The crossing has been long but I am already here. Now I have become a cat. After travelling inside a truck, my friend Pitxitxi —a cat from my own town, and an immigrant, like me—, has offered me a place in its cathole. We are several cats of different furs and origins living in the same mousehole. This circumstance would be amusing if it was not for the lack of metaphoric adornment it supposes and the discomfort it generates. There is nothing, not even a simple decoration.
In the cat’s home you only need to worry about the daily stuff, about selling handkerchiefs and gathering at night before going to bed. We could say that it is a small international conference of forgotten voices. Nobody is really from here, from these coordinates, from these latitudes, from these parallels. We are from there. There is our hometown. We come from other shelters, other worlds, both near and far, from other denigrated languages, both vernacular and foreign. We come from other voices that our parents would sweetly whisper to us. Babel is my new house and my language, the flag of society’s outcasts.
They say I am mad, raving mad, because I walk the streets speaking aloud to myself. I am like a dumb one who, despite speaking with his glance, nobody listens to. Today I visited the city and its red tile roofs. When I reached the park it was late and I climbed to the top of the statue of the prince warrior who defeated the cats, and I saw other dumb people, natives and immigrants, and they were in a worse situation than mine. This is the truth.
I have also seen how the young subjects of the great snow-white cat felinely carried lighters and bottles full of volatile and flammable liquid in their hands. They went to silence the miaows of the cats that live under the lamppost of the park. Cats like Pitxitxi, pitchblack, but homeless, mew-mews as thin as little fingers, skinny mew-mews without sardines. Some showed the blows of previous abuse. Before them spoke the incendiary ones: "Here, there can’t be other word than our word. The voice of the fire owners. Ours is the only genuine miaow".
They will find
Neither white flowers
Nor traces
The bench that you used as a bed until yesterday
The voice you used as emigrant compass
Will be today, along with your body, fuel to the flames
But you will become the bush that burns
But is never consumed
You will be eternally on fire
As long as the word in the mouth of your people remains alive
Juankar Mugartza
