The Sirmione Elephant

Sometimes the red elephant had dreams — rare, heavy, like the slow movement of tectonic plates. In these dreams, he tried to comprehend his own nature and that immutable burden entrusted to him amidst absolute emptiness.

In some visions, it seemed to him that he was an ancient Sisyphus, but turned inside out, subordinated to a different, much more sophisticated law. The Greek Sisyphus is doomed to eternal, furious movement, to an endless struggle with gravity and the steepness of the slope. The elephant understood that his fate was exactly the opposite, yet no less crushing. He was not a prisoner of a rolling stone, nor a slave to dynamics. His curse, his absolute duty, was total, frozen immobility. The elephant realized he was doomed to remain a static statue, a point of absolute rest. In this dream, the white cube existed only as long as the red shoulder touched it. Had the elephant taken even a single step aside, shifted from foot to foot, or yielded to a moment of weakness, the flawless facets of the cube would have instantly dissolved into nothingness, dragging with them everything that civilization had managed to accumulate over the long centuries of its existence. The world around him changed, eras succeeded one another, sending rare onlookers with cameras to the foot of the cube, while the elephant remained a motionless hostage to his own loyalty.

In other dreams, more subtle and anxious, he pondered the mysterious properties of memory. The white cube appeared to him not as a faceless monolith, but as a gigantic, hermetic repository where all the forgotten, repressed, and lost memories of humanity flowed. The elephant felt how billions of other people's lives, unshed tears, and faces erased from history pulsated inside this perfect geometric shape. His duty was to slowly, day by day, leaning with all his weight, carefully "squeeze" one old memory out of the cube and send it to dissolve in the boundless, silent ocean. It was the monotonous work of a filter. However, the most frightening thing in these dreams was that over time, among billions of alien pictures, the elephant began to recognize fragments of his own past — shadows of his native places, echoes of forgotten feelings. He vaguely remembered that he himself had once voluntarily given up his earthly life, surrendering his personal memory to the shared repository in exchange for the dubious immortality of a guardian.

But most often he dreamed that he was the sole and irreplaceable stabilizer of reality. The white cube in these visions acted not merely as a monument or an archive, but as a fundamental support, the keystone of the entire universe. The elephant did not just stand nearby; he served as a living sensor, catching the subtlest vibrations of space. Whenever the universe shuddered, whenever chaos threatened to destroy the fragile order, the elephant physically felt this subterranean hum and pressed himself harder against the cold edge. He had to concentrate all his will to hold back the pressure of entropy. The intrigue of his internal discord in this dream reached its limit: sometimes the elephant was seized by a burning, almost unbearable desire to step back, lower his tired shoulders, and simply watch reality shatter into pieces. He desperately wanted to see this primordial chaos, but the primal fear of responsibility for the death of all existence forced him to remain in place every time.

The Sirmione Elephant guarding its perfect white cube on the shores of Lake Garda.

When the dreams dissipated and a heavy awakening set in, all three conclusions invariably merged into a single, profound truth. The elephant understood that his nature was deeper than any metaphors. Like the mythical Atlanteans, he held upon himself not the sky threatening to fall to the earth, but the world itself — in all its existential volume, with all its memories, laws of statics, and fragile equilibrium. And by some cruel, relentless irony of fate, this vast, multifaceted world entrusted to his care, in reality, took the shape of that very same flawless, cold, and deaf white cube.