Bayawak in bucolic life

What animal did this? I wondered as I contemplated the round hole in my screen at my eye level. I’m not a short woman. Did it make its way in or out of this hole? "Cut a piece of flypaper and patch this hole from the inside." The next day the fly paper was unstuck on three sides, the hole was bigger and I knew no better. "Use bigger paper and patch on both sides. Let’s see what happens," I instructed my maid Ana. I don’t know what I was thinking but I was leaving for an appointment in Manila and had no time to fuss. I just wanted to look authoritative, like I knew the answers to all of life’s problems.

When I returned home midweek the screen panel below the one I had been contemplating sported a hole about four times bigger than the original one. My heart lurched then pounded. This was not a critter. I was dealing with a creature. An agitated Ana showed me picture frames knocked over in my bedroom, ornamental bottles knocked into the bathtub and broken, and my bar of soap scratched with mysterious marks. These "footprints" ruled out snakes. "I think it’s the lizard we’ve been seeing in the garden," Ana said breathlessly, "and you cannot imagine what bad luck that brings. I asked the healer in the village and she says that is really bad luck for you. It’s like you got money and then it turned to stone. And you know what? All the geckos here are sounding off much earlier in the afternoon..." meaning something malevolent and scary happening here. Here I cast her my best and sharpest stop-it-you’re-getting-hysterical look. She forces herself to calm down. "Anyway, I’ve seen it. It’s a bayawak (iguana). It likes to lie on the roof (I have a thatch roof) over the pond. It’s been eating the birds. Don’t you notice how quiet it is now? The bayawak has scared off the birds."

Before I leave for Manila again I take her outside and tell her my theory. "I think it climbs up this tree to the second floor roof and then gets into my studio through that gap – see the gap between roof and wall? Then it goes down that hole in the ceiling that hasn’t been covered by our contractor yet and then the bayawak has the run of the second floor because no one sleeps there when I am in Manila and I’ve been away a lot. You must sleep there and make noise."

She didn’t sleep there but when she went up early to check, she surprised the bayawak under my bed. She said it wouldn’t go away until after she had uttered this prayer she knew. On the spot I decided to stay in Manila longer. I don’t want to sleep in a room with a bayawak in it. My friends, much amused, tell me it’s what I get for moving to the country, for having a thatch roof. Bucolic? Bayawak? Didn’t you see the connection? They tease.

I do the one thing I do well. I give my contractor another ultimatum on the ceiling so we can block the bayawak’s access. Miraculously my contractor responds immediately, like he didn’t spend a year dragging his feet on this one. I think he heard the warning in my voice: I will write about you and tell everyone not to hire you. Ana then reports that the ceiling has been closed. The iguanas have no more access to my bedroom. Now three of them regularly sunbathe on the roof that overhangs the pond. Yes, you read right, not one iguana, THREE! "Don’t make them comfortable, they’ll settle in. You have to make them unhappy. Scare them," I instruct from Manila, where I consider buying a gun just to scare the darn things away. Since I’m not decided on that option, I surf the Net looking for information on iguanas, something that might help.

I visit The Green Iguana Lounge and something that wants to be the ultimate web site for green iguana owners. Apparently they are pets in the US. The lady who runs the web site prepared a paper to deliver at the launch of World Iguana Day but no one showed up (not even a green iguana) so she put the paper on the Net. One also senses much unhappiness and low-grade conflict simmering among iguana owners. Somewhere in those cyberbushes a plot for a sinister cold-blooded B-movie is brewing.

In the meantime I learn that green iguanas are vegetarians but, according to Ana and Pedro, bayawak eat meat, chickens, birds, furry creatures. They’re not touching my fish. Arnel, my gardener, plans to trap them using rotting meat as bait. Maybe green iguanas are not bayawak. Maybe they’re green because they’re vegetarian and bayawak are brown because they’re carnivores.

"They’re not harmful," I tell Ana on the phone. "Some people in the US keep them as pets."

"No, ma’am," she says. "They have poison in their tails. Where I come from we make sure we don’t come in contact with their tail because if it touches you you get the shrinking disease. You lose weight then you get smaller and smaller until you die." Sometimes I think Ana ghostwrote Alice in Wonderland for Lewis Carroll. Maybe I should throw my body in the path of the bayawak’s tail so I can lose all the weight I’ve put on since I stopped smoking.

"They refuse to move when I shoo them," Ana says. She is convinced they are evil creatures come to get me.

"It’s because they think that if they don’t move you’ll think they’re not there. You know, the frog trick? They think they look like stones. You have to attack them and make them uncomfortable," I say, wondering where I got this information. I can tell from Ana’s desultory, "Really?" that she doesn’t believe me.

One week later, I know what kind of animal bore those holes through my screens but I really don’t know what to do about them. If you know, please send me e-mail at [email protected].

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Or you may want to join the writing class that starts on Saturday, September 7, 2 to 5 in the afternoon at the Filipinas Heritage Library. Then e-mail me for more info.