An Elephantasy

by María Elena Walsh

Granddad was so caught up in his lesson that he didn’t even notice us arrive. So we got down off Dailan Kifki and decided we’d also have a quick nap, just till dawn.

  I lay down on the grass, with a little pumpkin as my pillow, and was lulled to sleep by the singing of the crickets and the frogs.

  I was woken up much later by a bell saying clang-a-lang-a-lang.

  At first, still half asleep, I thought it was a cowbell. What luck, I thought to myself. Now we’ll have milk to make everybody’s breakfast, especially Dailan Kifki’s lovely oats soup.

  But I was wrong.

  It wasn’t a cow.

  It was Granddad ringing the bell for everyone to return to class, in their overalls, with nails clean and faces scrubbed.

  Granddad was walking among the sleepers shaking the bell and shouting:

  “Right, children, time for class! Break’s over! Everyone line up!”

  Nobody paid him any attention.

  Everyone just turned over and went on grumbling in their sleep, apart from the Fireman who was used to this sort of thing and stood up in his sleep, polished his buttons with his sleeve and gave a salute.

  “Well done, student Fireman!” said Granddad, moved at the sight of such an obedient pupil.

  I had just woken up, and I was about ready to declare war on Granddad.

  When he saw me, he said—without so much as a “Good morning”:

  “And where is your pencil-case?”

  “Granddad,” I replied, “we’re not at school. This is the Forest of Gulubú, where the puddles are made of chocolate and it’s always break-time.”

  “Everywhere is school!” he answered, furious.

  And then he suddenly snapped out of his daze, looked at me and asked:

  “Wait…what? What did you say? What are these puddles of chocolate you’re talking about?”

  “All the pools in the Forest of Gulubú, Granddad.”

  “They’re chocolate?” he said again, squinting with envy. “And those smudges on your face and your pinafore and your ears and your hair—those are from the chocolate?”

  “Yes, Granddad.”

  Then Granddad set about waking everybody up so he could go and give them a chocolate lesson.

  Bit by bit, everyone opened one eye, then the other.

  My Auntie Clodomira, my brother Roberto, my dad and my mum.

  The Captain, the Superintendent, the Ambassadors, the Mini-Secretary, the busybodies, the onlookers, the ice-cream sellers, everyone.

  The moment they heard the word “chocolate”, they lined up nicely without batting an eyelid.

  Granddad was about to lead the new expedition when Mister Carozo interrupted him:

  “And where the devil are you going?”

  “What do you mean, where am I going?” replied Granddad.

  “My granddaughter has just told me your forest has lakes filled with chocolate. We are therefore going for a dip.”

  “No, sir,” replied the furious dwarf, “we are absolutely not going for a dip in the pools. We’re going to drink hot chocolate at my house, and the way it’s supposed to be drunk—out of pretty little porcelain cups on a table.”

  “I don’t want to!” said Granddad, “I’m bored of drinking chocolate out of little cups. I want to get covered in chocolate all over, just like you and my granddaughter and the Fireman and Dailan Kifki.”

  “In that case, supisichi!” said the dwarf fiercely, drawing his sword again.

  They started fighting, as usual, until the Superintendent separated them, using his whistle, his truncheon and his white gloves.

  Once this latest torment was over, we all set off in the direction of Mister Carozo’s house. It’s just as well it was nice and close.

  30

  The house really was very near.

  First you had to count out seventeen trees, go past one and a half streams, turn around, count to four, take fifteen waltz steps to the right and then fourteen tango steps to the left and… there it was.

  It was a castle, really, as big as a real castle, but I thought: That dwarf isn’t going to trick me again. I’m sure the castle is big on the outside and small on the inside, like the carriage.

  And it was! It was very big on the outside but only little on the inside.

  I wondered how so many people were going to fit inside the castle. But after all, we’d already overcome such a lot of problems I wasn’t going to get alarmed now over something so trivial.

  Mister Carozo made me and Granddad go in first. We ducked down and managed to crawl through the door quite comfortably.

  As soon as we had passed over the threshold, we heard a terrible sobbing behind us: it was Dailan Kifki, who was heartbroken because he really wasn’t going to fit inside. And he had noticed the divine smell of chocolate coming from the palace kitchen.

  He cried so much and so excellently that I’m sure every single stamp in the Gulubú Post Office must have come unstuck.

  I decided to ignore him and let him cry, which is what we usually do with badly brought up cry-babies, and as many of us as could fit made our way into the living room of Mister Dwarf’s castle. In other words, me and Granddad and one or two others.

  It’s hard for me to describe how lovely that room was. One thing I can tell you: it wasn’t a room for spending time in, or sitting around or entertaining visitors. It was a room made just for staring at. It was full of windows, big and small, which didn’t keep still but moved whenever you moved. The colours were constantly shifting and changing. It was like being inside a kaleidoscope.

  Can you picture it?

  There were no chairs or bits of furniture or anything. Only those crazy windows and, in one corner, asleep on a crystal bed, a beautiful football that certainly must have been the one that made Mister Carozo champion.

  “She’s asleep now,” said Mister Carozo, pointing at the ball with a serious expression on his face, “but when she wakes up, she’ll score a goal right away.”

  “And what time does she wake up?” I asked.

  “Quite eventually,” he replied mysteriously.

  We decided to let the ball sleep in peace, and the owner of the house invited us through to the dining room where, he explained, we were being awaited by a big table covered in a very fine tablecloth, and on that tablecloth, more than eight hundred pretty little porcelain cups already containing the steaming chocolate.

  We crawled through to the dining room after him.

  We arranged ourselves around the table and saw that, yes, the eight hundred little cups were indeed laid out on the fine tablecloth, but… there wasn’t a single drop of chocolate left!

  What could have happened?

  That shameless Dailan Kifki, angry at not being allowed into the palace, had found nothing better to do than to stick his trunk through the window and drink the chocolate from all the little cups, one by one.

  Would you believe it?

  Though I should point out in his favour that he had managed to suck out the chocolate so delicately that he hadn’t broken a single cup or spilt a single drop on that very fine starched tablecloth.

  We were all looking sadly, desperately at the empty little cups, when suddenly… Ker-BLAM! from the living room we heard the sound of breaking glass. No sooner had we turned our heads to look than in burst the football, leaping about and spinning like a mad thing.

  The uproar seemed to have woken her.

  The ball started jumping about on the table, and broke several of the little cups.

  “Supisichi, she’s awake,” muttered Mister Carozo.

  After bouncing around happily for a good while, the ball escaped out the window and Dailan Kifki started playing with her in the palace garden.

  I was most surprised that Mister Carozo, who was such a grouch, would put up with such a badly behaved ball!

  Anyway, the owner of the house was just about to call his mysterious, invisible servants to replace the broken cups and prepare more chocolate, when…

  I’d
almost rather not remember what happened next.

  It makes my hair stand on end.

  31

  All of a sudden, the whole castle trembled. The ground shook, paint from the roof rained down on our heads, and a hellish noise came from the living room:

  Crish crash bang blam-blata-ka-blooooommmm!

  “Supisichi, an earthquake!” we all said at once: Mister Carozo and Granddad and I, grabbing each other’s hands, terrified.

  However, I did think it strange that there should be an earthquake in Gulubú, since I hadn’t seen a single mountain anywhere, let alone a volcano.

  The three of us squeezed our eyes shut and covered our ears, certain that Dailan Kifki must have destroyed some part of the castle while playing with that football.

  “I’m sure it’s that elephant!” Mister Carozo roared like a lion cub.

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions!” I said.

  “That elephant should be locked up in a school for the rest of his life!” yelled Granddad.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t him,” I said, trying to defend poor Dailan Kifki.

  “Oh no?” replied the dwarf, green with rage. “I’ll bet my football it was him!”

  “Done,” I replied, calmly.

  “Supisichi,” added Mister Carozo. “If Dailan Kifki is innocent, you get to keep the football, with her bed and everything.”

  “I will.”

  I looked out the window and saw Dailan Kifki playing a nice, calm game of golf, pushing the ball with his trunk till she fell into an anthill.

  “Look over here,” I said to Mister Carozo.

  I picked him up so he could see.

  “So what was all that commotion?” asked Mister Carozo, intrigued.

  “I don’t know, but it’s quite clear that Dailan Kifki isn’t to blame. Which means I’ve won the football.”

  “Just a moment,” said Mister Carozo, who was already regretting having bet his precious ball. “This needs to be investigated by a proper detective. You don’t get the ball till we’ve made quite sure it really wasn’t Dailan Kifki who was behind this catastrophe.”

  “But Mister Carozo, first we need to know what this famous catastrophe actually was! We heard the crash but so far we haven’t moved from here to find out what in sampiolín happened,” I said nervously. (Some of the dwarf’s vocabulary was catching.)

  “If we’re to find out what happened,” he replied, stubborn as ever, “we need a detective. A proper one with a magnifying glass and a pipe and everything.”

  “But what do we need a detective for if we can see with our own eyes? That noise, the catastrophe—it happened somewhere very near here. Probably inside the house, Mister Carozo.”

  But do you think the dwarf gave in?

  Nope.

  He didn’t even bother going over to where the catastrophe had taken place. And he wouldn’t let me go, either. Instead he insisted, grumbled and stamped his feet, calling for a detective with a magnifying glass and a pipe and everything.

  Then we heard an ironic little laugh behind us…

  Can you guess who it was?

  Just imagine!

  32

  We turned around and our jaws dropped—there was Granddad perfectly disguised as a detective, with a little checked cloak and cap, a magnifying glass, pipe and sideburns.

  “I’ve been a qualified detective my whole life,” said Granddad with a condescending look on his face, as he polished the pipe on his sleeve.

  “I’m delighted to hear it,” replied Mister Carozo, shaking his hand.

  And right then and there he hired him to carry out his investigation.

  “All suspicions fall on the accused, Dailan Kifki!” cried Mister Dwarf.

  “Not so fast,” Granddad replied calmly. “The guilty party might be the football.”

  “No, sir! The football is playing nice and calmly in the garden!”

  “Allow me to examine this football,” insisted Granddad, the pipe between his teeth.

  I leant out the window and asked Dailan Kifki to hand me the ball, which he did most obediently.

  Granddad examined it from all angles with his magnifying glass and muttered:

  “Let’s wait for the police to show up and take this football away as a suspect.”

  “I will absolutely not permit that, by sampiolín!” roared the dwarf.

  But Granddad interrupted him, very calmly, and said:

  “We shall proceed with the investigation. First we need to know where the whole commotion came from and what physical damage has taken place.”

  “I think the noise came from the living room,” I said. “All the little cups in here are still in one piece.”

  “Then let us go through to the living room,” said Granddad calmly, pointing the way with his pipe.

  And off the three of us went, hand in hand.

  There was no longer a living room.

  There was only a pile of shattered fragments of glass in every colour. There was no trace left of the football’s glass crib. Nor of the frames of those lovely crazy windows that moved like a kaleidoscope.

  The three of us fell silent, looking down at the toes of our shoes.

  I felt a big tear escaping. It rolled down my cheek and burst with a clink against the broken glass that carpeted the floor.

  Mister Carozo was quite still, his hat in his hand and his head bowed.

  I stroked him a bit to comfort him, because I could easily imagine just how sad he must have been feeling.

  Such a beautiful living room. One of a kind.

  “Who was it?” he whimpered. “Who broke my lovely little living room? Who did it?”

  “Sir,” said Granddad, putting a hand on his shoulder, “this is one of the greatest mysteries in the history of Gulubú. But we will solve it, with the help of my pipe, my magnifying glass, and my extraordinary intelligence.”

  Granddad was becoming more modest every day.

  He took a little notebook from the back pocket of his big golf trousers and wrote:

  THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING ROOM

  “The first thing we have to do,” he said next, putting the notebook away again, “is question everyone who is in the vicinity of the house.”

  “But we’ll never finish that, Granddad! There are, like, eight hundred thousand people!”

  “And somewhere among them,” said Granddad, sucking on his pipe, “is the guilty party.”

  We went out into the garden, where our whole retinue was camped out under the trees in the clover.

  Everybody was behaving all absent-minded and innocent, which looked very suspicious if you ask me.

  Granddad climbed up onto a tree trunk and, standing in front of his audience, he said in a big, calm voice:

  “A terrible calamity has just taken place in this castle.”

  “What calamity?” everyone asked, looking all innocent again, even though it was right there under their noses: the living room smashed into little pieces.

  “Certain criminal elements have destroyed Mister Carozo’s living room,” said Granddad.

  “Oooooh, have they really?” everyone said, as though they hadn’t noticed.

  “We didn’t see a thing,” said one ambassador, who I’m sure was a shameless liar.

  “And you didn’t hear the noise either?” asked Granddad.

  “No,” said the Superintendent, “because we were all singing zambas.”

  “I would most earnestly entreat you,” said Granddad, “to assist me in this investigation, so that we might avoid the injustice of condemning an innocent man.”

  “Of course, of course. We’re at your service,” everyone said.

  “I would ask you then to move a bit farther off,” said Granddad, “and keep a bit of distance from the site of the catastrophe, because I’m going to be using my magnifying glass to study the marks on the ground.”

  Everyone moved back in silence, while Granddad got down on his hands and knees and set about studying the ground with his po
werful English magnifying glass.

  Mister Carozo stood with me and cried, covering his eyes with my pinafore.

  33

  Poor Mister Carozo!

  I stroked the little dwarf’s head and tried to console him.

  “Don’t worry yourself, Mister Carozo. Between us we’ll be able to put your living room back together.”

  “And till then, where’s the football going to sleep?” he asked, hiccuping inconsolably.

  “She can sleep at the foot of your bed, Mister Carozo.”

  “No, she doesn’t like that. In the middle of the night she has bad dreams, and then she jumps on my bed and startles me.”

  “Don’t upset yourself. Granddad will discover the guilty party, and he’ll make him rebuild the room as a punishment.”

  “My lovely little room with its crazy windows in every colour…”

  In order to distract him, I invited him into the kitchen to prepare some yummy oats soup for Dailan Kifki.

  I thought it strange that I hadn’t seen a single servant anywhere in the castle, or a single cook in the kitchen.

  “You can’t see them, but I’ve got lots,” the dwarf explained.

  I had to cook on my knees because the kitchen was so small.

  When we went out to take the soup to Dailan Kifki, Granddad was crawling around the ruined living room, sniffing at the floor like a bloodhound and squinting at it through his magnifying glass.

  “An ant,” said Granddad, and made a note in his little notebook.

  “A cockroach wearing a wig,” said Granddad, making a note of this suspicious discovery, too.

  “An embarrassed-looking earthworm.” And he made another note.

  This is never going to end! I thought to myself, alarmed.

  All of a sudden, Granddad stopped and buried his nose in the ground.

  He looked with his magnifying glass, and looked again. He compared what he was looking at with the ant, the cockroach and the worm. He got out a ruler and a pair of compasses and took a careful measurement of whatever he was looking at, made another note in his notebook, then came over and whispered in my ear: