Alain Mabanckou - Memoirs of a Porcupine

I need to find the right words, to explain to you about Mama Kibandi’s weak heart, she had always tried to conceal her illness from her son, my master only discovered it when they were living at Séképembé, it got much worse after our twelfth year here, she was at death’s door with every crisis, she’d lie still as a corpse for hours, then suddenly, just when you thought she must surely have given up the ghost, she’d breathe in, hold it, then breathe out sharply, murmur something like ‘I won’t let this cursed illness get me, oh no, I’m a healthy woman, my ancestors are protecting me, every night, every day, I call their names, dear Kong-Dia-Mama, Moukila-Massengo, Kengé-Moukila, Mam’Soko, Nzambi Ya Mpungu, Tata Nzambi, they’ll give me a new heart, a heart that beats faster than this old wreck smouldering away beneath my ribs’, but what could the ancestors do for a heart that slithered and rumbled and faltered, what could they do for a vital muscle that had contracted, and only supplied blood to half the body, there was nothing to be done, dear Baobab, perhaps they could have seen off a fever, a bladder burn, bilharzia, a flesh wound, a headache, but the heart was something else, Mama Kibandi knew it, the slightest effort tired her out, she hadn’t gone out selling her mats for a year now, my master gave up working too, and when I went into the workshop I noticed spiders’ webs, dusty books, work tools stowed away in a corner, Kibandi hadn’t been up on the roof of a house for months, Mama Kibandi kept telling him to get back to work, my master hardly listened, he stopped visiting the prostitutes in Kinkosso, he watched over his mother, gave her mixtures to drink that turned her lips bright red, he stopped leaving the house, till the day Mama Kibandi went to join Papa Kibandi in the other world, now several weeks before this, as though she had known exactly the hour and date of her departure, and probably because she was taken aback by her son’s strange behaviour, suddenly becoming an avid reader, a man of letters, you might say, she again told my master he must not disobey her, must not go down the same path as the late Papa Kibandi, or he might end up the same way, and the young man promised, swore three times on the name of his ancestors, it was a great big lie, it would probably have been better to tell her the truth, because the instant he swore on the blood of his ancestors, a fart of incredible fruitiness issued from his butt, and the two of them, he and the dying woman, had to pinch their nostrils, the smell of rotting corpse got so bad in the room they had to leave the door and windows open for thirty days and thirty nights, it only cleared the day the old lady died, a grey Monday, a Monday when even the flies couldn’t get off the ground, Séképembé seemed empty, the sky so low a human could almost have plucked a cluster of clouds without even raising his arm, and then, just on the stroke of eleven in the morning, a flock of skeletal sheep appeared from nowhere, trooped around my master’s workshop, stopped in front of the hut, covered the courtyard in diarrhoeal excrement, then made off in single file towards the river, while the oldest of them let out a cry like that of an animal being slaughtered in the abattoir, Kibandi rushed into his mother’s bedroom, found her lifeless, her face a rictus, her right hand laid upon her left breast, she had probably been counting her final heart beats, before her eyes closed forever, my master went running all round Séképembé like a madman, telling everyone, Mama Kibandi was buried in a place set aside for strangers, a few people came to the funeral, but not enough, because the villagers still considered her and her son ‘outsiders, come from the belly of the mountain’, even if they’d been living there for aeons, and, my dear Baobab, the way I see it, confidence between humans comes from a shared knowledge of the past, it’s not like in our world, a long established group of animals might view the arrival of an unknown beast with suspicion, animals are organised too, I know that from experience, they have their territory, their governor, their rivers, their trees, their paths, it’s not only elephants have graveyards, all animals are attached to their own world, but with the monkey cousins it’s strange, there’s an emptiness, a shadow, an ambiguity about the past which breeds suspicion, even, sometimes, rejection, and that’s why not many locals came to Mama Kibandi’s burial, after her body had lain for three days and three nights, under a shelter of palm leaves made by my master in his workshop

dear Baobab, I should like you to think of Mama Kibandi as a brave woman, at least, a woman who loved her child, a humble woman who lived in this village, and loved it, who spent her days weaving mats, a woman who maybe won’t find rest in the world hereafter, because my master failed to keep his word, from that point on Kibandi lived here alone, he decided to take up carpentry again, I’d hang around outside his workshop, I’d hear him banging away furiously with his tools, sawing away at the wood, I’d see him set off for the next village, work there, come back in the evening, lie down on his bed, open a book and in that silent hut, where Mama Kibandi’s shade could still be felt, especially when a cat meowed late in the night or a fruit splashed into the river, my master’s other self visited me more and more often, always with his back to me, all I saw was a sad, lost looking shape, I knew now that we were close, very close to the start of our activities, we could begin, now Mama Kibandi’s death had relieved my master of the last of his scruples

let me tell you about the day Kibandi came back from his mother’s grave, the day when towards the stroke of ten in the evening, I decided to go and sniff around his hut, all afternoon my master’s other self had been hanging about, I heard his footsteps, running everywhere, rustling in the undergrowth, plunging into the river, vanishing one moment, popping up again half an hour later, I knew the other self had a message for me, the time for our first mission had come, I grew restless in my lair, I couldn’t keep still, Kibandi wanted to see me, smell me, so, at dead of night I went to the workshop, it was so dark I could scarcely see beyond the end of my snout, there was no light in the hut, usually my master read till the early hours, I also noticed that the door was half open, I slid quietly through and found Kibandi stretched out on the last mat his mother had made before she died, it was only half finished, he loved that mat more than anything, I started nibbling his nails, his heels too, he appreciated these signs of affection and woke up, got to his feet, I saw him dress, turning his back so I wouldn’t see his genitals, and as I crossed what served as the living room, I stumbled over his other self, stretched out on the ground, we left the hut, while the other self went and lay down on the last mat woven by Mama Kibandi, I tripped along behind my master, who was walking with his eyes half closed, like a blind man, and we arrived at a place a few hundred metres from the house of Papa Louboto, the brick maker, my master sat down under a mango tree, I could see he was trembling, talking to himself, touching his belly, as though he had a pain there, ‘go on then, it’s your call’ he said to me, pointing towards the hut at the far end of the concession, and seeing me hesitate he repeated his order in a sterner tone, I did as I was told, and round the back of the hut I found a gaping hole, the work, presumably, of some local rodents, I pushed straight through it and found myself in the bedroom of Papa Louboto’s daughter, young Kiminou, a light-skinned girl, an adolescent, with a round face, said to be the prettiest girl in Séképembé, four young men had already asked her father for her hand in marriage, and were just waiting for Papa Louboto’s decision, due next year, when the girl came of age, here was young Kiminou now, I stopped to admire her beauty for a moment, the pagne scarcely covering her thighs, her breasts within reach, I felt a violent lurch of desire, I was shocked by my own genitals, I who had never done anything improper with a female, not even one of my own species, I swear, I’d never even once felt the itch, it never crossed my mind, unlike certain members of our group at that time, who stooped to such things the moment the old governor’s back was turned, they were older than me, these comrades, and then all at once, the day of my first mission, I got this curious bulge between my hind legs, my sex was growing hard, I’d always thought it was only for pissing, just as my rectum was only for defecating, I was suddenly ashamed, and I swear I couldn’t tell you to this day what I would do if I found myself face to face with a porcupine of the opposite sex coming on to me, or giving me the come hither, perhaps I’m still a virgin because of being a double, whenever I saw the other members of our community knocking around with females it felt like I was watching something indecent, it was all very hard work, but they got there in the end, they squealed, groaned, clutched at their partner’s quills, I always wondered what they were feeling when they waved their paws around as though they were having an epileptic fit and let me tell you something else, the noise of their quills rubbing together really irritated me, anyway, my comrades seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly, then suddenly they’d groan and fall into a state of semi-consciousness, even a babe that piddles in his cradle could have caught them bare-handed, then, the day of my first assignment, I discovered that even though my sex was quite indifferent to the attractions of a female porcupine, it immediately reacted to the sight of a naked human of the feminine sex, still my mission was not to try to get it on with this girl, so after a moment’s hesitation I set these thoughts aside, and told myself such things were not for me, they were things to be done between members of the same species, and to rid my mind completely of such ideas I tried to think about something completely different, I wondered what had made my master take against the lovely Kiminou, her perfectly formed body perhaps, and once again I brushed aside such considerations with the back of my paw, not wanting to weaken just as I was about to go into action, but deep down, even if I was deliberately making my mind go blank, I couldn’t help wondering, and I remembered that Kibandi was one of the four marriage candidates, which had made the whole village laugh, and he wished he’d never asked, I’d seen him two or three times in discussion with Papa Louboto near the market place, one day they drank a glass of palm wine together, the man had spoken with warmth of Mama Kibandi, he said ‘she was a really good woman, she’ll be remembered many years in this village, believe me, you can be proud of her, and I know she is watching over you’, his voice was totally insincere, and Kibandi remembered that Papa Louboto hadn’t turned up at his mother’s funeral, so he was pretending to be nice to my master in the hope of receiving his gifts as a suitor to his daughter, only to reject him when the moment came, then, when all the candidates had finished talking with the potential father-in-law, each of them went away convinced he was the right man for the job, he was the one Papa Louboto would give his daughter to blindly, now my master wasn’t falling for that, he knew he didn’t stand a chance, but even so, he gave that swindler everything he owned, everything his mother had given him, special celebration mats, baskets of palm nuts, all his work savings, he remade the man’s roof free of charge, you could see in Papa Louboto’s eyes a kind of inexhaustible expectation, he went round the village boasting, saying Kibandi was bug ugly, thin as the tack in a photo frame, adding that a woman worthy of the name would never accept Kibandi, but let him dream on, he’d ruin him, take everything off him, down to his underpants, his vests, his rubber sandals, I expect it was frustration and fury drove my master to take on this family, because, let me make it quite clear, dear Baobab, for one human being to eat another you need concrete reasons, jealousy, anger, envy, humiliation, lack of respect, I swear we never once ate someone just for the pleasure of eating, and so, on that memorable night, while young Kiminou slept like an angel, her arms crossed over her chest, I drew a deep breath, took one of my strongest quills, and threw it straight at her right temple, before she could realise what was happening, then a second, she shuddered, in vain she struggled, she was paralysed, I went up to her, heard her muttering nonsense, I started licking the blood as it oozed down her temple, I saw the hole left by my two quills vanish as though by magic, you’d have needed four eyes to see any sign of what had happened, I went into the next room, where the young girl’s parents lay sleeping, the father snoring like a clapped out car, the mother with her left arm dangling over the side of the bed, it was not part of my mission to deal with them, so I pushed aside the voice that whispered in my ear, telling me to shoot a couple of quills into Kimouni’s parents’ temples