The cat wholl live forev.., p.5
The Cat Who'll Live Forever, page 5
Day Four: Norton did nothing but sulk. Janis would use words like “clinical depression.”
Day Five: He’d had it. Now furious that I was obviously having a good time without him, Norton would go into Janis’s bedroom when she was away at her office and leave her a nasty little present. Right in the middle of her bed. Right on top of her antique linens and quilt. When Janis would return home, she’d call me, angry, sure, but also frustrated. “I treat him so well,” she’d say. “I don’t think it’s right that he feels he has to shit in my bed.”
I’d assure her that it wasn’t personal and that I’d strongly reprimand my cat when I returned. But deep down, I was kind of glad. I certainly didn’t wish a soiled quilt on anyone, particularly the love of my life. But if I was going to be depressed about being separated from my cat, it was comforting to know that he was just as neurotic as I was.
That San Francisco trip, he didn’t stay with Janis, obviously, since she was there along with the rest of the usual group. For the three days we were gone, he stayed with a woman named Ann King. Weirdly enough, I hardly knew Ann. She was a close friend of a friend—and had gotten word to me that she was a huge fan of Norton’s. The message was passed along that if the occasion ever arose, she’d love to take care of him (just so you know, I never get messages saying, “If you ever need someone to take care of you, just give me a call”). Since the occasion had arisen, I called her, asked if she’d like a cat for a long weekend and she jumped at the opportunity. When I dropped Norton off at her Chelsea apartment, he got his usual visiting-royalty treatment. Ann had special bowls all set up for his food and, while I stood by semi-invisibly, she showed her guest the entire apartment. By the time I left, Norton was happily exploring every nook and cranny. And when I returned to pick him up after the weekend, I got the full report: no depression, no morose sulking, no unpleasant surprises on the duvet cover. On both coasts, it was as successful a trip as it could have possibly been—except for Janis, who, deep down, was hoping that someone else would finally understand what she had to put up with.
The next spring, the destination was the Eastern Shore of Maryland. There was no cross-country traveling involved, so Norton was welcomed with open arms back into the group (Come on, admit it. Don’t you think it’s impressive that even after all these years I don’t overdo the cute stuff and say things like “welcomed with open paws” in almost every paragraph?). I don’t ever mean to make these books read like travelogues, but sometimes geographical description is truly in order. I’m also the kind of person who, when I like something a lot, I want everyone to like it as much as I do, so I generally do a lot of ranting and raving. And both Norton and I loved this part of Maryland.
First of all, what needs to be understood is that in Maryland, in the springtime, it is actually possible to eat all the hardshell crabs your little heart desires. And my heart desires a lot of those suckers. If you have never been fortunate enough to scarf some of these big boys down, what you do is go to a semi-divey-looking place with long wooden tables. The tables are usually covered with sheets of thick brown paper. As you sit and drink several pitchers of cold beer or, if you’re the more delicate type, white wine, the servers bring out trays of hardshell crabs. Along with the crabs, you’re given small wooden mallets (forks and knives are not just unnecessary, they’re totally useless). These crabs are covered in the spiciest seasoning imaginable, red and peppery and so hot that I take pity on anyone who has a scratch on his fingers or who bites his cuticles because any exposed cut or wound will feel as if it’s on fire. Before even trying to dig in, you get an explanation of how to eat them. Without this explanation, you’re doomed to failure and frustration, because you’ll wind up spending much money and getting about half an ounce of crab into you. If you follow directions—which involve expertly twisting various parts of the crab, delicately breaking parts in half, gently separating some parts from others, and then smashing down on everything as hard as you can with the mallet so you can get to the sweet, sweet meat—you will be rewarded with the perfect dinner. Most of the crab places I’ve been to down in those parts disdain vegetables as a side dish (another reason to love Maryland). And a lot of them serve brownies and ice cream with hot fudge for dessert. It’s fairly heavenly, particularly if you’re a cat. At the restaurant we went to, which was right on the water and glorious in its diveyness, Norton did not handle the mallet very well, but he was hell on wheels when it came to slurping up the crab I’d hand feed him (and if you’re thinking of trying this at home, please do what I do: wipe off a lot of the hot stuff and get rid of the tiniest of bones before letting your cat attack it).
The town we decided to stay in was Chestertown and there are very few places like it left in America. It has a population of a little over three thousand and when you walk the streets it’s like stepping back in time to the ’70s. And not like stepping back to the 1970s. There are no platform shoes and discos here. I’m talking 1770s. The village is dominated by colonial and Victorian influences. If you go late at night or very early in the morning, when there are no cars driving around, stand in the middle of the bridge crossing the Chester River and turn back to Chestertown, you see absolutely no semblance of the modern world. It is not difficult to imagine Thomas Jefferson (or, if you’re Norton, Thomas Jefferson’s cat) strolling down High Street on his way to a town meeting (or prowling around looking for Betsy Ross’s cat).
We stayed at a charming little hotel, which isn’t difficult because everything in Chestertown is charming and little. Norton once again won the hotel workers over and spent much time lounging at the front desk. Our one big excursion was into Annapolis, which is the perfect southern seaport town—beautiful row houses, monied enough to be preserved but blue collar enough to be real. And it’s got one of the great universities in the country, St. John’s, which has one of the most interesting curriculums imaginable. Here’s what you do in your four years at St. John’s: You read and study the hundred greatest books ever written. You get your basic Plutarch and Aristotle and Archimedes and work your way forward to the twentieth century. The brilliant idea behind it is that at the end of your reading and discussions, you should have a decent overview of what’s made the world exactly what it is.
Sometimes—in fact, most of the time; more and more of the time as I get older—I think that cats have a much better idea than we do of exactly what the world really is. They eat, they sleep, they choose who they love and bond loyally. That’s not a bad start. Add to it: They’re not afraid of being vulnerable, they are willing to please and to accept pleasure with no questions asked. They are remarkably self-sufficient, they are not obsessed with being liked, but they will rarely, if ever, go out of their way to cause any sort of pain or trauma. They are confident, with no need to show it off, and they are kind, with little need of reward other than to have that kindness returned.
I often wonder how different the world would be if Plutarch and Aristotle and Archimedes had had cats.
A lot different, I think.
And I think this, too: a lot better.
CHAPTER 5
THE CAT WHO
WENT BACK
TO PARIS
Norton’s travels were not confined to American shores. Whenever I was lucky enough to go to Europe, there was no question that he’d be lucky enough to accompany me. And just because he might not happen to speak the language of whichever country we were visiting, didn’t mean that he couldn’t change people’s lives.
In Sicily, he totally and permanently transformed the lives of one of the most interesting and delightful families I’ve ever met.
Janis and I went to Sicily with Norton for the first time in 1991. Before we left—it was when we were living in Goult, that most heavenly of Provençal towns—our friend Nancy Alderman faxed us a small story about a restaurant called Gangivecchio, in the Madonie Mountains. It had my name all over it: it had originally been an abbey in the fourteenth century, it was in the middle of nowhere and impossible to find, and it supposedly had the best food in Sicily. Put all those things together and you’ve got this: Pete’s goin’ there to eat.
We started our Sicilian stay in the touristy but spectacular town Taormina (where Norton’s adventures, particularly his tendency to scurry out on a ledge many hundreds of feet high, nearly giving his loving father a stroke, have been well chronicled). Our second day there, I insisted on trying to find the magical restaurant we’d read about, so we drove across a good chunk of the island to Gangivecchio. Or, rather, we tried to drive there. It was not as easy as it sounded (and it didn’t sound all that easy to begin with). What should have taken two or two and a half hours, took four. Sicilian roads are small and if you’re not inclined to blindly pass a slow-moving truck on a winding mountain road, you stand a good chance of driving along forever at twenty miles an hour. We didn’t get stuck behind a truck—we got stuck behind four trucks. So we were not exactly speeding. And then we got lost (I’m not usually one to make excuses for my embarrassing and horrendous sense of direction—the only person I’ve ever met who can get more lost than I can is Janis—but the endgame of the directions included things like “When you come to a tree that branches off into a Y, across from a church, make a left”). Eventually we did find the place and it was magical indeed. Four hours of driving, squabbling and meowing were immediately forgotten.
A brief foray into seven hundred years of Gangivecchian history, because I think it’s important to put Norton’s influence into some kind of historical perspective:
In 1363, Benedictine monks were given a gift of 1,600 acres and began to build a priory on the spot of a village, Gangi, that no longer existed because it had been completely destroyed in a battle in the year 1299. The priory eventually became its own little village and I guess these monks knew what they were doing because at some point the priory had its designation elevated to “abbey.”
Many fascinating things happened between that elevation in 1413 and the next 450 years—wars, invasions, religious upheaval, the usual sort of stuff—but the only real relevant item for our purposes is that in 1856, someone named Vincenzo Tornabene bought what was by then the former abbey (And just in case you don’t think this book is educational, for all you historical dolts out there, 1856 was just five years before Sicily decided to unite with Italy. Tell the truth, you thought Sicily was always part of Italy, didn’t you?). Various Tornabenes inherited the property over the next hundred years until Wanda Tornabene married the grandson of Vincenzo (whose name was also Vincenzo; trust me, I’ve spared you a lot of Tornabenes who all had the same name). Like many wealthy, land-owning Sicilians, Wanda’s Vincenzo, who was called Enzo (I guess the Tornabene ancestors had the same problem I do telling everyone with the same name apart) found hard times after World War II. By the late 1970s, most of his money was gone, as were about 1,450 of the ex-abbey’s acres and much of the magnificent furniture. That’s when Wanda took over. They needed money, she had one great skill—cooking—so the abbey was now a restaurant. Life was not easy, but they survived—and managed to keep up the magnificent building and remaining property. By 1980, Wanda’s cooking lured enough Sicilians so they had to expand the restaurant area and enclose an enormous second-floor terrace so it could function as a dining room. In 1984, Enzo died suddenly, but still the restaurant kept going, run by Wanda and her daughter, Giovanna.
And now we’re in 1991. Enter three weary travelers: two humans and a cat.
Quite simply, after we finally arrived, we had the best lunch we’d ever had in our lives. If you want the actual details, we sat in the long room that had once been a terrace on the west wing of the abbey, looked out over the many acres of glorious wild red poppies, watched as various animals strolled nearby (including a pet wild boar) and ate the most amazing pasta with pesto sauce ever devised (one of several key secrets is the addition of five different kinds of crushed nuts: almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, pistachios and pine nuts), veal rolls stuffed with ham (“involtini” is what you ask for, if you’re ever lucky enough to make it there for lunch), cannolis that were not to be believed, and then something called sofficini, which you don’t even want to know about because you might give up your life savings and your first born child in order to fly there and wrap your mouths around these things (Okay, I guess you do want to know about them, but don’t say I didn’t warn you: they’re fried dough stuffed with warm lemon pastry cream. I guess I should mention that what adds to the taste, as well as the cholesterol level, is that they’re not just fried, they’re fried in lard. My fairly demanding friend and literary agent, Esther, has actually threatened to withhold payment of my next check that comes in from the publisher unless I learn to make these things and bring her some).
The restaurant was full that day—there were a hundred German bikers on a tour, which meant that every single person in the restaurant other than me and Janis was speaking German and wearing spandex—so we didn’t get to talk very much to the two Tornabene women. The only reason they spoke to us at all was because Norton was fascinated with the place and, while we ate, he wandered the ancient abbey, exploring. At some point Wanda, the head of the family, came rushing over to us, muttering in Italian. My Italian basically consists of the following words (most of which I’ve already used in this chapter): cannoli, pesto, and ciao bambino. So I didn’t really understand much of what Wanda was saying until Giovanna, who speaks lovely, charming, poetic English, also came over and said, “Mama is worried about your little cat.” I told them both not to worry, searched for a minute, found Norton dozing on top of a table in some back room of this walled stone fortress, and convinced him that it was time to leave.
The next few days were spent touring the isle. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about Sicily. It’s one of my favorite places on earth for many reasons—its beauty, its culture, its food, its relative wildness (as compared to, say, Tuscany, which Sicilians have mockingly labeled “Chiantishire” because it’s been so Anglicized, or even to my beloved Provence which has been Peter Mayled to the point where it’s almost easier to hear English spoken than French)—but the next few days were pure torture for me. I got crankier and crankier, and more and more impossible to be around, until Janis finally turned to me, while we were in front of the magnificent Greek temples of Agricento, one of the real wonders of the world, and said, “Why are you acting like a total asshole?!” Being the cultured guy that I am, I graciously answered, “Because I don’t want to see any more temples, I don’t want to go to any more museums, and I don’t want to spend one more day being a damn tourist!” She calmly asked, as if talking to a petulant (if not very bright) sixth grader, “Well, then what do you want to do?” and I said, “I want to go back to Gangivecchio and eat!”
So the three of us got back in our rented car and drove three hours back to the abbey. Every so often we’d stop and try to call them, to make sure they were open, and we’d get some guy who answered the phone and said, “Pronto!” I’d then say, “Uh . . . openo for luncho?” and he’d hang up. Twenty minutes later, we’d call again, hoping to get Giovanna, the English speaker, but no, we’d get the same guy (we later learned his name was Pepe) who’d say, “Pronto!” I’d then say, “Uh . . . Giovanna?” And he’d say, “Si!” and still hang up. I called five times before we arrived, never managing to make Pepe understand a word I was saying, and when we finally showed up there wasn’t a soul eating in the place. But Wanda and Giovanna let us in, served us an even more amazing lunch than we’d had five days earlier, and this time they both sat and chatted with us for several hours, Giovanna doing the translating all around. Norton sat with us for part of the time and spent the rest of the meal wandering around as if he’d spent his entire life there. Wanda, possibly the greatest animal lover I’ve ever met, was enthralled with my little guy and insisted on walking around with him and talking to him and feeding him.
At the end of the meal and quite a lot of conversation, when we realized we actually couldn’t come up with an excuse to stick around one more moment, I said to Giovanna, “Would you like to do a cookbook? Because, if you would, I’ll sign you up on the spot.” (I worked then and still do work as an editor for various imprints within the humongous Random House Inc. complex, so I can do that sort of thing from time to time). They smiled, clearly thought I was trying to get a free meal out of them and said, “Ciao.” I, however, wouldn’t give up. When I got back to New York a couple of months later (remember, we were still living in France), I sent them a contract, found them a writer (a woman named Michele Evans, who’d written her own superb cookbooks and who heroically learned Italian for this job!) and we had a deal . . .
Sort of.
We didn’t really have a deal because we’d hit one big snag. Wanda—the matriarch of the family and the one with all the recipes—didn’t want to do it.
Two reasons. One: she didn’t want her neighbors to be able to get their hands on her long-secret, much-valued family recipes. And two: she didn’t know me from Adam and, being Sicilian, didn’t exactly trust my motives. Why was I doing this? Why would I want to help them? What was I getting out of all this? etc., etc., etc.
Giovanna took care of Issue #1. She worked on her mother for weeks on end and Wanda began to weaken. I was able to push her over the edge by assuring her that the book would be published in English and none of her neighbors spoke anything but Italian, so her secrets would be safe.
Issue #2 was a little harder. What was there that could get her to trust me?
Well . . . there was one thing . . .
Norton.
