Beings of the liquid

IN Truman Capote’s celebrated “In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences,” where the writing is so sublime, only an out-of-place punctuation would stand out, this passage still curls out at me:

“Among Garden City’s animals are two grey tomcats who are always together—thin, dirty strays with strange and clever habits. The chief ceremony of their day is performed at twilight. First they trot the length of Main Street, stopping to scrutinize the engine grills of parked automobiles, particularly those stationed in front of the two hotels, the Windsor and Warren, for these cars, usually the property of travellers from afar, often yield what the bony, methodical creatures are hunting: slaughtered birds—crows, chickadees, and sparrows foolhardy enough to have flown into the path of oncoming motorists. Using their paws as though they are surgical instruments, the cats extract from the grilles every feathery particle.”

On 6 January 1960, while waiting for murder suspects Dick Hickok and Perry Smith to arrive for arraignment, Capote sketched the canny felines that survived the streets—and the birds who didn’t.

In life as in fiction, birds rarely make it. Not even in jokes. Do you know the chicken’s reason for crossing the path of the truck? To get to the other side of the street.

In Silang, Cavite, I have to live with birds. We live at the end of a street facing a row of trees. Our garden is frequently overgrown. You could say we moved in with the birds.

When I am pulling weeds, some birds, with brown scarfs thrown over their heads, soon settle on the ground and start breaking the quiet of the dawn, like neighbours discussing a certain nearby creature. If my mood is fine, I listen. If it is not, I still listen.

Birds are noisy individualists. I wish they would keep talking while swooping and flashing across the garden, just to give fair warning to those of us who don’t have spring running in their veins.

Unflagging, effervescent, chirpy. Then, once, I looked up from the weeds, startled to hear a cat mewling in the trees. It turned out to be an Antulihaw, gold-jacketed, black-striped, red-billed.

When the Black-naped Oriole makes its call, the lament gives me pause: What lies beneath that golden plumage?

One weekend, I came home to find a pile of feathers left by the cat. It was a clean kill, nothing left to draw even the scavenger ants.

I think of birds as creatures of light and liquid while all else is still somnolent and turgid. The cat kill said another thing: bone, feathers, precious little meat. We see only what we want to see.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com. 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 10, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”