I need to talk about cats. And about power.
      It is tedious to hear people who love their animals—dogs, cats, gerbils, you name it—extol their pets’ virtues. (Who wants to know about dear Chunky’s latest exploits? Anton Chekhov called his pet ferrets Quinine and Bromide, by the way. And Virginia and Leonard Woolf had a marmoset named Mitz. Humans come up with the goofiest names for their animals…)
     So I am not going to talk about a pet of mine (though there is, in Brooklyn, a black cat called Zora who is indeed a pet of mine—an astonishing creature, much beloved and deservedly so, though she is currently committing adultery with our housesitter). I am instead going to talk about cats for whom the notion of “you’re mine” is risible. About cats born and raised without houses or “owners” or a clear sense of where the next meal is coming from—or whether, during rain or snow, there will be dry cover anywhere, or if survival will even be possible. Or for how long.
     If you’re a cat in Castiglione del Terziere—my current village-home in the hilly region of Lunigiana, Italy—you’re used to scaling walls and roofs. This village is medieval, steep-laned, and rocky. If you’re born here, you soon develop good leg muscles, tough claws, and an appetite for whatever comes your way: you don’t fuss over food. You sun yourself by lying on warmed stone. You roam the undergrowth in the fig- tree orchard just above our lane, or you lie languidly beneath one of the half-dozen cars in Il Collo, “The Neck”—the dead end at the base of Castiglione’s main lane. Or you ingratiate yourself with 85-year-old Rina, who might let you hang out by her door, and will feed you scraps. You must descend to one of several nearby creeks for water, then slink all the way back up after quenching your thirst.
     If you’re lucky and were born in the castle atop the village, you’ll get meals up there now and then—provided by Loris Jacopo Bononi and Raffaella Paoletti, who live there and don’t mind cats in their kitchen. (They rescued the castle from utter ruin, when it was just a heap of stones, a cats’ playground.) The castle’s library, which contains first editions of Dante, Petrarch, and other medieval and Renaissance authors, would make any well-educated cat’s head spin. But if you’re a Castiglione cat, although you might embody certain qualities associated with Renaissance folk (e.g., multiple skills, an eye for pleasure, keen awareness of who your friends and enemies are, healthy skepticism about both imperial and divine power), you won’t have much time to deploy those qualities. You’ll be working on nothing other than staying alive and well.

Tristana, as Antonio and I have dubbed her, has adopted us.
     She’s a wily girl. Little, solitary, stubborn. A roof-dancer. Soft-furred, her tail slightly bushy. Green-eyed, her gaze slightly askance, as if all the world strikes her as being a bit off-kilter.
     Tristana first started showing up not at our front door but on our terrace, a place reachable only by (1) coming through the front door—something no cat does, since we close it behind us whenever we come or go; or (2) climbing from a neighbor’s wall to that neighbor’s roof, thence to another and another and finally to ours, then down from our roof to the terrace. Trust me, it’s super-tricky getting to the terrace if you don’t walk in the front door. (If you’re not a cat and you try it, you’ll roll off and die.)
     Tristana was adept at all the maneuvers required. And careful not to let any other kitty follow her. She materialized on our terrace not long after we’d moved in, and watched us from the far end, taking our measure. Gradually crept in to grab scraps we’d leave for her near the terrace door. Then began showing up on the balcony outside our bedroom each evening. Inched closer to the bedroom door-window. Took to sitting there, staring impassively as I sweet-talked her. Grabbed and dragged to one corner a few bits of mozzarella I offered her. Bided her time til she felt sure I wasn’t going to do her harm.
     Long story short: Tristana now has me (and hard-hearted Antonio, too!) wrapped around her paw. We don’t allow her to spend the night inside, but she’s commandeered a chair in our living-room, on which she lounges, princess-like, for several hours of each day. In between naps, she accepts the prosciutto, fish scraps, and other delicacies we give her. For the longest time she rebuffed all my efforts at petting her, evasively corkscrewing her delicate little body each time my hand drew near. Recently, though, she’s decided that a bit of ear-rubbing would be a nice thing. And while I’m at it, a bit of side-rubbing too. And some backrubs. Again, please. Oh, and some more dry food. And a bit of water.
     All right, this account threatens to turn into one of those paeans to a pet that I (and you, reader) find obnoxious. So I shall stop. The point, anyway, wasn’t to focus on Tristana, though (as you’ll see from the photo) she’s a beauty. The thing I wanted to convey was this: it’s equal parts interesting and unnerving to live in a place amidst animals who are numerous (there must be thirty feral cats here!) yet wholly autonomous. Who count on the kindness of strangers—on Rina and Raffaella and myself—for food and affection, yet feel no need to express or even experience loyalty; it’s not an important virtue. Who respond to the pleasures of domesticity but know where to go at night when it’s cold, dark, and wet, and no human will follow them. Who fight and procreate and die in this village just as their fellow creatures have done for centuries.
     We, their human co-inhabitants, are bigger, and we have cars; we can move about without expending our bodies’ energy. We sometimes make things easier for the animals in Castiglione, but to them we’re mainly just part of the scene. We lack their kind of power, for we know nothing of all that goes on at night here—when the owls hoot and the donkeys bray and the wilder animals, those in the woods across the ravine (badgers, deer, perhaps a wild boar or two) make their noises, stirring and proclaiming and jeering and warning…
     We don’t know what they’re saying, can’t grasp their complex transactions. Must content ourselves with listening, if we awaken in the middle of the night, to an untrammeled realm—beautiful, terrifying—from which we’re excluded, and wondering what we’d do if we really had to survive there.

    Each September in the town of Colorno, near Parma, a very cool event takes place: the International Festival of Circuses and Street Theater, organized by Teatro Necessario, a trio of actors/street performers based in Parma. One of three, Jacopo Bianchini, is the father of Antonio’s grandson, Milo. (The latter is quite a charmer, and a lucky little boy: he gets to answer the question “what does your daddy do?” with “he’s a clown!”)

   This year, Antonio and I along with our dear friend Lynn (visiting from Boston, and not expecting—but happy—to be taken to see a bunch of clowns et al.) were given tickets to the event’s highlight: “L’Homme Cirque.” It was an hour’s performance by David Dimitri, a man who, according to numerous people in Jacopo’s line of work, has revolutionized the concept of a circus.

   I dunno about revolutionizing, but Dimitri sure blew us away. For starters, he works alone. This means he must organize all his props while performing—in addition to undertaking various mysteries of movement, as I came to think of them: things that left me scratching my head in wonder as I tried to figure out how he’d managed them.

   He started off by pretending to be a man without balance, teetering on one foot
as he changed from one pair of shoes to another. Then he put himself through a series of short problem-solving skits, never speaking a word but always smiling, his grin calm and unforced. It took me a little while to realize how extremely controlled his performance was, since he gave the impression of total ease. (He’s helped in this by the fact that he’s a handsome man, his body taut and elegant. But he’s also fifty years old, a bit long in the tooth for most circus performers.) Humor underlies everything he does, along with a palpable sense that danger and disturbance are everywhere and unavoidable, even necessary.

   What did he do? Dimitri put himself into, lit the fuse of, and got himself shot out
of a cannon he hauled onto his little stage. He dragged out a wooden horse—Helen of
Troy would’ve loved it!—and did acrobatic feats upon and with it, his love for the horse
as evident as it was perverse. And he walked a tightrope suspended above the stage,
getting onto and off it just as any cat would a fence. His movements were ceaseless, fluid,
sensuous. He’s got feet that work as hands might—equally as articulate, each muscle and
toe doing its job. The stories he told without words, through various balance-challenging
acts, were of a solitude strung delicately over an abyss of loneliness; of the attempt to
make things work right, and work out; of comedy as the only path possible through
thickets of distress.

   And his body shouted Freedom! with every move. I can think of only a few dancers (Bill T. Jones comes to mind) with that sort of command of a language, an entire vernacular of movement, which seems utterly instinctive. Dimitri is called a circus performer, but he’s really a dancer in the circus of his imagination.

   The ending of his show? He somehow slipped out through a hole at the top of his tent (which was small three hundred of us were shoehorned into it, barely able to move) and shimmied up to a tightrope strung outside. Follow me!, he called as he exited. And so we did, like the Pied Piper’s devotees. Craning our necks upward, we gazed at a marvelous sight: a man with a pole in his hands, traveling by foot from one end to the other of a tightrope high above our heads—each swing of leg and-foot, leg-and-foot a miracle of balance.

    I watched the rapt expression of Milo as he stared up at David Dimitri, magician on the wire, and thought, ah, che fortuna: you’ll always remember this.