In the café nobody had noticed when Barbara pulled her battered notebook out from her purse and started writing on it at full speed. She would say about herself that her chubby and square face, and her common features would make her invisible, but she did not care too much about that, she was almost proud of all her unclassiness, her mismatched clothes and messy hair, her locks repeatedly falling out of place and in vain being stuck behind the ears. She would also say that beyond the dull façade and all her shyness, her brain processed events and emotions at such velocity that memories were constantly being formed and erased.
In a last burst of vivacity, Barbara finished writing the last things she could remember about the park she had visited twenty minutes ago. She had especially tried to capture in her writing the visual aspects of the park and its surroundings, the lines of the most striking buildings, the shapes of the trees, the most evident colors, anything that her husband could find useful for the comic-book he was creating about her grandfather. Barbara still thought that the whole business about the comic-book was quite pointless, another lost cause.
Some weeks ago she had reminisced about the dubious stories that her grandfather used to tell her, when she was a child, about a bunch of crazy vagabonds and their epic adventures, and she also remembered her grandfather taking her to some of the genuine (according to him) scenes of those stories. Barbara had mentioned to her husband the highlights of those memories, and that was a sudden spark that got him all excited about writing the whole thing up as a comic-book. Barbara was glad about that wave of excitement and considered that that project might ease his depression, so she started physically revisiting some of those scenes, those places. Getting some fresh material to feed to his husband.
Now, as an adult, those places were obviously very different to how she remembered them, how she had seen them as a child. It was not only a question of scale, the memories were also deformed, surreal, compared to the present straight lines and appropriate colors. In those revisits, she had also recalled some precise memories from her childhood that she was not too sure that belonged to her, memories that had been patiently waiting for her in those places during years, in that park she had visited this morning, in the sewage system that she traversed last week, and behind the elephant exhibit in the zoo two weeks ago.
The elephant exhibit in the zoo... Barbara went back several pages in the notebook and reread what she had written two weeks ago after visiting the elephant exhibit. Pleased with her depiction, but pondering whether she could add something else, she looked around the café, searching for something that would push her back into the memory of her and her grandfather many years ago behind the elephant exhibit, something that would illuminate more details about that distant morning. But nothing. She closed her eyes, squeezed her brain but, still, she could not recall much else about that morning at the zoo, it might have rained before they arrived. The main memory remained, overwhelming any additional recollection: her grandfather was talking about the events that had happened several years ago, before she was born, one winter night, when the zoo had been closed to the public for hours.
Two weeks ago she had found the same spot behind the elephant exhibit where, as a child, she had been standing next to her towering grandfather, listening to his legendary stories about him and his comrades, while the other kids were allowed to gallop free. Two weeks ago, her elbows on the fence and her chin on her hands, she remembered her grandfather saying that they (The Company) had decided that the elephant had the largest brain in the city, and that consequently they would ask some of their burning questions (grandpa referred to these as the "principal questions") to the wisest-looking of the elephants and would look for signs from the elephant to discern which ones of those questions were the most relevant, the most principal.
Barbara opened her eyes again and decided against writing anything else about the elephants in her notebook. She twirled the remaining coffee to get some of the crema stuck on the sides and then finished the cup. She could not imagine how his husband could possibly transform these stories and memories in a comic-book, but that was something for him to find out with the material that she would provide to him. She would not tell him that two weeks ago, as she was standing on that spot at the zoo, between the fence and a wall of bamboo stalks behind her, an elephant approached her and extended his trunk towards her, almost reaching her face. That she carefully caressed the sides of the end of the trunk and the elephant responded with a soothing purr. That the elephant seemed to fixate his eyes on hers and that she then asked three questions. "Is he going to be ok?" Barbara asked first, and the elephant almost immediately emitted that low-sounding purr again. After a few seconds she asked "Do I love him?" and the elephant purred again. Then she almost summoned the question that she had been pondering over and over during the last weeks, but instead she asked "Was my grandfather crazy?" The elephant withdrew his trunk, turned around and walked towards the water hole.
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