Elephant Stories

By Luis Harss

Elephants tell us about ourselves. They can be merry-go-round animals or people weighted down with grief. In these stories a dreamer rides an elephant cart. A hunting party shoots elephants in a game ranch. White elephants inhabit a family home. Memory is an elephant head in a library. A land of dead immigrants is like an elephant cemetery. And an angel musician plays an elephant organ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palibrio
• Release date: May 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781506532509

Luis Harss

LUIS HARSS writes autobiographical stories. He has published The Blind (1962), Little men (1964), Into the Mainstream (1966), Sarah my Sarah (1968), Sor Juana’s Dream (1986), Mother Country (1987), Lonesome Twosome (2010) and My Other Lives (2011). Mystical Dreamers will appear in 2014.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by Luis Harss.

Cover design by Kristen Uccellini.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Rev. date: 14/05/2020

Palibrio

1663 Liberty Drive

Suite 200

Bloomington, IN 47403

812695

CONTENTS

The Witch

Bonita, 1978

Fragrances

Macey Homes

Vida Loca

Little Nell

The Pony Kids

A Visiting Angel

There Was Always Music

THE WITCH

I dreamed I was underground. Yes, that was me. Six feet down at least. I’d been keeping vigil over someone. I’d spent a long time in the unlit room, breathing stale air. It was late at night. A single candle had burned down. Only the body had a faint glow, from rubbing against the coffin’s satin lining. I stared into emptiness with wide open eyes, swallowing my tears. I was thinking of past times. Hey, get up, I said. If you can. And, to my horror, a shadow came out of the box and sat in my chair. And now I was in the box. I was being lowered down an elevator shaft. Doors opened on blank walls all the way down. The shadow watched in silence. The shadow was me, too. I don’t know how. It just happened that way. I got up and sat on the windowsill, gazing out at the sky. The shadow was back in the coffin. We’d met, like two different persons. Shaken hands as he went by. He pulled the lid shut over himself and gave no further sign of life for the rest of the night. But I’d started to think the dead man was alive.

Someone banged on the door. It was Mother, bringing a glass of water, who said:

I’ve come to keep you company.

She opened the coffin and bent over the body:

My God, he’s dead!

I said: No, he’s alive. I’m the one who’s dead.

She sobbed, and I hugged her tight. We knew we didn’t have much time left together.

The body in the box stretched out his arms, rubbed his eyes as if waking out of a long sleep, yawned and said:

I’ve slept enough. Now I want to look out the window.

I wheeled around, dropping my glass of water. He was smiling, and the coffin lid came down over my head.

Some hours later I woke up again. My head ached. My mouth and throat were parched. I couldn’t lick my cracked lips.

Mother came in and asked:

You’re not dead yet?

It won’t be long now.

I felt her dress rustling against the edge of the coffin and shouted desperately:

I’m dying of thirst!

She said quietly:

I’ll water your grave.

It was raining. I heard the pitter-patter of raindrops. She was also shedding big drops of tears.

I started to feel the humidity. It was drowning out my voice.

Lying in my box I was able to go over my entire life. I saw a long childhood. It stretched all the way into old age.

The heat was becoming insufferable. I crossed my arms on my chest. I tried to think of them as folded wings. A drop of water made its way in through a crack in the coffin and splashed on my face. I lay there in total silence. It had stopped raining outside. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I could almost see the sun. I felt worse every minute.

I heard people in the outside world talking. I couldn’t reach them. But I knew they were there. One of them was my shadow. He was sitting on my coffin.

Have you come to torture me? I asked him.

He laughed snd said:

Don’t you know you’re happy? Everything here is yours. You’re thirsty? Drink your tears. You’re hungry? Eat your flesh.

For the first time I had a good look at my shadow. There was nothing strange or horrible about him. In fact, he looked a lot like me. Just a bit darker, like my mood, and with something unpleasant about him. He smiled and aswered all my questions patiently, while suggesting that certain matters were beyond my understanding.

I want to help you, he said.

Those were beautiful moments, a world unto themselves. I was outside myself, talking to my absent being in the box.

It lasted for hours on end. I heard whispers and sighs and heavy breaths around me. I was able to swallow a few moutfuls of air. I started to sing, pretending I had air to spare, but I was suffocatng, fading fast.

I heard distant footsteps approaching. Soon some wayfarers came by, with walking sticks, like hikers or tramps.

I felt them poking around.

Hey, how did he end up here?

They buried him alive.

It doesn’t look like the earth has been dug up in years.

And they went by without another thought.

Time ticked back and forth, like a pendulum clock. I was in an agony of despair, but I didn’t pull out my hair or bang on the box. Instead, I went on singing, a bit madly. By then I was seriously worried. I was sweating, breaking out all over. As if stuck in a swamp or muddy river. Plant life growing on me. There were no more outside voices. But at bottom I was hopeful. My shadow came and went, and in a while I left it in my place.

When I got out Mother said:

I know who you are, Son, but I don’t recognize you. You must have been gone for years. You can’t imagine how much you’ve changed. You’ve missed the best part of your life. But I love you more than ever. You’re really mine now.

She made me lie in a hammock with her, swinging slowly, until I fell out.

I began a new life. I could tell everyone what death was like. Everyone would have to learn from me: something only I knew.

In the world around nothing had changed. The fields were still green, the sky was still blue.

Mother said:

You know you don’t have a father. He died long ago and we’ve forgotten him.

And, with trembling hands, she gave me a book called My Life. On the first page I read:

No one in the world can write like me because only I know my thoughts.

We sat by the fireplace, for endless hours, forgetting my father. There were three of us, because the dead man still smoked his pipe, as he used to do, occasionally rubbing his eyes, as if trying to remember something, and mumbled words we didn’t even try to understand. No one else said a word. Sometimes there was a moon and stars and sometimes not. But beyond was the void. I can tell you those nightlong hours got darker and darker, even if we turned on all the lights. We sat in the dark gazing at the fire with closed eyes. Sometimes we slept in our armchairs until the image of my father in the flames disappeared. Then we’d drag ourselves up the stairs to bed.

He’ll be back tomorrow, Mother said.

I kept busy. I was reading and writing My Life. I knew I’d soon have to go out into the world.

I loved Mother. On our balcony there was a potted plant that kept flowering out of season, in unexpected colors, even if we didn’t water it. We were alone with the flowers, for all eternity, except for an animal shape lying at the feet of my father’s shadow. He petted the animal while it rained outside. It was a dog he’d sent us. It growled at us, baring its teeth. But then it cocked its ears and grinned, as if it were listening to music. One day I picked it up and deposited it on the flames in the fireplace, and after burning bright for a few moments it went up the chimney in smoke.

Without knowing why, I fled across bare fields stripped of crops that had been recently harvested. I was hungry and thirsty but wasn‘t carrying food or water. I thought I heard Mother flapping her wings after me. Instead, I was caught in a flock of low-flyng birds that swept me along. For a while, after that, I got a lift and rode in an elephant cart that rattled along until the pantomime elephant, which was what it seemed to be, just a patchwork of pelts on old bones, collapsed, bellowing through a blowhole, like a whale, and I was on a dirt road way out in empty country that used to be farmland, where I limped and stumbled and fell in a ditch.

Many days later, I woke up in deep undergrowth. I‘d been in hiding. I walked through some tall grasses. A hot breeze blew seeds in every direction. I worked my way up a dry stream where I kept losing my footing, on to a paved road. Storm clouds were about to burst overhead. A huge feathery bird with a long tail flew by, like a witch on a broomstick.

Eventually I saw dim city lights. I stood on the crest of a hill, where the road ended, overlooking the city. It was dawning and the lights faded. Instead there was the shadowy radiance of daylight showing a city in ruins. I thought I heard early-morning birds twittering in the air, as if it were made of leaves, and I stuck out my hand, and a bat on a long string came down and landed on my palm.

BONITA, 1978

I was just a sales woman in a department store. Fortyish and alone. But I heard this child calling me. She woke me up at night. I lived in a single room with just a few odds and ends of furniture, above the store, where I also bought my food and clothes. I had no friends or family. My parents hadn’t survived exile. They’d left me only their suffering and bitterness. It separated me from others. I lived among strangers. But this child was calling, from way back. I couldn’t stop hearing her. She was all I had. So I got a passport and a visa, through a travel agent, gave my few items of furniture away, packed a bag and bought a plane ticket home to the bloodstained country to which my parents had sworn never to return. But I’d been happy down there as a child, even in the worst of times, staying with my grandmother. I’d felt she loved me when no one else had time for me. She called me Bonita. We used to laugh and drink like birds from a fountain in her garden. I still dreamed of her small town, a long day away from the capital by bus. It had a sunny park and a church bell, and the cemetery where she was buried in an unmarked grave. And I still spoke to myself in Spanish sometimes. Now— as then— generals ran the country, but I didn’t care anymore. There was this child calling. I’d been wanting desperately to overcome my fears and go. And I had my passport and visa and money saved up.

I flew down overnight. I was awake all night. My whole life with me. I hadn’t been down for years, since my grandmother’s death. We landed at dawn in a fog. I got through customs and immigration: murderous hands and eyes checking papers. They’d always been the same. Other passengers were searched, their bags emptied, documents seized, but I was an ignorant foreigner, no one bothered with me. I changed all my money at a money exchange window. I had to ride a cab through greyish suburbs into the noisy, smoky city, and across and out again along a gloomy river to another airport, where I caught a short flight over open country in a smaller jet, and before I knew it I was there: a flat, sunlit town, just as I remembered it, only with loudspeakers on telephone poles playing marches and speeches in the park, instead of the holiday music band, and unfriendly people who went by without looking at you.

The airport van dropped me off downtown. I found a room in a residential hotel. A stale and stifling place with old kitchen smells. I had to pay a week in advance and an ill-humored landlady kept my passport. But there was a patch of greenery in back with a birdbath, like my grandmother’s garden.

I went out and walked around town, looking for the alleys where I used to play street games. Everything was the same. Yet I didn’t recognize anything. I talked to people, but they wouldn’t say much. I didn’t tell them I’d been there before. The houses were shuttered, many stores were closed and some streets were blocked off. There was almost no traffic. A statue of a general on horseback in the empty square overloked the town named after him. A subdued crowd shuffled through the street market and people in a bar gaped at a World Cup soccer match flashing on and off on a TV screen.

Night fell fast, and in minutes the town was pitch black. The street lamps never came on. Patrols went by in slow-moving cars with dim lights. Everyone stayed indoors. I couldn’t take a bath or get to sleep. The hotel had no heat or hot water. A clammy staircase led down into the lobby. There was no one at the desk. And only a faint sun came out in the morning, as if darkness had invaded even daylight. But the streets had been cleared, life went on, and the next days I walked about everywhere, mingling with the people who busied themselves in shops and offices. I heard my child calling every night. I knew I’d find her, or else she’d come for me.

Meantime I needed to work. Prices were going wild in the country. I’d burn through my travel money in no time. Everything cost thousands in paper bills. My wandering footsteps took me down a block of wilted trees. At the far end was a hospital. I knew that beforehand because my grandmother was a nurse and had worked there. She used to take me on her rounds— to keep me by her side as long as she could, she said. I’d felt her cool powers. They flowed like running water over wounds. She was as calm in suffering as in joy. The hospital was the same massive old building, near the cemetery, looking at once abandoned and overcrowded, with mud-splattered walls, garbage piled up outside. Birds flew in and out the broken windows.

An unnatural silence hovered in the area. A warning street sign said: Silence is health. There’d been killings in town, and the dead and wounded were being quietly carried into the hospital all the time. They needed doctors and nurses. Half the staff was gone.

I imagined I could help. I could do bandages, first aid, things I remembered my grandmother doing with her able hands. Things as simple sometimes as a touch or a hug that brought someone back. And once, wanting to be like her, after she’d died, and to escape loneliness in my land of exile, I’d taken a Red Cross nursing course. So, grasping the unexpected opportunity to be of use, I offered myself, in an office with tired faces, and they put me straight to work, in a shabby ward where people in fetid bandages breathed with smothered cries. I’d receive only an allowance, but they’d train me, they said, and get me credentials, which meant some kind of a forged police certificate, so I could stay and practice. They gave me a nurse’s uniform and fed me in the makeshift kitchen, by a loading area where they smuggled in medicines and supplies on motorcycles..

I’d left the hotel, which I couldn’t afford. Instead, in my spare time, I did maids’ work there, by the hour. I’d done that, too, in my land of exile, before my job at the department store. Sometimes the landlady let me stay in a maid’s room. I never slept. I had no schedule. The hotel was empty, except for some pensioners on room and board, but there were constant emergencies in the hospital: people shot in the street, dumped in ditches. I was on call night and day, which were indistinguishable in the lurid fluorescent lighting of the wards. I could pump a chest, stop a hemorrhage with a vise, filling in for staff who’d fled and were in hiding or on the run, all sorts of stories went around. In just a few days I saw smashed bones, torn insides, and a baby born out of a corpse. And I discovered unknown abilities in myself, things I wouldn’t have dreamed I could do, but which seemed to be coming back to me from a forgotten part of myself, like finding the right words, which came to me in my grandmother’s voice, to help a ravaged soul die.

Round the clock, I waited for my child. When I could take a break, at unpredictable times of day, or on the rare days when there was nothing going on in the hospital, I went and sat on an empty bench in the park and thought of her. And that was where she came for me. I’d been expecting her so desperately that I wasn’t surprised when a scabby little street girl ran up one afternoon, out of nowhere, chased by other kids, and threw herself into my arms. And I knew at once it was her, as I clasped her to me, rickety little thing that she was, just a skinny stick figure, but with a pounding heart, like a wounded bird, frail and precious to me. She’d called me Mama. And I called her Bonita.

She was mine. And I was hers. Whatever we saw in each other. Maybe just a deep down will to live. And we had no one else in the world. Orphans, both of us, lost in life. So we hung on to each other, it was all we wanted, just being together, hugging and kissing. I rented a room with a washbasin for us over a laundry. She helped us make ends meet with the tips she earned running errands for stores. I got her out of her rags. I could sew a bit and I cut one of my two dresses down to her size and bought her some rope sandals. We watched her looking pretty in the mirror, saying: Mama. I took nights off from work. I brought home hospital food. We had a folding cot where we bundled up in a hospital blanket. When we lost the room, because half the time I wasn’t receiving my allowance and our savings had been stolen, we slept in a dormitory for transients where you could rent floor space, on a dusty dirt street in the outskirts. They gave us a straw mat and I had a ragged poncho that we both fit into. We washed at a pump where people lined up with buckets.

A wintry wind blew. More people were being killed, or they disappeared off the streets. It was a freezing cold town. A world without peace or mercy. The nights when we couldn’t pay for our place on the floor they wouldn’t let us into the dormitory, we had to sleep in an alley, wrapped in the poncho. Soon there was no more hospital food. Sometimes we didn’t even have enough money for a cup of coffee. We sipped sweet and salty tears off each other’s lips. We spent a cold and hungry month barely surviving. There was talk that the hospital would be closed down for harboring terrorists. But by