Rawi Hage - Carnival

I WAS CONCEIVED on the circus trail by a traveller who owned a camel and a mother who swung from the ropes. When my mother, the trapeze artist with the golden hair, tossed me out of her self to the applause of elephants and seals, there was rain outside and the caravans were about to leave. She nursed me through the passages of roads and the follies of clowns and the bitter songs of an old dwarf who prophesied for me a life of wandering among spiders and beasts.

But the owner of the circus already had plans for me. We are missing a strongman and a lion tamer, he said, and took me out of my mother’s arms to feel the size of my thighs and the shape of my head. But I grew up to become a knower and a guesser in the world of tents, amid the shouts of the barker in the midway shows, who lifted his long hat and banged his cane on the outdoor stage and shouted: Step right in, ladies and gentlemen, and meet the Surmise Child! You’ll get your money back if this kid fails to guess your weight, if he doesn’t guess your age and the remaining number of your living years before you rest under a stone. And I, who learned how to weigh lives by the size of feet, by the strangles of belts, the heaviness of eyes, and the expansion of cheeks, grew to become a watcher who saw my mother hang and my father fall under the weight of his own beard.

After my father’s departure and my mother’s death, I was left to the circus, to roam between the ankles of gentle giants, the brief hands of midgets, and the loving nature of freaks. At an early age, I learned how to pull the ropes and tie the monkey’s bow tie. I learned of smiling dragons by stretching the skin of the tattooed girl, and I played with the average son of the world’s smallest woman and the world’s tallest man. I grew within those circular tents and the rotation of their acts and I was carried by the trunks of elephants across borders and foreign lands.

I also learned how to guess and how to kill.

Sunrise Child, as the fat lady once mispronounced my name, you just made my day, because you guessed the lightness of my spirit under the burden of my weight. And she kissed my bright face and stepped right out of the tent, feeling the clouds on her hair and caressing the gliding birds in the sky. But when winter came and the tents were dropped and we all starved in the circles of cold, I killed a horse and fed it to the beasts.

RODENTS

FOR THE PAST five years I have lived in a building that hums with strange people, rodents, and insects who come and go as they please. In the next-door apartment on my left lives a Romanian woman who once was a gymnast, and now that she is in need and alone, she occasionally offers herself to a big old doctor who has a beard and cars that never cease to change and grow.

I know him from the neighbourhood clinic. On my last visit, he asked me a few questions about my family’s medical history, invited me to settle on the paper surface of his table, and then got busy tapping my back, pressing my tongue with a disposable stick, holding my testicles until he forced a cough or two out of me. He frowned as he added something to the pages of my medical file.

He shook his head, but before he could tell me the news, I said, Doctor, I know, you don’t have to say a word. I guess that I have to lose a bit of weight, believe me, I know, Doctor. . because I looked at my ankles this morning and examined my cheeks in the mirror. . we all have our vices, Doctor, it could well be gluttony in my case. One out of seven sins is not that bad. Not to be religious or anything. . I tried gambling and it never paid off, women make you suffer, and greed has no end. . I guess I have to change jobs, you seem to be saying, Doctor. Driving a cab for these long hours without a rest, or exercise. It dulls your mind, staring at the road like that. . all I think of sometimes is my fate. . I said fate, not fat. What a joker, Doctor! What a wasted life, what a wag I am. . it is not my fault, Doctor, and who can resist? I am attracted to all those banners, the ballyhoo that draws me inside those places of gigantic pizzas, double Siamese cheeseburgers, eyeless four-legged chickens calling to me in their yellow costumes, and let’s not forget those milkshakes straight from the triplicate nipples of newly cloned cows. . but I still say fresh milk goes very well with a dozen of the largest doughnuts in the universe. . I should have known better, Doctor. I guess, I can guess, but I never know. .

Well, said the doctor, what I detect here is some malfunction in the brain. Judging from the jerking movements of your hands and the shifting of your eyes, not to mention your long monologues and your fancies about librarian monkeys conspiring against the world, I say we had better check your head. Now, what I suggest is that I put you in touch with a psychiatrist who can assess all these wild thoughts of yours. What do you say? I can give you a referral today. .

The doctor recognizes me when I encounter him on the stairs of our building or when he parks his car along the garage wall underneath my balcony during those lunch hours when he goes up to see the Romanian woman next door.

I watch him coming up the stairs, almost ready to drop his pants under the patient watch of the spiders. As soon as he steps into the building, the dog bitches howl to the rhythm of their own heat, the jaw of the lady across the road clinks to the hiss of the gossip of rattlesnakes, and the hoofs of the horses next door tap dance to the beat of the shoemaker’s hammer down at the corner of the street. It is mating season every day!

So, Doctor, I think this is what it comes to after years of being studious, after memorizing thick volumes on the inflation of the lungs, the deflation of the kidneys, and the meticulous classification of bones, veins, anuses, Fallopian tubes, hearts, and genitals. This is the reward for not fainting or barfing in class in the presence of slashed pale corpses on autopsy tables. I say, doctors are the profiteers of death and unclaimed cadavers that were once inhabited by homeless and wandering poets! Doctors are the final custodians of those delusional walkers who roamed the streets, reciting monologues to imaginary friends, their long orangutan arms peeking out from magician’s cuffs and reaching inside the bellies of city barrels to make food appear and cans disappear and recycle into metal tables displaying the wretched of the earth, the unclaimed dead, in open chests and torn shoes.

ABOVE ME THERE is an old Polish woman who survived the Second World War camps. Her son, the building’s janitor, owns a Harley, long boots, and a black, mean jacket. He is an ignoramus who talks and talks and looks at his aging face in the hallway mirror. He straightens his leather pants before fixing his windy hair. At times, when a pipe is leaking in my apartment, or when the window is precipitating water and air, I knock at his door. He opens it and frowns at me with a Leave a note in the box at the door and I’ll look at it later.