Funiculi – A brief tragedy

Some lives are not worth the effort of sliding through the birth canal. And this is not just in the case of those born to be eaten as infants, or to be vivisected in labs and classrooms, skinned alive for their fur (caracoul), culled at birth because they don’t meet human standards …. or the many others doomed by the design of man.

 All animals are born helpless: Mom decides to drown you in the bassinette, or a bomb explodes in the maternity ward, and that’s that. The survival of a human infant is rarely threatened by a roaming Grizzly or the family cat, but the life of every non-human, “wild” or “domestic,” hangs on the whim of any person nearby. Even people who mean well are dangerous, as I’m about to illustrate.

 It was 1966 or ’67 when I spotted a newborn kitten in the tracks of the Tibidabo cog train, in Barcelona. No one seemed to have noticed him – too new to see or crawl he was barely moving. With me was a member of the “Guardia Civil,” trained to control riots, catch smugglers … and also bent on impressing me. The train was slowly approaching the station, but at my request Pajuelo leaped inside the deep well of the tracks, raised the newborn to my reaching hands, and climbed out with such agility that he got an ovation.

 First thing would be to rush the kitten to a veterinarian, provide first aid as needed, and start feeding him kitten formula. None of this was done. Instead, I took the kitten home placed him in a soft towel nestled inside a shoebox, and proceeded to try to convince my mother that we should keep “Funiculi” (funicular means “cog train” in Spanish). But she was resolute: No animals in the house. The kitten had been without hydration or nourishment for hours.

 The family altercation raged on when the doorbell rang and Damian, a teenage cousin, and two of his friends soon joined the fray. When their arguments failed to reinforce mine, they offered to take the kitten to the nearby Seminari Conciliar, on Carrer Diputacio. In the morning one of hundreds of young seminarians or their teachers would find the shoebox inside the gates … and save him. Could all of us have been so ignorant? The newborn had been surrounded by people since he was rescued from the tracks, and not one of us did the right thing to spare him suffering or his life.

 Assuming the boys did what they said, the seminarians found a shoebox with a dead gray tabby kitten inside. Did someone think enough of this brief tragedy of a life to bury him in the cloister? Or did he end up as trash.

 How different Funiculi’s life could have been if the right person had been in my shoes.