José Saramago - The Elephant's Journey

The first to appear were the cuirassiers. They led their horses out so that they would not slip on the gangway. The cavalry horses, normally the objects of great care and attention, have a rather neglected air about them, evidence that they need a good brushing to smooth their coats and make their manes gleam. As they appear to us now, one might say that they bring shame upon the austrian cavalry, a most unfair judgment that would seem to have forgotten the long, long journey from valladolid to rosas, seven hundred kilometers of continuous marching, of wild winds and rain, interspersed by the occasional bout of sweltering sun and, above all, dust and more dust. It's hardly surprising, then, that the newly disembarked horses have the rather faded look of secondhand goods. Nevertheless, we can see how, at a short distance from the quay, behind the curtain formed by the carts, carriages and wagons, the soldiers, under the direct command of the captain we have already met, are doing their best to improve the ap pearance of their mounts, so that the guard of honor for the archduke, when the moment arrives for him to disembark, will be as dignified as one would expect at any event involving the illustrious house of habsburg. Since the archduke and the archduchess will be the last to leave the ship, it is highly likely that the horses will have time to recover at least a little of their usual splendor. At the moment, the baggage is being unloaded, along with the dozens of chests, coffers and trunks containing the clothes and the thousand and one objects and adornments that constitute the noble couple's ever-expanding trousseau. The general public are also here, and in great numbers too. The rumor that the archduke of austria was about to disembark and with him an elephant from india had raced through the city like a lit fuse, and the immediate result was that dozens of men and women, all equally curious, had rushed down to the port, and in no time there were hundreds of them, so many that they were getting in the way of the unloading and loading. They couldn't see the archduke, who had not yet emerged from his cabin, but the elephant was there, standing on the deck, huge and almost black, with that thick trunk as flexible as a whip, with those tusks like pointed sabers, which, in the imagination of the inquisitive, unaware of suleiman's placid temperament, would doubtless be used as powerful weapons of war before being transformed, as they inevitably will be, into the crucifixes and reliquaries that have filled the christian world with objects carved out of ivory. The person gesticulating and giving orders on the quay is the archduke's steward. One rapid glance of his experienced eye is enough to decide which cart or wagon should carry which coffer, chest or trunk. He is a compass, who, however much you turn him this way and that, however you twist and twirl him, will always point north. We would go so far as to say that the importance of stewards, and indeed street-sweepers, to the proper functioning of the nations has yet to be studied. Now they are unloading the forage from the hold in which it has traveled alongside all the luxury items belonging to the archduke and the archduchess, but which, from now on, will be transported in carts chosen mainly for their functional nature, that is, being capable of accommodating the largest possible number of bundles. The water trough travels with the forage, but this time it is empty, since, as we will see, on the wintry roads of northern italy and austria, there will be no lack of water to fill it as often as proves necessary. Now it is time for the elephant suleiman to be disembarked. The noisy crowd of ordinary genoans is abuzz with impatience and excitement. If one were to ask these men and women who they were keenest to see close up, the archduke or the elephant, we think the elephant would win by a large margin. The eager expectation of this small multitude found release in a great roar, when, with his trunk, the elephant lifted onto his back a man carrying a small bag of belongings. It was subhro or fritz, depending on your preference, the carer, the keeper, the mahout, who had suffered such humiliation at the hands of the archduke and who now, in the eyes of the people of genoa gathered on the quay, will enjoy an almost perfect triumph. Seated on the elephant's shoulders, his bag between his legs, and dressed now in his grubby work clothes, he gazed down with all the arrogance of a conqueror at the people watching him open-mouthed, which, they say, is the most absolute sign of amazement, but which, perhaps because it is so absolute, is rarely, if ever, seen in real life. Whenever he was riding on solomon's back, the world always seemed small to subhro, but today, on the quay of the port of genoa, when he was the main focus of interest for the hundreds entranced by the spectacle before them, whether that consisted of his own person or the vast animal obeying his every order, fritz contemplated the crowd with a kind of scorn, and, in a rare flash of lucidity and relativity, it occurred to him that, all things considered, archdukes, kings and emperors were really nothing more than mahouts mounted on elephants. With a flick of his cane, he directed suleiman toward the gangway. Those members of the public who were closest drew back in alarm, even more so when the elephant, halfway down the gangway, and for reasons that will remain forever unknown, decided to trumpet so loudly that, if you'll forgive the comparison, it sounded to their ears like the trumpets of jericho and sent the more fearful among them scattering. When it stepped onto the quay, though, perhaps as the result of an optical illusion, the elephant appeared to have suddenly shrunk in height and bulk. He still had to be viewed from below, but it was no longer necessary to lean back one's head quite so much. That is the effect of habit, the beast, while still of a terrifying size, seemed to the genoans to have lost its initial aura of eighth wonder of the sublunary world, now it was just an animal called an elephant, nothing more. Still full of his recent discovery about the nature of power and its supports, fritz was most displeased by the change that had taken place in the minds of the people, but the coup de grâce was still to be delivered by the emergence on deck of the archduke and archduchess, accompanied by their immediate entourage, and, above all, by the novel sight of two children being carried in the arms of two women, who doubtless were or still are their wet nurses. We can tell you now that one of these children, a little girl of two, will become the fourth wife of philip the second of spain and the first of portugal. As they say, small causes, large effects. We hope thus to satisfy the curiosity of those readers puzzled by the lack of information about the archduke and archduchess's numerous offspring, sixteen children, if you recall, of whom little ana was the first. As we were saying, the archduke had only to appear for there to be an explosion of applause and cheering, which he acknowledged with an indulgent wave of his gloved right hand. The archduke and archduchess did not use the gangway that had, until then, served as the unloading ramp, but another beside it, newly washed and scrubbed, in order to avoid the slightest contact with any grime left behind by the horses' hooves, the elephant's huge legs or the bare feet of the longshoremen. We should congratulate the archduke on the efficiency of his steward, who has gone back on board to inspect the berths, just in case a diamond bracelet should have fallen down a gap between two floorboards. Outside, the cuirassiers waiting for his highness to descend have formed up into two tight lines so as to accommodate all the horses, twenty-five on either side. Now, if we did not fear committing a grave anachronism, we would like to imagine that the archduke walked to his carriage beneath a canopy of fifty unsheathed swords, however, it is more than likely that such acts of homage were thought up by some frivolous future century. The archduke and the archduchess have just stepped into the ornate, brilliant and yet sturdy carriage awaiting them. Now we only have to wait for the convoy to organize itself, with twenty cuirassiers in front to forge the way ahead and thirty behind to close it off, like a rapid intervention force, in the unlikely but not impossible event of an attack by bandits. True, we are not in calabria or sicily, but in the civilized lands of liguria, to be followed by lombardy and the veneto, but since, as popular wisdom has so often warned us, the fairest silk is soonest stained, the archduke is quite right to protect his rearguard. It remains to be seen what will fall from the heavens. Meanwhile, the transparent, luminous morning has gradually clouded over.