Mambo

How do you explain to other people the sorrow and grief when one of your cats 'disappears', and how do you explain the immense relief and the joy when at last you find her?

You are a female cat, 'Mambo', aged one year/4 months, neutered, vaccinated and pampered, and you have a very adventurous temperament - completely different from your sister's, who is a real 'Susy Homemaker' - you like to make expeditions in the neighbourhood. We all live in Brussels, and the environment here is the following: old town houses close the entire block, and inside of it there is a maze of gardens, yards, small buildings and wild vegetation areas, each one surrounded by the typical European high impenetrable brick walls. Cats adore to climb on the walls - with the help of trees, high bushes, compost-boxes and so on - and use these walls as a kind of roads criss-crossing the entire block. Sometimes problems arise: you slip from the wall down, or - in the emotion of the hunt - you forget that you must find your way back home, and you find your feline-self deep in a foreign garden, yard or hole, in the middle of nowhere and unable to climb again on the brick- roads... Cat mobile-phone is not yet invented - what are they waiting for??? - and you, cat, are in anguish, fear and necessity.

Your poor human, the one you proudly owns (although some are stupid enough to think they own) you... - and who takes care of you, this one is almost sick of sorrow and worries the whole day and night. No matter that there are still two cats at home. He will not accept the entire European feline population in exchange of YOU. At this moment, you are his little precious "One and Unique". After a sleepless night calling you with voice and with the tink-tink-tink of your favorite catbites in a tin, he prepares a leaflet with your cat's picture (blessed colour printer!), asking everybody to help you find your way home. He spends the entire morning and a good deal of the afternoon distributing it throughout the neighbourhood, asking everybody to allow him to enter into their yard or garden - which always is 'back' - and trying to convince mistrustful old ladies that in spite of his dark hair and moustache he is not going to murder, rob, or rape them...

Well, after many hours of hard work, he finally hears your anguished meeeow (stupid humans, with their poor, weak hearing capacity, not to speak of their null smelling sense!). He has to enter different gardens and yards - again a please-please-please plea to the owners to locate exactly that you are, finally, somewhere in a school ground, between a sports pavilion and a nuns' convent garden wall. School is closed at this time and nobody answers. The nuns, god-bless-them, are always at home, and they allow your human to enter their garden, climb on a decorative column to reach the wall, make some circus exercises risking the good state of his bones... and there he is! You are crazy of joy because he is in front of you and over you... but a glass roof of the d&$# sports pavilion separates him from you. This was, actually, what stopped you to reach your home: you tried to get out of the hole full of bushes and wild vegetation, and you slipped down on the glass roof like on ice. Your heavy human can't walk on the roof. This would mean probably to lost him forever, and who more would know how and when to pet you exactly how you like it? Good luck, he becomes a sort of Indiana Jones when he feels that you, 'his' adored cat, are in danger. He takes his coat out (he would have taken his trousers if necessary!), crawls a little over the glass roof, and let the coat hang until you can reach a sleeve and catch it with your claws. The following is very easy: he pulls the coat out of the hole and there you go, hanging from it with your little claws, like a fluffy Christmas tree decoration...

The rest has been relatively easy. Just three things to do:

1. Bring you, cat, at home, bundled in the coat because your nerves were in a terrible state and you couldn't even think of being transported on your human's arms the sidewalk along. This was a hard work, because you tried to escape and your human had a recent-broken arm and he was suddenly and painfully aware of it.
2. Receive food, water and a lot of pet and sweet words from your human family and lick-lick-lick of your fellow cats at home, which will grant you a wonderful, restful and peaceful night.
3. Send your human on the next morning to a flowershop, to offer the nuns a beautiful flower bouquet for their chapel.

Well, as I said: you must be a cat, or a cat-lover, to understand all this...

Copyright © Julio N. Rancel
September 10, 1998

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