MARZIA AND INGE, A TALE

MARZIA AND INGE, A TALE

I knew nothing about rats. It was not easy to find useful information. Veterinarians for exotics were nowhere to be found in a provincial city in the early 90s. The rats were considered aggressive and dangerous lousy animals. The word rat, in these parts, evoked open sewers and diseases.

Frau Inge enters my life on a midsummer night, year 1992. “About a month old” they told me. “She is not socialized” - in short - she is a little wild. “She has passed the age to get used to people. She would not find adoption, she has a propensity to bite. Take it please.”

First trip together, we return from Trieste. She is in a cage covered with a scarf. She is hidden, all the time. She trembles and if she moves she jerks. She makes a little impression on me and her muzzle and mustache, thet never stop. Her breath is very fast. “I suck you huh? I understand you ... me too I feel embarassed a little to be a human being.”

At home (as long as I can stay here) I put her cage in a quiet corner of the room. I cook something. “She eats what you eat” they told me. “It’s a rat” they told me. “It will grow up.” I bring her some pasta with broccoli but she remains hidden in the mini cardboard den. “Esco. I’ll be back after 10 minutes.” The food is gone. Good girl.

At night I can’t sleep, with the teeths she continues to gnaw the bars and with her little hands she shakes them. I see her disconsolate, she shows all the desperation of a prisoner.

I can’t make her live like this, I can’t give her life imprisonment, I hate cages and I can’t sleep. I don’t know you, you don’t know me, but there is enough room for two here. I open the cage door. I go to bed and look at her from a distance.

Shyly, she goes out and hides under the wardrobe. The second day I see her at times. A lightning bolt that would like to be invisible... If I talk to her she gets scared, if I look at her she gets scared, let’s ignore each other dearly. By ignoring us it works. She starts to move more slowly, always ready to hide but a little bit more curious than before...

She does not accept food from hands. I put it on her plate, “it is good, the food is guaranteed, I don’t want anything from you, I don’t want to buy you”. In the following days curiosity wins over everything, she starts to move freely in the room and I am free to look at it but I don’t try to touch her. I spy and laugh, I laugh a lot because she makes absurd jumps, from the desk to the bed and then up to the bookstore, whatever she experiences.

Cognition of play! She takes measurements and makes mistakes. She tries the same jump again until she succeeds. She climbs vertically on the clothes hanging in the closet and when I chuckle she stops and looks at me, then runs to hide. She goes out and runs towards me, then she stops and looks at me. I laugh and she laughs with me.

She looks at me as well, she would like to explore everything I touch, she waits for me to move and then she sniffs, my sheets, pencil, headphones. She gets into my shoes when I take them off. Our spaces merge, we exchange it. The same food during the day, the same oxygen at night. Our dreams in the same room.

We never touched each other but, one morning she is there. I hear her get on the bed at night, sniffing in sleep, her face, her hands. I think of the stories of my grandmother, of monstrous rats that during the war gnawed the noses and ears of newborn babies. I think of Albert Camus La Peste where mice are the undisputed protagonists and I laugh about myself alone, because she, with those little hands there, she who shines like silver, cannot do me any harm.

I sleep well but always aware of her position. I open my eyes one morning and she is there. A gray ball is sleeping near my face, a few centimeters, on my pillow. And she is so beautiful.

Marzia De Piero, 16.11.2019
testimony of the early periods with her rat Inge