The Collected Novels of José Saramago (435 page)

I
T IS SAID,
once tolstoy had said it first, that all happy families are alike, and there is really little more to say about them. It would seem that the same is true of happy elephants. One need look no further than suleiman. During the two weeks he spent in bressanone, he rested, slept, ate and drank his fill, until he could eat no more, demolishing something like four tons of forage and drinking about three thousand liters of water, thus making up for the many enforced slimming regimes imposed on him during his long journey through the lands of portugal, spain and italy, when it wasn’t always possible to replenish his larder on a regular basis. Now that suleiman has re-covered his strength, he is plump and handsome, after only a week, his flaccid, wrinkled skin has ceased to hang in folds about him like a coat on a hook. The archduke was given the good news and made a point of visiting the elephant in his house, or, rather, stable, rather than having him parade around in the square simply to show off suleiman’s now excellent physical form and magnificent appearance to himself, the archduch ess and the assembled populace. Naturally, fritz was present at this visit, but, conscious that the reconciliation between him and the archduke had not been formalized, if indeed it ever would be, he was discreet and solicitous, careful not to draw attention to himself, but hopeful that the archduke would, at the very least, utter some brief words of congratulation or praise. And so it was. At the end of the visit, the archduke shot him a rapid glance and said, You’ve done a good job, fritz, suleiman must be very pleased, to which fritz replied, That is all I desire, sir, my life is at your highness’s service. The archduke did not respond, apart from muttering a laconic Hmm, a primitive sound, if not the very first, and one which every man is at liberty to interpret as he wishes. Fritz was predisposed by temperament and philosophy of life to take an optimistic view of events, and despite the apparent brusqueness of that grunt and the inappropriateness of such a sound in the mouth of an archduke and soon-to-be emperor, fritz interpreted it as a step, a small, but definite step, in the direction of much-desired concord. Let us wait until vienna to see what happens.

The distance from bressanone to the brenner pass is so short that there surely won’t be time for the convoy to become dispersed. Neither time nor distance. Which means that we will bump up against the same moral dilemma we met before in the isarco pass, namely, should we travel together or separately. It’s frightening just to imagine the whole long convoy, from the cuirassiers in the vanguard to those bringing up the rear, being stuck between the walls of the ravine and under constant threat from avalanches or rockfalls. It’s probably best to leave the solution of this problem in god’s hands and let him decide. Just keep moving and see what happens. This anxiety, however understandable, should not make us forget another worrying factor. According to people who know, the brenner pass is ten times more dangerous than the isarco pass, others say twenty times, adding that every year it claims a few victims, buried beneath avalanches or crushed by the huge boulders that roll down the mountainside, even though, when their fall begins, there is nothing about them that indicates such a fateful destiny. Let’s hope that a time will come when, by building viaducts that span the heights, they can do away with these deep passes in which we are already almost buried alive. The interesting thing is that the people obliged to travel through these passes always do so with a kind of fatalistic resignation, which, while it may not prevent their bodies from being assailed by fear, at least appears to leave their souls intact and serene, like a steadily burning light that no hurricane could extinguish. People say a lot of things, and not all of them are true, but that is what human beings are like, they can as easily believe that the hair of an elephant, marinated in a little oil, can cure baldness, as imagine that they carry within them the one solitary light that will lead them along life’s paths, even through mountain passes. One way or another, as the wise old hermit of the alps once said, we will all have to die.

The weather is not good, which, at this time of year, as has been abundantly demonstrated, is hardly a novelty. It’s true that the snow is falling only lightly and that visibility is almost normal, but the wind’s chill blasts are like sharp blades come to cut through our clothes, however warm. Just ask the cuirassiers. According to the rumor doing the rounds, the reason they are setting out today is that the meteorological situation is expected to worsen tomorrow, and that, once we have trav eled
a few kilometers further north, the worst of the alps will, in theory, be behind us. In other words, strike before you are struck. Many of bressanone’s inhabitants came to watch the departure of the archduke maximilian and his elephant and were rewarded with a surprise. When the archduke and his wife were about to enter their carriage, suleiman knelt down on the frozen ground, a gesture that provoked a flurry of applause and cheers loud enough to merit being set down in the records. The archduke smiled, but his smile immediately turned to a frown at the thought that this new miracle was probably a crafty maneuver on the part of fritz, desperate to make peace with him. The noble archduke is quite wrong, the elephant’s gesture was entirely spontaneous and sprang, if we may put it so, from his soul, it was a way of saying thank you to those who most deserved his thanks, for the excellent treatment meted out to him at the am hohen feld inn during the two weeks he spent there, a whole fortnight of perfect happiness and, therefore, happily uneventful. Although one should also not exclude the possibility that our elephant, quite rightly concerned by the obvious cooling in relations between his mahout and the archduke, intended this charming gesture as a way of pouring oil on troubled waters, as people will say in the future and then cease to say. Then again, so that we are not accused of partiality by perhaps ignoring the real key to the matter, we cannot exclude the hypothesis, not merely academic, that fritz, either deliberately or accidentally, touched suleiman’s right ear with his stick, and as we saw from what happened in padua, that ear was a miracle-working organ par excellence. We should know by now that the most exact, most precise representation of the human heart is the labyrinth. And where the human heart is involved, anything is possible.

The convoy is ready to depart. There is a general feeling of apprehension and overt anxiety, it is clear that people cannot get out of their minds the idea of the brenner pass and all its dangers. And the chronicler of these events has no qualms in confessing that he fears he may lack the ability to describe the famous pass that lies ahead, an inability he had to disguise as best he could at the isarco pass by diverting the reader onto secondary matters, which, while possibly of importance in themselves, were clearly a way of sidestepping the fundamental issue. It’s a shame that photography had not yet been invented in the sixteenth century, because then the solution would have been as easy as pie, we would simply have included a few photos from the period, especially if taken from a helicopter, and readers would then have every reason to consider themselves amply rewarded and to recognize the extraordinarily informative nature of our enterprise. By the way, it is time we mentioned that the next small town, a very short distance from bressanone, is called in italian, given that we’re still in italy, vitipeno. The fact that the austrians and germans call it sterzing is beyond our comprehension. Nevertheless, we would accept the possibility, although we’d stop short of actually putting our hand in the fire, that italian is still more widely spoken here than portuguese is in the algarve.

We have left bressanone now. It’s hard to understand why in such a rugged region as this, where there is no shortage of vertiginous mountain ranges one after the other, it was thought necessary to gouge out such deep scars as the isarco and the brenner pass, rather than putting them in places on the planet less blessed with natural beauty, where such exceptional, amaz ing
geological phenomena could, with the aid of the tourist industry, materially benefit the modest, long-suffering lives of the local inhabitants. Contrary to what you might, quite rightly, think, bearing in mind our problems when it came to describing the isarco pass, these comments are not intended to replace the foreseeable paucity of descriptions of the brenner pass that we are about to enter. They are merely a humble recognition of how much truth is contained in that well-known phrase, Words fail me. Because words really do fail us. They say that in one of the languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of south america, possibly in amazonia, there are more than twenty ways, about twenty-seven we seem to recall, of describing the color green. Compared with the poverty of our own vocabulary in that respect, you would think it would be easy for them to describe the forests in which they live, in the midst of all those minutely differentiated greens, distinguished by subtle, almost imperceptible nuances. We don’t know that they ever tried nor, if they did, whether they were satisfied with the result. What we do know is that a monochromatic approach won’t solve the problem, why, one need look no further than the apparently pure whiteness of these mountains, because, for all we know, there may be more than twenty different shades of white that the eye cannot perceive, but whose existence it can intuit. The truth, if we want to accept it in all its crudity, is that it’s simply not possible to describe a landscape in words. Or rather, it’s possible, but not worthwhile. I wonder if it’s even worth writing the word mountain when we don’t know what name the mountain would give itself. Painting, though, is a different matter, it’s perfectly capable of creating on the palette twenty-seven different shades of green that have eluded nature, plus a few others that don’t even seem green, but that, of course, is what we call art. Painted trees do not lose their leaves.

We are now inside the brenner pass. On the archduke’s express orders, utter silence reigns. This time, the convoy, as if fear had produced a congregational effect, shows not the slightest tendency to disperse, the muzzles of the horses drawing the archduke’s carriage are almost touching the hindquarters of the cuirassiers’ horses immediately in front, suleiman is so close to the archduchess’s little bottle of perfume that he can breathe in the delicious scent that issues from it whenever the daughter of charles the fifth feels a need to refresh herself. The rest of the convoy, beginning with the ox-cart carrying the forage and the water trough, follows right behind as if there were no other way to reach their destination. Everyone is shivering with cold, but also, and above all, with fear. The tortuous crevices of the sheer escarpments are filled with the snow that occasionally breaks free and falls with a dull thud on the convoy, and these small avalanches, while not dangerous in themselves, only serve to increase the levels of fear. No one feels confident enough to use their eyes to enjoy the beauty of the landscape, although there are those familiar with the place who remark to their neighbor, It’s much prettier here when there’s no snow, What do you mean prettier, asked their companion, intrigued, Well, it’s not really something you can put into words. The greatest disrespect we can show for reality, whatever that reality might be, when attempting the pointless task of describing a landscape, is to do so with words that are not our own and never were, by which we mean words that have already appeared on millions of pages and in millions of mouths before our
turn to use them finally comes, weary words, exhausted from being passed from hand to hand, leaving in each one part of their vital substance. If we were to write, for example, the words crystalline stream, so often used in describing landscapes, we never stop to wonder if the stream is still as crystalline as it was when we saw it for the first time, or if it has ceased to be a stream and become instead a rushing river, or, unhappy fate, the foulest and most malodorous of swamps. It may not seem so at first sight, but all of this is closely related to our earlier brave affirmation that it is simply not possible to describe a landscape or, by extension, anything else. In the mouth of a trusted person who, for example, knows these places as they appear at all the different seasons of the year, such words would give us food for thought. If that person, in all honesty and basing himself on long experience, were to say that it’s impossible to describe what your eyes see by translating it into words, whether it be snow or a garden in full bloom, how could anyone dare to do so who has never in his life been through the brenner pass and certainly not in the sixteenth century, when there were no roads or gas stations, hot snacks and cups of coffee, not to mention a motel where you could spend the night in the warm, while outside the storm rages and a lost elephant utters the most anguished of cries. We were not there, we have been guided by whatever information we could garner, possibly of dubious value, for example, an old engraving, deserving of our respect only because of its great age and ingenious design, shows an elephant in hannibal’s army falling into a ravine when, according to the experts, during the carthaginian army’s laborious crossing of the alps, not one elephant was lost. No one was lost here either. The convoy is still keeping together, close and resolute, qualities that are no less praiseworthy for being based, as we explained earlier, on entirely selfish motives. There are, however, exceptions. The cuirassiers’ biggest concern, for example, has nothing to do with their own personal safety, but with that of their horses, obliged now to walk on slippery, compacted, blue-gray ice, where a metacarpal fracture would have the most fatal of consequences. However this may rankle with the stubborn lutheranism of archduke maximilian the second of austria, the miracle performed by suleiman at the door of the basilica of saint anthony in padua has so far protected the convoy, not only the powerful people traveling in it, but the ordinary ones too, which stands as proof, if proof were needed, of the rare and excellent thaumaturgical virtues of a saint who was born fernando de bulhões and over whom two cities, lisbon and padua, have been arguing for centuries, rather pointlessly it must be said, because it is clear to everyone that padua ended up flying the flag of victory, while lisbon had to make do with parades through the streets, red wine, grilled sardines, as well as balloons and pots of marjoram. It isn’t enough to know how and where fernando de bulhões was born, one has to wait and find out how and where saint anthony will die.