Jokes for the Gunmen
Page 9
Two or three weeks ago a fire broke out in the big house where he lives alone and it destroyed all his furniture and possessions. The little man only just managed to escape. But he did survive and he thanked the Lord. Then he sent a message to his brothers, who quickly sent him some money. Since the fire, he hasn’t appeared on the balcony and I heard that he was accusing me of laying a curse on him, saying that the whole fire was to take revenge on him for spying on us and trying to cause scandals for me and my wife.
In fact I was worried about him, and so was my wife. When we had sex, we would pull the thick curtain open a little (the wind could no longer move it), to see whether the dwarf was on the balcony or not. Maybe we had grown accustomed to his voice, or his voice had become a catalyst for sex between us. But we started talking about the dwarf when we were in bed, instead of cuddling and playing around. We started asking each other what might have happened to him, and after a while we were no longer able to have sex.
My wife insisted we go and visit him, so we went and knocked on the door of his house. He was surprised to see us and asked us in. The walls of the house still showed signs of the fire. He offered us some fruit juice and started apologizing and crying. ‘Forgive me. See what God has done to me,’ he said. We told him we weren’t angry with him. But he wasn’t convinced until, when we were leaving the house, I whispered in his ear, ‘Do you want me to show you proof that we aren’t angry with you?’ His eyes lit up and he nodded, saying, ‘As you wish, but it’s your own responsibility. I’m not responsible.’
I smiled.
The next day we waited till he came out on the balcony and then we started to have sex. We had put back the old curtain, the thin one, and sure enough, as soon as the first breeze blew, we heard the dwarf shouting, ‘There’s someone fucking on the seventh floor. They’re fucking just for me. Don’t go out on your balconies, you sons of bitches.’
Juan and Ausa
IF I HADN’T MET JUAN I WOULD HAVE MISSED THE most pleasant experiences I’ve ever had. He is married to Ausa and this is how they met:
Ausa was living at the time in a town in Spain, in a small ground-floor flat on a narrow street called Pablo Gargallo. Its only window looked directly onto the street. Ausa didn’t know that they held a bull run in the street once a year – you know, one of those fiestas where they goad a bull and it charges at everyone it sees in front of it. Juan was a young man who was eager to take part in the fiesta. You don’t have to pay to run with the bull. All you have to do is challenge the bull and then try your hardest to get out of the way when it tries to dig its horns into your chest.
Juan was no expert, as he had never taken part in such an event before. That morning Juan had had sex with his neighbours’ daughter. He hadn’t washed his hands so the smell of her vagina clung to his fingers. Juan spent the morning walking through the crowded streets, putting his hands to his face and smelling his fingers. It was the first time he had had sex. ‘That day I achieved three objectives all at once,’ he told me. It was the first time he had had sex, it was the first time he had run with a bull in Pablo Gargallo Street, and he was about to meet Ausa. What happened was that the bull singled him out from all the others, not because of his virility but because of the smell that lingered under his fingernails. Juan turned his back on the bull and started to run, as he was meant to. He was enthusiastic, but also frightened. This competition wasn’t like previous competitions: the person the bull was chasing had to wrap some sticky tape around the bull’s horns. If he failed, he lost and his reputation as a real man would be damaged.
The organizers had given out rolls of sticky tape to the public and asked them to throw the rolls to the person that the bull chose to chase. The man (in this case Juan) was meant to catch one of these rolls, undo the tape and wrap it around the bull’s horns, which meant he had to stop running every now and then and turn around to see the bull.
What happened was that the smell of sex made the bull angry and it didn’t give Juan a chance to catch his breath. Juan started running as fast as he could, clutching the sticky tape nervously in his hand. Even the people felt sorry for him because the enraged animal, which weighed about eight hundred kilos, pursued him relentlessly. He jumped off a little ledge, climbed on top of a pile of rubbish and ran along a wall, but the bull wouldn’t leave him alone. All Juan could do was throw himself through Ausa’s open window, from where she was watching the fiesta. It’s a good omen, of course, to have a handsome man jump through your window, but you may well panic when you see a bull coming in behind him. Ausa told me that she hid in the small cupboard under the sink, leaving Juan and the bull to fight it out in the flat. The cupboard was smashed, the bed was broken and when the bull snagged the chandelier with its horns it fell to the floor and shattered, along with a valuable collection of ceramics that Ausa had put together from various places in Spain. Incandescent with rage, she came out of her hiding place in the kitchen and grabbed a large knife. She made straight for the bull, head to head, and sank the knife into its shoulder with a sideways thrust. The animal fell to the floor. Seizing his opportunity, Juan pounced on the wounded bull and wrapped the sticky tape around its horns.
People had now gathered at the window, but none of them saw what happened, because everything that Ausa and Juan did to the bull took place in the corridor. It took thirteen men to remove the bull from the flat. Its horns were covered in sticky tape and blood was running down its neck and head. People thought Juan was a hero.
Juan promised Ausa he would repair all the damage the bull had done and he did indeed spend more than two weeks fixing the cupboard and the window frame that the bull’s hooves had ruined. The work on the flat should have taken less than two weeks, but Juan worked slowly and spoke a lot. He told Ausa everything about his life, except about the girl he had had sex with on the morning of the day he jumped through Ausa’s window. Juan was thirty and Ausa was twenty-seven.
The people in Pablo Gargallo Street thought the bull must have been the brother of the girl Juan had slept with. In that town people believe that bulls and people can be brothers and sisters. If it hadn’t been related, it wouldn’t have been so angry. Now they had to find out the identity of the girl who was the bull’s sister. The men threatened to hold Juan to account, so they brought all the girls out of their houses and told them to walk past the bull, which was standing in its pen covered in a large piece of cloth. The bull was supposed to identify the girl that Juan had had sex with. In fact, as soon as the girl walked towards the animal, it went up to her and lowed in her face. Her father promised to hang Juan within sight of the bull in the pen. Juan had to find a solution. He denied the whole story to Ausa, cried and asked her to help. They spent a night thinking of a solution. Then at last they found it: Juan would marry the young girl and Ausa would marry the bull. Nominally, of course, because that was the best solution, because the people who lived in Pablo Gargallo Street asked the girl not to abandon her brother the bull and to look after it, to make up for the shame she had caused it. And so it was. A short time later, Juan, Ausa, the girl and the bull all boarded a small truck and left the neighbourhood.
On the way the bull started lowing and roaring because the swaying of the truck made its shoulder hurt. The wound hadn’t completely healed yet. This upset the driver, who told them all to get out. After waiting some time on the motorway, Juan managed to hitch a ride with a driver. Ausa and Juan got into the car and asked the girl to wait with her brother the bull until Juan came back with a small truck. But Juan and Ausa left the girl and the bull and ran off. Since then they haven’t heard anything about them. They got married and moved to live and work near me, as political activists.
My friendship with Juan only began when he saw me butting an old school blackboard with my horns. I was by myself and bored. My only aim was to have fun and show off my strength to some cats and some unemployed farm workers. That was shortly after the last war. I had stopped going to the field because the farmer who was my master had
died when a large piece of shrapnel from a shell had destroyed his liver.
Anyway, I never went back to turning the waterwheel. That was because Juan bought me from the farmer’s children and moved me into the garden of his big house. Unlike other bulls, I don’t have a rope around my neck. I’m always in the garden and all I do is listen to Juan’s and Ausa’s stories and put up with being pestered by the children – Ausa tells them to feed me guavas from behind the fence while she grooms me with soap and water. My view is that Juan and Ausa are idiots. Whenever Juan sees me lying down, he comes up and whispers, ‘How’s your sister?’ I nod my head a few times, which he interprets to mean ‘She’s OK. She’s on her way here with her father.’ Ausa, on the other hand, is terrified at the prospect of the girl’s father arriving, so they argue, and as usual I hear them discussing the question of executing me soon, but they daren’t do that, of course, since I’m a bull. As for me, since I can’t take part in the conversation, I get fed up. I chew some of the fruit that’s been put beside me and go to sleep.
Copyright
Published by Granta Books in 2019
Granta Publications
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Copyright © Mazen Maarouf 2015
English translation copyright © Jonathan Wright 2019
This book was originally published in Arabic as in 2015 by Riad El-Rayyes Books, Beirut
The rights of Mazen Maarouf to be identified as the author of this work and of Jonathan Wright to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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ISBN 978 1 84627 667 5
eISBN 978 1 84627 669 9
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