May 5, 2008
Daryl Scroggins Says
This is great, Deron. It reminds me of a chapter in Italo Calvino’s novel Marcovaldo, or the Seasons in the City. Each chapter follows a man (Marcovaldo) through a city, and each chapter has an intriguing title such as “Mushrooms in the City,” “Park-bench Vacation,” “The Forest on the Superhighway,” “The Poisonous Rabbit,” and so on. But my favorite chapter is the one that relates to this story of fishing in basements–it’s called “The Garden of Stubborn Cats.” It begins with the line: “The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.” In this chapter, Marcovaldo encounters a number of cats in an alley, and they begin to communicate with him in a strange way with their furtive glances and darting runs that stop and turn back. They lead him down a narrow alley behind a long row of businesses that open on a lower street level. There they show him a slant-windowed skylight that looks down upon a restaurant–and right below the skylight there is a tank of live fish, from which patrons may select for the dinner to be prepared for them. Marco looks at the cats and they look at him–and he realizes what it is they want him to do: he gets a fishing pole, opens the skylight and lowers the hook. When he has reeled in a nice trout a cat suddenly grabs it and runs. Marco follows, winding all through the city, through back yards and gardens. He comes to a little house where the cats all apparently live (there are many of them around it) and the fish, trailing the fishline, has become caught in a tree. Marco grabs the end of the line and is having a tug of war with the cats over who will gain the prize, when “from a blind of the little villa, two yellow, skinny hands darted out: one brandishing scissors; the other, a frying-pan. The hand with the scissors was raised above the trout, the hand with the frying-pan was thrust under it. The scissors cut the line, the trout fell into the pan; hands, scissors and pan withdrew, the blind closed: all in the space of a second.”
This wonderful scene also came to mind recently when Sheila mentioned once seeing three gray cats, on a night of swirling fog–all three of them sitting in a perfect triangle looking at each other. Maybe they were planning an expedition!
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