Two Lucky Kittens!
By Nike
HAVANA TIMES – This story begins in 1984 when a cat fanatic friend agrees to adopt two male cats.
It was not the first time that my friend received cats. Her passion for these felines was so well known that whenever an abandoned kitten appeared in the town, they took it to her house or left it under the fence. Some knew her as the cat lady. Who doesn’t have a lady like that in her neighborhood?
It was a painter friend who asked my friend to adopt two cats from a neighbor who was leaving the country. My friend did not make requests and one afternoon of that week the painter and his neighbor showed up at my friend’s house with the two felines.
The painter’s neighbor wanted to meet my friend personally and as always happens between those who love cats they immediately became friends. The owner made her new friend promise that she would take care of her because only then could she travel calmly and without remorse.
The kittens had grown up in the apartment of a building in Alamar and had never seen other cats, so they maintained a very intense friendship between them. But his new home was different.
The new house had a dirt patio, fruit trees and a perimeter fence that adjoined other patios. But what marked the difference with their previous life was the total freedom of movement that their new owner allowed them.
For a time the kittens, which as I said at the beginning were male, followed a routine of play and caresses that called the attention of all of us who visited the house in those days. There was no shortage of people who said that kittens were Gay. But this soon changed.
One detail that I do not want to leave out of this story was the fact that when the kittens were left in their new home, their first owner left them with a bag of rubber toys and two boxes of minced fish that were sold in some fishmongers that were very famous in those years because they were everywhere in the city.
The disappearance of these fishmongers and the fact that today it is almost impossible to find fish in Havana are part of the nostalgia that surrounds this story.
The first thing the kittens did in their new life was to stop playing with the toys, the next thing was that upon discovering freedom one of the cats that was yellow abandoned the other and began to chase as many female cats as there were around the house becoming very famous in the neighborhood. It even responded to the name that its new owner gave it, El Mafia.
The other never left the house and had to get used to living with the rejection that The Mafia used to give him when he tried to approach him to play. Over time he stopped trying. The two kittens lived a long time, but The Mafia lived longer, leaving an offspring of yellow cats in the neighborhood that persist to this day.