The Owner of (His) World: Mr. Gray’s Train

On the old train at Calçada Station, a gray cat seems to have figured out something we humans have a way of making unnecessarily complicated: who actually belongs to whom?

I’ve never been much of a cat person. I’ve never mistreated an animal, and I feel compelled to say that because these days it seems every opinion comes with a required statement of character. But there’s something about cats’ independence that gets under my skin. I know that’s exactly what many people admire about them, and about certain people too. I don’t. I like warmth. I like people. I like being connected, building things with others, having that back-and-forth that comes from being around one another. Human beings are, by nature, much more social than cats, although there’s always someone ready to point out an exception and prove that no generalization is ever quite safe. I’m talking about most of us. A tendency, not a rule.

This one, though, caught me completely off guard.

He had a kind of swagger about him. Self-confidence, dignity, and the unmistakable air of someone who considered himself in charge. That’s why I named him Mr. Gray. I gave him the name myself. There was something almost aristocratic in the way he carried himself, a quiet sense of superiority, and an absolute conviction that he had nothing to prove to anyone.

I had a telephoto lens with me, and I decided to get close on purpose. I wanted to see whether he’d get nervous when confronted with a big white lens and some strange guy he didn’t know coming straight toward him. I kept moving in until I was barely a foot away. The lens could no longer focus at that distance. He didn’t move. Not even an ear.

That was the funny part. I had walked over there intending to find out how brave he was, only to realize that maybe he was the one finding out how brave I was.

I asked the station guards about him. That’s when I learned that the train is home to the cats. There are others living there too, although I got different answers about whether there were two or three. On one point, though, everyone agreed: there was no question about who ran the place. Mr. Gray.

Maybe that’s what fascinates me about him. To me, the train is heritage, memory, architecture, history. To him, it’s none of those things. It’s home.

I show up with a camera to look at the place. He stays where he is. I have to figure out how close I can get; he doesn’t even have to think about me being there.

That reversal is where the title came from. The world belongs to him.

The “his,” in parentheses, is my attempt to claim some small part of something that may not be mine at all. Maybe it belongs only to the one who knew how to take possession of it simply by being there.