Memoirs of a Porcupine

by Alain Mabanckou

  How Mama Kibandi joined Papa Kibandi in the other world

  it was strange to see my young master grinding roots with his incisors, sharper than those of an ordinary human, I even wondered if he was going to spend his entire adolescence eating nothing but bulbs, but in the end he accepted the death of his father, living here in Séképembé broadened their horizons, the distance between them and the north helped them put the past behind them, and with it the memory of how the people of Mossaka, aided by the sorcerer, Tembé-Essouka, had wiped out Papa Kibandi, it was clear that Mama Kibandi and my master now hoped to start a new life, it seems only yesterday they moved here, the locals welcomed them as they would any outsider, inviting them in, they moved into a hut made of gaboon planks, with a straw roof, which admittedly was on the edge of the village, but only because there was no land left in the heart of Séképembé, the next question was work, my master became apprentice carpenter to an old man to whom Mama Kibandi paid a modest sum, the old carpenter became almost like a father to Kibandi, who called him ‘Papa’, he never dared use his real name, Mationgo, this man reminded him of his real father, probably because of his stooping posture, his chameleon-like gait, ‘Papa’ Mationgo recognised my master as an intelligent, inquisitive young man, Kibandi quickly mastered the subtler points of carpentry, there was no need for the old man to repeat things endlessly, though he did begin to have his doubts about the young apprentice, who, although he followed his instructions to the letter, never failed to amaze him, by updating ‘Papa’ Mationgo’s outmoded work methods, climbing up on to roofs with unusual ease, the old man was dumbfounded when one day, feeling ill, he put my master in charge of making the wooden roof structure for a farm, young Kibandi managed to make the ties, the laterals, the ridgepoles, the cross ridges, the boarding, the beams for the ridge, croup and semi-croup, which was not within the grasp of your average apprentice, and my master even showed the old man how to put up a metal roof frame, before that ‘Papa’ Mationgo had only ever dealt with wooden frames, in fact everything was just going perfectly between the two humans, I was the one, really, who aroused ‘Papa’ Mationgo’s suspicions, and I know the old man died quite convinced that there was something odd about his apprentice, one day I went for a little wander round the back of the workshop, my master was busy sawing a plank, I heard ‘Papa’ Mationgo’s hesitant tread, he undid his trousers, began pissing against the workshop wall, and when he turned round his eyes met mine, he picked up a large stone lying at his feet, and almost brought me down, the stone landed only a few centimetres away, but the days of his youth were gone, he had lost his aim, I took off in the direction of the river and a few moments later he told my master he believed the porcupines of Séképembé had lost their fear of mankind, that there were too many of them, that the hunters needed to deal with them, that one of these days he might well kill one himself, and eat it with a few green bananas, he swore he would make a trap, Kibandi stopped sawing his wood at that, and answered calmly, ‘Papa Mationgo, the porcupine you saw wasn’t from Séképembé, believe me’, and the old man faltered and gave him a long look, then said in a resigned voice, ‘I see, I see, Kibandi, my son, I see, I suspected as much, I must say, but I won’t say a word, in any case, I’m just an old wreck myself, a bit of old scrap, I don’t want any trouble with people before I leave this world, because I’m going to die any day now’

  a few years later, before taking his final leave of this life, ‘Papa’ Mationgo handed over his work tools to my master, Kibandi felt as though his own father had just died all over again, at that time he was seventeen years old, and in spite of his youth, he had learned everything there was to know about roofing, he had more work than any other artisan in the neighbourhood, most of the new huts in Séképembé had roof frames made by him, and when necessary, he would go to the cemetery and stand in silence before the tomb of ‘Papa’ Mationgo, I would see him sobbing as though at the graveside of his own parent, I was only a few hundred metres away from the cemetery, I knew too, that the noise behind me was coming from my master’s other self, I didn’t turn round for fearing of meeting the eye of the creature with no mouth, the other self was getting more and more agitated, he slept in the workshop, wandered dewy-eyed along the river bank, climbed trees, I sometimes wondered how he managed to eat, since he had no mouth, and, since I had never seen him snacking, I had to conclude that either it was my master who ate for him, or that the other self must eat by means of a different orifice, I’ll leave you to guess which, my dear Baobab

  for twelve years, poor Mama Kibandi had woven mats which she sold to the locals, she did quite good business, and whenever it was market day in one of the neighbouring villages, Louboulou, Kimandou, Kinkosso or Batalébé, mother and son would go with their wares, Kibandi would spend his holidays in these remote little places, with Mama Kibandi’s friends, who were traders like her, leaving me alone with his other self, I didn’t much like it when he went away, I felt it upset the harmony between us, I didn’t come out of my hiding place, I ate only the supplies my master’s other self brought me, thus nights passed, and days passed, my thoughts turned to Kibandi, not that there was any cause for worry, I knew exactly what he was doing during these absences, which lasted only a few weeks, the other self kept nothing from me, I knew, for example, that my master had had his first sexual experience in Kinkosso, with the famous Biscouri, a woman twice his age, a most curvaceous widow, with a cumbersome behind and a rather excessive appetite for virgin boys, the moment she set eyes on one, she’d bound up to him, and pester him, she was well known for it in Kinkosso, she’d hang around after him, talk sweetly to him, prepare food for him, some parents even encouraged her, but widow Biscouri didn’t like actually to be offered a virgin boy, she liked to be able to choose her stallion herself, even if he was skinny as a rake, like my master, she had her own technique for snaring innocents, first of all she’d set up a conversation, along the lines of ‘I know your mother, boy, she’s a fine woman’, and then she’d wrap her arms around him and suddenly thrust her hand between his legs, grabbing his intimate parts and then cry ‘my god, you’ve got something there, boy, you’re set up for life with that thing’ and she’d laugh, and hastily explain ‘it’s ok, I was only joking, my boy, come on, follow me, I’ll make you our finest local dish, the ngul’mu mako’, but people still felt that Biscouri was the least catastrophic solution to the problem of introducing a boy to sex, now my master did not enjoy this experience, he always felt that Biscouri’s excessive ardour had paralysed him, so that he had remained completely passive, as though he were being raped, from then on he began seeing local prostitutes, having got the idea that a woman would only perform the sexual act gently if she was being paid for it, and when he went on holiday to surrounding villages, he would break into his savings and go to the roughest areas, find a different partner every evening, get drunk with a working girl, then return to Séképembé with empty pockets, now Mama Kibandi was no fool, she had a good idea that my master had started seeing women, and she was confident that one day her son would present her with a future daughter-in-law, or people would come knocking at their door with a pregnant daughter

  I remember, too, the day Mama Kibandi came across my master sitting in front of the hut reading the Bible, someone had given it to him in Kinkosso, a religious person who wanted to persuade him to take up the way of the Lord because he’d seen him in the prostitutes’ area, a sign that my master was a lost sheep, a sinner who must be guided away from the path to hell, before this servant of the Lord had had time to discover that he was in fact illiterate, Kibandi had taken the book and vanished, and the man in the cassock never realised what a favour he had done my master, for the first few weeks he didn’t open the book, he left it lying by his bed until it was covered with a layer of dust, and one evening, unable to sleep, he finally picked it up, opened it up in the middle, brought it up close to his eyes, drew a long breath, smelled the pleasant smell of the page, and when he opened his eyes the light of
the storm lantern fell across the words, and stripped them of their mystery, forming a kind of halo around each letter, and each phrase began to move, flowing like a river, he never knew when exactly his lips began to move, to read, he didn’t even know he was turning the pages fast, that his eyes were flicking from left to right without his feeling any giddiness, the words were suddenly alive, representing reality, and he imagined God, and that mysterious vagabond, Jesus, he would never stop reading, and for the next few days he did not sleep, he’d fall on the book the minute he got in from the workshop he’d built behind their hut, Mama Kibandi couldn’t hide her astonishment, she was amused by her son’s behaviour, she wondered why the young man was so concerned to conceal his ignorance, after all, just because you had a book in your hands didn’t mean you were educated, and she treated it as a joke, considering my master had never set foot inside a school, so he couldn’t read, and another day, infuriated by my master’s new activity, she glanced at the book he was going through, as though she too could devour it, her son seemed very focussed, he murmured phrases, traced the lines on the page with the index finger of his right hand, it must have been that day, surely, that she realised Kibandi had to have a double and that his father must have made him drink the mayamvumbi in Mossaka

  from then on my master just had to be reading, he brought all sorts of books back to the house, books he’d bought in neighbouring villages, he placed them in a corner of his workshop, there were some in the bedroom too, most of the books had lost their covers, he spent hours in the library of the church of St Jospeh in the village of Kimondou, and when he wasn’t in the workshop or working on site in a neighbouring village, he would spend the entire day reading, it was around this time that I too began to pick out letters among the thoughts passing through my mind, whole words even, it was fun identifying the letters, knowing that somewhere among them there must be a word, before long I could recite what my master read, several times I caught myself muttering aloud to myself, and then I reached the conclusion that for once men really did have a head start on us animals, because they could set down their thoughts, their imaginings on paper, and it was around the same time that curiosity drove me from my hiding place, I went into my master’s workshop while he was out with his mother at the market in Séképembé, fell upon the pile of books, I wanted to be sure that I could really recognise the words floating round in my mind like little silver-winged dragonflies, my master had put the Bible by his work tools, as though to consecrate them, I took it and opened it at random, I read several chapters, I discovered some extraordinary stories, like the ones I told you about at the beginning of my confession, I also found some other books, I didn’t need to read them all, my master would do that for me, I scuttled off before nightfall, in case Kibandi and his mother found me there, I don’t know what would have happened then

  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

 
how last Friday became black Friday

  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