Only the Animals (17 page)

 

…why, some even say that man himself was made out of what was left over after the elephant had been created …

José Saramago,
THE ELEPHANT'S JOURNEY

 

My twin sister and I, like all young elephants in our herd, were raised on a feast of stories about our ancestors, whose souls glowed at us from constellations in the sky. On certain summer evenings, the elders would point out identifying features among the stars: the tip of a trunk, or the triangular ends of an ear spread out in preparation for a charge – the same shape as the continent of Africa. They would tell us the story of one of these hallowed forebears looking down on us. My sister and I liked to re-enact what we had heard, living out an ancestor's great moments on earth and imagining what it might feel like to be transmuted into a soul that sparkles forever, wheeling about on an invisible axis.

It was clear to us from early on that only the ancestors who had died a noteworthy death made it into the stars. This fostered in us both a secret longing for a death deserving of a small legend that could be told and retold as the years and generations and eons passed. We decided that a dramatic individual death would be best, such as our ancient ancestor who was killed by a dragon wanting to drink her blood. But mass historical death would be grand – to die along with hundreds of thousands of beasts of burden sacrificed to Yahweh at Solomon's Temple, to be one of the five thousand animals ordered slaughtered by Roman Emperor Titus at the opening of the Colosseum, to be among the fifteen thousand killed in a single day's hunt by the Moghul Emperor of India! These outsized deaths seemed to guarantee eternal life in the stars.

*   *   *

Once my sister and I were a bit older, no longer babies coddled by the maternal force of the herd but still young enough to get away with certain mischief, I decided to ask one of my aunts why it was that all the ancestors whose stories were told and retold, whose distinguishing features we joined the star-dots up above to see, had lived in lands so far away from our native Mozambique. I knew she had a taste for marula bark because of the pleasant intoxicating effect of ingesting the beetle pupae embedded in the wood, and I waited until she was swaying slightly before I approached her.

‘We don't make distinctions between our geographical lineages,' she said. ‘We believe all elephants share a common ancestor, which makes us all kin, no matter where we live.'

‘But so many of the ancestors in the skies are Indian elephants, or forest elephants from North Africa. What about the African savanna elephants, where are the stories about us?'

‘Oh, but darling, there
are
stories about us, plenty of them. Most of the souls in the sky lived out their lives right here, in these lands.' Then she caught herself. ‘How old are you and your sister now?'

‘We're twelve,' I lied. We were only eleven.

She hiccuped. ‘On second thought, I suppose there are fewer stories about us, because those Indian and North African ancestors of ours had more interesting lives,' she said. ‘Being closer to Europe and all.'

I gave up on that line of questioning. ‘But why did they all live so long ago?'

‘It takes time for their souls to appear up in the sky,' she said.

I sensed my question had caused her some discomfort. ‘How long?' I pushed.

‘Well,' she said cautiously, ‘which ancestor's story have you heard that is closest to our own time?'

‘Castor and Pollux, the sibling zoo elephants,' I said. ‘The ones who died in the Jardin des Plantes during the Siege of Paris.'

‘Well, there you go,' she said. ‘That was – when was it? – around the year 1870? 1880? A hundred years ago. So perhaps that is how long it takes.' She wandered off to strip another marula tree of bark, and returned later in the day, singing loudly and walking in unsteady zigzags across the plain, to join the herd at our waterhole.

Once the sun had set, one of our baby cousins asked the elders to tell the story of our ancestor Suleiman, a story my sister and I had listened to many times with pleasure. But that night I didn't want to hear about faraway elephants.

‘Suleiman was born in the royal stables of the King of Ceylon in the year 1540,' one of our great-aunts began. ‘As a young boy, he was sent to Lisbon as part of a diplomatic outreach to King John III and Catherine of Portugal. Though he delighted them, they decided to gift him to their grandson Don Carlos. Suleiman travelled on foot to Spain, but Don Carlos found it too complicated to care for him. He was given to the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian II, who put him on a ship with his wife and children to Genoa. From there Suleiman travelled on foot again, all the way to Vienna, where a special celebration was held to welcome him to the city.

‘In Vienna, Suleiman was given the honour of being the first animal housed in the menagerie within Maximilian II's newly built palace, the most beautiful Renaissance palace outside Italy. Here Maximilian tried to ensure his new pet's happiness. He gave orders that the elephant be fed the best exotic fruit from his orchards, and only the fruits Suleiman did not like were served at dinners in the imperial court. In the winter, Suleiman was given a gallon of red wine to drink every day, to warm his blood. On the stone blocks of the entrance to his spacious enclosure, Maximilian ordered one of the court's scholars to inscribe the words of the Roman historian, Pliny the Elder:
The elephant is the largest land animal, and also the nearest to man in intelligence. It understands the language of its country, obeys orders, remembers duties it has learned, likes affection and honours – more, it has virtues rare in man – honesty, wisdom, justice, and respect for the stars and reverence for the sun and the moon.

‘A giraffe was purchased to keep Suleiman company in the empty menagerie, but they did not take to each other, and the giraffe was eventually allowed to roam free in the palace gardens, where she developed a trick the noblewomen loved, of sticking her head through their first-floor windows for treats. Gradually, Maximilian expanded his menagerie as he expanded his empire, acquiring panthers and peacocks, lynxes and leopards, bears and buzzards. But he never managed to find another elephant to join Suleiman; some whispered it was because he didn't want Suleiman to bond too closely with one of his own kind.

‘One day, when Maximilian brought his most pious priests to visit Suleiman, they found he had written something on the sandy floor of his enclosure:
I, the elephant, wrote this
. The priests were horrified. They insisted the elephant be killed on the spot, that his writing was proof of demonic forces at work. Maximilian refused, but he understood the risks enough to wipe out Suleiman's words with the sole of his own slipper. The priests took it upon themselves to have Suleiman secretly poisoned over the course of the next winter, adding arsenic
to his daily wine.

‘It took four months for Suleiman to die, and when he did, Maximilian was inconsolable. He told his servants to rub snuff in the eyes of all the other menagerie animals so that they would appear to be crying, in mourning as profound as his own. He decided that Suleiman's body should be divided up and distributed throughout the Holy Roman Empire so that his domain would never forget him.

‘To the Mayor of Vienna, Maximilian gave Suleiman's right front foot and part of his shoulder blade – if you look up at the stars, see, there; can you see the shoulder blade and foot together? And next to them, if you join up that cluster of stars, you can see the chair that was made of Suleiman's bones, that to this day is in the abbey at Kremsmünster. His soul glows at us from these remnants. But most important is his stuffed skin – you have to draw an imaginary line from that trunk star to that tail star to see it – which was housed in royal collections and then in the Bavarian National Museum for a long time, until the humans had their second great war of this century and it disappeared from the collection, never to be seen again.'

I waited for my great-aunt to sigh with contentment at the end of her telling, and for the herd around us to shift and settle. ‘Is it because we don't have a museum?' I said. ‘Is that why we don't tell the stories of our ancestors who lived here in Mozambique?'

‘There is a museum, in Maputo,' said one of my cousins who had just come of age and was soon to leave the herd, before he was hushed by the elders and we were told by our mother, in no uncertain terms, to go to sleep.

*   *   *

Our oldest female cousin, who mostly ignored my sister and me though we followed her around devoutly, decided one day during a mini-rebellion against her mother's control that she would tell us the recent secret history of the herd in our own birthplace.

‘There was a human war in our country that ended a few years after you two were born,' she whispered to us behind a scrub of thorn trees. ‘Between the Portuguese and the local people, who wanted this country to be independent. You were too young to remember.'

‘Were there any historically worthy deaths of our ancestors in this war?' my sister asked excitedly.

Our cousin looked over her shoulder before answering. ‘Many of our clan were de-tusked and left to bleed out by the Portuguese as they fled the country,' she said.

‘Right here? In Gorongosa National Park?' I said.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Now you keep your little mouths shut. I'm not supposed to tell you these things. You'll find them all out when you're old enough.'

‘When?' my sister said. ‘When will we be old enough? We turn thirteen this year.'

She looked surprised we didn't already know. ‘It is almost time for you to be initiated,' she said, her eyes softening.

‘But nobody will tell us when that is.'

She pulled a strip of bark off an acacia trunk, exposing its pink underside, and gave a low rumble of frustration. ‘You two have always had special treatment because you're twins. We didn't think you would survive at first. Your mother didn't have enough milk for you both, so one of the aunties shared her milk. The herd has cared for you and protected you from harm. When you are strong enough, you will learn what you want to know.'

*   *   *

Our cousin was right in saying the time would pass quickly, that we should not wish it away. Soon after my sister and I turned thirteen we experienced our first full night of wakefulness. Instead of falling asleep lying on the ground like the young elephants, she and I found we could not sleep. We kept company with the adult members of the herd, standing awake and protective above the sleeping children. Just before sunrise, we coiled up our trunks on our upturned tusks and dozed on our feet until the sun made the air bright. Only our great-grandmother, the matriarch of our herd, did not doze at all.

In the morning our mother told us we were ready to be initiated. ‘This wakefulness is the first sign that you are ready to be mothers and leaders yourselves,' she said.

The herd waited for the full moon to arrive, and from the night it rose fat and red above the bush until the night it had melted away by half, we were initiated into the secrets of the herd and the principles by which we should live as adults.

On the third night of our initiation, the matriarch told a story.

‘Many years before you two were born, something terrible happened here. There was a piece of land nearby that the Portuguese thought might be suited to growing crops. They ordered a local hunt supervisor to kill two thousand elephants living on the land. He followed his orders, but he had a scientific bent to his mind. He decided to cut out and collect every unborn baby he found in the wombs of the dead.

‘His ambition grew. He could not stop until he had the world's only complete collection of elephant foetuses, one for every month of the twenty-two months of our gestation. When he had collected all twenty-two in ascending size, he had them preserved in formaldehyde and donated them to the curator of the Lourenço Marques Natural History Museum – this was before our capital was renamed Maputo – which still displays the jars.'

She looked at the sky. With her trunk she pointed to a knot of stars close together on the horizon and waited for my sister and I to count them. There were twenty-two.

‘You have asked for the stories of your immediate ancestors,' she said. ‘Their souls are inscribed up there too. But their stories are more difficult for us to tell our young. We have to start you on the tales of elephants from long ago and far away.'

She must have seen the excitement in our eyes at discovering a new layer of constellations in the sky dedicated to our own African ancestors. ‘Death is not something to worship now that you are adults,' the matriarch warned. ‘It is the province only of the very young to want things to work out badly. The souls in the sky live only as long as we remember their stories. Beyond that there is nothing, not for them nor for us.'

*   *   *

Though I had been told by the elders of the power it would give me over males, the effects of my first oestrus took me completely by surprise. Adolescent bulls from all corners of Gorongosa began to hang around our herd and wider bond group, gazing at me with open desire and shoving one another away to get a closer sniff of my urine. The attention was intoxicating. But the elders counselled me to ignore these too eager boy-men and wait for an older bull in musth to begin to court me. And soon one did, a bull in his thirties with secretions from his temporal glands streaming down his cheeks. I let him shadow me for a while, glancing over my shoulder at him and enjoying the sound of his calls while he followed. It was the only time in my life that I forgot the presence of my sister and all my family: my world had shrunk to the two of us in consort.

I knew immediately a new life had begun inside me and sang the deep, arched notes I had been taught during my initiation to summon my herd around me to celebrate. They trumpeted and flapped their ears, smelled the spilled semen on the ground, and rubbed their flanks against my stomach, rumbling with joy. My sister stayed by my side all the rest of that day and night, rejoicing. Her own oestrus began soon after. We carried our babies at the same time, through two of the longest, driest summers the herd could remember.