José Saramago - The Elephant's Journey

THE FOLLOWING DAY, the convoy slept in until late, the archduke and archduchess in the house of a local family of nobles, the others scattered here and there throughout the small town of bolzano, the cuirassiers' horses distributed among whichever stables still had room, and the men billeted in private houses, because camping outside would have been a most unappealing prospect, if not impossible, unless the company still had strength enough to spend the rest of the night clearing snow. The hardest task was to find a billet for suleiman. After looking high and low, they found a kind of shelter, a tiled roof supported by four pillars, which offered him little more protection than if he were to sleep à la belle étoile, which is the lyrical french version of the portuguese expression ao relento, although that is equally inappropriate, really, because relento means the night damp, a kind of dew or mist, meteorological trifles when compared with these alpine snows that would easily justify such poetical descriptions as spotless blanket or mortal bed. There he was left no fewer than three bun dies of forage to satisfy his appetite, whether there and then or during the night, for suleiman is as subject to his appetite as any human being. As for the mahout, he was lucky enough, when lodgings were being allocated, to be given a merciful mattress on the floor and a no less merciful blanket, whose calorific power was increased when he spread his greatcoat on top, even though said coat was still somewhat damp. The family who took him in had but one room with three beds, one for the mother and father, another for their three boys, aged between nine and fourteen, and the third for the septuagenarian grandmother and the two maids. The only payment they demanded of fritz was that he tell them some stories about elephants, which fritz was glad to do, beginning with his pièce de résistance, namely, the birth of ganesh, and finishing with the recent, and in his view, heroic ascent of the alps of which, we believe, quite enough has been said. Then the father, from his bed, while his wife lay snoring beside him, mentioned that, according to ancient histories and subsequent legends, the famous carthaginian general hannibal, having crossed the pyrenees, had marched through more or less this same region of the alps with his army of men and african elephants, who had given the soldiers of rome such a hard time, although more modern versions state that they were not really african elephants, with huge ears and vast bodies, but so-called forest elephants, not much bigger than horses. But there were heavy snowfalls then too, he added, and no clear paths to follow either, You don't seem to like the romans very much, said fritz, The truth is that we're more austrian than italian here, in german our town is called bozen, To be honest, I prefer bolzano, said the mahout, it's easier on the ear, That's because you're portuguese, Having traveled from portugal doesn't make me portuguese, Where are you from then, sir, if you don't mind my asking, I was born in india and I'm a mahout, A mahout, Yes, mahout is the name given to people who drive elephants, In that case, the carthaginian general must have had mahouts in his army too, He wouldn't be able to take elephants anywhere if he didn't have someone to drive them, He took them to war, To a war waged by men, Well, there isn't really any other kind. The man was a philosopher.

Late the next morning, his strength restored and his stomach more or less consoled, fritz thanked the family for their hospitality and went to see if he still had an elephant to look after. He had dreamed that suleiman had left bolzano at dead of night and wandered off into the surrounding mountains and valleys, in the grip of a kind of intoxication that could only have been the effect of the snow, although the bibliography on the subject, with the exception of hannibal's disasters of war in the alps, has, in more recent times, been limited to recording, with tedious monotony, the broken legs and arms of those who love skiing. Yes, those were the days, when a person would fall from the top of a mountain and arrive, splat, a thousand meters below, at the bottom of a valley already crammed with the ribs, tibias and skulls of other equally unfortunate adventurers. Ah, yes, that was the life. A few cuirassiers were already gathered in the square, some on horseback, others not, and the rest were arriving to join them. It was snowing, but only lightly. Ever curious, out of necessity, given that no one bothered to tell him anything directly, the mahout went to ask the sergeant what was happening. He needed to say only a polite good morning, because the sergeant, knowing at once what he wanted, told him the latest news, We're going to bressanone, or brixen, as we say in german, it will be a short journey today, less than ten leagues. Then, after a pause intended to arouse expectation, he added, Apparently, in brixen, we're going to get a few days of much-needed rest, Well, I can only speak for myself, but suleiman can barely put one foot in front of the other, this is no climate for him, he might catch pneumonia and I'd like to see what his highness would do then with the poor creature's bones, It'll be all right, said the sergeant, things haven't gone so badly up to now. Fritz had no option but to agree and then he went to see how suleiman was. He found him in his shelter, apparently perfectly calm, but the mahout, still under the spell of that uncomfortable dream, couldn't escape the feeling that suleiman was pretending, as if he really had left bolzano in the middle of the night to romp around in the snows, perhaps climbing to the highest peaks, where the snow, they say, is eternal. On the ground there wasn't a trace of the food they had left him, not even a piece of straw, which at least meant that they could reasonably expect that he wouldn't start whining with hunger as small children do, even though, and this is not widely known, he, the elephant, is really another kind of child, not in his physical makeup, but as regards his imperfect intellect. In fact, we don't know what the elephant is thinking, but then we don't know what a child is thinking either, apart from what the child chooses to tell us, and one shouldn't, on principle, place too much trust in that. Fritz signaled that he wanted to get on, and the elephant, quickly and precisely as if wanting to be forgiven for some mischief, offered him one tusk to rest his foot on, just as if it were a stirrup, then coiled his trunk around his body, like an embrace. In one movement, he lifted fritz onto his back, where he left him comfortably installed. Fritz glanced behind him, and, contrary to his expectations, found not the slightest trace of ice on his hindquarters. Therein lay a mystery that he would probably never be able to solve. Either the elephant, any elephant and this one in particular, has some kind of self-regulating heating system capable, after a necessary period of mental concentration, of melting a reasonably thick layer of ice, or else the effort of going up and down mountains at some speed had caused the aforesaid ice to detach itself from his skin despite the labyrinthine tangle of hairs that had given fritz so much grief. Some of nature's mysteries seem, at first sight, impenetrable, and prudence perhaps counsels us to leave them be, in case a piece of raw knowledge should bring us more bad than good. Just look, for example, at what happened to adam in paradise when he ate what appeared to be an ordinary apple. It may be that the fruit itself was a delicious piece of work by god, although there are those who say that it wasn't an apple at all, but a slice of watermelon, but, in either case, the seeds had been placed there by the devil. They were black after all.

The archducal coach is waiting for its noble, illustrious, distinguished passengers. Fritz directs the elephant to the place reserved for him in the cortège, behind the coach, but at a prudent distance, not wishing to anger the archduke by the near presence of a trickster like him, who, while not going to the classic extreme of selling a pig in a poke, had nevertheless duped a few poor bald men, among them some brave cuirassiers, with the promise that their hair would grow as thick as the hair of that unfortunate mythic figure samson. He need not have worried, the archduke didn't even look in his direction, he seemed to have other things on his mind, he wanted to reach bressanone before nightfall and they were already late. He dispatched the aide-de-camp to take his orders to the head of the convoy, orders that could be summarized in three almost synonymous words, speed, alacrity, haste, allowing, of course, for the delaying effects of the snow that had begun to fall more thickly now, and the state of the roads, which, normally bad, were now even worse. It may only be a journey of ten leagues, as the helpful sergeant had informed the mahout, but if, by current calculations, ten leagues are fifty thousand meters or some tens of thousands of paces in old measurements, there's no avoiding the facts, numbers are numbers, then the people and animals who have just set off for yet another painful day's journeying are going to suffer greatly, especially those who are not blessed with a roof, which is most of them. How pretty the snow looks seen through the glass, the archduchess maria remarked ingenuously to her husband, the archduke maximilian, but for those of us outside, our eyes blinded by the wind and our boots sodden with snow, with the chilblains on our hands and feet burning like the fires of hell, it would be timely to ask the heavens just what we did to deserve such a punishment. As the poet said, the pine trees may wave at the sky, but the sky does not answer. It doesn't answer men either, even though most of them have known the right prayers since they were children, the problem is finding a language that god can understand. They say that the cold, when it's born, is intended for everyone, but some get more than their fair share of it. There is a vast difference between traveling in a coach lined with furs and blankets fitted with a thermostat and having to walk along in the flailing snow or with your foot in a frozen stirrup that feels, in the cold, as tight as a tourniquet. What did cheer them up was the news the sergeant had passed on to fritz about the possibility of having a good rest in bressanone, news that spread like a spring breeze throughout the convoy, but then the pessimists, singly and altogether, reminded the forgetful of the dangers of the isarco pass, not to mention another still worse that lies ahead, in austrian territory, the brenner pass. Had hannibal dared to go through either, we would probably not have had to wait for the battle of zama in order to watch, at our local cinema, the last, definitive defeat of the carthaginian army by scipio africanus, a film about the romans produced by benito's eldest son, vittorio mussolini. On that occasion, the elephants proved of no use to the great hannibal.