Carnival
Also by Rawi Hage
De Niro’s Game
Cockroach
CARNIVAL
Rawi Hage
Copyright © 2012 Rawi Hage
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This edition published in 2012 byHouse of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Hage, Rawi
Carnival / Rawi Hage.
Issued also in electronic format.
ISBN 978-0-88784-235-1
I. Title.
PS8615.A355C37 2012 C813’.6 C2012-902914-9
Jacket design: Brian Morgan
Jacket Illustration: Lorenzo Petrantoni
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
For Madeleine Thien
True open seriousness fears neither parody, nor irony,
nor any other form of reduced laughter, for it is aware
of being part of an uncompleted whole.
— Mikhail Bakhtin,
Rabelais and His World
Those who are motionless on the wandering
earth: the voyagers.
Those who flee over the motionless earth: the
stay-at-homes.
But those who flee over the wandering earth,
and those who are motionless on the motionless
earth: what should
they
be called?
— J. M. G. Le Clézio,
The Book of Flights
ACT ONE
MOTHER
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.
When I leave the janitor a letter, I make the situation sound urgent, with apocalyptic consequences. I write in a poetic, wrathful, religious style with a hint of menace to his own well-being and to the collective welfare. I try to explain to him that everything is interconnected. Even a small, innocent leak of air from a window can tip the balance of warmth in a building and lead to microcosms of small global infernos. I remind him that our nature is a fragile one.
Like I said, he is an ignoramus, and he never gets the humour of my literary, sardonic style. His speed machine has made him lose all interest in history and humankind.
But, nevertheless, he ends up by appearing at my door waving my letters in his hand: What exactly is wrong here? You are not a little girl and should not be afraid of spiders. And what do you mean by the words
juridical rivers of blood
. . .
welfare and warfare
. . .
licit and explicit
. . . Are you trying to scare me by using big words? I ran your letter by a lawyer, pal. I say you better be careful what you write, because my lawyer can drive you up against the wall. If you keep threatening me and writing letters in red ink with “buccaneer flags” . . . I might have to double the rent or kick you out altogether. I don’t have time for this! And your apartment is cluttered with books and papers, and that, my friend, brings all kinds of insects and rodents. So you might as well make peace with me and accept the spiders as pest control. And now, where is that flood you wrote about . . . and who is this Mr. Moses, is he staying with you here . . . ?
LANTERN
BENEATH ME THERE
is an agitated student who complains
that my sluggish steps, the ship-like commotion of my hips against my ever-insomniac mattress, and the ultrasound fretting of my flying carpets are forbidding her from excelling in her studies,
ruining her future life of grand diplomas and her prospects for a large car, a big house with a pool, a husband on a leash, and a free-range poodle mowing the lawn. A few times, she threatened me with the police. When she appears from below, she is usually in her pyjamas, her Mickey Mouse slippers frowning up at me, her hair looking like she’s gone through a psychiatric treatment or homegrown electric shock. I always promise that this is the last time she’ll
hear a noise; I blame it on a pile of literature that fell on the floor and bounced for a while because of the lightness of the writing inside. She never gets the joke, maybe because she is studying to be an engineer, and falling matters are never a light matter.
Beneath it all, in the parking garage, there is my car, its meter and its long oval rearview mirror, and the lantern on its roof. In my car, on the dashboard, between the glass and the steering wheel, I keep a Kleenex box that I use, on occasion, to scoop dirt and stop spills and the slow movement of liquids extracted from running noses by bare, sweeping hands. I also use it to cover my nostrils from the assaulting smells of the poor and the drunks and the unwashables who ride in my car with the stiffness of floating corpses and the miseries of the underground.
When all is calm, after all the strange creatures in my building have settled down, retreated to their stoves to feed themselves, and then moved towards their televisions to receive their daily allowance of vitamin D from the eminent face of the news anchor, I get in my taxi and go out into the night.
SPIDERS
THERE ARE TWO
kinds of taxi drivers: the Spiders and the Flies.
Spiders are those drivers who wait at taxi stands for the dispatcher’s call or for customers to walk off the streets and into their hungry cars. These human insects can be found on city sidewalks rolling newspapers, comparing cars, recalling customers and their own lives. They wait on corners for things to come and ages to pass. Nameless they have become, reduced to machine operators who identify each other and themselves by the number of their car: 101 had a fight, they might say; 56’s wife is pregnant; 97 just passed by . . .
But I call them the Spiders.
Flies are wanderers, operators who drive alone and around
to pick up the wavers and the whistlers on edges of sidewalks and streets. They navigate the city, ceaseless and aimless, looking for raising arms to halt their flights, for the rain to make them busy, for the surfing lanterns above their hoods to shine like faraway ships leaving potato famines and bringing newcomers. No wanderer ever rests on the curb to play or feed. No wanderer chooses to travel the same road twice.
I am a wanderer.
IN THE EVENINGS
during my shift, I often pass by Café Bolero. It is open twenty-four hours and many taxi drivers stop here to rest, eat, and socialize. I sit in the corner and listen to their stories and complaints. I find consolation when I assess their tired faces and watch their knuckles open and liberate themselves from the clutches of steering wheels, the handling of doorknobs, and the counting of change. I am an oddity among these charioteers but I observe their ways, hear their words, and follow their movements between the tables and the chairs. I also assign them names because I fear to forget their numbers.
Spiders come in many forms and shapes and colours. And here is the Sleeping Spider, ladies and gentlemen! Also known as Mr. Green, he takes a very short nap at every red light. He wakes up just as the light changes. Some drivers say he shuts his eyes and doesn’t sleep but stays aware of everything around him; others say he has a colour sensor in his eyelids. But the truth is that when the colour green catches his eyes, he wakes up and thinks he is back home in the lush jungles of the south. It is said that once, in Café Bolero, he fell asleep in the middle of a meal, his head hanging over his plate, but when the daughter of the owner brought a green salad to the table, he was awake again. That is how he got the name Mr. Green.
And let’s all welcome the Piss Spider, ladies and gentlemen, the driver who never leaves his car! He works twenty hours a day. He has a grand plan! He wants to retire to an island one day, with a house and a young woman to marry.
Since he never leaves his car, he hardly ever takes a shower. But, even worse, this spider always carries an empty antifreeze container and pisses in it. Going to the bathroom is a waste of time, he thinks. He is afraid to miss a dispatcher’s call or a customer off the street. It is said that a young woman who sat next to him in the front seat asked him to stop the car and got out and puked on the side of the road. If I were a customer of his, I would leave the swine the change and never touch anything that touched his hands. I’d become a generous donor to help cease the epidemics of the world. That spider could plague you with typhoid, the plague, hepatitis A, B, and C, and the whole Phoenician alphabet.
The Piss Spider is a man who would win every fist fight. Just his grabbing you by the collar and pulling your nose towards his armpits would assault you with olfactory punches, give you instant menopause. A waft of smells stronger than a thousand filthy Crusaders would ravage you, and you would be begging for mercy and clean air, you would be on your knees chanting five Hail Marys and six Our Fathers. But he is also a Renaissance man. With his knowledge of the art and science of channelling and containing liquids, his great mysticism expressed through an ascetic lifestyle, his skills for long-term navigation, his capacity for alchemy and the gathering of gold, he is admired and feared by friends and foes. A real son of the European kings and nobility, I call him the Piss Spider, but he truly earned his royal status when he became known among his fellow drivers as Louis XIV, after the French king who never took a bath in his entire life. When the sun hits le Roi Soleil’s dashboard, it turns into a fussy layer of dust, enough for ten fingerprintings at the border crossings. And every December he says, One more year of this and then I am off to my little bride on the beach, but then the massive layers of dust in his car turn to sand and beaches, and the smell of his seat becomes the smell of the old and familiar, and the cavity of his chair becomes a hole of misery and an opaque quagmire of greed, dirt, warmth, and even comfort.