Faldoni, parts 2664 - 2667

 

 2664. Sitting very nonchalantly in the middle of the street is a cat who is preoccupied in cleaning his fir and the salesman scans the street up and down to see what the traffic situation is and if the cat is in any danger.

 2665. Soon a light in the distance changes from red to green and some traffic begins to bare down on the preoccupied cat, and the cat seems not to notice, because perhaps he is deaf as well as not very bright. At the exact same time that the man is standing at the window looking at the cat in the street a news item comes on the radio which is quietly playing in his room.

2666. In the news he hears that six Chinese miners are trapped at the bottom of a coal mine that is on fire in some remote Provence of China. As he listens to this news the cat is nearly struck by a car, and only manages to save himself at the last instant by a sudden burst of speed with his belly almost touching the ground. The cat escapes but he loses the tip of his tail which remains embossed in the pavement of the main street for many months.

2667. A year later the salesman is staying at the same hotel. He looks out the window into the street and immediately thinks about the cat. A year has passed and still he thinks to himself, “I’m so glad the cat made it out of the way of that car.” He has completely forgotten about the Chinese miners, that is if he ever thought about them in the first place. He knows nothing about their fate simply because they were so small and way off in the distance, and the cat was very large by comparison.