Tintin, a very special cat
The first time I saw him, he was sitting under the canopy of a bush, his whole body in shadow, just a ray of sunlight filtering through the leaves and shining right into his face. That moment had the beauty of a revelation, and what I didn't know at the time was that I would never forget that scene. When I approached, he waited with calm certainty for the intimacy of the touch that was to follow. The touch was followed by my embrace and then we went home together. Where he would never have left if I hadn't abandoned him for a whole year. But that's not the time to talk about it.
That very first night, he slept with me in my bed. For a while I tried to kick him out, because a bed is not a cat's place. At least, that's what almost everyone told me. Eventually I gave up trying to get him to respect other people's laws and we soon evolved to the point where we formed a stable couple, full of quirks, habits and rituals. Jealous and possessive, he had a deep contempt for most of the people around me. The only exception was my boyfriend, whom he tenaciously devoted himself to taming. Clever cat!
My closest friends soon got to know my cat and accepted the veneration I lavished on him. The others, well ... The others, when they saw the way I treated Tim, asked me incredulously, "Why are you so fussy? He's just a cat!" Yes, he was a cat, but I always knew he was a very special cat. He always seemed to understand everything that was going on in my head and heart. He was a black street cat, like the witches' cats, with very long, lustrous fur. "Velvet!" the carpet cleaner would say in delight when he came to the house and was greeted at the door by Tintin. With plenty of food at his disposal, he grew to Garfield-sized proportions when he became an adult: he weighed twelve kilos.
Concerned about his excess weight and the difficulty of getting him to follow a weight loss diet without being tortured by his long, protesting meows, I hired a veterinarian who treated cats with homeopathy and feline psychology. When she arrived at my house to meet him in his domestic environment, I saw that she was little more than a girl. Very young, dressed in a pulover full of threads pulled - by her cat? - and with an impressively simple demeanor, she gave me a few words of introduction before sitting down on the living room rug and starting a conversation in an affectionate, childlike tone with the cat that remained motionless in front of her. In a few minutes he was lying on his belly and purring with happiness at the affection he was receiving. I watched the whole scene with amazement and an unconcealed jealousy, as my cat wasn't one for being intimate with anyone.
Later, I found out that I had been duped: the so-called vet wasn't even a graduate, she was just the niece of the owner of the clinic where my cat was treated. Despite this, my cat, who had been diagnosed by her with obsessive-compulsive disorder, started taking Thuya and lost weight. When we learned that we had been duped, Tintin and I were deeply disappointed, and from then on there was no treatment that worked as well.
I don't know if it was his size or weight that scared most of the vets I took him to, but I soon discovered that many of them didn't like seeing cats. They were afraid. The first few times I traveled and left him at the clinics, I received my cat back in a sad state. His nails had been torn out and his fur was filthy. These were some of the obvious signs of the suffering to which the poor cat had been exposed. I then started leaving him at my mother's house, or at my own house, under the occasional care of my now ex-boyfriend, who had already been properly trained by my cat.
One sunny weekend in November, when we were planning to drive to a friend's beach house on the coast of São Paulo, the owner of the house made me the magical proposal: "Why don't you take Tintin with us?". The day had finally come for me to travel with my cat! On the appointed day, we all got into the car. Tintin was in his carrying case. When we passed in front of the Angra Nuclear Power Plant, my friend, who was sitting next to Tim's carrying case, complained that something stank inside. We stopped the car and discovered that he had pooped. While I left the cat in the care of this friend, I went to the gate of the Angra Power Station and asked to use the tap to wash the box. However, when a car with its exhaust open passed our group, the cat was startled and broke free of my friend's arms to crawl under a thicket of thorny plants on the roadside.
Despite all the consoling words and attention from my friends, my weekend was miserable. I couldn't get my cat out of my head for a single moment. At night, when I closed my eyes to go to sleep, I saw a close-up of the grass, where grasshoppers and other insects strolled in the moonlight. All this was illuminated by a phosphorescent green light. I saw this scene as if through my cat's eyes, while imagining the terror he must have been feeling. An apartment-bred cat, never more than a meter away from my lap, facing the dangers of the jungle alone at night! Poor Tintin!
The next day, I was so nervous that we set off for Rio just after lunch. My intention was to arrive at the Angra nuclear power plant during the day. Once there, I started shouting. "Come back, Tintin. Where are you? Come with Mom, my love!". My friends soon joined me and we shouted in chorus, calling for him for more than half an hour. All the food I had left on the road had been eaten. All that was left was the open cardboard, stained with grease. We called him for a while longer, but finally gave up. As we were walking back to the car, saddened by the outcome of this story, I heard a very low meow. A meow I knew so well! "Tim, Tim, Tintin," I shouted again, with redoubled energy. And he finally showed his little face amidst the vegetation on the roadside. A few minutes later, we were all on our way together, Tim sitting like a lord on my lap. We stopped for a snack at Mc Donald's, where he accepted the attention and affection of the children very calmly. Now Tintin was a cat who had shown his bravery to everyone in the radioactive forests of Angra.
When he was fourteen, I spent a year abroad. During this time, he lived with my mother, whom he also successfully tamed. She, who had never liked animals, now competed with me when it came to affection and attention. The two of them, too, soon developed their own routines. My cat was well cared for and happy. When I arrived a year later, I was greeted with a roar at the door of my mother's house. He ran around nervously, rubbing against my legs and asking for affection. He had missed me so much, he told me. Overcome with emotion, I held Tintin tightly on my lap and stroked him until he finally calmed down.
But it wasn't all roses. In the year that I had been away, he had fallen ill after receiving a vaccine, and shortly after my return, he died. My mother and I were inconsolable. Every now and then we talk about the various stories of my pets and, invariably, one of us always comments "Tintin, ahhh... Tim was a special cat!".
Voltar