The torrione of the ducal palace

Well, it’s Monday afternoon and the library is closed so I’ll take the opportunity to keep in touch. And it will surprise no one to hear that I’ve been involved with a cat.

It started last Wednesday, when I heard a cat crying plaintively outside my window. When I went downstairs to go out to breakfast, I went around to corner to see if it was still there, and it was, having attracted two or three neighborhood people to discuss it. It was a very cute small black cat, probably a few months old, with longish hair, incredibly dirty and incredibly terrified. It was running back and forth along the side of my building, scratching at every indentation in an attempt either to get in or to hide. No one knew whom it might belong to and no one wanted to take it, though several people already had cats. Eventually, it ran around the corner of the building to the open door and headed down the stairs to the basement, where it disappeared. I went down with the little flashlight I keep in my purse but could see no sign of it amidst the rubbish down there.

The next day, I drove to Rome for the weekend, which was very nice. It seemed rather strange to be in such a big place, especially the traffic, and it rained one day, but it was a nice change and it was good to see some friends. I stayed with a friend who has a washing machine, so I took nearly everything I brought with me to wash. No dryer, of course - private dryers are still very rare in Italy - so I ended up bringing a bag of damp clothes back with me. (Shades of student days) No matter - they’re CLEAN. Since my friends have a VCR, we watched an English-language film, which was fun - I do miss movies.

I drove back yesterday, hung my clothes out to dry, and thought about the cat. There must have been a telepathic link since almost immediately I heard it start crying downstairs. I went down with my trusty flashlight and got just a glimpse of it before it disappeared behind some debris. When we first saw it outside, I had called it and petted it, so I knew that it wasn’t wild, just scared. I assumed that it had been down there all weekend, probably without food and water, so I took down some water and a can of tuna fish. When I called it, it meowed back but it wouldn’t come out. This morning, it started crying again, so I went down again and this time it stayed out in the open. Perhaps it associated me with the food. In any case, it came to me - filthy! - and let me pick it up. In fact, once I had picked it up, it clung to me as though there were no tomorrow. So, what could I do? I took it upstairs to my apartment and tried to clean it up a bit, but one of those clean sweaters I’d brought back is now black, and then just sat with it for awhile. It - she - was extremely agitated but clearly had been raised by people as she was just starved for affection and didn’t want to be put down. After about half an hour, I took her out to see whether I could find someone to take her, or at least to take responsibility for her. No luck. I tried the elderly woman who had been one of those to take an interest the previous week, but her solution was to just put her down in the street and let those people who feed cats feed her. But this cat was still terrified and would not, I think, have made a success of street life. For lack of any other ideas, I took her to the Italian school, from which I am renting my apartment, and told the secretary there about the dilemma. She was sympathetic but has three cats already and really didn’t want any more. But another woman in the office did step forward and offer to take her. She said she lives in the country and has four cats and a dog and is concerned about whether the other cats will accept this one and whether she will learn to stay away from the dog, but hey, what choice does the cat have? So I took the cat back with me until 12:30, when the woman went home for lunch, and spent the time cuddling her and feeding her. She ate another can of tuna, two saucers of milk, and, after I finally put her down long enough to go out to the store, some hard cat food. Then I took her back to the school, we found a box to transport her in, and off she went. Whew! I did, of course, toy with the idea of bringing her back and naming her Cornelia, but that was obviously not really a possibility. I hope it all works out for her and her new owner, and I’ll go by in a few days and hear the news.

And then I came back and took my second shower of the day! Boy, was she dirty.

Otherwise, I just keep working away on my notaries’ books. Last week I found two really interesting entries. One is a marriage contract between Cornelia’s father and her first husband 1 1/2 years before the one I already knew about, but this one was for Cornelia’s sister! I believe this sister died a few months later and Cornelia was apparently brought in as a substitute. That tells us, I think, that the important issues in this arrangement had to do with the agreement between the two men - the dowry offered by Cornelia’s father and the prestige brought by Francesco’s association with Rome and Michelangelo. The second item concerns Cornelia’s second marriage. About 2 1/ 2 years after her first husband died, Cornelia wrote to Michelangelo to protest her father’s choice for her remarriage and ask for his help. She said the man was from S. Angelo in Vado, a neighboring town, and that the contract had already been signed and the agreement made public. A few months later, she married someone else, the chief judicial official of the town. The day before I went to Rome, I came upon a notary’s record of an agreement between Cornelia’s father and a man from S. Angelo in Vado saying that, since an agreement had been made between them for a future marriage between their children and since this arrangement was not going to be carried out - no reasons given - the parties agreed that the previous contract was annulled. The neat little twist here is that this agreement took place before the same judicial official who, two weeks later, would himself conclude a marriage contract for Cornelia.

Oh my, the sun has just come back after a rainy morning, and the man next door has just started playing Viennese waltzes. This is new and somewhat disconcerting among the tile roofs and Renaissance buildings, and it seems an appropriate place to break. I really love hearing from you all so don’t forget to write now and then. I must say, the one thing that really struck me in Rome was how nice it’s going to be to have my own phone and, therefore, my own Internet access. I successfully dialed in to AOL while there and it seems to work well for e-mail too - much faster than the connection I use here. So, although I wake up mornings in a panic about whether I’ll be able to finish what I need to here, I do look forward to transferring to Rome on 31 October.