La gatta, Borges e il fox terrier

They lived in the same years, at the end of the last millennium, but they never met; their posthumous, and at least apparently cordial, date was for the end of 2020, on the cover of this little treat in book form. She was a practical cat, who in her youth had suffered the "trauma of the newborn": the same as children who have a newborn younger brother or sister. Her owners had had a son, and she, feeling deprived of cuddles, had decided to make a new life for herself. He was a fox terrier, a noble-born dog who, sent into retirement by farmers, had gone through a painful period of degradation; the break inflicted on his psyche by that experience re-emerged during the meeting and the brief coexistence under the same roof with the writer Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he had a stormy relationship. They lived, cat and dog, in the 1970s and '80s on two Milanese streets not far from each other, Via Soresina and Via Giason del Maino. A member of the human species who had the good fortune and honour of knowing them both has written their stories.