AN ORANGE CAT IN ROME

AN ORANGE CAT IN ROME

A week’s just too short.

Especially when that’s all you’ve got left to live. Tightness grips my throat, like someone’s choking me.

Dr. Gottmann places a hand on my shoulder until I feel its warmth penetrating my skin. Doctors don’t usually do that. They’re austere. Scientists. Cold. When they do that, things must be bad. Real bad.

My only symptom is this intermittent tingling behind my ears. Otherwise, I'm perfectly fine, with energy to burn. I still sport my teenage mullet, graying as it may now be. I’m not prepared to die; I still feel my best years are still to come. Which makes it all the more absurd. Even cruel.

I stare into the void while Dr. Gottmann fills out endless papers for more therapy for each day I've got left. What is even the point? All the therapy in the world won't stop the tumor from invading the innermost quarters of my brain. It's already there knocking on the doors of my sancta sanctorum, and by the doctor's estimate within some seven days I'll be meat for the worms. It's incredible how this damn thing got so deep inside of me so quietly and so stealthily. Little did I think of that tingling when I first felt it about a year ago.

I take a long, hard look at my life. Forty wasted years of could’ve-beens. Nothing salvageable. Nothing of worth. And this it. Last station. All change please.

I look at my pocket mirror and try to recognize the man looking back at me. The eyes are welling up, the chin is shaking. All that I ever lived for is going to waste. I might as well not have lived at all. That is when, without warning, she comes back to my mind.

Rosalba. 

If nothing else, there was her. I’ll go find her again! For one last time. Whatever it takes. Fuck therapy. Fuck everything else.

I met Rosalba three decades ago, I was an exchange-student at her college in Rome. It was love at first sight, second sight, hundredth sight; Rosalba was the soul of my semester-long Dolce Vita. We’d meet again, we said, we’d never forget each other. She dreamed of coming over to California. I also dreamed she would.

Then we lost touch. Our correspondence fizzled out. She wasn’t getting my letters. Someone at the college was taking them away before she’d get to see them. I’d get hers asking why I’d stopped writing. But I hadn’t!

Then she stopped writing too. She must have given up.

It ended that way. My most beautiful page, turned. I was seventeen. A downhill spiral followed. The Summer of Love. LSD. A man walked on the moon. More LSD. I walked on moons of planets circling other suns. The lights of Vegas flickered and danced with diethylamide's mellow yellow, red, green and pink. Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Cheap sex. Threesomes, foursomes. Nothing sums.

“Shoo! Shoo!” 

This cat’s been following me since I got off the taxi that brought me from the airport to the city center. Of all the people in Rome, she took a liking to me!

“Already told you – got no food! Do my shoes, by any chances, smell of fish?"

I give up. She’s pleased when I stroke her, purrs, and looks deep into my eyes. Hers are large and grey and lovely. Her orange fur is soft and too clean for a stray. 

I’ve no clue where to start looking. I’ve no address. Rosalba never took me home to her Catholic parents. It would’ve been a scandal back then. Right under the Pope’s nose! That's why, after I left, I used to send her letters to the college address. Hopefully the college keeps trace of its alumni. Maybe Rosalba isn’t even in Rome anymore. My heart races. I’ve no time to waste. She must be married by now. She won’t want to see me! My blood freezes. I really don’t know what I’m doing. Why I even came here.

But the cat knows what she's doing. She walks steadily ahead of me, confidently, from time to time looking behind her tail to check if I'm still there. I simply follow.

Traffic-choked streets give way to that magnificent traffic-island that is the Colosseum. Once, men tore each other's flesh with swords inside this arena, or were fed to starved lions, merely for the crowd's amusement. Today's bloodiest Netflix series was a live show back then. Now, tourists gleefully take selfies upon selfies, all smiles and white teeth, with the backdrop of that ancient blood-tainted arch-laced building behind them.

“So you’re gonna be my tour-guide!” I tell my newly-found feline friend. She seems to agree. Okay. But I haven't come to Rome to see the sights.

Flashing memories of Rosalba’s first showing me the Colosseum juggle for space in my head. She shed a tear when she explained its dark history to me. Now, as fate wants it, I’m here with a cat!

We walk on. I get fleeting temptations to suddenly change course and lose the animal. But they say it's impossible to lose a cat. They'll find their way back to you, if that's what they want. They can choose to abandon you, but you cannot abandon them. Besides, I’m somehow getting to like this cat.

Next on Kitty’s Tour is the Pantheon. She stops at the doorway, as if she knows she can't get in, and sure enough she's still there waiting for me when I get out again. Rosalba and I once gazed at the evening sky through the famous round hole at the top of the dome. 

“Thousands of years ago, lovers like us looked at those same two stars up there, felt the same thing,” she said, face glowing in her usual dreamy glimmer. I loved the dreamer in her most of all.

Who knows, come this evening, when the bright glare of the Roman sun finally surrenders to the night sky, if those very two same stars will kiss again tonight for anyone looking through the hole in the dome?

In Rome, some things truly never change. Thirty years on, the cobbled Piazzas are exactly as I remember them. The same restaurants, same wobbly tables, same inviting smell of pizza. I’m from the land-of-the-movies, of twenty-four-frames-per-second; my mom used to say that she could see that celebrated Hollywood sign from the window of the hospital ward where I was born. There life flickers by rapidly. Not so in the Eternal City. In Rome, things stay the same. Except that now Rosalba’s not by my side.

The cat mingles with the open-air patrons of La Antica Pizzeria, packed as always. Locals and tourists alike abandon their pizzas to stroke her. She leaps onto a table where a father and three kids, two girls and a boy, are eating, nearly toppling the father’s enormous glass of red wine. Eight hands rush to pat her.

It all comes back to me! Rosalba and I at that same spot! Rosalba stood on that very table, where the father and kids were eating, for a ‘magic-photo’ (that's what they called instant photos in Italy, back then) with my Polaroid.

She was stunning, in a coral A-line dress, against a backdrop of purple bougainvilleas clinging jealously to the ancient stone-wall. I expected the waiter to tell us off. Back home, you stand on a restaurant table and you're kicked out quicker than you've come in. Instead he instructed me to also get on the table for a photo with her. He told us to kiss. It was embarrassing. We’d just met in class for the first time earlier that day, I passed her a note, and she accepted to take me around after school; we certainly hadn’t yet kissed.

“Solamente per la foto! Just for the photo,” he insisted, catching a hint of our uneasiness.

We kissed. And then again. And again. The waiter kept snapping away until he used up my whole supply of Polaroid paper.

“Your gatta?” the father asks me about the cat.

“No!” I say instinctively. But at once, I repent: “Yes, yes, mine…”

“È bellissima!”

I feel a strange sense of pride in his compliment about a cat that wasn't even really mine.

The cat jumps off from the table back to me, and we continue with our excursion. I recognize the two-lion fountain I used to pass by everyday, on my way to the college.

Excitement and melancholy hit me hard, both at once, with equal force. The college is my only ticket to somehow, perhaps, reach Rosalba. Maybe she accepts to have a café macchiato with me, while her kids are at school and her husband isn't back home yet. Just that. To look into her eyes one more time like back in the day.

And then I can die.

But my hopes are immediately dashed. The Fascist-era edifice is boarded up, decrepit. There is no signage stating where the educational institution has moved to or if it still exists at all. There is indeed no clue at all that this place was once a thriving college, such is its state of dilapidation. It's an undignified end to a place that hosted so many first kisses, first heartbreaks, so much emotion.

We trudge ahead blindly, cat and I, through winding streets so narrow that they seem dark even though it's still daytime on a very sunny day. Cat leads, man follows. Sadness engulfs me. Just look at me. Such an idiot. I’m ending my short life following a cat!

Old Rome viciously and without warning metamorphoses into a lackluster avenue surfaced in bad asphalt and lined by sun-baked social-housing apartments with flaking amber facades.

“Buongiorno,” an elderly lady inside a first-floor apartment greets me dryly from behind a Persian window that must have once been painted bright green. In every ancient street in Italy you’d find a witchy octogenarian prying behind a battered window: the local gossip-gatherer, scandal-police and unofficial neighborhood watch. It’s one other thing that never changes.

Something agitates the cat. Her tail twists and curls, her back humps.

“What’s wrong, kitty?” 

A speeding car breaks the wistful silence, screeching on the cracked asphalt. The cat crosses the street in panic, narrowly missing the car’s front wheels. But not the back ones. I squeal. The driver gets out, cursing, barely sparing the flattened cat a glimpse as he inspects the fenders of his Alfa-Romeo with great concern.

A tuft from the dead cat’s fur gets blown over to me, landing on my cheek. I catch it and press it against my face. It smells nice. The scent takes me down memory lane. ‘Extasi’ by Silvestri. Rosalba’s perfume! I’d bought it for her with my hard-earned student cash stacking boxes at Walmart.

As the Alfa-Romeo tears out of the scene and pulls precariously into the driveway of a nearby apartment block, the old lady behind the Persian window that was once painted in bright green makes her opinion known:

“That man, he squashes what he doesn’t like.”

A uniformed school-girl, nine years old, more or less, emerges out of the same driveway where the Alfa-Romeo has pulled in, and dashes towards me to see what has just happened.

“That’s exactly where mom died,” she tells me.

I’m still trembling.

“Dad ran over her. An accident, he says, the judge said so too,” she continues in fast, successive gulps. She has an Italian accent, but speaks good English. She knows I'm not a local dude.

“Dad made mom’s nose bleed that day. She said she was going to the police-station. He chased her by car, that’s when it happened.” She speaks so fast I can hardly catch what she's saying.

Her tangerine hair reminds me of Rosalba’s. Her flushed cheeks too.

She digs vigorously inside her schoolbag. 

“This is my mom.” She shows me the Polaroid of Rosalba on the wobbly table, fold creases running through it in two directions.

The girl fixes her eyes onto mine. She seems to be thinking profoundly and only speaks again when she's done examining me.

“Are you the man-from-the-moon?” she finally asks. “Mom was once in love with a man from a place as far away from here as the moon. You’re like him, because he had long hair too. Only his was gold not silver.”

“If she was in love with the man-from-the-moon,” I speak through tears, “then why did she marry your father?”

“Because the man went back to the moon! He forgot about her.” With that she chuckles and shrugs one shoulder, and sets off: “Bye now. Dad doesn’t like me talking to strangers.”

I clench the tuft of fur. I now understand everything. The cat. The re-lived love tour. The car accident. It all adds up. Rosalba’s waiting for me! She has been all this time. Somewhere between here and the moon. I’m ready to go now.

Only thing is, I can't wait to be with her again...

A week’s just too long.