I first saw him one late afternoon. In a sloping field, perhaps twenty yards away. He crouched in the tall grass and watched as I walked along the path below him.
This is the second time. Beside the same path, he sits on a fence post at nightfall. Between the path and the woods. I am making my way home before dark.
I expect him to leap and disappear into the undergrowth as I move toward him. But he is motionless, watching my approach, watching as I cautiously raise my phone because I am seized by a desire to photograph him. He turns his gaze away from me at the moment the photo occurs.
I lower my phone and take a quiet step. He turns to look at me again.
I am shedding.
In an early essay on photography, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” (1859), Oliver Wendell Holmes “encourages us to look at the images we ‘shed’ as well as those we receive from others – to view ourselves from the outside, as others see us, as well as from the inside, where we see them: ‘these evanescent films may be seen in… any clear, calm sheet of water, in a mirror, in the eye of an animal…’” (Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, 2015)
We remain there a moment, strangers, eye to eye, opposite one another in massing darkness. It crosses my mind that this could be Vico: a ghost, a revenant. The old historian.
Toughest animal I ever knew, Vico came before the other animals in our young family and outlasted them all. Vico weathered the arrival of a dog, the dog’s lumbering affection, fights with other cats, going missing after house moves, and becoming trapped under the floorboards of one house in a last-ditch attempt to avoid moving altogether. Vico went missing so long and so often, only to return emaciated and injured, that he wore out our desire to have a cat. It was too painful, we said. How he found his way home each time, how he managed to purr at the sight of us, even while bleeding, limping, and starving after some misadventure, we could not know.
I carry guilt about Vico that never leaves me. The source of this guilt is my attachment to our dog, Maisie. From the moment she arrived, even in her exasperating puppy days, my affections shifted from cat to dog. For years, I mostly ignored him, yet Vico never gave up on me. I was his person. He favored me, rubbed his arched body against my legs, climbed onto my lap, and purred heavily. It can’t be explained to an animal that we humans go through life feeling shame about particular episodes. There are words, deeds, failures, and omissions that we try not to think about that, nonetheless, remain in our minds until we think no more.
It was late, the last year of his life when I returned to Vico. As a grizzled old black cat, he developed two health problems. The first was chronic conjunctivitis requiring daily eye drops until he died. The second was a brain tumor that mainly affected his movement. He walked with a tilt to one side, contorting his neck and pressing his head hard against the wall and door frames. He drank water in large quantities but did not eat much, losing weight and shrinking into an old man. I was his nurse.
We sat together in the sun on warm afternoons. Twice a day, I cleansed his eyes and administered drops, prednisone, and painkillers. He put up no resistance to my ministrations. Vico had always liked the sound of my voice, purring loudly when I talked to him. So I talked to him again. Told him what I was doing. What I was thinking. He purred. In the end, just after the vet gave him the injection, damn if Vico didn’t climb to his feet one last time when I spoke to him. He stood facing me and purring. Then he dropped back down and died.
Vico, who fought death long and hard. Never gave up on me. And for his last summer, cruised the waters from Amsterdam to Paris, hoisting his tumored head, resting, receiving medication from me, calling me back, napping in the sun on a canal boat. More than ten years later, Vico is on my mind. We’re on the boat and I would nurse him again if I could.
So now, to this stranger on a fence post, I think of saying aloud, “Vico? Is it you?”
But he is not and I don’t.