Memoirs of a Porcupine by Alain Mabanckou Page B

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
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    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