Thirst (6 page)

 

One Saturday afternoon when I was eleven or twelve, we chipped in for a bunch of thirty-five-cent helium balloons at a nearby five-and-ten. At home I removed a half-gallon cardboard container of milk from the fridge, emptied the milk into a pickle jar from under the sink, and cut away the carton’s top. We stapled the carton to
the strings hanging from the balloons, thus fashioning a little gondola. Then we debated our choice for the craft’s passenger.

“It should be the smartest one,” Nathan said. “Like the way they pick the astronauts. You know, give them tests.”

“What’s the difference?” I said. “They’re cats.”

“We should get the smallest,” decided Osinski. “So it won’t escape.”

None of us could have said exactly where we hoped to send the animal, though balloon launchings had a long history in our neighborhood. We often tied messages with our addresses to them, in the hope that we’d get a response from some distant country. There was never any letter from abroad, however, nor even a phone call from Syosset—so we probably didn’t expect to see the cat again. But then the dogs that the Russians launched into space didn’t come back either. According to the television, they burned up in the atmosphere. Perhaps we thought our cat would do the same.

We eventually found a young tortoiseshell that had evaded Mark’s culling. Although the kitten was free of visible defects, it was an ugly animal, with metallic green eyes and a wiry, uncuddly body. Nathan wanted to whirl it around in a bucket, to prepare it for the g-forces, but Osinski noted that gas was leaking from the balloons. Already two of them were slumping toward the ground.

We cut slits in the gondola’s sides so that the kitten could see out. “Where is it going to pee?” Nathan’s little sister Eleanor asked, obliging us to cut a hole in the
corner of the carton. The kitten complained when we picked it up, but once it was placed in the gondola it satisfied itself by sniffing at the milk-encrusted walls. I gave it a piece of lox, as provisions for the trip, but the animal ate it immediately and whined for more. We ended up giving the kitten all that was left in the fridge. It tore at the fish as we carried the balloons out to the middle of the street.

Perhaps as many as eight of us met there as if by pre-arrangement, or destiny. We were mostly quiet, and each incidental remark or joke went unanswered. Since we had brought home the balloons, the day had turned bitter, and we were now impatient to get back indoors. Just as we were about to let it go, the kitten stuck its face through the hole we had cut. It let out a series of short, uniform, almost electronic mews. Nathan poked its face away with his finger and told it, “Get ready for blastoff.” It returned to the hole and resumed crying.

Its cries did not change their tempo or tone as the balloons rose. For the first minute or so, the craft’s ascent was slow, almost imperceptible. Then the wind picked up and it gained altitude. The cat’s cries diminished until nearly inaudible, but not quite.

We ourselves didn’t speak. There had been a moment of elation when the gondola cleared our heads, but now we didn’t even smile. “Catch,” Osinski said, palming a football, but no one took up the offer. We just looked into the sky. Once in a while the wind caught a sound like that of rusty hinges or worn brakes.

For a long time the balloons didn’t appear to move. They just hung there, the gondola the size of the full
moon. I entertained the belief that it would always be there, as a kind of punishment, the cat over our heads, mewling as we walked to and from school, played spongeball, and grew up and got married.

Yet I felt no relief when Nathan announced, “It’s coming down.” A gust of chill wind blew grit into our eyes. When our eyes cleared, we saw that Nathan was right: the apparent size of the gondola was a little greater than it had been a minute earlier. One of the balloons had lost most of its helium and hung off the milk carton like a shriveled, broken flower.

The balloons descended much more slowly than they had risen, blown gently past our block. We ran through the Rosettis’ backyard and pushed ourselves through the hedges onto the property of the house on the next street. The cat, however, had lost no more than a little altitude. Not yet ready to land, it sailed over the next block and the block after that. We fell back through the hedges, claimed our English racers and stingrays, and took off after it.

Our housing development was a labyrinth of “drives,” “lanes,” and “ways” that twisted around each other, so that the gondola hovered at our shoulders and behind our backs as we furiously pedaled after it. Several times it disappeared behind a house or a stand of trees. We emerged at last from the development, at the shore of the pond, just as the balloons were skimming over the pond’s surface. As soon as the gondola touched the surface, its forward motion was arrested, and it fell in.

We bicycled to the edge of the muck and dismounted quietly. I made a conscious effort not to look at my
friends. Instead I stared across the pond, watching a spot a little short of where the gondola was sinking.

Osinski finally broke the silence. He said, “Glub, glub, glub.”

I let my bicycle drop to the ground and waded in, still wearing my dungarees and sneakers. The slime was warm and oily, and when it touched my crotch I shivered. My feet slipped on various things on the pond-bed—rocks, tires, broken beer bottles, probably condoms, probably dead cats. It took me about forty-five seconds to get to the gondola, which had tipped to its side away from me. My motion pushed it for a moment out of my reach and nearly turned it over. When finally I got there I found the kitten huddled in a corner of the carton, drooling from fear. It hissed and extended its claws as I grabbed its scruff.

I returned, my friends watching me without expression on their faces, Nathan and Osinski with their arms crossed. I thought of the dead, who from another shore watched the living in eternal silence. I put the kitten down. I don’t know what I expected, but all it did was whimper a few times and then interrupt itself to vigorously scratch its left ear. Holding it against my handlebars, I brought it back to our neighborhood, even though there was no man, woman, child, or beast who would have missed it.

The cat didn’t show any ill effects from the flight, nor even any recollection of it. It did, however, remember the lox, and after that it never strayed far from our back door.

I never quite adopted the cat, and never named it,
but it more or less became mine, and years later when I went to college, I took it with me. Now fat and old, and always dissatisfied with its food, the cat surreptitiously lived in my dorm for a year and a half. By that time I had gone through several roommates unhappy with the odor of its litter box under my desk, and I myself would have been pleased to get rid of the animal. Then one wet Saturday afternoon it died.

It was a peculiar time in my life. The cat died, and I had to take it to a vet just to dispose of the body. Two weeks later I broke up with my girlfriend, cruelly, for almost no reason except to see what it would be like, and a month after that I dropped out of school. I felt this enormous freedom—I was an adult!—but had no idea what to do with it, and I ended up working the next three years for a travel agency.

I now infrequently return to the neighborhood, which is mostly inhabited by strangers. The descendants of the cats we knew still roam its nights, but there seems to be fewer of them, and I wonder if I overestimated their numbers when I was a child. The pond has been filled in and replaced by a very small shopping center that, to judge by its empty storefronts and cracked parking lot, will soon be abandoned. I am married now, with my own children, and I have a job that sometimes requires brutality, in a quiet, nine-to-five way. I take my children to parks, watch TV with them, and help them with their homework. I try to be sure they are kind to animals, but you can never be sure of anything. Like the rest of us, they’re on their own.

“Many discoveries which we laugh at as childish
and fantastic later vindicate themselves.”

—An eyewitness

 

 

A
lessandro Cacciaguida has been dying all his life, indeed from the moment of conception, but in the last week he has died more than in all the preceding weeks of his life, and in the last day more than in all the preceding days. In a matter of hours his fall to the earth will be completed, and he will be a body at rest. Charles Albert has abandoned the Republic. Marshal Haynau holds all passage to our city. Cholera has left corpses rotting in the gutters and floating in the canals, and whoever among Venice’s living has the strength to eat does not have any food. Now what is required of the enemy is patience.

All the members of Alessandro’s household are either dead or gone from the city; he does not recall their individual fates. Of his servants, the last to remain was Maria, his wife’s maid. Maria died two nights before, while he was washing her befouled body he had once so lightly enjoyed. Now he walks through his house for the last time, virtually a ghost, running his hands along the spines of his books, an oil painting of his son, and a small
escritoire that was given to him by an ancestor and will soon be either hacked to bits or sold to some Viennese merchant who has no known ancestor of his own. His head spinning, Alessandro passes from the house and his courtyard, too feeble to shut a door or gate.

If some bandit laid a dagger in his chest, then Alessandro would at least see his killer’s eyes. Now, he is being slain invisibly by the Venetian businessmen who have maneuvered our city into fighting this war without allies, the Venetian politicians whose ineptitude at diplomacy is surpassed only by their ineptitude at war, the Austrian generals who have never seen his face, and this dread wasting disease that turns a man into shit.

Alessandro’s house is on a shady lane; the coolness under the trees mocks his fever. The lane opens onto the Campo San Angelo, which is as deserted as it might have been three hours before dawn a year ago. A dog noses a pile of offal. Something smaller scurries from one gutter to the other. All the shops are padlocked. Alessandro rests against a cool, whitewashed wall. He thinks, well, this is where I will die, after a lifetime of speculation about the place and the date, in the Campo San Angelo, against a wall belonging to Girolamo Biaggio, whose family has known mine for three hundred years, and who hasn’t spoken to me in two, because of a dispute about a patch of weedy pasture near Mestre. Alessandro cannot remember today’s date, but believes the month is August. At that moment, with a shout and guffaw, three or five stocky youths appear, in ragged uniforms, jostling each other on the narrow sidewalk like billiard balls. They are in an ugly humor.

As savage as the enemy has proven himself to be, worse has been the invasion of mercenaries from throughout Italy, soldiers without an army, loitering about our streets, ostensibly on our behalf. If there is a demonstration in favor of republicanism, they are at hand; a half hour later they are carrying the banner of the Piedmontese; an hour after that, they are emptying the taverns of provisions. They are angry, for this has not been the war they were promised. It is a siege, one in which the enemy, because of the contagion, remains so distant his ships can be seen only from the highest structures of the city. So the soldiers haunt our streets, looking for another fight.

Alessandro, too weak to fight a cat for a morsel of liver, turns away, looking at the ground, hoping that if he doesn’t see them, they will not see him. They approach, their boots clicking against the street. The heel of one of their boots is loose, causing a slight echo with each step. The mercenaries pass without incident, and Alessandro looks at their backs, not relieved at all, but a little saddened by his invisibility.

The Austrians and their Croatian troops are also dying of fever and have been forced to leave their positions, but from the safety of their ships they have devised new strategies against us, each more marvelous than the one before. In the unfettered republican press, there has been speculation about self-propelled cannons, underwater boats that can glide unseen up the Grand Canal, and ice machines that will suffocate the city in a summer blizzard of snow. A few weeks ago a new rumor spread through Venice: Haynau was planning to attack the city
from the air. This was a bit of relief, comedy amid the cholera. Immediately the city was placarded. A cartoon showed the promised event: a mustachioed Croat atop a balloon, dropping a bomb onto the Piazza San Marco. Other caricatures were offered in broadsheets and newspapers. There were many jokes made; pedestrians teased each other by suddenly stopping and staring into the sky, as if they had caught the first glimpse of these engines of destruction. On the following day, July 12, the holiday of the Madonna della Salute, the comedy came true. A small number of balloons appeared above the Austrians’ anchor. They rose very slowly, like puffs of very dense smoke, and many fell back into the water.

Alessandro was in the Piazzetta at the time, having come from an interview with Manin. What were the President of the Republic’s intentions? Would he impose bread rationing? Would he attempt a civilian evacuation? Would he ask for assistance from Mazzini or Garibaldi? Did he have any plan at all for breaking the siege? Manin just smiled, as if he knew the answers to these questions, but thought it clever not to answer them. As Alessandro returned home, reflecting that the hero-democrat of one year would be the fool-despot of the next, the Austrians seemed to be making their own reply to his questions by sending their ridiculous devices over the Lagoon.

If the Austrians thought this strategy would terrorize our city, they were mistaken. We can imagine, of course, such a reaction of superstitious wonderment in some Bosnian backwater, but here in Venice we are well acquainted with the
montgolfière
as a Parisian
entertainment. Indeed, our citizens met the supposed instruments of their doom with a cheer—previously, there had been little cause for cheer—and mothers pointed out the objects to their children, who were dressed in ribbons and bows for the holiday. None of the balloons reached the city. A few fell near the Lido and one into the castle at St. Andrew. Attached to them was some kind of grenade, which damaged neither person nor structure.