Rawi Hage - Carnival

After my father’s departure, my mother took to the ropes, and for days she swung, cried, and wailed at the top of the tent. She wove a large web in the sky and trapped clowns and lion tamers, sword swallowers, and the one and only Alligator Man, and dragged them to our little trailer behind the main circus tent.

She would lock me up in a bed of cobwebs and try to hypnotize me to sleep so she could play, but I would wake in a daze, guessing at the arrival of the Wolf Boy or the Skeleton Man. And I would climb onto one of my father’s carpets, fly below the ceiling and watch, with a bird’s-eye view, my mother tangled in ropes with a fellow trapeze artist, chained beneath the magician’s saw, or roaring like a lion under the long leather boots of the animal keeper. And I, who was flattered that the ringmaster was coming to our house, happy to be in the presence of this carnival of flesh, gasps, and pleasurable groans, would lie still on the carpet and watch my mother’s acts and, imagining my father on his camel crossing the world, I would happily masturbate.

We always wondered whether he had survived his journey back. After all, the bearded lady said, a camel is a highly visible animal. Camels can’t hide, camels are too sluggish to fly, and too patient, too curious, too opinionated, and too stubborn a creature to kneel for robbers, fall to dictators, or flee the cold.

Now when I remember my mother and her collection of bare-assed companions, when I lie back on one of my father’s carpets and float above the world, I journey through those ancient lands of guns, trenches, and blood, the troubled lands of Slavs, Germans, Latins, Assyrians, Arabs, Turks, Kurds, and Greeks. In those nations where young men were drafted and women wept and populations were transferred and people starved and burned by the millions, I landed my carpet, I witnessed, I rectified, and I flew again.

BOOKS

HOW ARE YOU, Zainab asked as she appeared, with her books and her combed wet hair, from behind the entrance door.

Long night, I said. The world is a circus and it will always be. By the way, I have a book to show you.

Do you have it on you?

No, it is in my apartment, I said. Why don’t you come up and I’ll make you a cup of coffee before you leave. A coffee will keep you awake and attentive, because listening to God’s words can be confusing, all those contradictions. Personally, I would be afraid to fall into an eternal boredom. Besides, I said, your hair is wet. Maybe you should cover it, or you could wait a bit, have a cup of coffee until it dries, and that way you won’t catch a cold.

So considerate and sweet, she said, but I don’t have time to come in and I am not done with the stack of books you left at my door last week. I am not sure why you think I would be interested in The History of Court Jesters or The History of the Comic Grotesque. Are you trying to tell me something, Fly? My dissertation, may I remind you, is on religion.

But, yes indeed, I think clowns could be an essential addition to your thesis. Is there anything on earth or in heaven more potent than a good dose of mockery and laughter?

Oh, Fly, you take life too seriously, she said, and giggled at her own joke. And don’t worry too much about my hair. It should be okay.

Have you or any members of your family been to the black stone for the pilgrimage? I asked her.

What an odd question for an early morning.

I was thinking of my father, who went in the stone’s direction.

Is that what you call it now? Zainab asked. A stone?

Well, that is what it is.

What about what it represents?

To whom? I asked.

To some of us humans, she replied. Not all, but a substantial number. But who knows, maybe one day it will be all of us.

Submission?

Conversions, she said, frowning at me.

By love or by might?

Love would be nice.

But before I could bite she followed with, How was your night?

I told her about the man’s proposition. She listened and then she asked, But why did you accept?

He said that nothing is legal in this universe and I agreed with him, so I said yes.

There need to be some laws, said Zainab, or everything will go to chaos.

God’s laws?

Man’s laws, she said, or God’s laws, nature’s laws, some guidance by something bigger.

Man’s laws are self-serving, nature’s laws are arbitrary, and God’s laws, I proclaimed, are in need of some serious updates.

Such as?

The forbidding of wine, for instance. Granted, I also hate those pretentious “sophisticated” people and their swirling and sniffing and spitting of wine. Shouldn’t there be an amendment of some sort by these deities, an appendix, a second or third edition with an introduction by the translator, explaining the harm, or indeed the benefit, of wine? And how about an apologetic statement in defence of the text’s irrelevance in this age of great scientific discoveries. Or a treatise on the importance of free love! Definitely, this archaic lot of religious elders needs to take another look at love. . What’s with your ever-absent patriarchal gods? Their laws are becoming as old as dog’s tricks.

But maybe they are absent only to you.

Heureusement , I said, and acted like a Frenchman with champagne and flowers in hand. It would certainly be traumatizing to meet any of them. Just the sight of the blood on their hands would make me want to cuff them to my bed and slap the shit out of them. .

She smiled and almost laughed.

You are a joker, she said. I have to go.

BRAZIL

THE NEXT NIGHT I picked up four drunk numbskulls. They were all wearing white suits for some inexplicable reason, and they were rowdy. When they had finished barraging each other with fucks and oh yeah, oh yeahs , one of them, maybe to defuse the inner violence of the group, turned to me, the scapegoat, and asked me where I came from.

I knew perfectly well where that question would lead. I said Brazil, because that would turn the conversation to beaches and thongs and, if I was lucky, football and carnivals. They would find something to agree upon, women on beaches, bikini dances and surfing, and oh yeah would become words of agreement and fuck would regain its literary sense.

But then one of those smartasses looked at my name on the dashboard and started to shout, What kind of Brazilian name is that? You are a fucking towelhead or one of those things there, from the desert and shit, Brazilian my ass, fuck. You are a camel jockey, liar, and I bet you are taking us the long way.

Yeah, one of them shouted, I don’t see our hotel yet, buddy. Are you taking us tourists for a ride? We may be from out of town but we’re still in our own country! You can’t fool us.

I kept quiet while they shouted at me and jeered and became rowdy again.

And one of them, as I pulled up to the hotel, said, Liar, maybe you should go back to BRAZIL, liar. And they all shouted, Brazil my ass! and slammed the door. They didn’t want to pay me. Their alcohol breath said to me: We don’t pay liars and cheats.

I followed them into the hotel, my Philips hiding in my sleeve, because I had once promised myself that everyone pays. I told them that I would get paid or I would turn their white suits into splashes of red, I would hunt them in bars and wait for them all night if I had to. I am capable of swiftly pulling the bedsheets out from under their sleeping heads without waking them up, I could make their prostitutes appear in their girlfriends’ closets, I could substitute their cocaine lines with fishing ropes that sailed up their nostrils and down their brains, or I could simply juggle bowling pins while standing at their Sunday barbecues in the middle of their lawns. . But they all shouted, Liar, liar, and walked towards the elevator, except a short guy who stayed behind.