The Bestiary

by Nicholas Christopher

  I sat at the desk. It felt massive, immovable, like an upright piano. Two oversized books were shelved beside it: a volume of nautical maps and a world atlas. I rolled the desktop back and found a five-by-seven manila envelope on which my name was printed in my father’s hand.

  I should have known that he would have considered this ship, not the houses ashore, to be his true home. If he left a trace of himself anywhere, it would be here.

  Inside the envelope was a single photograph of my mother and father, the first I had ever seen of them together, taken the day they were married. They were standing in front of the Bronx County Courthouse, near Yankee Stadium. The sunlight was bright. Their shadows loomed on the broad steps. Patches of ice shone on the sidewalk. Some pigeons had just taken flight. My father was wearing a black suit and a wide checked tie. His overcoat was folded over his arm. His hair was slicked back. He had his other arm around my mother. Standing beside him, she was not as small as I would have thought. But she did look so much younger than him. She wore a double-breasted coat over a white dress. The wind was ruffling her long hair. The two of them were smiling, squinting into the light. I had never seen my father look that happy.

  He had left me something he had never been able to give me in life: an image of himself happy. As to why this girl had made him so happy, even at this late date he was not willing to share that information. Nor to tell me that he loved me: just that he had loved her, to the end.

  IT WAS VARTAN MARZCEK who had said to me, “You’re from the most hard-assed people in Europe: Cretans and Sicilians. A couple of islands too big to be islands. And too tough. No hammer breaks their stones. They make the rest of Greece and Italy look soft by comparison.”

  I was in Sicily, a town called Fornace in the mountains fifty miles southwest of Messina. It lived up to its name, for even in October it was hot as a furnace. On top of which there was a severe drought. Dust coated the one road in like snow. The pine forests were dry as tinder. The stream that skirted the forest was reduced to a trickle.

  The residents were suspicious of visitors. Fornace was my grandmother’s birthplace, so I had hoped to feel at home. Maybe if I had mentioned my lineage sooner, people would have been more welcoming. But even when I did identify myself as the great-grandson of Emmanuel Azzaro and the grandson of Rose Azzaro, it barely registered. All the Azzaros had either died off or moved to Catania and Messina to find work.

  I did get a response finally on my third day in town when I struck up a conversation with an old man. I was renting one of the four rooms at the only pension in town, and he was at a café next door. He had a brown, lined face and a wild thatch of white hair. He was wearing a blue work shirt, with old wine stains washed in, and frayed suspenders. I bought him a grappa and smoked one of his Corso cigarettes, the harshest tobacco I ever tasted.

  “I knew your grandmother’s cousin, Mariella. She married a boy from Triano and died there a few years later. She had two children.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what happened to them. In America, did your grandmother have many grandchildren?”

  “Not too many.”

  He smiled wryly. “A lot of money?”

  “Not too much.”

  He stuck a toothpick in his mouth alongside the cigarette. Two of his front teeth were gone. “She never came back here,” he said. “Her father never came, either. None of them who left came back.”

  “And there are no Azzaros left here?”

  He shook his head. “None.”

  I signaled the waiter—a skinny schoolboy in an apron—for two more grappas.

  The old man leaned forward. “But, you know, there is a cousin of yours here now.”

  “A cousin who is not an Azzaro?”

  He nodded. “I don’t know her name. But she’s your cousin.”

  “Where is she?”

  “At old Garzas’s house. His son rents it out.” He gave me directions. Then two of his cronies joined him, and that was the end of our conversation.

  After lunch, I walked to a small stone house at the other end of town, close to the forest. A cat was sleeping by the front door. Chickens were pecking in the yard. A rooster was perched on the fence. His plumage was red and orange, his coxcomb gold. Eating my landlady’s bean soup the previous night, I heard her tell her nephew a story. An old shepherd in his hut woke from a restless sleep and overheard his rooster and his dog discussing the fact their master was soon going to die. Distraught, the shepherd ran outside to question them, but in the darkness tripped on a stone, hit his head, and died. “He should have gotten to his knees and prayed,” my landlady concluded solemnly.

  In Sicily it is well known that animals converse. If you understand their languages—a rare gift—you can avoid many tribulations. My grandmother told me this.

  The woman who answered my knock was about my age, thin and pale, with brilliant red hair and black eyes. I had only seen hair like that once, on my cousin Silvana in the Bronx. Was it possible I had another such cousin?

  She looked at me in disbelief when I said, “My name is Xeno Atlas.”

  Standing frozen on either side of the doorway, we scrutinized one another. Then she beckoned me in, and in clear English said, “I’m Silvana Conti.”

  But by then I knew she was my American cousin, Uncle Robert’s daughter whom I had seen long ago at my grandmother’s funeral.

  It wasn’t just her red hair. To my astonishment, Silvana had the face of Uncle Robert’s sister as she might have looked had she lived past twenty—a face I knew only from photographs, most recently the one on the Makara.

  She looked like my mother.

  MY DOCTORS told me to go somewhere quiet, with clean dry air, like Utah or Arizona. Instead, I came here. I wanted to be close to Nana.”

  That was what she called my grandmother.

  “They said my chances of recovery were good, but I had to get away.”

  She had nearly died of tuberculosis. It was a virulent strain, resistant to antibiotics, and in the end they had to remove half her left lung. She was hospitalized for two months, and convalesced for several more.

  “I’ve never been sick before, and that made it harder.”

  We were in the grape arbor behind her house, where the shade was densest. She had brewed a pot of tea. The cat had come around and was sleeping beneath the table. Ants were scurrying along the flag-stones. The scent of wild thyme was blowing in from the fields. Silvana was getting tired. In the three hours I had been there, we had begun to sketch out our respective histories.

  Instinctively we each worked backward from the present. Our childhood years—the circumstances that had kept us apart—were too painful to approach head-on. The only surprising thing was that we were able to discuss them at all after such a short time together. But my grandmother had been right: Silvana and I were very much alike. It felt as if we had known each other for many years—and in a way we had.

  She was a draftswoman. She worked for a camera company in Atlanta. That was where she had gone to college. She had picked up a slight Southern accent, which took me aback at first.

  “I don’t design the cameras or projectors,” she said, “I draw the blueprints to the designers’ specifications. I could always draw things true to life.”

  She was being modest: in fact, she could precisely render the workings of complex instruments, framing them three-dimensionally. Having previously worked for an electronics company, she said the assortment of lenses, shutters, and spools that comprise a camera were far easier to draw than the circuitry of a stereo receiver.

  “People often ask if I wanted to be an artist—as in: am I a frustrated painter? The answer is no. If anything, it’s surgeons and engineers who always fascinated me. I like to see how things work. But I’m not an inventor myself.”

  She had been married briefly.

  “To a man like my father,” she said pointedly. “That was what was wrong. We got married right out of college. He was a devout Catholic—a zealot, as it turned out. I lef
t the Church to get divorced. That was the one good thing that came of my marriage. My father never forgave me. But we were already estranged. He was a worse zealot. The most unforgiving person I ever knew.”

  I sipped my tea, thinking of those Sundays when my grandmother went to visit my uncle and his family: Uncle Robert’s balding head and brown suit, his boxy gray sedan reflecting flashes of sunlight. For Silvana and her siblings, he had made my mother and me into mysterious, forbidden figures, objects of curiosity.

  I must have looked pained, for Silvana said, “I’m sorry. Here I am telling you, of all people, about my father. You must have hated him.”

  “I did,” I said, “inasmuch as you can hate anyone you’ve never met face-to-face.”

  Staring at Silvana, I couldn’t get over it: her forehead, cheekbones, even the curve of her lips were so like my mother’s. Everything seemed the same except that shock of red hair. And her eyes were darker. Silvana’s resemblance opened up another grim angle onto my uncle: what kind of man could look at his daughter and see his sister’s face so clearly, yet continue to keep me out in the cold?

  “Did he hate my mother, too?” I asked.

  Silvana cocked her head. “He liked to say that he loved your mother until it hurt. Hurt whom? I used to think. He claimed he would have done anything for her. His little sister. The flower of the family. Then she ran off and married without permission—a common seaman, and a non-Catholic, to boot. As if the Contis were royalty. He would have done anything for her, but he never tried to understand her and he certainly wouldn’t forgive her. I always felt he was jealous of your mother because she did what she wanted and he was trapped. A trap of his own making. My—our—grandfather also died young, and my father claimed that he had been expected to fill his shoes, to be responsible for the family. In fact, no one expected that, or thought him capable of it—certainly not Nana. He got caught up in this delusion, which in his mind justified his prejudices, his false pride, all his suppressed rage. Yet he saw himself as deeply religious, the bulwark of the family. When your mother died, he acted as if he had been vindicated. If only she had listened to him, everything would have been different: she would have lived, would have thrived.”

  “Instead, she was bad. And so I must be bad.”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “I’m afraid most of us were bad.”

  “What did your mother think of all this?”

  “She was afraid of him, like everyone else. Righteousness can be as effective as a blackjack.”

  “Grandma wasn’t afraid of him.”

  “No. But she really stepped out of our lives when she went to live with you. What influence she had on my father disappeared.” She hesitated. “I resented that she went. That must sound awful.”

  “No. Sometimes I hoped you and the other cousins did resent it. I felt it was the only advantage I had over you.” I shook my head. “It was an impossible situation. Everyone knew that.”

  “Not my father,” she said angrily. “That’s the worst part. He didn’t know it. He died not knowing it.”

  I hadn’t expected her to be so vehement. “When did he die?” I asked.

  “Three years ago. Of leukemia.”

  I couldn’t bring myself—even perfunctorily—to say I was sorry, because I wasn’t.

  Sensing this, she changed the subject. “Why did you come here, Xeno?”

  “The same reason you did: to be close to Grandma. I’d always wanted to visit. I needed a reason. Then my own father died a few months ago.”

  “Oh, I—”

  I put my hand up. “Please. I hadn’t seen him in years.”

  “I had stopped seeing my father, too, but still it was hard.”

  All I could think was that these were the two men who had perverted the course of my childhood, and I was glad they were dead. They were dead and I was alive. And if that made me an unforgiving bastard like my uncle, that was all right, too.

  “I visited here once before,” Silvana said, “with my parents when I was thirteen. Nana had died three years earlier, but I felt her presence.” She smiled. “Maybe my father did, too. He hated it here, and we left after a single day.”

  She poured me more tea, then picked a cluster of grapes and rinsed it under a spigot. Watching her move, I saw she must have been strong, with a fuller figure, before her illness. Despite her thin arms, her hands were steady, her grip firm. Her leg muscles were taking shape again. She held herself erect. She was someone who wouldn’t easily reveal her pain.

  She felt my eyes on her and blushed.

  “You’ve recovered well,” I said awkwardly.

  “I’m getting there. In the spring I was down to ninety pounds, and falling. I’ve been making lots of vegetable stew—yams and blue turnips—to regain my strength. And all the bread and pasta is finally sticking. I’ve been eating big meals, but I may not have that luxury for long.”

  We fell silent. The cat came and went. We picked at the grapes. The minutes ticked away. I was as unselfconscious as I would have been if I were alone.

  “When I was a kid, I used to ask Nana about you,” she said.

  “What did she say?”

  “That you were special, like your mother. Energetic. Fearless.”

  “I wish that had been true,” I said ruefully.

  “She showed me pictures of you.”

  “I would have liked to see your picture.”

  Silvana thought about this. “Maybe she thought it would have made things more difficult for you.”

  “Maybe.” I wasn’t sure she was referring to the fact she so resembled my mother.

  “Once I saw you,” Silvana said brightly. “At your window.”

  “From your father’s car?”

  “How did you know?” Her smile faded as she realized that, for me, this could not be a pleasant memory.

  “I saw you, too,” I said. “Then again, at Grandma’s funeral.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “My nanny brought me to the church, but we didn’t stay long.”

  She shuddered. “That’s terrible.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “After Nana died, we lost track of you. I figured you lived with your father.”

  “No. He parked me in a boarding school in Maine. My childhood officially ended when Grandma died.”

  “I am sorry.” She squeezed my arm and stood up. “But I’d better rest now. This is the most talking I’ve done in months.”

  “I stayed too long.”

  “Not at all. Can we meet in town tomorrow for lunch?”

  At the door she took my hands. Hers were cold and small. I could feel the bones so clearly. “I wouldn’t want you to forgive my father for what he did,” she said. “But please forgive me.”

  I wrapped my arms around her. “I feel so lucky to have met you after all these years.”

  THE NEXT DAY at noon, when the heat was fiercest, Silvana walked into the square, wearing a broad white hat, her face in shadow. From a distance, she looked even thinner. She carried a handbag so flat I thought it must be empty. She reached into it for a small canister and sprayed something into her mouth. When I got up close to her, I saw that she didn’t look quite so pale; she had put on some makeup: penciling her eyebrows, reddening her cheeks and lips. Still, even the short walk seemed to have winded her. For my part, I was tired, having spent a restless night pacing my room, smoking, and finally downing three grappas at the bar before getting a few hours’ sleep.

  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.”