The Collected Novels of José Saramago (433 page)

T
HERE ARE THE ALPS.
Yes, there they are, but you can hardly see them. The snow is falling softly, like scraps of cotton wool, but that softness is deceiving, as our elephant will tell you, for he is carrying on his back an ever more visible layer of ice, which the mahout should have noticed by now, were it not for the fact that he is from a hot country where this kind of winter is almost unimaginable. Of course in old india, in the north, there is no shortage of mountains and snowy peaks, but subhro, now known as fritz, never had the money to travel for his own pleasure and to see other places. His one experience of snow was in lisbon, a few weeks after arriving from goa, when, one cold night, he saw falling from the sky a white dust, like flour being sieved, which melted as soon as it touched the ground. Nothing like the white vastness before his eyes now, stretching for as far as he can see. Very soon, the scraps of cotton wool had become large, heavy flakes which, driven by the wind, beat against the mahout’s face. Sitting astride suleiman and wrapped in his greatcoat, fritz did not feel the cold partic ularly,
but those continuous, endless blows to the face troubled him as if they were some kind of dangerous threat. He had been told that from trent to bolzano was a mere stroll, some ten leagues, or a little less, a flea-jump away, but not in this weather, when the snow seemed to be possessed of claws with which to grasp and delay any and every movement, even breathing, as if unwilling to allow the imprudent traveler to leave, as suleiman knows, for despite the strength given him by nature, he can only drag himself painfully up those steep paths. We do not know what he is thinking, but, in the midst of these alps, we can be sure of one thing, he is not a happy elephant. Apart from the occasions when the cuirassiers ride past as best they can on their frozen mounts, uphill and downhill, to see how the convoy is coping and to avoid any dispersals or diversions that could mean death to anyone who might lose their way in that icy place, the path seems to exist only for the elephant and his mahout. Having grown used, since their departure from valladolid, to being close to the carriage carrying the archduke and archduchess, the mahout misses seeing it there before him, although we dare not speak for the elephant because, as we said earlier, we do not know what he is thinking. The archducal carriage is somewhere up ahead, but there is no sign of it, nor of the cart laden with forage, which should be following immediately behind them. The mahout looked back to see if this was so, and that providential glance made him notice the layer of ice covering suleiman’s hindquarters. Although he knew nothing of winter sports, it seemed to him that the ice was fairly thin and fragile, probably due to the heat from the animal’s body, which would not allow the ice to set completely. At least that’s something, he thought. However, before things got
any worse, he needed to remove it. Taking infinite care so as not to slip, the mahout crawled along the elephant’s back until he reached the offending sheet of ice, which turned out to be neither as thin nor as fragile as had at first seemed. One should never trust ice, that is the first important lesson to learn. Stepping onto a frozen sea might give others the impression that we can walk on water, but it is an entirely false one, as false as the miracle of suleiman kneeling at the door of the basilica of saint anthony, for suddenly the ice gives way and who knows what will happen then. Fritz’s problem now is how to remove that wretched ice from the elephant’s skin without recourse to some kind of tool, a spatula with a fine, rounded blade, for example, would be ideal, but there are no such spatulas to be had, if, indeed, such things existed then. The only solution, therefore, is to use his bare hands, and we are not speaking figuratively. The mahout’s fingers were already numb with cold when he realized where the nub of the problem lay, namely, that the elephant’s thick, coarse hair had made common cause with the ice, so that any small advance was won only after a desperate battle, for just as there was no spatula to help scrape the ice off the skin, so there were no scissors with which to cut that hairy tangle. It quickly became clear that removing each hair from the ice was far beyond fritz’s physical and mental capabilities, and he was obliged to abandon the task before he himself turned into a pathetic snowman, lacking only a pipe in his mouth and a carrot instead of a nose. The very same hairs that had been at the heart of a promising business, nipped in the bud by the archduke’s moral scruples, were now the cause of a fiasco whose consequences to the elephant’s health were as yet unknown. As if this were not enough, another ap parently
urgent matter had just arisen. Disconcerted to feel that the mahout’s familiar weight had transferred from his shoulders to his hindquarters, the elephant was showing clear signs of disorientation, as if he had lost sight of the path and did not know where to go. Fritz had no alternative but to scramble rapidly back to his accustomed place and, so to speak, take up the reins again. As for the covering of ice on the elephant’s back, let us pray to the god of elephants that nothing worse happens. If there was a tree nearby with a really strong branch three meters up and more or less parallel to the ground, suleiman could free himself from that uncomfortable and possibly dangerous sheet of ice, by rubbing against it, as all elephants have done since time immemorial, whenever an itch became unbearable. Now that the snow had redoubled in intensity, although this is not to say that one was a consequence of the other, the road had grown steeper, as if it were weary of dragging itself along on the flat and wanted to ascend to the skies, even if only to one of its lower levels. Just as the wings of the hummingbird cannot even dream of the powerful beating of the petrel’s wings as it battles against the stormy wind nor of the majestic flight of the golden eagle as it soars above the valleys. Each of us is made for the thing for which we were born, but there is always the possibility that we might encounter important exceptions, as was the case with suleiman, who was not born for this, but whose only option was to invent some way of coping with that steep incline, which he did by stretching out his trunk in front of him, looking every inch the warrior charging into battle to meet either death or glory. And all around is snow and solitude. Someone who knows the region might say that this whiteness conceals a landscape of extraordinary beauty.
But no one would think so, least of all us. The snow devoured the valleys, buried the vegetation, and if there are any inhabited houses around, they can barely be seen, a little smoke from a chimney is the only sign of life, someone inside must have lit some damp kindling and is now waiting, with the door practically blocked by a snowdrift, for the aid of a saint bernard with a barrel of brandy tied round its neck. Almost without his noticing, suleiman had reached the top of the slope, and he can now breathe normally again and, after all that sheer painful effort, especially with a mahout on his back and a sheet of ice weighing on his hindquarters, can resume an easy walking pace. The curtain of snow had thinned slightly, allowing one to see a few hundred meters of path ahead, as if the world had decided, at last, to restore the lost meteorological norm. Perhaps that really was what the world intended, but something odd has obviously happened, how else explain this gathering of people, horses and carts, as if they had come upon a good place for a picnic. Fritz urged suleiman to quicken his step and saw that he was back once more among his companions and the convoy, which, it must be said, did not take much perspicacity because, as we know, there is only one archduke of austria. Fritz climbed down from the elephant and the question he asked of the first person he met, What happened, received an instant reply, The front axle of his highness’s coach has broken, How dreadful, exclaimed the mahout, The carpenter is already installing a new axle with the help of his assistants, and we’ll be ready to head off again within the hour, How come they had one with them, One what, An axle, You may know a lot about elephants, but it obviously hasn’t occurred to you that no one would risk setting out on a journey like this without taking with them some spare parts, And were their highnesses injured at all, No, they just got a bit of a fright when the coach suddenly lurched to one side, Where are they now, Taking shelter in another coach, further on, It will be night soon, With heavy snow like this, the road is always light, no one will get lost, said the sergeant of the cuirassiers, who was the man he was speaking to. And it was true because, at that moment, the cart carrying the forage arrived, and just in time too, because suleiman, having dragged his four tons up those mountains, desperately needed to recharge his energies. In less time than it takes to say amen, fritz had untied two of the bundles right there, and a second amen, if there was one, found the elephant eagerly munching his ration of food. Immediately behind came the cuirassiers from the rear of the convoy and with them the rest of the company, numb with cold and exhausted by the tremendous efforts they’d been obliged to make for leagues and leagues, but glad to rejoin the group. When one thinks about it, the accident to the archducal coach could only have been an act of divine providence. As that never sufficiently praised popular wisdom teaches us, and as has more than once been shown, god writes straight on crooked lines, and even seems to prefer the latter. When the axle had been replaced and the soundness of the repair tested, the archduke and archduchess returned to the comfort of their coach, and the convoy, fully regrouped, set off, with strict orders having been issued to all its members, both military and civilian, to keep together at all costs and not to slide again into the same state of almost total fragmentation, which had only avoided the direst of consequences thanks to the greatest of good fortune. It was late at night when the convoy reached bolzano.

T
HE 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.