Memoirs of a Porcupine

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

the next day, the whole of Séképembé was in shock, Kiminou was dead, and though it was generally agreed she had been eaten, it was assumed to be the result of rivalry between the mother’s and father’s lines, there was some dispute between the two, out came the scythes, the spears, the axes, the chief of Séképembé managed to calm the two camps, he proposed a trial on the day of the funeral, where the corpse picks out the criminal, Kibandi was half expecting it, dear Baobab, so he was prepared, Papa Kibandi had taught him to get round these things, my master had stuck a palm nut up his rectum just as his progenitor had, back when he was trying to catch out the sorcerer Tembé-Essouka, and the corpse of young Kiminou picked out one of the other marriage candidates instead, and the poor innocent was buried alive with the deceased, with no further trial, because that’s how things were done my dear Baobab, the universally dreaded trial by corpse, where the corpse picks out its aggressor, is widely used in these parts, whenever someone dies, the villagers rush to do it, to their minds there’s no such thing as a natural death, only the dead can tell the living who caused their death, I expect you’d like to know how it’s done, well, four strong men carry the coffin on their shoulders, a sorcerer chosen by the village chief picks up a piece of wood, knocks three times on the casket, and says to the corpse, ‘tell us who ate you, show us where the wrongdoer lives, you can’t just disappear into the other world without vengeance, come on now, stir yourself, run, fly, cross the mountains, the plains, and if the wrongdoer lives across the Ocean, if he lives up in the stars, we’ll seek him out and make him pay for what he has done you and your family’, the coffin suddenly starts to move, the four strong bearers get dragged into a devilish sort of dance, they no longer feel the weight of the corpse, they run left and right, often the casket drags them way off into the bush, then brings them hurtling back into the village at breakneck speed, and though they walk on thorns, on shards, they feel no pain, they are not harmed, they plunge into water, but do not drown, they pass through bush fires and are not burned, and once White men came here to watch this practice, so they could put it in a book, they said they were ethnologists, they had difficulty explaining to some of Séképembé’s less sophisticated inhabitants quite what an ethnologist was for, I had a good laugh myself, because I could just have speeded things along by saying an ethnologist was someone who discusses other people’s customs, which strike them as strange when compared to their own culture, no more no less, but one of the Whites made so bold as to explain to the poor lost souls of this village that the word ‘ethnology’ came from the Greek word ethnos, meaning ‘people’, therefore what ethnologists study is people, societies, customs, ways of thinking, ways of living, anyone who was bothered by the word ‘ethnologist’ could simply say ‘social anthropologist’, which created still more confusion and most people just went on thinking they were people who were out of work in their own countries or who had come to put satellite dishes in the village so as to watch people, so anyway, there they were, these ethnologists or social anthropologists, they’d been waiting for someone to die, and luckily for them an individual had been eaten here, not by my master, by another guy whose double was a shrew, the ethnologists all cheered ‘fantastic, we’ve got our stiff, he’s at the other end of the village, the burial’s tomorrow, at last we’ll be able to finish that darned book’, and they asked if they might carry the coffin themselves, on their shoulders, because they were convinced there was something not quite right about this whole business, that it was really the men who carried the coffin who shook it about so as to get people falsely accused, but the question of whether or not the White men could take part in the ritual divided the village, some sorcerers were opposed to foreigners meddling in Séképembé’s affairs, in the end the village chief played diplomat and swore that the rites of the ancestors would still work, even in the presence of the Whites, because the village ancestors are stronger than the Whites, and he convinced everyone that it was a good thing these outsiders would be present during the rite, what’s more, they’d mention Séképembé in their book, the village would become world famous, people from many other countries would be inspired by our customs, to the greater glory of the ancestors, and that put an end to the discontent, which transformed into a collective sense of pride, another row almost blew up when it came to choosing one out of the twelve village sorcerers to supervise the ritual, they all wanted to work with the Whites now, when only a few hours earlier such a thing would have been inconceivable, and all the sorcerers began bragging about their family tree, but only one of them was needed, the village chief took twelve cowries, marked one of them with a little cross, put them in a basket, shook them and asked each sorcerer to close his eyes and put his hand inside and take one cowrie at random, the one who drew out the marked cowrie would have the honour of directing the ritual, the suspense lasted until the eleventh cowrie, when one of the sorcerers, who had kept on putting off his turn drew it out, before the envious gaze of all the others, and so, once all these negotiations were complete, the ethnologists or social anthropologists finally lifted the coffin, amid laughter from all the villagers, who seemed not to be concerned that their hilarity might bring shame upon the corpse, and the sorcerer, who was also fighting back guffaws, gave three sharp knocks with his bit of stick, struggled to find words with which to ask the corpse to point out the person who had harmed him, but the deceased understood what was expected of him, as well he might, because in his remarks the sorcerer added, ‘be careful not to bring shame on us in front of these White men who have come from afar and think our customs are just one big joke’, the corpse didn’t need to be asked twice, a light rain began to fall, and when the coffin started jolting forwards, hopping like a baby kangaroo, the ethnologists at the back shouted ‘come on now, comrades, stop shaking the damn’ coffin, let it move on its own if it’s really gonna move’ and the other ethnologists replied, ‘stop assing around guys, you’re the one who’s moving it’, the corpse started dancing around, speeded up its rhythm, dragged the ethnologists off into a lantana field, then brought them back to the village, pushed them down as far as the river, brought them back up to the village again and the whole mad chase finally came to a halt in front of old Mouboungoulo’s hut, with a huge thrust, the coffin broke down the door of the guilty man’s hut, drove into his home, an old shrew that stank like a skunk slipped out of the house, circled in the courtyard, then shot off down to the river, the coffin caught it at the first thicket of trees, came down on top of it, and that is how old Mouboungoulou met his death, dear Baobab, and apparently the Whites wrote a long book about the incident, over 900 pages, I don’t know whether the village of Séképembé has become world famous, what I do know is that other Whites have turned up since, just to check what the first ones wrote in their book, several of them left empty handed because the locals with harmful doubles were wary of them, and suddenly it seemed like no one ever died when the whites were around, a few corpses refused to go along with the ritual, refused to play the game, or sometimes the villagers would instruct their families, in the event of their death, not to allow their corpses to take part in the ritual in the presence of Whites, who might then go and sully their global reputation, so now, you see, the ritual is practised only with great caution, but the most convincing reason, let me tell you, dear Baobab, came from a guy called Amédée, and the reason I speak of him in the past tense is because he has passed on to the next world, may his soul rest in peace, he was what humans called an educated man, a cultivated man, who had studied for many years, he was respected for it, added to which he had travelled widely, he had been up in a plane several times, one of those noisy birds that rip the sky in two, every time you think it’s going to take your head off, apparently Amédée was the most intelligent men in the entire south, not to say in the whole country, but that didn’t stop us, we still ate him, as you will soon learn, he claimed that the book written by the first Whites on this question had been published in Europe and translated into several languages, he asserted that it had become a key work of reference for ethnologists and Amédée, who had read it, was harsh in his criticism, saying ‘I have never read such a trumped up work, what else can I say, it’s a disgraceful book, a book which seeks to humiliate Africans, a tissue of lies by a group of Europeans in search of exoticism, who would like nothing better than for Negroes to continue dressing in leopard skins and living up trees’

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’

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’

my master may have been a quiet tempered man, but he was not someone to pick a quarrel with, I only saw him get into an argument once or twice, there was that time with old Moudiongui, the palm wine tapper, probably the best palm wine tapper in Séképembé, they knew each other very well, he and my master, I would never have imagined that one day I would find myself dealing with a loser like him, his whole life revolved around palm wine, he could draw mwengué, the finest wine to be got from a palm tree, the village women were crazy for it since it was sweeter than any other wine, but the bad thing about the mwengué is that you don’t know you’re getting drunk, you drink cup after cup and don’t realize you’re cackling like a hyena, and it’s only when you try to get up you find you can’t control your legs, you walk all crooked, like a crab, everyone busts out laughing, saying ‘there’s another one who’s been at Moudiongui’s mwengué’, and my master had got into the bad habit of mixing a bit of mwengué with his initiation drink, to make it less bitter, so now he would only drink it when it was mixed with old Moudiongui’s palm wine, so every morning the old loser stopped by Kibandi’s hut to drop off a pint of palm wine, he spoke fondly of Mama Kibandi and remarked how quickly time passed, in fact this was to make Kibandi feel sorry for him so he’d give him more money, my master paid no attention, handed him a crumpled note, Kibandi was convinced that the palm wine added that extra something to his mayamvumbi, now old Moudiongui was becoming unreliable, he’d get into a sulk for nothing, sometimes Kibandi had to go and wake him to get him to go out into the bush and fetch the palm wine and, taking advantage of my master’s dependence, the old man put up the price as he felt like it, take it or leave it, ‘if you don’t like it, go and fetch your own mwengué, otherwise, pay my price, end of discussion’, Moudiongui claimed that mwengué was getting increasingly hard to come by, that the palm trees in our region had stopped producing this special wine, that my master would have to make do with normal palm wine, and one day the old man brought back some mwengué, as usual, my master tasted it, he had a moment of doubt, he realized it wasn’t real mwengué, the old man was tricking him, he said nothing, just called me one evening and said, ‘right, tomorrow at dawn when the plains grow bright, go follow that bastard palm wine tapper, he’s acting strange, I can feel it, go and see how he works’ and I followed him first thing next morning, I saw him vanish into the forest, till he reached a place where there’s nothing but palm trees, as far as the eye can see, and I saw him climb to the top of a palm tree where he’d hung his gourds the day before, he took them down, they were full, he climbed down, he sat at the foot of the tree, took out a small bag from his pocket, I caught him pouring sugar into the palm wine he’d just drawn, and since he was mad at my master he even spat into the gourd, muttering angrily, and I reported this back to Kibandi later, so when the palm wine tapper turned up at Kibandi’s house to offer him this nasty brew, he had the truth flung in his face, I heard them arguing, old Moudiongui was desperate to sell his palm wine, my master replied that it wasn’t real mwengué, they called each other all the names under the sun, old Moudiongui insulted my master, ‘nothing but a bag of bones, you are, you’re dead already, you’re jealous of my trade because you’re only a poor carpenter, you couldn’t even climb up a mango tree, you’re a crazy guy, a maniongi, a ngébé, a ngouba yak o pola’, all insults in bembé, Kibandi didn’t answer, he just said to the palm wine tapper, ‘let’s just see, shall we, who’s the maniongi, the ngébé, the ngouba yak o pola around here’, old Moudiongui said, just as he was leaving, ‘what will we see, then, you’re a nobody you are, don’t expect me to give you mwengué from now on, old dry bones, go join your mother in the graveyard’

I left my master with his other self, the two of them lying on the last mat Mama Kibandi ever wove, at break of day I returned to the foot of the same palm tree where I’d caught the palm wine tapper mixing sugar in the gourd and spitting into it, slowly I climbed to the top and hid there, a few centimeters from the hanging gourds, which were filled to overflowing with palm wine, the bees were already having a party up there, I saw Moudiongui arrive, he seemed quite anxious, his eyes darting about, he couldn’t understand how my master had found out about his little fiddle, I saw him arranging the ropes he used to climb up to the top of the palm tree, up he climbed, up and up, but halfway up he paused to look about him, as though to make sure no one had spotted him, then, reassured, he went on climbing, he was almost at the gourds, and when he looked up, bless my quills, found himself looking into my dark, glistening eyes, it was too late for him, I’d already fired two of my quills, hitting him full in the face, the old man slipped, tried in vain to grab the branch of a paradise tree just next to the palm tree, I heard him fall, and land like a sack of potatoes down below, his legs and arms spread wide, the villagers found him there a day later, eyes wide open, his face locked in a rictus, and everyone agreed he had grown too old to tap palm wine, he should really have retired long ago, and now a young person from Séképembé must be trained up to take over his work

the problem with Youla was he owed my master money, I think this must be one of our most heartbreaking episodes to date because now I really think about it, it was the thing which ultimately brought about Kibandi’s downfall, but I need to tell you the whole thing more slowly, after completing this mission I felt uneasy, I kept seeing the victim’s face, his innocence, I really felt Kibandi had gone a bit too far this time, but then did I have a right to tell him how I felt, it’s not for a double to judge or argue, and certainly not let his own remorse get in the way of things, and as far as I was concerned this was one of the most gratuitous acts we had committed, Youla was father of a happy family, a modest peasant with no education and not much success, he had a wife who loved him and had just had a child by him, a baby whose eyes were barely yet open, and then, one day, I don’t know why, this business of the debt between him and Kibandi cropped up, Youla had been to see him to borrow money, a ridiculously small sum which he said he’d pay back the next week, it seems he wanted to buy some medicine for his child and swore he would pay back the full sum by the agreed day, he grovelled, went down on bended knee, wept, because no one had been prepared to lend him this pitiful sum, Kibandi did him the favour, though his own finances were dwindling from year to year now that he’d given up carpentry, and the notes he gave Youla were so dirty and crumpled, they looked like they’d come straight out of the bin, and a week went by, no visitor to the hut, another week, still Youla didn’t show up, he’d dropped out of circulation, my master thought correctly that he must have done a runner, so he went to his home two months later, and told him if he didn’t give him his money back things would get nasty between them, and as the man was drunk that day he began sniggering and insulting Kibandi, telling him to drag his skinny frame off someplace else, which of course did not please my master, who said ‘you can find the money to get yourself drunk but you can’t pay your debts’, and when Youla just laughed harder, Kibandi added dryly, out loud, ‘people with no money shouldn’t have children’, Youla indulged in the remark ‘ I’m not even sure I do owe you money, do I, maybe you’ve got the wrong person, now get out of my yard’, his wife then joined in, telling him to get lost, or she’d summon an elder of the village, and when my master got back home, feeling vexed, I saw him talking aloud to himself, cursing, I knew then that things were going to go badly wrong for Youla, I had never seen Kibandi in such a state, not even when that young show-off Amédée had called him a sick hick, he summoned me straight away, this was urgent, he couldn’t wait, Youla would soon see what my master was made of, and at midnight, after Kibandi had taken a giant dose of mayamvumbi, this time without mixing it with mwengué to sweeten it, we were all ready to go, my master’s other self was coming with us for once, although I wasn’t very clear what his role would be, we came to the peasant’s compound, his house was so run down a donkey could have got in through the holes in the outside walls, my master sat down at the foot of a paradise tree, his other self was behind him, with his back to us, as usual when he was moving about, I walked round the house, ending up in the bedroom, I saw Youla snoring on a mat, with his wife in bed at the far end of the room, I expect it was always like that when the husband was drunk, I crossed the room, went towards the child’s room, as soon as I got close to the baby I felt a pang, I wished I could go back home, Kibandi’s other self was behind me, I wondered why my master had decided to attack the little babe instead of the man who owed him money, or if it came to that, his wife, who had dared take sides in their argument, my quills grew heavy and reluctant, I told myself I wouldn’t be able to shoot, I had never attacked a child before, I needed to find a reason, something to increase my determination and put some fight back into me, but what motive could there be, I couldn’t think, then suddenly I said to myself that my master was right, actually, to remind this guy that when you have no money you’ve no business making children, and I also remembered that the old porcupine used to preach that all men were bad, including children, because ‘the tiger’s young are born with claws’ so we needed to pin some vice on him, find some fault with him that was beyond redemption, I told myself he was a drunkard, and in any case, the poor kid would have a terrible life with this uneducated peasant, I muttered these arguments to myself, in an attempt to sweep away the remorse, as though I could banish the pity which was making my quills wilt, suddenly they perked up, I could feel them starting to whirr, my master’s anger was now my anger, as though it was me Youla owed money, and I lost the sense that the creature before me was just an poor innocent thing, I told myself that in fact our action would free him, relieve his suffering, Youla didn’t deserve to be a father, being an alcoholic who broke his word, who perhaps owed money to the entire population, and at that moment of reflection I tensed, a firm quill flew out of my back and into the poor child, my master’s other self had gone from the room, perhaps he’d been there to give me the strength to do the deed, I quickly left myself, so I wouldn’t get upset, what I really didn’t want to do was watch the poor innocent child taking leave of this life just because of the stupidity and irresponsibility of his father, that I did not want to see, and yet something about it bothered me, I felt ashamed of my own reflection in the water, I went to the funeral, perhaps hoping for some kind of forgiveness, I heard the poor folk singing their funeral songs, and I wept

in the days shortly after this incident, the image of baby Youla came back to haunt me, I began to fear my own shadow in bright daylight, I imagined the ghost of the baby was hiding behind the next bush, waiting for me, and perhaps that was a weight on my conscience too, and I withdrew into the bush and took stock, I analysed all the facts, the only slightly serious, the rather serious, the serious and above all the very serious, like the death of this child, and the faces of our victims flashed before me, we had already carried out ninety-nine missions, but not the slightest suspicion attached to us at that point, my master always got away with it, thanks to the palm nut he stuffed up his rectum, and I couldn’t work out why, out of all our victims, the only one that really stopped me thinking about anything else was this baby of Youla’s, it was as though he was spying on us, waiting for us at each bend in the road, and after all, I said to myself, he was only a tiny little human, with no strength, and no power, and I remembered also how the old governor used to warn us that the enemies we should really fear were the tiny ones, and sometimes I told myself that this little baby had a message for me, was trying to tell me to revolt, and all I had to do to break the chain of our missions was to take my own life, or rebel against my master by standing up to him, or disappear without trace, but some force held me back, even though I had the feeling our hundredth mission would be fatal to us, would most certainly cost us our lives, perhaps it was just me worrying, and I was convinced that Kibandi, for his part, wasn’t keeping the score, he was just driven by the drink, high on the mayamvumbi

by then there had been so many victims, it no longer gave me any pleasure to obey my master, he had to shout for me several times, get his other self to follow me round the whole time, threaten to kill me, though I knew he couldn’t carry out that particular piece of intimidation because that would be the end of us, and so, my dear Baobab, our nighttime activities began to falter

the eyes of the local population were all on my master, who seemed to be acting on auto-pilot, we’d had difficulty pulling off our hundredth mission, I’d lost count of our failed attempts, my quills seemed to be losing their power, missing the target, as happened with the woman they call Ma Mpori, I hit her in the calf, but my quills had no effect on her at all, which should have made Kibandi sit up, now my master wanted me to carry out the mission again, but it is unthinkable, reckless, even, to attack the same person twice, I know this woman too had something, she was not an ordinary being, she had made this quite clear to me by asking me several times who had sent me, who was my master, only an initiate would ask that kind of question, and thinking about old Ma Mpori now, I realize that if had we doubled our level of vigilance my master would not now be rotting away in his grave, but I’ll tell you this, old Mpori was something else, I am sure she’d eaten a few people in this village, and why, you may ask, am I speaking of her in the past tense when she’s still alive, well, she’s lost all her teeth, she leaves her door open all night long, shows her naked body by way of a curse when the young folk show her disrespect, and the young ones immediately scarper, because the sight of her naked body damns you for all eternity, she’s propped up on her two rickety legs, with a hide like an old reptile, there’d been no previous history between her and my master, but even so, Kibandi believed she could tell what we got up to at night, she bothered us, she was a danger, we needed to wipe her out, it was easier said than done, even if her door was wide open on the day I went to carry out my mission, it was last month, I was alone, not even Kibandi’s other self was with me, unless, unknown to me, he was hiding out somewhere, Ma Mpori was inside her hut, and when I finally got inside I couldn’t see a thing, as though it was the middle of the night, I could only just make out the shape of the old woman in the corner, my quills weren’t moving, but I had to go ahead, I had to carry out my mission, and it was then I heard a voice murmur, ‘come on then, you old beast, you’ll soon find out what Ma Mpori’s made of, I’ll strip naked for you’, she could see me, but I couldn’t see her, and she added, ‘you’ve been doing things in this village with the one who sent you here, but you won’t do that to me, you fool, you’ve come to the wrong place’, I began to feel afraid, I wanted to go back the way I’d come, but it seemed the door behind me had closed, there was just a wall, it must have been a trick of the eye, ‘who is your master, then, who sent you here, it’s Kibandi the carpenter, isn’t it, I know it is’ she shouted at me, and when I didn’t reply Ma Mpori stood up, suddenly the old hag seemed full of energy, ‘tell me yourself who your master is, don’t you think you’ve eaten enough people in this village now, what about Youla’s baby, that was you too, wasn’t it’, then, bless my quills, I had to steel myself, she was heading straight for me, she had something in her hand, a machete, I thought, though I wasn’t exactly sure, I managed to quickly cock a quill, I fired it at her, I heard her shout ‘you filthy beast, what have you done to my leg, eh, just you wait till I catch you,’ I looked for a way out in the pitch darkness, I aimed straight for the door, found myself outside, the old woman came out of her hut, suddenly agile on her matchstick legs, she stood there talking in front of her shack, ‘evil spirits of this village, I see you at night, you bad people, you sorcerers, when you see my door left open, like it is now, it means I’m setting a trap for you, so come on back, why don’t you, then you’ll see me naked, right up close’, I was already a way off, it was my greatest fear, my heart was pounding, if I’d had the courage I would have said to my master that we had reached the limits of our activity, that we must on no account cross the red line, but alas I said nothing, all that happened was I got told off by Kibandi, he was really horrible to me, he had forgotten my devotion, everything I had ever done for him, he called me a good for nothing, and threatened once more to kill me, and it was that day I understood his connection with his other self, my master actually pointed out his other self lying on the last mat Mama Kibandi ever wove, and said ‘you see that guy lying over there, well just lately he’s been getting hungrier and hungrier, it’s not the moment to start bungling things, this guy needs to eat, or you’ll pay the price, you don’t realize that whenever he gets hungry it’s me that suffers’, and he told me I must make up for my failure, this time by attacking the Moundjoula family, they were a couple who’d arrived in Séképembé recently with their two children, twins, who, so he claimed, had been disrespectful to him, my master had no inkling at that point that he’d just signed his own death warrant, by giving me the mission which would turn out to be our hundredth success, sorry, make that hundred and first, since we’d be killing two birds with one stone

bless my quills, how time flies, my voice is raw, night has fallen over Séképembé already, I weep and weep, I don’t know why, for once my solitude is a burden to me, I feel so guilty, I did nothing to save my master, was there anything I could have done to stop those two kids who tormented him so in the few weeks before his death, I don’t know, I really don’t, at first I just wanted to save my skin even though I was sure that if Kibandi died I must die also, and under conditions like that, it’s true what they say, better a live coward than a dead hero, well I’m not exactly overcome with grief at Kibandi’s absence, nor embarrassed to have been lucky enough to survive till now, to have had you as my confidant, but I’m ashamed of all the things I’ve been telling you since this morning, I wouldn’t want you to judge me without taking into account the fact that I was just an underling, a shadow in Kibandi’s life, I never learned to disobey, it was as though I was gripped by the same anger, the same frustration, the same bitterness, the same jealousy as my master, and I don’t like my present state of mind, because I’m constantly haunted by the faces of our victims, they may have vanished, but they are still here, before me, around me, watching me, pointing at me, on each face you can read the reason why we decided to finish them off, it would take me a year to explain it all, for example, young Abeba, we ate him because he had teased my master for being thin when he happened to spot him half naked by the riverside, it was unforgiveable, believe me, we ate Asalaka because he called my master a sorcerer, then desecrated Mama Kibandi’s grave, it’s disrespectful, the dead should be left in peace, we ate Ikonongo because he dared to defend the man who desecrated Mama Kibandi’s grave, which meant he approved of it, we ate Loumouanou because she had rejected my master’s advances in public at the bistro Le Marigot, though she was the one who first came on to Kibandi, and afterwards she claimed it was my master who had gone too far, for her it had just been a game, she said Kibandi should take a look at himself in the mirror before talking to a woman like herself, you can see, remarks like this were simply intolerable, we ate old Mabélé because he was spreading lies about my master, he said it was he who’d stolen a red cockerel from the head of the village, which wasn’t even true, because it’s the kids in this village who carry out that kind of theft, we had eaten Moufindiri because he was one of the ones who wanted a sorcerer to come and purify the village, rid it of all those in possession of a harmful double, who did he think he was, eh, especially since my master had no wish to end up like his father, he hadn’t forgotten Tembé-Essouka, the sorcerer who was responsible for the death of Papa Kibandi, we had eaten Louvounou because he claimed to have seen a strange animal that looked like a porcupine behind my master’s shack, he said things like ‘in some ways it was like a porcupine, you know, and in another way, what’s strange is, it wasn’t like a porcupine, I mean, it was a weird animal, it looked at me like one man might look at another, and it showed me its backside before disappearing into the carpenter’s workshop, I swear I didn’t dream it, believe me’, the guy was right but he’d made the mistake of telling the village chief about it, and he then came to talk to Kibandi, singling him out, we ate Ekonda Sakadé because he had seen my master talking to me in a thicket near Mama Kibandi’s grave, and he too had gone to tell the chief of the village, we ate wise old Otchombé because he opposed Kibandi’s candidature for the village council on the grounds that my master was and would remain an outsider, which offended him, when what he wanted more than anything was a chance to show the village that he was just like the rest of them, we ate the grocer, Komayayo Batobatanga because he had refused to give us credit on a storm lamp and two tins of Moroccan sardines in oil, it was unfair because the whole village bought from him on credit, we had eaten old Dikamona because of her odd comings and goings every night in front of my master’s shack, hoping to catch the two of us at it, my master and I, since there was a rumour going round that there was something about him, and the truth is, for porcupine’s sake, we just began eating people at the drop of a hat, because my master’s other self had to be fed and when the creature with no mouth, no ears and no nose had had his fill, it would go and settle on the last mat Mama Kibandi ever wove, scratching and farting away, no normal creature would ever have been that hungry, and just seeing him stretched out there on the mat I could tell he was hungry because often he’d turn round, fidget for half an hour then once again lie still as a corpse

there are some victims I’ve forgotten completely, dear Baobab, but that’s because I carried out those missions during my period of apprenticeship, they were all so similar that I may well have got them muddled while trying to fill you in on what seem to me the most important facts about my career as a double to date, leading up to last Friday’s mission, the most dangerous of all

I can still see that family now, they were new in Séképembé, I can still see the two kids running around shouting, they seemed to be everywhere at once, that should have aroused my suspicions, I had wanted to warn my master, but he’d already decided, his plan was in place, he wouldn’t put up with the cheek of these kids, he muttered nasty things about them, he was really just looking for an alibi, a reason to pick a fight with them, but things didn’t work out like that, as it happened

my master was obsessed with thirst for mayamvumbi, and by his other self’s inexhaustible appetite, and as a result he had ignored certain basic prohibitions usually observed by those in possession of a harmful double, for example never attack twins, but he had started acting with a casualness which took my breath away, I was the cautious one now, he was convinced that by ignoring the prohibitions he would make it to the top, as though he was aiming to beat his father’s record, which is why he’d been all edgy ever since the Moundjoula family came to live in Séképembé, and it’s true that around the time the Moundjoulas arrived, the father of the family made a show of his pride, dragging the children around the streets as though to show off his great good fortune as father of twins to all the villagers, ignoring those residents who claimed the two children had done all sorts of damage in their fields, Kibandi scarcely knew the family, the village chief had been pleased to introduce the newcomers to the rest of the village, he had walked down the main street, stopping at every hut saying, ‘Papa Moundjoula is a sculptor, his wife is a housewife and looks after the twins, two charming children,’ they lived at the far end of the village, and became each day more and more integrated, so that it soon felt as though they had always lived there

I met these two enfants terribles in rather dreadful circumstances, they are the kind of twins who have no distinguishing features, so that even the keenest observer would have found it impossible to tell them apart, their father and mother called them both Koté or Koty, since you only had to call one of them and they’d both turn round, but deep down Papa and Mama Moundjoula always rather enjoyed confusing everyone in the village, while in fact they did secretly have a means of telling them apart, they had decided to circumcise only one of the two children, it was said in the village that the older child was circumcised, the younger one not, and whenever Papa and Mama Moundjoula get in a muddle they just take the children’s clothes off to see which of them came into the world first, I swear the two of them can scarcely be more than ten or eleven years old, they are completely inseparable, they blink, scratch, cough, fart, hurt themselves, cry or fall ill at exactly the same moment, two identical entities who sleep with their arms wrapped round each other till morning light, have the same way of sitting down, with their legs crossed, and, as though to confuse things even further, the parents dress them in identical clothing, trousers with blue braces, beige cotton shirts, they each have a head the size of a brick, kept shaved by Papa and Mama Moundjoula, they are not a pretty sight, you can imagine, with their staring eyes, they don’t mix much with the other children, they go running wild through the village, they like to play near the cemetery, in a huge field of lantanas, they move all the crosses around, turn them upside down, they play hide and seek, hunt down butterflies, frighten the crows, give the sparrows a hard time with their dreaded catapults, they’re uncontrollable, they always pop up where you don’t expect them, the first time I came across Koty and Koté my quills were erect, by way of warning, the twins wanted to use me to play with the moment they saw me moving about in the field of lantanas, in fact I had just come from my hide-out, and was having a rest on Mama Kibandi’s grave, I was about to go and have a wander about behind my master’s old workshop, and perhaps read for a bit without straying far from Kibandi’s hut, just in case he needed me, and the two kids heard me rustling about in the leaves, they turned round, one of them pointed to me, ‘a porcupine, a porcupine, let’s catch him’, the other kid started to load his catapult, and bless my quills, I flung myself into an about turn, while their missiles landed a few metres away, I wondered where on earth they could have come from, these two rascals with rectangular heads, at one moment I decided they must be little ghosts whose parents, down in their graves, had given permission to go and play outside, as long as they were back before sunset, but the pair of good-for-nothings decided to follow me, I heard them brushing the lantanas aside, whooping for joy, laughing like two dwarves at a fair, one of them ordered the other to go to the right, while he stayed on the left, so they could jump out at me a few hundred metres further, they didn’t realise I understand human language, and could foil their plan, I curled up in a ball and began to roll at top speed, I landed in a pile of dead bracken, in front of me I saw a thicket of thorns, I plunged into it without a backward glance, and arrived at last in a clearing overlooking the river, without thinking I plunged into the water, which is quite shallow there, I was panting desperately, I reached the opposite bank, I shook my quills, but I was trembling more with fear than cold, the village came into view, I could hear nothing behind me, I therefore concluded that the kids must have turned back, I wasn’t certain they lived in Séképembé, but several days after this episode, when I saw them crossing the main street with their father, I recognise their rectangular shaped heads, and their matching clothing

last Tuesday, early in the afternoon, Koty and Koté escaped from their parents again and came past my master’s hut as he sat in front of his door reading an esoteric book, the twins had been popping up like this for a while now, they’d stand opposite his house, on the exact spot where my master had seen the strange flock of sheep on the day Mama Kibandi died, and the two children seemed to be spying on him, imitating the bleat of an old sheep having its throat slit, they sniggered, then vanished, this really wound my master up, he was sure the two children had been sent by their parents to annoy him, and when he finally got up to go and talk to them, tell them they owed him some respect, the kids scarpered, then came back again the next day and took up their post on the same spot, imitating the old sheep again, I could see my master was growing uneasy, asking himself questions, these two children had some message for him, they knew something about us, so that Tuesday afternoon Koty and Koté took up their position as usual opposite my master’s hut, my master tried smiling at them, the two little urchins didn’t smile back, ‘what do you want then’, Kibandi said, at last, one of the little Moundjoulas answered ‘you’re a bad man, that’s why you don’t like children’ and my master, somewhat taken aback at this, answered ‘you little rascals, you know nothing, why are you calling me a bad man, you’d better watch out or I’ll tell your father’, and the other kid added, ‘you’re a bad man because you eat children, we know you ate a baby, he told us when we were playing in the cemetery, and he’ll tell us the same thing again tonight’, my master snapped his book shut, his anger got the better of him, he jumped up, crying, ‘band of vermin, birds of ill-omen, little lice, I’ll teach you to respect your elders’, he was about to run after the twins, when one of them shouted, ‘and that baby you ate, he told us to tell you he’s watching you, he’s coming to see you, it’s your fault he’s stopped growing’, and the two brats ran off, Kibandi saw them vanish over the horizon, he decided that whatever happened, he must go and see the parents of these little creatures

my master went to see the Moundjoula family that same Tuesday, in the late afternoon, the father was carving a hideous-looking mask, the mother was preparing a dish of manioc leaves with plantains, the couple were surprised to see him because he’d never set foot in their compound before, the father immediately put down his work, hastily offered their visitor a raffia chair, the mother waved him welcome from a distance, perhaps Kibandi would like to drink some palm-wine, he said no, even if it was mwengué, the mother brought him some cold water in a gourd and then left the two men to talk between themselves, my master tried to peer inside the house in the hope of spotting the two children, they weren’t there, perhaps down in the cemetery, in the lantana field, after a few more general comments on the Moundjoulas’ roof frame, which, in his opinion, was badly constructed, Kibandi explained the purpose of his visit, coming straight to the point, ‘your twins have been disturbing me for the past two weeks, they came and bothered me again earlier this afternoon’, Papa Moundjoula paused for a moment, then replied, ‘I know, I know, they’re a pair of little pests, I’ll talk to them, they’re always wandering about, you’re not the first to complain, but you know how it is, at their age, they don’t understand the consequences of their actions’, then my master explained that the two kids had said he was a bad man, they didn’t even say hello to him in the street, they had said things to him which he chose not to repeat out of respect for their parents, Papa Moundjoula looked at Kibandi, and you could see in his eyes, that as a father he felt sorry for him, he probably imagined the children had been teasing my master for being thin, they must have found it so strange that they hadn’t tried to hide their real feelings, and just as Papa Moundjoula was asking Kibandi what it was the two children had said about him, Koty and Koté arrived with their clothes covered in dust, they threw only a cursory glance at their father and his visitor and went rushing over to their mother shouting that they were hungry, the pot was still on the fire, and the mother said ‘that will teach you not to go running around the village all day long, your food isn’t ready’, Papa Moundjoula called them to him with an authoritative air, ‘Koty, Koté, come and say you’re sorry to Uncle Kibandi, right away, he’s not a bad man, I don’t want you being disrespectful to your elders’, the two kids reluctantly came over, and the father said to the first one, ‘you shake his hand, he’s your uncle, all the grown-ups in this village are your uncles, you must respect Uncle Kibandi like you respect me, he has the right to spank you if you’re rude again’, Kibandi held out his dry, skeletal hand to Koty, or maybe Koté, who looked at it with distrust and suspicion, then held out his own, the child looked Kibandi straight in the eye, there was a kind of silence, then suddenly his face transformed, growing smoother, younger, the big, bare head was covered with soft hair, grew rounder, my master felt a kind of electric shock run through his body, he saw the head of the infant Youla in place of that of the twin who was shaking his hand ‘don’t look at grownups like that’ Papa Moundjoula said, and as he shook the hand of the other twin my master had the same vision, again the head of the baby we’d eaten, he quickly dropped his gaze, Papa Moundjoula hadn’t noticed anything, the kids apologised to my master, but were careful to add, with a touch of irony, ‘see you soon Uncle Kibandi, we’ll come and see you Friday’, and again with irony, they chorused, ‘have a good evening Uncle Kibandi’ and Papa Moundjoula breathed a sigh of satisfaction at his twins’ behaviour, ‘you’ll see, they’re extraordinary kids, very likeable, once you connect with them, they’ll be coming to play with you every day in your yard’, but Kibandi was lost in thought, fixed on the image of baby Youla’s head, he didn’t dare look at the twins, he knew now that he was going to have to see to these two, they seemed to be the only people who knew about our nocturnal activities, and so he declined the Moundjoulas’ offer of dinner, saying he had some urgent work to see to, which needed to be done before nightfall, and he left, without looking back, talking to himself as he went, he almost tripped over a stone, he sat drinking mayamvumbi all night long, I heard him cackling to himself in a way he didn’t usually, repeating over and over the name of the baby we’d eaten, his laughter was a façade, I discovered for the first time that my master too could be frightened out of his wits

after the Tuesday when my master went to complain to Papa Moundjoula, his life was one little mishap after another, and on the evening of that same day, around the stroke of midnight, he heard a baby crying behind his workshop, he heard children sniggering, the sound of frantic footsteps, and things diving into the river, he heard flying beasts settling on his roof, it was impossible to sleep, he lay watching and waiting till dawn, then the following morning decided that enough was enough, and for the first time, to my great surprise, he summoned me in broad daylight, I realised then he had lost it, no initiate ever summoned his harmful double in broad daylight to brief him for a mission, but I couldn’t disobey him, so I left my hiding place, I had lost that spring in my step that I had back in the days when things were working out as we’d planned, this was an emergency, till now we had attacked living people, we had never confronted the shades of night, no one we had ever eaten had come back to settle with us, and when I got to Kibandi’s house I pushed the door open with my paw, and stood there in the entrance, imagine my surprise, I saw a man distraught, a man who had spent the entire night drinking mayamvumbi, his face haggard, as though he had not slept for two or three moons, there was fear in his eyes, he told me to enter, looked at me, murmured words I couldn’t catch, I said to myself we must be going to leave the village of Séképembé, and accept the fate of his family, which was to roam forever, in search of a new place to live, but instead he spoke to me of the twins, he was obsessed with them, he said the two kids were more powerful than he had realised, that we must see to them by Friday at the latest, that he did not wish me to return to the forest before this mission, which meant more to him than all the ninety-nine others before, and so I spent the day in a dark corner of his hut while he lay lifeless on his mat, the twins didn’t return to disturb my master while I was there that night, but the calm was deceptive, on Friday, around the stroke of ten in the evening, while we were getting ready to make our way towards the Moundjoulas’ lot, my master and I were startled by the sound of night birds scrabbling on the roof of the hut, a violent wind blew the door of his hut to bits, my master’s former workshop flew apart, we were blinded by a flash of light, as though day was breaking in the middle of the night, and in the yard we saw baby Youla, the one we’d eaten, he seemed to be in fine shape, he was pointing at us, and with him were his two bodyguards, the twins Koty and Koté, they had captured my master’s other self, it was painful to watch, it was as though Kibandi’s other self had not even the strength of a scarecrow planted in a corn field, he was passive, like a puppet, a clown, a marionette stuffed with cotton, rags, sponge, and the two rascals were tossing him about as their fancy took them, rolling him in the dust, trying to stand him upright, my master’s other self’s legs would not hold, his head flopped down onto his chest and his arms dangled down by his legs, the kids were sniggering, Kibandi barked an order at me, ‘ go on, throw, throw your quills, damn you’, but alas, my spikes would not move, I was petrified by what I saw, and then the twins let my master’s other self fall to the ground, they came towards us, they came level with baby Youla, they looked quite different, transformed, as though they were not the same little fellows who had chased me at the cemetery, Kibandi stepped backwards, we quickly retreated into the hut, we heard them coming like a herd of a thousand cattle, the earth shuddered beneath their feet, and the walls of the hut trembled, in they came, I had curled myself up small in a corner, Kibandi had run into his bedroom, I saw him come back out with a spear in his hand, the twins and the baby doubled up laughing, pointing at his weapon, my master took up his stance and tried to throw the spear, his hands were heavy, so heavy that the weapon fell at his feet, one of the twins leapt towards him, the other seized his right foot, they pulled together, while baby Youla sniggered just outside the door, and I saw Kibandi collapse on the ground like an old tree felled with a single blow, I don’t know what the little furies did to him after that because I closed my eyes I was so frightened, I heard a sort of report, like a gun firing, and yet there was no firearm in my master’s hut, and the twins carried none either, I was trembling like a fool, the blinding light which had appeared when they arrived disappeared as though by magic, night fell upon us as baby Youla raised his left hand to the sky, as though he could command all nature, from my hiding place I could see his firmly planted little legs, and as he turned his burning gaze in my direction I realised he had flushed me out, that I would not be spared, his eyes bored deeper and deeper into me, he seemed to be saying that I too was finished, just like my master, who lay by the door, I began to panic, then to my surprise, the baby looked away, I thought maybe he didn’t want to attack me himself, that he was going to order the twins to deal me the same punishment as my master, but no, all he did was look back at me, nod at me, asking me to flee, I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t hang about though, I scuttled off discreetly, I was crossing my master’s bedroom when I heard a long gasp, his final breath, it was his last minute on this earth, and I went on running out into the night like a fugitive

It’s getting late, dear Baobab, the moon has just disappeared, I feel my eyelids growing heavy, my limbs giving way, my sight misting over, could this be death, folding its arms about me, I can’t hold out much longer, I’m slipping away, I’m tired now, oh yes, I’m very tired