The Bestiary (27 page)

We had lunch at a restaurant with tables in front, beneath a broad shade tree. We ate salad and cheese. I ordered cold wine, she drank mint tea. I told her I had spent the morning at the church, scanning the registries of births, marriages, and deaths in the basement archives.

“I unearthed some interesting family items,” I said.

“So fast?”

I had only told her about my chosen field in a cursory way, and I said nothing about the
Caravan Bestiary.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries and archives.”

“You looked up Nana?”

“Uh-uh. Her grandmother, your namesake.”

“Oh.” She placed her fork down and sat back with a sigh. “She was another person not to be mentioned in our house. My father said she was a witch. An anti-Christian.”

“Yet you were named after her.”

“That was Nana’s doing. A minor scandal. I was the eldest, so out of respect, my parents asked Nana to offer up the name at my christening. They told her they had chosen her own mother’s name, Maria. You can’t get more Christian than that,” she grinned. “But when the priest turned to Nana, that’s not the name she gave. And once he pronounced ‘Silvana’ aloud, that was it.”

“That sounds like something Grandma would do.”

“So, what did the archives reveal?”

I took out a piece of paper and sipped my wine. “Silvana Parese was born on July 1, 1840. She married our great-great-grandfather, Gabriel Azzaro, on March 5, 1857. She was sixteen, he was twenty-five.”

“They were married in the Church?”

“Yes. Did you know she was the runaway daughter of a priest?
‘Una fuggitiva,’
Grandma used to call her. In the baptismal records, I found certificates for their two sons, Angelo and our great-grandfather, Emmanuel. And I found the death certificate for Gabriel Azzaro, dated December 27, 1872.”

“Silvana was a widow at thirty-two. When did she die?”

“I couldn’t find out. I checked every year from 1880 on, though I’m sure she lived to be well past forty. It was easier to check deaths, because they’re recorded in annual rolls as well as individual certificates.”

“How far forward did you go?”

“To 1955. Unless she lived to be over 115, what are the possibilities? That she died elsewhere, her records were lost—”

“Or her burial was not sanctioned because she was a witch.”

“Yet they allowed her to baptize her children. And her husband was given a church funeral.”

“Maybe they only learned about her after her husband died,” Silvana said.

“Maybe. But what did it mean, exactly, when they called her a witch? You know, she had some extraordinary gifts. She was a kind of idiot savant.”

“How so?”

“Aside from the fact animals flocked to her in the wild, she had a gift of tongues. One day she began spouting pre-Homeric hymns in Greek, despite the fact she was illiterate in Italian. And ancient Greek hasn’t been spoken around here in two thousand years.”

“Nana told you all this?”

I was surprised. “Who else?”

She was lost in thought. “What else did she tell you about Silvana?”

“That she could communicate with the animals in their own languages. A gift the people here prize enormously.”

“In other words, maybe she wasn’t such a pariah.”

I shrugged. “I just don’t think it was black and white.”

Whenever the conversation returned to my grandmother, I discovered how little Silvana really knew about her. At least, compared to me. I had assumed my grandmother told all her grandchildren about her relationship to the world of animals, which began with her connection to her own grandmother. That essential part of herself, which she shared with me, she had apparently withheld from others. I didn’t understand why she would have done so with Silvana, to whom she had bequeathed that name, and with whom she insisted that I—and, by extension, she herself—would be so simpatico. I suspected that it had to do, again, with Uncle Robert. He would have been repelled, even as a teenager, by this aspect of my grandmother’s life, and would have objected strenuously to her sharing any of it with his children. Her response, I saw now, had been to erect a wall between herself and him—and his family. For the first time, I grasped how much it had benefited her to live apart from them. Frigid as her relationship was with my father, under his roof she could say and do whatever she liked, spiritually or otherwise. Certainly he didn’t care, even when he was around. And so I became the only grandchild privy to her innermost beliefs. Silvana and the other cousins had nuclear families, but I had my grandmother, even more than I—or they—realized at the time.

It was nearly siesta. I called for the check. People passing on their errands had taken notice of us, many staring openly. After all, we were the only two foreigners around, we were relatives, and we had roots there, as they would have learned by now. The old man who had told me about Silvana appeared, lugging a roll of chicken wire.

“Ah, due cugini,”
he called out by way of greeting.

“Cugini germani,”
I replied, letting him know that we were not just cousins, but first cousins.

“Germani,”
he repeated solemnly, for to Sicilians this was an important distinction.

“You’re leaving tomorrow, then,” Silvana said as we stood up.

“Yes. I have to be back in Paris.”

My business in Paris could have waited. Maybe I would regret that I hadn’t prolonged my visit to Fornace. But while meeting Silvana had been cathartic, it had also been draining. Especially on top of my father’s death. And it was far more unsettling at this second meeting that, with the hat covering her red hair, I really felt as if I could have been looking at my mother.

“How long will you stay here?” I asked.

She thought about it, her eyes wandering, then returning to mine. “Maybe a long time.”

I offered to walk her home, and she suggested a shortcut through the woods, to avoid the heat of the open road.

I was amazed to be entering the woods Silvana the dryad had roamed, which my grandmother had brought to life in her bedtime stories—and to be doing so with another Silvana. It felt like a place previously accessible to me only in my dreams. My grandmother had actual memories of these woods, but from so early in her life they must have seemed like dreams. As a boy, I had pictured the woods to be like one of the illustrations in my book of fairy tales: tangled vines and gnarled roots which at any moment could turn into serpents; fleshlike mushrooms; flowers glowing like suns; a waterfall that emptied into a pool of moonlight. And, most importantly, the animals, each more fantastic than the next, visible everywhere: chimeras and hippogriffs, man-sized ants, one-wingèd birds and two-headed owls. Caves of bats with glittering eyes. Dragonflies trailing fire. Tigers romping with manticores, armadillos with basilisks.

Of course, the forest before me was nothing like that. At first it looked like any other forest, but with truly ancient trees: towering oaks with broad trunks and interlacing branches. Their leaves were dark, their acorns plum-sized. The underbrush was thin at the forest’s rim, and the ferns green, despite the drought. There were boulders lined with moss, and hollow tree trunks orange with toadstools. As always happened when I walked into a forest, I felt that the world of men, of everyone and everything I knew, was falling away from me. Usually I was alone. This time I’m glad I wasn’t.

Silvana was a few feet ahead of me. She was sure-footed on the rough ground, as if she were accustomed to it. We didn’t exchange a word. The silence was complete, all the way to the treetops, which were so high and dense the sky was no longer visible. There was no telling if it was blue, or cloudy, or if a storm was blowing in, for the weather could change rapidly in those mountains. And so, ten minutes into our detour, we were surprised by a downpour—doubly unexpected because it hadn’t rained in so long. Thunderclaps were followed by sheets of rain. And a whiff of sulfur, as if lightning had struck nearby.

Silvana leaned against a tree and tilted her head back. She removed her hat, which, like her dress, was already drenched. Her long hair spilled down her shoulders. I took off my jacket and draped it around her. I thought it would be dangerous for her to get chilled. She didn’t seem to share my concern. Drawing that burnt air into her lungs, letting the water run down her cheeks, she stared around her and began laughing.

The forest was changing before our eyes—as if the rain could alter the very chemistry of the place, setting in motion, and revealing previously hidden elements. Colors deepened. Sounds emerged, playing off each other: birds fleeing, bees swarming low for shelter, the wind quickening in the heavy leaves. The rain itself seemed equally composed of water and light. When it struck the ground, silver dust rose and brushed my skin, like the mist containing the spirits of animals when I was a boy. My body felt weightless, my head was buzzing, and I saw animals begin to appear—just flashes at first: tantalizing glimpses of a muzzle, a tail, a bared fang, a luminous wing. In and out of the mist they slipped. Bits of a tapestry that existed whole in another dimension, visible only to other spirits. I hadn’t seen anything like it since my grandmother died. I turned to Silvana, to determine if she saw it, too.

“Silvana,” I whispered.

But her eyes were closed now.

I heard faint howls in the distance. Then again, a little closer.

“Silvana!”

A snout, a hoof, a patch of black fur blurred past me in the mist.

Silvana was so still now she could have been asleep. Her head resting against the tree. Water streaming from her hair. Her white hat dripping in her hand. The rain seemed to have washed all strains of illness from her face, so she looked young, fully at ease for the first time since I’d met her.

Those howls were louder now, over the farthest ridge of trees.

Then something large stirred in the brush ahead. I approached the spot cautiously, twice glancing over my shoulder at Silvana, who hadn’t budged. I was wet to the skin. My pants were clinging. My shoes sank into mud. The rain smelled like iron, filling my eyes to overflowing.

In the brush where I had seen movement there were paw prints in the mud, narrow and not too deep. They led away from me, winding deeper into the forest.

The howling trailed off.

I followed the tracks. Again I saw something move, behind some trees. And, again, when I reached the spot, there was no sign of an animal, just those paw prints continuing on.

The rain was drumming harder than ever, tearing through the foliage, rattling branches, echoing off the oak trunks. If that howling resumed, I couldn’t have heard it.

I set out once more, then heard a cry behind me and spun around. I had left Silvana about a hundred feet back, but she was gone. Instead, there was an animal by the tree. A red fox, with a ring of white fur around its neck. Rising onto its hind legs, its muzzle twitching, it stared at me with its black eyes.

I stared back, the hair on my neck bristling and the fox’s long tail ticking off the seconds—eight, nine, ten—before it darted into the trees. I watched it race deep into the forest, a streak of flame burning through the mist, then looked down at the tracks I had been following and remembered that line from the Hereford bestiary:
The fox can leave tracks in one direction while traveling in another.

The fox disappeared. The rain poured down. The tracks were washed away. I found my jacket at the foot of that tree.

As for Silvana, I would never see her again.

6

I
N
P
ARIS
, I redoubled my efforts, searching for information about the
Caravan Bestiary.
Over the previous ten years I had filled twenty-six notebooks with entries, drawings, maps, and clippings. In addition to new animals, the twenty-seventh notebook chronicled my research into the final whereabouts of Adolphus Sarkas, the last man known to have the bestiary in his possession.

As in Venice, for many months I had been putting in ten-and twelve-hour days, poring over obscure source materials, cross-referencing even the most tenuous lead. I had a hunch that from Rhodes Sarkas did not travel to North Africa, or double back into Asia Minor, but fled deeper into the Aegean, to Crete, another island with Venetian roots. I realized that Cava, Madame Faville, and Brox had all been partially correct: Cava with his assertion that the bestiary had been in Italy for centuries; Madame Faville for focusing on the Greek islands; and Brox for traveling to Turkey (which I didn’t think a coincidence), before he was murdered. But following Sarkas’s trail after a century and a half was like chasing after smoke. And I no longer had Sylvie to assist me at the Sorbonne’s medieval library; in the pile of mail that had been held for me at the post office, I found a postcard from her in Brussels, where she and her boyfriend Charles had moved and gotten engaged.

At the reference library of the Musée de la Marine in Chaillot, I spent a month reading the captains’ logs of ships that sailed the southern Mediterranean between 1818 and 1830. Then, at the Greek embassy, examining microfiche of Cretan and Rhodian census rolls and customs records that the cultural attaché had obtained with great difficulty, I was indeed able to confirm Sarkas’s arrival on Crete in the fall of 1819. An “A. Sarkous” was listed in the manifest of the
Fontana,
a ship out of Rhodes that docked in Irakleion on September 3. On Rhodes, the harbormaster had stamped a joint customs declaration from the eleven departing passengers, who had scrawled only their initials, the last of them “A.S.” However, no “Sarkas” or “Sarkous” was listed in the census rolls, which included foreign residents of a year or more as well as permanent citizens.

I went to the Maritime Bibliothèque and read all the historians and chroniclers who touched on Crete at that time. Not surprisingly, I came up empty. I felt deflated, having to face the obvious fact that Sarkas was a thief on the run, an obscure figure desperate for even greater anonymity; not the sort of person who would make himself readily available to a census taker or any other official. I realized I would have to search through private, not public, documents—no easy task, especially since the ones I most likely needed were archived in Venice, not Paris. For a while, I worried I might have to return to Venice. But after exchanging a flurry of faxes with the librarians I knew at the Villa Ziane, and visiting the Société Italienne on the rue Marbeau, I got lucky.

In the otherwise dreary diary of Giorgio Zetto, a wealthy Venetian doctor and former consul that the head librarian put me onto, I found Sarkas mentioned twice. Zetto had retired to Xaniá, on the northwest coast of Crete, because of ill health. It was there, on October 4, 1819, that he met Sarkas. He identified him as an Armenian monk returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem—an obvious lie—and a painter of note, whose work he admired.
Father Sarkas can render animals—of sea, sky, land, and ether—with frightening clarity.
In his second entry about Sarkas, on November 15, Zetto wrote:
He claims to be embarked on a mission conceived by angels, which one day all the world shall know. His only fear is that Death will claim him first.
That was Sarkas, grandiose and elusive. Zetto’s next observation is what one would expect from a doctor turned diplomat, a man as coolly observant as Byron, whose complaint about Sarkas he echoes:
The monk’s humility is tempered by an evasive glance, for he never would meet my gaze.
Zetto does not describe the exact nature of Sarkas’s “mission” or of his animals, but I had little doubt their “frightening clarity” and that reference to “ether” connected them to the
Caravan Bestiary,
from whose pages Sarkas may have copied images onto canvas. I sent the head librarian at the Villa Ziane several new queries, but had yet to receive a reply. And my researches in Paris were turning up nothing new. Again I despaired that, close as I might be to some bigger breakthrough, the channels of information had become too rarefied, the possibilities too thin; not to mention the fact that, even if I learned all I needed to about Sarkas, I might still discover that he was many links back in the chain, that after traveling to Crete with him, the
Caravan Bestiary
had continued its journey with someone else, and someone after that—as it had done for centuries—and could now be anywhere in the world, or nowhere at all, and to pick up its trail I would have to start all over again.

And I knew that wasn’t possible.

B
RUNO EASED
his electric wheelchair into the shade of a peach tree. He was wearing a seersucker suit and a madras tie. The blue lenses of his Ray-Bans shone beneath the brim of his Panama hat. His white shoes, to the soles, were unblemished, for they seldom touched the ground. We were in the horticultural orchard outside his laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a warm spring afternoon. Starlings were chattering. Water splashed into a fountain filled with carp. In the tropical greenhouse, toucans and parrots occasionally took flight. I had come to the States for ten days, to visit the Italian Archives at the Library of Congress (cross-referencing, in vain, “Sarkas” and “Zetto”), and for a variety of personal reasons, one of which was to see Bruno.

At twenty-six, he held an endowed chair—the youngest person in the university’s history to receive that honor. Many people served him: a team of lab technicians and researchers, an administrative assistant, various graduate students and gofers, and the maid who cooked his meals and kept up the three-bedroom house provided him by the university. He had an elastic budget and a sizable expense account. He was in touch with a network of fellow biologists, in the United States and abroad, who were undertaking similar or parallel research, and when he traveled to conferences, he enjoyed all the amenities. Officially he reported to the university president. In fact, he reported to no one. Nor would he so long as he continued doing groundbreaking work and attracting grants that swelled the university’s coffers.

There was no question all of this had gone to his head, the sickly, disabled son of a fireman from the Bronx. How could it not have? Especially at his age. I was as impressed as anyone with his accomplishments, his stamina and brilliance; but I also had known him his whole life, and in the few hours since my arrival in Philadelphia, I was surprised to see just how imperious and vain he had become. A vanity that extended beyond his newfound affectations of dress—silk shirts, gold cuff links, a luminous Rolex—to his dealings with practically everyone he encountered. He could maintain a glacial reserve or affect a formal tone that was foolproof as distancing techniques: so far as I could tell, no one liked him. His intellectual confidence had devolved into arrogance. And he seemed to take perverse pride in his decrepitude. It may have started as a defense, but over time it had been integrated into the pose he assumed: a celebrated scientist who had had to overcome handicaps that would have stymied the best of men. He had suffered indignities for which he now demanded compensation. Respect and admiration were no longer enough: thus the pleasure he took in playing the improbable role of dandy and in indulging his newfound appetite for truffles, pâté, and exotic fruits after years of bland functional food. Others had to help him get around, but until he was flat on his back for good (as would happen soon enough), his shirts were going to be custom-made and his meals haute cuisine.

When you looked past the fancy clothes and flashy accoutrements, it wasn’t a pretty picture. I hadn’t seen him in a while, but it might as well have been decades; for every calendar year, he looked to have aged five years. He couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. He sat awkwardly, his knees touching, his feet pigeon-toed. His right eyelid drooped worse than ever. Because of his kidney medication, his eyes were hypersensitive to light; unless he was in a dim room, he wore thick dark glasses.

All of this, like his vanity, was readily discernible; not so his anger, which, though submerged, had increased exponentially. His afflictions had always made him ornery and fatalistic; it was frustrating to have such a capacious mind anchored by so frail a body. The broader anger he felt now was a natural outgrowth of his life’s work, in which he was pummeled with reports of human cruelty and callousness toward other creatures. Things were always worsening in that area, and all his life he had kept himself informed of those horrors. His idealism was long gone. What had remained unchanged, and pure, was his love of animals. Still the best part of him, it was also what drove him to keep going, despite his frustration—and protestations.

“Extinction has made me a big shot, Xeno,” he said, peering at me over his glasses. “There’s something unsavory about that, don’t you think?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer. He could answer his own questions, after all, better than anyone else.

“Even worse, what we’re doing here is not working. It may even be counterproductive. We’re losing the race.”

“But you’ve saved so many species.”

He shook his head. “Not enough.”

“And if you were doing nothing?”

“Nothing would be different.”

“You’re just tired.”

“I am tired. But what I’m saying is true. In science, problems always outrun solutions. But not at this pace. And these aren’t theories falling by the wayside, they’re living things. I used to tell you about these animals when we were kids. Fifteen years later, I still put up a poster every week of the next animal that will disappear. I saw you looking at it.”

“The white monkey.”

“It’s called the douc. One of the most sociable primates. Very intelligent, with a musical voice. It used to thrive in the rainforests of Laos and Vietnam. Maybe you saw one over there. You wouldn’t see it today. Ninety-five percent of the doucs were killed by Agent Orange and napalm. It used to group in families of twelve. Now, to avoid hunters, it travels in pairs. Some hunters eat it, others kill it for its fur, but most shoot it for target practice and leave the carcasses to rot.” His voice was rising. “It’s no different over here. Cowards who pick off grizzlies from helicopters or pay to shoot a penned tiger—or even a giraffe. You can fight pollution and sprawl, but killing for pleasure—how do you deal with that?” He smiled crookedly. “Maybe we need another Flood. When life began, the earth was entirely ocean—a chemical soup, bombarded with ultraviolet light. Shift a few molecules and everything could evolve differently. Maybe you end up with a planet of insects, or worms. Maybe that’s an improvement.”

His rant was interrupted by his administrative assistant, Naomi, who emerged from the lab. She handed him a sheaf of computer printouts, which he initialed. Naomi was a knockout, in her mid-twenties, curly black hair, bright blue eyes. She wore all red: leather miniskirt, V-necked blouse, zip-up boots.

Diverted, Bruno calmed down. He watched me follow her retreating figure up the steps to the lab. Pollen was swirling around us. Bees were humming, and mayflies. “Wonderful, isn’t she? Her current beau races motorcycles. Weekends he skydives.” He chuckled. “Still, I have my hopes.”

That night at dinner he opened up to me about his private life, which, for once, was offering him solace from his work, and not the other way around. We had eaten on the screened-in porch off his living room, crickets on the damp lawn, a full moon rising. His housekeeper had prepared mushroom risotto and fennel salad. We were finishing our second bottle of Barolo. This was another of Bruno’s newly acquired tastes. I had never known him to drink. He didn’t have the weight to absorb the alcohol, which was bound to mix unpredictably with his prescription drugs. He was high, slurring consonants, when he announced to me that for the first time he had a real girlfriend.