Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Author:Juan Pablo Villalobos
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781908276049
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2011-10-19T21:00:00+00:00

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.

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