For Bagheera
Once upon a time, let’s say 18 years and 5 months ago for those insisting on exactitude, there was a black and white photo of a totally forlorn kitten on the adoption folder of the FBB, the Brigitte Bardot Foundation.
This kitten didn’t choose to live. Her life was decided for her by people who left her in a cardboard box outside the FBB office on Rue Vineuse in Paris— the way unwanted babies were once left on church steps.
She was still blind, a newborn, as kittens begin to see only after seven days. Leaving her there was an act of responsibility by those to whom she had happened—who couldn’t or wouldn’t keep her. Who else but the FBB’s devoted staff would feed and groom a newborn kitten every three hours, day and night, disregarding their own comfort?
She arrived around Christmas, the season when Paris dazzles her admirers with promises she has no intention of keeping.
The cat who had lived with us until then—an unwanted pet hurled from a speeding car in the tunnel under the Bois de Boulogne—had died two months earlier. We had picked him up from the slope where he had somehow survived. This time, we didn’t wait for another stray in need to show up. We chose adoption.
She was a black kitten we named Bagheera, after Kipling’s panther in The Jungle Book. Shortly after Christmas, she was ready to be picked up from the FBB office. Without a glance at the people who had saved her, she allowed herself to be placed in the cat basket—facing the unknown with nonchalance. Hamlet’s dilemma—To live or not to live—was the least of her concerns.
She accepted everything with cool detachment: a cushion to lie on, toys to play with, morsels of juicy food. Like a Buddhist, she deigned to acknowledge anything, including our presence. She didn’t spurn us; she simply wasn’t interested in making friends.
Then one day, she straightened her ears and wiggled her tail when I called, “Bagheera!” Was she vexed by my persistent attempts at closeness, hoping that acknowledging her name would make me stop meddling in her life? Was she afraid of the feeling called love—until then unknown to her? Bagheera, the card-box kitten, refusing to be roused from her limbo.qq
I slowly moved my hand toward her snout—cats perceive more by smell than sight. Her body went rigid. Was she afraid of me? Then, suddenly, her eyes met mine. They didn’t waver; they challenged me to dare her. In that moment, I understood her deeply. A feeling of tight closeness surged in me—a kind of addiction. It was as though water gushed from parched soil, and I was the vessel meant to catch it. The water of life, every drop precious. Like a pebble suffused by the sea, I was filled by Bagheera’s existence.
Wavering in her wish to surrender, her nostrils flinched from my touch, her eyes shunned mine. As I began to withdraw my hand, her tiny claws wrapped around my fingers, holding me back—the tiny fist of her heart beating steadily. A sound escaped her clenched teeth—more a cry for help than a cat’s call. How else, when she had been raised by humans and never taught to miaow by a mother cat?
I tentatively stroked her bristled coat. She didn’t pull away; she reached out with her whole body to meet my touch.
That was the beginning of our bond. From that moment on, we were always there for each other. Loneliness became an abstraction. We shared a joint presence—as much as her feline nature allowed, since cats spend most of their lives asleep. Though, who knows? I might have been a constant presence in her dreams.
Now she died. She didn’t want to leave me. She fought with all the strength she had left—blind, emaciated, a bundle of bristly fur over sharp bones. Even in her final days, she craved my touch, purring to show she was still with me. Then her body failed her, and we had to put her to sleep. As the needle entered her vein, she lay in my arms. She was there—and then she wasn’t.
To put her to sleep was my ultimate proof of love. Was I betraying her love for me? When she turned her head toward me one last time, her eyes were opaque. Was it blindness? Abandonment? Impossible to say—just like the first time we met. Was she again the kitten in the card-box, all alone? Does it change anything that I wished my heart would stop beating with hers?
I wake in the small hours, in the grey time between the dog and the wolf. Bagheera sits on my pillow, waiting to be groomed, her face as resigned as in the photo on the FBB folder. When I take her in my arms, I touch a frigid darkness—the void. She walks through my sleep, vaporous and fading, her grooming brush thrown on the carpet. I pick it up and run it through her fur, which clings in clusters to my palms.
“She has become your Guardian angel protecting you from Evil!” comforts me Sam.
I don’t need a guardian angel. I want Bagheera waiting for me at home, her little triangular head squeezed through the door’s aperture, sharing my food, walking with me in the garden, showing me how colorful nature can be when seen through four eyes.
With dogged obstinacy, I transmute Bagheera into characters on my computer screen—my only alternative to nothing: Bagheera as artefact.
Time stopped when she died.
“You do it! You decide!”
Did she say it? Did some unmerciful god speak through her mouth?
Then she died. Was her last gaze the one of forgiveness?
From somewhere far away, the hues of a melody reach me in my abstruse abandon. The ultimate desertion—the desertion of Bagheera from myself.
The ultimate desertion- the desertion of Bagheera from myself.
Cats want nothing—but all.
