Leaping Lizards

I’ve gotten to the part in San Giuseppe where the animals start behaving in ways I don’t want to believe. There is a sparrow that has been sent to teach the nuns how to behave. It flies in the window during Matins and Vespers before the nuns can get situated in the choir. Miraculously it knows what page in the psalter they are singing from before they do and chirps out the tune so they will sing at the right pitch. If one of the nuns is inattentive, the sparrow pecks at her. If two of the nuns get in an argument, the sparrow comes between them and flaps its wings like mad and even claws at them until they are subdued. The story reads like a Hitchcock inspired version of “Snow White.” When the nunnery goes haywire, send in the Birds.

I’d written awhile back to Rosellen and Michael that, working so intimately on the translation day after day, I’d begun to identify with San Giuseppe. I wrote this the day before I got to the chapter about his hair shirt and the chain he wore clenched around his loins and kidneys and the cord with bent needles he’d whip himself with to tear off his skin. I’d written this without thinking that perhaps I’d given the impression that I’d begun to think myself destined for martyrdom and sainthood, but of course my tastes and longings do not run the way of martyrdom, self-flagellation or sainthood. What I really meant was that I identified with some of his ways of seeing things, especially his way of seeing how animals are more intimately connected to us than we realize and desperately try to teach us things.

When my life was in crisis a couple of summers ago, every time I went to sit in the chaise lounge on the terrace two doves would fly over from the steeple of San Rocco and swoop down onto a branch suspended just above my head and start cooing at me. I have binoculars and books about birds and I could tell by ring-markings on the throats of these doves that indeed it was the same pair, day after day, holding some kind of vigil over me. They would talk to me in low throaty coos which, if I had known then what I know now about Animal Communication, I might have learned how to interpret and perhaps understand, but sometimes I think it is all hooey, our attributing human words to a kind of communication that pulses at some deeper preverbal place. It seemed enough, just the music of the cooing, the song mantra and how it worked on me, the mere wonder of the doves’ presence, there in the piney overhang, pulling me out of some deep well of a bad mood into the animus mundus—the mystery of the moment I participate in.

About that time, my friend Jill came to visit. No coincidence I am sure that Jill studies animal totems. The doves, in their faithfulness, came to sing the evening she was here drinking wine with me on the terrace. “Ah, you know what the doves mean, don’t you,” she said without the slightest wince of skepticism. “It’s a new beginning. It’s the lifting of the veil between this world and the other. Doves mate for life—it’s a message about your relationship.” As she was saying these very words, a grasshopper leapt on my foot and suddenly startled me. “Don’t shake him off…that’s a very good sign. You are about to make a dramatic leap!”

I suppose I remain suspended somewhere between belief and disbelief as far as all these mysteries go, but I must confess that I take no terrace visitor for granted. A ladybug lands on my sleeve and I close my eyes and send my radar out in search of mysterious inner voices. I google “ladybug totem” and wryly see what the cyber goddess has to say. You’d be amazed at the vicissitudes I’ve lived in these years of communing with the creatures that daily find me. My own talking dogs notwithstanding—I am never alone.

Most recently I have been assaulted by lizards. When I am out walking the dogs, they skitter stealthily across the path, stirring the dogs into a desperate frenzy, frustrating me because they dart by so fast I can’t get a good look at them, can’t tell what kind they are, can’t look them in their eye to further penetrate the mystery of them. “Look at my iguana,” the man who sells me dog food said the other day. Out of the blue, he’s come into possession of an iguana. He’s put his iguana in a huge aquarium behind the cash register where it watches his customers all day. All the skittish lizards I’d been seeing the past few days seemed to see me through the iguana’s deep reptilian stare. “Detach. Listen to your intuition. Listen to your dreams. Your dreams are about to manifest as reality,” the site on lizard totems tells me. Oh good, I think, not entirely trusting my relief. I am definitely in a lizard phase.

I have six pages left to translate of the chapter pertaining to San Giuseppe and animal miracles. Wouldn’t it be something if the lizards find me even there—in the deep mysterious mirror of this work across centuries. I wouldn’t be surprised, nor surprised by my own fickle credulity.