if his happiness and that of his loved ones depended entirely on him seeing an elephant, Well, we can put that right this minute, come with us, You go on ahead, sir, I'll harness the mule and catch up. The commanding officer returned to the square, where his sergeant was waiting for him, and he said, Right, we've got the oxen, Yes, sir, they passed by here just now, and the ox-driver looked as pleased as a dog with two tails, Come on then, said the commanding officer, mounting his horse, Yes, sir, said the sergeant, following suit. It did not take them long to reach the rest of their men, and there the commanding officer was faced with a serious dilemma, should he gallop into camp and announce this victory to the assembled hosts or ride alongside the oxen and receive the applause in the presence of that living proof of his ingenuity. It took a good one hundred meters of intense reflection to find an answer to this problem, a solution which, anticipating the term by some five centuries, we might call the third way, and this was to send the sergeant on ahead with the news in order to predispose the men to offer him the most enthusiastic of receptions. And so it was. They had not gone very far when they heard the mule approaching with ungainly step, for the creature had never been required to break into a trot before, still less a gallop. Out of politeness, the commanding officer stopped, as did the sergeant, although he did not know why, and only the ox- driver and the oxen, as if they belonged to another world and were ruled by different laws, continued at their usual pace, that is, a very slow one. The commanding officer gave orders for the sergeant to ride on ahead, but soon regretted having done so. His impatience was growing by the minute. It had been a gross error to send the sergeant on ahead. By then, he would already have received the kind of rapturous applause that always greets good news when given at first hand, and any subsequent applause, however loud, always has a taste of yesterday's warmed-up stew about it. He was wrong. When the commanding officer reached the camp, whether accompanied by or accompanying the ox-driver and the oxen it would be hard to say, the men had formed up into two lines, the laborers on one side, the soldiers on the other, and, in the middle, the elephant with the mahout perched on top, and everyone whooping and applauding wildly, and if this were a pirate ship, it would be the moment to say, A double ration of rum all round. Although this does not preclude the possibility of a quart of red wine being served to the whole company later on. When everyone had calmed down, the convoy began to get itself organized. The ox- driver yoked the count's oxen to the cart, because they were stronger and fresher, and the two that had traveled all the way from lisbon went ahead of them, so that they could rest a little. Whatever the steward may have been thinking, mounted on his mule, he kept crossing himself and then crossing himself again, scarcely able to believe what his eyes were seeing, An elephant, so that's an elephant, he murmured, why, he must be at least four ells high, and then there's the trunk and the tusks and the feet, look how big those feet are. When the convoy set off, he followed it as far as the road. He bade farewell to the commanding officer, to whom he wished a good journey and an even better return, and waved furiously as he watched them move off. Well, it isn't every day that an elephant appears in our lives.
...
IT ISN'T TRUE THAT heaven and the heavens are indifferent to our preoccupations and desires. They're constantly sending us signs and warnings, and the only reason we don't add good advice to that list is that experience, heaven's and ours, has shown that memory, which isn't anyone's strong point, is best not overburdened with too much detail. Signs and warnings are easy to interpret if we remain alert, as the commanding officer discovered when, at one point along the route, the convoy was caught in a heavy drenching shower. For the men engaged in the hard work of pushing the ox-cart, that rain was a blessing, an act of charity for the suffering to which the lower classes have always been subject. Solomon and his mahout subhro also enjoyed that sudden cooling rain, although this did not prevent subhro from thinking that, in future, he really could do with an umbrella in such situations, perched up high and unprotected from the water falling from the clouds, especially on the road to vienna. The only ones not to appreciate this atmospheric precipitation were the cavalry men, proudly got up as usual in their colorful uniforms, now stained and sodden, as if they had just returned, defeated, from a battle. As for their commanding officer, he, with his already proven agility of mind, had understood at once that they were facing a very grave problem. Once again, it just showed that the strategy for this mission had been drawn up by incompetents incapable of foreseeing the most ordinary of eventualities, such as rain in august, when popular wisdom has been warning since time immemorial that winter always begins in august. Unless that shower was a chance occurrence and the good weather returned for a lengthy period, those nights spent out under the moon or the starry arc of the milky way were over. And that was not all. Having to spend the night in villages meant finding in them a covered area large enough to shelter the horses and the elephant, the four oxen, and several dozen men, and that, as you can imagine, was not easy to find in sixteenth-century portugal, where they had not yet learned to build industrial warehouses or inns for tourists. And what if we get caught in the rain while on the road, not in a shower like this, but in a continuous downpour of the sort that doesn't stop for hours and hours, wondered the commanding officer, concluding, We'll have no option but to get soaked. He looked skyward, scrutinized the heavens and said, It seems to have cleared up for the moment, let's hope it was just a passing threat. Unfortunately, it wasn't. Before they reached safe harbor, if such a description can be applied to a couple of dozen hovels built some distance from each other, and a headless church, that is, one with only half a tower, with not an industrial warehouse to be seen, they met with two more downpours, which the commanding officer, by now an expert in this system of communications, immediately interpreted as two more warnings from the heavens, which had doubtless grown impatient because the necessary preventative measures had not yet been taken to save the rain-drenched convoy from falling victim to colds, chills, flu and doubtless pneumonia. That is the great mistake made by heaven, for whom nothing is impossible, imagining, as it does, that mankind, created, it is said, in the image and likeness of heaven's powerful occupant, enjoys the same privileges. We would like to see what heaven would do in the commanding officer's place, having to go from house to house with the same old story, I'm the officer in charge of a cavalry unit at the service of his highness the king of portugal, our mission being to accompany an elephant to the spanish city of valladolid, and meeting with only distrustful faces, hardly surprising really, given that the people in that part of the world had never even heard of the elephantine species and hadn't the slightest idea what an elephant was. We would like to see heaven asking if there was a large empty barn available or, if not, an industrial warehouse, where both animals and people could shelter for the night, which shouldn't be impossible when one recalls that the famous jesus of galilee, in his prime, boasted of being able to tear down a temple and rebuild it in only three days. We cannot know if the only reason he failed to do so was a lack of manpower or cement, or if he simply reached the sensible conclusion that it wasn't worth the trouble, considering that if he was going to destroy something merely in order to build it up again, it would be better to leave it be. On the other hand, that business with the loaves and fishes really was impressive, and we mention it here only because, by order of the commanding officer and thanks to the efforts of the quartermaster, today there will be hot food for everyone in the convoy, which is no small miracle if one bears in mind the general lack of facilities and the uncertain weather. Luckily, it stopped raining. The men took off their heavier clothes and placed them on poles to dry by the heat of the fires they had lit. Then it was just a matter of waiting for the big pot of stew to arrive and of enjoying the consoling pang in the stomach when they smelled it, knowing that their hunger was finally going to be satisfied, and of feeling just as much a man as those who are brought a plate of food and a slice of bread at regular hours, as if such things were ordained by some beneficent fate. This commanding officer is not like other officers, in that he is as concerned about his men, soldiers and non-soldiers alike, as if they were his children. More than that, he is little concerned with hierarchy, at least in the current circumstances, so much so that he has not gone elsewhere to eat, but is here, taking his place around the fire, and if he hasn't yet participated very much in the conversation, this is only in order to put the men at their ease. One of the cavalrymen has just asked the question that has been preoccupying them all, And what are you going to do with the elephant in vienna, mahout, Probably the same as in lisbon, nothing very much, replied subhro, there'll be a lot of applause, a lot of people crowding the streets, and then they'll forget all about him, that's the law of life, triumph and oblivion, Not always, For elephants and men it is, although I shouldn't really speak of men in general, I'm just an indian in a foreign land, but, as far as I know, only one elephant has ever escaped that law, What elephant was that, asked one of the laborers, An elephant who was dying and whose head was cut off once he was dead, That would be the end of him, then, No, the head was placed on the neck of a god called ganesh, who was also dead, Tell us about this ganesh, said the commanding officer, Sir, the hindu religion is so very complicated that only an indian can really understand it, and even then not always, Now I seem to recall you telling me that you were a christian, And I recall answering, more or less, sir, more or less, What
