The Great Sicilian Cat Rescue (4 page)

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.

M
aria’s voice brought me back to myself. She stroked a grey and white cat with blue eyes, surely a touch of the Siamese there and probably abandoned when the novelty of kittenish behaviour wore off.

Maria was a
gattara
, a woman who feeds cats.

Occasionally I have seen elderly men standing in piazzas or among ancient ruins dishing out food from Whiskas tins but usually the
gattare
are women. Some people joke about them, sneering that the creatures are a child substitute. But they don’t recognise the heroic dedication of the often-elderly woman, dragging her basket on wheels, heavy with cat food towards ‘her’ colony. In Rome, it is these cat ladies who care for many of the estimated 180,000 stray cats prowling the city’s streets. One of the most famous was the beautiful actress Anna Magnani, who used to feed the cats at Torre Argentina
every day when she was appearing in the nearby theatre. In the UK, former supermodel Celia Hammond, whose face once graced the cover of
Vogue
magazine during the 1960s, is a dedicated
gattara
. For decades she has been rescuing, neutering and re-homing stray and unwanted animals.

‘It’s very hard to do this job and have a normal life,’ she has been quoted as saying. ‘Relationships just fall apart, I’ve had three main ones and I neglected all of them, which is why I’m on my own.’

She sometimes ends up working twenty-two hours a day helping cats and says her modelling days feel so far removed from her life now. It is as though they happened to a different person.

‘You only get one life, you have to do what you feel is right with it. If you have a lifestyle where you have spent your whole existence taking drugs, going to parties, flying all over the world and lying on the beach, what would you feel at the end of your life?’

Maria’s fear of letting the cats down is common among these women. Their lives are composed of considerable sacrifices and small gratification. As one of them told me: ‘I’ve sold everything, my rings, my gold, everything but I can’t abandon them.’ She had been feeding cats for twenty years.

I wanted to put my arm round my companion, she looked so sad and alone sitting there, but then Lily pushed herself against Maria’s leg. She never missed the chance of a lap to make herself comfortable on.

In a while, Maria heaved herself to her feet, rinsed the bowls that had been licked clean anyway, and filled one with water. She gave me one of her rare smiles. ‘
A domani
,’ she said
and trundled off. I could see her legs were troubling her this sultry afternoon.

As I wandered along the paths, gazing at flowers, I recognised some of them: hibiscus, oleander, African marigolds, but others were unknown to me.
You’ve changed,
I told myself.
Fifteen years ago, you’d have loved the colours and the perfumes of this garden but more likely you’d have been thinking about the latest amore you were meeting that evening. You certainly wouldn’t have got all these cats’ hairs over your white trousers!

She was like a stranger, that other Jenny. Did she ever notice that each of the old olive trees lining the last path towards the exit gate bears a plaque commemorating a soldier fallen in the First World War? Did she bother to find out that the nickname for those strange askew wooden pavilions is ‘the beehives’? I don’t think she did. In the gap between my visits I’d changed and Taormina hadn’t – only it seemed different to me because my viewpoint was new.

I arrive at the bust of Florence Trevelyan in a little enclosure. Her hair is drawn back into a bun and she wears a locket on her high-necked blouse; she’s smiling a secret little smile. Florence, daughter of Lord Edward Spencer. Born in Newcastle in 1852, Queen Victoria called her ‘my little niece’. Photographs of the period show her among flowers and dogs in the royal parks. No one knows exactly what happened to Florence until she was twenty-seven years old. It was then in April 1879 that she left England to travel for more than two years. She doesn’t seem to have been very enthusiastic about this; rather than a pleasure trip, it seems she was going away to forget a love affair rumoured to be with Victoria’s son Edward.

She and her travelling companion, Louise Harriet Perceval, arrived in Italy, where they visited all the big cities. Florence was an avid diary writer. Arriving in Messina in a February of the early 1880s, she noted ‘nothing worth the trouble of visiting’ and promptly left by train for Taormina. This was a different story altogether, as she wrote to her ‘dear cousin’.

The journey from Taormina railway station was ‘marvellous, great, stupendous, immense, very picturesque, beautiful, seductive with the view of Etna. The sea is blue and the mountains: it is impossible to describe how beautiful they are.’

Like many other visitors, she finally felt at home in Taormina and it was a regretful departure. On her return to England in August 1881, life apparently ceased to be a fairy story. Something serious happened between Lady Trevelyan and the Royal family. Dino Papale, author of
Taormina Segreta
, suggests that in 1884 she once more departed England, leaving everything behind ‘as if she were running away’ and journeyed to Taormina.

It is said that Queen Victoria had ‘invited’ her to travel abroad for a lengthy period in order to try to make her forget Edward. But on her return and with the renewed interest of her son, Her Majesty appears to have decided there was nothing for it but to exile Florence for twenty years.

Florence arrived in Sicily one February and six years later became engaged to Professor Salvatore Cacciola. The couple met when Florence banged on the door of his villa, demanding he treat her terrier. ‘I’m a doctor, not a vet!’ he protested. Nevertheless, he not only cured the dog but also married its owner.

Florence turned her back on the past and threw herself into life in Taormina, created these gardens and built little pavilions where she could take afternoon tea. When she died in October 1907, she left her gardens to her beloved husband on the condition that ‘the trees must not be cut down and no houses built. All the creatures of whatever kind: dogs, cats, parrots, raven, doves, tortoises, canaries and other birds must be looked after with loving care as I did in my life’.

You’re a lady after my own heart, Florence,
I thought.

I photographed six black kittens playing near the entrance to the gardens, oblivious to the cars, which swing round from Via Roma. Then I spotted some other flowers with huge obscene stamens luring the bees. In spite of water problems, Sicily is greener and lusher than its neighbours in the Mediterranean. There is an astonishing fecundity of swift blossoming and fruitfulness, which as quickly fades. This reminded me of the love affairs in the town, of the spoilt-for-choice attitude of the men who select women from the coaches that arrive and depart each week from Catania airport.

If I’ve learned anything about life, it is change is the only constant thing and love so often transitory, not the ‘happy ever after’ I used to believe. I could not imagine I could become again the Jenny who turned her back on everything and gave herself up to the sun, the girl who found everything ‘lovely’ but whose eyes failed to see the plaques on the olive trees. Could I fall in love with another Sicilian man? It was hard to imagine.

Opposite a ceramic shop there is a series of steps leading down to a narrow street. Motorbikes and cars rush past,
yet against a garage door are set a series of bowls, a sure sign of
gattara
territory. This colony is more nervous than that of the gardens. Tourists don’t come here as a rule. As I approached, they ran across the road almost under the wheels of a motorbike and peered out at me warily through some railings. After a while a small woman approached: it was Gabriella.

She resembled a bag lady. Her broken sandals tied to her feet over thick stockings, she wore an old dress and what looked like several cardigans over the top. But it was her face that always held my attention: it was rather round, with a small chin and wide-set eyes. She must have been a beauty when she was young but now that skin was sallow and leathery. And she smelled musty – unwashed – an overpowering stink!

When I mentioned this to a friend who lived nearby, he laughed and said, ‘You mean
La Baronessa
. Oh yes, I know her! When she comes into the bank, we all make sure we stand upwind. She smells ten times worse when it’s been raining.’

It was an appalling stench but I stood my ground while we talked, this time in Italian, about the cats. She told me once again how she spent all her pension money on them and, although in bad health, she still came down here every day.

Then she launched into the story everyone has heard ad nauseam: how she was born in Milan, married a Taorminese and came here when she was very young. How the family ran a restaurant at Isola Bella. They were happy days, such happy days all that time ago. Now she was over eighty and some days she didn’t know how she got herself down here. But if she didn’t, who would? I watched as she doled out the
food, talking softly to another raggedy little group.
I couldn’t end up like her, could I?

Later, I called at the butcher, averting my gaze from the sight of the skinned rabbits, looking horribly human, hanging overhead. Instead, I watched the red worms of beef exuding from the mincer. Everything is spotless and absolutely fresh in Sicilian butchers’ shops. Even I, a vegetarian, had to admit that. When I arrived back at my apartment I’d cook the meat slowly, then add lentils and rice to give it bulk. Tomorrow I’d take it to the Public Gardens.

And I asked myself:
Was I to become like Florence Trevelyan, a strange Englishwoman who reinvented herself and found fulfilment in helping animals?
Whether I liked it or not, the fact was, I was fast becoming a
gattara
.