Given that the Camino de Santiago officially begins not just in France or Spain or Portugal, but also in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Malta, it was no surprise to learn that Switzerland, too, has a pair of send-off routes: the Geneva Way – or Via Gebennensis – and Via Jacobi. The lakeside, Alps-close city of Geneva features importantly in both. So, it was there I waited at the gate for Candy’s flight from San Francisco to arrive – in the city where pilgrims either begin or pass through on their trek through historical towns, picturesque villages, rolling hills, alpine forest, craggy mountains, and along the lakeshore miles that comprise these Camino routes. I waited and felt, yes, I am still on the Way. Anyone looking at me sans backpack and trekking poles would scoff, ha! Girl, you a big phony. Where is your face full of the sweat and dust of the real Camino walker? Well, okay, I did get especially squeak-clean to meet my sister, and, for anyone’s information, I still was no-kidding headed to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela and would arrive there eventually. Why not ski a bit on the way? If my sister’s and my little Alps adventure to Chamonix, Zermatt, and Saint Moritz happened to put us in any historical town, picturesque village, rolling hill, alpine forest, craggy mountain, or shore-of-lake officially on the Via Jacobi or Geneva Way, then great! I absolutely would be traveling the Way of Saint James, and I am sure its attendant lessons and spiritual blessings would find me just as easily as I blissed out in an après-ski hot tub as they would if I sweated on a dirt trail.
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I begged my sister to be quiet, to enter gently. Camino would be asleep and I didn’t want to surprise and terrify him by crashing into the room with a chaos of ski equipment and baggage. Candy had single-handedly traveled with not only her ski stuff, but also mine, and despite my plea, we both barged, banged and fell into our suite like beasts of burden collapsing at the end of an ordeal.
Where’s my kitty? Camino stood statue-still on the bed, staring. He didn’t blink; he didn’t flinch; he stared at the new person in his world, transfixed. Sun-blonde hair; bright, beamy smile. Here was a creature that seemed to stop his breath. Unmoving, Candy stared back.
“It’s okay, Camino, Candy loves kittens.” In a sweet, soft voice I reassured him that he needn’t be afraid – no reason to dart behind the bureau or hide for hours beneath the bed. The two continued to stare and, I swear, something electric passed between them. I banged farther into the room to arrange all the bags, and honestly, was I just the bellman expected to collect my tip and beat a hasty retreat because I was interrupting something? At last Candy spoke:
“Oh, hello. You must be Camino,” she said in a voice rich with recognition. “I know you.” She knew him? Like how? Had she met Camino before – impossible – or was now mistaking him for some other cat somewhere, or was this simply a case of the feline mystique accepted in Spain, where of course the kitty hailed, which declared it entirely correct that during one of his seven (not nine) lives, he had been Candy’s…well, what? Her pet? Her lover? Or else now our proof that life indeed holds strange, strange marvels and mysteries, mostly never explained?
Suddenly, my sister pounced. Before Camino could run, she swept him up off the bed, squeezed him like she might squeeze the life from him, and roughly covered him with kisses. “Camino! I finally get to meet you! You are soooooooo cuuuuute,” she squeezed and kissed.
“OhmyGod, Candy, careful! You don’t want to hurt him!” I considered kitty a baby. He was fragile; he needed protection. Just then, my sister threw the kiss-limp kitten back onto the bed, flipped him on his back, and, firmly holding his pink, spotty tummy, slid him around in circles. I was beside myself. She was being so savage! But Candy wouldn’t stop. Flipping him right-side up, she pushed him to the bed’s far edge and ducked down so he couldn’t see her. He stood there dazed, his pupils inflamed. She then popped up and I couldn’t imagine what aggression she next would inflict upon my inexperienced little orphan who was completely naïve to the ways of the world, having so far lived safe and protected only with me, in AirB&Bs. Candy pounced again! She flung herself across the bed as he tried to make an escape – not more breath-constricting squeezes! – and at that point, I had had enough.
“Candy, stop! That’s enough. You’re scaring him.”
“Oh, yeah?” she replied, and rose onto all fours in the person version of a wildcat-crouch – prepped for a strike. “Then why is he purring?”
Purring? I could hear from across the room: Camino wasn’t purring; he was roaring in joy. He was prancing and dancing in play-anticipation of whatever surprise Candy next might spring. He put his right paw in, he put his left paw out: it wasn’t the hokey-pokey but it was close. Candy sprung and Camino ducked; Camino advanced and Candy leapt. It was beautiful, really – like two fencing masters who crossed foils in a ballet of finesse and derring-do. En garde! Kitty at one moment had the advantage, when he leaped over Candy’s head to dash away and return – sneaking, creeping – from behind her. And I thought his little Zorro heart would burst with the thrill of triumph when she seemed for a second to fatigue, but then – then she, with the surprising speed of one who had just deplaned after a flight of too many torturous hours, was on her feet running right behind him. Touché! She had him – more squeezes! More kisses! – and she threw him through the air to crash-land paws-down on the bed. Candy flopped there, too, pooped. All that parrying, all that riposting – their bout was finished, for now. I was beyond bewildered.
“You are so rough with him!” I shuddered at Camino’s flight across the room, at his hard crash-land, and yet…yet…the kitty from that moment on could not get enough of whatever it was, this new knowledge my sister brought him.
“He loves it,” she said, as sure as he was now sitting at her feet, staring at her with something like…wow. “Trust me: I get him,” she said.
“You get him?” I wondered, what was there to get, other than everything I already got about my rescue kitten who certainly had aspects of personality and character that would develop as he matured, but who in the end was an innocent cat-infant not yet even four months old?
“That is not a baby. That is a boy who is, like, 15 years old! He wants to roughhouse. Believe me,” she said with the authority of one who had successfully raised two sons who were once upon a time teenagers. “He wants to be thrown around.”
It was true that Candy understood men – men-men, boys-to-men, man-boys, and the boy inside the man. Graced by both vavavoom and a certain voodoo that all her life has made her catnip for male admirers, she would know what Camino liked – I mean, if a kitten could work his own voodoo to convince my sister he was man enough to take the roughing up she proposed. I mean, even Zorro in swordplay sometimes was known to doubt his own cojones. In Zorro, for instance, Isabel Allende’s swashbuckling saga of the masked hero’s younger years, the “audacious, daring, playful” crusader, when posing as his alter-ego Diego de la Vega, feels himself not a legend of derring-do at all. Rather, he’s more dandy than duel-worthy, “affected and hypochondriac.” Camino was gifted with claws as sharp and piercing as a saber, and a bite that drew blood; Candy was equipped, apparently, with the desire to challenge the young feline’s inner lion, why? Because, she said, and popped up to retrieve a hand-towel from the bathroom, “he needs to know himself as the Big Cat he is, and you treat him like he’s still a kitten.”
“But he is still a kitten!” Too stunned to protest further, I could only watch aghast as my sister with stealth stalked Camino as he attempted to elude her by disappearing – he thought – behind a sheer, filmy curtain. She pounced and he shot out across the room, scaled the far wall, streaked down the length of the desk, and finally darted under the bed. On her stomach she dragged him out and roughly wrapped him like a burrito in the towel, with his little head sticking out and big purrs roaring. With strength she bowled the bundle down the carpet, and the moment Camino fought free of his wrapping and ran straight back to Candy for more, I was ready to admit it: the sick, fragile foundling Gina and I rescued off the Camino was growing up. I hadn’t seen it: He was now all cat, a feline becoming as fierce as his Spanish forbears dating back to Magerifelis peignei, a prehistoric cat species that lived near Madrid 15.5 million years ago. Proud, independent, and since then evolved into a companion so admirable that early Spanish conquistadors didn’t dream of sailing to the Americas without a handsome collection onboard, the cat within Camino no longer needed – or wanted – my babying. What he did want was the woman who got him.
Most of that night in our Geneva hotel room, Candy and Camino carried on. Neither could exhaust the other, for the more kitty teased and taunted, the more my sister responded with unpredictable, prey-like moves. Do you want a happy cat? “Take on the role of the bird, be the mouse,” advises cat expert Jackson Galaxy. Camino no longer had use for my heretofore sweet-talking, calm-inducing tricks to soothe the savage beast so both of us could sleep; he wanted to be all primal in the night, and, Galaxy adds, “hunt, catch, kill, and eat.”
I am the mouse! Candy didn’t really need to announce this: her play-skills with kitty spoke to his feline soul so well that he was besotted. He followed her, stalked her, waited at the door for her return from the ice machine down the hall. He sat with her, napped with her, and, the next morning, clamored into her suitcase to plead, Take me with you! Whither thou goest I will go!
“You are a baaaad kitty,” my sister said and half-zipped the bag to trap him within. Damn right I am. I could almost see in Camino’s maneuvers to claw free his self-confidence soar. He was the cat! At last, someone saw him for the dangerous, villainous, vainglorious specimen of cathood he truly was! He was James Bond crawling out from the deadly, suffocating cave of socks and sweaters – strong, sexy, shrewd, with not a whisker askew. “Bad?” I could almost hear him ask in his new (to me) pussycat persona. “Stay tuned, ladies: It will be fun to show you just how bad I can be.” Then, I swear, he winked.
Later we drove Camino to sleepaway camp for his life enrichment experience more or less in Turkey. As always in the car he was quiet and content in his travel house, but when we arrived at Fatma’s apartment and I handed him over to her, he melted down. Meows of heart-rending tone; desperate scratching to escape from the crate; and two orange forepaws that reached and reached again outside the carrier’s locked door that said everything: don’t leave me!!! Before Fatma walked him off to her building’s elevator, I put my (brave) face up to the crate and, cooing and soothing my kitten as best I could, baby-talked words of assurance I hoped would give him comfort. “It’s only a couple of weeks, Camino, and I promise! We’ll be back. Remember,” I squeaked as tears gathered, “Mami loves you!” The kitty meowed louder, scratched harder, and threw his weight against the door to break it down.
“Oh, stop,” commanded Candy from behind me. Camino stopped. I moved aside so she could put her face up to his crate. “What sort of gato resists when duty calls – a coward?” Kitty gazed at her and grew still, apparently hearing her every word. “Cat up, my strong, fierce friend. You are going to kill it at sleepaway camp. And in a couple of weeks when you are done showing Fatma and her family what a real Spanish feline is all about, we will be glad to hear of your conquests and adventures in the faraway land of Turkey. Now go!” She motioned to Fatma that it was okay now, the elevator need no longer wait for them. “Make us proud!”
The doors to the elevator started to close, and sweet, smiling Fatma waved bye.
“She has no idea,” said Candy, as we both waved back and the cat-sitter lifted Camino’s crate to give us a last look at him, looking at us.
“She has no idea of what?” How would I stand it, this grief of being separated for the first time from my kitten?
“She has no idea what a bad, bad kitty Camino really is.” At that the elevator door closed, but not before I heard it: his big purr, cocky and sure.
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