Summary
At the beginning of summer, a little girl named Isabel is sent by her mother and her grown sister Inés to the country estate of the Funes family. Isabel is babied by her mother and sister, but her lungs are too delicate for summer in the city, and besides, she's quite a handful to take care of, and childcare is expensive when school is out. The Funes family invites Isabel to spend the summer with them in Los Horneros, and the offer is too convenient and cost-efficient for Isabel's family to pass up. Inés and Isabel's mother express concern over the general sadness of the Funes household, but they're confident that Isabel will be fine there with Nino to play with, and they're not overly concerned with the tiger that roams freely through the Funes household, because they are "very careful in that respect" (78).
So, they take Isabel to the train station and send her off by herself on the train to Los Horneros, where an employee of the Funeses awaits her and takes her to the estate. At the estate, she's greeted by Nino, a little boy close to her own age, and Nino's Aunt Rema (sister of Nino's father, Luis, who spends most of his days in his study, reading). The other man of the household is the Kid, Rema's husband and Nino's uncle. The Kid also spends a great deal of time shut away in his own study.
Isabel is shown to her room, which is a spacious, adult room. Rema is a warm and comforting presence. Isabel quickly learns the ways of the household, which revolve around avoiding the tiger that wanders from room to room, garden to garden. Don Roberto, one of the estate staff, keeps tabs on the tiger's location and informs the family of where the tiger is at a given time at various points throughout the day. Isabel gets used to the tiger; after all, it can only be in one room at a time, and the estate is enormous, so it really isn't all that limiting. She and Nino play all day long and spend every moment of the summer together, except for at night, when Isabel retires to her big room and sometimes when she tries to write a letter to her mother back home.
As Isabel spends more time at the Funes estate, she begins to realize that the Kid wields a dominating and oppressive presence on the entire household, save Luis, who really isn't involved or affected by the Kid's oppressive rage. Isabel and Nino "grow microbes" in a tank with scummy water and lilypads. They observe the growth under a microscope and mistake mosquito larvae for microbes. Luis tries to explain the difference, but the children don't want to hear it. They collect ants and build an ant farm, which quickly grows inside the deep glass vessel given to them by Luis.
One afternoon, while playing ball with Nino and the son of one of the field hands, Isabel is overwhelmed with conflicting emotions of anger and joy about the summer. She hits the ball wildly, and it soars through the window of the Kid's study. The Kid yells down at them, calling them "filthy pains-in-the-ass" (87) and they call up that it was an accident, but the Kid disappears back into his study. Later that day, in the early evening, Nino and Isabel are playing checkers. Nino wins and Rema kisses him. The Kid comes into the living room and pulls Nino out of Rema's arms and beats him, all the while keeping his eyes locked on Rema. Even before this incident, Isabel notices how the Kid makes Rema feel uncomfortable and jumpy, and how she recoils from his touch.
That night, Isabel dreams about Nino's blank, crying eyes, and her mother and sister wearing yellow gloves. The images swirl around her head. The next day, Isabel and Nino find a praying mantis which they keep in a jar and plan to enclose in the ant farm to see how the ants and the mantis interact. Rema doesn't like all of the bugs Isabel and Nino keep around. She is especially disturbed by the mantis, which she asks them to put out of the house, but they insist on keeping it until the next day. That night, as Isabel is walking to her bedroom past the open door of the Kid's study, the Kid whistles at her and tells her to come into his study. In the study, he tells her to go down to the kitchen and tell Rema to bring him a glass of cold lemonade. Isabel complies, but Rema gives her the tumbler of lemonade to bring to the Kid. Isabel begs her not to make her bring the lemonade, but Rema refuses to go herself. Isabel brings the lemonade to the Kid, who scolds her for bringing it instead of having Rema bring it. The Kid seems to cruelly delight in the fact that his wife is too afraid or exhausted to face him, and that this child is cowed by his presence.
The next day, on the way back in from collecting snails in the garden, Don Roberto tells Isabel the current location of the tiger. They eat their lunch, and Isabel tells everyone that the tiger is in the Kid's study. The Kid shrugs off the information and slinks away to the library, annoyed that he can't use his own study but accepting that he can't do anything to change it. Isabel involves herself with the tray of slugs drying out on wax paper. Rema, Louis, and Nino are all involved in their own small tasks and leisures in the living area of the house—Louis smoking his cigarettes, Rema looking for sugar in the pantry. The post-lunch quiet of the house is shattered by the Kid's screams. The tiger is in the library, not his study. The story ends with Rema tenderly stroking Isabel's hair, an unspoken gesture of thanks, as Luis bangs on the library door and the Kid is eaten alive by the tiger.
Analysis
"Bestiary" is, in many ways, a story about repression. The repressive environment of the Funes estate is interpreted through the eyes of Isabel, a perceptive and rather precious child from the city. Cortázar establishes Isabel's outlook by beginning the story in her home, before the start of summer. Isabel's mother and her sister, Inés, dote on her, despite her being a very particular and rather difficult child to care for. She is portrayed as somewhat spoiled and as a trouble maker—e.g. when her mother's phone rings at the beginning of the story, Isabel immediately starts reviewing her day and what possible complaints could be leveled at her by teachers or neighbors and thinks "of old lady Lucera being angry because she'd pushed her doorbell on the way back from school" (77). The beginning of the story that takes place in the city, before Isabel arrives at the Funes estate, serves to establish a home base for Isabel, a place to which she can write back, a place of origin and a home that makes her, Isabel, somewhat of an outsider at the Funes estate, a status which gains significance later in the story.
The tiger, though it remains unseen, is a main feature of the story and a major source of tension and cause for the characters to behave the way they do. Though its presence is normalized because of its ubiquitousness, the tiger looms constantly over the Funes estate. It is a danger that they've accepted but refuse or are unable to confront. The mostly unspoken, or at most understated, presence of the tiger paired with the fact of its scarcity (to the reader, invisibility) contributes to this theme of repression. The wandering tiger can be considered an allegory for those fears and dangers people live with every day, hanging silently over their heads like the sword of Damocles. The form of the story also contributes to the theme of repression—while it remains in the third person, the perspective favors Isabel and at times slips into a formal imitation of the notes she takes on the ant farm and her and Nino's other biology experiments. Here, Isabel's status as an outsider becomes essential to her ability to observe the Funes family as if they were another biology experiment, a blown-up version of a gallery in an anthill.
Another formal mirror of the repression that pervades the story is Isabel's ongoing attempt to write a letter to her mother about her visit. Cortázar peppers bits of the letter throughout the story in which Isabel communicates her day-to-day adjustment to Los Horneros, and in which she eventually pleads with her mother to join them there for a few days and keep Rema company. Isabel admits that life in Los Horneros is sad—not necessarily for her, a visitor, but for those stuck there indefinitely, like the ants in her and Nino's ant farm, constantly trying to build their way out, even in the total darkness of night (a revelation which Isabel finds sobering). The ant farm becomes a symbol of the inescapability of estate life in Los Horneros, particularly for Rema and Nino. Cortázar draws the parallel through Isabel's secret envy of the ants for living without fear of any tiger. He writes, "it gave her immense pleasure to think that the ants came and went without fear of any tiger, sometimes she tried to imagine a tiny little tiger like an eraser, roaming the galleries of the ant-farm; maybe that was why the dispersals and concentrations" (85).
Over the course of her stay, Isabel becomes aware of the Kid's oppressive effect on Rema and Nino. When Rema insists that Isabel take the lemonade to the Kid's study instead of her, it's clear that the Kid is, for Rema, her own private tiger. Isabel's reaction to being asked to take the lemonade to him, pleading and bargaining, saying she'll throw away the mantis if only she doesn't have to be in the same room as him, demonstrates how, given enough time on the estate, anyone can become averse to The Kid's presence (particularly women and children, as he seems not to wield as much power over the aloof Luis). An extreme moment of tension occurs when Isabel brings The Kid's lemonade to him, against his wishes for Rema to bring the lemonade. Cortázar describes The Kid looking at the lemonade "like someone looking at some kind of infinite naughtiness" (93), and this mixture of pleasure and disdain exhibited by the Kid is mostly directed, one can assume, toward his wife, Rema, but it is felt strongly by Isabel as well. His presence is so odious, in fact, that Isabel is perhaps motivated to trick the Kid into entering the same room as the tiger. Cortázar deftly leaves the reader with enough circumstantial evidence to confidently believe that Isabel meant to lead the Kid into the room, without giving us any hard evidence to confirm the suspicion. The story ends on a note of extreme irony: the Kid is devoured by the tiger, the very almost magical and insidious force that his own odious presence emulates.
