They know each other for more than ten years. They were born in distant places: one in the forests of the Venezuelan Amazon and the other, in the north cays of Camagüey. Both of them were rooted out of their grounds, as the settlers did with the African inhabitants, and they had to adapt themselves to the city´s habitat. The coexistence in the courtyard of a house, my house, has produced small stories, fruit of this atypical shock...: cultural?

That tiny black conch with yellow points walked for the first time in the soil of its new home in the morning in which its captors visited us. When its paws touched dry land, the chelonian went out quickly in all the directions. I make sure that in its brain a flirtatious comment resounded to describe its impressions: "... the most beautiful land that a turtle had seen”.

As work of a poor creativity, I named it, Banana to resemble the heroic bananas fallen down under its stomach and that then finished like garden fertilizer. His all-terrain movement, his strange manias of bloodhound, capable of chasing and of bitting everything for fun, and this perfect spatial recognition to be like a radar of the NASA, those thing make him extremely dangerous at ground level.

With these precedents, the biggest inhabitant of the micro-forest must coexist: the iguana Chucho. He is a kind of jumble of thorns, of Cactaceae - lizard without flowerpot, which every morning gets up early to look for his piece of favorite area. There he stays immovable. With the same devotion of the ancient Egyptians, he awaits for the Star king.

In contrast to the intrepid chelonian, the arrival of the new tenant to our hands turned out to be somewhat curious. As was told by his ancient owner, when he scarcely measured the same as a small lizard, the animal was moved in a trip from his habitat to the provincial head; he was going neither in a suitcase, nor in a sock, or in the top hat of some intoxicated magician. He made the trajectory in the brassiere of his discoverer.

In the moment in which Banana appears in the distance, several looks follow him carefully. First of all the look of my mother, guard of the home cleanliness. One day she wanted to establish an encirclement between the courtyard and the interior of the house. She desisted. On the other hand, she trained her six senses to catch the silent invader. In the second order, the irate eye of his partner watches him. He knows where the other goes. He knows that Banana will attack him. He wants to evade the other. He cannot. The frustration throws him to the load.

During the struggles, wags of the tail fly, exchanges of bites happen, skirmishes behind walls and domestic appliances, attacks as of medieval battering-rams and sometimes it is necessary to be sorry about scars, blood effusion... lots of blood. In the moment of the fateful meeting, a god as busy as Mars, joins the hands, closes the eyes and asks so that nothing should happen.

In general, a complaint of this type keeps the opponents away for a time. I am sure that the iguana also imagined it at first, but when they still have not cured the wounds and the memory of the facts remains fresh, the proprietor of the carapace turns to the collision as a pirate ship.

His ingenuousness remains unharmed, along with the idea of contemplating his friend like the most perfect creation of the universe. It is a mystery. The other, being condemned to this eternal comeback, to share the heat of the sun, to what his genes and male condition deny, he lays his body in the arid area and waits, without need for a clock, that it should be time to sleep.

I never said that the protagonists of this history were the absolute settlers of the courtyard, where the madness of Mother Nature pops often. There a Cuban turtle lives trying to win the love of them. She is a stubborn suitor with strong ambitions of conceiving a hybrid with the iguana or the chelonian. She does not know about fractiousness or indifferences. When three specimens are together, the “chaos” spreads over the corners and at the end, it implies all of us.

Responsible for the litter, nobody more than their proprietors wants to finish the contest. We want a courtyard with scenes similar to these sweet documentaries of Animal Planet, where the pets run comfortably together and play up to the weariness.

I know that one day Chucho and Banana will sign, at least, a lasting armistice and I dare to say more, the absolute peace. While I wait, I watch them through the window. I please myself with a not programmed truce: Will I be able to say: finally? Nothing of that, I go quickly towards them and, later, I ponder again in the plans of the slavery.

Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez