The Bestiary (5 page)

Flimsy folding chairs and two tiers of benches surrounded the ring. The room was dimly lit and poorly ventilated, smelling of sweat and liniment. The spectators were hard-core aficionados, all male. They drank Turkish coffee and smoked oval cigarettes. I never saw my father so engaged by any activity—or so talkative. He watched intently, commenting on the various holds, the precise footwork and positioning. He referred to the wrestlers by nicknames, “the Goat” and “the Ram,” which they both lived up to. The Goat had nimble goatlike feet and, yes, a blond goatee, while the Ram, with unruly red hair and short legs, snorted loudly.

In the ancient Olympics, my father informed me solemnly, wrestling had been second in importance only to the discus throw.

“The wrestlers were naked, with olive oil rubbed on their bodies,” he explained. “They wrestled outside in the sun. Back then, it was part of a boy’s education: you practiced every day, just like grammar and numbers.”

As we took our seats, he explained the basics. “See, the ring is perfectly square, twenty-four feet on each side. Most of the action takes place in that circle in the center. No holds allowed below the waist. No holds using the legs. No tripping. It’s all balance and leverage. Agility. Endurance.”

The day we saw the Ram battle the Goat, my father pulled at his moustache and told me all the reasons he favored the latter. “Quicker hands…superior shoulder strength…lateral mobility—plus, he’s got the killer instinct.”

“How can you tell?”

“Look at his mouth. He never opens it. He breathes through his nose. Stokes his anger. Gets a fire going inside, but stays icy on the surface. That’s the sign of killer instinct.”

I wasn’t sure, even at age eleven, that I agreed with this formulation; but I was interested if only for the fact that, in making it, my father revealed more of himself than usual. I noted, too, that, when animated, he expressed himself with the metaphor he knew best: coal stoking.

He was right about one thing: the Goat was the more powerful wrestler, pinning the Ram, a more muscle-bound man, in less than a minute.

For dinner we went to a nearby restaurant called Samos, run by two brothers from that island. Their specialties were octopus stew and stuffed peppers. They served retsina from the barrel and ouzo in blue shot glasses. Blown-up photographs of Samos’s landscape covered the walls. Also an illuminated beer ad in which Miss Rheingold 1961, wearing her crown, stood beside a faux waterfall that appeared to be flowing. The place was packed. The air thick with smoke. My father ordered me the peppers and for himself grilled bass and a glass of wine.

We were in a corner booth. I was surprised to find that he actually knew several people on the premises. A furniture salesman in a plaid jacket who patted me on the head and introduced himself as Artie. And one of the brothers from Samos, named Manny. And, finally, a tall seaman with a buzz cut named Gus. I remember them clearly because they were the first men with whom I saw my father socialize.

He was his usual self, though I did glimpse another part of him—if only a sliver. With Artie, who was also a habitué of the athletic club, he continued the wrestling patter, and he and Manny bantered about the food. But it was Gus who interested me the moment I realized he and my father had been shipmates. Another first. When Gus referred to their sailing into Caracas at night, pictures opened up in my head: flickering lights, murky piers, a windswept harbor.

Gus called my father Teddy, which I’d never heard anyone do. Though at ease, my father maintained his usual reserve, sipping his wine while Gus threw back several ouzos and chain-smoked Lucky Strikes. Gus was already a little tight when he joined us. The more he drank and talked, the more restive my father grew. He was still under the spell of the wrestling, which he didn’t want broken. Besides which, he didn’t feel safe around people who veered, conversationally or otherwise. Also, I was there.

Calling for the check, my father ordered me to finish my dessert, a thick rice pudding, while he went to the men’s room.

“Yeah,” Gus continued, “your old man and me have seen some places. Down in São Paulo an old woman read my future in chicken tracks. You know how?”

I shook my head. He leaned forward, his breath like kerosene.

“I give her five bucks. She wets down the dirt and has two chickens walk around while she talks mumbo-jumbo. Then she reads the tracks.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “How should I know?”

“Maybe it’s a kind of alphabet.”

“Maybe.” He lit another cigarette. “You’re a smart kid, huh?”

“What did the tracks say?”

“Eh?”

“About your future.”

He blew a string of smoke rings. “That I’d have three kids and live to be ninety.” He snorted. “Maybe the second part will come true.”

“Do you have kids?”

“Nope. Don’t like ’em. Present company excepted,” he added half-heartedly. “Anyway, for five bucks the old lady didn’t tell me much.” He laughed. “For another ten she said she’d cook me the chickens.”

I tried to conceal my disgust. “Did she read my father’s future?”

“No, he didn’t want no part of it.”

“No part of what?” My father’s voice came up behind me.

“I was telling him about the old lady in Brazil who read the chicken tracks.”

My father grunted and examined the check. “Put on your coat, Xeno.”

“You got a smart kid here, Teddy.”

My father nodded while counting out some bills.

“You never talk about him.” Gus was looking at me, smiling, but his eyes were cold. “I don’t know why not.”

“Come on,” my father said to me.

“Hey, one for the road, Teddy?” Gus said.

My father shook his head.

“Suit yourself. So you’re in town until Friday. Then you go home?”

My father stiffened. “Then I
leave
home. I’m shipping on the
Hecate
for Barcelona.”

Gus looked away, nodding vigorously. “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

“Goodbye,” my father muttered, clutching my arm and leading me from the restaurant.

On the sidewalk he tried to head off my questions. “Sometimes that’s what sailors say when they’re putting to sea: ‘going home.’”

Speeding through the subway tunnel beneath the East River, I was thinking hard about this. “Do you think of a ship as home?” I asked him.

Without missing a beat, he said, “You’d better think that way about your ship when you’re in the middle of the ocean. But, no, I think of our apartment as home.”

I didn’t believe him. I decided to be as direct as I’d ever been on the subject. “Even though you’re on ships more than you’re here?”

But he didn’t bridle. “Yes,” he replied, staring at the lights that flew by.

“Why did you get mad at Gus?” I said.

Asking my father a question like this, however innocently, was usually out of the question. It wasn’t that he got angry when you probed: he just clammed up.

This time he looked at me. “Never trust what a man says when he’s drinking.”

This was not an answer to the question I had asked, and he knew it. But that was all he was going to say.

The door between us had been jarred open a crack, and I had hoped to open it further. But, just as quickly, it closed on me. A few days later, my father set sail. And that same evening, while my grandmother dozed on the sofa and Evgénia prepared dinner, I realized how much it had hurt when Gus said my father never talked about me.

M
Y GRANDMOTHER DIED
on a snowy December night. Only the cause of death was unexpected: she was being treated for kidney disease and intestinal disorders, but she suffered a massive heart attack. She had had her spleen removed the previous winter, after which her sister Frances urged her to move in with her once and for all. My grandmother refused: our apartment had become her home, and sensing that the end was near, she said she wanted to die there.

She rarely left her room that last year. I sat at her bedside for hours at a time, with Re at my feet, beside a table cluttered with pill containers, tonics, tinctures, ointments, lozenges, and a Thermos of blackberry tea, which she believed superior to all her medicines. She sat propped up with a heating pad at the small of her back and packets of herbs beneath her pillow.

Cataracts had set in, but though her vision was darkening, she refused surgery. At first, she continued to watch the morning soap operas. Or she stared out the window at the shadows that shifted, like pieces of a jigsaw, across the building façades. Finally, though, she could only listen to the television. And even when the room was sunlit, all she could see was a vast spiderweb—
una ragnatela vasta.
As her condition worsened, she often lapsed into Italian.

“I ragni stanno facendo…”
she murmured.
The spiders are spinning…

In her mind’s eye, however, she saw clearly. She described to me a panther that walked on its hind legs and addressed her in a language she had never before heard but understood completely; a burning salamander that exploded into a rainbow; an eyeless crow with one white and one black wing threading a forest.

“I demoni,”
she whispered.

The demons that inhabit this world—
to whom the world belongs,
as she once told me—were now everywhere, in all their manifestations.

“No, Xeno, they’ve been there since the world began,” she corrected me, “but now I can see them clearly. The panther—
la pantera—
most of all. He stood right there at the foot of the bed.”

I looked at the spot. “What did he say?”

“Ah,” she smiled. “Things I wished I knew before, that I can tell you now. So you’ll know them all your life. First, he explained why I could understand him. He said before men started their killing ways, they spoke the same language as all the other animals. There was no boundaries between them. Then the worm of cruelty burrowed into man’s heart. The animals needed to protect themselves, so they made up their own languages that only their own kind could understand. The same thing happened when men started killing other men. Everyone felt safer talking their own language. They still do.”

She sipped her tea.

“Next he told me that there are animals like the phoenix—
la fenice—
that can only live in the world one at a time. You can’t be more alone than that.”

I was about to pipe in about the chimera, but she was getting short of breath and I didn’t want to interrupt her.

“He said there are other animals like that,” she went on. “‘The lost animals,’ he called them, that didn’t make it onto the ark at the time of the Great Flood. One day these animals are gonna be discovered, and all of their stories told, and the great mysteries will come clear.” She closed her eyes. “That panther promised me that soon my spirit’s gonna move on. If you’re lucky, it doesn’t live on in heaven—forget all that—but inside another creature on earth. Otherwise, it becomes a lost soul, like one of those seabirds that tries to fly to the moon but instead falls into what my grandmother Silvana called
il mare di tempo—
the sea of time—and never returns. When I was a girl, and we went to Messina, we waited in the dunes all night for a look at those birds. I don’t have to wait long now, Xeno, no matter where I’m going.”

“Don’t say that, Grandma.” I choked back tears, but she was happy with the thought, and she pulled me close and kissed me.

That last night, I was eating a sandwich in the kitchen when I heard a glass break in her room. Then Re started barking. Evgénia had just stepped out the front door, on her way home, and I cried out to her as I raced down the hall.

At my grandmother’s door, I stopped cold. Her bed was empty. Re was barking at the window, where the red fox I had seen years before was slipping out onto the fire escape, into the snow.

I turned to Evgénia as she reached my side, and when I looked back into the room, the fox was gone and my grandmother was lying in bed. Her head was tilted and her mouth was open. Her face was white as powder. Shadows from the lamp swam up onto the bedclothes. The tea from the broken glass was spreading on the floor-boards.

It felt as if my own mouth was filling with sand. I was shaking as I ran over and laid my head on my grandmother’s chest, listening for her heart. Evgénia took hold of her wrist, then pressed her neck, searching for an artery.

“I think I hear something!” I cried, but Evgénia shook her head and hurried away to the telephone.

What I heard was my own blood pounding in my ears. I sank to my knees sobbing and at the same time felt as if I were floating far away from myself, that room, my grandmother’s body. Despite her bittersweet feelings toward my mother, and her strange ways, my grandmother had been the great constant in my life. I became inconsolable. If it hadn’t been for Evgénia, I don’t know what I would have done. She was the only one I had to fall back on in those terrible days, and she came through for me.

The ambulance took my grandmother away. And then her family—the family of Rose Conti—prepared to bury her. She was theirs now. And I was not invited to the funeral. Even if my father had been around, I would not have been invited. Evgénia was outraged. “I won’t allow it,” she declared.