Memoirs of a Porcupine

by Alain Mabanckou

  there’s a certain kind of person I really don’t like, like the educated young man called Amédée, whom we ate, he was only about thirty, he was the one who had read the book in which the ethnologists or social anthropologists wrote about the practice of the corpse denouncing whoever had harmed him, the reason I mention it is because if there’s one person whose disappearance I really don’t regret it’s that young man, he was such a show-off, a braggart of the first order, he thought he was most intelligent person in the village, in the region, not to say the whole country, he wore Terylene suits, sparkly ties, the kind of shoes you wear if you work in an office, those dens of idleness where men sit down, pretend to read papers and put off till tomorrow what they should be doing today, Amédée walked around with his chest puffed out, just because he’d studied for years, simply because he’d visited countries where it snows, let me tell you this, whenever he came to Séképembé to visit his parents, the young girls on heat went running after him, even married women cheated on their husbands, they’d bring him things to eat on the quiet, round the back of his father’ s hut, they’d wash his dirty linen for him, the guy went round doing things he shouldn’t have all over the place with married women and the young women on heat, down by the river, in the grass, in the fields, behind the church, near the cemetery, I couldn’t believe my eyes, true, he was handsome, athletic, and he certainly spent a lot of time on his looks, almost like a human of the feminine sex, such coquettishness had never been seen before in our village, and when he went to bathe in the river he’d spend hours gazing at himself in the water, rubbing in scented oils, and where the river grew calm, like a mirror, conspiring with his vanity, he admired his own reflection, until one day he almost drowned, when, leaning far over, so as to be able to see the whole length of his body, he stepped onto a stone covered with moss, and splash! bless my quills, he tripped, and ended up in the water, but luckily for him he knew how to swim, and in less than no time he got across to the other side, laughing like a moron, the bathers all applauded, and to celebrate the day he almost died, he picked a red hibiscus flower, threw it into the river, watched it follow the current, disappearing in a tangle of ferns and lilies, which is why people from this village don’t say ‘red hibiscus’ now, they call it ‘flower of Amédée’

  the worst thing was, Amédée would criticise the old folk out loud, calling them ignorant old fools, the only ones whom he spared were his own parents, saying that if his parents had been able to go to school they would have been as intelligent as he was, because that’s where he got his intelligence from, and at sunrise each day, he’d sit under a tree, reading great thick books in tiny print, the big show-off, novels usually, oh, I’m sure you’ve never seen a novel, I don’t suppose anyone’s ever sat beneath your shade reading a novel, well you’re not missing anything, but just to keep it simple, and not pollute your spirit, I’ll tell you this, novels are books written by men to recount things which are untrue, they’ll say it all comes from their imagination, there are some novelists who would sell their own mothers or fathers to steal my porcupine destiny, draw inspiration from it, write a story in which I’d have an rather less than glorious role, make me look like low life, let me tell you this, human beings find life so boring, they need novels so they can invent other lives for themselves, by diving into one of these books, dear Baobab, you can take off round the world, leave the bush in the blink of an eye, turn up in a distant country, meet foreign people, strange animals, porcupines with even murkier pasts than mine, I was often intrigued, hiding there in my bush, hearing Amédée talk to the young girls about the things in his books, and the girls looked at him with more respect and consideration because for monkey cousins, if you’ve read a lot of books it gives you the right to boast, to look down on others, and people who’ve read a great deal seem to talk all the time, especially about the things in their books that are most difficult to understand, they want other people to know they’ve read things, so Amédée would tell the young girls all about a wretched old man who went deep sea fishing and had to battle all alone with a huge fish, if you ask me this huge fish was the harmful double of a fisherman who was jealous of the old guy’s experience, our erudite young friend also talked about another old man who liked to read love stories and went to help a village to wipe out a wild beast that was terrorising the region, I’m sure the beast was the harmful double of a villager in that distant land, and it was also Amédée who told them several times over the story of a guy who flew about on a magic carpet, a patriarch who founded a village called Macondo, and all his descendents were afflicted by a kind of curse and were born half-man, half-animal, with snouts, and pig’s tails, I’m convinced these must have been cases of harmful doubles, and if I remember correctly, he told stories about some weird guy who went round fighting windmills, or, in a similar vein a poor unfortunate officer in a desert camp sitting waiting for reinforcements, and then again the old colonel waiting for a letter and his veteran’s pension, living in abject poverty with his sick wife, all their hopes pinned on their fighting cock, that cock was their one ray of hope, it must have been a peaceful double of some kind, well, I won’t go on, and then, to give the girls a scare, because they get a thrill out of stories of rape, blood and murder, Amédée told them about a sexually impotent gangster who raped someone using a corn cob, somewhere in south America, and in the same breath he’d tell them the tragic tale of a double murder in the bizarrely named Rue de la Morgue, and since it was about a young woman who was strangled and stuck head first down a chimney, the girls shrieked with horror when Amédée added that behind the building where this drama had taken place, in a little courtyard, was a second corpse, that of an old lady, who’d had her throat cut and her head chopped off, and some of the girls left at this point, and only came back when Amédée had unravelled the mystery of this dread murder, by following the brilliant analysis of the investigator, but actually what thrilled them most was the tale of a beautiful woman called Alicia, in some respects, it occurred to me that Amédée was making fun of my master, Kibandi, here, talking about him in veiled terms, the young man would say things like, ‘let us now leave the world of Edgar Allen Poe, let me take you far away to Uruguay, and Horacio Quiroga’, and then he’d delight in describing Alicia, a shy, blonde, angelic young woman, he would say, and all the girls would sigh ‘ahhhh’, and the young man of letters would say that Alicia loved her husband Jordan, but he was a hard man, they loved each other though they could not have been more different, they walked round arm in arm, but their marriage would last three months, no longer, that was their destiny, autumn came, clouds darkened their idyll, like a curse, almost, come to blight their love, then things got even dicier when Alicia caught a kind of flu which she couldn’t shake off, she lay in her bed, unable to leave it, in terrible pain, each day she grew thinner, the life seemed to seep out of her, and nothing was as it had been, though her husband tried to heal her, and at this point in the story, when Amédée came to paint a picture of the couple’s house, a note of terror began to creep in, joy turned to fear, Amédée dropped his voice, and described the home of Jordan and Alicia, ‘inside, inside the glacial brilliance of stucco, the bare walls affirmed the sensation of unpleasant coldness, whenever someone walked through the rooms, their footfall echoed throughout the house, as if long abandonment had increased its resonance’, no one knew what was wrong with Alicia, different doctors tried, and failed to cure her, none of the various medicines worked, in the end Alicia died, and after her death, the maid came in to strip the bed, and discovered to her amazement two bloodstains on the feather pillow beneath her head, the maid tried to get them out, and finding the feather pillow surprisingly heavy, she asked the young widow, Jordan, to help, they placed it on the table, Jordan set about cutting it up with a knife, ‘the top feathers floated off and the maid opened her mouth wide and clutched at her head wrap and shrieked with horror’, read Amédée, in a dark, serious tone, and since the girls of Séképembé still hadn’t understood w
hat Jordan and the maid had found under the feather pillow, Amédée at last revealed it to them, weighing each word as he said ‘underneath, among the feathers, slowly waving his velvet paws, sat a monstrous beast, a living, slimy ball,’ and it was this beast which, over five days and nights, had sucked out Alicia’s blood with its trunk, and I did wonder whether Alicia was perhaps an initiate, a human being who’d been eaten by her own harmful double, hidden in the feather pillow

  one day my master said to me ‘you see, we have to have that young man, he thinks too much of himself, he tells people stupid stories, it seems he puts it about that I’m sick, and that there’s a beast that eats me every evening’, and we waited till the dry season holiday, when he was due back from Europe with his box of books, and one day Amédée walked past my master’s shack, he saw Kibandi sitting outside with an esoteric book in his hands, Amédée said, ‘my dear sir, I’m so glad to see you read from time to time’, my master didn’t answer, the young man went on, ‘if I’m not mistaken, you seem rather thin to me, and remind me of an unfortunate character in Stories of Love, Madness and Death, things go from bad to worse for you, year after year, it’s not even your mother’s death that’s got you into this state, is it, I strongly recommend you see a doctor in town, I hope there isn’t a beast hidden under your pillow feeding off your blood through its trunk, if there is, there’s still time to burn the pillow, to kill the beast hidden within’, once again, my master didn’t react, he thought our village intellectual was raving, mixing up real people and characters in the books he’d brought back from Europe, and Kibandi went on reading his own book, which was about more important things than the things in Amédée’s books, and when the young man had walked on by Kibandi took one last look at him and said to himself ‘we’ll see which one of us grows so thin he looks like the rib of a roof frame, I’m not one of those little maids you tell your stories to’

  Amédée went out at dawn for his morning walk in the bush, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, whistling as he walked down to the river bank, where he dipped his feet in the water, stretched out on the bank and began reading his books full of lies, my master had told me to spy on him, see what he was getting up to all alone there, make sure the young man didn’t also have a double who could make trouble for us while we were seeing to him, it was an unnecessary precaution, dear Baobab, they get so narrow-minded for porcupine’s sake, all those guys who go off to Europe, they think stories of doubles only exist in African novels, which, instead of setting them thinking, just makes them laugh, they would rather think rationally, as the white men’s science teaches them, and the rational thoughts they’ve been taught say that every phenomenon has a scientific explanation, and when Amédée saw me coming out from a clump of bushes near the river, for porcupine’s sake, he yelled furiously, ‘out of my sight, filthy beast, ball of prickles, before I turn you into pâté and eat you with chili and manioc’, I ballooned till I was ten times my normal size, I was almost exploding, my eyes were popping out of my head, I rattled my quills, whirled round in circles, saw him grab a piece of wood, meaning to smack me on the head, which reminded me of Papa Mationgo back when my master was his apprentice, I did an about turn, looked for escape from impending slaughter, shot off into the bushes I’d emerged from, Amédée stepped towards me, I knew these bushes better than he did, so I rolled all the way down on some dead leaves and found myself at the bottom of the hill, he threw the stick of wood, it landed a few inches from my snout, and when I found my master half an hour later, I told him how the fellow had insulted us, had almost killed us with his piece of wood, Kibandi kept his cool, ‘don’t worry about it’ he reassured me, ‘there’s nothing he can to do harm us, I haven’t been to Europe myself, but I’m not ignorant, with the mayamvumbi you don’t need to go to school to learn to read and write, it opens your mind, channels the intelligence, he won’t be getting his plane back to Europe, that’s for sure, he’s ours now, his grave’s as good as dug, as far as I’m concerned he’s been dead a long while, but he doesn’t realise, because the Whites don’t teach that kind of thing in their schools’

  at midnight, in heavy rain, we made our way to Amédée’s little hut, next to his parents’, we had left my master’s other self stretched out on the last mat Mama Kibandi ever wove, blinding streaks of lightning flashed across the sky, Kibandi sat down under a tree, signalled to me to go on ahead while he took a good glug of mayamvumbi, I didn’t take much bidding, I was angry with our little genius myself, I went and scrabbled furiously at the earth under the door of his hovel, to make a way in, and the rain, which by now was falling in torrents, made my task easier, so that in no time I managed to dig a hole so deep that even two fat, idle porcupines could get through without any problem, and once I was inside I saw a lighted candle, the fool had forgotten to blow it out, he was sleeping on his belly, I crept silently forward, came level with the bamboo bed, I don’t know why, I suddenly felt afraid, but I managed to control it, I stood up on two legs and clutched at the side of the bed, I was between his two spread legs now, I tensed, so as to find the strongest quill from among the tens of thousands I might have used at that moment, and zap, I released it, it landed right in the back of his neck, the quill almost penetrated all the way into the brain which had so annoyed my master, and as a result, annoyed me also, Amédée had no time to wake up, he was seized with a series of spasms and hiccups while I fell upon his body to remove the quill with my incisors, I took it out, I licked the blood till no trace of my act remained, I saw the little hole close again, just like when I had seen to Papa Louboto’s daughter, the lovely young Kimouni, I jumped down onto the ground, but before I left I went up close to the candle because I wanted to burn down his hut, and then I said to myself there was no point doing that, I shouldn’t exceed the limits of my mission, Kibandi would have been angry with me, I glanced out of curiosity at the title of the last book the bookworm had been reading before going to bed, Extraordinary Stories, sleep had pulled him into the world of these stories, it was another one of those books he took his lies from, to tell the village girls, now he could go and tell them to the phantoms, it’s another world there, another universe, they never believe anything, to start with they don’t believe in the end of their physical bodies, they resent us for going on living, the Earth for going on turning, and that’s why, instead of going up to heaven, they wander the earth, restless shades, hoping to live again, I mean phantoms won’t just swallow whatever you tell them

  Amédée’s funeral was one of the most moving ever seen in Séképembé, in marked contrast to that of the late lamented Mama Kibandi, the crowd around his mortal remains seemed to consist entirely of young girls, they had all summoned their girlfriends from neighboring villages to come and pay due homage to this exceptional being, the pride of Séképembé, of the entire region, not to say country, and everyone wanted to know what had happened to our resident intellectual, some said he’d read too many books brought from Europe, others demanded we carry out the ritual whereby the corpse identifies the criminal, Amédée’s parents opposed this idea because, as they recalled, their son didn’t believe in such things, it would be an offence to parade his corpse around the village, so they accepted his death, they buried the young man with two boxes of books, some of them were still in their wrappings, with prices in the currency they use in Europe, and in the funeral speech, made this time by the priest from the town, and not by one of the village sorcerers, whom they suspected couldn’t speak Latin, the man of God recalled how this young man of letters had pushed back the tide of ignorance, demonstrating that the pages of a book offer a new freedom, restore our humanity, he spoke in Latin, read out a few pages of Extraordinary Stories, put the book to one side, picked up a brand new Bible, placed it on the coffin and concluded, in a bleating voice, ‘may this book, dear Amédée, guide you along the unfathomable way of the Lord, that you may at last come to see that the most extraordinary story of all is that of the creation of Man by God, a story contained in the pag
es of the Holy Book I give you now, for your journey to the other world, amen’

  my master may have been a quiet tempered man, but he was not someone to pick a quarrel with, I only saw him get into an argument once or twice, there was that time with old Moudiongui, the palm wine tapper, probably the best palm wine tapper in Séképembé, they knew each other very well, he and my master, I would never have imagined that one day I would find myself dealing with a loser like him, his whole life revolved around palm wine, he could draw mwengué, the finest wine to be got from a palm tree, the village women were crazy for it since it was sweeter than any other wine, but the bad thing about the mwengué is that you don’t know you’re getting drunk, you drink cup after cup and don’t realize you’re cackling like a hyena, and it’s only when you try to get up you find you can’t control your legs, you walk all crooked, like a crab, everyone busts out laughing, saying ‘there’s another one who’s been at Moudiongui’s mwengué’, and my master had got into the bad habit of mixing a bit of mwengué with his initiation drink, to make it less bitter, so now he would only drink it when it was mixed with old Moudiongui’s palm wine, so every morning the old loser stopped by Kibandi’s hut to drop off a pint of palm wine, he spoke fondly of Mama Kibandi and remarked how quickly time passed, in fact this was to make Kibandi feel sorry for him so he’d give him more money, my master paid no attention, handed him a crumpled note, Kibandi was convinced that the palm wine added that extra something to his mayamvumbi, now old Moudiongui was becoming unreliable, he’d get into a sulk for nothing, sometimes Kibandi had to go and wake him to get him to go out into the bush and fetch the palm wine and, taking advantage of my master’s dependence, the old man put up the price as he felt like it, take it or leave it, ‘if you don’t like it, go and fetch your own mwengué, otherwise, pay my price, end of discussion’, Moudiongui claimed that mwengué was getting increasingly hard to come by, that the palm trees in our region had stopped producing this special wine, that my master would have to make do with normal palm wine, and one day the old man brought back some mwengué, as usual, my master tasted it, he had a moment of doubt, he realized it wasn’t real mwengué, the old man was tricking him, he said nothing, just called me one evening and said, ‘right, tomorrow at dawn when the plains grow bright, go follow that bastard palm wine tapper, he’s acting strange, I can feel it, go and see how he works’ and I followed him first thing next morning, I saw him vanish into the forest, till he reached a place where there’s nothing but palm trees, as far as the eye can see, and I saw him climb to the top of a palm tree where he’d hung his gourds the day before, he took them down, they were full, he climbed down, he sat at the foot of the tree, took out a small bag from his pocket, I caught him pouring sugar into the palm wine he’d just drawn, and since he was mad at my master he even spat into the gourd, muttering angrily, and I reported this back to Kibandi later, so when the palm wine tapper turned up at Kibandi’s house to offer him this nasty brew, he had the truth flung in his face, I heard them arguing, old Moudiongui was desperate to sell his palm wine, my master replied that it wasn’t real mwengué, they called each other all the names under the sun, old Moudiongui insulted my master, ‘nothing but a bag of bones, you are, you’re dead already, you’re jealous of my trade because you’re only a poor carpenter, you couldn’t even climb up a mango tree, you’re a crazy guy, a maniongi, a ngébé, a ngouba yak o pola’, all insults in bembé, Kibandi didn’t answer, he just said to the palm wine tapper, ‘let’s just see, shall we, who’s the maniongi, the ngébé, the ngouba yak o pola around here’, old Moudiongui said, just as he was leaving, ‘what will we see, then, you’re a nobody you are, don’t expect me to give you mwengué from now on, old dry bones, go join your mother in the graveyard’