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

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