Cats and Fairytales

31 March 2003 Cats and Fairytales
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/fairytales_myths_fables_&legends/99458

For Cherubino, my beloved cat

Cherubino is the young courtier in Nozze de Figaro. The role is played by a mezzo-soprano and falls into one of Mozart's confused gender roles, because Cherubino as a mezzo-soprano lavishes affection on the Countess, but eventually becomes infatuated with someone more his age.

After going through a whole range of names, I decided that Parsifal and Gotterdammerung were not much good for cats. Ditto for Siegried. Octavian was impossible because he would get called Octopus instead. Nearly all the other masculine roles that were counterparts didn't fit the roles I knew; but the Marschallin and the Countess both are plagued by young admirers scarcely out of their acne stage. The cat didn't know whether he was male or female. Nearly everyone identified him as female, including himself. So he got the wonderful name of Arabella Cherubino after Richard Strauss' delicious opera and Mozart's Nozze. Like Cherubino, his gender role seemed confused. Like a female, he sat and loved playing with other cats' kittens. And his valentine face made him a sweetheart for admiration.

Like the tabby cat in Grimms' story or the tom in Puss N Boots, he was my sole companion through years of incredible hardship and at least once, saved my life. Like the youngest apprentice or the lad in Puss N Boots, I had nothing. Nothing that is save the cat. In January 2000, my landlord with two of his friends, broke into the flat where I lived and vandalized it, stealing everything of value. Unfortunately, one of the men caught me on the street. Waving a police badge in front of my nose, he grabbed onto my arm and forced me to return into the flat where the furniture was already tossed.

There I was cornered and threatened. When I tried to escape, I was hit and when I tried to use my cell phone, it was taken from me and beaten against the table in an attempt to break it. More threats were made and I was struck several times. Eventually I realized that I was inside a surreal drama; I had to escape or probably get killed.

I escaped, but had nothing but my purse and a thin jacket in minus nine degrees Centigrade weather. An acquaintance came belatedly, complaining that I ruined her night. She didn't understand why I was begging for help to go to the police. It took at twenty minutes of arguing with her before she realized that the landlord had attacked me with two men. We spent the night in the police who refused to take a report until 3:30 in the morning. They didn't bother to spell my name correctly and denied that I even lived there...so it never happened.

Trying to hire a lawyer to break open a flat on Saturday morning in Prague is impossible.

Late that afternoon, we entered the flat. Everything of value was stolen, including all my legal documentation, jewelry, wine, dinosaur computer, and diskettes that held five manuscripts for an ESL program I had written. Everything destroyed in one night. The walkmans were gone. So was the Henkel Champagne from a recital in Vienna. Nothing of value remained behind. Even dictionaries and eyeglasses were taken.

And the cat... the cat was hiding in the tiny space behind the oven. It took three hours to coax him out and bring him into the new flat.... But he was seriously traumatized. Anytime I walked past the oven, he panicked. If I opened my oven, he disappeared. The behavior was abnormal. Before he knew that oven was for food. Perplexed I picked him up and carried him closer to it. His claws ripped my shoulders as he fled to the next room. They had tried to cook him alive. Now he was terrified of plastic bags which had been a favorite game for hide-and-seek. If the oven was on, he was gone.

Within after a short time we moved to the new flat, someone shot him. He was an excellent shot, but Bino's fur was so thick as a Czech wild cat that the pellet lodged in the rib. The vet said it was too risky to take out. He would die in surgery.

Bino was my companion through all hardship. We shared this terror together. When he was shot, he was comatose for two weeks. I watched over him without sleeping, afraid of the person on the other end of the gun.

In February, he was afraid of somethig outside. He went out and a few minutes he would be begging at the window to be let in. I didn't understand the danger out there. His death was horrific. There are no dead birds or other dead cats out there... Just my cat who was my sole companion through all the hardships that I faced. He made my life bearable. Trained to be an opera singer, I was forced to teach English. I studied in Vienna, but Prague defeated me.

The stories are to honor the closest friend and companion I have had in twelve years.

The cruelty of my cat's death horrifies me, and leaves me awake in the night. He was a friend, a good companion who was with me when I could not sit or walk without struggling in geat pain. He knew how to open doors, drawers and windows. Like the Prince or Hans, I was lucky to have him as my Katerprinz.

Cats in Fairytales and other literature
http://home.att.net/~k-doyle/Cats/literature.htm
k-doyle@att.net
please note the short preface before Poe's Black Cat

however, I cannot read the story as it gives me the goosebumps, yet when I saw the horror and agony that my cat suffered from strychnine poisoning, this was indeeed the story that I first remembered.

Madame la Comtesse de Aulnoy, The White Cat
http://home.att.net/~k-doyle/Cats/whitecat.htm

Puss N Boots
http://fairytales4u.com/story/boots.htm
a simplified version from 1909

Charles Perrault, Puss N Boots
http://home.att.net/~k-doyle/Cats/boots.htm

Grimm, The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat
http://home.att.net/~k-doyle/Cats/grimm.htm#Miller

Grimm, The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat
http://www.5000freebooks.com/books/summary-GRIM_PO.htm
M Hunt, Grimm's Household Tales 1857 free ebook download for the story

AesopFables.com : The Cat and Venus
http://www.pacificnet.net/~johnr/cgi/aesop1.cgi?1&TheCatandVenus

AesopFables.com : The Fox and the Cat
http://www.pacificnet.net/~johnr/cgi/aesop1.cgi?2&TheFoxandtheCat