Funny Ha, Ha

by Paul Merton

  Both wives were equally angry and worked up. They reeled off abuse in a frenzied battle of wit and hate. Atoke had better control of her performance. Asunle was too angry to be effective. Atoke’s performance was therefore entertaining. Atoke looked at Asunle, shook her head, and said, “Do you ever observe how you carry your body when you move about? You push that heavy mouth of yours forward like a timid stray dog venturing onto a dance floor.” The audience would have applauded, but the elders suppressed all response, except a few muffled chuckles. Asunle had virtually lost her voice. She was going to cry! The villagers’ sympathies instantly returned to her. An elderly lady came forward and shouted angrily at the two women. “What on earth do you think you are doing? Can’t you see? People are laughing at you! Is this the kind of report you want sent back to your parents? Shut your mouths and go inside, now!”

  The two ladies stopped shouting and went into their house. But the damage had been done to Asunle’s reputation. She had been humiliated. She went into her bedroom and cried. Depo had to take Olu to school to explain why he was coming so late that morning.

  Asunle knew she had to do something to redeem herself. After some hard thinking, she smiled and carried on with the day’s chores. Depo took his machete and went to the farm. The two ladies were not speaking to each other. That morning little Lara stayed with her mother.

  It was two o’clock when Olu came home from school. Asunle had prepared a good lunch for him. He was eating hungrily because he hadn’t had breakfast. Asunle sat watching him dotingly. Then a conversation began:

  “Olu, my dear son.”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “How was school today?”

  “We learned Bible stories and did arithmetic.”

  “Have you been learning any English?”

  “Oh yes! We have learned a lot of English! Let me show you my book.”

  “No no! Don’t worry. But you’ll do something for me.”

  “An errand? You want to write a letter? Let me wash my hands.”

  “No, it’s not a letter, but go and wash your hands.”

  Olu washed his hands and sat beside his mother.

  “Now mother, what do you want me to do for you?”

  “You said you have been learning some English?”

  “Yes, we have learned a lot of English. Look at this book. Everything inside it is English!”

  “Really!”

  “Oh yes!”

  “But can you insult someone in English?”

  Olu hesitated a bit and said, “Well, yes! Oh yes! It is possible. There is so much English in my head!”

  “Well then, you remember how that stupid Atoke abused me in the morning? Now, I want to show her that I tower above her in social standing. I have a son who can insult her in English! So, I want you to go to her now and insult her roundly in English.”

  Olu stood up calmly, tucked in his shirt, and adjusted his belt. He dashed to his bag and quickly checked something in his book. He nodded satisfactorily and marched smartly to face Atoke who was just entering the house. Olu stood right in Atoke’s way, and Atoke was forced to stop and wonder.

  Then Olu simply asked, “Why were you abusing my mother in the morning?”

  The confrontation was unexpected, and it momentarily disorientated Atoke. But she quickly regained her balance. She shouted at him. “Shut your dirty mouth! Has your mother run out of ideas?”

  Olu then moved a few steps back and with arms akimbo he started to speak English knowing full well that Atoke would not understand.

  He said, “What is this?”

  Atoke was taken aback. “What is he talking?”

  Olu responded, “It is a basket.”

  Atoke concluded that Olu must be insulting her in English. She warned mother and child: “If you want to abuse me in English, you’ll get into trouble. And I hope you are listening, careless mother?”

  Olu moved farther back before throwing another English missile: “What are you doing?”

  Atoke was annoyed now. “I am warning you, little rat.”

  Olu just fired on: “I am going to the door.”

  Atoke said, “This is a good-for-nothing boy!”

  Olu continued. “Sit on the chair. What are you doing? I am sitting on the chair.”

  Atoke said, with a lot of hatred in her voice, “That stupid English you are speaking will be the death of you.”

  Olu would not be deterred: “Where is your book? It is on the desk.”

  Atoke then said, “I know that my God will surely throw back all those curses on your ill-fated head!”

  At that point Asunle felt the need to protect her son. She had been sitting down, enjoying her son’s special performance with tremendous pride. She now stood up to defend Olu: “Don’t curse my son, shameless woman. His intelligence is a gift from God. I know you can’t understand.”

  “There is nothing to understand,” Atoke retorted. “You think he can succeed where you have failed? Where a calabash fails to bail out enough water, there is no job for the basket. It is one more step down the road to perdition for mother and child.”

  A big noisy quarrel ensued between the two wives, and a crowd quickly gathered. Now Olu had absolutely gone wild with English! He was reeling off original verbal insults in special English:

  “Go to the door. What are you doing? I am going to the door! Put the basket on the table. Where is the basket? It is on the table.”

  The crowd grew bigger. Olu walked up and down the crowd, the left hand in his pocket, and the right held aloft as he nodded his head to emphasize the importance of each verbal missile in English!

  Villagers tried to settle the quarrel. Atoke complained that Asunle had started asking her son to insult her in English! An elderly man wondered whether little Olu had acquired enough English to insult anyone. Before the man finished talking, Olu started rolling out his English again.

  “What is this? It is a window.”

  When Atoke heard the word window she flew into a rage. Unfortunate coincidence! Yoruba had borrowed the word window from English and its meaning had been extended to describe gaps in teeth. Atoke shouted, “Did you all hear that? Is it right for this luckless little rat to ridicule the gap in my teeth?”

  After more bitter exchanges villagers succeeded in pacifying the fighters. An old man shouted at Olu to quiet down, and he shut his frivolous mouth.

  The oldest woman in the crowd wanted to know how Atoke, who never went to school, knew what Olu was saying in English. Atoke narrated how the fight started and reminded them that they were all witnesses to Olu’s ridicule of the “window” in her teeth.

  All this noise had attracted the attention of a teacher from the mission house. As the teacher approached, Olu cleverly went into hiding. Villagers sought the teacher’s opinion on Olu’s knowledge of English. When another pupil in a higher class who witnessed part of Olu’s performance explained what Olu had been saying to the teacher, they both burst into laughter. When the teacher explained it all to the villagers, everyone laughed.

  The old man sighed and remarked: “This lack of English is a big embarrassment.”

  The teacher wanted to see Olu, but the little scholar had disappeared.

  Noticing the improved atmosphere, little Lara quietly walked to Atoke and held on to her shawl. Atoke looked at her, smiled, and picked her up. The little girl smiled too. There was a gap in her tiny set of teeth.

  Atoke laughed and said, “Well, look what we have here! I am not the only one with a window!”

  Translated from the Yoruba by the author

  MY FINANCIAL CAREER

  Stephen Leacock

  Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) was a Canadian teacher, political scientist and writer. Though not as well known now, during the early 1900s Leacock was the most famous humourist writing in the English language. At one point, it was claimed that more people had heard of Stephen Leacock than Canada.

  When I go into a bank I get nervous. The clerks make me nervous; the
little windows at the counters make me nervous; the sight of the money makes me nervous; everything makes me nervous.

  The moment I go through the door of a bank and attempt to do business there, I become an irresponsible fool. I knew this before I went in, but my salary had been raised to fifty six dollars a month and I felt that the bank was the only place for it.

  So I walked in with dragging feet and looked shyly round at the clerks. I had an idea that a person about to open an account was obliged to consult the manager.

  I went up to a counter marked ‘Accountant’. The Accountant was a tall, cool fellow. The very sight of him made me nervous. My voice was deep and hollow.

  ‘Can I see the manager?’ I said, and added solemnly, ‘alone.’ I don’t know why I said ‘alone.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said the accountant, and fetched him.

  The manager was a grave, calm man. I held my fifty-six dollars clutched in a screwed-up ball in my pocket.

  ‘Are you the manager?’ I said. God knows I didn’t doubt it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Can I see you,’ I asked, ‘alone?’ I didn’t want to say ‘alone’ again, but without it the thing seemed obvious.

  The manager looked at me in some alarm. He felt that I had a terrible secret to reveal.

  ‘Come in here,’ he said, and led the way to a private room He turned the key in the lock.

  ‘We are safe from interruption here,’ he said: ‘sit down.’

  We both sat down and looked at each other. I found no voice to speak.

  ‘You are one of Pinkerton’s men, I suppose,’ he said.

  He had gathered from my mysterious manner that I was a detective. I knew what he was thinking, and it made me worse.

  ‘No, not from Pinkerton’s,’ I said, seeming to suggest that I came from a rival agency.

  ‘To tell the truth,’ I went on, as if I had been tempted to lie about it, ‘I am not a detective at all. I have come to open an account. I intend to keep all my money in this bank.’

  The manager looked relieved but still serious; he concluded now that I was a son of Baron Rothschild or a young Gould.

  ‘A large account, I suppose,’ he said.

  ‘Fairly large,’ I whispered. ‘I propose to deposit fifty-six dollars now and fifty dollars a month regularly.

  The manager got up and opened the door. He called to the accountant.

  ‘Mr. Montgomery,’ he said unkindly loud, ‘this gentleman is opening an account. He will deposit fifty-six dollars. Good morning.’

  I rose.

  A big iron door stood open at the side of the room.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said, and stepped into the safe.

  ‘Come out,’ said the manager coldly, and showed me the other way.

  I went up to the accountant’s counter and pushed the ball of money at him with a sudden, quick movement as if I were doing a conjuring trick.

  My face was pale as death.

  ‘Here,’ I said, ‘deposit it.’ The tone of the words seemed to mean, ‘Let us do this painful thing while we are in mood for it.’

  He took the money and gave it to another clerk.

  He made me write the sum on a piece of paper and sign my name in a book. I no longer knew what I was doing. The bank was going round and round before my eyes.

  ‘Is it deposited?’ I asked in a hollow, vibrating voice.

  ‘It is,’ said the accountant.

  ‘Then I want to draw a cheque.’

  My idea was to draw out six dollars of it for present use. Someone gave me a cheque-book through a little window and someone else began telling me how to write it out. The people in the bank had the impression that I was a millionaire who had something wrong with him. I wrote something on the cheque and thrust it in at the clerk. He looked at it.

  ‘What! are you drawing it all out again?’ he asked in surprise. Then I realized that I had written fifty six instead of six. I was too far gone to reason now. I had a feeling that it was impossible to explain the thing. All the clerks had stopped writing to look at me.

  Reckless with misery, I made up my mind.

  ‘Yes the whole thing.’

  ‘You withdraw your money from the bank?’

  ‘Every cent of it.’

  ‘Are you not going to deposit any more?’ said the clerk, astonished.

  ‘Never.’

  A foolish hope struck me that they might think something had insulted me while I was writing the cheque and that I had changed my mind. I made a wretched attempt to look like a man with a fearfully quick temper.

  The clerk prepared to pay the money.

  ‘How will you have it?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How will you have it?

  ‘Oh’ – I caught his meaning and answered without even trying to think – ‘in fifties.’

  He gave me a fifty-dollar bill.

  ‘And the six?’ he asked dryly.

  ‘In sixes,’ I said.

  He gave it to me and I rushed out.

  As the big door swung behind me I caught the echo of a roar of laughter that went up to the ceiling of the bank. Since then I bank no more. I keep my money in cash in my trousers pocket and my savings in silver dollars in a sock.

  CONSUMING THE VIEW

  Luigi Malerba

  Luigi Malerba (1927–2008) wrote short stories, historical novels and screenplays and was a leader of Italy’s Neoavanguardia literary movement. An original, linguistically inventive writer with a taste for satire, Umberto Eco called him ‘maliciously ironic, unpredictable and ambiguous.’

  The sky was clear and the air clean, yet from the telescopes on the Gianicolo hill the Roman panorama appeared hazy and out of focus. The first protests came from a group of Swiss tourists complaining that they had wasted their hundred lire on malfunctioning devices. The city sent out an expert technician, who had the lenses replaced. Nonetheless, protests kept coming, in writing and by phone. City Hall sent out another expert to test the telescopes again. A peculiar new element emerged: the panorama from the Gianicolo appeared blurry not only through the lenses of the telescopes but also to the naked eye. The city claimed the problem was no longer its responsibility, yet the tourists kept complaining, in writing and by phone. After gazing for a while at the expanse of rooftops, with the domes of Roman churches surfacing here and there and the white monument of the Piazza Venezia, many went to have their eyes checked. Some even started wearing glasses.

  A professor of panoramology was called in, from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. She leaned over the Gianicolo wall at varying hours: dawn, daybreak, noon, sunset, even at night. Finally she wrote a lengthy report on the distribution of hydrogen in the photosphere, on phenomena of refraction, on carbon dioxide polluting the atmosphere, and even on the fragrance given off by exotic plants in the Botanical Garden below—without recommending any remedy.

  A doorman at City Hall, who lived near the Gianicolo and who had learned of the problem, wrote a letter to the mayor explaining a theory of his. According to the doorman, the Roman panorama was being slowly worn away by the continuous gaze of tourists, and if no action were taken it would soon be entirely used up. In a footnote at the end of his letter, the doorman added that the same thing was happening to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and other famous paintings. In a second footnote he emphasized, as proof of his thesis, how the view visibly worsened in the spring and summer, coinciding with the great crowds of tourists, while in the winter, when tourists were scant, one noticed no change for the worse; on the contrary, it seemed the panorama slowly regained its traditional limpidity.

  Other expert panoramologists took photographs from the Gianicolo week after week, and these seemed to confirm the doorman’s theory. The truth, however strange, now seemed crystal clear: the constant gaze of tourists was consuming the Roman panorama; a subtle leprosy was slowly corroding the image of the so-called Eternal City.

  The City Hall public relations office launched a campai
gn, which, in order to discourage tourists, tried to ridicule the panorama in general, the very concept of a view. Their press releases had titles like “Stay Clear of the Panorama” and “The Banality of a View.” Others, more aggressive, were entitled “Spitting on the Panorama,” “Enough of This Panorama,” “One Cannot Live on Views Alone.” A famous semiologist wrote a long essay entitled “Panorama, Catastrophe of a Message.” Some journalists abandoned themselves to malicious and gratuitous speculation on the greater corrosive power of Japanese or American or German tourists, according to their own whims or the antipathies of the newspapers in which the articles were published. Fierce discussions were unleashed, which, though noisy, achieved the opposite of the desired effect: all the publicity, though negative, ended up increasing the number of tourists crowding the Gianicolo hill.

  Eventually, the Roman city government, following the advice of an expert brought in from China, resorted to the stealthy planting of a row of young cypresses under the Gianicolo wall, so that, within a few years, the famous panorama would be completely hidden behind a thick, evergreen barrier.

  Translated by Lesley Riva

  THE DAUGHTERS OF THE LATE COLONEL

  Katherine Mansfield

  Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born in New Zealand and settled in London in 1908. A recognised master of the short story, her prose style was celebrated for being innovative, accessible and psychologically acute. She died at thirty-four of tuberculosis. On her death, Virginia Woolf – her close friend and rival – wrote ‘I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’

  I

  The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives. Even when they went to bed it was only their bodies that lay down and rested; their minds went on, thinking things out, talking things over, wondering, deciding, trying to remember where…

  Constantia lay like a statue, her hands by her sides, her feet just overlapping each other, the sheet up to her chin. She stared at the ceiling.