Like water, the world flows through you, and for some time it lends you its colors. Then it goes back and again leaves you alone with all emptiness you carry. Nicolas Bouvier
Each day is just the waiting until the advent of the night, and each night is just the waiting until the advent of the day. Playing with the cats prevents me from getting nuts. Sandra and her father Javier, owners of the house where I’m staying for a week, said that I shouldn’t touch these cats, because they are wild, they scratch and I can catch rabies or some other nasty stuff.
Maybe they are right, but because there is no one around to whom I could speak up and salamanders poorly respond to my accosting (as well as big, flying insects, which come into the room through absolutely invisible holes – but just in case they get swatting at their heads and, on a scoop, return to the garden), so the cats seemed to me an excellent material for having fun, and for being able to unbosom myself – you can speak to them, run after them, play hide and seek, simply look at them.
I was even able to catch the black one and stroke him for a minute. No longer, cause the black stabbed his teeth in my arm, so the petting was over – apparently, I am out of practice in providing pleasure and now I will have to learn this art again. As fate will allow, maybe not necessarily on cats.
So, there are cats in the house. At first I thought there were eight of them, then, that seven, but eventually I counted nine, including two coming most likely from another mother. Well, two red cats. One looks like a female, I do not know, she’s got something in her eyes, I’m pretty sure it’s a woman. I could not look at the part which would dispel any doubts, cause this particular redhead is the most timid of all, but believe me – she’s got a sort of female eyes, so it must be that sex.
Although I’m still not in good health, I’m smiling to the world, waving to flashing by redcats, warding off relentlessly biting mosquitoes – Colombian masters of camouflage, which fly at a speed of a hummingbird and change their trajectories so quickly that if I am able to grab one, I almost fall out of a hammock with sheer happiness. And then I smile again, even though my head hurts, mosquitos bite, cats do not want to be touched, and there is no one to whom you could tell your yesterday’s dream.
But never mind. I’ve already decided. Rocking in a hammock, looking at the wall, where salamanders were performing their mating dance, I decided that whatever is going to happen, I will smile. Even if I do not feel better and will have to return home, because, unfortunately, it looks like that. That I will come back. But maybe not. Maybe in two or three days a miracle will happen, and antibiotic will start working and I will feel better, and there will be the road again, the horizon and only warm thoughts. Because at the moment everything seems to be too far. The house is too far, the destination is too far, but it’s getting closer to a peaceful mind, in which there is the road, and there is the horiozon, and there is no need to run for any cats, and certainly not for any red ones. Red is nasty, my grandmother used to say, even though she had a red-haired husband.
I finish my dinner, swallow pills and go out to the garden to get some fresh air, which, through my clogged sinuses, I still can’t feel. And then I go into the garden to look for a black cat, maybe he will allow me to cuddle him once again, even for a minute.