Free Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos Page B

best day of all was the day Alotl brought a samurai film I hadn’t seen. She said it was to show me that real samurai don’t wear dressing gowns. We even made a bet: if I won she’d buy me a samurai costume and if she won I’d stop wearing the dressing gown. It turned out that some of the samurai were wearing dressing gowns and others weren’t, because they were wearing trousers and armour on their chests. Yolcaut said the dressing gown the samurai wore wasn’t a checked one like mine. Theirs were black. So they stopped the film and we didn’t carry on watching it until I’d taken off the dressing gown.
    Anyway, we had a lot of fun watching the film, especially the part with the fights. We also had fun watching the part with the conversations, because the samurai didn’t speak Japanese, but a funny kind of Spanish. Yolcaut said they spoke like Spaniards and started calling me what one samurai had been calling one of the baddies: rascal.
    At the end of the film one samurai cut off the head of another samurai who was his best friend. He wasn’t a traitor, it was the opposite. He did it because they were friends and he wanted to save his honour. Then I don’t know what got into Yolcaut because when the film was over he took me into the room with the guns and rifles. He told me that there weren’t any secrets between us and let me look at all the weapons and explained what their names were, the countries where they’d been made and the calibres.
    For pistols we have Berettas from the country of Italy, Brownings from the kingdom of United and lots from the country of the United States: mainly Colts and Smith & Wessons. By the way, you can put a silencer on the guns, to make them mute. The rifles are nearly all the same. We have some called AK-47s, from the country of Russia, and other ones called M-16, from the country of the United States. Although we’ve mostly got Uzis from the country of Israel. Yolcaut also showed me the name of the rifle with the gigantic bullets, which isn’t really a rifle, it’s a weapon called a bazooka.
    Before I went to bed Yolcaut asked me if I’d paid attention to the samurai film and if I’d understood the ending properly. I said I had. Then he said the most enigmatic and mysterious thing he’s ever said to me. He said:
    ‘One day you’ll have to do the same for me.’
     
    Today when I woke up there was a really big wooden box next to my bed. It had lots of stickers and labels on it that said: FRAGILE and HANDLE WITH CARE. I ran to ask Yolcaut what it was and to ask him to help me open it, because it was nailed shut.
    We opened the box and inside there were lots of little polystyrene balls, thousands. I started taking them out until I found the stuffed heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of Austria, our Liberian pygmy hippopotamuses. The truth is, the people who stuffed them had done a very immaculate job. The severed heads have their snouts open so you can see their tongues and their four tusks. And they’re shiny, because they’ve been varnished with clear paint. Their eyes are made of white marbles with a brown pupil. And their minuscule ears are intact. Their necks are attached to a board that has a little golden plaque with their names. Louis XVI’s head, which is a very big head, says LOUIS XVI. And underneath: Choeropsis liberiensis . Marie Antoinette of Austria’s head, which is a smaller head, says: MARIE ANTOINETTE. And it also says: Choeropsis liberiensis .
    Together Yolcaut and I hung the heads on the wall in my bedroom: Louis XVI on the right and Marie Antoinette of Austria on the left. Really it was Yolcaut who put the nails in and arranged the heads. I just told him if they were wonky or straight. Then I got up on a chair and tried lots of different hats on them. The ones that look best are the African safari hats. So I left the African safari hats on them, but I’ll only leave them there for a bit. Soon the gold and diamond crowns we ordered to be made