Rawi Hage - Carnival

To where? I asked.

Take Highway 18 for now, and then I will show you the way.

When a woman cries in my boat, I turn into a sad infant and then a lover of the high, far seas, a daring buccaneer. On these seas, the lower decks of merchants’ ships are filled with slaves and captured women. And I heard the whips from behind me lashing at Mary.

All you care about is your damn books, the man was saying. I need to go out, I need to see people. Books, books, fuck books. You spend all your time reading. And you have nothing to say to my friends, nothing to say to me. You sit there with your passive air of superiority. I am tired of this, do you understand?

I looked in my mirror and saw Mary crying. And when the man started to shout in her face and gesture with ominous hands, I pulled the car over to the side of the road. We had reached the edge of the city and were about to enter the suburbs with their flat houses and little gardens. And that is when I grabbed my thick feathered stick from beneath the seat and opened my door and opened his door and grabbed the hater of books by the sleeve, then by the collar, and I pulled him out of my car and pushed him down onto the pavement. I lifted my stick in the air and it fluttered in my hand and against the wind like a menacing bird quaking warnings not to cross, not to enter my rescuing arc, and I closed the doors and drove Mary away. It was raining that night; for days it hadn’t stopped raining. And I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw Mary’s husband defeated under the rain. And I thought, not all animals should have been saved from the deluge. Some should have drowned, without a doubt.

Mary, sweet Mary, had no place to go to. So I suggested we go to my house.

I don’t know you, she said.

Mary, sweet Mary, I said, you have the same name as my mother the trapeze artist. I’ll offer you my bed and my books. The neighbours are all quiet at this hour; you will go to sleep among the pages of history. Have no fear. I’ll shelter you and then I’ll drive away. I’ll leave you with many heroes, I’ll tear up the pages with villains’ names, I’ll let the old Spaniard on the skinny horse protect you from the swirling of menacing windmills and evil knights. I’ll send Sancho here for some Chinese and hot sauce from around the corner. And Mary, sweet Mary, please watch your head as you step in; the bookshelves are low and the spiders’ abodes can easily break.

When Mary entered my apartment, she barely made it past the first shelf. She smiled and looked and turned pages of books that sprang from the ceiling of the complaining student beneath me, multiplied and tilted sideways by the eastern wind that blew from the Arabic and Persian section (I put them on the same shelves for the obvious historical reasons). Books fell like rain from above, books opened and closed like butterflies’ thighs. Books, she said. Look at all these books! And she laughed and walked among the garden of books, and then we took off our fig leaves and made love in the corner, where verses from heaven touched our bare, cracked asses that hopped and bounced like invading horses in holy lands. We flew out of the city and we landed on the page where Moses split the sea and the Jews marched between those suspended mountains of water, hovering, humming on both sides, and the poor expelled merchants wondered if Moses knew what the fuck he was doing. What if his hand got tired and he accidentally dropped his magic cane, or got distracted by a wet desert ass, or lost his sandals, or what if that lush single malt of a God changed his mind again and the fucking Red Sea closed in on them with its menstrual red liquid? There wouldn’t be any of them left. And a goy brother from New York, who was holding a big apple in his hand and who was in it for the ride, was heard saying: I hope the motherfucker, that basket river-floater, fucker of Pharaoh’s sisters and butcher of Baal the bull god, doesn’t fuck it up. And then, as the sea parted, the man from the hood declared, What happened? Shit, I ain’t crossing, fuck. Look how muddy the bottom is, full of crabs going sideways and jelly creatures and shit. . our sandals will get tangled in all the algae. . this lunatic of a fucker is taking us through a quagmire to claim a few olive trees and a herd of goats. Fuck it, I’ll just go back and apply for Egyptian citizenship and become a cosmopolitan landed immigrant, I’ll sell papyrus on the sidewalk, drive a chariot for hire, or work on them pyramids, yo.

When I was about to go back to my car beneath the building, Mary asked me to stay.

She cried all night and I read poetry to her from a collection that I swiftly pulled from under my mattress. I climbed the walls and, at the risk of sending everything crumbling down on our heads, reached for funny passages in books. I read to her from Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude and she laughed at the character of the uncle, the drunken train operator who rides his train round and round his garden. But then Mary became sad at the passage where books are pulped and destroyed and, like Hrabal, who failed to save all those characters from the stomping of the pulp machine, we went and opened many cans of beer and drank all night and then we kissed, read, and cried until the Kleenex box next to my bed was nearly empty. So I went down to my car and reached for the box on my dashboard and I noticed that the meter was still running. I stopped it and said to myself, One day, I’ll make her husband pay for this.

LINDA

MARY LEFT THE next afternoon, and I got in my car and drove downtown. There was a traffic jam because of a crane blocking the way. A man was tying up a banner that said WELCOME TO THE BEST CARNIVAL IN THE WORLD. It is that time of year, said a taxi driver whose car was stuck next to mine, and then he asked me if he could get through because he was late for a house call. I let him pass, but then I saw him pick up the first customer on the street.

It is that time of the year when everyone in this city becomes covered in slimy greed, and the whole market, where the Carnival takes place, becomes a frenzy for the seasonal sellers, the fishers of coins from kids’ pockets, the suppliers of intoxicating barrels. Here come the thieves, the hooligans, the charlatans, the sausage makers, and the walking dolls! Let’s not forget the walking dolls. .

At eight in the evening, I picked up two out-of-towners, typical beer-bingeing sports fans come to watch their team play in a foreign land. These empty-headed chicken-wing eaters are all the same. When they win, they get trashed and celebrate on the streets, shouting with joy, We won! But when their team loses, they need to fuck something, or someone, so they shout, Where are the whores? Take me to the whores!

So I told them I would take them to the Corner, as the red-light district here is called.

I drove to the block where my friend Linda usually stands and I spotted her right away. I rolled down my window and called to her, saying, Ms. Pleasure, please, this way. She recognized me, winked at me, and leaned in to deliver her opening phrase, which included the words you boys, looking , and fun .

Linda looked appealing in her contained, voluptuous way. She was on the plump side, and her thighs stretched and squeezed within the peripheries of a leopard-print skirt that just managed to contain it all. Her pointy heels made her thighs look longer and her shoulders wider. And with her large cleavage, her wavy black hair, and her Spaniard’s eyes, round as two big black olives, she looked like she had burst from a place where gypsies had met Arabs and fucked and done the stomp dance for a few centuries.

She opened the passenger door and sat in the front next to me, talking to the boys behind. One of them asked if she had a friend who could join them. Just around the corner, sweetheart, Linda said and smiled. So I drove there. And we stopped. She called her friend over, and a woman came and leaned in the back window. She was a bit rundown, missing a few teeth from either her pimp’s repetitive punches or the toll of heroin use through the years. No good, said the boys in the back. Let’s find another one.