One of the results of American dominion on the planet is the invasion of other languages by English words. As part of this process, Italian has adopted “escalation,” and, though it is pronounced in the Italian way, the meaning remains that of the English, as does the violence lurking in the syllables.
I dedicated a great deal of the summer to un escalation with the dormice who have laid siege to my house in the mountains. I won the opening campaign of the war, a clever flanking movement, which drove them from the beams of the study and effectively removed them from the central field of battle. A few days after this I was sitting under the portico attached to the house, gloating over the ease of my victory, when I happened to glance up to the beams upon which this roof rests. And there my gaze was met by four round little black eyes, the size of grape pips, looking curiously back. “Sam and Louise,” I muttered, their names springing to my lips. That was a tactical error, for once they had individual names they ceased to be merely “the enemy.”
Quite content to study the opposition, we looked at one another for ten minutes or so, until my eye moved to what, until then, I’d assumed to be a swallows’ nest. Why was Sam’s tail draped around it? I got up, went across to my neighbor’s, and borrowed her ladder. I set it against the wall and climbed to the top, muttering dark threats, rather like one of those falsely fierce sergeants in Dickens. I was going to toss them out, hurl them to the ground, grind their little faces into the dust.
But when I reached the top Sam (or Louise) was crouched in the nest, paws drawn up to his (or her) chest, confronting me, whiskers a-quiver with terror, body a-tremble as this blustering monster approached. I stood at the top of the ladder for a moment, eyes no more than six inches from those of my enemy. I would guess I’m seven hundred times bigger than a dormouse.
“I’m going to break your little neck.”
He trembled.
“I’m going to grab you and hurl you to the earth and jump on you, crushing you to a pulp.”
He blinked.
“I will be merciless in your destruction.”
His nose twitched.
Our eyes remained locked for long moments, and then I climbed down the ladder so as best to plan the next move. During the next week, I accumulated a number of satanic devices. There were two ecological traps, guaranteed to capture but not injure, both of which the dormice ignored. There was the ultrasound machine, guaranteed to drive them either mad or away, but which I cannot use because my neighbor’s cat doesn’t like it. Following a recipe in a wildlife magazine, I prepared a sauce of olive oil and peperoncini and squirted it with a water pistol on the beams where I’d seen them; Louise, I suspect, dabs it behind her ears. And then a man driving past told me that it’s effective to suspend a plastic cat’s head in front of where you think their nests are. These I carved out of Styrofoam myself, carefully painting them to look like cats’ faces, even using dental floss for whiskers, then I climbed up and attached them by short pieces of thread to the four corners of the roof.
Two nights after this, we had a fierce windstorm, branches breaking and things going boom in the night. The next morning, when I went out on the patio with coffee, I saw four hairless pink creatures, little bigger than cashew nuts, lying dead on the pavement beneath the place where I’d last seen Sam and Louise. There was no sign of the nest, which the wind must have carried off into the fields beyond the house. I got a trowel and put them in a matchbox, then buried them under the lilac near the stairs.
I’ve given back the traps, decided to use the peperoncini in pasta, and when I get the ladder back I’m going to take down the cats.