I was sitting in Taormina’s Public Gardens talking to the cats. The gardens house a colony of feral felines, which grows or diminishes depending on the number of animals abandoned and whether someone throws down poisoned meatballs. A lot of Sicilians look upon ferals as vermin.
Lily was sitting on my lap, her eyes narrowed to slits as I gently scratched under her chin, a favourite place for cats, though each is different. I thought that she must be over eight years old and, unlike some of her companions who ran away, she had worked out it was politic to allow stroking because then she would get the lion’s share of any titbits.
The afternoon was so hot it seemed to be holding its breath; time was suspended. I’d chosen to come here and sit in this green shade rather than bake on the beach of Isola Bella, hundreds of metres below the town. I couldn’t face being squashed into a bus packed with people – all that tourist panic of where or where not to get off.
As I stroked Lily, I gazed at a truly picture postcard view: huge pots overflowing with geraniums, pink and red, standing on a stone parapet, and further beyond grumpy Etna rising against the perfectly blue sky.
Lily purred. It wouldn’t be hard to nod off myself.
‘Sera.’ Rounding a flowerbed, the familiar figure of Maria arrived, out of breath, carrying two large plastic bags.
‘Sera, Maria.’
She and I had met here too often to stand on ceremony. Besides, it was too hot.
She set the bags down, gathered up the feeding bowls and gave them a rinse in the fountain. Immediately the cats sprang into action. Lily’s eyes widened and she flew from my lap. The air was filled with meows. The cats milled round Maria, pressing themselves against her legs as she emptied out great mounds of pasta cooked with fish. Then there was a lot of grumbling, a lashing out of paws as they fought for their place. They were a pretty sad bunch, but even when they are starving cats retain their table manners – about twenty of them, ginger, black and tortoiseshell; the big grey tom had a weeping raw patch behind his ear, several were thin and mangy and there was a small white cat with one eye. I knew how he lost that: a vicious infection akin to feline chlamydia, which is actually part of a feline upper respiratory disease complex, most often appears in cats as conjunctivitis, which is inflammation of the tissues of the eye, also known as ‘pink eye’.
Unless it is treated in time with an antibiotic like Pensulvit cream, the animal loses its sight. I carried a tube of this cream in my bag but it really needed two people on the job: one to hold the cat, the other to spread the cream. The two sickly ginger kittens I noticed the other day were absent. Theirs is a grim world.
Maria plumped herself down on the bench beside me and began to speak in the Sicilian dialect. She did this in the understandable belief that, because we shared a love of cats and the desire to help them, I should be able to understand her. In a way, I suppose I did, at least the gist of what she said. It’s a language packed with guttural sounds and with only a nodding acquaintance with Italian. Pronunciation is easier for a Brit because the ‘r’ isn’t emphatically rolled. At Maria’s age she was no longer jealous of foreign females, thank goodness! Often I’d been the subject of a penetrating glare when I tried to befriend other Sicilian women.
She was beautiful, not outwardly, I should add. Elderly, with a strong-featured face and grey hair, she wore the typical matron’s dark frock. Her varicose veins gave her trouble, she’d often told me about them: ‘Mi fanno morire nel caldo’ (they kill me in the hot weather). Without grace, she sat with her legs splayed, showing her knee-highs. But Maria was beautiful within. She had a generous, loving heart, a childlike simplicity. The several badges of animal welfare associations she wore on her collar announced her devotion. She was a widow and had moved from a house into an apartment so she couldn’t keep cats of her own. But every day – whatever the season – she bought fish from the market, cooked it up with pasta and brought it here.
She related the trouble she was having with her neighbours, who were suspicious of her strange behaviour; this is a society where anything new or unusual is mistrusted and her eccentric feeding of cats was not tolerated. As she described the nasty tricks they played on her, like watering their plants just after she had hung out her washing on the balcony below, I gazed round the gardens.
Nearby were some gigantic terracotta pots filled with cascading plants covered with tiny scarlet bells; the label said they came from Mexico. The roses were already in bloom and the bougainvilleas as I always remembered them: gaudy and riotous, a clash of magenta and crimson.
‘I worry – I really worry what would happen to these bambini if I couldn’t get here anymore. Sometimes I’ve been ill and missed a few days. I’ve lain in my bed imagining them waiting here for me and I don’t come,’ Maria told me.