oh

It was just a normal Monday afternoon... when I noticed an iguana on the balcony. Paschalis noticed it too, and engaged it in a hissing contest. I put an end to that -- with a pane of glass between them.

The babysitter said, don’t worry, you see those all the time, crawling the walls, one of them got in my window, and I was afraid to sleep, they’re harmless, though. (She talks like that.) That was a gecko, I said, indicating the size of a cute little mosquito-eating gecko with my forefinger and thumb. The iguana on the balcony is no native to Greece, I tried to explain, and anyway, the thing was longer than my arm. And κακάσχημος, I told her, which is a very strong word for ugly.

With the doors and windows closed and locked, I watched it. And it watched me. It went behind the ficus and watched me some more.

Then it went vertical.



It sat on the rail.



And then it started down the bougainvillea, presumably the same way it had come up. (But from where? It seemed less likely that it had escaped -- from a house in this neighborhood, inhabited mostly by the elderly? -- than that it had been abandoned.)



At which point, it was captured in a laundry basket and taken to the neighborhood pet store. The proprietor said an iguana like that would fetch 150 euros. I’ll give it to you for 50, said my intrepid co-captor. I’ve already got two, said the proprietor. I had visions of the thing spending the night in my house clawing at my laundry basket, and I quickly intervened. We’re not selling it, I made it clear to both of them, we just want to get rid of it. So the guy picked it up, declared it to have frozen (which explained its docility), and put it in a glowing orange tank with two other very fine members of its species. It seemed cozy in there. It was fine by me.