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Was it chance or destiny, I wonder, that caused the eldest of our six children, Caterina, to pull over in the dead of night and park the car where she did? She was on her way back with a young man from a beach party down the coast and had stopped next to a derelict farmhouse so she could look for shooting stars in the endless night and make a wish. That is how she found the latest animals to join our household: a very strange silver-grey cat with long legs and blackish spots and a single kitten who looked exactly the same in miniature.
This tiny kitten constantly interrupted the star-gazing activities of Caterina and her suitor by straying out on to the road, followed by its mother, who was so weak that she looked half-dead. Each time Caterina, who is twenty-one this week, would go and pick up the kitten and carry it back to a shed next to the farmhouse which appeared to be their home. To no avail. The road was in the middle of nowhere, but cars hurtled past every so often nonetheless. Presumably there had been other kittens and this is how they had died. There was no sign of a father.
The young man quickly got bored, of course. While he could just about grin and bear shooting stars, protecting a kitten from death was too much like a waste of time. But Caterina refused to budge until the fiery orange sun emerged out of the sea and then she reluctantly agreed to leave the long-legged cat and its identical kitten.
Not for long, as she had a plan. Having dumped the star-crossed lothario in Ravenna, she came home to pick up her mother, Carla, and they drove to the farmhouse to — as they put it — “save” the two cats. The mother cat had no milk, they decided, so they gave the kitten to Carla’s aunt, Lalla, who is a widow and loves cats but hasn’t had one for a while.
“Egyptian mau,” announced Rita, our youngest daughter, after conducting a search on her phone. The long legs, the gooseberry green eyes, the spots… Rita was undoubtedly right, we all agreed. We now “owned” an Egyptian mau. This strange cat, which Carla, a devout Catholic, soon named Esther, after the queen in the Old Testament whose name derived from the Babylonian Ishtar (star), was identical to the online photos of that rare and ancient breed.
“Il mau” — as we soon began to say — is a direct descendant of the spotted cats in 3,500-year-old Egyptian hieroglyphics and was brought to Europe by the Romans. It is related to a smallish African wild cat — the serval — or il gattopardo in Italian, the title of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s great novel about the decline and fall of the Sicilian aristocracy, wrongly translated into English as The Leopard.
Unlike the Sicilian aristocracy, the Egyptian mau escaped extinction, but only thanks to an exiled Russian princess — according to one popular story — who in 1953 saw a male mau at the Egyptian embassy in Rome and persuaded the ambassador to find a female from Cairo, which he did. The princess then emigrated with the cats to America where she started to breed them.
They say that there are only about 3,000 Egyptian maus on the planet. And we have got one and Lalla another, and — I am pleased to announce — we have increased the global total by two. Esther, you see, had two more kittens on Monday — both also identical to her. When Caterina found her in early July she must have been pregnant again, which we soon realized. Pregnancy for maus lasts seventy-three days, longer than for other cat breeds.
The more I delve into it, the more certain I am that I could convince even Sir Alan Sugar that we’re on to a winner. I contacted a British breeder who told me that maus go for $1,100-$2,000 and much more if they’re breeders. In Italy, they go for $2,000-$2,400.
OK, so this time round Esther has only had two kittens, but at British prices that’s still a minimum of $2,400. Make that four kittens from now on as, settled into her new life, she will feel more confident about bringing offspring into this troubled world. Multiply by five, the number of times a cat can get pregnant in a year, and that’s $24,000.
What if we then use ten of Esther’s female maus as breeders and a couple of males and set up a conveyor belt situation in our huge barn? That would rake in $240,000 a year. But why not go the whole hog and pack fifty female maus in the barn, which is full of rats, which will cut the cat food bill? That’s $1,200,000! A year! Minimum!
Tax? Come off it. This is Italy. We’d have so much money we could buy the nudist beach. There are only a couple of potential problems. Who is the father and where the hell is the little rascal? One of Esther’s new kittens has a cream-colored patch on one leg, and Caterina and Carla tell me that the only other cat they saw at the farmhouse was a skeletal siamese. We’re going to have to go back and investigate. If we find a male mau we’ll save him too, and if not we’ll probably have to buy one male, maybe two, to kick-start the business, but the cost will be chicken feed compared with the profit.
It is also just about possible, I suppose, that Esther, being a rare cat worth a heck of a lot of money, does actually belong to somebody, but as Carla, who has sought counsel from our parish priest, says: “They don’t deserve her.” And as I say: “We shall cross that bridge as and when it presents itself.”
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
