An Elephantasy

by María Elena Walsh

  A terrible shouting broke out behind the cabbage. Mister Dwarf was furious and said some really awful words like “By sampiolín!”, “Patatip!” and “Oh, tambapatán!”.

  The Fireman gagged him with his handkerchief, so that Granddad wouldn’t realise we’d fished out one of his students without permission, and like that, all muffled up, he picked him up and between us we carried him farther away, this time behind a pumpkin.

  Mister Carozo was still protesting, kicking his feet and waving his arms.

  “Do excuse us, Mister Dwarf,” I said. “I’m ever so sorry we took you out of the lesson, where I can see you were having such an interesting time…”

  “Interesting my foot!” said the dwarf. “I was more bored than a fly!”

  “So why are you grumbling so much?” I asked.

  “I’m not grumbling because you fished me out,” he explained. “I’m grumbling because I was having such a beautiful trip through the air on that fishing line and you brought me down much too soon!”

  “Well, if that’s the problem,” I said kindly, “we can fish you up again so you can keep having fun.”

  No sooner said than done. We hooked the safety pin onto his T-shirt, and the pin was tied to the shoelace that was tied to the branch, and we twirled him through the air back and forth and back and forth for quite some time.

  And Mister Carozo swung from side to side utterly delighted, laughing himself silly because the air was tickling him.

  Until the Fireman’s arms got tired and he put him back down on the pumpkin.

  “More, more!” cried Mister Carozo. But I knelt down and said to him very seriously:

  “No, sir. Later we can swing you around as much as you like, but for now you must understand that we only fished you out of class and brought you here so you can help us with a serious, dangerous expedition, and not for these high jinks.”

  “What’s happened?” he asked, in great alarm.

  “What’s happened is that we’ve lost Dailan Kifki, and as you are the only person who knows all the nooks and crannies of this forest, you must be our guide to find him.”

  “And what do you want to find him for?” he asked, combing his beard with his little finger. “He can stay here and live in the forest.”

  “No, sir,” I said emphatically. “Dailan Kifki is mine, and I have to take him back home. And imagine, if he stayed here and one day you decided to flatten down the forest, Dailan Kifki would surely be squashed to death by a tree.”

  And do you know what the dwarf replied?

  “When Granddad’s lesson is over, we’ll all go to my house for some hot chocolate in pretty little porcelain cups. Then we’ll see.”

  “But it’s already getting late,” I said, my bottom lip starting to quiver, “and any manner of disaster could happen to Dailan Kifki…”

  “Supisichi,” he said, finally.

  And the three of us made our way into the wood, hand in hand in hand: the Fireman, Mister Carozo, and me.

  27

  We were walking in silence when suddenly Mister Dwarf stopped dead and struck the ground with his heel, like this:

  Toc,

  toc,

  toc.

  What could be happening? I wondered.

  We soon heard a teeny little high-pitched voice from down on the ground, saying:

  “Good evening, my dearest Mister Dwarf Carozo.”

  I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from. It seemed to be somewhere near my shoes, but since it was already beginning to get dark I couldn’t quite make out what was happening down there.

  “Good evening to you, Mrs Titina,” replied the dwarf.

  By crouching all the way down, I could see that the voice was coming from an ant standing at the entrance to her anthill, just about to sweep the threshold with a very—and I mean very—small broom.

  Titina the Ant, very serious-looking and nicely dressed, with spectacles and an apron.

  “What can I do for you?” asked the ant.

  “Supisichi,” explained Mister Carozo.

  “Eep,” replied Titina.

  “Would you tell us, Mrs Ant, whether by any chance you happened to have seen an elephant passing this way?”

  “An ele-what?” asked Titina.

  “An ele-phant,” I explained, impatiently.

  “What’s one of those?” asked the ant, most curious.

  So I tried to explain:

  “An elephant is a huge great animal, with four big feet and a trunk and two tusks and a little tail…”

  “Does it wear a hat?” Titina interrupted me.

  “No, just two very large ears, that’s all,” I explained.

  “In that case, no, I haven’t seen one,” replied Titina curtly.

  “Well, sorry for the trouble, then—thank you anyway,” said Mister Carozo. And after giving her a low bow he set off again. We followed him, always hand in hand, feeling Titina’s curious look still on our heels.

  It was almost dark and we were a bit frightened. We walked on for a while longer when all of a sudden… Ker-BLAM! Mister Carozo stopped dead. And fortunately the Fireman and I managed to keep our balance, because if we hadn’t, we’d have fallen head-first into a small pond.

  Mister Dwarf gave some kind of signal by splashing lightly in the water with the toe of his galoshes, like this:

  Plaf,

  plaf,

  plif.

  We soon heard a voice answering:

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Good evening, Mrs Frog,” said the little man.

  And the Frog answered:

  “Ha-ha!”

  “We’re sorry to trouble you, but we just wanted to ask whether by any chance you happened to see an elephant going by?”

  And the Frog answered:

  “Ha-ha.”

  Convinced that the poor Frog must have gone crazy from so much splashing around in the pond, we didn’t ask her any more, and after waving her goodbye with our shoes, we walked on.

  “There’s one other person who could give us information,” said Mister Carozo.

  “Isn’t everybody already asleep by this time of night, or nearly?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” he replied, “this is someone who’s awake all night, singing away, and that is the someone we’re going to ask about Dailan Kifki.” Then he added “Supisichi,” which reassured me a great deal.

  Finally we arrived at the home of this character, who was the famous Mister Cricket Supreme. He was singing a zamba he’d just composed, which went under the title Cric cric crickiti cric crickiticri cric-cric.

  We couldn’t interrupt him right in the best bit of the concert, so we had to wait quite some time, as the zamba was a long one.

  When he finished he took a bow, and the three of us clapped very loudly, which delighted Mister Cricket, as you can imagine. Because—and I don’t know why this is—normally nobody ever claps crickets when they finish singing. Or is it because they never normally finish?

  Anyway, just when Mister Dwarf opened his mouth to ask after Dailan Kifki, Mister Cricket started up singing again, this time a chacarera he’d just composed, which went under the title Crickiticric cric cric so-very-much-cric cric. He wanted us to tell him whether we liked it.

  We had to listen carefully to the chacarera, which lasted, like, an hour and a half.

  Several times I had to nudge the Fireman with my elbow to wake him, because he’d fallen asleep on my shoulder, and his snoring was drowning out the voice of Mister Cricket Supreme. I stayed awake, even though the song did make me feel pretty sleepy. But I didn’t sleep, because I was worried about Dailan Kifki. Time was passing and we still hadn’t found him.

  Finally Mister Cricket ended his chacarera, bowed, and then without a moment’s hesitation Mister Carozo quickly asked him whether he happened to have seen an elephant going by.

  “Of course I saw him,” replied Mister Cricket Supreme. “And what’s more, I had an argument with him. I gave him such a number of punches on
the nose! Honestly, I gave him a serious beating.” Which honestly left me with a serious impression that Mister Cricket was a bit of a fibber.

  “Why did you have an argument?” I asked, very curious.

  “Because he nearly trod on me!” replied Mister Cricket Supreme. “But I gave him, like, a thousand punches on the nose!”

  “And who won?” I asked, curious to hear how far his lies might go.

  “Me, of course!” replied Mister Cricket.

  “Congratulations,” I said, not wanting to contradict him. “I don’t suppose you might know where that elephant is now?”

  “He must be in hospital,” replied the liar. “In any case, you should ask Butterfly Lolita, because he went off with her.”

  “Very well. Goodnight then, Mister Supreme, and thank you for the concert,” we said. And we set off again to look for this Butterfly Lolita who, it would seem, had befriended Dailan Kifki.

  We stumbled along, nearly dead from exhaustion, till we reached a place which, according to Mister Carozo, was where the butterflies lived. All we could make out was a bit of blue air between the trees, but he insisted it really was the home of the butterflies. Mister Carozo started clicking his fingers and calling them one at a time, by name, but the butterflies didn’t appear.

  “Where can they have got to?” Mister Carozo wondered. “There are, like, three thousand four hundred and fifty-three of them, and not one has stayed behind to look after the house!”

  And then all of a sudden we heard, just a bit farther away, a whispering which sounded like the wind tuning up through the trees. But when we listened more closely, we could clearly make out little butterfly laughs, butterfly smiles and butterfly giggles. Yes, the sound was coming from the butterflies themselves. Neither cats nor giraffes nor cicadas make a sound like that when they laugh.

  The three of us, hand in hand, ran towards the place the voices were coming from and there, on the very edge of the Forest of Gulubú, lit up specially by a star which had come unhooked from the sky, what do you think we saw?

  Just guess…

  28

  The butterflies were playing. They were jumping about and tickling each other, running through the air and playing tag. And it wasn’t only the star lighting them up, because nine hundred and sixty-five fireflies had also been invited to the party.

  And do you know where they were playing, all these butterflies and all these fireflies?

  On a tree trunk?

  No.

  On a toadstool?

  No.

  On the bank of a stream?

  Well, OK, yes. But no.

  They were playing and jumping around on Dailan Kifki’s back, and he was laughing with sheer delight!

  What do you think of that!

  I gave him a good telling-off, as was entirely appropriate, and Mister Carozo gave him a smack just below his knee, because he couldn’t reach any higher.

  “Aren’t you ashamed, Dailan Kifki, to be playing around like this while we’ve been running around desperately looking for you all over the forest?”

  “And what’s more, supisichi!” Mister Carozo added emphatically.

  “We have to go back to Ituzaingó station right away,” I said firmly, “to take the train back to Buenos Aires.”

  But Dailan Kifki didn’t move and the butterflies just went on playing as if nothing were happening at all.

  “Come on,” I said again, “you’ve had your fun.”

  No response.

  “Come now, get a move on, don’t delay! Elephant, we haven’t got all day,” said the Fireman.

  Nothing! It was as if Dailan Kifki were glued to the ground.

  I pushed him. All three of us pushed him.

  Nothing.

  Mister Carozo started tugging on his trunk.

  Nothing.

  “What can we do?” I asked, exhausted. “We can’t stay here all night waiting for this elephant to finish playing. Do something, please, Mister Fireman.”

  So the Fireman spun his polka-dot hose and gave Dailan Kifki a good whack on his rump.

  Fortunately, since the hose is made of rubber and so are the polka-dots, it can’t have hurt Dailan Kifki too much, but he did feel the slap and took a few steps.

  As for the rest of us, we were worried that he might escape again into the forest, so we all three grabbed Dailan Kifki’s little tail.

  If only we hadn’t done that.

  In the half-darkness—because the fireflies had turned themselves off just to annoy us—we hadn’t noticed that Dailan Kifki was walking into a big puddle.

  And in the three of us fell: Mister Dwarf Carozo, the Fireman, and me. Down we went, the three of us, into the mud.

  You can’t imagine how the butterflies laughed hee hee hee and the fireflies laughed ho ho ho.

  There we were, the three of us sitting in the mud. But let me tell you, we still hadn’t let go of Dailan Kifki’s tail, so he couldn’t possibly get away.

  We were pulling so hard on his tail that eventually… Ker-BLAM! he also fell in the mud and, of course, as he sat down he spattered us good and proper: our faces, our hair, our necks.

  Our bottom lips started to quiver.

  Dailan Kifki was too big to pick himself up all on his own, so he just went on sitting there in the mud. And the three of us sat there without moving, too. Just because.

  Finally the Fireman, doing various cartwheels and a fine bit of slipping about, managed to get to his feet. He smoothed down his jacket, straightened his helmet and untangled his hose.

  I also managed to struggle to my feet without losing my balance. But before anything else, I wanted to clean a bit of the mud off my face, as it was so thick I couldn’t so much as wink.

  And as I rubbed my hands over my face, my tongue was poking out a little by accident… and…

  “What’s this?” I said, pleasantly surprised. “This mud tastes quite yummy… Am I dreaming?”

  I stuck my tongue out a bit farther and tried it again.

  “Oh, quite so. This isn’t mud. It’s thick chocolate.”

  And then the fireflies all lit up at once and I saw that Mister Dwarf, who for some reason hadn’t spoken in a while, was still sitting in the mud, licking himself nice and clean.

  “You’re saying this isn’t mud, but chocolate?” I asked. “Can that be true?”

  “Of course,” he replied. “Isn’t it a nice idea? In the Forest of Gulubú all the puddles are made of chocolate, or milk and grenadine, or jam, or rice pudding with cinnamon, or raspberry jelly.”

  “Well, I never knew that, Mister Carozo,” I said, before going on to taste another little bit, then another, then another.

  Dailan Kifki had finally managed to pick himself up with the help of the Fireman. He had gone back to playing with the butterflies when suddenly he noticed that everyone else was busy tasting the chocolate from the puddle.

  If only he hadn’t noticed.

  First he took just a little with his trunk, and tasted it.

  Then he immediately dunked his trunk straight back into the chocolate and didn’t take it out again.

  “That’s enough, Dailan Kifki, you’ll get indigestion!” I shouted.

  But he went on sucking it up without taking a breath, paying me no notice at all.

  Eventually he had sucked up so much so quickly that the puddle was completely dry and, thanks to Dailan Kifki, we were in no danger of drowning, and at no risk of dying of indigestion.

  The puddle was all dried out, and the ground beneath it shone like a china plate, having been well slurped, over and over, by Dailan Kifki’s trunk.

  “Supisichi,” said Mister Carozo then. “It’s time we went back home for some hot chocolate.”

  “But how can you even think such a thing?” I asked him indignantly. “How can you imagine we could possibly go on drinking more chocolate?”

  “You won’t?” replied Mister Carozo, black with rage. “How can you insult me like that? You can’t leave the Forest of Gulub
ú without first stopping by my house to have chocolate in pretty little porcelain cups!”

  “Mister Carozo, you’ve been ever so hospitable, but please try to understand: we’ve already been away from home for days. We only popped out to fish Dailan Kifki out of the sky, and now that we’ve done it we can’t just wander around the Forest of Gulubú for ever.”

  “Would you turn down an invitation from the Queen of England?” he asked me with a hard stare.

  “No, Mister Carozo,” I stammered.

  “Would you turn down an invitation from the Shah of Persia?”

  “No, Mister Carozo, I wouldn’t…”

  “Would you turn down an invitation from the Prime Minister of Kenya?”

  “Ermmm, no, Mister Carozo…”

  “Would you snub Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?”

  “Ermmmm, noooo, Mister Carozo.”

  “Well then, why do you say no to me, and only to me!” he asked, furious, hurling his cap on the ground.

  And I understood that we had no choice but to accept his invitation.

  In short, a whole other adventure…

  So off we went, the three of us, to gather up the rest of the retinue.

  We took two or three little steps through the wood, in the darkness, lit only by the fireflies who by now were all half asleep.

  We were so tired our feet wouldn’t walk for us, our legs wouldn’t move us.

  So… do you know what Dailan Kifki did?

  All on his own, without anyone having to ask him, he knelt down and hoisted us up with his trunk, putting all three of us on top of his head.

  And off he trotted, while we hummed the San Lorenzo March, but so sleepily it sounded more like the San Quentin Lullaby.

  29

  And that was how we arrived back at the edge of the wood, where Granddad was still teaching his botany lesson. Naturally, everyone else was snoring discreetly.