An Elephantasy

by María Elena Walsh

  His beard came down over his T-shirt, so I couldn’t tell what his team was. I could only make out the little shorts and the big boots.

  My Auntie Clodomira gave a disappointed sigh.

  “Pah,” she said, “such a big carriage for such a small dwarf.”

  “Shhh,” I said, “he might hear you and get annoyed.”

  The grouchy dwarf stamped his little feet two or three times, then—without looking at anyone or saying hello politely, which annoyed Granddad—he marched straight over to Dailan Kifki.

  He barely came up to the elephant’s knees, and started jumping up in the air to pull on his ears, but he couldn’t reach.

  So I picked him up and the little dwarf stroked Dailan Kifki’s ears very happily.

  Then he showed his gratitude by smiling at me.

  I said: “Welcome, Mister Dwarf.”

  And he replied: “Supisichi.” Which in dwarf language means something or other. I honestly have no idea what.

  “I want to ride around on the elephant,” he added straight away, whimsically and now in perfect Spanish.

  No one dared contradict him, seeing as he was such an important little dwarf who travelled around in a carriage and who was probably a little football champion. And so between us we all lifted him up and placed him on Dailan Kifki’s head.

  He rode around a few times, smiling and greeting people and making great flourishes with his hat.

  “Right then, that’s it, I’ve had my ride around now,” he said three hours later. But he hadn’t ridden around us just once. He’d done it fifteen thousand times, and Dailan Kifki was extremely dizzy.

  We were all dying of curiosity, whispering to each other about who the mysterious dwarf might be. We were afraid he might run off again in his carriage without telling us about himself, or even his name.

  That was what we were all thinking, when suddenly he looked at each of us in turn—it took quite some time—and finally asked us, crossly:

  “And you people, who are you?”

  At first nobody dared answer, as though we had all forgotten who we were.

  So I introduced them.

  The dwarf, listening very carefully, took off his hat and shook hands with each of us in turn. There were so many of us that just this saying hello took him something like five hours and fourteen minutes.

  After this introduction I felt I had the right to ask him myself who he was. I cleared my throat, smoothed down my pinafore and straightened my tulle hat with the little flags, which was in a wretched state. Making a low bow I asked him:

  “And now might we perhaps know who you are, Mister Dwarf, sir?”

  “What do you mean, who I am?” he answered, furious. “Is it possible you don’t know who I am?”

  “No, I’m ever so sorry, Mister Dwarf, sir. I’ve never seen you before.”

  “Such ignorance!” he remarked, hopping about with annoyance.

  I decided to ask Granddad, who is so wise.

  “Granddad, do you know who he is?”

  Granddad answered:

  “He can’t be anybody, because I’ve never seen him in any history books, or geography books, or botany books, or books of phantasmagorical astronautics… not even drawn in a comic strip.”

  And because the dwarf was so silent and pensive, looking down at his boots and not telling us who he was, we all became fascinated. And we too just kept looking down and squeezing little eucalyptus leaves with nervous fingers.

  23

  “Very well,” said the dwarf half an hour later, “if someone could pick me up, I shall tell you who I am.”

  The Captain hurried to pick him up delicately, and when he was up, feeling much taller now, the dwarf coughed a little, straightened his hat and said solemnly:

  “I am the dwarf Carozo Minujín, Owner and Lord of the Forest of Gulubú.”

  “Aaaahh…” we all said with a round of applause, even though we’d never heard of the Forest of Gulubú.

  At that moment Granddad took a step forward, grabbed the dwarf by the nose, and said:

  “You’re a liar!”

  “A liar? Me?” roared the dwarf, furious.

  “Yes, you,” insisted Granddad. “I’ve spent my whole life studying geography and I’ve never seen any forest or country or lake or corner or football pitch called Gulubú. It’s all lies!”

  The dwarf started flapping his hands about to try and hit Granddad, but he couldn’t reach him.

  “This Gulubú forest of yours does not exist!” screamed Granddad. “Show me, go on! Point it out on the map of the Argentine Republic. Well? Let’s see it, then.”

  “Me, point it out to you? No supisichi way!” roared the dwarf. “The Forest of Gulubú doesn’t appear on any maps, sir, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Ah,” replied Granddad, “so you’d have me believe that a forest that doesn’t appear on any maps really is a forest?”

  “Yes, sir. And if you like I’ll take you there and show it to you.”

  I thought: How delightful, the little dwarf is going to take us in his carriage to see a forest that doesn’t exist on any maps!

  But my grouchy old granddad seemed determined to rain on our parade, because he just kept stamping his feet and saying over and over:

  “No sir, I’m not going to some inferior little forest that isn’t on any maps.”

  “Inferior?” screamed the dwarf. “Did you say inferior? Well, how can it be in Ferior, sir, if it’s right here in Argentina? Well, what do you say to that?”

  Which was a good point.

  “Well, if it’s not an inferior little forest, it must be a rubbish little forest,” grumbled Granddad, who was not prepared to give in.

  And then… Oh, I’d rather not remember what happened next!

  The little dwarf Carozo Minujín drew a sword! Naturally it wasn’t a very big sword, but it did look really sharp. Right then and there he challenged Granddad to a duel for having insulted his lovely forest.

  “Come on now, don’t quarrel,” I said. But the dwarf flapped his arms about until he had got free of the Captain, and landed firmly on the ground.

  “Let me at him,” said Granddad. “Let me at him to defend my honour—and more importantly, the honour of geography!”

  And right there they started to fight. Chiss, chass, clink, clank! went their swords. The little dwarf, his face flushed with rage, muttered again and again through gritted teeth:

  “Supisichi supisichi supisichi.”

  It was like a musketeer movie. They leapt about, twirled, skipped and somersaulted.

  Until Granddad got tired, because to be frank he is an old man, and asked for a temporary truce. He went off to rest a bit beneath a eucalyptus tree.

  The dwarf put his sword away beneath his beard and said:

  “I have won a great victory. I deserve to be picked up to greet this audience.”

  My Auntie Clodomira picked him up and he raised both his arms to greet the crowds, who cheered his name:

  “Long live Mister Little Dwarf Carozo Minujín!”, which made him blush with pleasure.

  Then he said solemnly:

  “Now I invite you all to come for some hot chocolate at my palace in the Forest of Gulubú, so you can see it really does exist.”

  “Let’s go, let’s go!” cried everyone except Granddad, as we were all desperate to take a carriage ride and drink hot chocolate in an unknown forest.

  And do you know what the Fireman (who was still sulking) said?

  He just made this ridiculous comment:

  “Oats soup is quite the only thing that really makes me smile. I don’t like going places, and hot chocolate is vile!”

  Would you believe it?

  24

  Little Mister Carozo Minujín led me by the hand to his carriage. I was about to get in when I heard a huge commotion behind me.

  Ker-BLAM!

  I said, “Another problem.”

  The Secretary of the Union of Kite-Flyers was screeching li
ke a demon.

  “You owe us for lots and lots of hours of work!” he complained. “We’ve been flying kites for three days now, to fish for this calamity of an elephant, and now you’re just going to go off without paying us!”

  “You’re quite right, of course,” I replied. “The thing is, we all thought you fished for elephants for free.”

  “Absolutely not,” he said, handing me a dirty scrap of paper covered in numbers. It was the bill: 65 pesos, 20 cents.

  “Either you pay us,” he grumbled, “or we put the elephant back up.”

  Everyone began rummaging through their pockets, but Mister Dwarf was too quick for us and drew out a purse made of a caterpillar cocoon from which he took two square gold coins. At the same time he also took out a circular handkerchief to blow his nose.

  The Secretary was very pleased with the coins, and didn’t bother us any more.

  Finally I boarded the carriage and then I really did have quite a surprise. Because the carriage was very big on the outside but rather tiny on the inside, since it was made to measure for its owner. On the inside it was very luxurious, all lined in silver paper and with a few photos of the great comic actor Charlie Chaplin and the great tango singer Charlie Gardel stuck on the ceiling. But it was really very tiny for me. I had to be all crumpled up and squeezed like a walnut, my hat pressed against the roof. I didn’t even have enough space for smiling in without a bit of my mouth escaping out the window. I had to put one foot on top of the other and one hand on top of the other and both hands on top of my head because there was nowhere else to put them.

  Mister Carozo sat down beside me and asked, hospitably:

  “Comfy?”

  I answered yes with a little smile, so as not to offend him, but hoped with all my heart that the journey wouldn’t be too long.

  The other people followed us, either on foot or riding on Dailan Kifki. Honestly, the poor thing had well over, like, a thousand seven hundred and eighty people on his head and back.

  From time to time Mister Dwarf would invite me to admire the scenery, but I have to admit I couldn’t see a thing because the carriage windows were so small on the inside it was like looking through a keyhole.

  So I sighed with relief when at last the horses stopped snorting and Mister Dwarf said contentedly:

  “This is where it starts: my Forest of Gulubú.”

  25

  Mister Dwarf Carozo Minujín hopped out of the carriage and politely offered his hand to help me down after him.

  I unrolled myself as best I could and jumped down onto the ground. I looked around carefully and then asked, a little disappointed:

  “So, this is your famous Forest of Gulubú?”

  “The very same,” he replied, very pleased with himself.

  “But I don’t see a forest anywhere,” I said.

  And my companions and my family and the busybodies all joined in:

  “We don’t see a forest anywhere! Why have you brought us all this way?”

  “Supisichi,” replied the dwarf, which calmed us down a great deal.

  When we were all just about ready to have our bottom lips start quivering, the little dwarf took a few steps forward and said some magic words, which were:

  “Chipiti-chapiti-bampiti-boom…”

  … or something like that, I think. He walked over to some pieces of wire and pulled. We all thought he was crazy, when we saw him holding on to some quite ordinary wires—just those regular ones that grow wild on a normal wire fence—but we were wrong.

  Not only was he not crazy, but the wires were magical, and the moment he pulled them… Ker-BLAM!

  Have you seen those pop-up books that you open and the characters suddenly stand up inside them?

  Well, the Forest of Gulubú is just like that. As if it were filled with sleeping marionettes. You give a little pull on their strings and they’re up on their feet, dancing and moving about.

  The Forest of Gulubú is ironed flat on the ground, and when its owner pulls on the wires, the trees and the grasses and the cottages and the animals all appear suddenly, as if to say:

  “Here we are! We were just playing hide-and-seek.”

  You can imagine our surprise. My Auntie Clodomira fainted, with pretty good aim this time because she fell right into the arms of the Superintendent.

  It’s not every day you see a forest rising up from the ground, just like that, in a place where a moment ago there was nothing but a bit of open pasture and which, it would seem, is not all that far from the town of Ituzaingó.

  None of us could believe it. We rubbed our eyes and our jaws dropped.

  Dailan Kifki was utterly delighted. He knelt down to allow people to dismount from his head and back, using his trunk as a slide. And the moment he felt free of that enormous weight he trotted off into the Forest of Gulubú, no doubt hoping to find himself a banana tree, or a pear tree, or an oats-soup tree.

  Meanwhile the rest of us walked into the forest with the dwarf, who wouldn’t let go of my hand. He explained that whenever he went off on a trip he would flatten the forest and leave it lying down and invisible so that nobody would steal it or spoil it. I remarked that he was right to do so; it was worth taking good care of such a handsome forest. Because I must tell you, that Forest of Gulubú isn’t just any old forest. It’s certainly not some inferior little forest like Granddad said it was.

  Not at all. It’s very big and very real, like one of those forests that only exist in stories. With trees filled with wise little birds, the kind that aren’t just painted but completely alive. With a delightful stream where there are frogs learning to swim, in polka-dot swimming-trunks, and where Dailan Kifki had rushed to give his trunk a drink until Mister Carozo shooed him away, because he was drinking so much he was going to dry it out completely.

  In this forest there were toads smoking pipes and big toadstools with fridges and TV sets. Rabbits cycled past, and—strangest of all, I thought—there were canaries with cages. But those birds weren’t inside the cages. They were carrying them around like briefcases, filled with all their school equipment.

  We were all very happy as we walked through the Forest of Gulubú, breathing in a delicious scent of peppermints, finally having a rest after so much coming and going and turning around and around, when Granddad, as usual, decided to throw cold water on our party.

  He stood up on a tree trunk and shouted:

  “Quiet, children!”

  We all fell silent.

  When Granddad saw that the silence was so complete that even the birds were dumbstruck and the canaries had stopped in mid-air to listen to him, he said, solemnly:

  “Now that we have arrived in this forest, following a long and arduous voyage through dangerous and unknown regions, I shall immediately be giving you an illustrated zoology and botany lesson.”

  I’m sure you can imagine how much we all felt like having a lesson just then, can’t you?

  My brother Roberto said:

  “We’re toast.”

  Once again, I had to admit he was right.

  26

  We were getting extremely bored listening to the lesson and waiting patiently for Granddad to finish reciting all these really strange plant and animal names, when suddenly I looked around me and asked in alarm:

  “Where’s Dailan Kifki?”

  I couldn’t see him anywhere, and he’s definitely too big to go unnoticed or to hide underneath a head of lettuce.

  I’d been sitting on the grass like everyone else, yawning this wide over Granddad’s lesson, and I started to slide away sideways, just very slowly… slowly… so I could escape and go looking for Dailan Kifki before anything serious happened.

  Fortunately Granddad was having so much fun busily explaining a snapdragon that he didn’t notice me getting away from his lesson. I crawled slowly over to the Fireman, who immediately put himself at my service without even asking what the matter was.

  I pulled him away from the crowd till we were out of Granddad’s
line of sight. We hid behind a cabbage and I asked him in a whisper:

  “Where’s Dailan Kifki?”

  “I on’t-day oh-nay…” the Fireman whispered back.

  “I’m absolutely sure the little pest has escaped again. We’ve got to find him!”

  Then the Fireman explained, very seriously:

  “To find a lonely elephant who’s missing in the wood, you need a lot of patience and your senses must be good.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” I said, “but you also have to know the terrain very well, and if you ask me we’re going to get ourselves lost in this blessed Forest of Gulubú, so we’d do well to find Mister Dwarf Carozo to lead our expedition.”

  But the really big problem was that Mister Carozo was sitting in the very front row of Granddad’s lesson, and to reach him I’d have to go past a whole crowd of people who were sitting all quiet and serious just like at school.

  “So what do we do?” I asked the Fireman.

  And the Fireman thought for quite some time, frowning, with his finger to his forehead, then replied:

  “To remove a dwarf discreetly from your Granddad’s class, just look: You take a fishing rod and neatly tie a fishing line and hook.”

  I thought this was an excellent idea: we’d fish Mister Carozo out without Granddad noticing, because if we were to wait for the break-time bell, we would be toast. Granddad’s lessons never last less than five hours.

  Since there were no fishing rods around, the Fireman used his axe that shone as bright as the moon to cut off a strong, flexible branch. Since we didn’t have any fishing line we used the laces from his boots. And since we didn’t have a hook, we used a safety pin that was attached to my pinafore.

  When you’re in a forest you just have to figure out a way, don’t you?

  Between us we held the branch tight, and aimed very carefully with a very steady hand, to be absolutely, completely sure we were fishing out the dwarf and not some other person. (Just imagine if we’d fished out my Auntie Clodomira!) And then… Zzzzzzooooom! without anybody noticing, Mister Dwarf Carozo was flying towards us through the air on the pin that was tied to the shoelaces which were tied to the branch, and landed safe and sound right beside us.