Mister Dwarf Carozo Minujín.
“But what are you doing here, Mister Carozo? We thought you’d be asleep at this time.”
“Yes, I was sleeping,” he replied.
He opened his frock coat, and underneath it he was wearing a fustian nightshirt. He lifted his hat, and underneath that he had another cap, this one knitted and with a pompom at the end. He took off one of his slippers and underneath he was wearing another, made of wool.
“I was sleeping,” he said, “but suddenly… Waaaa aahhhhh!”
And he started to cry like a little madman.
(I don’t want to tire you out, so I’ll skip over the inevitable bit where the postmaster showed up, crimson with rage because of the new tearful explosion that had shaken his office and his philatelical stamps all over again.)
“What’s happened, Mister Carozo?” I asked.
“Pick me up and I’ll tell you,” he said, like a spoilt brat.
So I picked him up, walked him about a bit, waiting for his hiccups to pass, and finally he told me:
“I was asleep and I had a dream about my football. I missed her so much, I came running here to see whether you all… still… supisichi…”
And what with all his crying and his hiccuping, he couldn’t say any more.
I consoled him as best I could, though I could tell he was only sobbing so much because he was trying his luck to see if I’d give him his ball back.
“Mister Carozo,” I said, “here’s your football in her little cage, but I’m sure you know: Taking back something you’ve given a friend, is a sure-fire way for a friendship to end.”
He immediately threw his arms around the cage, hugging it tightly—as if I’d never won it fair and square in the first place.
His crying and his sleepiness disappeared and he became instantly delighted.
Having stared at his football for a good long while, he finally looked at all of us.
“And what the supisichi are you all doing here in the station?” he asked at last.
We told him about all the misfortunes that had befallen us.
“Ah,” said Mister Carozo. “So what the supisichi are you going to do now?”
“Well, that was just what we were thinking about when you arrived,” I replied.
“So that means I’ve got to think now, too?”
“If it’s not too much trouble,” I said.
“Very well then, I will have a think, though I really am rather sleepy.”
Mister Carozo frowned, put his finger to his forehead and took three little steps around to join the queue of thinking people.
We spent a long while like that, in silence, going round our merry-go-round of thoughts, when suddenly Mister Carozo stepped away from the line and said:
“That’s it, I’ve done my thinking.”
“And what have you thought, what have you thought?” we all asked, dying of curiosity. We crouched down around Mister Carozo, who said:
“Dailan Kifki cannot travel by train because he’s an elephant, right?”
“Right.”
“Well then,” the dwarf went on, “it’s very simple. We have to disguise him so nobody realises he’s an elephant.”
You see how clever Mister Carozo is? Such a simple idea, and it hadn’t occurred to any of us, in spite of our fingers and eyebrows being quite numb from so much thinking.
“Very well, then, Mister Carozo,” I said. “So what should we disguise him as, too-loora-loora-lay?”
“Elephants are really big, right?” replied Mister Carozo. “So we have to disguise him as something really tiny so nobody notices how big he is.”
Once again the crowd murmured their amazement at such vast intelligence in such a small gentleman.
I asked again:
“So what should we disguise him as, too-loora-loora-lay?”
“As something terribly small!”
And we all went back into our merry-go-round of thoughts, fingers back on our foreheads, frowning and muttering:
“Something terribly small… something terribly small… something terribly small…”
“That’s it!” said Mister Carozo at last. “A butterfly! He’ll be very good at pretending that because he used to be a flying elephant.”
“We’re toast.”
“But why?” we all asked.
“Because a butterfly is an animal,” Roberto answered, “so we’ll just end up having the same problem: you aren’t allowed to travel with animals.”
“A butterfly isn’t an animal, it’s a creepy-crawly,” I said, “just a little creepy-crawly that could easily have come in through the window without buying a ticket.”
“Yes, but a butterfly as fat as Dailan Kifki will arouse too much suspicion,” Roberto insisted, being a big old spoilsport as usual.
“And so what should we disguise him as, too-loora-loora-lay?” I asked once again.
“There is one solution,” said Roberto. I have no idea how he was able to think so much at this time of night.
“So what’s the solution?”
“We have to disguise Dailan Kifki as a person, not a creepy-crawly or an animal.”
Such intelligence astounded us.
My brother Roberto thanked us modestly, his eyes lowered, as the crowd went wild with applause.