Anyway, I should have stopped reading long ago. I should control myself, to keep from wasting too much light; I should control myself and sleep the right number of hours and not be a despicable sleepyhead when I go to work tomorrow.
The feverish cats, beings whose love is bellicose and essentially nocturnal, have taken the book from my hand. Beneath the moon, I believe, love can be more idyllic and more beastly. Maybe, in a relationship, it is the candor of the sun that nurtures those disclosures that lead to tedium and disenchantment.
My own little cat, my Fuci, must dwell among those cats; whether idyllic or beastly I do not know, but certainly unrecognizable. Unrecognizable for me as well, though I watch over his development and even see him in my dreams, when I dream that he is a leopard. I see him as a leopard, like an ordinary father whose son has surpassed his aspirations and taken on the proportions of a giant. A normal father, unable to stifle an inner voice that calls him, simply, son.
Thus I call my Fuci-leopard Fuci, nothing more. Fuci, I say to him, as a greeting and show of affection, when I visit him in the field in the park where he reenacts an old custom of his from his days as a cat. Back then, curled up and drowsing, he would sidle up next to any saucepan that smelled good. Now that he’s a leopard, he drowses in the field where three hens are pecking, waiting, I suppose, for their death, so he can eat them without lapsing into flagrant criminality. While he waits, needs have arisen which, though they don’t make him forget his longing, relegate it to the condition of a possibly ruined hope, and have imposed another life on him and another situation. His present state is that of a head of household. He lives, with his cubs and his chosen one – who puts me in mind of a hyena, and may even be one – in an abandoned oven, where the field’s verdure goes dead, unable to make inroads into the salt earth. My Fuci-leopard lets no one approach him, save for me, though the presence of his wife, who doesn’t care for me at all, disrupts our communication a bit. At those times, I limit myself to standing at a distance from the oven and looking, just looking; and while I look, I utter the name Fuci, as in a one-sided conversation, for all that intimate and caring. Because now I see in Fuci’s visage, sad and tenuously severe, the burden of obligations, and I think, no matter how much a leopard he is, deep down he’s just a cat, and they can’t weigh a cat down with so much responsibility. I know this well, from my personal experience, as a man.
If he returns now, from the roofs and his allotment of love, he will find in me, beyond the customary protectiveness shown by man to cat, the solidarity of those whose problems have gotten the best of them.
It must be him, and tonight he must be a leopard, judging by his strength and ungainliness as he opens my door.
No.
It’s not him. It’s a man, a man whose presence is perplexing. I have a second to see he doesn’t need a knife or gun to kill me, and neither is in view; and a second to see that, if he weren’t there, the sky could be beautiful, revealed through the open door.
Fortunately, I’m a boy and still have many years left.
But how will I free my Fuci from that lawbreaker?