Down the Rabbit Hole

by Juan Pablo Villalobos

  Franklin Gómez has come to Monrovia with us because he can speak French and English. Monrovia is the capital of the country of Liberia where the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses live and where the Monrovians speak English.

  In the plane from Paris, Franklin Gómez spoke French to the French servant girls. And spent the whole journey drinking the French people’s champagne. Winston López told him to take advantage of being in first class, which isn’t for people dying of hunger like him. The French servant girls on the plane said their ‘r’s really strangely, as if they had a sore throat or the ‘r’ was stuck in it. Pathetic. Maybe the French have sore throats because of cutting off their kings’ heads.

  When we landed in Paris, Franklin Gómez got all excited and said we’d arrived in the land of liberty, fraternity and equality. Apparently the reason you cut off kings’ heads is to have those things. Winston López just said:

  ‘Franklin, don’t be an asshole.’

  The first thing we did in Monrovia was to get a Monrovian guide. Our Monrovian guide is called John Kennedy Johnson and he speaks English to Franklin Gómez. A Monrovian guide is good for three things: so you don’t get lost in Monrovia, so you don’t get killed in Monrovia, and for finding Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. That’s why he’s charging us a lot of money, millions of dollars I think. Because it turns out that finding Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses isn’t easy, even in Liberia. John Kennedy Johnson says that Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses are on the edge of extinction. Extinction is when everything dies and it’s not just for Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. Extinction is for all living beings that can die, including Hondurans like us.

  The good thing is that when you’re on the edge of extinction it’s not all of you who are dead, only the majority. But there are very few Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses still alive in Liberia, 1,000 or 2,000 at the most. And there’s another problem: they spend their whole lives hidden in the forests. And to top it off they don’t live in herds but are solitary and go about two by two or three by three. That’s what John Kennedy Johnson’s job is, to find animals that are hard to find. John Kennedy Johnson’s clients want to hunt the animals. John Kennedy Johnson takes them to where the animals are and the hunters shoot them dead. Then the hunters cut off the animals’ heads and take them back home so they can hang them over the mantelpiece in their house. And with the skin they make a mat to wipe their feet on. We don’t want to shoot the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses dead. We just want to capture one or two and take them to live in our palace.

  To make the safari go well John Kennedy Johnson advised us to switch around our sleeping patterns. He says it’s the best thing if we want to have enough energy to look for the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. Switching around your sleeping pattern means sleeping in the day and living at night. The thing is it’s easier to find Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses at night, when they come out of their hiding places to look for food. Switching around our sleeping patterns is easy for us, because it means going to sleep after breakfast time in Monrovia, which is the middle of the night in Mexico. And then waking up in the evening in Monrovia, which is the morning in Mexico.

  When we wake up, the servants in our hotel, the Mamba Point Hotel, bring food up to our room. They bring: hamburgers, chips, some kind of tough meat and lettuce salads we throw in the bin so we don’t get ill with Monrovia’s diseases. Lettuce is dangerous. At least that’s what Franklin Gómez says, that lettuce transmits diseases. It seems that lettuces are like pigeons, intimate friends of infection. You eat an infected lettuce leaf and you get a devastating disease. Now that I think about it, maybe Quecholli went mute from a disease in that lettuce she likes so much.

  Franklin Gómez says John Kennedy Johnson has the name of a president of the United States who was shot dead in the head. President John Kennedy was driving around in a car with no roof and they shot him in the head. So guillotines are for kings and bullets for presidents.

  The bad thing about being Junior López is that I can’t wear my hats. Winston López says it’s to do with not calling attention to ourselves while we’re in Monrovia. My hats stayed in our palace, stored in the hat room. It’s hot in Monrovia, but my head was cold, really cold. So Winston López bought me two African safari hats in the Mamba Point Hotel gift shop. They’re hats that look like aliens’ flying saucers. One is khaki and the other is olive green, which are camouflage colours for hiding yourself.

  African safari hats are hats animal hunters wear and they’re good for looking for Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. Actually they’re good for looking for any animal, a lion or even a rhinoceros. They’re like detective hats, which are good for doing investigations, but specialised in animals.

  At ten o’clock at night in Monrovia, John Kennedy Johnson comes to pick us up from the Mamba Point Hotel in his jeep to go on safari. This is what a safari is: you get in a jeep and you go into the forest, the jungle and the swamps to look for animals. There are safaris for killing animals and safaris for catching them. There are also safaris just for looking at animals. This is to avoid making them go extinct. Winston López says this is pathetic. As well as the jeep we also have to use a pickup truck with cages in it to keep the animals in. Driving the truck is John Kennedy Johnson’s partner, who’s called Martin Luther King Taylor. John Kennedy Johnson’s jeep bounces around a lot as we drive along the roads from Monrovia to the forests of Liberia. It bounces when we drive into a hole and bounces again when we get out. After that it gets worse, because in the forests of Liberia there aren’t even any roads. We drive into the trees and the jeep bounces around so much you can’t even feel it bouncing any more. It’s like flying. John Kennedy Johnson has some special headlights to light up the forests of Liberia. We go out looking for the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses with these headlights, but we can’t find them. So far we’ve seen: on the first day, antelopes, monkeys and pigs. On the second day, antelopes, vipers and even a leopard. And on the third day, antelopes and monkeys. But zero Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses, zero.

  I think the African safari hats I’m wearing are useless, because they’re not authentic. It’s because we bought them in a gift shop and not a hat shop. All because of Yolcaut’s paranoia. If he’d let me bring my detective hats we would’ve definitely found the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses by now.

  The worst thing is that when we’re not on safari we’re totally bored. We spend the whole time shut up in the Mamba Point Hotel, because in Monrovia there’s nothing nice to look at. We’re so bored Franklin Gómez is teaching me all the card games that exist. It would have been better if we’d gone to the empire of Japan. Over there we would have looked for Japanese mutes in the daytime and in cities. But we came to Liberia to look for the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses, which look like they’ve gone extinct. Winston López says that to play cards we’d have been better off going to Las Vegas. Fucking shit-hole of a country Liberia.

  Franklin Gómez says Martin Luther King Taylor has the name of a man from the country of the United States who was also shot dead. It seems the Liberians really like naming themselves after murdered corpses.

  The rum from the country of Liberia comes in these dark bottles, as if it was poison, but it’s really good because it stops things being boring. If you drink one glass you feel like laughing and if you drink more you start telling jokes. In the Mamba Point Hotel you can order bottles of rum from the country of Liberia over the phone at any time of day. Even if it’s four o’clock in the morning. Today when we got back from looking for the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses we ordered two bottles.

  We still haven’t found the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses, today all we saw were packs of wild dogs. Winston López says if we’d wanted to see stray dogs we could have stayed in Mexico. He started shooting them in sheer rage. The dogs tried to run away but Yolcaut has really good aim. He would’ve killed them all if Mazatzin hadn’t persuaded him to stop shooting, to remember we weren’t supposed to be calling attention to ourselves.

  The truth is, by now we�
��re sick of looking for the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses and not finding them. That’s why we ordered two bottles of rum from the country of Liberia. Really it was Winston López and Franklin Gómez who ordered them, but they let me come to their party. You drink rum from the country of Liberia with Coca-Cola and ice. This is called a Cuba Libre. You put ice in a glass, and you fill half with rum from the country of Liberia and the other half with Coca-Cola. Franklin Gómez prefers to drink it warm, without ice. He says the ice from the Mamba Point Hotel might have Monrovia’s devastating diseases in. Winston López would rather get ill than drink warm Cuba Libres that taste like shit without ice.

  Winston López’s jokes are about Spaniards, who are really ridiculous people: it takes three Spaniards to change a light-bulb. The Spaniards nearly always get muddled up and come to strange conclusions. Then there are the jokes about countries that all start the same: there was a Mexican, a Gringo and a Russian. The Russian might change, sometimes it’s a Spaniard, or a Frenchman, or a German. When there was a Russian in the joke, Franklin Gómez said that the joke was old, because the Russians aren’t Communists any more. Winston López just said:

  ‘Franklin, don’t be an asshole.’

  The good thing is that later he stopped being such an asshole. At least that’s what Winston López says, that when Franklin Gómez gets drunk he stops being such an asshole.

  The joke I liked best was the one about some Mexican policemen who made a hippopotamus confess it was a rabbit. It wasn’t a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus, just a normal hippopotamus. The joke was about a competition between the policemen in the FBI from the country of the United States, the KGB from the country of Russia, and the Mexican police, to see who would be the first to find a pink rabbit in the forest. In the end the Mexican policemen turned up with a hippopotamus painted pink saying:

  ‘I’m a rabbit, I’m a rabbit.’

  This was funny, but it was also a little bit true. That’s why I liked this joke so much: because it wasn’t really a joke. Everyone knows pink rabbits don’t really exist.

  The good thing about the edge of extinction is that it’s not extinction yet. Today we finally found the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. And I wasn’t even wearing a hat. My head was bare and I was taking the cold like a man. There were two Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses and their ears were just how I imagined them: minuscule like the bullets from a tiny little gun. When we saw them they were in a muddy swamp eating the weeds. They were such nice animals to look at, as if they were the children of a pig and a walrus. Or a pig and a manatee. John Kennedy Johnson shot them with a special rifle with sleeping bullets. The bullets from this rifle are injections with a poisonous substance that puts animals to sleep so you can capture them. The injection got one of the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses in the back. It got the other one in the neck. After a few seconds the Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses lay down on their sides and fell asleep. John Kennedy Johnson, Martin Luther King Taylor, Franklin Gómez and Winston López lifted them into the cages in the back of the pickup truck. Even though they’re pygmies they weigh lots of kilograms, easily more than 1,000, which is a tonne. Then we bounced all the way back to the Mamba Point Hotel in the jeep. Our pygmy hippopotamuses were taken to the port of Monrovia to be put on a pirate ship to go to Mexico. But they’ll take a long time to get there, four months or more. Because you can’t go straight from the port of Monrovia to the port of Veracruz. You have to stop in lots of cities before you get to Mexico.

  We’re going to leave soon, too. Winston López ordered Franklin Gómez to investigate what had happened in Mexico over the last few days, to look for some news about a man called El Amarillo. Franklin Gómez went to use the Mamba Point Hotel’s computer and when he came back he just said:

  ‘Uh-huh.’ And Winston López laughed in a really strange way.

  I think this means we can leave now.

  The most important thing now is that our Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses arrive safely in Mexico. That’s why we have to plan everything scrupulously and give detailed instructions. The bales of alfalfa our Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses will eat during the journey must be immaculate, with no infections. I calculate each hippo will eat a bale a day, or more. We’ve also given orders for them to be fed apples and grapes, which they really like. I made a list: twenty apples and thirty bunches of grapes a day. Per head. Mix up the alfalfa, apples and grapes to make gigantic salads.

  Franklin Gómez translated the list of instructions into English and we gave it to John Kennedy Johnson so he can give it to the pirates. John Kennedy Johnson says we were really lucky, because we caught a male and a female. The list also says they should wash our Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses three times a week and clean their minuscule ears. Speaking of food, Azcatl’s going to be happy when he sees our Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses, because they’ll help him get rid of the weeds in the garden of our palace.

  Franklin Gómez asked me if I’d thought of any names for our Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses yet. This was a secret I hadn’t told anyone, not even Miztli, who’s really good at keeping secrets. I thought if I told anyone it would be bad luck and I’d never have a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. The problem was I’d only thought of one name. I hadn’t thought of two names, because I didn’t think I’d have two Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. Now it wasn’t just about choosing another name. The two names had to sound good together. So I spent ages thinking, making combinations, and writing them all down in a list.

  In the end I chose the names I still liked after repeating them 100 times. It’s a foolproof test. You repeat something 100 times and if you still like it it’s because it’s good. This doesn’t just work for names, it works for anything, food or people. Franklin Gómez thought they were really odd names to give Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. Cinteotl says oddness is related to ugliness. But they’re not ugly names or odd ones, they’re names you don’t get tired of saying 100 times or more. Winston López is right. Educated people know a lot about books, but they don’t know anything about life. There’s no book that tells you how to choose names for Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. Most books are about useless things that don’t matter to anyone.

  Today we went to look around Monrovia. All because Winston López was in a good mood and hired a 4x4. It was the first time I saw the city in the daytime and I discovered that Liberia isn’t really a disastrous country. It’s a sordid country. It smelled of fried fish and burnt oil everywhere. And there were lots of people in the street, too, thousands of people or more. They were people who weren’t doing anything, they were just sitting around or talking and laughing. The houses were really ugly. Monrovia is not an immaculate city like Orlando, where we went on holiday once. Franklin Gómez says Monrovia looks like Poza Rica, but I don’t know if that’s true because I’ve never been to Poza Rica. I’d say it looks like La Chona.

  As there wasn’t anything nice to see we started looking for bullet holes in the walls as we drove around. In the country of Liberia there was a war not very long ago. It seems incredible but it was fun: we invented a game, the game of seeing who could find the wall with the most bullet holes in it. Franklin Gómez found the wall of a shop with sixteen bullet holes in it. I found one on a house with loads more, twenty-three. In any case Winston López won, and he was driving. Winston López’s wall was on a school and it had ninety-eight bullet holes in it. We managed to count them one by one because we got out of the 4x4. Franklin Gómez started to take photos while giving a lecture about injustice. He talked about the rich and the poor, about Europe and Africa, about wars, hunger and diseases. And about whose fault it is: the French people’s, who like cutting off kings’ heads so much, and the Spanish, who don’t like cutting off kings’ heads, and the Portuguese, who love selling African people, and the English and the Gringos, who actually prefer to make corpses with bombs. Franklin Gómez went on and on with his lecture. Winston López took his camera away and said:

  ‘Don’t be an asshole, Franklin, we don’t do that.’ Then we
went to buy souvenirs from Liberia. I bought five genuine African safari hats in a special safari shop. The hats are all the same shape, but they’re different colours. One’s grey, one’s olive green, one’s coffee-coloured, one’s white and one’s khaki. Winston López bought some figurines of African men from a local handicrafts shop and also two decorative masks to hang on the walls of our palace. And some African jewels that must be for Quecholli. We paid for all these things with our dollars and we could have bought loads more, because we have millions of dollars. But we didn’t buy more things because they wouldn’t fit in our suitcases. Unlike us Franklin Gómez bought souvenirs that don’t need to go in a suitcase: two years of school for four Liberian girls, ten vaccines for Liberian babies and twenty books for Monrovia’s public library. We had to go to an office to do all that. While Franklin Gómez was filling in a big pile of forms they’d given him, Winston López said something enigmatic to me. He said:

  ‘Look at him, he’s a saint.’

  When we got back to the hotel Franklin Gómez had an expression like you couldn’t tell if he was laughing or about to cry. At least now he was really quiet, looking at some certificates he’d been given by the people in the office he bought his souvenirs from. Winston López just said:

  ‘Franklin, you really are a total asshole.’

  This is the most disastrous day of my whole life. And nothing was supposed to have happened, because the only thing we were going to do was wait until tomorrow to go to the airport and fly home to Mexico. But in the afternoon John Kennedy Johnson turned up and started to talk about secret things with Franklin Gómez. Then we all went to the port of Monrovia to visit our Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses.