As I had to release the salamanders, like Free Willy But on another scale, I thought that what better occasion than for San Juan, on the summer solstice, given the legendary relationship of these amphibians with fire. Many extravagant things are attributed to salamanders (such as that preserved in honey and mixed with food they constitute a powerful aphrodisiac), but the most notable, as is known, is their ability to not burn and even to extinguish fire. It is also funny that the most famous person to maintain this, Pliny the Elder (Natural HistoryBook all his Roman life.
Anyway, I was saying that I had to release my salamanders, which deserves an explanation. I had collected them from a pond in Viladrau in their larval state, which is aquatic, and they have lived at home until they have metamorphosed and become miniature copies of the adult salamander that everyone knows, black and yellow (aposematism, it is called: striking features of poisonous animals to ward off predators). The pact—with myself—is that I take them out of the pond, which tends to dry up, which condemns the larvae, and I return them to the same place after offering them a temporary foster home. I have been doing this, which is now seen as almost a crime (and not nearly so, because salamanders are a protected species), for many years (when I started I was about the same age as Gerald Durrell in Corfu, and I also put water snakes in the bathtub), and I have become, without intending to, a specialist in these amphibians: I can even sex them, if I let you.
And I’m not saying it, that I know a lot about them: it is something that the salamanders themselves can attest, of which I have a very high survival rate that has reached 100% in this last breeding episode. Indeed, the seven larvae that I extracted from the pond, with such rustic means as a can of tennis balls, a plastic container of Krit de Cuétara cookies (krititas) and a kitchen strainer, have all survived for their reintroduction. Its care has required practically rendering one of the house’s sinks unusable, converted into a nursery of salamanders with two terrariums, one aquatic and semi (with a flat stone so they can stand on it when they undergo metamorphosis, since they would drown in water) and another completely terrestrial, with soil and moss, to which they are transferred when the change is complete. Add containers for the small prey that my beloved urodeles live on, supplies of mineral water, decorative plants, and various gadgets to provide food for the specimens, as well as a conspicuous reference library presided over by the indispensable The genus Salamandraby Seidel and Gerhardt (Chimaira, 2016).
My salamanders, although I don’t know if they are mine or I are theirs, given the servitude to which they force me, belong to the Franco-Catalan subspecies Salamandra salamandra terrestriswhich is the one in Montseny and is different from others on the peninsula such as ss almanzoris, lavish either brunette, Although there is quite a bit of confusion with all this about species. The name I love is the one given to the generic common salamander (salamander salamander) in English: fire salamanderfire salamander, which seems to come from old salamandrology and even alchemy. Which brings us back to St. John.
The summer solstice festival has always been my favorite since I was a teenager, because of the romanticism of the festivals and the precocious reading, a product of the youthful sentimental failures of the aforementioned festivals, which left me a lot of free time, The Golden Boughby Frazer, one of my favourite books despite its obsolescence (1922, the abbreviated version of almost 900 pages). On Saint John’s Day, June 24 and its eve, the official birth of Saint John the Baptist is celebrated (it would have been a great Day of the Dance), who baptised Jesus Christ and literally lost his head for Salome, it is not clear if it was a day of verbena. But in reality, says Frazer, what the festival did was to superimpose a Christian veneer on the whole series of pagan solstice celebrations in Europe, which were celebrated with bonfires. The idea of fire and fire festivals, of course, is to restore strength to the sun at that critical moment when it reaches its peak and begins its decline, to rekindle the flame so to speak. In Provence a boy was chosen as king to preside over the festival. The lad was selected for his ability to hunt woodpeckers, probably because of the association of these, whose males have red necks, with the sun (and the staccato (These bonfires were lit to scare away dragons, creatures related to fire such as salamanders, and believed to be more active around St. John’s Day. Frazer mentions a tradition according to which “pernicious dragons”, excited by the summer heat, “copulated in the air and poisoned wells and rivers by their semen falling into them”: you have to see how entertaining that is.) The golden branch. The witches and the brotherhood of the green wolf also came out through San Juan, luckily this one only in Jumièges, Normandy.
So last San Juan, June 24, my daughter Rita, her partner Ramón, their one-month-old baby, Mateo, the salamanders and I went on an afternoon excursion to the Can Batllic pond, where Rita, then pregnant, and I had picked them up on March 30. Mateo, huddled in a backpack, didn’t seem to notice much, but surely more than on his previous visit to the pond. I liked the idea of him coming because it was like closing the circle: the larvae had metamorphosed and he had been born. Everything followed its natural course, which would now culminate with the release of the salamanders on a day so propitious to the creatures of fire. On the way we saw two hares, greeted with joy by my companions, so I refrained from commenting that Frazer says that it was believed that witches transformed into these animals (even more than into cats) and that for this reason they were usually burned in the solstice bonfires. Once we reached the pond, next to the old farmhouse from 1724 that holds so many memories, I proceeded to circle it twice (some ceremony must be invented) and took the little salamanders out of their mini-travel terrarium, leaving them among the vegetation around the water. I cannot say whether they recognized their birthplace as larvae (mother salamanders give birth to their young alive by depositing them in the water), but they soon disappeared into the ground, dissolving their small splendor in the grass.
A great sadness overwhelmed me, after all we had been living together for three months, some festival loves lasted less. What would become of them? Of the salamanders I say. Beyond that melancholy, the act had no dramatic component, no matter how much Frazer put into it. Then I saw that my daughter had reserved her last salamander to release herself and was placing it in the palm of her hand before the dark, wide eyes of her son. Amphibian and baby seemed to look at each other as if they shared something that the rest of us missed. The sun, already very low, then emerged from the clouds and a reddish glow seemed to set the two creatures on fire. It was a magical moment. I don’t know what it will mean in Mateo’s life, but not all children have a salamander as their godmother, nor does fate give them a baptism of fire for Saint John.
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