The fauna of Tenerife are not very numerous. There is man, his dog, his donkey, his goats, his pigs; there are the feral cats, lean, supercilious and wary, that patrol the restaurants, posing for scraps of food; there are the melancholic and flatulent camels, shipped over from Morocco to give the tourist his romantic ride-of-a-lifetime in a wilderness where camels never were; there are chimps, crocodiles and other exotics, brought in to embellish the Zoo, for wherever there is a package holiday there is a coach tour, and wherever coach tours exist there arises, by and by, a Zoo, or at the very least a Nature Park, requiring some resident exotics to entertain the kiddies; there may be, in addition, a bird or two, couple of seagulls, a visiting pigeon, a red kite, a passing finch. All these, however, are incomers, or newcomers, or come-overs. None of them could be described as aboriginal or endemic, a description which, in my perhaps oversimplified view, must be restricted to two species: the oldest inhabitants, here by right of tenure, have to be the cockroach and the lizard.

Cockroaches exist wherever there are bathroom floors and bare feet. They love the dwellings of man and will establish themselves wherever there is a murky crevice or a desirable fissure. They lurk behind archetraves and skirting tiles and the smart new toaster on the kitchen work-top. At times, it seems that the beggars are everywhere. If you are suffering one of their periodic infestations you are committed to a hopeless war of attrition, hysterically brandishing a canister labelled Para hormigas y cucarachas, and boring your friends with wordy accounts of the nimble little devil you zapped yesterday, making a zig-zag run for his bolt-hole under the washing machine. Their principal mode of entry is via the drains and sinks, and is facilitated by a peculiarity of local plumbing, which leads all sink outlets to a central point, a kind of concourse, called an octopus, where they are united with the main drain. The enterprising cockroach, emerging from his base in the dank black recesses below, climbs the main drain, and once arrived at the octopus makes his exit choice, be it the shower or the bidet, the kitchen (with a choice of two sinks) or the bathroom washbasin. Their ingenuity is astonishing. And they are so infernally tenacious of life. They run like streakers, or like wide receivers in gridiron football. They do not stop in their tracks when you catch them with a squirt of toxic vapour, or do anything more than play dead if you catch them a whack with your broom. They may lie on their backs for a while, gently suspiring (through their bellies, I understand), but they are up and off before you can fetch your wife to see. And it is useless, not to say cruel and inhuman, to scoop them up and flush them down the lavatory. I am almost ashamed to admit that I have tried this. Submerged by the thunderous inundation of the flush, they surface again, striking out valiantly, like the shipwrecked seamen in Virgil, nantes in gurgite vasto, swimming in a wild waste of water. It takes a lot to kill a cockroach.

I do not wish to exaggerate my loathing of what is, after all, one of the more successful of God’s creatures, but they have given me some unsettling moments. How can I ever forget that night in the timeshare apartment? I sat on the edge of my bed, in my new silk pyjamas, thinking of nothing but pleasure and a life of unbridled self-indulgence, when suddenly, from behind me, came the characteristic fluting wail of a woman who has caught sight of a cockroach, and simultaneously, a blow between the shoulder-blades, fit to floor a karate master. “Look out!”, my wife cried, whether to me or the cockroach I never discovered; I know she missed the insect, which darted away under my bed, while I lay stunned.. This being a timeshare apartment, and therefore representative of all desirable standards of comfort and service, nothing would do but that she should ring reception and inform the night porter that roaches were on the rampage in room 510. I expected him to suggest that we should take a milky drink and pull the sheets up over our heads, but his response was, in all fairness, a good deal more impressive than that. Within five minutes a squad of qualified cockroach-operatives arrived, three or four burly men wearing what could have passed for space helmets, and carrying on their backs yellow tanks filled, I could judge, with noxious liquid to vaporise the invader. They were overalled from chin to ankle, and their trousers were tucked into their socks, always a good precaution when cockroaches are around. Warning us to keep all external doors and windows tight shut, they stepped out resolutely onto the terrace - one small step for a man, it might have been said, if anyone had thought of the phrase, but a huge leap for roach busters. Then we watched while they turned their death-dealing hoses on to the scampering hordes. It was quite impressive really, but we could see why they had warned us to keep doors tight shut; it was not so much to keep the cockroaches out as to keep the oxygen in. The acrid whiff of the lethal gas hung around after they had gone, and crept in around the frames of closed doors behind drawn curtains. We slept with the sheets pulled up over our heads.

The next morning we expected to see the terrace strewn with the corpses of the fallen, doomed adventurers punished for the insolence of jumping into a pair of Gent’s Silk Pyjamas (XXL), but the results of all that vaporising were oddly disappointing. Half a dozen, perhaps, had assumed the position of final indifference, with their legs and feelers in the air, but I was convinced there had been more, and decided that many had survived the attack and reeled away into the oleander bushes to take a breather and regroup. There is a strong possibility that for cockroaches of a certain physique and experience a snort of poison results in nothing more lethal than a high and a hangover. I have seen evidence of this, or at least something like a provisional indication, in, of all places, church. Our church is spotless, its pews lovingly polished, its tiled floor assiduously mopped with fragrantly disinfectant fluids, its brass agleam, its altar furniture stark and seemly; no place for one of the Blattidae to romp and wallow, surely. Then how came it that one morning at communion, standing to recite the Nicene Creed, and deeply involved in its rhythms, I should catch sight of a cockroach, a big cockroach, about the length of a cheroot, clearly out of sorts, clearly - what’s that grand Irish word?- peloothered, reeling and rolling towards the open-toed shoe of a lady in the pew in front of me? My immediate response to this was to close my eyes, as though to shut out of my consciousness such an ugly intrusion on a spiritual moment. I admitted as much to a friend, who promptly accused me of cowardice, physical and moral. She considered that I should have taken steps, to deal with the cockroach or at least to warn the lady of her peril. But what was I meant to do? Should I, there and then, on the austere heights of the Nicene Creed, have tapped the lady on the shoulder and murmured, discreetly, “Excuse me, my dear madam, but are you aware that there is a cockroach - drunken, belligerent, and huge - even now on course for your great toe?” Or should I have waited until, judging my moment, I could dart forward and stamp on the intruder, filling the whole church with rattling echoes? I suppose I might have tried the chivalrous ploy of removing my shoe and tempting the cockroach with a sight of my own big toe, but I cannot think that would have worked, and I am sure that had I adopted any of these measures I would never again have been admitted to communion. I closed my eyes, therefore, and when I opened them, after the words “the life of the world to come”, the cockroach had disappeared. His appearance in the first place may have been a hallucination; his disappearance a miracle; whatever the truth of it, I felt mightily relieved, and did not tell the chaplain afterwards, for fear of upsetting him.

Everyone has a cockroach story, the essence of which is that everyone’s nasty cockroach is bigger, nimbler, more resourceful, infinitely more repellent, than anyone else’s nasty cockroach. Over the coffee cups anecdotes are matched, with the curious result that the creatures acquire a sort of cultural status: celebrated in fable, they become almost popular.Then it is not of cockroaches we tell, but of something else, a “cockroach-ness”, a plausible character of the sort that literature develops and promotes. Through storytelling we are reconciled to nature’s worst; thus burglars and sneak-thieves, muggers, murderers, timeshare salesmen, even, can acquire a hold on our respect, possibly on our affections. I do not know if cockroaches have ever attained what might be called “the pardon of fiction”, though there has been at least one cockroach, called Archy (or rather, “archy”, in lower case), who in my view has scuttled up the Olympic heights of literary esteem. For those who may not have heard of him, Archy (archy), as represented by Don Marquis (or don marquis), is a vers libre poet, whose soul has transmigrated into the body of a cockroach. In his nightly foragings round the office, with its twice-bitten snacks and discarded sandwiches, he is often obliged to take swift refuge from the attentions of Mehitabel, a demi-mondaine cat, a superbly free spirit with a lurid past which she relates to Archy between attempts to get her paws on him. These he evades by hiding himself among the keys of Mr Marquis’ typewriter, and then uses the machine to type his poems, lyrical, historical, moral, observational and reflective, for Mr Marquis to find when he comes to the office next morning. Archy has one transcriptional problem: being too weak to work the shift key, he cannot produce capital letters, with the result that all proper nouns, and all the lines of his spendid verses, have to begin in lower case. This is what makes him a vers libre poet, model 1920s-1930s; he is in tune with the typography of his time I thought of Archy a year or two ago, when a young editor told me that my own verses were “old fashioned”, adding: “The practice of beginning a line with a capital letter has virtually died out in English verse”. I wrote back to him - I hoped, good-humouredly - regretting my failure to please him, but remarking by the way that English verse had evidently taken a long time to revert to Archy the Cockroach and the inoperable shift key. He missed the allusion, I think, which was perhaps as well, for it was a sneaky sort of thing to say, a cockroachy thing, doing scant service to the only Blatta to rise to literary honours. This much I can say, you will not find Archy’s like in Tenerife, where the quality of the domestic cockroach is sadly debased.
Our lizards, now, are a different class of fauna altogether - and yes, we do have domestic lizards. House lizards, called lagartijos, are quite engaging little reptiles, no more than two to two and a half inches long, goggle-eyed, sucker-footed and iridescent green from living in the dark and dank recesses under the roof space. The first lizard to visit us after we had bought our apartment we called Lorenzo, el lagartijo luminoso de Los Gigantes, “Lawrence, the luminous little lizard of Los Gigantes”, and what a splendid fellow he was - an addition to our home and a conversation point if he happened to come out when we had friends to dinner. We had other lizards after that, and we called them all Lorenzo in his honour. We even used the name as a common noun, as in “I saw a lorenzo this morning”, or “This is the time of year when you get the lorenzos”. These little beasts are not scuttlers and panic-strikers, like the cockroaches. Their principal qualities are discretion and a vigilant stillness. They have an odd ability to know when they are being watched. Gaze at them for as long as you please and they will not move. Nod off, or look aside for a moment, and they have either disappeared or managed to traverse half the wall and stand stock-still before your attention returns to them. You can see them almost apologising for intruding on your privacy. This is an animal muy sympatico, an interesting study, not frightening to the ladies, not liable to arouse in gentlemen the instinct to display masculinity with a club, cleanly by and large, and pardonable for his habit of popping out to leave his little pellets in the whitewash. It would be too much to say that no house should be without one, but I have never lost a wink of sleep over a resident lagartijo, and I have never heard of anyone being employed as a lizard exterminator.
The outdoor lizard, your real lagarto, is less of a softie. He grows to a length of perhaps six inches, or even a little longer, and he squats, coal-black and scaly, sunning himself on the baking cliffs, or in the crevices of walls built dry-stone fashion out of the porous volcanic rock. You can see him sometimes, lodged in his little tunnel between the stones, looking out at you like an old gent at his front door, bright-eyed and crusty. In his posture, should you catch him in the open, poised and watchful, there is something, if not human, at least not remote from human likeness. I think it not wholly accidental that the Latin lacerta , meaning “lizard”, closely resembles lacertus, the word for “upper arm", though I could not say which meaning came first - whether arms made someone think of lizards, or lizards suggested a resemblance to arms. There is a resemblance, perhaps, between the fluid sculpture of the arm and the lizard's lithe muscularity.

There are giant lizards in the Canaries - if you will accept a length of three feet or so as “giant”; it would certainly strike me as adequate, if I ever clapped eyes on one, which I am unlikely to do, for they are a shy and strictly protected species. These creatures, deemed “prehistoric” on zoological authority, are of the genus and phylum Lacerta Simonyi, a Clan Cameron of the lizard kind, and very grand and baleful they look. Even the photographs make me think I would approach one with respect, a step at a time, always ready to retract anything done or said out of turn. Pliny the Elder, who mentions the Canaries in his Natural History, apparently supposing them to consist of two islands, Canaria (“dog land”) and Capraria (“goat land”), tells of giant lizards on Capraria. Whether he is to be relied on is another matter, since in his nature studies he has an engaging tendency (which I confess I recognize in myself) to go by hearsay and they-do-say; but in this instance I am inclined to believe, at least that there were big lizards on one of the islands. In modern times the home of these classical giants has been some wild rocks in the sea off the north-western tip of the island of El Hierro, called the Roques de Salmor. The Roques are at one end of a great semi-circular sweep of steep coast, the southern wall of a huge caldera. The northern wall sank under the waves long explosions ago, leaving a vast bay called El Golfo, “The Gulf”. I like to think of them, the giant lizards, in aeons before the catastrophe, nestling in the hot crater and climbing its walls. That would have been something for tourists to see.

Of recent decades there has been a crisis among the giant lizards of El Hierro, and though this may well be a routine ecological problem, legend blames a tourist for their departure from the Roques. The story goes that this man, allegedly a German (at least in British accounts of the affair) attempted to steal a giant lizard for his private collection, and bribed a taxi-driver to help him with the abduction. A likely story, one might say. Consider the problem. First, to get out to the Roques, in a sea that is never less than lively, clamber up the sheer rock, get a half-nelson on your selected reptile, wrestle him into the boat, row him ashore. Then, with the taxi-driver’s help, force him into the boot of the Mercedes, along with the jack, the wheel brace and other paraphernalia, perhaps stunning him with a blow from the tyre lever, or maybe tranquillizing him with a carefully-measured injection. Or perhaps he just sat on the tourist’s knee while the car sped to Valverde airport, where they popped him into a sack to make him look more convincing as a piece of luggage. I do not think so. Not at Valverde. Valverde is a tiny airport where the crews of the piston-engined sky-vans can double as baggage checkers, at need, and they are not likely to be fooled by the first sackful of lizard to come off the carousel.
No: on due reflection, and with detailed reference to probable circumstances, the tale of the kidnapped lizard does not ring wholly true (which by no means detracts from its seductiveness as a story) There may be some smidgen of truth in it, but the sober general fact seems to be that when the lizard population on Hierro was observed to be falling, no doubt wilting from the attentions of too many amateur naturalists, the survivors were rounded up (at which the mind also boggles), taken away from their residence on the Roques, and housed in a special lagartario, a home for distressed lizards, elsewhere in the island, where they were to be watched over and encouraged to feed and breed. I understand that the stock now flourishes, and specimens may even be put on show in their new habitat, secure from the attentions of rogue taxi-drivers and German lacertomanes.

Quite recently it has been discovered that Tenerife has its own colony of giant lizards. They have been discovered in the malpais, the “badlands”, beyond the Punta de Teno in the north west. I am very pleased about this. Not to have had them would have been, somehow, a confession of inadequacy; for what is the use of having a casino and a symphony orchestra here on Capraria, if the island cannot boast a Plinian lizard? I hope, however, for their honour and safety, that they are left to live their lives and love their loves in the aboriginal scrub. I dread the day when some enterprising businessman will light upon the idea of building LizardLand, A Thrilling Educational Experience for All The Family, Children and Over-65s Half Price. (A free glass of sangria on presentation of this voucher). Or a Prehistoric Park, See the Island’s Original Inhabitants in their Volcanic Habitat, Free Bus From All Resort Hotels. (NB Only one glass of sangria per voucher; this offer does not apply to children and invalids) Then the lizards will go the way of the imported parrots and chimps and camels, fading out of the realm of nature, becoming objects to clap into captivity for the temporary distraction of the easily bored and the considerable profit of the entrepreneur, who alone among the fauna of this island is never seen but all too visible.