Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou Read Free Book Online Page B

around midnight, Mama Kibandi never even realised he’d gone, she just saw her husband’s other self lying in the bed by her side, my young master would suddenly find columns of rats marching up and down in the main room of his parents’ house, he knew the largest of these rodents, the rat with the big tail, flattened back ears, and hooked paws was his father’s double, he mustn’t whack him with a stick, though one day, for fun, he’d sprinkled rat poison on a piece of tuber and left it at the entrance to the hole where the rodents came out, a few hours later there were a dozen or so rats lying dead, while his parents slept my young master quickly gathered up the defunct rodents, wrapped them in banana leaves, and went and disposed of them round the back of the hut, but in the early dawn, to his great surprise, Papa Kibandi came and gave him a talking-to, saying ‘if you want
to do away with me, get a knife and kill me in broad daylight, it’s thanks to me you are who you are today, ingratitude is an unforgivable sin, I hope I won’t have to speak to you about this again’, Mama Kibandi knew nothing more about it, father and son understood each other
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    and there were so many deaths in Mossaka, one hard upon the other, nose to tail burials, you’d no sooner finished lamenting one dear departed, and there was another one lined up, Papa Kibandi didn’t go to the funerals, which got people asking questions in the village, where everyone knew everyone, he saw people looking at him, crossing the street to avoid him, with his rat-like air, and then there were the women who gossiped about him at the river bank, his name came up at every meeting in the palaver hut, children wept and clung to their mothers’ skirts as soon as the old man appeared, and even the Batéké dogs barked from a distance, or from their masters’ doorways, the whole of Mossaka now had it that there was something about Papa Kibandi, every detail of his life was scrutinised, examined with a fine toothed comb, it was strange, they said, how he hadn’t had many children, just the one, when his hair had already turned grey, he was prime suspect for any one of these deaths, take his own brother, Marapari, for example, who died sawing down a tree in the bush, when he was the best woodchopper in Mossaka, eh, it’s true that the brother had changed his working method, had got himself an electric saw, something you needed to learn to use, in this part of the world where everyone still used axes, perhaps Papa Kibandi was jealous of this piece of equipment, then, envious of his brother’s savings, which came
from the profits from its use, from hiring it out, and what about the death of his younger sister, Maniongui, who was found limp, lifeless, with wide staring eyes, the day before her wedding, eh, everyone knew Papa Kibandi was opposed to the union for some reason to do with regions, ‘no marriage between a northerner and a southerner, and that’s that’, he’d say, and what about Matoumona, the woman Papa Kibandi wanted to take as his second wife, a woman of half his age, eh, did she not die when her corn soup went down the wrong way, and Mabiala the postman, who seemed to be interested in Mama Kibandi, and Loubanda the tam-tam maker, who was just too successful with women, and Senga the brick maker who wouldn’t come and work for him, and Dikamona, who sang at vigils for the dead, who snubbed him, and had publicly called him an old sorcerer, and Loupiala, the first qualified nurse Mossaka produced, a young woman who, according to Papa Kibandi, talked a lot but said nothing, and was always showing off her diploma, hm, and Nkélé, the biggest farmer in the region, a selfish man who’d refused him a plot of land by the river, eh, what had happened to all these people not related to him, who popped off one after the other, ah, my dear Baobab, these