On Cats. Doris Lessing

interesting.

      In Portugal, say H. and S., who are Portuguese, when the bourgeois ladies visit for their tea parties, they talk about their operations and their female problems. The phrase they use for these organs is exactly the same as that used for fowl giblets: ‘My giblets, your giblets, our giblets.’

      Very interesting indeed.

      I put the grey cat in the cat basket and took her to the vet. She had never been shut up before, and she complained – her dignity and self-respect were wounded. I left her, and came back late that afternoon to collect her.

      She was in the cat basket, smelling of ether, limp, dizzy, sick. A large patch had been shaved off one side, exposing her whitish-grey skin. Across the skin a two-inch red gash, sewn up neatly with gut. She looked at me with enormous dark shocked eyes. She had been betrayed and she knew it. She had been sold out by a friend, the person who fed her, protected her, whose bed she slept on. A terrible thing had been done to her. I couldn’t bear to look at her eyes. I took her home in a taxi, where she moaned all the way – a hopeless helpless frightened sound. At home, I put her in another basket, not the cat basket with its memories of the vet and pain. I covered her, put the basket by a radiator, and sat with her. It was not that she was very ill, or in danger. She was in a bad state of shock. I do not think any creature can ‘get over’ an experience like this.

      She stayed there, not moving at all, for two days. Then, with difficulty, she used the cat box. She drank a little milk and crept back to lie down.

      At the end of a week the stubble grew back over the ugly scarred patch. Soon I had to take her back to the vet to have her stitches taken out. This was worse than the first journey, because now she knew the basket, the motions of the car, meant pain and terror.

      She screamed and struggled in the basket. The taxi man, as helpful as they always are, in my experience, stopped his taxi for a while to let me try and soothe her, but then we agreed it was better to get it over with. I waited while the stitches came out. She was forced, struggling, back into the basket, and I brought her back in the same taxi. She made water from fear, and cried.

      The taxi man, a cat-lover, said why couldn’t those doctors invent a birth control for cats? It was not right, he said, for us to steal their real natures from them, to suit our convenience.

      When I got inside the door and opened the basket, grey cat, mobile now, fled out of the house and on to the garden wall under the tree, her eyes again wide and shocked. She came in at night to eat. And slept, not on my bed, but on the sofa. She would not let herself be petted for days.

      Inside a month from the date of that operation, her shape changed. She lost, not slowly, but fast, her slenderness, her grace; and she coarsened everywhere. Her eyes subtly loosened, crinkled; the shape of her face broadened. She was, all at once, a plump, if pretty, cat.

      As for the change in her nature, well, that might have been, probably was, partly due to the other blows life dealt her at the same time – losing her friend, the young tom, losing her kittens, and the advent of the black cat.

      But it did change. Her confidence had been struck. The tyrannical beauty of the household had vanished. The peremptory charm, the heart-breaking tricks of head and eye – all gone. She did, of course, return to old cajoleries, rolling back and forth on her back to be admired, pulling herself under the sofa – but they were tentative for a long time. She was not sure they would please. She was not sure of anything for a long time. And so, she insisted. A strident note entered her character. She was tetchy over her rights. She was spiteful. She had to be humoured. She was bad-tempered with her old admirers, the toms on the wall. In short, she had turned into a spinster cat. It is a dreadful thing we do to these beasts. But I suppose we have to do it. The little black cat, for a variety of sad reasons, was homeless and joined our household. It would have been better for harmony if she had been a male cat. As it was, the two she-cats met as enemies, crouched watching each other for hours.

      Grey cat, half her side still stubbly from the razor, refusing to sleep on my bed, refusing to eat until coaxed, unhappy and unsure of herself, was determined about one thing: that the black cat was not going to take her place.

      Black cat, on her side, knew she was going to live here, and would not be chased away. She did not fight: grey cat was bigger and stronger. She got into the corner of a seat, her back protected by a wall, and never took her eyes off grey cat.

      When her enemy went to sleep, black cat ate and drank. Then she surveyed the garden with which she had already become acquainted from the end of a smart leash and collar, examined it carefully. Then she examined the house, floor by floor. My bed, she decided, was the place for her. At which grey cat leaped up, spitting, and chased the black cat away, took her place on my bed. Black cat then took up a position on the sofa.

      Black cat’s character is altogether different from grey cat’s. She is a steady, obstinate, modest little beast. She knew no coquetry until she saw grey cat’s: did not pose, flirt, roll, scamper, or show off.

      She knew she was not the first cat of the household; grey cat was the boss cat. But as second cat she had rights, and insisted on them. The two cats never fought, physically. They fought great duels with their eyes. On either side of the kitchen they sat; green eyes, yellow eyes staring. If black cat did something over the edge of what grey cat thought was tolerable, grey cat gave a faint growl, and made subtle threatening movements with her muscles. Black cat desisted. Grey cat slept on my bed; black cat must not. Grey cat could sit on the table; but not black cat. When visitors came, grey cat was first at the door. And grey cat would not eat, unless separately, out of a newly washed saucer, with newly cut food, and in a fresh place in the kitchen. For black cat, the old food corner would do.

      Black cat submitted to all this, and with the humans in the house was modestly affectionate, wreathed our legs, purred, talked – she is half-Siamese too; but always with an eye on grey cat.

      This behaviour did not accord with her appearance. Grey cat’s looks and her behaviour have always gone together: her looks have dictated her character.

      But black cat is ambiguous. For instance, her size. She is a small slender cat. When she has kittens, it seems incredible there could be room for them. But pick her up: she is solid, heavy; a strong close-packed little beast. She does not look at all modest, domestic; and as maternal as she later turned out to be.

      She is elegant. She has a curved noble profile, like a cat on a tomb. When she sits straight, paws side by side, staring, or crouches, eyes half-masked, she is still, remote, withdrawn to some distant place inside herself. At such times she is sombre, inspires awe. And she is black, black, black. Black glossy whiskers, black lashes, not a white hair anywhere. If grey cat’s designer was a master of subtlety, of loving detail, then black cat’s said: I shall create a black cat, the quintessence of black cat, a cat from the Underworld.

      It took about two weeks for these antagonists to establish rules of precedence. They never touched, or played, or licked each other: they created a balance where they were always conscious of each other, in watchful hostility. And that was sad, remembering how grey cat and her grown child had played and cleaned each other and wound about each other. Perhaps, we thought, these two might learn affection in time.

      But then black cat got sick, and poor grey cat’s hard-fought-for position was lost completely.

      Black cat had a cold, I thought. Her bowels were out of order: she made frequent trips to the garden. She was sick several times.

      If I had taken her to the doctor then, she would not have been so very ill. She had enteritis; but I did not know how bad that is, and that very few cats get over it, not, at least, while they are still half-kitten. On the second night of her illness I woke and saw her crouched in a corner – coughing, I thought at first. But she was trying to be sick – with nothing left to be sick with. Her jaws and mouth were covered with white froth, a sticky foam which would not easily wipe off. I washed it off. She went back to the corner, crouching, looking in front of her. The way she sat was ominous: immobile, patient, and she was not asleep. She was waiting.

      In the morning I took her to the cat hospital around