"The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes
are on the smaller, female one, back-to,
her wicked tail straight up and over,
red as a red-hot wire."
“Brazil, January
1, 1502”
Brett Millier says that the above poem was part of a
“second-wave of poems about her adopted country” (300), which Bishop began to
write in 1959. “Brazil,
January 1, 1502” appeared in The New
Yorker on 2 January 1960. (Millier 301)
I start this post about Bishop’s next letter to Grace with
these lines and facts because this letter, dated 12 November 1959, commences
with a lively account of lizards at Samambaia.
As I mentioned last time, this November letter breaks a long
gap, the previous letter being dated August. It is clear that the letters between
them had continued, but what happened to them is unknown. Bishop begins this
one with a declaration, “I’m not sure who owes whom a letter now.” This
bespeaks of a steady exchange, not a three month silence, because Bishop also
thought that their last epistles “crossed.”
Without any more preliminaries, Bishop launched right into
her exotic account, one I’m sure she knew would make Grace laugh.
She started with a brief weather report: “a quick rain and
hail storm with the sun shining at the same time.” One result: “everything
looks dazzling.” Another result: “the lizards have started to come out again.”
It is her account of the lizards’ activities that relate
directly to what she was writing at the time. “Watching the lizards’ love-making
is one of our quiet sports here!” She tells Grace about the ritual: “the male
chases the female, bobbing his head up and down and puffing his throat in and
out like a balloon.” One wonders if Grace could imagine this courting display
(the only place she might have seen it was on the pages of a National Geographic). Bishop observed
that the males were “much larger and uglier” than the females. In this chase,
Bishop notes, “the female runs ahead and if she’s feeling friendly she raises
her tail up over her back like a wire — it is bright red, almost neon-red,
underneath.” All this chasing was often for naught, as Bishop reported: “He hardly
ever seems to catch up with her.”
These shenanigans were not always confined to outside.
Bishop informed her aunt that “sometimes the cat will pursue a huge one right
through the living-room.” Imagining that might be even harder! This pursuit
“usually” happened “when we have squeamish lady guests, who shriek.” The main
instigator of this race was Bishop’s cat Tobias, whom, she thought, probably
did “it on purpose, really.”
When you Google lizards and Brazil, you get hundreds of
possibilities and thousands of images. Even when I narrowed it to mating
rituals, I could find nothing to match Bishop’s description. I asked Carmen
Oliveira, the author of Flores Rares e
Banalíssimas, if she had any idea which lizard Bishop described. She sent
me the photo below and told me that in Portuguese, lizard is legarto. Even if it is not exactly correct, it is a nice lizard that looks like it has attitude!
The 12 November 2018 letter is as wide-ranging as all the
others Bishop wrote to her aunt. The next paragraph, and next post, brings in
one of their favourite subjects: food.
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