Bestiary Read online

  When we went for walks in the park, she talked about the animals she saw embodied in other people. The animals those people had been in previous lives. She believed they displayed the vestiges of these lives—the man with bovine eyes, the woman with a rodent’s teeth, the sheepish, catty, and pig-headed among us. There is the cliché about people who resemble their dogs; or is it the other way around? Does it become impossible to say after such resemblances have been passed back and forth long enough? In crowds my grandmother picked out wolves and vultures, rats and tigers. “Piccioni,” she murmured, as we left the park, pointing to a stone bench where, in gray coats, with darting beady eyes, pigeonlike old men were tossing bird seed to pigeons. Never much of a churchgoer, my grandmother was a pagan at heart. Maybe literally so.

  Her parents were Sicilian, from a mountain town southwest of Messina. She was born there, and before they emigrated to America, her father bought and sold mules. Her grandfather was a woodsman. He chopped down trees, hewed them, and sold the wood in nearby villages. He married a woman he met deep in the forest, who told him she was the runaway daughter of a priest. Some villagers said she was not Christian at all, but a dryada—a wood nymph—attached to a pagan coven.

  Her name was Silvana. She had red hair and black eyes. Though she wasn’t able to read or write Italian, much less Greek, she could recite from memory pre–Homeric hymns celebrating Artemis and Hera. They flowed from her like music. No one could explain where she had learned ancient Greek, last spoken in eastern Sicily in the third century B.C. when it was an Athenian colony. My grandmother remembered her father telling her how as a boy he had scoured mountain caves for mushrooms with his mother. She would add them to a stew of field onions, yams, and blue turnips, cooked over a fire in a black pot.

  My great-great-grandmother Silvana had even stronger connections to the animal world, living as she did in the wild. However embellished or distorted they might have become over several generations, the stories about her always boiled down to the same elements: small animals followed her without fear; birds alighted on her shoulders; wild beasts refrained from harming her; and somehow she knew how to communicate with all these creatures in their own languages.

  I didn’t know about the rest of it—I never saw a sparrow perch on my grandmother—but I was sure this last power of communication had been passed down from her own grandmother. I knew, too, that it hadn’t continued on to me. Perhaps one of my American or Sicilian cousins was the recipient. That I was attuned to the spirits around me was enough. I took it as an extension of my grandmother’s powers. A gift.

  On countless nights after tucking me in, my grandmother retired to her bed and told me animal stories, punctuated by sound effects, out of the darkness. I heard about the one-wingèd stork that flew over the Alps and laid an egg from which an entire city was born; and the serpent that ate the moon and spat out a skyful of stars; and the black bear that fell asleep on a mountaintop and awoke a hundred years later in the same spot, now a tiny island in the sea, and turned himself into a whale. All of this was accompanied by sound effects—growls, beating wings, birdcalls—so authentic that I always imagined my grandmother as the animal in the story. Often a fantastic animal, like the ones found in her stories; an animal, that is, no longer, or never before, or soon-to-be found in nature.

  Late one night, after she finished one of her stories, the stray headlight of a passing car shone through the window and I was stunned to see, not my grandmother, but a red fox, with a ring of white fur around its neck, stretched out on her bed.

  I cried out, and Re started barking. A moment later, the lamp came on and there was my grandmother, sitting up in bed. She was wearing a red nightdress, with a white shawl around her shoulders.

  “It’s all right, child,” she murmured, coming over and laying her palm against my cheek. “You were dreaming.”

  I shook my head.

  “Yes, you were dreaming,” she nodded.

  I turned onto my side and she rubbed my back and sang a lullaby.

  The next morning I found a white whisker on the floor. Re’s whiskers were black, and it was too long to have come from the cat that visited us. I saved the whisker, keeping it inside a silver music box that once belonged to my grandmother. When you raised the lid, and saw yourself in the mirrored interior, that same lullaby played.

  WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER grew infirm, my father hired a young Albanian woman to take care of me. Her name was Evgénia. She was thin and pale, with sharp features and straight black hair. Her blue eyes shone brightly in her pale face. She spoke softly, with a strong accent. A neat dresser, she favored plain dresses and cardigans and rubber sole shoes. Outdoors she always wore a hat.

  My grandmother told me Evgénia had lost her entire family when the Nazis overran Albania. Evgénia herself had escaped into Macedonia, then Turkey, and using what money she had, bribed her way onto a passenger ship bound for America. That was all my grandmother knew, for it wasn’t territory Evgénia liked to revisit. At first, my grandmother was wary of Evgénia, as she would have been of any outsider. But Evgénia won her over. She never shirked her duties, cut corners, or complained. She didn’t allow me to leave the house in clothes that were not clean and pressed. She never lost her head. And she was a good cook. In short, we were lucky to have her. Yet, though quietly good-humored, she remained a mysterious sort of character, and by her own peculiar logic, my grandmother found this comforting, reasoning that such a person would be self-involved, not inclined to meddle.

  It was true that Evgénia was a private person—averse to small talk, comfortable with silence—but she was not selfish, and I never knew her to be dishonest. More trusting of children than adults, she was, in fact, a very tender woman, without whose devotion my own childhood would have been far rockier.

  In time I learned more about her, but at first there were only these facts: she was unmarried, lived alone in Brooklyn, took three subways to get home, learned English at Berlitz, and had come to us through an agency, with excellent references.

  She didn’t touch alcohol or tobacco, but she drank many cups of black tea during the day and for lunch always ate a salted cucumber and a hard-boiled egg.

  When I asked why she never varied her lunch, she replied, “Eggs give you energy, cucumber refreshes the spirit.”

  That was one of the few times she referred to the spirit, my grandmother’s favorite topic.

  Evgénia came into my life when I was eight years old. The previous year we had moved into a bigger apartment. Again it was dark, with most of the windows facing north, but I had my own room finally. My grandmother occupied the room beside it, through a door which I liked to have open when I slept.

  Every Sunday Evgénia helped my grandmother into her best black dress and took her downstairs to a gray sedan idling at the curb. From the window I watched a stocky man in a brown suit help her into the front seat. He had a pencil moustache and thinning, slicked-down hair combed across his large head. This was Robert, my mother’s older brother. He would drive my grandmother to her sister Frances’s house for dinner with the rest of the family, including her many other grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.

  Once I heard my grandmother remark to Evgénia that she wanted to take me along. “But Robert, my son, won’t allow it. One day he’s gonna have to,” she added defiantly.

  That day never came.

  I was not to meet Robert’s children, his brother’s children, my great-aunt, nobody. He never relented. I had enough of my father’s pride and anger to tell my grandmother the feeling was mutual.

  “I don’t want to meet any of them,” I said bitterly, “especially him. If they hated my mother, and now me, I want no part of them.”

  My grandmother looked pained, furrowing her brow. Usually she confined expressions of feeling to her eyes—just a glance or a flicker to clue you in. She didn’t defend my uncle, or herself, didn’t offer excuses, but neither did she give me the satisfaction of agreeing outright. Warmer hearted than anyone
else in her family, she nevertheless would not speak against them—especially under my father’s roof.

  Yet, to the end, she defied them by remaining with my father and me when she could have been living with her sister or one of her sons. Her other grandchildren saw her for a few hours a week, while she devoted most of her time to me.

  I could console myself with this knowledge, but, in truth, the ongoing rebuff from my mother’s family hurt badly. As I grew older, and understood better how cowardly, how insane, it was to punish a child for choices his mother made before he was born, I knew my instincts had been correct and I was better off having no contact with these people.

  EVGÉNIA ARRIVED at dawn and left at dusk, except on Sundays. After I dressed, we gave Re his morning walk, down Webster Avenue where the shops were opening, the grocer stacking pyramids of fruit, the old man at the Chinese laundry ironing in the window. Then she heated me milk with honey stirred in, and toasted rolls already buttered, and joined me at the table with her first cup of tea, to which she added a spoonful of blackberry jam. At eight o’clock she sent me off to school with two quarters for a hot lunch at the cafeteria.

  Evgénia and I got along well, and I came to trust her implicitly. When she thought I was out of line, she called me “Effendi Xeno,” raising her voice a notch. Outside the house, away from my grandmother and father, she relaxed out of her role.

  During our walks, she liked to talk about the birds we spotted: the thrushes, bluejays, doves, and cardinals that lived nearby, in the New York Botanical Garden. She could identify every type of cloud, from cumulonimbus to altocumulus. “And highest of all,” she said, “the cirrostratus you can only see from the mountains. In my country, people say angels make their wings from those clouds.”

  “Do you believe in angels, Evgénia?”

  She hesitated. “No. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

  Sometimes, sitting on a bench outside the candy store, sipping Cokes, we played the game of guessing people’s occupations, the nature of their errands, and their destinations. It was a game I liked because, without conclusive answers, our conjectures took on lives of their own, entertaining us long after the person had disappeared. Evgénia was good at it. From the way she picked out and assembled details, I sensed she had seen more of life, across the social spectrum, than she let on. Maybe more, at thirty-two, than she had wanted to see.

  At dinner she read me human interest stories from the Daily News: a French balloonist had sailed over the North Sea; a doctor in Antarctica had removed his own appendix. “You’ll like this one, Xeno,” she said one night: “‘When the floodwaters reached Memphis, a dog and two pigs were observed sailing down Davis Avenue in a small boat.’”

  At first the new apartment was as stark as the first, but one day, offhandedly, my grandmother suggested Evgénia try sprucing it up.

  “Some plants, you know. Get fabric, too, and I’ll sew new curtains.”

  “Any particular colors?” Evgénia said.

  “You pick.”

  Evgénia fixed up the place far more than my grandmother had expected, trying to make it cheerful for me. She hung white embroidered curtains in the kitchen. In my room she laid a red comforter on the bed and replaced the drab muslin curtains with bright green ones imprinted with jungle animals. She bought a Persian rug for the living room and placed jade plants and potted palms around the house and a spider plant in the front window. She put white lampshades from Woolworth’s on the old ceramic lamps that flanked the sofa. Across from it she set a fishbowl with fantails, their ribbony fins a turquoise swirl. In the front hall she hung framed photographs of alpine vistas: the Himalayas, the Andes, and her native mountains, the Albanian Alps.

  Isolated and unsociable long before she came to live with us, my grandmother seemed oblivious to such amenities; but, even for her, my father’s neglect of his (and my) surroundings had had its limits. He never treated any house I shared with him like a home. He came and went as he saw fit, carrying his essentials in a seaman’s trunk. Over time, the ships he sailed on were fueled by oil, not coal. He was elevated to boatswain, supervising the engine room. It was still hard physical work, but now he was also responsible for a team of five other men. He told me some of the places he visited, but without a trace of romance or adventure, without mentioning the sights he must have taken in—the Southern Cross shimmering on the horizon, mountainous icebergs, volcanic islands enshrouded in fog—and the marine creatures, from flying fish to narwhales, he encountered. I got all of this from books, which I read in hopes of getting closer to him. When this didn’t happen, I grew even more resentful, as always happened when I tried too hard with him. That terse postcard from Tangier was my father at his most outgoing. He believed displays of enthusiasm, spontaneous emotion, jarred your inner compass and diluted your focus. And what was it he was so focused on?

  For many years we had no television. My grandmother wouldn’t allow it. Her reasoning was simple: “They want to control your dreams.” It was not a political conspiracy she feared, but the fact that such an onslaught of visual information, ingested so rapidly, must corrupt the imagination, crowding out the naturally acquired imagery of life. For her this was a visceral, not a philosophic, issue. When I persuaded Evgénia to help me buy a small black-and-white portable late in my grandmother’s life, we kept it in a closet. I watched it surreptitiously in the kitchen. The picture was cramped, the sound tinny. I favored the old cartoons—old even in the 1950s—in which the protagonists were animals. They weren’t so much fables, like Aesop’s—in which a turtle outfoxes a hare or a fox is tricked by a stork—as conventional human comedies in which animals stood in for people. A pig in coveralls who ran a general store was beset by troubles: a hectoring wife and lazy son (also pigs), a sneaky clerk (ferret), cranky customers (hippos), an unscrupulous competitor (wolf ), and pesky mice (in cameo roles as real mice) who foiled cat burglars. These cartoons were testaments to my grandmother’s notions about the animal natures of people, with animals functioning directly as those archetypes. I wanted to share the cartoons with her, and one day I got up the courage to do so. I thought as a younger woman she might have seen them at the movies, where they often preceded the main feature. She hadn’t, and after watching a couple, she got hooked, and the television was awarded a permanent place in the living room. Now, in the evenings, I was able to watch the The Lone Ranger and Tarzan and some Yankee games.

  My school was a boxy brick building on a busy street. I was dazed at first by the commotion of a large public school. Socially it was a relief to be one of many, to lose myself in the stream of bodies in the hallways. The classes were full, and during recess about two hundred children crowded the playground. I was good at sports, but indifferent to my studies. I grew bored easily. As an only child in an insular household, I had grown accustomed to devising my own forms of entertainment. Rote lessons and the memorization of facts left me cold.

  I frequently got into trouble: listening to a transistor radio through an earphone, reading comic books, chewing gum. In truth, I wanted to be caught out because the punishment usually got me out of the classroom, even if I did have to stand at attention in the hallway. My rebellion took other forms. I could write with either hand, and when my teachers insisted I restrict myself to one hand or the other, I did it all the more. A couple of times I got myself sent home early, claiming to be sick, but Evgénia saw through my lies and scolded me. After that, if I got restless, I cut school altogether.

  In the cafeteria we sat at long Formica tables beneath fluorescent lights. The menu was the same each week: chicken à la king, macaroni and cheese, meat loaf, spaghetti, fish sticks, and Jell-O embedded with fruit cocktail for dessert.

  In the playground I hung out with a group of boys who were also troublemakers. My nickname was X, of course, which I shared with a big ruddy Irish kid named Xavier, a known bully who was a grade ahead of me. For the audacity of allowing myself to be called X, he challenged me to a fight. He was a head tall
er than me, but other boys had heard him taunt me, and I wasn’t about to duck out. He was strong, but clumsy. He didn’t throw punches, or even kick. Instead he came right at you and applied a crushing headlock until you begged for mercy. He demanded I renounce the nickname X. “Tell ’em never to call you that,” he growled. I refused (though I didn’t even like being called X), and he squeezed so hard that my face turned blue. The other boys grew alarmed, shouting at me to give in, but I wouldn’t. My eardrums were pounding, and my nose started to bleed, and when he released me finally, I collapsed. For days I plotted my revenge. It came a week later when he waylaid me again, eager to work me over. My father once told me that in a fight, even with someone bigger than you, the trick is to break his nose: the shock will stop him cold. Xavier pushed me against a wall and closed in, a twisted smile on his face. I let him think I was scared. Then, as he leaned down to hook my head under his arm, I planted my feet and punched him in the nose as hard as I could. “Fuck you!” he sputtered, and I hit him again. This time the cartilage crunched. Blood spurted. And he dropped to his knees, wailing. I pushed him to the ground and pinned his chest with my knee. “Don’t ever come near me again,” I shouted into his face. And he never did. Nor did anyone else pick a fight with me.

  It was at school that the loss, and ongoing absence, of my mother felt most acute. Because of my erratic performance and bad behavior, my various teachers had asked to see my parents. I always managed to deflect them when I said my mother was dead, my father was at sea, and my grandmother was sick. I took a perverse satisfaction in watching their faces when I recited this litany, but it didn’t compensate for the hollowness I felt. It was especially painful when I began thinking of my teachers in relation to my mother. They were all women, about the age she would have been. Knowing my mother’s face from a handful of photographs, I looked for resemblances. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Borodin, was most similar, with wavy brown hair and dark brown eyes. I wished I could see her, just once, outside of school.