,’ I hiss. ‘Him you know of lurks below, in white with the big hat, ready to sing you an evening ditty.’

  The bedroom door creaks open, then, and: whee! through the air Puss goes, discretion is the better part. And, for both their sweet sakes I did it, the sight of both their bright eyes inspired me to the never-before-attempted, by me or any other cat, in boots or out of them – the death-defying triple somersault!

  And a three-storey drop to ground, what’s more; a grand descent.

  Only the merest trifle winded. I’m proud to say, I neatly land on all my fours and Tabs goes wild, huzzah! But has my master witnessed my triumph? Has he, my arse. He’s tuning up that old mandolin and breaks, as down I come, again into his song.

  I would never have said, in the normal course of things, his voice would charm the birds out of the trees, like mine; and yet the bustle died for him, the homeward-turning costers paused in their tracks to hearken, the preening street girls forgot their hard-edged smiles as they turned to him and some of the old ones wept, they did.

  Tabs, up on the roof there, prick up your ears! For by its pow
er I know my heart is in his voice.

  And now the lady lowers her eyes to him and smiles, as once she smiled at me.

  Then, bang! a stern hand pulls the shutters to. And it was as if all the violets in all the baskets of all the flower-sellers drooped and faded at once; and spring stopped dead in its tracks and might, this time, not come at all; and the bustle and the business of the square, that had so magically quieted for his song, now rose up again with the harsh clamour of the loss of love.

  And we trudge drearily off to dirty sheets and a mean supper of bread and cheese, all I can steal him, but at least the poor soul manifests a hearty appetite now she knows he’s in the world and not the ugliest of mortals; for the first time since that fateful morning, sleeps sound. But sleep comes hard to Puss tonight. He takes a midnight stroll across the square, soon comfortably discusses a choice morsel of salt cod his tabby friend found among the ashes on the hearth before our converse turns to other matters.

  ‘Rats!’ she says. ‘And take your boots off, you uncouth bugger; those three-inch heels wreak havoc with the soft flesh of my underbelly!’

  When we’d recovered ourselves a little, I ask her what she means by those ‘rats’ of hers and she proposes her scheme to me. How my master must pose as a rat-catcher and I, his ambulant marmalade rat-trap. How we will then go kill the rats that ravage milady’s bedchamber, the day the old fool goes to fetch his rent, and she can have her will of the lad at leisure for, if there is one thing the hag fears more than a cat, it is a rat and she’ll cower in a cupboard till the last rat is off the premises before she comes out. Oh, this tabby one, sharp as a tack is she; I congratulate her ingenuity with a few affectionate cuffs round the head and home again, for breakfast, ubiquitous Puss, here, there and everywhere, who’s your Figaro?

  Master applauds the rat ploy; but, as to the rats themselves; how are they to arrive in the house in the first place? he queries.