Another Insane Devotion (12 page)

But at that time and place, I had no witness.

What did I do the rest of that night? I wrote e-mails. I read, or tried to read, my undergraduates' essays. One of them began with a description of a small object falling out of the sky and landing at the writer's feet. Only when it was lying there did she recognize it as an injured hummingbird. A moment later, it died.

It's hard to get a cat to do tricks. The difficulty and the reluctance responsible for it are often cited in debates on feline intelligence, mostly by skeptics. In one study, in which subjects could get food by pressing a lever on a kind of vending machine, cats performed worse than pigeons. For a long time one of the least-used books in my library was
Tricks Your Cat Can Do.
Somebody gave it to me as a gift back when I first had Bitey, and I tried it out for a month or two before exiling it to a series of remote bookshelves, for I kept taking it with me when I moved, out of hope or habit, periodically bringing it out to gaze at its photos of cats jumping onto their owners' shoulders or tapping the keys of a piano. Fifteen years and four moves later, I finally got rid of it in a yard sale.

Still, there's a trick I managed to teach Biscuit. She liked being petted and, in her eagerness for affection, would practically butt against my hand. If, while petting her, I lowered my face to her level, she'd rub against it, cheek against cheek. She'd do it over and over. At close range, her face was a tawny, shield-shaped blur, paler at the muzzle and cheeks. Her breath was musty but not unpleasant, smelling of the dry nuggets I poured into her bowl every morning, a scent of dried fish and, oddly, leather, as if from a saddlery. Her gold-green eyes, which usually had some discharge at their corners, were intent but not especially loving. I don't know if you can see love in a cat's eyes the way you can in a dog's, and of course dogs turn their amorous gaze on everybody and everything, down to the half-eaten burger somebody dropped in the grass two nights ago that they regard as if it were an old, dear friend before snapping it up. Sometimes it occurs to me that what I saw as I
rubbed faces with Biscuit wasn't much different from what a mouse might see in the moment before she punched its little ticket. In my case, though, she was purring.

As tricks go, it's not very impressive. All I did was encourage Biscuit to do what she'd do anyway, rub against me when I petted her, just substituting my face for my hand. This is said to be the fundamental rule of training any animal: you can only get it to do what it wants to do—in essentialist terms, to act in accordance with its nature. If I were more ambitious, I could have trained her to respond to a verbal cue. The thing would be to start out by petting her, I guess, and then to say, “Give me some love,” or something equally gross and present my face for her to butt against. In the beginning I'd probably have had to say it over and over—“Gimme some love, gimme some love”—like a Barry White song. In time, she might have come to respond to the words alone. This would be a classic example of forward conditioning, in which a stimulus—here, the words “Gimme some love”—brings on a response (i.e., rubbing).

My projections of success may be rosy, since Biscuit's response to other words was hit-or-miss. She didn't always come when we called her name, and barking “no!” wasn't always enough to stop her from misbehaving. It wasn't the time she brought in that chipmunk. The one cue that almost always worked was the call “meaty dinner!” But of course the conditioned, verbal stimulus was reinforced by other stimuli, both conditioned and unconditioned, since F. or I sang out the words at the same time of day, and when Biscuit raced into the house or pattered downstairs from one of her sleeping spots, an unconditioned stimulus in the form of a dish of canned food
was waiting for her. This was the thing she wanted, the thing for which all other stimuli, temporal or verbal, were only signs, or perhaps, given the animal's confusion of contingency and cause, means. The cry “meaty dinner!” and the fading light weren't indications that food was ready. They were what made food happen. And it was food she loved.

But then, why do cats do so badly in those learning experiments? If they love food, why can't they figure out that pushing a particular lever will make it come rattling down into a dish? I can't believe it's because they're stupid. The psychologist Edward Thorndike placed cats in specially designed boxes from which they could escape by performing simple actions—pulling a loop of cord or stepping on a platform or pushing a lever. The cats were kept hungry. Outside the box but in plain sight of the captives, the experimenter left some food. He found that certain cats, by trial and error, learned how to break out of their traps and get at the food. With repetition, they were able to do it in no time at all, having formed, as Thorndike put it, “a perfect association between the sense-impression of the interior of the box and the impulse leading to the successful movement.” Cats, in other words, are bad at getting food from a vending machine but excellent at getting out of a box in order to feed themselves. It may be that, after millions of years of feeding not on stationery nuts and seeds but on clever, fast-moving birds and rodents, cats are poorly adapted to the monotony of pressing a lever to secure a few pellets—the portions in the experiment are pretty chintzy—of dry food. It may be that in the hierarchy of feline skills, extraction ranks lower than escape
.

According to a study that sifted through DNA samples collected from 979 house cats and wildcats on three continents—the collecting can't have been much fun—the domestic cat is descended from
Felis silvestris lybica,
the Near Eastern wildcat found in the deserts of Israel and the Arabian Peninsula. Some 12,000 years ago, this creature is thought to have taken up habitation in the early agricultural settlements of the Fertile Crescent. At first, the wildcats probably just darted in long enough to snatch a few rats from the granaries, but over time they began staying longer. The farmers must have welcomed the small, deft creatures that silently prowled their storehouses, stalking the vermin that ravaged the wheat and barley. It helped that the visitors were unobtrusive. They made no claim on their hosts. They wanted nothing but the pests they hunted with such artful dedication, lying in wait for them in the shadows, their sleek bodies flattened to the earth, their eyes full of light, their pupils like black suns. Their cruelty was marvelous. How they toyed with their prey, pinning it down only to let it wriggle free so they could pounce on it again; they'd do it over and over until their victim died of terror or exhaustion.

Thousands of years later, in “Jubilate Agno,” Christopher Smart would ascribe these habits to chivalry:

But chivalry was only invented in the Middle Ages, most peoples up until then having commonsensically believed that
there was no point in showing mercy to a helpless enemy unless you meant to make him a slave. And Smart wrote “Jubilate Agno” in the madhouse.

Certainly, the cats must have had to modify their behavior. They learned not to snarl and strike out at the large creatures whose dens so abounded in game and not to shit in the dried grass seeds they liked to eat. In this way, they became the first animals to domesticate themselves. The adaptation probably took place through the same trial-and-error process by which Thorndike's cats learned to escape traps, except it wasn't just individuals that were adapting but an entire species, or the progenitors of one. Tests of mitochondrial DNA indicate that all of today's house cats are descended from five female lineages, five feline Eves.

It makes sense that cats and humans would learn to live together. Each had something the other needed. The mystery is when their relation evolved beyond convenience. Did one of the visitors grow so used to the great creatures that one day he forgot himself and brushed against one as he might brush against one of his own kind, except that instead of a flank he was making contact with an enormous leg? He may have meant nothing by it, just wanted to stamp the other creature as being, briefly, his. (Cats are possessive, but only on a short-term basis, judging by the way different individuals in a household will rub in turn against the same door frame in passing, as though punching a factory clock, with no cat appearing to take umbrage at later claimants.) Did the cat purr as it did this? And did the great creature, sensing its intent or just enjoying the supple, furry caress, reach down and stroke
the little creature in return? Imagine how clumsy he must have been, his hand stiff as a paddle. Children always have to be taught how to stroke a cat rather than thump it like a dog. “Don't
pat
her,
pet
her,” I remember telling Wilfredo. He looked at me narrowly, wondering what he was doing wrong and maybe, given things I learned later, if I was going to hit him. It's possible that the first such exchange was between a cat and a human child. The difference in their sizes wouldn't have been that great, and cats, like other mammals, seem able to recognize the young of other species, thanks to their large round heads and eyes and small mouths and noses, the same features that make kittens so appealing.

Call this the simple friendliness that arises between individuals when they share an environment in a mutually beneficial way. You see it in offices. Such friendliness is pragmatic,
acknowledging the services the parties render each other and building up a fund of good will against future conflicts, as for instance when one party defecates in the other's food supply or thoughtlessly steps on the other's tail. At those times I hurt Biscuit by accident, eliciting a pain shriek whose real duration may have been between one and two and a half seconds but that seemed to go on forever, I was always touched when, after an interval of brooding under a bed, she allowed me to pet her again. “I'm sorry, sweetheart,” I'd tell her and reach down to scratch her head, which astonishingly rose to meet my hand, and I marveled at the trust she showed for a creature that a little while before had caused her to scream in pain and that by sheer virtue of its size could easily kill her.

Some 9,500 years ago, on the island of Cyprus, in a village called Shillourokambos, a man was buried beside a cat. A team of French archaeologists unearthed their bodies in 2001. Both sets of remains were well preserved, and although each had a separate grave, these were only sixteen inches apart and had been dug at the same time. Both man and cat lay with their heads facing west, the man with his arms crossed on his chest, the cat with its limbs tucked beneath it. The deceased man was about thirty and, judging by some shaped flints and a small green stone axe arrayed around him, a person of rank. The cat was only eight months old. It may have been killed to keep the man company in the grave or in whatever world the people of that time believed lay beyond it. While a nearby grave pit contained parts of several animals, the cat had been buried whole and intact in a way the scientists believed called
attention to it as an individual. This creature and not another. With this man.

What happened between the time humans began admitting
Felis silvestris lybica
into their granaries (though, really, how could they have kept them out?) and the time they first took
Felis silvestris catus
with them into the afterworld?

 

Just before F. and I became lovers, I hung back. It was true I wanted her very much. She was the only person in any room in which I happened to find myself; whole cocktail parties were depopulated because of her. And I didn't want to be in any room that didn't have her in it. The trouble was that by then I also liked her. I hadn't thought that would happen. How had the woman who'd looked at me like I was a turd turned into somebody I liked? We were in a room in the city, high above the street. The lights were dim. The walls were hung with photographs that seemed to be portraits, but it was hard to tell. Were those shadows the faces of men or women? Were they faces at all? The lights in the street below might have been stars, each with its radiant smeared corona. I had to force myself to look at F. It was as if I were about to tell her something terrible. “I want you,” was how I may have put it, “but I like having you as my friend. You're so nice. I'm just scared that if we go any farther, it'll fuck everything up.”