Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou Page A

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