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 cortege, 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.
Mounted on suleiman's shoulders and receiving in his face the full brunt of the snow being whipped up by the incessant wind, fritz is not in the best of positions to elaborate and develop elevated thoughts. Nevertheless, he keeps trying to think of ways to improve his relations with the archduke, who not only refuses to speak to him, he won't even look at him. Things had begun rather well in valladolid, but suleiman, with his intestinal upsets on the way to rosas, had seriously damaged the noble cause of creating harmony between two social classes as far removed from one another as mahouts and archdukes. With a little goodwill, all this could have been forgotten, but the offense committed by subhro or fritz or whoever the devil he is, the madness that had made him want to grow rich by illicit and morally reprehensible means, put paid to any hopes of restoring the almost fraternal esteem which, for one magical moment, had brought the future emperor of austria closer to that humble driver of elephants. The skeptics are quite right when they say that the history of humanity is one long succession of missed opportunities. Fortunately, thanks to the inexhaustible generosity of the imagination, we erase faults, fill in lacunae as best we can, forge passages through blind alleys that will remain stubbornly blind, and invent keys to doors that have never even had locks. This is what fritz is doing while suleiman, painfully lifting his heavy legs, one, two, one, two, makes his way through the snow that continues to accumulate on the path, while the pure water out of which it is made insidiously transforms itself into the slipperiest of ice. Fritz thinks bitterly that only an act of heroism on his part would restore him to the archduke's favor, but, however hard he tries, he can come up with nothing sufficiently grandiose to attract his highness's approving eye even for a second. It is then that he imagines the axle of the archducal coach, having broken once, breaking again, the coach lurching violently to one side, the carriage door flying open, and the helpless archduchess being hurled out into the snow, where she slides on her many skirts down a relatively gentle slope, not stopping until she, fortunately unhurt, reaches the bottom of the ravine. The mahout's hour has come. With an energetic prod of the stick that sometimes serves as his steering wheel, he
