Gatos

Gatos appear throughout Shmuel Ash’s story as independent creatures and as occasions for human feeling: a kitten’s approach can bring him to tears, a stray cat crosses the garden and the foggy streets, and the habits of cats prompt an argument about natural selection. Their recurrence links his capacity for sympathy to his isolation, while also making the limits of explanations based solely on utility or survival visible.

Encounters That Draw Out Sympathy

Shmuel is easily moved by scenes of distress, including those involving strangers and animals. One winter night, a kitten meows beside a fence, perhaps separated from its mother, then rubs against his leg and looks up at him. Shmuel’s eyes fill with tears at once. The encounter belongs to a broader pattern: a scene of unexpected generosity in a film or the grief of an unfamiliar woman and child outside Shaarei Tzedek Hospital can move him to tears as well. The kitten is not presented as a pet or possession; it is a vulnerable stranger whose presence draws an immediate response from him.

This response gives the cats a place within the story’s portrait of Shmuel’s emotional openness. His sympathy is not reserved for people he knows, or for situations in which he can intervene. The kitten’s uncertain separation from its mother remains only a possibility, but the possibility is enough to affect him. The scene therefore reveals both his responsiveness to other beings and the embarrassment that such visible emotion can bring him.

Cats and Questions About Nature

In a discussion about Darwinian selection, Shmuel challenges the idea that natural selection alone can readily account for every striking animal behavior. He points to the cat’s apparently inborn practice of digging a small hole and covering its waste. He presses the comparison: if this behavior arose through selection, would cats that failed to perform it have been eliminated without descendants, and why would such cleanliness characterize cats rather than dogs, cows, or horses? The passage frames the questions as a challenge to an explanation, not as a settled alternative account of how the behavior developed.

The detail matters because the cat’s habit is both ordinary and unexpectedly elaborate. Shmuel treats it as a small puzzle that complicates a general theory: the animal’s repeated, practical behavior seems to demand more explanation than a simple appeal to survival can provide. The cats thus enter the narrative not only as objects of feeling but as evidence in Shmuel’s habit of questioning broad claims through concrete examples.

The Cat in the Garden and the Attic

Shmuel’s low, snug attic looks out onto a walled garden, cypress trees, and a stone-paved courtyard shaded by a vine and an old fig tree. A stray tomcat passes through from time to time, walking slowly with its tail raised. Its route across the polished paving gives the cat an ease of movement that contrasts with the enclosed quality of Shmuel’s living space. The animal belongs to the courtyard, but its intermittent visits make it a recurring presence at the edge of his view.

The window also becomes part of Shmuel’s lonely routine. With coffee in one hand, he takes his fox-headed cane from the corner and looks out again. When he spots a cat moving through fog among frozen hedges, he taps the glass with the cane, as if urging the carved fox to chase it or signaling to the outside world for rescue from the attic’s confinement. The living cat, the carved fox, and Shmuel’s gesture converge at the window: a passing animal becomes the occasion for an imagined pursuit and, at the same time, a wordless appeal beyond the house.

Street Encounters and the Limits of Contact

Cats also cross the scenes in which Shmuel tries to approach Atalia. After she pays their bill at a café, the two walk home through a narrow lane as fog surrounds the streetlamps. A frightened cat darts across the road and disappears into a courtyard. Shmuel then admits that he sometimes speaks nonsense instead of saying what he means. He puts an arm around Atalia and presses his shoulder to hers; she does not move his arm away and slows her pace slightly. The encounter remains restrained, and Shmuel cannot tell from her face what she feels.

The street cat does not cause or resolve their uncertainty. Its brief passage instead marks the scene’s movement through a dim, unsettled space as Shmuel takes a small risk in seeking closeness. Across the garden and the street, cats remain passing presences: they arrive, cross Shmuel’s field of view, and are gone. What persists is his attention to them, whether that attention takes the form of tears, a question about animal behavior, or a tap against the attic window.