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Gradually and in this style Gian Carlo took over our hearts and our purse. For Candida he had a special regard, possibly because she usually gave in immediately to his bullying, while my wife and I irritated him a bit by sometimes holding out. It was Candida who discovered that he was vain. She had a little box of gaudy jewelry on her dresser in which was one particularly flashy trinket, a wind-around bracelet strung with blazing gee-gaws of all colors. Gian Carlo hooked this thing of beauty out of its covert one day and when Candida returned he had it on the floor and was crouched over it contemplating it fixedly. Candida noticed immediately that he was very cross-eyed. Without telling us, she experimented. A week later a wondrous surprise was sprung upon us. Some friends had dropped in and we were all seated out on the lawn. The talk had become somewhat desultory when one of our guests suddenly straightened up. "I thought I saw fire in the bushes over there!" I looked but saw nothing in the privet and consequently said, "Maybe a piece of broken glass, or tin." But our guest was not satisfied. "No, it really was something - it flashed; over there!" She pointed and we peered at the spot indicated. Casually, out from under the dark, glossy leaves, ambled the saint. Around his handsome neck was a heavy cluster of diamonds, rubies, topazes, and amethysts, glittering in the sun and strung on a golden chain. Like Louis XIV he came forth elegantly and with pure contrivance, as if descending to one of the fetes galantes or embarking for Cythera. He knew what he was doing. He knew perfectly the effect he was making. Out into the very center of the lawn he walked jingling his jewels. He was so cross-eyed it was a wonder that he knew where to put his front feet. Half way across to us he sat down to wash an ear, and then he came on. Our guests (we also!) sat with mouths open. From Gian Carlo's point of view that was exactly what we were supposed to do. Candida then came bursting forth from the bushes, screaming with laughter and leaping up and down in joy as a result of her part in this great adornment. She told us then how she had secretly coached Gian Carlo in her room to walk prettily with those mogul's jewels swinging under his chin, and how she had told him over and over how beautiful he was. His ego, never negligible, had been inflated to unheard of proportions. One of the guests foolishly tried to finger his treasure, saying, "Pretty kitty! Pretty kitty!" and was bitten and howled at. In the year 1690 you wouldn't have said "Pretty Louis!" either. Or if you did you would have been seeking a slave's oar in the Barbary galleys for the rest of your born days. From that time on all of our parties were graced with this bejewelled presence.
7 I must now briefly tell you about Gian Carlo's ballon. Had we known about this truly astonishing talent of his we would surely have named him Aerial or Vaslav or Icarus, instead of bestowing upon him the canonical name he bore. All Siamese cats have peculiar springs in those stiffly held hind-quarters of theirs. In walking they often give the impression of superannuated athletes whose muscles, still powerful, have become bound and ossified with age. There is a strange mixture of grace and awkwardness in the gait of the Siamese cat. The impression is purely false. I suppose there exist animals in the state of nature who, in ratio to size, can outperform the Siamese in feats of grace and leaping, but of these I cannot speak. I can only say that the Siamese is my candidate for the truly superb in aerialism. And of all the Siamese which it has been my privilege to know, Gian Carlo was the undoubted master. I still thrill when I remember in my mind's eye his effects. I can only compare him to the "greats" of ballet. His sense of theatre was intimately bound up with his aerialism. He guarded these treasures, displaying them only on selected occasions. And it was he who always selected the occasions; he could never be coaxed into a flurry of pyrotechnics. He did not perform until one evening as my wife and I were just leaving the house for some function or other, Candida flew out after us with a piercing scream, pigtails flying, "Daddy! Mommy! Daddy! Mommy!" Full of concern for what must have been a trauma of major proportions, we hastily returned. We discovered however that she wasn't in tears at all. She was bubbling with something else unspeakable. The following had happened. While we were adjusting ourselves in the front hall, Candida and Gian Carlo were in the old wainscotted room in the back of the house, a room we had turned into casual uses. Gian Carlo had been sitting sleepily squeezing his eyes together near the door leading out onto the back porch. The house was very old and in its plush days had been of true elegance; all the doors and windows were excessively high and the ceilings were twelve feet in every room. Surmounting this special door was a kind of flaring lintel, a full seven feet above the floor. According to Candida, who at the time had been trying to get up a conversation with Gian Carlo, the animal looked at her (winked once, so she said) and then as if raised vertically on slow and invisible wires, had drifted upward to the top of the lintel from the floor. A strange story! We calmed her and then went back to investigate. There was the brute cheerily looking down at us from the spot described and emitting rasping noises appreciative of himself. "Candida, you put Punker up there." "I didn't, Mommy. He jumped, like I told you." "Now, Candida, you shouldn't say what isn't true." "But Mommy, it's true, I saw him. He jumped. He did it - all himself." I looked around for a chair or a ladder by which our daughter could have achieved the hocus-pocus, but saw none. We were a trifle bewildered, needless to say. Was Gian Carlo a magician? A witch's familiar? Or was Candida a little liar? I got Gian Carlo down with a low step-ladder which I fetched from the basement, and in the dust which lay on top of the lintel I saw no tell-tale finger marks, but only the scuffled tracks of the cat. On our way to the function, my wife and I discussed the possibilities. Probably the one thing we were sure didn't happen was what Candida said had happened. But we were trying to discover means of exonerating her from the sin of willful prevarication. We came to no conclusion and decided to let it ride. The truth came out a few days later when my wife inadvertently frightened Gian Carlo in the garden and he literally leaped over a thick, waist-high privet bush. I came out to survey the scene and it became obvious that the animal had the most extraordinary powers of flight. We felt that Candida was cleared, though it still seemed unbelievable. From that time on we were treated almost daily to some startling exhibition of high leaps, as Gian Carlo came to realize our intense interest in his feats. Once, as the dusk was falling, I called him in from the garden, and his flying figure burst like an arrow out of the shadows of the lower flower-beds. Gathering momentum, with his tail held erect like a hussar's saber on parade, he sheared across the grass and in a glorious frenzy of speed left the ground a good five feet from the front of the steps and hurtled past me in the gathering gloom into the house. When I picked him up and fondled him, there was a look in his eyes of sheer elan. The picture of him which I particularly cherish is of that time when, stalking a robin from the overhanging shrubs, he delivered his charge with all the fury of lightning, missed, struck the ground, and as the bird spun away into the air at right angles to his direction of attack, he reversed himself, flung himself sideways a full four feet in the air and unerringly speared his prey, already in fast flight. He had apparently killed the bird in mid-air, probably breaking its neck, for when he landed it hung limp in his mouth while feathers still drifted down around him like great slow flakes of snow. It was an inconceivable performance, the very epitome of savagery and of muscular beauty. At the end of his Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin speaks with religious awe of the plentitude and wondrousness of creation. For Gian Carlo and his supernal grace I had the same feelings. God had given to this animal a touch of that magisterial quality of life which made the beholding heart to soar.
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Me, particularly, he blessed with fine bits of conversation; hour-long duels of sound for the execution of which I had learned to howl and murmur very much like him, the result being antiphonies of coarse and mournful cheeriness. Both Candida and my wife would leave us when we set to in this way. It must have been nerve-racking to an outsider, but for some unaccountable reason I enjoyed it. When Gian Carlo had something on his mind, he warmed up by slowly tamping one hind leg rhythmically up and down, until I spoke first. I usually opened with a lugubrious howl, done without opening the lips. He would listen carefully and tamp some more; finally he would fetch up whatever had been bothering him in a truly hideous holler. Thus was the symposium initiated. He howled, I howled, he gurgled, I gurgled, he moaned lonesomely, I did likewise. When the conversation became really vital, I would occasionally try new sounds (always compounded, however, of basic Siamese). These novel effects would fill him with delight. Invariably he became cross-eyed, and replied to me from the depths of a joyful heart. These conversations were very pleasant affairs to us.
9 There came the time when we moved out to New Mexico. Taos and its environs were to provide Gian Carlo with the fullest items in his experience, and a run-down of this happy time - the flowering of his short life - is in order here. I had received a grant to complete a work upon which I was engaged, and some friends of friends had offered us a two year's lease on a small modern adobe house outside of Taos. We were to act as caretakers. It was an exceptional offer. Candida could go to school in Taos three miles away and yet we would be isolated as need be out on the dusty sage plains of the upper Rio Grande Valley. In this environment Gian Carlo flourished - except for that second day when he almost did himself in with heat prostration and only hasty dipping in cold water, followed by penicillin shots from the vet to prevent pneumonia, saved him. He never forgot the experience and from that time forward he quietly dozed away during the heat of the day. Evening and night-time became his seasons. Under the influence of the desert stars, his personality developed in a new direction, and one quite unexpected. He became deeply affectionate with the three of us in a way he had not evinced before. Previously he had seen us as peripheral to his world. He had been the cat whom I found self-sufficient and unescorted in an Italian town - our entry into his entourage had been an act of grace on his part. Now, without altering one iota of his high ego, he took us in to the center of his circumference. I do not know to what to attribute this change. Possibly it was the influence of the horizons, the presence of the desert pressing up against the house, the cutting violence of the dust-devils and the barren grandeur of the earth. Gian Carlo, dozing on the cool tiles of the living room on a summer day, would keep seeking us out with his eye and cheerfully murmuring at us if we were silent too long at a stretch. Before he left the house about eight o'clock in the evening, he danced on the threshold for us, a peculiar and most graceful placing and replacing of the paws, backward and forward, backward and forward. Candida would kneel down beside him on all fours and with her hands pat on the flagstones beside him. Thus the two danced a brief moment until his eagerness for the great mellow world outside overcame him and he leapt away. When I typed during the day he used to settle himself in the narrow crevass between my back and the chair, wedged deeply in; it felt as if I were wearing a soggy life-belt, but I bore it manfully. When my wife made the beds in the morning, he insisted on being "made" in them, which left him as a caterwauling white lump under the covers in the very center of the bed, after which he would scramble out the side and drop to the floor. With Candida he established the closest relationship of all. He would sleep nowhere else but in her room, laid out across her feet like a long and indolent pasha. At mealtime he bullied us without mercy for snacks, but he treated Candida with elaborate politeness, as if she had become in his eyes an equal. It was Candida, however, who took it upon herself to discipline him with sundry small slaps and irritated chases. At such times he would stampede off around the house, a living arc of blue-eyed fury, raising the roof with his piratical lungs, for he loved to put on the air of kingship outrageously betrayed. Like a dim arrow he flew through the rooms. He bounded off the tops of bookcases. He passed over your head or shoulder, if you were seated, like a rushing comet, with a true Doppler effect to his happy screaming. Always he came back to Candida and curled up cozily in her arms. Outside in the eveningtime he tended to stray farther and farther on his jaunts. We used to leave the patio door ajar for him. He would come strolling home anywhere from twelve to three o'clock in the morning when the desert chill became uncomfortable, generally with some tiny desert booty dangling from his mouth.
10 In those deserts Gian Carlo became a mighty Nimrod. This may seem incompatible with his new-found interest in us, but I suspect it was merely the reverse of the same coin. His nocturnal excursions into the demi-monde of nature where all his feral powers were put to the test alone and unapplauded, necessitated the warmer companionship of the home with which we provided him during the day. Candida learned a lot of natural history from Gian Carlo's forays into the desert. She tried many expedients to stop the slaughter, such as belling him (which created a plutonic outburst and was never repeated), overfeeding him, and even restraining him indoors. Nothing worked and he continued to the end a career of Assyrian wickedness.
His most amazing victory must have been the small jack rabbit he brought home. My friends do not believe me when I tell them this, for the hare was in size his equal. It had been bitten through the neck and worried a bit. I suspect that in reality Gian Carlo almost over-reached himself there, because to him a hare must have been a formidable opponent, a beast that could rake with its hind legs with even more devastating effect than a cat. Naturally we never witnessed any of these royal hunts, but we tried to visualize them. Did Gian Carlo go far out over the face of the desert and stalk his prey? Did he hide under clumps of yucca and prickly pear? Or did he perfect the leonine charge, bearing down hard and swift for a short moment? I would have given much to know. His most grotesque and unaccountable coup came when he brought home a very small flat-sided fish. The Rio Grande was miles away and down at the bottom of a vast trench, invisible from any part of the desert until you almost stumbled into it. He could not have traveled that far, for evidences of such an arduous trek would have been upon him the next morning, and he was as sleek and shining as ever. I knew of no water holes nearby. My wife thought there might be caves or fissures in a small outcropping of rocks about a quarter of a mile away from the house where there might have existed hidden cisterns, but this too seemed unlikely. It is as mysterious to me now as it was then. I soon ceased to talk about it to the people we knew in Taos as they evidently considered me sunstruck - this on top of the hare story! One old Pueblo Indian to whom I put the story listened intently and at the end nodded gravely and waved his hand in the direction of the Sacred Mountain, saying three times with slow emphasis, "He catch wind-fish," which only added more to the mystery. A week after this incident I drove Gian Carlo over to the Taos pueblo to meet the old Indian, thinking that the sight of the cat might prod him into more information. When old Deers-Running saw Gian Carlo in the back seat he grunted heavily, which I understand was the equivalent of a gasp of surprise. But he never said a word; he simply stared at Gian Carlo who stared wildly back at him, his blue eyes shining like pools of heaven. Several other pueblo dwellers came up and along with Deers-Running sullenly surveyed the animal in the car. Gian Carlo was not to be intimidated (though here he came close to it) so he pumped up his lungs and favored the aboriginal audience with the most baleful shout of his career. It even startled me. As for the Indians, to a man they all quickly turned on their heels and shuffled off without a word. I imagine they felt that they had been dismissed from the scene without appeal. What is of interest is the sequel. Five years later I happened to receive a letter from a good friend in Taos, an artist who had sketched many of the Taos people and was friendly with all, white and Indian alike. He wrote that one of the Indian lads had told him what purported to be a tribal story to the following effect, and I transcribe it literally from his letter. "Once in the old days there were two great animals who shared the sky together. One was a beautiful maiden, a gleaming fish who lived in the rushing wind high up over the Sacred Mountain. Her name was Wind-Fish. She fell in love with a tormenting warrior who took the form of a great cat in the sky. For eyes he had two turquoise rings that flashed lightning and from his jaws rumbled the seasonal thunders which frightened the peoples of the earth. His name was Thunder-Voice and he lived in the skies over the desert. One day this warrior noticed the soft glances of Wind-Fish and courted her by hurling lightnings out of his turquoise eyes, but Wind-Fish trembled at the ardor of his attentions and turned away. Outraged at such a reception, Thunder-Voice spoke out loudly and complained that his heart was broken, but the terrible noise was more than beautiful Wind-Fish could bear. She fled to her mother and died that night surrounded by her mourning kinfolk on the summit of the Sacred Mountain. Her spirit timorously flits about in the cool waters of the springs lying at the feet of the mountain, uncertain and unhappy whenever the blarings of Thunder-Voice in his rage against her and her kinfolk shatters the peace of the desert below." Thus, I suppose, was my beloved Gian Carlo remembered by the Taos Indians and converted into a God of Thunder. What cat in our day has been so honored!
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I have tried to give an impression of how this animal viewed us, his guardians. He loved us, particularly Candida, but he loved us in the way a great man of the seventeenth century would have loved his pensioners. It was affection garnished with good humor, but demanding a full and constant homage. He never asked a single favor of us - he expected them.
Luckily he left his catches out on the patio every night before he turned in, and there we would find them in the cool morning, various types of desert mice, large and beautiful moths, lizards of several kinds, small snakes, gophers, small birds, and once a horned toad. He never ate any; they were a sign of his greatness and were in no way designed to serve as provender.