Instructions from a bestiary

I LIKE best these times. After the mad and maddening whirl of days, everything seems to move towards this point: a dog and his human in a room, a book open on the table, the fading of another year.

Birds taking wing and the blue vault of a summer sky are sublime, but this, too: the dog sleeping at her feet, his hind legs sometimes kicking in a dream of puppyhood he is returned to by a mid-morning nap.

For a while, everything is perfect. But the human, flipping pages, finds his quietude irresistible and rubs him with her foot. He halfheartedly growls and, when the offending foot finds the spot behind his ear he is particularly sensitive to, rises to his paws and plops down on a spot several paces away, his behind pointedly facing her.

A dog is a human’s best friend.

Even under the scalding abrasions of that kinship, loyalty and love for their human is fixed in the canine nature.

In the same way, we know how fragile peace is and cannot resist breaking it.

Our abrasiveness finds its natural outlet in that most unnatural of occupations: making war on each other.

That is at the heart of Merlin’s tutoring of Wart, the dreamer who later grows to shaky manhood, pulls out a sword buried in an anvil in a church courtyard, and moves on into an even more tenuous rule in T. H. White’s luminous retelling of the Camelot legend, “The Once and Future King”.

The Penguin Group recently published an edition that’s in stock in a national chain of bookstores. The cover illustration is partly a watercolor rendering of a knight mounted on his steed and wielding a sword, and partly a visual giveaway since White’s novel is like a Rorschach ink blot test for one’s notions about power.

In the novel’s first part, “The Sword in the Stone,” Wart, the future King Arthur, is turned into several animals as part of his education with Merlin.

Portrayed by Walt Disney as a magician and by White as a nigromancer or practitioner of Black Magic, Merlin is growing backwards or becoming younger with each year. Being able to see how the king will meet his end gives Merlin an unrivalled vantage point to guide his education as a child, an excellent qualification for teaching that later inspired J. K. Rowling to create Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series.

How can being turned into a perch (a kind of fish “braver than the silly roach, and not quite so slaughterous as the pike”), merlin, ant from the Afric shore (more “belligerent” than Norman ones), owl, wild goose and badger prepare Wart to become the once and future king?

“Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance,” decrees Merlin.

So transformed, Wart first learns that “might is right” from the murderous ants who view war as neither sickening nor honorable, just “Done”. Asked to stand sentry as other wild geese sleep, Wart misunderstands the nature of the enemy.

When he asks the young female, Lyo-lyok, if he is guarding against other geese, she finds his notion of geese killing other geese obscene: “But what creature could be so low as to go about in bands, to murder others of its own blood?”

It is in the novel’s second part, “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” that Wart is told by Merlin the fine point of his education as different animals: “learn to be a human being”.

Wart is now the young King Arthur, fresh in ascendancy but ancient in his lust for the sporting game of fighting other humans. The young king of England surveys the scene of one battle and confides to his old mentor that he enjoys war, specially the part about winning.

Merlin replies that chivalry is fine when one is encased in armour and seated on a horse or directing from the battlements of a castle: “The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.”

Though elegant in prose and elegiac, White is nowhere close to Udo, my saintly aspin, who forgets and forgives and insinuates his muzzle back to warm my feet. I look down on that napping head. I look away. Something directs my foot back to that sensitive spot behind his ear. Humans, alas, learn only too well.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Dec. 30, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday main op-ed column

Rocky mountain high

IN THE end, it was the children who saved us.

To find an address in the mountains of Talamban, we did the practical thing: asked directions.

Improvements on a spillway had made the usual route impassable except by habal-habal (motorbike improvised for commuting in the boondocks). Preferring to use the family car, we took an alternative route but had to ask around whenever the road forked off.

At the first crossroads, a smiling fellow revving his habal-habal engine tilted his head to indicate the left road. He told us to go “straight lang,” pursing his lips for emphasis.

Anyone who's been around knows that mountain paths hardly go “straight.” But since we were looking for a sitio known as Pulangbato (red stone), the sight of that winding ribbon of red earth made us think we were on the right road or, at least, heading in the right direction.

Soon enough, our path diverged with children going home from school. A few of them clung, as if sticky-limbed, to habal-habal drivers, but many of them walked home, if not by necessity, certainly by choice.

Slowed down by the twists and curves, we found ourselves watching the children. They chatted, joked. Many “wore” their rubber slippers on their hands, walking barefoot. We swerved to avoid two boys, checking out the caimitos (starapples) ripening in the roadside trees.

Another group stuck the thick, matted tendrils of the orcalla tree in their heads so it seemed that they sported dreadlocks. I laughed aloud at their creativity while wondering at the speed some aspects of popular culture are communicated.

When the road stopped twisting, we gained speed and left behind the children. But noticing that the ground was no longer a red shade, we checked our direction again with a man nursing a bottle.

He said we had strayed into the next barangay. Pulangbato was near the school, he said and waved the bottle in the direction we came.

Although dubious now about bottles, pursed lips and unconventional direction devices, we remembered the children and decided to return to the spot where our paths converged.

The children were still on the road. When the Rastafarian boys spotted us, they puffed their chests and strutted. In no time, we found the school and our destination.

The school had the shuttered, abandoned look these places take on at duskfall on Fridays. I wondered if it had a computer lab or even Internet connection. In many places of learning in the uplands, even a typewriter remains a hi-tech craving.

How did the Rastafarian boys know about the dreadlocks? Did they see Bisrock icon Budoy drive by on his big black bike? Most likely, it was a habal-habal driver or a local boy, cocky with tales from the city.

The deserted school came back to me again while I watched that night the TV coverage of the interfaith protest in Manila.

In places like Pulangbato, what information about the latest controversy involving the Philippine National Broadband Network (NBN) filters through? The NBN deal with the ZTE firm would have meant faster, more efficient and cheaper Internet connectivity for government entities and through them, the public. Who knows? Perhaps the NBN plans might have included schools, traditionally kept in the backburner of development plans.

With a computer lab and Internet connection, places like Pulangbato can introduce children to exploding worlds of knowledge. The Rastafarian boys, for instance, can google “dreadlocks” and learn what's really cool from Wikipedia: started by the poor of Jamaica to express the Rastafari movement's “Young Black Faith,” this 1930s hairstyle showed that the wearer lived in “dread” or awe of a higher being; hence, the term “dreadlocks.”

But as greed and corruption for the P15-billion NBN-ZTE deal seems to have leapfrogged over the country's technological leap, the Rastafarian boys and I will just have to rely on learning, perhaps through osmosis with habal-habal drivers.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 2, 2008 issue

Class traitor

AT 20, I subscribed to a world taken over by the Reds.

I had only read “Das Kapital” as a comic book. I often mistook Karl Marx as Albert Einstein scowling on a very bad hair day. But I believed that the Reds were the only ones who considered late-night karaoke-singing as inimical to the interests of the people.

At 20, I was on a bus, seated on my duffle bag, heading for Barangay Kalumboyan in Negros Oriental. Young and green, I was tasked to do the development grunt work of testing a comic book on land tenure among farmers sandwiched between our foreign-aided special project and the Reds, who were also into land tenure but totally not into comics distribution.

Seasoned co-workers had updated me that the week before, the Friendly Folks ambushed a suspected informer in the nearby barangay of Sta. Catalina.

So I came prepared. For my one-week stay, I arranged in my bag seven pairs of maong pants, folded only once in the knees for fewer creases, with new underpants tucked away in each pair. Should I meet the same fate as the Sta. Catalina worker, I did not want to die, deeply embarrassed, when they cut away my blood-soaked clothing.

My duffel bag was obscenely long and fat. It did not fit in the overheard slot of the rickety bus for Kalumboyan or in the space under its belly where all the chickens, piglets and carefully disguised sheaves of MJs were.

When the other passengers saw my intention of cradling my duffle on my lap (with whatever excess taken on by neighboring laps), they all ushered me to the bus “throne” that alone could accommodate me, all seven pairs of denims, survey forms, comics for testing, and tripod (my photographer, a believer of equal rights, generously shared a few kilos of his equipment, a Manfrotto tripod that was a spitting cousin of a miniature oil-drill rig or a baby submachine gun).

That was why I found myself squatting on my duffle bag, which was on top of the bus’ spitting engine, and gazing stoically back at about sixty pairs of eyes that knew, with felt compassion, how my two cheeks would fare after 100 kilometers or so of merciless steam.

Youth, however, is resilient. When we disembarked at the town of Bayawan, I was anatomically complete. My duffel though was a dubious matter. Aside from the pelting rain that was dripping over my throne (it was truly the privileged class because the bus did not leak elsewhere), the antediluvian engine was also hiccupping grease.

When I zipped open the bag, I found all seven pairs, which lined the bottom, to be indeed creaseless, swimming as they were in a kaleidoscopic soup of rain, black grime and copper-toned bus lubricant.

Propaganda can be peddled in the absence of conscience but never in a state of deep mental disturbance. While helicopters circled the green valleys, with frankfurter-like nozzles poking out of their exposed ribs, ready to rain fire (in case the comics were not huge hits with the local oppressed), my mind wandered far from the government’s war for the people’s hearts and minds.

I could stretch the pants I wore to cover six more days. But what were my options for, as they say in bureaucratese, “inside coverage?”

The thought of handwashing and hanging out to dry my virgin whites and buttery yellows and baby blues beside the macho blacks, greys and camouflage olives of the all-male crew (the local female staff went home after office) did not bear thinking. Fortunately, unlike in our other headquarters in the region, the Kalumboyan site management unit observed a curfew.

All Betamax-watching, drinking, karaoke-singing, and attempts at official thinking were suspended at exactly 10 in the evening. Since some bozo constructed our office beside the local military detachment, the Friendly Folks solicitously included us in their target practice.

According to the military, the generators were shut down to give away any treachery hatched in the dark. But according to bunkmates, the last exchange of unfriendly fire was triggered when some lout on our side insisted on warbling “My Way” past curfew.

Thanks to the Friendlies’ iron-willed refusal to tolerate off-key multiple abuse with a microphone and a minus-one, I dried my dilemmas in the dark and completed my ideological shift. What is the point of civilization without “fresh coverage?”

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com or 09173226131)