Carnival

by Rawi Hage

  So we went around the blocks and up the streets. I stopped alongside a few prospects, but no one was to the boys’ taste. It is a busy night, Linda said. Between the game and the Carnival crews, most of our beauties are taken. The guys started getting frustrated and hungry. The one with the baseball cap suggested taking turns with Linda. You wait outside while I finish, he told his friend. No, the other said, I go first, I ain’t fucking after you. So we drove a few more hunting rounds but then they got too tired and decided to go and eat and call it a night.

  When Linda asked them for her money, the boys in the back of my car refused to pay. There were a few fuck yous and motherfuckers back and forth over the seats. Linda told them that she was like an on-call doctor who gets paid by the hour, and what they did within that hour was not her problem. I stopped the car and told the guys they should pay her something for her time.

  The one with the baseball cap told me to shut up and yelled at Linda to leave the car and fuck herself.

  Pay me or I’ll fuck you up, you two fucking faggots, Linda screamed back.

  We ain’t paying. I didn’t feel anything in my dick, did you, Joe? the guy in the cap asked his steroid companion.

  Go fuck each other, you look the type, you fucking faggots, Linda said. One of the guys tried to grab her. Linda pulled her hand from her bag and shot pepper spray right in their faces. I closed my eyes, but one of the guys must have taken a swing at Linda, missed her, and hit me on the side of my head.

  Linda disappeared. The two guys were wailing, Bitch, motherfucking bitch, my eyes are burning and I can’t fucking breathe!

  I jumped out of the car, opened the back door, and tried to calm them down, and I told them not to touch their eyes. They were rubbing their eyes and it was making it worse for them. These two, I thought, are no rebels; it is obvious that they have never been on the barricades of protesters and revolutionaries, they have never waved flags through the tear gas of a nation state. They have never charged with stones and sticks to break down the fences that protect the men in suits, the diggers of gold beneath the indigenous’s soil, the oil thieves in boardrooms and the politicians behind citadel walls. The first rule of resistance is to keep your eyes open and protect your nose from the smell of defeat when the waft of power comes to separate you from your brothers-in-arms. In my boat that night, I carried two screaming, defeated cheerleaders. And I started thinking to myself, What’s with these crowds inside the Roman circuses and arenas, what’s with these pissers of beer, steroid-bloated muscle inflators, these Viking hooligans on the shores of the British Isles?

  As they cried and wailed, I caught a breeze that led us straight to a gas station. I pulled them one at a time into the bathroom and pried open their lids and poured water straight into their eyes. They must have pronounced the word bitch ten thousand times. So while I helped them, I inquired into the true meaning of the word bitch. Do you mean bitch as in dog in heat, bitch as in sexually promiscuous, bitch as in assertive, strong, manipulative, go-getting, competitive, conniving, funny, sweet, or bitch as in someone who fucks with your head and makes you blind to the miseries of the world? Two fucking stooges on a red-eye flight, I thought, as I drove them back to their hotel.

  When we arrived, I stopped the car and turned off the meter. Now that their eyes were open, I pointed at the meter and they looked stunned by the amount of money they owed me. Fucking hell, said the ball-capped one, we ain’t paying you that. Fucking hell, you took us to the wrong bitches, pimp. You could have taken us to some fucking classy joint. Fucking hell! You should have stopped the meter, because in an emergency you shouldn’t charge people. It’s the law.

  Yeah, besides, the other one said, you took the bitch’s side as I remember.

  I always get paid, I said, and I always take the bitch’s side, bitches.

  Maybe that’s because you’re one of them, fucking faggot. Fuck no, you’re trying to rip us off. You played with the meter while we were blind. Fuck, hell no, the muscles said.

  So I stepped on the gas and drove into the alley behind the hotel. From below my seat I grabbed my feathered stick. I left it low but made it understood that I held something in my hand. Implicit threats are more effective.

  I am getting paid, I said, or I’ll close back your eyes. I am no bitch, I said. I am the man who always gets paid.

  Fuck that, one said, pulling out some bills and throwing them at me. Fuck you, fuck your team, and fuck your town, asshole! And they opened the doors and stepped out and one of them started kicking my headlight. I performed a trick and made my stick disappear inside the sleeve of my coat and I swirled the ostrich feathers in the air. I walked along the length of my fender and I strutted like the strong rooster I had grown into. I took their wallets, and after I had wiped their blood from my hands, I went back and looked for Linda.

  I found her on the same corner. Fredao, her pimp, was standing on the other side of the street. Linda hopped into my car and said, Fly, drive by Fredao, okay? Let him see you. He’ll know it’s you and won’t think you’re a customer and ask me for the money later. I drove by Fredao and then around the block. I gave Linda her share of the money I’d taken from the two boys.

  She kissed me and said, Not a word to Fredao. I told him I couldn’t get them to pay. If he asks you, back me up. Tammer is getting older, she said, and we need the extra money.

  Then she asked about Otto and why he’d stopped passing by. The two of them had become good friends over the years. I told her that I hadn’t seen him for a while.

  Just in case the police tracked us down, we agreed on some story about how these out-of-towners tried to beat up Linda and take my money, and that is why I had to stop them with my feathered stick.

  But I never heard from those two defeated boys again. There was nothing in the news about tourists getting robbed, fucked, or punished. Idiots like that are usually too proud to admit defeat. They just go and get drunk and numb their wounds and the next day go to the gym and pump iron and check their muscles in the mirrors. I must admit, I take pleasure in beating men with big, inflated muscles. One can spot them on the streets by the steroids’ effects in their eyes. They always look a bit paranoid, and their whole existence becomes about performing to glass audiences in city windows. There is no mirror that they pass and do not greet with a flex of biceps or the slow landing of a leg. Inflated balloons with broken cords, always walking as if they are taking their first step on the moon.

  TAMMER

  I HAD MET Linda through Otto and Aisha.

  Once, when Linda was in rehab, Aisha brought home Tammer, Linda’s son, and looked at Otto and said, The kid is staying with us for a while. Tammer had curly hair and big brown eyes; he held a threadbare quilt in his hands and looked at Otto and said, Food. Otto walked him to the kitchen and made him a sandwich. The kid ate and then stayed quiet.

  And that’s the way it was for several months. While Aisha went to work, Otto, who was unemployed at the time, stayed home and wrote letters to local newspapers and pamphlets for activist organizations. When the kid came home from school, Otto fed him and helped him with his homework, taught him to wash his hands long enough to finish singing “Happy Birthday” twice, and how to brush his teeth. Before tucking him into bed, Otto would read him a bit of Marx’s The Civil War in France, adding a twist of Orwellian animal characters. The Assembly and the Paris Commune became the pigs barricaded in a hut made of hay and hats, defending themselves with their tusks and with bombs made of smelly little farts. Otto transformed Monsieur Thiers, a royalist statesman in charge of crushing the uprising, into an evil wolf who wanted to tear down the house and eat the pigs with the help of his foreign army of Prussian bears and the blessing of the pontifical greedy slob Pope Zouaves the lion . . .

  Then one day Aisha phoned Otto from work and said, Pack the kid’s suitcase, his mother is back.

  When Linda showed up at the door with Aisha, she was skinn
y and had only a plastic bag of clothes in her hand. Tammer stood looking at her from a distance, and with a distance in his eyes he watched his mother cry.

  Come here, baby, she said. Come, I am taking you home. The kid looked at Otto, then his mother, and stood motionless. Linda cried and said, You remember Mommy. Come, baby, come, and then she walked towards him and knelt down and hugged him hard, and he looked over her shoulder and out of the little window and into the sky.

  Aisha held the kid’s suitcase with tears in her eyes. She handed it to Otto and Otto opened the door and followed the family out into the hallway.

  Linda, he said, please call us if Tammer needs anything. He is a special kid, and him being in our lives . . . bring him here anytime, our door is always open.

  I might, Linda said, taking the small suitcase. I just might. You are good people.

  BOLERO

  ON MONDAY, I was outside the man’s house by eight. I was tired and my eye was still red from the sports fan’s punch in the face, and after ten minutes of waiting I was ready to leave. But at exactly eight fifteen I saw the man swaggering towards me.

  You’re good with roads? he asked.

  I am the best around.

  That is what I want to hear, the man said. Take me to the Financial District.

  Before each stop he gave me a corner, never an address. He’d ask me to wait, then he’d disappear for a few minutes and come back. Once in a while I saw him shake hands quickly with a bureaucrat in a suit or some other variety of shady character.

  Sometimes I took a shortcut and drove through back streets, between buildings, and down alleys, and he was impressed with that. I knew exactly what he was doing. He was collecting money and checking on his dealers and I was driving him around.

  At one point he asked my name.

  I said, Call me Fly.

  He laughed. I like this guy, he is careful. And then he said to me, You are a man of contradictions, Fly. You are sometimes honest and other times not.

  I smiled.

  Why didn’t you keep the bags the other day, man? There was some good, expensive clothing in there.

  I have no girlfriend, I said.

  He laughed again and handed me a large bill. Yeah, a real fly you are. I’ll call you when I need you. You’re okay with that?

  Yes, I am.

  Cool. Now fly, Fly.

  I WAS HUNGRY, so I decided to stop at Café Bolero. I sat, ate, and joined the spiders’ tables and heard them discussing their rides, their catches in between the swinging of the car doors. I like to listen to them when they are dreaming of houses back in the mountains and overseas. They lace, twist, knit, intertwine schemes; they braid, plait, loop their stories in chains of truth and lies; and then they point, signal, motion, gesticulate, wave, indicate roads, long and short ways, clients who sat, talked, shouted, cried, and escaped.

  There was music coming from the ceiling or from somewhere above the tables.

  Number 53, the Dancing Spider, as I call him, was standing in the line for food and swaying lightly to the sound of knives and forks. Every year on Carnival nights, the Dancing Spider retires his car around eleven and goes down to Club Ballayou. He dances the balla balla and the bachata and the rumba with contingents of women. These ladies, who live in remote areas of the countryside, have bused in from far and wide to dance at the notorious Ballayou. Married and unmarried, middle-aged, nicely round and voluptuous, they are tired of Sam and Bob on the TV, tired of fantasizing about bubbly virtual heroes on daytime soap operas. These ladies want to dance, they want to get down with the real thing, they want to feel thighs and biceps. There is no substitute for the commotion of the tangible, the smells and secretions of the flesh, the large arms of a worker, the balancing of the heels, and the twisting of the dancing rooms.

  The Ballayou is the dark, glittering star of the north, the place where love prevails across the barrier of oceans and the petty divide of culture. It is the opener of eyes and of uptight, reluctant, austere asses. Legend has it that every woman will be invited for a dance or two, and no woman will ever leave alone at the end of the night. The ladies will have the chance to parade their heels on tables surrounded by dark men, with blinking eyes and lips and tongues stretched to scoop every drip of liquid nectar that falls from above. Dogs are women’s best friends, and these stray dogs, who have navigated north in the direction of the tail of the Big Bear of the Milky Way, are thirsty African jackals, desert Arabs, stomping gypsies, and seasoned Latinos howling with anticipation for the luscious, the plump, the healthy, the bumptious, the tubby, the generous. These dogs wait with the smiles of the hungry and the jingling hips of dancing warriors, the burned lips of sweet-talkers with empty, vacant pockets. They gather at the Ballayou like belugas during a feeding frenzy in the Arctic. They come with the charm of the poor and a love for the curvaceous. They come in defiance of the closure of orifices and in celebration of the openness of mouths and ears, and of radiant pot-bellies under the suns of luminous phalluses. These immigrants are fast, young, handsome dancers by night and slaughterhouse workers, construction workers, dishwashers, and taxi drivers by day. They are fishers who grew up in countries of godlike beaches and generous suns. They know the drill. As kids they watched their cousins and older brothers courting northern women, sweeping them off on their small Vespas as soon as the air-conditioned tourist buses landed on the surface of the southern moon. One small step for the northern kind, one large step for the hungry dogs. A woman, these men will tell you, all she needs is a bit of attention, a lovable smile, and the dance of a lifetime. Inside the Ballayou, one strolls beneath plastic coconut trees, beside stools covered in tiger skin, tables laid with Moroccan tin trays, and a tall lady bartender by the name of Jinna B., with a big afro and a magnificent bust. And men, gracious men, who will sweep up a lady’s hand in no time and lead her to a dance.

  Listen, Number 53 will tell you, with animated hands. It is like you being the passenger and the beautiful lady being the night driver. If you’re a good night driver, when you see someone hailing a taxi late at night, you never stop right next to the client. You park a few metres away and let the client come to you. This gives you time to check out his walk, his clothes, even the matter of his breath. No one wants to take drunks in his cab; they will just puke and you will have to spend hours cleaning the car and lose your whole night’s earnings. A drunk passenger will pass out on you and you might have to guess where he lives by fumbling in his jacket for a wallet, slapping him in the face to revive him, shaking him by his tie for a confession.

  The same thing with the ladies, gentlemen. You have to give them time to observe you, assess your walk . . . and do not forget to shine a smile on your face . . . choose a lady, lock your eyes with hers, show your friendly teeth, walk straight, never wobble, never hesitate, and when you are there, slowly and gently pull her by the hand towards the dance floor. Move your hips slowly, hold her waist and then let go, hold her hand and brush her waist again. Be attentive, dance with her in mind. Be as suave as a quiet wave. Do not forget your own hips: shake them sideways and never back and forth. Shine your shoes, clean your ears, always have a nice ironed suit on and no hat, it will cast a shadow on your own beautiful eyes.

  THE STAGE

  AFTER I’D EATEN I left the Bolero and went back to the streets.

  Customers came in and out of my car. Some were silent, some were polite, a few were busy talking to each other about the Carnival and work and life. I encountered the usual old lady with groceries, the lost tourist, the businessman.

  Then two guys, a couple, I assumed, got in, softly bickering with each other. It is hard not to listen to others’ quarrels. A quarrel imposes itself on your hearing. A quarrel is made of little ultrasonic waves that can be heard and felt through earplugs, dreams of distraction, and even, one might say, the low, ever-present humming of reverberating erections.

  In this case, it was a
quarrel about money. The older, bald guy seemed to be supporting the younger one, who, from what I gathered, was an opera singer.

  You insult me all the time lately, the young man said.

  No, you are sensitive, very sensitive lately.

  I am poor and my career is going nowhere. Who wants to be an opera singer in these times except crazy romantics like me? So I have a right to be sensitive. I am sensitive.

  You are constantly irritated. You have the right to be sensitive in your art, but not with your lover.

  My keeper, more like it.

  No one is asking you to stay, though I would be sad if you left.

  No, you wouldn’t, you would just keep some other young man.

  I am not keeping you in any way.

  Well, you know I will be on the street if I leave you. And you know I have nowhere to go in this city. You are keeping me.

  You are keeping yourself.

  Well. Then, if I have a choice, I should just take it and make do. Taxi, stop here, please, the young man said.

  Taxi driver, go on, do not stop, the older man said.

  Stop, please, the younger man said.

  Driver, carry on, the older man said.

  Stop, please! the young man shouted.

  Carry on, I am paying your fare, driver, said the older man firmly.

  I have to stop when a passenger asks me to, I said, it is the law. I wasn’t actually sure that it was, but I make my own laws to encourage people to flee their confinements and chains. I stopped at the next corner.