Reading Pablo Neruda to Carlita

Francis of Assisi Society is not convinced that we are the right home for Carlita. They don’t doubt our love and commitment to this little kitten, but they are worried about Nina Dog chomping her to death in one split second.

I write this to you as I play a nighttime game of fetch with this kitten. The dogs are gated downstairs, and Carlita and I are taking on her comic book cat world of monsters with this new chapter: The Crumpled H&M Receipt of Doom! As I understand it from Carlita, the receipt threatens the well-being of our entire household! And we must crush it! We must throw it, over and over, and bat it and bite it, until we have beaten it into submission!

Carlita is teaching me that the only way to play with cats is to enter the game and be on their side in the fight against evil. So I throw. She fetches. We purr. We attack. She brings it back to me, over and over. I have no idea if kittens do this, but she does this, so I assume this is what I have been missing all my life, being a dog person. She fetches better than my dogs, and when I say, “Get it, girl! The future of the universe! It’s on us! Get that receipt!”, we lock eyes. She understands, and she purrs like the Super Kitten she is. This is teamwork.

I want to say I am sure that Nina Dog will not break Carlita in two. I am 97% sure, but the 3% uncertainty is breaking my heart.

Yesterday, because Carlita speaks some Spanish, the girls sang, “Hola, Hola, Amigos,” to her, and then we had a Pablo Neruda poetry reading. I read words of love and longing to our kitten in butchered Spanish. I have never studied Spanish. But my aunt left me an ancient copy of Neruda love poems, and Carlita purred appreciatively as I stumbled through the original Spanish. The girls, too, settled as we read and listened. We didn’t bother with the English translation. The sound of the Spanish—no matter how far from Carlita’s rough, licking native tongue—pleased us all.

I believe I took in Carlita because I feel I am failing at caring for others in my life, aside from my children. It feels like everyone has had to care for me over the past two, three years. And I am not sure what I have been able to give back.

If I must give back Carlita, because Nina Dog simply will not come around, the girls will be broken-hearted. And it will be one more thing that feels like an absurd failure in my life. I do not mean to set myself up for failure. In fact, I try again and again to follow my heart. I want to succeed. I want to care as well as I have been cared for. I want to do the right thing. The only thing I have going for me is some grasp of compassion, and belly-to-the-ground humility that I never wanted. I’d like to be able to use that.

Some would say taking in a kitten in need of a home is a pretty stupid thing to do in a time of flux, especially when there are doting children involved. They may be right. I have been known to do some truly stupendously stupid things in my time.

But she slept on my breasts at the Agway, for an hour, with her little light-dark face a symbol only I could decipher. “You never stop looking for meaning,” my mother chided me, and she is right. I cannot stop. I don’t know what else to do. If I stop looking for meaning in a supermarket love song, or a tiny cat’s face, I don’t know what I have left to offer the world.

On my breasts, she was a Pablo Neruda poem, without words.

Right now, she is asleep beside me as I type to you. We have vanquished the H&M receipt. Downstairs, I hear a dog puking. I shake my head at my own folly. I listen to Carlita breathing, I watch her ginger-striped fur rise and fall. To her, this has not been a failure. We have won a battle, together, and now, she may sleep.

Francis of Assisi (not Saint, for no one trusts saints these days) tells me to be careful, and keep them posted about our household. They would eagerly take her back. Perhaps I am an idiot to press on as I do, doggedly (!) listening to trainers, allowing visitation between Nina Dog and Carlita regularly, my hand woven through Nina’s autumn print collar. Will it take until autumn? Will Carlita never be safe? Have I put this tiny animal soul in a terrible position? Have I put my girls in a terrible position (yet another—divorcing a cat?)?

I don’t know. I sigh tonight. The melancholy is brutal, insistent. I can do no right, it tells me. I am a waste of resources. I write of kittens and receipts and puking dogs. What good can come from this?

And yet it is all I have to offer, tonight at least. Carlita and I will sleep. The dogs will sleep. I will leave the puke till morning, because I cannot bear another reminder that my life is ridiculous.

Instead, I will will myself to dream of Carlita’s world, of dangling threads and birds just out of reach—and of beautiful Spanish words I do not yet understand, may never understand.