Bestiary Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I have handled other rarities...

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Books by Nicholas Christopher

  Copyright

  for my wife, Constance,

  for her dedication to this book, from beginning to end

  ALEXANDER THE GREAT: Which is the most cunning of animals?

  INDIAN PHILOSOPHER: The animal which man has not yet discovered.

  —Plutarch, Parallel Lives

  …I have handled other rarities, plum-sized pearls from Ceylon chimes stirred to music by light rose windows tinted by a blind glazier, but none so wondrous as the illuminated book filled with all manner of unnatural fantastical beasts refused entry to the Ark by Noah when he set sail in the Great Flood. I acquired this book from an Antiquary’s widow on the Island of Rhodes presented it to the Doge of Venice, to whom I was a royal Emissary in the year of our Lord 1347. Now, as we know, the first bestiary, called the Book of Life, was a natural history of all the beasts delivered unto the Earth at the Creation. Only God Himself saw the original, but its offshoots were transcribed scattered in monasteries throughout Christendom. Over many centuries, divers monks and scholiasts attempted to consolidate these bestiaries, but one fugitive volume eluded them came to be called the Caravan Bestiary after an Alexandrian Greek smuggled it by Caravan across the Libyan Desert. Compiled by many hands, this book of lost beasts, that were left to their fate in the Flood, was composed in Aramaic, appended in countless tongues—Armenian, Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Latin, Provençal our own French. Many times the book has surfaced been lost, in pursuit of it, men have suffered torture, imprisonment, death at the stake. The book itself avoided the Inquisition’s fires. But by the year 1255 no man alive had seen it, or could claim to know of men deceased who had, so it was said to have disappeared forever….

  —Duc D’Épernay

  Paris, 1368

  1

  THE FIRST BEAST I laid eyes on was my father.

  At all hours his roars reverberated, breaking into my sleep, rattling the windows. When he entered my doorway, he filled it. That was my earliest impression: he was bigger than the door. And he came from far away, smelling of the sea, snow fringing his thick coat and woolen cap.

  We lived in four dark rooms. I shared a room with an old woman, my mother’s mother. My father slept in the room across the hall, tossing on the rusty box springs, snoring loudly. He was a restless sleeper, getting up many times in the night, his footfall heavy on the creaking boards. Then there was the kitchen, a low-ceilinged room with a black stove and a round table where my grandmother fed me.

  When shadows moved through those rooms, brushing my skin like mist, I could hear their subtlest workings. Sound was my primary sense. The world seemed to be coming to me through my ears. Water trickling through wall pipes, steam knocking in the radiator, a mouse scratching, a fly buzzing. In sleep my grandmother’s breathing was punctuated by a whistle from the gap in her teeth. Everything else out of her mouth was a whisper. She whispered to me continuously, as she must once have whispered to my mother.

  I believe my grandmother was telling me things, and when I came to understand words, they were already embedded in my consciousness. Dates, names, places that could not have arrived there by any other route. My grandmother’s history, my mother’s—the story of their lives, which I had just entered, a character in my own right.

  My mother died in childbirth.

  That was when my father began to roar. In my first year, this was how I knew him. Then one day he fell silent, as if he had dived into a deep pool inside himself from which, in my presence at least, he never truly emerged.

  THERE WAS A DOG AND A CAT. The first nonhuman beasts I would know. The dog was my grandmother’s. He was a German shepherd, black with a tan muzzle, named Re. He slept at the entrance to my room, like a sentry.

  The cat had no name. She was orange, with white stripes and golden eyes. When she came to the windowsill from the fire escape, my grandmother fed her kitchen scraps. Sometimes the cat curled up beside me and slept. I remember her warmth, her small breath on my arm, the ticking of her tail against my ribs.

  At night my grandmother held and rocked me, stroking my head or singing a lullaby. Her own bed felt far away in the darkness, like a ship across a deep harbor. Mostly I was alone, the window to my left, the door before me, the ceiling overhead lined with plaster cracks—a map of some nonexistent place I studied.

  A part of us never leaves the first room we occupy. Everything I was to hear, see, or feel first took shape in that room. It was a world—with landmarks, climate, a population—splintered infinitesimally off the bigger world. The air was dark blue. It moved. Was ruled by currents. Ripples. Fevers of motions.

  I felt the spirits of animals. In the instants of entering or leaving sleep I caught glimpses of them: an upturned snout, a lizard eye, a glinting talon, the flash of a wing. Hooves kicked up sparks by my cheek. Fur bristled. Teeth clicked. I heard pants. Howls. Plaintive cries.

  And at dawn they were gone.

  THE FIRST IMAGINARY ANIMAL I ever saw leapt out at me from my father’s back. He was shirtless, shaving in a cloud of steam with the bathroom door open, when I came up behind him. Inked in blues and reds—with flashes of yellow—the tattoo looked alive, undulating with every movement of my father’s muscles, from his shoulders to his waist.

  It was a sea serpent. A long scaly body with a horse’s head. Flaming mane, fiery tail fin, bared fangs, glowing eyes. A terrifying hybrid. It was surfacing through cresting waves, beneath clouds torn by lightning, with foam streaming off its back.

  I cried out, and my father wheeled around, shaving cream on his chin and his razor frozen in midair. Kneeling down, he patted my cheek and reassured me that there was nothing to fear. I didn’t agree. To this day, it is the most fearsome tattoo I’ve ever seen.

  “It scares away evil spirits when I’m at sea,” he said.

  To me, it was an evil spirit.

  My father was the man who shoveled coal into the furnace on a freighter. His name was Theodore. His hands were huge, his arms and shoulders knotted like wood. His back so solid it had once bent a knife blade when he was jumped in an alley. He had black eyes, curly black hair, and a thick, close-cropped beard. His eyebrows met above his hooked nose. He wore a heavy medallion on a chain around his neck. When I first saw images of pirates in a picture book, I thought this was what he must be.

  Usually he was away for two months at a time. When he came home, even after he had bathed every day for a week, the coal dust still adhered to his hair, his skin, his breath. He would be talking and a black wisp would trail the end of a sentence.

  Ports he visited in one year alone: Hamburg, Marseilles, Singapore, Murmansk, Caracas, Montevideo, Sydney. He sailed through the Panama and Suez canals, around Cape Horn and through the Strait of Magellan. He followed the equator across the Indian Ocean from the Seychelles to the Maldives.

  Sometimes he sent a postcard from a foreign port. Only one of these has survived, yellowed and crumpled: a tinted photograph of the open-air fish market in the harbor at Tangier. Rows of sardines gleaming silver on rickety carts. The sun casting webbed shadows through the nets hung to dry. A man in a kaftan beating the ink from squid on the seawall. As a boy, I could almost smell the harbor. From the stamp on the other side a man in a red fez gazed out severely. My father’s laborious print, in watery ink, turned pale brown over the years. He w
as a man of few words, written or otherwise.

  Arrived Friday, leave Tuesday for Alexandria. Raining.

  —Theodore Atlas

  His name signed in full. The card addressed to “Atlas,” and then our street address.

  His parents, married as teenagers, had emigrated from Crete. Their village was perched in the mountains of the interior, amid jagged cliffs, deep ravines, and pine forests. Its inhabitants were like the man Odysseus was told to watch for when he traveled to remote lands carrying an oar—a man who, never having set eyes on the sea, would ask him if the oar was a winnowing fan. These Cretans were farmers and goatherds who never ventured more than ten miles from the houses in which they had been born and would die. My grandparents were an exception.

  They settled in the Bronx and died before my father turned sixteen, his mother of diphtheria, his father in an accident on the docks. Like me, my father was an only child, and he had no other relatives in America. Having to support himself suddenly, he dropped out of school. Already over six feet, he could pass for eighteen. He might have become a stevedore, like his father, but instead went to sea, signing on to a freighter flying the Colombian flag, bound for Lisbon.

  He had only seen the Atlantic from Jones Beach and Far Rockaway. Just as his ancestors had lived within a tight radius of their village, he had rarely left the South Bronx and only once—a week in the Catskills—been out of New York City. The open sea stunned him. His father had told him that only the sky above the mountains in Crete was bluer, so close to the mountaintops you could reach it by scaling the tallest tree. My father claimed to have done just that on his first visit to his parents’ village, several years after I was born—the most expansive statement I ever heard him make.

  Still, however, nothing he ever said or did in those days compared in scope to his tattoo. I never really got used to it. And I never forgot that it was there, so at odds with the drab inexpensive clothing that covered it.

  When I asked my father about it one day, he told me he had been tattooed in Osaka, Japan. He said he was twenty-five years old at the time. Which meant my mother had lived with it. I wondered what she thought when she saw it for the first time—if it frightened her, too—and how she felt sleeping beside it at night. Even among Japanese sailors this particular tattoo was uncommon. The image was so ferocious that many regarded it as a challenge to the sea gods, which could as easily provoke as appease them.

  I encountered the tattoo twice more in my life. The first time was on the docks in Tokyo, where I was boarding a ferry. Three young Japanese sailors, shirtless in the afternoon sun, were awaiting a dinghy that would return them to their ship. One of them turned into the wind to light a cigarette, and there was the sea serpent on his back, vividly colored. I stopped and stared, moving on only when the sailors stared back.

  The second time, some months later, I was in the jungle, certain that I was about to die. The tattoo was on the back of a man who was framed by burning palms, holding a machete. He had a red bandanna tied around his head. For a few seconds, the tattoo hovered before me, the man’s sweat running down his back like rain onto the rearing serpent. I thought that tattoo would be the last thing I saw in this life. Then an explosion shook the earth. The man was engulfed in fire. The flames danced on his back as if it were parchment, crumpling the skin, devouring the serpent, before the man was swept up into the air.

  MY NAME IS XENO. The name my mother had chosen for me. She was sure I would be a boy. She was Italian, exposed to Latin in the Catholic Church, and I like to think she derived my name from xenium, a Latin word for “gift.” But when I asked my father about it, he claimed she had gotten the name from a faded billboard across from their apartment on Tremont Avenue, advertising “Xeno’s Eye Drops,” a product already long gone in 1950. “She liked the sound of it,” he shrugged. “A fancy name.” He made it clear he hadn’t approved. And, in a dismissive tone, added, “In my people’s language, xenos means ‘stranger.’”

  In my mother’s family, the second generation descended from immigrants, the men had names like Steven and Edward—Anglicized from “Stefano” and “Edoardo” on their birth certificates. A dreamy, romantic sort, my mother would not have surprised them by naming me “Marcello” or “Rosanno,” but no one could understand “Xeno,” a name that conjured images of praetors and centurions in ancient Rome. Obviously my father had never explained (or been given the opportunity to explain) the old billboard. And what could he have said, when, in fact, it made little sense to him. My mother was uncharacteristically adamant about the name, and my father adhered to her wishes, duly recording “Xeno” on my birth certificate. Xeno Atlas.

  I grew accustomed to my father’s absences. It was all I knew. Over the years, he signed on to longer and longer voyages. But I also knew it would have been difficult to have him around all the time. His temper was volatile, his moods quicksilver. Which is not to say I didn’t get lonely. Loneliness was at the center of my childhood; from it proceeded all I was to become.

  When he met my mother, Marina, in the electric glare and clatter of a street fair, my father was thirty-two and she was nineteen. Just out of high school, she was working in a record store. He courted her for eight months, they eloped, and ten months later I was born and she was gone. He was a man who shared few feelings, but I knew he had been grief-stricken. Even as a small child, I sensed my mother’s death was the worst thing that ever happened to him—altering him more profoundly than the loss of his parents. For over fifteen years—half his life—he had been on his own, living closemouthed and tightfisted, on ships and in furnished rooms. Then, out of nowhere, he had fallen in love, and after a spell of brief, apparently intense happiness, had lost everything. He still had me, but I was less a product of his happiness than a reminder of his anguish. His take on the situation was anything but subtle: I had lived and she—the great love of his life—had died. And he resented it bitterly.

  My mother was one of three children of a widow named Rose. Rose Conti was a small woman with a tight bun of white hair, thin lips, and a long nose. She had a small mole beside her mouth which in her youth marked one end of her smile. Her ears were pointy, the lobes too small to accommodate earrings. My father always addressed her as “Mrs. Conti.” Among the aunts, uncles, and cousins on my mother’s side, there were plumbing contractors, electricians, a funeral parlor director, and the one prodigy, my uncle Robert, a certified public accountant who had graduated from night school. None of these relatives ever approved of, or accepted, my father. Whether their rejection of him catalyzed my parents’ elopement or whether the latter had incited this vast rebuff after the fact was a murky point. On this, as on so many matters, my father and my grandmother held opposing views. It was amazing after my birth that they were able to coexist under the same roof. For my benefit they maintained a remarkably effective truce. I never heard a cross word pass between them, despite the fact that their dislike was mutual and unyielding.

  Their typical conversation went like this:

  “I’ll be back in two months,” my father would say. “The bills are paid. There’s four hundred dollars in the bread box. Do you need anything else?”

  The tin bread box, a blonde girl with a basket of wheat painted on its slide-up door, was where my grandmother kept money, never bread. “How about that you tell O’Dowd the landlord to fix the faucets in the bathtub,” she would reply. “Sometimes they both run hot. Maybe that’s how they work in Ireland. But Xeno could get scalded. I told O’Dowd plenty of times, but maybe he’s going to listen to you.”

  “I’ll speak with him.”

  Throughout my childhood, I never met anyone else in my mother’s family, and they made it clear they didn’t want to meet me. After my mother eloped, all of them, including my grandmother, severed contact with her. Their list of grievances was long: she had been married in secret, outside the Catholic Church, by a justice of the peace; my father, poor, practically a greenhorn, was at the base of the social ladder; and, worst of
all, he wasn’t Italian. They were a hard-bitten, intolerant lot. “He could have been a Jew, or colored,” one of her nastier cousins remarked. “Otherwise, it couldn’t be worse.”

  The day before my mother’s funeral, my father informed the family of her death. His intermediary was an Armenian priest, the brother of a shipmate, who returned grim-faced from his mission. The sight of an Orthodox priest had merely fanned their anger. My grandmother was the only one of them to attend the funeral. She broke down, and the following day she turned up at our door carrying a suitcase filled with baby necessities. She looked hard at my father, and without a word began caring for me. She seemed to take this as a given, her unquestioned duty: her daughter was dead and there was a newborn infant. That trumped all previous history.

  At times my grandmother’s silence—toward my father, in particular—resounded in our small apartment as loudly as his voice. Unfortunately she died when I was eleven, so I never heard, through adult ears, her full and true take on him. All I had to go on was innuendo, tiny shifts of expression, intimations of what was not being said. Between my grandmother and my father there was not so much a gulf as a desert, stark and measureless. Even if each of them, with the best intentions, had set out to cross it, the chances are nil that they ever would have met. And they never did.

  MY GRANDMOTHER had strong connections to the animal spirits in the house. At times I thought I heard her talking to herself in Italian, only to realize she was conversing with creatures invisible to me. When I inquired, she muttered words like lupo, struzzo, drago, which I soon learned meant “wolf,” “ostrich,” and “dragon.” She believed these spirits were everywhere. Billions, trillions, of animals had come and gone on this earth, she liked to say, so how could it be otherwise. Their bodies returned to dust, but their energy must remain behind, finding new vessels, new outlets.