Memoirs of a Porcupine (9 page)

a breeze is rising now, your leaves fall upon me, it's a pleasant feeling, it's these little things that remind me of the joy of being alive, and looking up at the sky above I think to myself how lucky you have been, to live here, in this place, so close to paradise, where everything is green, here on top of the hill, overlooking the surrounding countryside, the trees all around are bent low towards the ground, while you consider the moods of the sky, with the indifference of one who has seen it all, over the years, compared with you the other vegetable species are mere garden gnomes, you watch over the entire plant world, from here I can hear the river running, splashing down onto a rock further downstream, people from Séképembé hardly ever come here, even if they cut down every single species in the bush, no one would lay a finger on you, the villagers respect the baobabs, I know it hasn't always been so, I know things have been said about you, I can read in the veins of your bark, some of them are scars, some madmen in the village tried to finish you off, and in a destructive frenzy, for porcupine's sake, they set about you with an axe, to chop you up for firewood, they said you hid the horizon, you blocked out the light of day, well they didn't succeed, their saw buckled in the face of your legendary resistance, then they made do with gaboon planks for
their coffins, their houses, the same wood my master used to make roof structures, and some villagers believe you have a soul, that you protect this region, that if you disappeared it would be a bad thing, fatal, even, for our region, that your sap is as sacred as the holy water in the village church, that you are the guardian of the forest, that you have existed since the dawn of time, that's why, perhaps, the sorcerers use your bark to heal the sick, others say that a word with you is a word with the ancestors, ‘sit at the foot of a baobab tree, and given time, you'll see the whole universe pass before you', our old porcupine used to say, he told us that at that time the baobabs could talk, respond to humans, punish them, whip them with their branches when the monkey cousins took up arms against the plant world and in those days he went on, the baobabs could move about, find themselves a more comfortable spot where they could take better root, some of them came from far, far away, they would pass other baobabs going the other way because one always tends to think that the soil elsewhere is better than one's native soil, that life is easier elsewhere, I think about those days, when everything was on the move, and distance was no obstacle, nowadays no one would believe the governor, no man bloated with reason and clogged with prejudice would ever have the idea that a tree with its feet planted once and for all in the ground could move about, after all, the incredulous soul would retort straightaway, ‘and why not the mountains while we about it, eh, they could go walk about too, say how d'you do at the crossroads, talk about the wind and the weather, swap addresses, exchange family news, it's all just twaddle, that is', but I believe it, for once I'm with our governor, they weren't legends, it wasn't just twaddle, he was right, and I know that you must have moved about too, you must have fled
other lands where the desert threatened to erode, regions where you can count each drop of rain that falls, you left your family, returned to the rainy region, you must deliberately have chosen the most fertile spot in this country, I don't know of any other baobab round here, I would love to trace your genealogy, find out which tree you're descended from, and where your earliest ancestors lived, but perhaps I've strayed too far from the subject of my confessions, talking of you, it must be the human in me speaking, in fact I learned my sense of digression from men, they never go straight to the point, open brackets they forget to close

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 what 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'