Diary

Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan

Our life has become a weird comedy of cats. Our friends who lived in this house in Mexico City before us had a pair of cats named Pancho and Lupe. The idea that a couple of cats share names with a hero of the Mexican Revolution and the nation’s beloved patron saint has raised a few eyebrows here, but that’s another story.

When our friends moved to Istanbul, they asked us if we would please take care of the cats for a couple of months until they and their baby got settled there. We all agreed that would be the easiest thing for everybody. It’s been a delight for us. Our kids and Pancho and Lupe have become a sort of team. The cats have learned to live with the fact that our 3-year-old, Tom, thinks it conveys love to pick the cats up by the neck and hug them. And the kids have learned to overlook the fact that their cuddly kitties decapitate squirrels for sport. “Just like Simba,” they say, which we think shows wisdom beyond their years.

But now the Great Circle of Life has come spinning around like a Frisbee to ding Pancho and Lupe on the nose. Actually, it’s mainly nailed our office manager, Gaby, and our friends in Turkey, who are all now making arrangements to ship the cats. You may think this is easy. It is not. We all have been working on this for at least two weeks, and we have concluded that, in fact, it may be mathematically impossible.

Follow closely: The cats need a vet’s certificate proving that they are disease free. This is good for five days. Once they have that certificate, they must get a document from the Mexican foreign ministry certifying that the cats are indeed from Mexico. That takes two days to process. (Despite two weeks of phone calls, we have not been able to locate the ministry’s official in charge of animals. Dead human bodies, yes, live animal ones, no.)

Tick, tock, tick, tock. Once Pancho and Lupe are officially certified Mexican by the foreign ministry, the Turkish Embassy must issue a certificate certifying their health certificate. That takes three days. So, of course, by the time all the paperwork is done, the health certificate would probably no longer be valid.

So unless something changes, even if Pancho and Lupe managed to catch their flight (KLM to Amsterdam, with a one-night layover in an airport “hotel,” then another KLM flight to Istanbul), they would be felines-non-grata in Turkey. We are told arriving without a valid health certificate would land them in quarantine for 40 days. Call us crazy, but we’ve seen Midnight Express and we don’t think Pancho and Lupe could survive 40 nights in a Turkish cat-slammer.

Gaby is a maestro at making cumbersome government bureaucracies produce results. But even she is flummoxed by what’s going on with Pancho and Lupe. We have already written this week about how bribes make the world go ‘round in Mexico. That is surely where we are headed with the cats. That’s almost always the bottom line here. We actually had to pay a bribe to buy carpeting at a department store the other day. And if that’s what it takes to make sure the cats have a safe trip to the great meeting point of Asia and Europe, we are ready to grease some palms. Gaby agrees. She’s seen this too many times. This morning she signed deeply and concluded: “I think it would be easier if they took a taxi to Turkey.”

Still, we are worried. We are hoping that things move faster than we have been told. We love Pancho and Lupe. We want to think of them happily chasing squirrels into their golden years on the banks of the Bosporus.