T.S. Eliot is one of the greatest figures in the history of English Literature. On the other hand, he was a horrible person, even though he liked cats so much that he wrote a book dedicated to them, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats –in the 1982 Faber & Faber's edition astonishing illustrated by Edward Gorey. Well, our man begins his collection of poems with these lines I learnt by heart some time ago:
'The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.'
When Mrs. Jennings arrived home, her name was Satanita –'little Satan' in Spanish. So baptised her my friend Laura, who had rescued her in February in Madrid.
She was emaciated then, the half of her tail skinned, a hissing, roaring, ready to scratch both cats and humans six months old creature with whom I fell in love immediately and irrevocably.
Satanita couldn't stay at Laura's because she was constantly making a scene with Melón, the cat, and Pu, the dog. Laura thought that maybe in my place, with the soothing company of the three cats I live with, placid, sceptic felines who don't give a shit about gender roles and stereotypes about their species, Satanita could be sheltered in relative peace till an adopter'd be eventually found.
An adorable fiend got out of the carrier the afternoon she arrived at home, spitting with all her might to the other cats, who ignored her with such a phlegmatic air that she realised gradually she was making a fool of herself. 'A bit of dignity! Don't be ridiculous,' seemed to be considering Jennings.
In the transformation from The Exorcist's possessed child to a sometimes moody, sometimes exhaustingly loving cat with an incipient beer belly, Mrs. Jennings have deserved her third name: Archilochus of Paros, one of my most beloved archaic lyric poets from Ancient Greece (after Sappho of Mytilene). This fellow is known as the 'first poet of hate' (C.M. Bowra dixit). Brilliant, independent, original, this mercenary wrote about every theme he fancied, from love to warfare, with extreme delicacy or thunderous wrath. Perhaps I'm 'as mad as a hatter' if I tell you that this fragment from Archilochus makes me think of Jennings while smiling idiotically:
'I know how to love those
Who love me, how to hate.'
