‘Ma – sca – mol – o. Say it, come on, bit by bit, ma–sca–mol–o.’
Failure to comply and repeat brings out the disciplinarian in him, expressed in stern disappointment and a refusal to acknowledge me for the remainder of the voyage. Repeating my word of the day breaks his tree-bark face into a wide smile and a doggie pat for me. When he is pleased with me as a pupil, he turns to praise my progress to his other passengers. I do not let on that I already understand a lot of what is said in Macua, so his invariable comment of, ‘You see, she might be different but she isn’t stupid,’ is the nearest I come to a compliment in my new bush home far from the gallantries of Paris or Rome. Over the following year, this particular captain and I spent many hours conversing on many crossings to Ilha and back. We never made it on to name terms: he was always ‘O Capitano’ and I was always ‘A Akunha,’ but in our way we became friends. My name is less confusing than his. There are dozens of capitanos in the Cabaceiras but very few Akunha, of whom my daughter, Lolly, and I are the only ones to actually live here now. Telepathy and intuition play a great part in local conversation. Thus everyone else seems to know exactly which capitano is being referred to and which boy, which girl, which mother and which uncle, despite calling all boys muido (boy), and all girls menina (girl), all women mae, and all men tio (uncle), irrespective of any family tie. I was quite disconcerted when the first dozen students at the college here started calling me ‘my mudder’ until I realized that all women become ‘mother’ (mae), albeit in name only, once they cease to be a girl, and the name is a sign of affection and respect.
I rest my bare feet on sacks of manioc and baskets of live prawns with cloth bundles wedged behind and beside me as we loll across the sea. Far out, there are pools of startling turquoise in the mostly still water. Along the shoreline, a ribbon of pale beaches stretches north and south for hundreds of kilometres. For miles out along the coast there are strands of shallows in which flamingos and fishermen wade, gathering edible treasures from the rich seabed. Between them and the shore there are thickets, woods and forests of red and white mangroves. These marine trees have barnacles encrusted on their trunks and branches up to the high-tide mark. Their lush green tops are the nesting places of egrets and pelicans, gulls, storks and thousands of other birds that rise in startled flocks each time a sailing dhow punts by or a dugout canoe scarcely bigger than the muscular fisherman inside it paddles past the red lattice of hanging roots. The red mangroves have arched stilts. Their branches are beloved of egrets, which rise and flee as we glide by. Seabirds fly in circles, and then return to their perches to guard their watery realm. The air roots from the seedlings, saplings and large trees thrust up through the sand in knobbly spikes. These roots form palisades through which the fishermen have worn down a maze of narrow, almost invisible paths. Only the fishermen and the ferrymen know which paths are safe to follow and when it is safe to follow them as the tide comes rolling in.
III
Parallel Lives
BEFORE I LEFT ITALY – my adoptive country for twenty years – I pulled the pragmatic side of my character to the fore and planned my immediate future (for a seven-year stretch) like a military campaign. Then in the winter of 2000, in a reasonably orderly fashion, I moved to Paris and then to the Netherlands with my youngest daughter, Lolly (who was nine at the time).
Chastened and galled by having lost numerous court battles, the roof over my head, and the sleeves, at least, of my shirt, I was hell-bent on avoiding further escapades. I chose rather to immure myself in the business world under the tutelage of solid business people. I chose to do this in Amsterdam, a solid northern European business city.
In some ways, it would be hard to find a more down-to-earth approach to life than that of the Dutch. I had no idea that by choosing to make this exotic downshift I was actually launching myself into the biggest and most exotic challenge I have ever met: Mozambique. And yet, by a series of coincidences, I was launched into and have subsequently embraced life on the edge on a stretch of coast along the Indian Ocean.
There was a Dutch-African overlap during which I lived a double life: quite simply, day by day, I was a writer who lived in the heart of Amsterdam in the beautiful Villa Einstein overlooking a canal. And by night I was the person who ran a community college on the edge of the Indian Ocean, arranging for sacks of rice to be transported from Nampula to the college kitchens and for tree trunks to be shipped in from Nacala. A construction team of local builders were (and still are) working their way through the derelict rooms of what used to be a Portuguese naval academy, restoring them into classrooms and kitchens, dormitories and offices. The minutiae of one life and the other have made kaleidoscopic patterns in my mind.
Now, as I wait for sporadic gusts of breeze to waft through the doors to my ballroom office, with so little contact with the outside world, it seems hard to believe that for two years, every Wednesday, I flew from Schipol to London and was a film producer, Monday to Friday, from nine to five. I was a businesswoman stealing time from board meetings and banks to be a writer again. By night, though, and every time I could get away – even for a few days – I did what I have always wanted to do. I lived my fantasies to the full.
That may sound like sheer selfishness. And yet on the other hand I know that if I describe the work I do in Mozambique, the schools Teran Foundation is setting up, the farms we are planning, the water projects and my consultancy for the railroads and tourist projects there, then it might look as though, on the contrary, I were a selfless person. The truth is neither one nor the other. It lies in the balance of give and take. I give everything I have and am and can do. I take the most wondrous times and happiness as I have never known it before.
Every time I look out across the palm groves that flank the college on two sides, I am reminded that nothing about my life up until 2002 has been as surreal or as magical as what I am doing now. Be it the beauty, the spirituality, the harmony, the friendship or just the warm weather and warm water and great beaches here: a combination of all has captivated me and it holds me in a grip no other place has exercised before to this degree. As a farmer, my work lies in coaxing new (to Mossuril) crops to grow in this salty sandy soil. And as a writer, my work lies in sifting through and selecting nuggets from an endless seam.
I have always come to know other villages from the edge in, unfolding their secrets with less clinical eyes than I have cast over the Cabaceiras. But then I have always passed through other villages, pausing for however long as a mere visitor and not with the intention of helping them out. This time, I had to establish what was missing so as to be able to help fill the gaps. The Cabaceiras have been both blessed and cursed by their isolation. They were blessed by being outside of the seventeen years of war after independence, by having had (to date in 2007) less than a dozen known cases of HIV/Aids, by being shielded from most of the ills of the West; but they are cursed by missing out on nutrition, transport, education, healthcare, jobs, basic technology and most basic consumer goods. Any form of communication beyond the village is a challenge.
An incongruous factor of such isolation is that the area has mobile phone coverage. Landline telecommunication might not have reached this particular bit of the East African coast, but the mobile phone has. Mozambique has a national network called M-cell which reaches right into the mangroves, even mid-channel when sailing to Ilha. Possession of a mobile is not only an enormous status symbol, but a unique and essential link to the outside world. Where mobile phones in the West are used more as business appendages and/or as the conveyors of continuously updated tittle-tattle to the exclusion of normal one-on-one conversation, a mobile in the bush is a life-saving device. However, there is a wide gap between its potential and reality.
Like Italian teenagers who dangle car keys to nonexistent cars to show off their macho prowess, many local mobile phones are unavailable for use in critical moments due to lack of credit. The phones are topped up with two-or three-dollar cards, the purchase of which
exceeds most family budgets. Those who can afford them tend to abuse their phones as rampantly as any Western teenager. Yet because most people cannot afford them and are therefore not used to phoning out, the use of the treasured mobile remains mysterious. When a new top-up credit has been installed, the ensuing glee is immediately shared. Any Mozambican with a mobile phone will use it to exchange inanities without any mobile etiquette at all. And no matter how inopportune a phone call might be, the idea of switching off a phone that works is inconceivable, as is the possibility that one might not answer a call.
When the tsunami devastated so much of the Asian coast, the local people here knew something strange was happening because the tide streamed in and out of the mangroves in rapid succession. Such a thing had never happened before. It didn’t cause any damage though. It was a talking point: a moment of wonder. I was in Holland at the time and my first thought was of the Cabaceirians. I was able to call Morripa and ask if everyone was safe; he described the double tide to me.
So if the village were less poor, and if top-up phone credits were available more locally, and if phone parts such as batteries and chargers could be supplied there, and if there was electricity to recharge the batteries or solar energy to replace that, then in theory all the villagers could be linked by mobile phone to the rest of the world.
Morripa and about a dozen of his fellow village leaders have mobiles. There is no clearer sign that a person is upwardly mobile than such a possession. A man with a ‘rooky tooky’ (a bicycle) is a man to be reckoned with, but a man or woman with a mobile is in a higher class of achievement altogether. Horrendous ringtones are part and parcel of this elevated status. Deep in the bush, a carpenter or one of the Varanda workers will let their ‘Peer Gynt’, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ or ‘La Cucaracha’ ring repeatedly rather than rush to answer the offending mobile, just to enjoy the moment and share their good fortune with their friends and family. Every time I take my own phone out of my pocket and fiddle with my text messages, I see admiring eyes appraise my little silver Samsung. Because Lolly and I each have a mobile, and Mees has a stunning three of them, we are people who have made it.
Being a writer doesn’t bring much credit in an area where there are no books to speak of. Not only are there no books, there are no bookshops or libraries, and, worse still, there are hardly any schools. A Cabaceirian can study to fourth-year primary; then the education system stops. Elsewhere in Mozambique this is not the case, but here behind God’s back there is nowhere to go to get an education. Newspapers don’t reach here and the internet has yet to arrive (waiting, no doubt, for electricity and telephone lines to precede it).
There is much talk in town of a new system called ‘blabla’, a wireless radio phone which is to come our way any day. So far, I have bought two bla-bla phone faxes and both were dead on arrival with irreversible faults that did not allow them to work either in town or out of it. However, with patience, this seems to be the way of the future, and in some kind of African timescale which will not be tomorrow, and which cannot name the day in the future when the miracle will occur, I believe that a new link to the great beyond is about to form.
Because the whole concept of telephones is new, many people with a limited circle of friends with phones have little idea how to use the magical object. Advice is freely given about how one should be held, used, kept and cosseted. Most of this advice comes from hearsay. Many people believe that this miraculous ‘talkie talkie’ must be moved continuously from ear to mouth. Others swear by holding it like a microphone. And when one breaks down (often), there is always someone ready to take it apart with a homemade penknife while a chorus of friends stand by to bewail the almost inevitable demise of that particular piece of technology.
Every day, someone will call me and launch into a conversation that makes no sense to me and has no context without the caller identifying his or herself. When I ask, ‘Who am I talking to?’, the answer is simply, ‘Me.’
‘Yes, but who is me?’
‘I am.’
‘But who are you?’
‘I am me.’
‘But what is your name?’
‘What are you saying? This is me! I am talking to you.’
And so it goes on, consuming the little yellow top-up cards from M-cell and quickly bringing whoever that ‘me’ was to the end of their credit. Thus everyday phone calls are imbued with life’s mysteries. The age-old search for identity is there, the philosopher’s riddle permeates. Existence attempts to base itself on audio reflection: you must know who I am because you can hear me; I exist because you can hear me. Thus the sheer joy of talking into a phone overrules the need for the speaker to identify him-or herself or to stand by the idea that speech per se is not communication and only becomes that when someone else understands what has been said.
I hear the drums beat and relay their sound, slow and steady, filtering through the groves of palms and mango trees. The rhythm quickens, joined by new beats as more dried gazelle skins are pounded and more villagers gather round in ways that are known to them all, and which have been handed down religiously through the centuries by spoken words and gestures. While much of the rest of African culture was observed and anthropologically dissected, analysed, recorded and transported as a curio to the West, this Macua culture has survived unspoilt, unknown to us and untouched. As it unravels (and unravel it does) to reveal so many of its secrets, I feel so excited about sharing them that I am calling out of the bush as an anonymous caller. In this tale filtered through an ‘I’ and a ‘me’, I have so far assumed that you must know who I am because you can hear me.
Pre-empting the ‘Yes, but who are you?’ question, let me say that I am a writer who was once a farmer and has become a farmer again, and who has always been a rootless person in search of a place to call home. I was born and brought up in London, but my absent father is South American and can claim kinship across half the world. I started writing as a child and have been writing ever since (mostly novels, but also short stories, autobiography and travel writing). I was brought up in London in the 1950s by a mother who longed to be somewhere else.
From within a paradoxically close yet dysfunctional family (made up almost exclusively of females), I developed an intense clan spirit combined with an obsessive obligation to follow unorthodox paths. By proxy, my duty was to live life to the hilt, to make a mark and to do all the things my mother had been thwarted from doing. Apart from skipping school and indulging in minor childhood delinquency, for years I fulfilled this mission in an almost constant daydream. My expectation of how life should be was so rarefied that I managed to squeeze a few lives into the 1970s without really noticing them pass by. During that decade, I was benignly stalked by, and cradle-snatched by, a Venezuelan revolutionary and taken to his inherited lands in the Andes, and I became a farmer and a mother, a writer and then a refugee without realizing that that was my life, rather than the other more elusive dreams I was endlessly chasing.
While I lived in the Venezuelan Andes, I spent many hours crying, secretly bewailing the fact that life had passed me by. When I returned to England and found literary success, it took me as many years again to come to terms with other people’s fascination with what had been, for me, a deep emotional trauma and eventual awakening, and over two thousand days of drudgery interspersed with an occasional highlight.
Then, by drifting from one country to another and one adventure to another with three children in tow, I lived for twenty years basking in the complacency of minor success. A few of my books made it on to bestseller lists but none rushed to top those charts. More critics were kind than brutal, and although my fame was more for the strange life I led than for the books I wrote, it was fame enough to keep me endlessly afloat. However, when I reached the age of fifty and took stock of myself, I was disconcerted to see how ill my dreams matched my achievement.
My life has been cocooned by unusual good luck and dogged by misfortune (sometimes simultaneously). The intensity of each frame of
each scene has often excluded my seeing the bigger picture. Swathed in good intentions, I bumbled along in what often appeared from the outside to be a streamline, but which was actually a survival tactic. I could have continued bumbling to the end of my days and few would have been the wiser, but I was born greedy for experience, and when I scratch the surface of my own skin, I remember that I have always wanted more. The knocks I have received should have probably woken me up before, but, somewhat shamefully, they didn’t. I had to pinch myself awake.
Mozambique Mysteries Page 3