The Bird by Tita Lacambra Ayala

The world of “The Bird” by Tita Lacambra-Ayala (Lacambra-Ayala 1984) is a female world seen through the eyes of a female. There are male characters in the story – the narrator’s father and the “Chinaman” who buys the family’s coconuts – but they are peripheral. At the story’s center are the pre-pubescent protagonist-narrator and Sisa, her maid.

In Sisa I have my first example of those older women characters whose relationship with the adolescent female characters I wish to examine. Sisa is also a recurring figure in the fiction of Filipino women – the yaya or housekeeper, surrogate mother for the adolescent heroine, usually a “natural woman,” wise in a different way from the other adult female characters, a kind of priestess who is to initiate the young protagonist into the world she must enter.

Her importance is stressed by the story’s opening line: “It was all Sisa’s fault anyway.” And her connection to the natural life forces is underlined by her being linked with nature images. Her hair is “like a black waterfall falling down in straight lines”; she oils herself up “like a snake”; the “waves in her voice” grow “like the rising tide”; the rhythm of her days seems to follow the rising and setting of the sun. As a maid, she takes charge of the daily chores associated with safety, security, the routine-doing the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry. Yet there is something enigmatic, something vaguely irrational-even slightly dangerous-about her, something the narrator senses but cannot define. Far from being “savage,” however, she appears to possess a higher level of knowledge. This “superiority” reinforced by her speaking in a more “poetic” language than the language of narration:

Sometimes when the waiting is strong, the bird does not come… Then one day, if you’re patient enough but nearing the end of your patience it will appear.

The protagonist’s feelings toward Sisa are ambivalent. There is envy mixed with admiration mixed with repulsion. This ambivalence provides the tension of the story.

In the beginning of the narrative, Sisa is combing her long hair with regular strokes which lull the narrator to a near-hypnotic state.

I felt very lonely, like I wanted to go home somewhere but didn’t know where. I swam in the feeling for a while, staring at the blue flowers on her brown dress…

Sisa’s skin glistens “from her own natural oils and the coconut essence” and the narrator wonders vaguely “if other parts of her body were just as oily.” She also imagines that in a day or two, Sisa will “probably smell rancid and overripe.”

The “repressed material” here has to do with sexuality. But because the narrator is so young, she is barely aware of what is going on. This awakening happens in a “bamboo house” by the sea, drenched alternately by sunlight or moonlight. Over and under its sawali walls, lizards “wove their loveliness and housekeeping without a thought for human beings.”

Sisa has told the narrator of a bird that “comes from a long way,” so far away that “even as it flies to you its limbs grow and its feathers lengthen ageing in its flight.”

She said that if I sat beside the window facing the sea without moving, for hours on end, a bird would come and sit on my head and nest there.

Is it simply a story designed to make a child keep still, or does Sisa actually believe in the big bird, or is she trying to teach the protagonist something, and doing it through metaphoric language?

The bird is a powerful figure, and associated with maleness in the narrator’s mind. The imagery used to describe it is undeniably sensuous, deliberately reminiscent of Leda and her swan.

The girl imagines the shadow of the bird’s wide wing falling over her as she floats on her back in the sea, “beckoning me out of the water and on the house so that I might sit there and wait its arrival.” In her sleep, she feels “the clasp of its claws” on her hip, “its weight pressing me closer to the mat, its tail fanning my underside.” Sometimes it seems somewhat sinister… “when the sea was still and the moon was up I thought it came in the guise of a bat gliding strongly among the palms.” At others, it is mysterious, “invisible like a wind,” entering “dead-blind into the bamboo house slapping against the sawali.” She is both afraid of it, and sorry for it,

…Silently perched on the nipa roof… resting its travel-worn head under its wings, hiding its eyes front the moonlight, its fine head feathers trembling in the wind.

She feels certain it is beautiful-either white-grey like a dove, or bright blue like a kingfisher “brilliant and elusive, the lone flash of color in the black of night,” or sliver and red. But always, half blind, and circling

…Endlessly above the house and higher searching for me, uttering a forlorn cry, and never finding me.

Why “half blind” or “blind?” Perhaps this is a reference to the undiscriminating force of sexuality. The yearning for the bird, which invades her dreams and reduces her to tears is a yearning for love, a need to be possessed, which she only half comprehends. It is a waiting which becomes more intense at night.

The mysteries if the dark made him more changeable and fascinating, the span of wings wider, the song of deeper call. His reality extended from the sounds and shadows if the hours into the immeasurable ravines of sleep.

In her fantasies, the bird sometimes “finds” her, and “under all the wet feathers I would feel its hot skin, its heartbeat fast and strong under my hand.”

The reader is prepared for the story’s denouement, first by focusing on the weather. It is a “clammy morning, the air heavy with damp from the night’s rain.” The sun “had risen too early and too hot.” Everyone is edgy or distracted or morose, the Chinaman who is the object of the protagonist’s errand in town is not in. riding back with him in his truck, she closes her eyes against the dust and sees “red and orange lights, spots of violet and light green and blue dancing in different sizes, advancing then rearranging and blending inside my eyes.”

Back home again, the narrator finds Sisa is not at her usual post by the door to greet her. She eats a solitary lunch, then heads for the room she shares with the maid. It is locked. When she calls to Sisa, Sisa replies in an “urgent and threatening” voice, telling her to go away. “I’m making a nest,” Sisa says. The narrator becomes wildly excited, imagining herself “likewise making a nest with straw and palm fronds. Mother’s shawl, soft and downy things. Anything. Anything.” But Sisa will not let her in, despite her shrieks of “I want to see…Let me in.” She can hear shuffling sounds, the bamboo slats of the floor moving.

The narrator finally breaks into the room, using a bolo to dislodge the strip of wood barring the door, to confront a completely naked Sisa, sitting serenely amid a pile of clothes and pillows,

…Just sitting there in the middle of her nest, staring at me with dark round eyes with something like amusement and smugness in them, just as if she expected me to envy her.

And though she sees nothing else in the dark, enclosed room, the narrator feels the presence of “something that has long been expected and had finally arrived,” eyeing her curiously, questioning her “impertinent presence.” She backs out slowly, disturbed by the
unameable presence-unameable because not yet understood-and-by Sisa’s “strange sharp eyes.” And she runs down the stairs to call her mother.

Is she intending to tell on Sisa? To ask her to explain Sisa’s behavior? Or is she merely seeking the safety she has lost? There is nothing in the story to suggest that she will find it. Her relationship with her mother has been depicted as rather pallid and unsubstantial when contrasted with her relationship with Sisa. More likely, her initiation into womanhood will continue.

All of this is narrated with great subtlety. And if not for the detail of Sisa’s nakedness in the last scene, it would be quite possible to read the story-as it must have been read by an older generation of teachers of Philippine literature in English-without acknowledging its erotic content. But without it, what, then, would one make of the story?

Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, PhD
A Gentle Subversion: Essays on Philippine Fiction, 1998