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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