Joel Blackledge
He rode into Madrid on a white horse, flanked by a military guard that ran the length of Calle de Toledo. Every Spaniard, whichever side they were on, had heard the promise spread by those dour women in their dull dresses and headscarves: Franco’s justice brings food to all. I watched furtively from the rooftops and gutters I’d come to call home, clawing at wild-eyed pigeons and looking ahead to the days of plenty just around the corner. His victory parade cheered him into the city with a bombastic energy I thought was starved away by the war, but there he was at last: General Franco. Victor, leader, saviour. Whether or not he knew it, this Franco held a promise for me personally: no more pigeons.
I had only known war. I was born into a busy litter to a poor mother who didn’t have milk enough for our hungry and desperate mouths. When she wasted away, the family we lived with did not hesitate to throw us into the street. Food was hard enough to come by without six mewling kittens to feed. Don’t pity us—I’ve no doubt that, had we been born another few months into the war, we’d have ended up on the skillet ourselves.
I swiftly abandoned the others. I was the smallest by some distance and knew my own blood well enough to see the limits of sentimentalism in a hungry cat. The streets of Madrid were my new home—though they were mostly deserted. The few who chanced a walk on the pavement ran furiously from one alcove to the next, as if dodging an invisible downpour. The place was either dead silent or shaking apart under the sound of gunshots and death screams. It made hunting mice unpredictable.
While the battles raged on, I climbed to the rooftops lest some wayward sniper should make sport of a humble non-partisan cat. I covered the city with ease and saw piles of sandbags behind which soldiers smoked and sang—men and women together, their uniforms mismatched and weapons rusty. When I went begging they were mostly warm and affectionate but loathe to part with their meagre rations of stale bread and chalky cheese. I stole what I could, gifting them with rats and mice in return.
I learned to keep away from the barricades; that was where the soldiers were most nervous and quickest to shoot at any movement. Instead I followed the scent of blood to their hideouts and meeting places. There they would gather round candles and coffee in metal cups, exhausted into fevers, up to twenty men crowding around a single bowl of watery soup. The leader insisted the injured eat first; the injured refused it and passed it to the youngest; the youngest refused it and passed it to the oldest; then the oldest would silently palm it back to the leader. I watched the food circle the room like that again and again, every man in the place salivating as it went past but none tasting it. When I tried to take it myself, the soup spilled to the floor and I barely had a lick before I was thrown through the door.
Artillery fire shook the glass from the street windows, and I retreated underground, a strategy apparently adopted by every mouse in the vicinity. I made short work of the dumb little creatures scared into confusion by the noise, and their stringy, paltry flesh kept me alive.
Exploring the other side of the city, I caught an aroma of meat and sweetness and fairly floated on the air to a small cellar, the walls and surfaces covered by various maps, bulletins, and correspondence. There I spied a meeting of generals. Unlike the other soldiers, their uniforms were immaculate, their moustaches tidy, and no one wore a smile. Before them on an oak table sat plates of chicken, herb-braised ham, bread rolls, butter, triangles of manchego, salami sausages, vegetable stew, and a carafe of red wine. Not one of the dozen men was eating—it in fact seemed a point of pride to resist, as any man caught glancing at the spread met with a stern mixture of contempt and pity: If the manoeuvres of the falange in Leganés are straining your attention, Colonel Cortés, then perhaps you should take a break and help yourself to some dinner? I’m sure we could continue the work while you indulge. The accused would turn red, mumble his excuses, and return to the operations with renewed interest.
There are many things I have struggled to understand about humans, but their refusal to eat is the most alien.
The fascists’ contempt for food, however abhorrent, clearly served their purposes in war. Ultimately, they declared victory and cleared the streets of rubble to welcome the new head of state.
I followed Franco’s parade as he rode into the royal palace of El Pardo, baked a pale yellow by the early summer heat. The paranoid military guard would not permit even a cat to enter through the main gate, but after reconnoitring the perimeter I found a small broken grate, the gap in which, as a twisted benefit of being starved to the bone, I could just about fit through. I took a watchful position beneath the stairs to witness the General’s grand entrance and saw him at last. Flanked by an entourage of military men pasted with glinting medals, Franco himself was shorter than most and wore a small moustache that seemed to soften an already pudgy face. He was the only man smiling, and as he strode down the airy halls of the palace, he looked for all the world like the star-struck winner of a beauty pageant.
The palace staff were lined up like a last-minute militia. Franco marched before them and explained that he was to be called Generalissimo at all times, and he would be accompanied around the grounds by his own Moorish guard retained from his service in Africa, whom he indicated with a dismissive wave at the doorway (they had been barred entry by an especially sweaty officer). Franco asked each servant in turn if they understood, and each responded with the same breathy Yes, Generalissimo and a swift, bouncing curtsy.
The Generalissimo was enumerating Mrs. Franco’s breakfast preferences when he caught my eye and stopped speaking mid-sentence. All heads swivelled my way, and the cook turned pink with rage as she almost fell down in shame. I made a dash for the door but was grabbed at the collar by one of the Moorish guards and presented to the Generalissimo like a bomb that needed defusing.
An argument broke out. The cook blamed the butler for allowing in such a ‘mangy creature’; the butler blamed the maid for leaving food around that brings in wild animals; the maid, through tears, said that I resembled her dear childhood pet who had been drowned in the Manzanares. The officers were nervous to handle a cat who could be a Republican spy, and even turned away from me as they spoke in hushed voices.
But the Generalissimo only squatted on the floor and called me over. I sniffed his hand—floral soap and leather on top of the usual scent of flesh and shit—and he scooped me up into his arms. My wriggles for an escape were useless in his firm grip, and he held my stare with those dark, beady eyes.
“Cats have no party,” he said with a smile. “They are simply Spaniards.” He tickled my chin, at which the other officers coughed with manly disapproval. Franco shrugged. “For my daughter,” he said, and threw me at the ground. The cook’s poisonous stare followed me as I trotted off to explore the house.
The Generalissimo made himself at home straight away. Carpets were made softer, curtains were thicker, and every antique item was dusted and polished daily. Anyone else who expressed a similar interest in decorating he chastised harshly: the new Spain, he told them, was one that embraced manly hardship. Discomfort was now a virtue instead of a complaint. I, of course, opted out of such arrangements and made a habit of sleeping in the master bedroom where the finest rugs and blankets were fastidiously stockpiled.
The strict program of austerity threatened my culinary prospects. Extracting just a morsel of meat from that miserly cook was a feat even in days of plenty. If the staff were down to scraps themselves, then it was a sure bet that the cat of the house would soon fall by the wayside—I knew the story well. It became a matter of strategic necessity, therefore, to align myself with the Generalissimo and gain his trust. His soft spot for animals that his embrace had betrayed on that first day was the earth where I would dig until I struck gold.
The first part of the plan was to learn when to stay out of the way. His mood was erratic and his temper short—if I were visible then I would be blamed, and the excess stress of government would be heaped onto my dainty shoulders. When his mood was good, I would approach casually. I wouldn’t demand attention as one does with more docile humans but rather give a double-take as if seeing an old friend by chance—a friend who is lucky to be graced by my presence. In those days, true relaxation for the Generalissimo was rare but not impossible. For instance, the week he introduced a new law that retrospectively criminalised Republican activity he was quite chipper, especially when the execution figures doubled day by day. I ate well that week.
Now all of this was fine for the occasional drop of milk or mouthful of beef, but the Generalissimo spent most of his working hours in meetings with his military and ministers. He had no time for what he doubtless saw as the superfluous and womanly work of feeding the cat. Short of stealing right from his plate—and thus risk execution—I saw no way to realign his priorities. That is, until I found a sleeping spot in a drawing room that the Generalissimo had repurposed for meetings and dressings-down of his staff. I made my bed on top of a cabinet that never saw the sun and caught a cool draft from the northern wall.
I had been sleeping quite happily when I awoke to a ferocious stomping and shouting from below. The Generalissimo was in a foul mood and fussed over his immaculately organised stationary while pacing the length of the desk. He was trailed half-heartedly by two men: one a tall, clean-shaven minister who wrung his hands in an endless fidget, and the other a squat, stern corporal who spoke in guttural grunts and wheezes.
Evidently, another war was upon us. The minister was pleading with the Generalissimo not to come to the aid of the fascist countries, but to remain neutral and not risk the wrath of the other side.
“What, is Franco a coward?” bellowed the Generalissimo, almost knocking the minister down.
The corporal punched his palm and concurred that Spain should join the fight for a fascist victory.
“I have won my war!” the Generalissimo roared, even louder. “Where should our food come from if we turn England away?”
He stomped his feet and tore at his hair, not looking either man in the eye but simply willing them and their dilemmas to go away.
Here was my chance: I leapt in one bound squarely onto the Generalissimo’s desk. From there I launched an assault of hisses and claws at both minister and corporal, seizing the advantage of surprise to force them back, stirring up such a commotion that Franco threw up his arms in disgust.
“Now look, you’ve upset the cat!” he cried. The minister stumbled over his own feet while the corporal fixed his eyes on me with ghastly intent, but both were summarily dismissed from the room and the door slammed after them.
At once my manner switched: I was all purrs and contentment, and at my cosy affections the Generalissimo cut a thick slice of chorizo and hand-fed it to me.
“At least someone around here sees sense,” he muttered as I ate. “General Franco will enter this war only as the last shots are fired.”
My strike was on target, and decisive in victory.
From then on, I was a regular feature of all military audiences, civil hearings, councils, and meetings. Few in the government liked me—the military brass never disguised their disdain—but they tolerated me as yet another whim of what was turning out to be an eccentric and quite deluded head of state. Many of the meetings were merely approval hearings for various items that would bear Franco’s face: stamps, coins, murals, textbooks, notes, portraits for schools, portraits for banks, portraits for post offices, banners to be hung on national holidays and at railway stations, etc. The Generalissimo brought the likenesses into the light and turned them this way and that, seeking but never finding flaws. Finally, he turned them to face me, at which point I gave an approving meow, and the designer sighed with audible relief while I was rewarded with rice pudding.
Meanwhile, Franco’s cabinet waswere pressing upon him the urgency of the national food shortage. Beyond the walls of El Pardo, most of Spain went hungry every night—more reason for me to secure my good standing for the future. One minister presented the Generalissimo with a plate of corbina, a mealy fish brought from the Spanish Saharan fishing grounds, that he suggested could replace expensive imported cod. The Generalissimo put a piece on his tongue, deposited it in a handkerchief, rinsed his mouth with a drop of anisette, and declared it an excellent food for the lower classes. He put the rest of the plate at his feet where I was sitting. I made a studious show of turning my nose up at it—I even spilt some across the carpet in disgust. If the lower classes were now eating knock-off fish, I had to make my pedigree clear.
My impression in that period was that, as a military man bred for war, the Generalissimo could not bear peace. Yet, starved and penniless as his country was, he couldn’t afford to enter the great battles beyond Spain’s borders. Though he had idolised the other dictators as they gained ground, when the war ended the portraits of Mussolini and Hitler behind his desk were replaced with one of the Pope—just in time for a visit from the British ambassador.
Like almost every other visitor, that bearded little man took an instant dislike to the Generalissimo. Knowing my position was as tenuous as his, I bolstered the Generalissimo’s standing by showering the ambassador with affection, rubbing my face across his ankles and leaping into his lap with rumbling purrs. (Perhaps you think I should be ashamed of such behaviour. All I can say is that it was a time of great need, and I was not prepared to give up survival having come so far. So I am not above a little mincing and prancing when it is called for. Can you really say different?)
The ambassador softened and declared the Generalissimo a trusted—if not exactly a respected—ally. At the least, he was relieved to see a leader with such strong anti-Communist zeal.
As the ambassador left, the Generalissimo gave me a celebratory hug.
“You see how prudent I was, little friend,” he mumbled into my fur. “One is a slave to what one says, but the owner of one’s silence.”
All I could do was meow in agreement.
After that, the Generalissimo was radiant with power. His decoration was more ostentatious than ever, and so—thankfully—was his menu. Roasted quail, boiled lobster, hot buttered rum, spiced entrails, eggs in oil, prawns in garlic, squid ring sandwiches, stuffed fritters, marzipan, merengue, fried bread and cream—everything was available. Always delivered to the back door at night-time and always shared with me right from the table. From the table! I needn’t even wait for the leftovers to be scraped into a tin bowl in the hallway. The Generalissimo adored me as the son he never had, and often attended to me at dinner times before even looking at his daughter.
Like him, I grew fat. The cook screamed at me to catch the mice attracted by the wasting food, but I simply went about my day and napped on the finest furs. Catch mice? Why? Who was I to do that work? Who can taste calf tripe cooked with blood sausage and sweet paprika only to sweat galloping after miserable Madrilenian street rats? No one could touch me while I had the Generalissimo’s favour.
Now he travelled to church under a canopy, demanded to be called Caudillo, and himself passed a law that gave the Caudillo regency until he was lowered into his grave. Whenever anyone—always carefully, always quietly—ventured a dissenting voice, he simply threatened to start another war. It was clear that, despite his creature comforts, this was still a military man and he would be as happy in battle as he was prone on the bespoke chaise longues of El Pardo. So, he stayed. The Generalissimo thanked God for his divine duty to serve as leader, and I thanked him for the meals dropped at my feet.
From God to man to cat: all good things rolled downhill.
Over the following years, El Pardo never housed a personal library. There was no theatre, no visual arts, no dancing or music of any kind. Save for the films the Generalissimo and his wife would watch and talk through at the weekends, it was a blissfully peaceful home. We wasted no energy on the world beyond the palace walls—when we were not in meetings we were lounging, taking visitors, thanking God, and feasting on first-rate meals that emerged without fail from the kitchens that never saw their fires go out.
The quiet was disrupted one afternoon when the Generalissimo’s daughter—whom he had largely ignored as he did all women—bounced into his office without a knock and announced that she had someone to introduce. The Generalissimo grunted, and through the doorway slid a tall, muscular man in a perfectly fitted suit and hair slicked back in a taut slope. His pocket handkerchief, I noticed, matched his socks.
“Generalissimo,” said the daughter, “May I present Don Cristóbal Martínez-Bordiú y Ortega, 10th Marquis of Villaverde and… my fiancé.”
The man made a fuss of securing the Generalissimo’s permission for the marriage, listing his family’s aristocratic credentials, and offering assurances he had a bright future as one of the region’s eminent heart surgeons. The Generalissimo, still at his desk, peered over his half-moon reading glasses.
“And you are Catholic, sir?” he asked in a monotone.
“Of course,” replied the man.
The Generalissimo nodded and went back to his work.
The ceremony was to take place in El Pardo the following month. The bride and groom were running about the place almost every day, imagining decorations and berating the staff, willing into existence the most ferociously opulent wedding Spain had ever seen. The Generalissimo largely stayed in his office during the preparations, writing notes to his ministers and looking out at the view of his courtyard where the gardeners hosed the lawn in a relentless battle against the roasting sun.
On the day of the wedding, El Pardo became a maelstrom of activity and noise. Maids polished every surface hourly, even if they were to be covered in flowers, and a team of bickering chefs was drafted in to create a spellbinding buffet for the guests.
The Generalissimo idly walked through the chaos with me in his arms, as he usually did now; I barely had to walk anywhere. We passed the cake, a beautiful tower of cream decorated in the colours of the Spanish flag, and he whispered in my ear:
“I will save some for you tonight, my friend. At least some good can come of my daughter marrying that empty-headed braggart.”
He stroked my neck and nodded approvingly at the staff as they worked away. Everyone curtsied as he passed, though their curtseys were quicker and more anxious than usual. Today of all days, the first person to make a mistake would be shot.
The groom cantered around the corner, fussing over a bow tie and scolding anyone in sight. He saw the Generalissimo and hailed him—much to the Generalissimo’s sorrow—as father. He wanted to know if the Franco family had a particularly fine sword that he should wear for the ceremony, or if his own would do. He was elaborating on his sword’s relative merits and faults when he exploded into a sudden and violent spasm:
“AH-CHOO!”
Before he could quite regain composure, the sneeze came again, and again, and again. He backed away, propelled by the sneezes as much as his legs, and raised a spasmodic arm to point his finger at me. He was shaking his head and throwing words out in between the eruptions:
“No… allergic… out… im… possible… ruined….”
The commotion caught the attention of every servant in the house, and even the Generalissimo’s stern glare couldn’t dissuade them from gawking at the tall, impeccably dressed man having a fit because of a cat.
The Generalissimo looked at me. I held his eye only for a moment, in which he seemed to change from the benevolent hedonist who was my carer to the tedious, queer, and stubborn little man I know everyone else saw. In the second moment he called one of his Moorish guards, and by the third I was being passed along without the merest touch of tenderness.
The Moorish guard carried me out of the front doors just as he had carried me in all those years ago. I was granted only a few looks of pity and embarrassment from the staff before I was thrown with a two-armed swing over the garden wall. Thanks to my soft belly—and a remaining vestige of animal instinct—I landed on the dusty pavement without breaking any bones.
The morning sun pierced my fur, and after so many years of lounging behind the shutters and musty curtains of El Pardo it was a momentary, paralysing shock. I wobbled to my feet, regained my bearings, and trotted around the wall. At length I found the grate I had passed through before: thankfully still broken. But I was not the same cat that I was at the end of the war. The girth bestowed upon me by the palace stopped me from slipping back in through the small hole. No matter the angle from which I approached, I could not make my way through.
The effort exhausted me, and I sought a skinny tree in a nearby boulevard for a nap in the shade. Only when the sun had gone down did I return to the palace, but the guards were so vigilant that even a wretched Madrilenian mouse would not have slipped through. I spent the rest of the evening circling the perimeter, listening to the revels inside, sniffing the scent of cream and braised pork in the air, getting out of breath, and almost collapsing in hunger.
With grace, I finally accepted that El Pardo was no longer my home. I may have been pitched over a garden wall and lost almost everything, but I still had my dignity. I returned to the streets of Madrid that I had once known so well and found them much unchanged. The people were still skinny and wide-eyed, the mice still stupid and fearful, the food still scant and jealously guarded.
This is where I make my life now, working away the fat of luxury and sharpening both my wits and joints back into utility. I have thrown in my lot with a burly street cat who has other followers, and we constitute a casual roving band of sorts who stake our claim wherever we will. We often share scraps and even amiability that is a balm in the sleepless fever of summer nights. I was advised early on not to disclose that I was the favoured pet of the Generalissimo; somehow that title does not carry quite the same currency outside El Pardo.
In all, I can say it’s a blessing we are no longer at war. What a senseless business, and how plentiful the bounties of peace. I have even acquired a new taste for pigeon. It takes getting used to, but we are nothing if we cannot adapt.
