Last night, between the clatterings of the rain, one could hear the crying of a kitten coming from the basement of a block where the air openings had just been stopped up. Everybody in the block was at home (it was 11 o’clock at night), but not one of them was at least curious to come out and see what was happening. They probably simply turned the tvs or computers louder, for the noise to stop disturbing them.

The kitten was desperately hanging to the bars that blocked the air opening, crying with all his half a kilo strength. We managed to get into the basement and, passing through the boxes with bars and past the tons of fleas who slipped under our clothes, we reached the air opening. The kitten was waiting for us. He was tiny, covered in fleas, with an infection to his eyes. He started to purr the moment we took him in our arms.

Between the bars of the nearby box we saw protruding the head of an adult black cat, recently dead.

By now the basement was silent and we were getting ready to leave, when we heard a weak meow from the box where the dead cat was. Between the ducts and pieces of wood thrown in a pile, there it was, a tricolor little head, even smaller than that of the little tiger who alerted us. It was impossible for us to reach the tricolor kitten (the box was tightly locked up, made of a wire net with small loops), but she slowly approached us and in the end we managed to grip the scruff of her neck with two fingers and we pulled her from loop to loop up high, where there was a slightly bigger opening around a duct.

Tiny, full of fleas and very, very hungry, but gentle and purring (even though nobody had ever touched them before), the two little things are now safe, but they’ll need a family as soon as possible.

We can’t end their story without wishing “keep sleeping tight” to everybody living in that building.