The Bestiary Read Free

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