Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos Read Free Book Online

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