Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [11]
Some cats use their voices rarely and some never stop yammering except in sleep; are we to suppose that the silent ones aren’t communicating and the noisy ones are? Not necessarily. I have here a young Siamese female who, since she was neutered, says almost nothing. When she speaks, it’s a syllable somewhere between “mah” and “wan,” and it means “want.” She has a high opinion of my intelligence, and never goes to the cupboard for food or the door for out; she comes to me and says “want,” and I’m supposed to understand. The Persian Barney speaks even less frequently, his single “meh” being forced up from his very toes with obvious difficulty, and depending on location it means either that breakfast is late or he wants the tap in the basin turned on.
Neither cat is unintelligent or uncommunicative.
The new little black cat never opens her mouth to say anything, but speaks in her throat, to herself, trotting up and down stairs and in and out of closets chirping and murmuring and exclaiming in a kind of watered-silk pattern of sound that can make the possessor of mere English feel as mute and flightless as a turnip. This is interior monologue, though, intended to communicate with no one but herself; for speech she has a long, wavery, pointed tail of such expressive grace that it must be a perfect poem for those with the sense to understand its voice.
Then there’s Corvo, a stout elderly Siamese, who speaks in deep chest tones, as if from a bellows, in an infinite variety of yet-to-be-invented vowels, comparable maybe to an unmilked cow or a French horn with a sore throat. It sounds consistently gloomy, and is capable of roaring amplification, but it’s used mostly as a greeting, or to suggest the making of a lap, or to inquire after missing members of the family.
Sidney, probably the least intelligent, has the largest vocabulary. He believes that a cat can penetrate a windowpane with a bird on the other side of it by standing on his hind legs and swimming violently on the glass with his front paws, and he has believed this for seventeen years in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but he has a marvelous range of vocal expression. Some of it means something. A booming spectral moan means he doesn’t like riding in cars, and a cantankerous “a-yow” means he’s about to use the litter pan. A sharp nasal “yan” means it’s twenty after three in the morning and time to get up; this is followed by ducklike food cries of “skwap skwap” as he hustles down the stairs urging us to follow and serve breakfast. (The fact that he keeps on hoping, though he never has been fed at that hour and often gets things thrown at him, speaks poorly for his learning ability, and if he’d had to step twelve times on electric pressure plates to get his food he would have starved.) However, most of what Sidney says is apparently meaningless, a kind of feline skat or do-wop with dozens of different grunts, squeaks, cries, and murmurs that seem to be just Sidney talking to hear the sound of his own voice, as a human might sing in the shower. Sometimes he goes down to the basement and sings to enjoy the hollow concrete acoustics.
There is no cat “language.” Painful as it is for us to admit, they don’t need one.
We depend quite woefully on speech to understand each other even slightly. When the leaders of great nations get together to sort out the problems of the world, they have no way of knowing what’s in each other’s minds without