The Bestiary (2 page)

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.

M
Y 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.

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.

W
HEN 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.