Love, Let Me Not Hunger

by Paul Gallico

  Mr. Albert remembered that Janos had looked somewhat like that the day he had seen him in the dining room. Perhaps he had had an attack of this apoplexy while eating and because of it had fallen beneath the table. And strange to say, this self-delusion gave Mr. Albert a momentary sense of the most exquisite relief and he felt almost as though he could breathe again.

  “He will be buried tomorrow in our private cemetery,” Don Francisco was saying. “He will have the best funeral possible. All work will stop. The Marquesa herself will attend.”

  Mr. Albert was pleased that his friend was to be interred with respect. “I should like to go too,” he said.

  “Everyone will be there,” said the major-domo and made a movement towards the door. Mr. Albert was glad for this also enabled him to leave.

  It was only some time after when he was in the cage of the little, brown, gypsy bear the Marquesa had bought that he thought of Hans, the bear back at the encampment, and from Hans his thoughts turned to circuses, and thence, with an icy pang, he wondered why Janos lying up there with candles burning had been wearing his clown costume. Did he sleep in this or had they dressed him in it after he had been found dead, in deference to his profession? Or what? All of the relief that he had experienced previously drained away and was replaced once more by anxiety.

  Then there was the episode at the communal supper table that night when some of the rougher element were discussing the death of the dwarf and, safe in the knowledge that Mr. Albert spoke no Spanish, were indulging in gossip and innuendo. For this he could tell from the expressions on their faces, and there was even some sniggering though it was quickly hushed. But one old fellow from the carpenters shop was not to be quieted, and he went on talking with winks and grimaces using a word which sent them all into a sudden uncontrollable uproar of laughter, and the word sounded to Mr. Albert like “cascanueces” It was passed around the long supper table, handed on from one section to another—“cascanueces—cascanueces”— and each time setting off further outbursts until one or the more responsible servants at the head of the room rapped on the board jerking his head in the direction of Mr. Albert, whereupon all the laughter was guiltily hushed and it was obvious that the subject had been changed for the name of Janos was no longer heard.

  The word and the way it had been bandied about the table upset Mr. Albert again. Its sound offered him no clue. He could not even guess at its meaning but the winks and nudges it had provoked were unpleasant and added a further note of mystery to the sudden death of his friend. Janos had been a maker of mirth. It was not right that he should be laughed at for what he was or for something perhaps that had been done to him, particularly now that he was lying dead.

  Mr. Albert remembered suddenly that there was a way of finding out the meaning of the word. Don Francisco would know and would be able to tell him and the next time he saw the major-domo he was on the verge of asking him, but at the last moment did not do so. He realised suddenly that he did not wish to know, that if the half-formed suspicion that had floated into his mind from the nowhere was confirmed it would be too horrible to contemplate.

  The funeral of Janos the next morning was all that Don Francisco had promised. The cemetery of Pozoblanco lay a kilometre south of the finca and was like the one Mr. Albert had seen that day, which now seemed so many years ago, when first he had walked the road up from Zalano to beg aid of the Marquesa. It consisted of the same walled rectangle filled with the elegant, slender cypress trees. Inside there was a white marble mausoleum in the shape of a Grecian temple to receive the sarcophagi of generations of the Pozoblanco family, and behind it were scattered sometimes headstones, sometimes bits of statuary, to mark the graves of those who served them.

  The procession was led by a black hearse drawn by black horses with black plumes and black string fringes. It was followed by the special Rolls-Royce whose body had been rebuilt to accept the bulk of the Marquesa. Then came the limousine assigned to the chaplain and his acolyte, followed by the car of the major-domo. All the others, every man, woman, and child from the finca, some hundred, followed on foot, the women as always swathed in their dark shawls, the men with their heads bared.

  It was late September. The fire had gone out of the Spanish sun and the sky was dappled with white cotton clouds. The destructive scythe of hail that had ruined the countryside two months ago had just missed this part of La Mancha, and along its edge where they walked the grapes were purpling. Dust rising from the road marked the slow passage of the cortege from the finca to the cemetery.

  Within the cemetery a small grave had been opened beyond the white temple of the mausoleum to receive the child-sized casket. All the workers, employees, and their families arranged themselves in a respectable semi-circle. The Marquesa, the major-domo, the chaplain, and the acolyte stood to one side.

  Mr. Albert had found a place for himself in the front rank from where he could see everything and everyone. He could not take his eyes from the Marquesa. For the occasion she was attired entirely in black—comb, mantilla, wig, dress, shoes, gloves, and fan. Her face, except for mascara, had been left untouched to reveal her pallor. About her neck she wore seven strands of heavy jet beads with an ebony crucifix attached.

  The chaplain, Father Belmondo, cross in hand, stepped forward to conduct the rites. He was a silvery-haired old man with a weak face but a sweet expression. As the chaplain intoned his prayers, the Marquesa’s sausage-like fingers moved rapidly as she began to tell her rosary. But Mr. Albert saw that neither her gaze nor her mind were fixed upon the rosewood casket with silver handles, the fresh earth by the side of the open grave, the orating priest or the crowd of retainers. Instead her eyes were fastened intently upon the face and figure of the young acolyte who was standing by with censer and bell, his thin lips moving in prayer.

  From nowhere there arose in Mr. Albert a memory of the great, strong thighs of the Marquesa as he had seen them that morning of her levee, as they would be now, powerful, concealed beneath the black canopy of her dress. He looked to the coffin of Janos and thence to the figure of the acolyte and he became filled with horror and revulsion of himself because of the great pity for this unfortunate woman that came welling up from inside him and brought tears to his face.

  Monstrous! Monstrous! Tears that he should be shedding for the dead dwarf were falling for the Marquesa instead. What fearful things must weigh upon her conscience and of what dark deeds had she not been capable in her misery and loneliness?

  He was aghast at himself and filled with consternation at the emotions struggling within him—sorrow for this woman and, above all, sympathy and understanding.

  In an attempt to escape them, he concentrated upon the coffin, now lowered into the grave, and as the dirt fell upon it even forced himself to mutter, since he could not pray, those graveside clichés, “Goodbye, Janos. So long, pal.”

  The chaplain sing-songed his Latin; the acolyte rang his bell and censed; and all the men and women in the semi-circle of mourners bowed their heads, sighed, and crossed themselves. But the eyes of the Marquesa remained hungrily upon the pale young man in the black soutane, and Mr. Albert continued deeply to pity her.

  C H A P T E R

  2 5

  The return of Rose for the last time was signalled by a trumpet blast which, in the stillness of the Spanish night, broken only by the chirping of cicadas, blared more loudly than the brassy clamour that had felled the walls of Jericho.

  The noise brought Toby to his feet out of deep sleep, instantly alert. It sounded a second time and he recognised it for what it was: the war cry of Judy.

  There was no time for light. His steel-tipped, wood-shafted elephant hook was never far from his hand at night. He seized it and ran out into the area at the far side of which the beast was staked.

  There was a waning moon hanging lop-sided high in the sky. It had an iridescent weather ring around it and shed a pale light, but there was enough for him to see the reflected glitter of the elephant’s eye and it was
blood red. The beast’s trunk was curled in the air over her head, her jaws open and slavering, her left forefoot raised. Her short lengths of blunt tusks gleamed whitely.

  Standing before her, just out of range, her back to Toby, was the figure of a girl. It was unmistakably Rose. Over one arm she carried her coat, that same coat that Jackdaw Williams had bought her in the long ago, and in the other hand she held the cheap suitcase containing all her possessions.

  Toby paused, for the moment unable to move, his limbs were trembling, every nerve end in his body quivering.

  Rose! Rose by moonlight! Rose in surrender! For this was the attitude of the body of the girl standing silently before the enraged elephant.

  The beast trumpeted again and this time set off a hubbub among the other animals. When the uproar died down, Toby heard Rose cry out, “If you want me, you can have me! I whored for you, you bloody great rubber gasbag! Now you can kill me if you like!” The suitcase fell from her fingers; her coat slid to the ground; and thereafter she walked forward towards death.

  Toby shouted, “Rose, Rose! Come back!” and with a supreme effort threw off the spell of the impending tragedy that had held him inert and ran forward. “Rose, no!”

  Even as he raced across the intervening ground, she had come within range of Judy. The elephant reached out with her trunk, picked up the girl off the ground and whirled her high into the air preliminary to smashing her to the earth, stamping upon her until her bones were crushed, and mauling the body with her tusks until it would be no more than a mass of bloody rags upon the ground.

  The moment of holding the girl aloft opened the road to the beast’s delicate throat. With all, his force, coupled with the speed he had gathered, Toby jammed the steel head of the ankus into her open mouth, turning and twisting it, screaming with fear as he did so.

  The sudden pain came as a surprise. The shock, the rasp of steel within her throat cutting her tongue and filling her narrow windpipe, as well as the cries and the attack of the man who had once been her friend, bewildered Judy. The maddening iron searing and choking her and the man who was wielding it distracted her so that for an instant she relaxed the tension of her trunk about the girl. The momentum flung Rose slipping and sliding along the elephant’s back whence she tumbled to the rough grass. There she lay amidst the loose stones dizzied and half-stunned, still in deadly danger as the unchained hindfoot of the beast began to probe for her.

  With a wrench, Toby dislodged the elephant hook from her throat, for it was his only weapon, and prepared for the battle. It would be him or her. He had expected the lashing blow of the descending trunk, and was prepared to avoid it. Instead the cunning elephant, determined now to get rid of the pygmy who had attacked her before finishing off the girl, lowered her head and charged him with her tusks, each one capable of bludgeoning him to death.

  Thus surprised, Toby was not quick enough to turn sideways to offer the smallest target. One tusk struck him a glancing blow on the shoulder knocking him to the ground, and in an instant the huge beast had him pinned and was thrusting and plunging, trying to get the tusk to the soft part of his body and drive it through his entrails.

  Toby squirmed and twisted, managing to avoid each lunge, but one arm was caught now by the curling trunk and he could not free it. Then he felt a sucking sensation, warm and wet, upon one foot and knew that the elephant had got it into her mouth and was trying to work it backwards towards the huge grinding molars at the back of her jaw which in a few moments would chew it to pulp.

  Fighting for his life, Toby had still time to cry out, “Rose! Rose, for God’s sake try to roll clear! If you get under her she’ll finish you!” Indeed, at that moment the ground trembled as Judy let her huge bulk crash to earth, but there was no answering call from Rose and whether she was beneath the beast or alive or dead he had no way of knowing.

  Yet this change in position gave Toby a moment’s purchase to free his foot and squirm about to retrieve the hook which had fallen under him. Desperately, he poked the point at one maddened red eye above him and touched the corner. With a squeal of pain, the elephant reared up and in doing so snapped the chain holding her right forefoot as though it were a thread.

  But Toby, too, was on his feet, bruised, battered, half-blinded by sweat, but free and swinging. He beat the elephant with the heavy ankus on the bulge at the base of the trunk; he whipped her between the eyes with all the strength of the muscles in his powerful back; he skipped and dodged and got around to one side and struck her on the fleshy portion of her head between the eye and the ear, shouting her down, his voice high-pitched with battle lust, for he knew that he must conquer her before she smashed the last remaining bond that held her. Young, strong, and agile as he was, he was aware he could not last more than a minute with an enraged, unfettered elephant. If Rose were not already dead, Judy would kill her and then him too.

  For an instant as the elephant stood there quivering with fury, gathering strength for the next plunge that might tear her loose, Toby caught sight of Rose sitting up dazed on the ground not far from the elephant’s belly, and he called to her again, “Rose, for Christ’s sake roll clear! Get up! Crawl! Do anything! Get out!”

  She seemed to hear him then for she turned her face, tightened with terror, to him. She tried to rise but her knees would not support her. Yet, as she staggered and once more fell, it was away from the elephant and out of her range unless the huge pachyderm broke free.

  It then evolved into a final battle between the man and the beast, a brutal, savage, clubbing fight with Toby matching his physical condition, his eye, and his agility against the strength and savage cunning of the elephant.

  The boy was spattered with blood, his own where his skin had been rasped as well as that of Judy where the iron had bitten into ear, flank, and trunk. His chest was on fire, his muscles beginning to ache from the acids of fatigue. Still he continued to swing and to club, to leap and to evade, to hack and slash, his voice hoarse from shouting. The solid thwacks of wood and iron upon bone and hide echoed horribly from the walls of the finca.

  Suddenly, and without warning, a change came over the animal and Toby, himself on the verge of dropping, was aware of it almost before Judy. She ceased plunging at him and stood trembling. The fire went out of her eyes.

  Toby called upon his last reserves and whipped her again squarely between the eyes. “Down!” he shouted. “Down, you bloody bitch, or I’ll kill you!” The rage went from her throat and her squeals turned to a whimper. Tears began to flow from her eyes. She was feeling sorry for herself.

  “You’re licked!” yelled Toby, and suddenly and incongruously, remembering what Rose had called her, raised his voice in louder triumph. “You’re licked, you bloody big rubber gasbag! Down!”

  The weeping eyes of the elephant suddenly bulged with fear. Her limbs shook. With a tremendous rumbling thunder her bowels evacuated violently and loosely. Her knees began to bend. She gave one long shuddering sigh of surrender and toppled onto her side. The battle was over.

  And Toby Walters thereupon felt himself overwhelmed with a surge of love and pity for the fallen animal. Yet before he could give way there was Rose, and he looked across the body of the quivering elephant to where the girl was now kneeling in the moonlight, her hands clasping her face in horror, and called, “Are you all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Go to the wagon then.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I tell you to. Go! For Christ’s sake, go!”

  For he could hold then no longer, the emotions welling up within him in this curious aftermath to the fury of the battle. The hot gush of tears mingled with the sweat streaking his bloodied face. He fell to his knees beside the elephant, threw his arms around the great battered head and held it, stroked it and cried, “Judy! Judy old girl, I couldn’t help it! I didn’t mean to hurt you so.”

  He did not see Rose climb to her feet, pick up her coat and bag from the ground, walk to their living wagon, enter it, a
nd the light within go on a moment later. For he was babying his elephant, crying over her, soothing her, examining her wounds and saying again and again that he was sorry. He was filled with grief and remorse.

  Judy felt it—the love and sympathy flowing from her conqueror—the madness had left her and she was now only a hurt and bewildered beast who once more recognised the friend who would help her. She sighed great sighs, and with the tip of her trunk, lighter than the touch of a feather, she fingered Toby’s face in a gentle caress and the boy knew that he was forgiven.

  He brought himself to his feet and then her, too, still talking to her softly and soothingly, “Poor Judy. Poor old girl. You didn’t know what you were doing. Here, let me look at you.”

  There were a bucket of water and an old towel nearby. He sluiced the sweat and blood from his own face and body, tied the towel around his loins and then washed the wounds of the elephant tenderly to see how badly she was hurt. His greatest fear had been for her eye, but the point of the hook had missed the eyeball and merely cut the flesh at the corner before the lunge of the beast upwards had taken her out of danger. He peered into her mouth to see what damage he had done to her throat with the ankus and washed out the blood and mucus. There was one cut but it was clean and would heal.

  “You’ll be all right, old girl. You’re going to have a sore throat for a couple of days.” He secured her right forefoot to the stake again, and was surprised to find that his hands were still trembling, his knees shaking and his throat was constricted with sorrow. He felt a sudden wave of lethargy and weakness come over him. He wanted to lie down and weep because of the strange love that had come to him for this animal and what he had done to her.