The Great Sicilian Cat Rescue Read online

  ‘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.

  SEVEN

  Some Encounters with Cat Ladies

  Maria’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 an
d 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.

  EIGHT

  An Appointment with Taormina

  As the week went by, I was feeling the strain of having a feral cat in the apartment. I missed Andrew’s down-to-earth approach, although we spoke nightly on the phone. There was the daily chore of cleaning out her litter tray and trips to the butcher for mince, which she seemed to thoroughly enjoy. It must have been a welcome change to her normal diet of scraps. She had become less timid of me and came out from under the bed when I was around. But if I made any move to touch her, she darted away – her mother had trained her well.

  My stay in Taormina was turning out to be very different from the one I’d planned: the excursions, the interviews for my long-imagined book, all must be abandoned now because of this small feline. But I only had to remember that image of Lizzie with her terrible injury to be content with what I was doing.

  One morning, I decided to walk through the backstreets of this little town. Away from the Corso and its nightly street theatre, you step into the world of day-to-day life. In Via Numitorio, a caged bird sang its heart out. I paused to read some of those wry ceramic plaques showing the Sicilian biting sense of humour and pleasure in philosophising. One I knew: ‘A guest is like a fish –after three days he stinks’. Others were less familiar: ‘The viper that bit my mother-in-law died – poisoned’ and even: ‘Eat well, excrete well and you needn’t be afraid of death’. Some builders sang a Sicilian melody as they worked on a new house in Via Giardinazzo.

  I stopped at Auteri, the ironmonger-cum-everything else shop that never failed me, no matter what I needed, from glue to a toilet plunger. The two elderly owners gaze at the customer over their glasses and then rummage and produce exactly what she is looking for. I could never fathom how they remembered where it might be among all those boxes and shelves of their cavernous store.

  I went up and down flights of steps, up and down. Taormina is not for the lazy walker, if you truly want to know it. In a backstreet I paused outside the kitchen of Cyclopes and heard a chef singing. I sniffed the delicious scent of fish being cooked in the simple way: San Moriglio, with parsley, garlic, lemon and oil. A little open-backed van skimmed along, loaded with fennel and red onions.

  This might have been Taormina before the tourists invaded. I wished I could have seen it. But beautiful as it is, you still wonder how it has reached these heights of popularity; in August you can scarcely make your way along the Corso. One significant event in its tourist history was the chance visit of a young German painter to what was then a practically unknown Sicilian village.

  When Otto von Geleng set out from Rome to visit Sicily in 1859, there would have been no road linking the village to the coast. His journey through the precipitous ravines from Giardini was on the back of a mule. He stayed in Taormina for two or three months and it must have made a great impression on him because two years later he returned. Soon he was courting the sister of a Sicilian baron; he married her and settled in the town. The natural beauty of the place inspired him and before long he had painted enough oils and watercolours to hold an exhibition in Paris. Scenes of Taorminese gardens aflame with tropical flowers in brilliant sunlight while Etna glittered with snow, painted in the winter months, astonished visitors, who could not believe such a climate existed in Europe. Geleng was surely making it up!

  As a kind of wager, Geleng invited three of his most sceptical critics to come and see for themselves this fishing village situated between Catania and Messina. If they did not find it was exactly as he had depicted, he would foot the bill. He knew he was on a safe wicket for, of course, he had not exaggerated. They were enchanted by the exotic colours and beautiful views and wrote back to friends in France until articles about Geleng’s Taormina began to appear in newspapers. In the Place du Tertre, Montmartre, all they could talk about was this unknown fishing village suspended between a turquoise sea and sky, with a smoking volcano, while at the same time there were almond trees in blossom, oranges, lemons and cactuses. Soon Geleng realised that Taormina could flourish if more visitors were encouraged but the town would have to smarten itself up; there was room for a lot of improvement.

  Involving himself in local affairs, he emphasised that, if the foreigner was to undertake the necessarily long journey, he must find decent accommodation and at least some of the amenities he was accustomed to in his own country. At that time there was no hotel or inn in the place, no light or running water, only stone cisterns for collecting rain. Refuse was thrown into the streets and conditions were rather primitive. But Geleng’s forceful personality persuaded the Taorminese to put their house in order. A hotel, the Timeo, was opened in 1873 with a few rooms (later to be enlarged by the redoubtable Florence Trevelyan). The streets were cleaned, running water was introduced and no longer did the tourist have to grope his way through darkened streets at night.

  At one o’clock all the shutters in Taormina clang down and everyone goes for lunch, but I wasn’t hungry. I took a left turn and walked down the steps to the old Naumachia, a monumental Roman supporting wall in brick, some 122 metres long, punctuated by huge niches. The name ‘Naumachia’ literally translates as ‘naval battles’. In fact, at one time it was believed that the monument was an aquatic circus representing such battles. In reality, it was a huge aqua theatre, a colossal fountain playing water.

  I remembered it as a dank, insalubrious place but now I saw it had been cleaned up and planted with flowers. A notice said it was the work of the local gardeners group.

  I admired the lilies, roses and marigolds, then caught sight of a black man crouched by the door of the Arcate restaurant, devouring spaghetti with a dab of tomato sauce. The Taorminese have tender hearts: if they have never been hungry, race memory recalls those who suffered under Sicily’s conquerors. Tender but also passionate, their tempers are easily provoked. Quarrels can break out, insults hurled that would sever an English friendship for life, but not here. You will see the combatants next day strolling along the Corso, arm in arm. They have not forgotten the incident but they do not intend it to create an eternal rift. The Taorminese knows when the moment has come to draw in his horns. He does not commit himself to anything, not even an appointment, always allowing a loophole for escape. It’s foolish to make a man an enemy, he reasons, you might need him tomorrow or the day
after.

  I hesitated, wondering whether to go inside the Arcate. I had a dim recollection of the last time I saw Turri; that I did not part on very good terms with this sometime acquaintance.

  The restaurant was empty. From the kitchen I heard the sound of clattering pans, sniffed the unmistakable scents of Sicilian cooking – the garlic, the basil, the pesce spada. I cleared my throat. Turri, an incorrigible Taormina ‘character’, appeared in the doorway, an apron tied round his waist. He stared.

  ‘Good heavens, you!’ was all he said. But he seemed pleased to see me. ‘I’ve just got to finish what I’m doing. Go up to the terrace and I’ll be with you in a minute.’

  Beyond the flight of steps was a delightful area gazing out over the rooftops. I could see the care that had gone into creating it – the white awning overhead, fresh flowers on the tables, pretty linen – but it was deserted.

  ‘I know.’ Turri nodded, pouring wine from the jug into our glasses. ‘I don’t know what to do. It’s the kind of people who come on holiday, these days.’

  ‘I’m surprised they don’t want to come to a lovely little place like this.’

  ‘Things aren’t what they were. People don’t go in for proper lunch, these days. They’ll buy a slice or two of pizza or a burger and then go and sit in the Irish pub.’

  ‘But you can’t hear yourself speak,’ I added, thinking of another pub I had sat in briefly the other day but had to leave, unable to write or think because of the constant loud music.

  ‘Do you really need pubs here?’ I asked.

  ‘Muh!’

  For a moment we sipped our wine and looked back on the Taormina of all those years ago.

  ‘Not married then?’ Turri demanded.

  I pondered aloud on why my romantic dreams have never been realised. How all these years I have come and gone, increasingly drawn to the little town but I have never found anyone who matches my romantic image.