LAfter the biography ‘Obregón, delirio de luz y sombra’ was published, the journalist, writer and painter Gustavo Tatis Guerra surprises the literary world with a new book. This time, about children’s literature, with a story from which we all can and must learn: ‘Michelin is not just any cat’, from Editorial Panamericana.
Inspired by real events, this book teaches us to love animals a little more, to be tolerant and condescending.
The genesis of this children’s novel takes place when “the employees of a newspaper office discover a little kitten hidden in the parking lot”, it is detailed.
Some fall in love with the protagonist pet, while others see her as a hindrance. As the days go by, the actions of various people begin to become evident: the kindness of Lala and Omega, the neighbor’s heartlessness and the ruthless attitudes of others.
The novel has very funny and picturesque situations, but also a bit tragic and through them all readers will discover how the offices of a newspaper work and what the job of being a journalist consists of.
Where does this Michelin story come from?
– It happened a few years ago, when a stray and homeless kitten entered the parking area of the newspaper The universal, and falling asleep next to the newspaper’s dealer truck tires. The driver Oddonel Meléndez García (Omega) woke her up calling her Michelin and the cat reacted to the name. He protected her by taking her to the garden and that was the beginning of a tender and dramatic story. Eulalia Pinedo Flórez (Lala) was moved by Michelín’s orphanhood and, together with Omega, turned her into a clandestine and invisible pet between the garden, Víctor Hugo Hernández’s mechanical workshop and the parking area.
For more than sixty days, the cat stayed to live there, and at night it attracted an irrepressible cat flap that took the air and the night space of the work area. Lala, with the complicity of Omega and some guards, brought him his concentrate for the whole day every morning. Very soon, that would generate a situation of tension with two opposing sides. Those who opposed the presence of Michelin and those who ended up being close friends of the kitten who gave birth to five kittens and turned one of the guards into a cat midwife.
At what point did it occur to you to turn that story you witnessed in the newspaper into a children’s novel?
– At first, I thought that this could be the beginning of a children’s story. I never thought it could be a story for a novel. I solved it in ten pages. But I found in two and three versions of the same story that the story went beyond the workplace and extended to the entire city. The helplessness of stray cats and dogs and the inexistence of an animal shelter in Cartagena opened up other possibilities for history. As I rewrote it and interviewed its protagonists, I discovered that reality was ahead of my own fictions. Lala confessed to me that her dream when she retired was to make a shelter for stray animals. That was a revelation. Then my own family experience with cats that had been strays, and had also been poisoned, led me to another dimension of the initial story. In addition to the helplessness of the stray animal, the affectionate and respectful human relationship with pets and the violent and perverted relationship of those who, in addition to hating cats and dogs, invents the clandestine monstrosity of poisoning them or disappearing them with ground glass or setting them on fire, as has happened in a neighborhood of Cartagena, shortly after the appearance of the novel.
In these times, more than ever, we must be more in solidarity with animals, this novel invites that …
– I think that the pandemic we have lived through has a lot to do with our violent and degenerate relationship against nature and against animals, call them domestic, non-domesticated and wild. In the novel there is a portrait of respect and also of animal abuse that ends up being mistreatment of nature. And to ourselves, who are children of that nature.
The novel also awakens sensitivity towards animals, how much do you personally like them?
– For me, cats are superior creatures endowed with a tenderness that humans must learn from. And it is not a tenderness to conquer anyone, but life itself. The French writer Victor Hugo said a phrase that Borges made his own and improved: “God invented the cat so that man could caress the tiger.”
How do you intertwine the story of a cat with the fact of telling how the offices of a newspaper work?
– It is curious, but from the eyes of Michelin each employee of the newspaper is described by the footprint, from the director, the manager, the journalist and even the cleaner. But it is not a gaze that judges, but rather contemplates. It is a tender look that weaves reality and fiction. There is Germán Mendoza Diago, El Panti, Lala, Omega, Víctor Hugo Hernández, Alonso Doria, Álvaro Paternina (whom Germán jokingly called Cabeza de Puerco). They are Virginia and a sum of friends and fictional managers. But the evil and fictional character that emerged in the rewrite was Débora, a close neighbor on the stage, who poisons cats and life surprises her with the fact that the cat she is going to poison is the one who saves the life of her own mother prostrated in a bed.
What do you think will be the feeling that the book will leave in those people who may not love animals so much, will it teach them to love and defend them?
– Shortly before the book was printed by Panamericana, in the middle of the pandemic something monstrous happened that alludes to the book, in a Caribbean city near Cartagena they collected more than a hundred stray cats and put them in the cages of a truck heading to another city to get rid of them.
I investigated how cats had come to America from Africa, and how they became a presence and a company in our lives, more than five hundred years later. I told the story of how Michelín came out of Papayal’s abandonment and ended up in the newspaper and how poor circus owners passing through the city solved the hunger of the tigers by feeding them stray cats. Michelín saved himself from the tiger and the circus director to tell his story.
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