Alain Mabanckou - Memoirs of a Porcupine

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 pages of the Holy Book I give you now, for your journey to the other world, amen’