Galilakis Mitsuflakis: Adventures of a Gentleman Cat

or, my lil baby boobaloops

Born… sometime before 2010, location unknown

Died 13 November 2024, Manresa

Ten years ago, just over a week past Easter, I met the love of my life. He came right up to me in the parking lot below my new home, asking for love. And food.

A friend had helped me crowbar open the door to an apartment that sympathetic neighbors had told us was five years vacant. Outside the US, building construction is sturdier and you can’t just kick a door in. For this one, two crowbars were necessary: holding, prying, lowering in tandem; holding, prying, lowering in tandem; until either the doorframe or both the bolts pop.

We picked Easter Sunday because the kind of neighbors more likely to call the cops would probably be at church. And it worked: no one called it in. I gave a big smile and introduced myself to my new stairwell neighbors who were surprised by my sudden presence. I just told them I lived there now and that I hoped my cleaning and fixing up wouldn’t disturb them, acting like I was doing the most natural thing in the world, being there. And I was: turning abandoned housing from property into a home.

My friend had some training as an electrician so he restored the connection to my circuit breakers. From there it was just building out a new electrical installation—wiring and outlets—and that was all stuff I could handle. I took him out to lunch and he took the train back to Barcelona. My home of the past eight years.

But I’d had enough of the big city, and I’d heard about this neighborhood on the edge of a small city in central Catalunya, almost in the mountains. An abandoned neighborhood with an intriguing mix of old retirees with controlled rents, and then a mix of anarchists, single mothers, and undocumented folks who were squatting. A couple of those single mothers were also anarchists and in family with a couple of the undocumented folks. Nothing solidly contained in the squatter punk subculture or the legal old person subculture. Subversive collisions. Latent but potent. The neighborhood assembly and the resistance we organized against the demolition of the whole neighborhood is another story, one of good strategy and then bad conflict, revolutionary heartbreak, bullshit egos, success on paper, alienation in practice, but at least a few friendships that survived it all.

I wasn’t immersed in any of that yet. I hadn’t even finished cleaning out the apartment, where an old Spanish man had lived alone for five years after his wife died and clearly didn’t know how to take care of himself. A tragedy for her, for him, for their children. A lot of cleaning work for me.

There were a bunch of feral cats in the neighborhood, which was on the other side of the railroad tracks, nestled up against some abandoned fields and orchards, and then the foothills leading to Montserrat, which is a sacred place.

But one day, this bold ass tabby walks right up to me asking for pets. Eduardo Galeano had just died a day or two before, so I started calling him Gali.

It began with scritches. Then, Gali started following me into my building and up the staircase. Then, when I held my door open a moment, Gali strolled right in like he owned the place.

You have to understand, Gali moved fast, and he didn’t ask for permission. If he were a human I probably would have despised him. But as a gentleman cat, he stole my heart.

I soon found out Gali also made himself at home in two other apartments in our stairwell. Later, I would learn he would try to hang out in any house he could get into. Turns out Gali was a bit like Nick Cannon. But it didn’t matter. We were in love. And in no time, it was clear I was his favorite. He was used to sleeping outside, and some summer nights he preferred it. Many weeks a year I was away travelling, and other nights coming home from a busy day we might miss each other in the parking lot… but for the eight years I lived in Manresa, most nights he slept with me. And in the daytime, honestly, he’d often lounge around the apartment, though he loved going down to sit on one of the stone benches, with the old ladies or alone. And every now and then he’d make sure to visit one of his other apartments.

Most of the following photos are by Lea

He hated the other neighborhood cats, and it was clear he considered himself apart from them and above them in every way. There were two other tabbies who looked like they might be his relatives, Nisper and Whisper, and he just ignored them. And then two cats who bullied him pretty viciously. Oscar, a black cat with big ole balls who attacked any other male cat around (even Gali, though he was fixed); who finally let himself trust me after years of me leaving him food, and even checked out my apartment once, though he never felt safe indoors and was definitely the kind of cat who would piss on the furniture. In the last year before he died, Oscar suddenly became the biggest sweetheart in the world, though the cats he’d bullied for so long weren’t quick to forgive him or trust him.

Then there was Charlize, named for her close resemblance to the actress. Pale white with some yellow and brown splotches, Charlize was an absolute princess with a couple attendant cats-in-waiting. She was also a total b. She would meow sweetly and bat her eyes at humans, asking for food, but there was something intangibly shark-like about her. I guess that’s true of every white South African. Oh wait, I’m talking about the cat.

Once, after a human she’d been flirting with had gone inside and she thought there was no other hominin observer (I was spying from my balcony like a good Catalan), she turned and with absolutely no justification, calmly smacked the shit out of one of her faithful attendants, an orange doofus whose name never quite stabilized. He just cowered and trembled obsequiously, clearly used to this behavior.

I learned much later that Gali spent many of his first months as a domestic cat. He was probably adopted from a local shelter as a kitten, so still possibly a blood relative of Nisper and Whisper; he lived with a family in the neighborhood, but one of the adults got a job somewhere, they moved out and abandoned him on the street. So he didn’t fit in with the street-cat-for-lifers. But it was also clear he didn’t want a single stable home.

He was a gentleman cat who enjoyed owning several properties, and also having access to a bit of parkland, hunting land, to have his strolls in. He would often accompany me to my squatted garden, lounge on a palette, and watch as I labored. It seemed to calm him.

At home, he expected to be fed, and his tastes were particular. Never the cheapest brand of kibbles, Gali was a Brekkies boy. The only food he would eat for years was Brekkies, the second cheapest brand. Once, the corner store was out and I had to get him a more expensive brand. Anyway, he refused to eat that other brand. Only Brekkies.

(Some of the neighbors made sure all the street cats got fed so Gali never starved if I didn’t feed him but, well, he was my guy!)

Another of his foibles: Gali was a prodigious masturbator. Actually, there might be a more specific scientific term for his quirk. He loved to fuck a blanket. You’d just be sitting on the couch, reading a book, and he’d walk up nonchalantly, shift the blanket around a little like a cat might do to prepare a napping nest, except he’d grab the blanket in his teeth and start humping it, often while staring straight at you, or backing his rear up against you as he began to rock.

He was fixed, there was nothing happening there in any biological or material sense but still, he would just go to town. There was this one fuzzy purple blanket I had dumpstered – anyway, we don’t need to hear anymore about that. It just wouldn’t be telling Gali’s full story without that little… habit of his.

Clearly, Gali was a cat who made himself at home. As his personal mythology developed, the possibility arose that he was actually nobility. He’d often sit on the ledge of the southern balcony, the one overlooking the fields and the Cardener as it twisted downstream. On one of the steep old hills in that direction, there was a tiny old town called Castellgalí. A possible translation: Gali’s Castle. Maybe, just maybe, a hundred years earlier, Gali had been a minor noble and he had cruelly denied hospitality to a poor traveller who was actually a witch. Cursed, he was banished to roam the world, reliant on the hospitality of others. But he was still an aristocat at heart, plotting how to recover his castle and title.

He’d walk with me a lot, accompany me when I went to prune my olive trees, and in his younger years he’d even take the half hour loop with me up and over the hill (as long as I picked him up and held him close when we had to pass the farm with the dogs), up to the Witches’ Stone where there’s a view of Montserrat in one direction, and the Pyrenees in another. Where in the mid-1800s the first group of anarchists swore a secret oath that’s still being passed down today…

When I had to move back to the States, Gali was well taken care of. His last year he moved in with some friends in a spacious apartment in the old town. The friends who adopted him let him explore the rooftops, built him a replacement castle, and told me how in the warm afternoons he’d go out and hang with other elderly street cats (many of them who looked like they might also be his relatives), sitting and passing the time as though they were nursing carajillos and trading stories.

Following photos by a good friend who gave him a great home

Once he wandered too far and got lost in the labyrinthine streets, so they got him a collar with their phone number on it. The friend wrote to me,

He spent the last months of his life having adventures. It took him only a day or two to figure out that thanks to this wondrous device, he could wander really really far and then just approach a stranger and, as if by magic, we would come to pick him up – no matter how far from home he had gone. He was abusing it on a daily basis, getting us to befriend half of Manresa’s old ladies as he went about.

Another of his favorite things to do was to stage a lie-in right in the middle of our street, stopping all traffic and standing up to even the biggest of cars, with a very strong “whose streets, our streets” vibe to it. It was both nerve-wracking and hilarious to watch.

He never missed an opportunity to sneak out of our apartment and try to slide into one of our neighbor's. The neighbors weren’t particularly keen on that initially but soon enough, they all realized how cool he was. Soon they rolled out the welcome mat and he became a bit of a celebrity.

A few months ago, I discovered that he is a great fan of roasted chicken and after that, as much as I rarely cook meat, I was making it for him regularly. He could eat his weight in it and he would get really cross if we tried to have some of it too, giving us proper dirty looks and usually not talking to us for the rest of the day as punishment.

Since moving back to the States, I’ve been able to visit Catalunya a couple times, and each time I would drop in on him. He’d come up to me, get a little scritch, and then sprawl out like no time had passed at all.

He was getting thinner and thinner and for a while he became alarmingly sick, but his new home, his new humans, and a couple vet visits fixed him right up. No one knew his exact age, though he was at least 15. He was happy and healthy. And also, winding down.

At the end of last year, I got this message:

Gali died yesterday evening. There was nothing dramatic about his death and no signs it was coming. We were cooking dinner and he came to check on us in the kitchen, asked for a cuddle and then went to take his favorite spot next to the radiator. He called us from there, I came to give him a stroke and then he died. It took only a few minutes. The picture I’m sending is the last one I took of him, it’s from yesterday morning. Today, we buried him in your garden, next to the olive tree.

rest in love and peace my little guy