[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_18

Sentimental Bestiary, Guadalupe Nettel, 2020

There was a time when I avoided buying collections of short stories. There wasn't a clear reason why. I partly found the sudden change of scene difficult, given that it takes me some time to settle into a new novel. I also ended up confusing the stories if I read more than one on the same day, and I forgot them all after a couple of days.

When I also started using short stories as a medium to express myself and understood how complex they could be, I became passionate about them. “Sentimental Bestiary” was not the collection that changed my opinion on short stories. I picked up this book by mistake, thinking it was a novel, when I was still in the "everything but stories" phase (which had followed the "everything but comics" phase), and I was monstrously angry with myself when I discovered the contents. I bought it sight unseen, hypnotized by the title: I was and still am a massive fan of the Bestiaries.

This book ended up in a drawer and remained there waiting for a couple of years. Finding it again was an unexpected joy because when it fell into my hands again, I had become an omnivorous reader, and it emerged from a moving box just when I was looking for something new to read. I recently read Cortazar's Bestiary (also a collection of short stories), which disappointed me a bit because the decisive charge of images it created quickly dissolved into a weak narrative structure. Nettel's Bestiary is completely different—perhaps less ambitious—but precisely for this reason, it is freer and more authentic. I read it in a couple of hours. It wasn't a “fantastic” bestiary as I supposed: The animals were real, and their behaviors recalled those of people as if in a Mirror. In one of the stories, the pretext for a reflection on motherhood was given by a cat and its litter. It brought back many of my childhood memories: I also developed my first reflections on gender precisely from comparisons with animals. When I was a child, I used to play with kittens and stray cats that roamed around the house, and I suffered a lot when they suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.

The stories told to me as explanations were always different: the puppies had gone to play with other children, other families had adopted them, and other animals had eaten them. Even as a child, I knew these stories weren't true, but I couldn't accept the idea that someone dared to kill the puppies. I asked my grandmother why the cats continued to have kittens if someone took them away every time, and she explained to me that female cats didn't choose; that if they could, they would never have had puppies; that it was all extreme

suffering for them conceiving them, making them, losing them. “Don't you hear them screaming at night?” she asked me. “Female cats are never happy,” and in saying those words, I understood very well that Grandma wasn't just talking about the animals. A few years later, I asked my grandparents if I could have a cat to take care of. Thanks to my grandmother's intermediation, my grandfather agreed, and I asked to have a particular kitten from the litter, the white one, fat and soft, with colored spots. The cat that was then delivered to me was gray and with rough fur. It was not the one I had chosen, and the rest of the litter had, as usual, suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. "Why didn't you save the cat I liked?" I asked my grandfather because by now I had grown up and understood who was behind the disappearances, "Why did you give me this, which is also ugly?".

"Because it was the only male in the litter," he replied.

"And why couldn't you keep a female?"

"Because females are useless."

My grandfather had three daughters and had only received granddaughters from them. Like my grandmother's words years before, my grandfather's words also seemed to me to refer not only to animals.