Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

Successful writers receive a lot of praise and (despite some ups and downs in the reception of my sixteen books) so too have I. The modern cult of the writer makes praise for work written spill over into something much more personal. Fans of a book often become fans of the author, creating a halo-cum-swaddling band round the writer in praise of his or her life’s achievement. Although I did not set out to be an ‘autobiographical writer’, explaining how I got into some of the places where I have been often seemed like the only way of introducing a reader into that world. Several of my books have revealed a great deal of personal detail, thereby inviting friend and foe alike to know me at a remove. Although the goodwill of strangers has been a sustaining factor I have often felt grateful for, it has also made me feel uncomfortable. Other than make a bit of an effort here and there, apart from writing and bringing up three children (all of which I enjoyed immensely), I haven’t really done anything.

  I was present when others were doing. I worked hard on the Venezuelan hacienda but I would have had to have a heart of stone not to. After leaving the Andes, the effort and organization I put into my domestic life were almost sufficient to run, if not a small country, at least a small town. It wasn’t that I wanted to go into politics or run for mayor anywhere, but I felt my efforts could be better used elsewhere.

  Long ago in Venezuela, I had made a foray into community service and worked closely with a group of isolated villagers. But far from being a success story, it was a failure for which I have felt consumed by guilt. In a world of give and take, I got far more than I gave. My engagement with life began there and although I retained elements of somnambulism after I left, before my seven years of hard labour in the Andes I was like someone from another planet. And no matter what good deeds I did while I was there as the teenage mistress of my mostly absentee husband’s hacienda, I championed a cause and then abandoned it. I didn’t stay there: I ran away. After seven years in an increasingly violent marriage, I saved myself, my sanity and my daughter. With hindsight, I still don’t see what else I could have done (although, of course, I could have not married a complete stranger and not gone to South America in the first place).

  After I make all my own excuses, there is still the moral issue of what I was doing in a place of such abject poverty: the Andean hacienda was firmly rooted in Andean snobbery in which I was the lady of the manor and the people I worked with were hardly better off than serfs. The only lasting mark I made there was in the hearts of a handful of people. I know that most of the socio-economic changes I made came undone and unravelled like a half-finished jumper caught on a fence within months of my leaving.

  Then, three decades later, in Holland, while it seemed strange to live two such different but parallel lives, the strangest thing was that all the apparently disparate things I had done so far (from restoring palaces to farming avocados) served as ideal training for my new life. After nearly thirty years of searching, I have finally found the place I was looking for, and in so doing I seem to have found myself. This is the second chance that so rarely comes around and which I am determined not to blow. Long ago, I had a place, the hacienda, and it made sense to me. Now, once again, I have the chance to make a mark in the hearts of some fine people. And once again, I have the chance to be their catalyst for change. Given this new opportunity to stand by them, in so doing I can lay my own ghosts to rest in their heavily haunted mangrove.

  IV

  If Not Now, When?

  BACK IN 1998 AND 1999, while living in Italy embroiled in court cases, I sat by my telephone in Umbria, waiting for one or other of my numerous lawyers to ring, and I had hundreds of hours in which to plan a new life. It didn’t take me much reflection to realize that the two areas in which I felt I had truly failed were in my search for an ‘ideal’ partner and in getting into any active philanthropy. On the former count, after three marriages and various affairs, it had become blatantly obvious, to me at least, that I was hopeless at choosing anyone with whom I could delight in sharing either my life or dreams.

  I always used to be attracted to people who lived on the edge. Whether that edge was approached by their passion for art or their proximity to mental instability was not something I had weighed in the balance. More importantly, nor had I weighed the fact that even when that edge was given exclusively by a passion for art, as was the case with my last husband, the painter Robbie Duff-Scott, such a drive leaves little over, in real terms, for someone like me who is seeking a great deal of emotional and moral support. One of my millennium New Year resolutions was to stop seeking what I so obviously could not find.

  Another resolution was to stop being passive and take action. I took steps to change my life in such a way that I could repair my fortunes and set off to sub-Saharan Africa to fulfil another dream. Because no matter which way my thoughts turned, one remained as a steady backdrop to all the others: come what may, I was determined to set up a chain of African schools and libraries. This particular goal had been in the back of my mind for over twenty years. It started long before I had ever been to Africa. It had been further shaped during ten years of travelling in West Africa; and had grown from a whim to an obsession. A lack of funds, know-how or help did nothing to deter it. It was a stubborn plan and it wouldn’t go away. It really did not fit with my then predicament in Italy; but I knew all about stubbornness, and rather than try to quash it, I decided to shape my life around it instead.

  Last but not least, as the millennium dawned, I promised myself to actually carry out my New Year resolutions, instead of just thinking them and then letting them get shoved aside by other things.

  To which end, I went from one extreme to another: from searching for love to absolutely closing down my personal body shop and refusing to even contemplate a date, let alone a new partner. Soul searching, I had discovered that I seemed to consistently confuse a need to help and a pleasure in so doing with my relationships. The solution to both seemed to lie in the same direction: I should actively work in charity and stop mistaking marriage as a way-station for the International Red Cross.

  Resigned to being single and celibate, I indulged my capacity for long hours and hard work and turned my attention to the movie business. It was during that phase of personal austerity and abstention that I met Mees. Although he is now my partner, getting there was a very gradual process: first we shared a love of the Cabaceiras, and only later did we share our lives.

  When I moved to Holland, financially I was still reeling from a disastrous sale of the villa in Italy which had been my ‘let’s put all our eggs in one basket’ asset. This sale had not only left me without a nest egg, it had also failed to cover all of my outstanding debts. I reckoned it would take me three years in business to break even and between five to six years to add enough zeros to my bank balance to be able to set up my own charitable foundation. By dabbling in the charity world I knew that I would need a duly registered vehicle through which to carry out my school and library plan. I had heard that trying to get money from bigger aid organizations was like trying to get blood from a stone, and the only way to get round that was to be disgustingly rich.

  I knew that smart business people could make their first million in a year, but I also knew that I was no maverick in the business world. In fact, my track record to date was a disaster. I would have to go back to the beginning and learn. Whatever money I made would be through a combination of lateral thinking and a lot of hard work. I spent 2001 planning my next five to six years. I devised a film development plan and then persuaded people to believe in it. Somewhat to my surprise, a lot of people did almost as quickly as I had, and I went to work with a will and discovered, among other things, that I didn’t know the meaning of drudgery until I set up an office. I take my hat off to all those who work in one for surviving a state so obviously at odds with human nature.

  But even when things were going well in my glorified Dutch office, I couldn’t see the point of most of what I was doing. I felt more like a character in a very dull movie than the pe
rson who puts movie packages together. I was cramming my brain with media tax laws and international treaties, finance, investment and regulatory laws and the like, and yet I couldn’t – in the tapestry of life – see why.

  Other, buried skills seemed much more real. I had learned a great many things as a young woman in Venezuela and I learnt most of them the hard way by trial and sometimes fatal error. They were useful, practical things like how to lower fevers and heal wounds, how to market-garden and keep sheep, how to build and mend fences and make walls, how to stock-take and cook for hundreds of people, how to grow sugar, and avocado pears, and oranges. I also learnt how to communicate with isolated, semi-literate people in a time warp, and to bridge some of the gaps between their reality and mine. Most of these skills were never called upon again except for the odd juggling act, and most are completely redundant in the modern Western world. So I put them on hold and lived an episodic life without them, struggling to stay in tune with a rhythm that wasn’t mine. Yet not using the many skills I had amassed seemed like a waste and without them the pattern of my life felt incomplete. I wanted there to be a point, despite so palpably not being able to see one.

  Although much has happened since I left Venezuela and the hacienda I lived and worked on, a part of me missed the life I led when I was girl with a mission farming crops and dreams. Despite the long hours of dull work inherent in any kind of farming, I had felt more alive on the hacienda and more in tandem with life than anywhere else before or after it. In other roles, I felt as though I was acting a part: pretending to be a chatelaine, a businesswoman or a member of the literary establishment. I didn’t belong in these places under any guise; and was there, it seemed to me, under false pretences.

  With more energy than I had work to do, I invented ways to fill my time. In Italy, I had spent most of my days gardening and was happiest when so doing. The nights were restless times, probably because when others sleep, I roam about, thinking. I am not much of a sleeper and never have been. In Venezuela, this enabled me to farm by day and write at night. During the twenty years that I lived in Italy, I wrote in the very early mornings before anyone else at home was awake. Then when each day ended and everyone else went to sleep, I had time on my hands. When every day is twenty hours long, there is always time for reflection.

  In Italy, although I enjoyed the ways I found to fill my nights, reading, watching movies, bottling fruits, and embroidering butterflies, with so many nights to think through, I couldn’t help thinking: If not now, when? What exactly was I waiting for?

  The room I use now as an office, study and bedroom is ten metres high and has a barrel-vaulted ceiling made up of hundreds of strips of wood. This ceiling is painted pale blue. There are three large windows on one wall and a fourth high over the double entrance door. It is a grand room by any standards but seems even more so to me because I moved into it in mid-2006 having spent the previous year squatting in a dark airless room at the end of a dark corridor. In that one, bats flew in and out of a hole in the false ceiling, frequently disproving the theory that bats have perfect radar and never knock into things. All the windows in my new office are too high to see out of except to look up to the palm tops and the sky. It is surprising how many variations one can spot in a palm frond if one looks at it for long enough. When sorting out the administration (a task I find supremely boring), I sometimes spend hours on end trying to find names for all the shades of green and words to describe the various sounds the wind makes as it rustles and creeps, rattles and shivers, shakes and judders, whispers and creaks through the ragged windmills of the surrounding coconut palms.

  In 2003, talks with the Mossuril District Administrator revealed that this derelict mansion could be the government’s contribution to a community college. My room was the ballroom in the nineteenth-century days when this was a naval academy. It had probably been built in the late eighteenth century as a convent. When we took over the derelict building, this huge room was the most ruined of all the rooms, and because a ficus tree had caused structural damage to an entire side of it, we left it till last. There was no time in the first rush of restoration to tackle such a big job. Numerous birds, mammals and insects had made their homes in it and when I and then Mees moved in, they did not take kindly to us. The screech owls who nested here gave up their tenancy with the least resistance, but several of the rats, bushbabies, striped squirrels, termites, tunnel beetles, ants, lizards, geckos, centipedes and scorpions that lived here undisturbed until we came have stubbornly refused to give up.

  When I went to Malawi for a week in June 2006, the rats had a ball in the former ballroom. I arrived back exhausted from twenty-seven hours on the back of a truck and fifteen hours on a slow train to find that rats had eaten my clothes, shoes, books, papers, pencils, key ribbons, bed linen, towels, hats, baskets, the mosquito net, two pillows, six cushions, and tunnelled their way into our mattress. Good rat poison is one of the many things that cannot be bought locally but I was already prepared for battle with the rats and had scoured Limbe for the best Malawian poison. I brought back a jar of lurid pink pellets that were so cruelly effective it took a week to clear all the corpses. I located them with Adamji by their foul smell. I asked him to find them with me because I am very squeamish about dead rats and could not bear to touch them, whereas he seemed to quite enjoy the hunt. He told me that our kapok cushions were to blame for the invasion.

  ‘Epa! Kapok is like piri-piri [chilli] to rats. They love the seeds that get stuck in the kapok fluff.’

  And he was right. The kapok cones we had gathered from the skeletal tree outside the college entrance had lured them in. Every room that had been decked out with new fresh kapok-filled cushions had suffered a lesser but similar invasion.

  I hope (in vain, I know) that I never see a rat again, dead or alive. The local squirrels, on the other hand, are another matter because they are sweet and furry and have striped bushy tails. The first time I saw one, it was scampering over the wall of the governor’s palace. Mees and I followed it and took a photo, thinking it was both rare and wonderful. Now, upwards of a hundred live with us in the college, dislodging tiles and stealing peanuts from the outdoor kitchen, raiding the rice as it is picked over by students, dangling off the passionfruit vines and, when they can get away with it, darting into my room to share whatever biscuit or breadcrumbs they can find. Now, if I didn’t shoo the squirrels away when I see them, my room would be overrun by them.

  I have become so used to shooing squirrels, bushbabies, mongooses, genets, lizards, eagles, falcons, tarantulas and bats away, just as the local people do, that I have ceased to see them as exotic creatures. Occasionally, though, after chasing one or more of them from our domain, I still pause to wonder at the loveliness of the bird or beast were it to be in another context (i.e. not attempting to steal or destroy college property).

  And sometimes I pause to wonder at the strangeness of my being here and the leap from Amsterdam to the Cabaceiras. But, in general terms, since I wanted to work in Africa, being here and being steered into helping develop Mossuril District was actually a logical step on a path I had already chosen.

  Step one had been to fantasize endlessly about starting a chain of libraries, selecting books and shipping firms and working out filing systems in my head. Step two had been a clumsy attempt to try and organize something in Mali. Then step three, after visiting the Cabaceiras, was to write over a thousand letters to over a thousand aid organizations. The next step grew out of their rejection: no one, it seemed, cared enough about the Cabaceirians to do anything to help them. So when Morripa asked, ‘Can’t we just do it ourselves?’, I thought: Why not?

  I had wanted to start my own charity for years but I had imagined that to do so would be slow and difficult. Yet when it came to actually doing it, the act was surprisingly swift. It didn’t require millions of dollars: anyone can do it with just six hundred euros. Perhaps one of the reasons why there are so many charities is that one can be born with almost indecent has
te. One day I made the first formal enquiries in Holland about opening a foundation, and the next day, the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce was asking what name to register the new charity in. As with some premature babies, I didn’t have a name ready. A family brainstorm didn’t produce one, and if I wanted to go ahead and register it while the wheels were in motion, I had to come up with one fast. My then business manager suggested using my name, but my very cumbersome name is not one readily pronounceable worldwide. As closing time at the Chamber of Commerce approached, in homage to my eldest daughter and her family of unsung achievers in the Venezuelan Andes, I opted for ‘Teran Foundation’.

  There was a scurry of paperwork and then the forgotten villages of Mossuril District had a registered charity at their disposal as a vehicle to help them on their way. The Teran Foundation came into being in April 2004 and work began in the Cabaceiras soon after. All the walls of the former naval academy are half a metre thick and built from coral rock which had absorbed decades of damp, which damp reemerged as a thick layer of green slime that had to be laboriously scraped off. The first group of thirty workers made this their first job.

  Meanwhile, with a few notable hitches, the Dutch-based movie development was all going well until the autumn of 2004, when it began to fall apart with substantial help from a saboteur on my own team. On the brink of going into production with our first movie and recouping our investment, our development budget was stopped with no notice. Most companies close when they are doing badly: ours closed when it was riding high. It was a powerful lesson in pointlessness. Nearly three years chained seven days a week to a desk and computer had just been flushed down the drain. More than anything, this act confirmed my desire to put my work into something that actually mattered within the big picture of life.

  The difficulties in the movie company dovetailed with the birth of the College of Tourism and Agriculture. Both started at the end of September 2004. I had been secretly longing to get out of my office and set off to Africa with a mission ever since I had fallen in love with Mees and through him found an enormous energy untapped since the days of my youth. The end of my film venture left me with a financial headache, but this was outweighed by giving me back the freedom to live wherever I chose and to spend my time however I chose. After a three-year detour, I could get back onto that precarious road which is the pursuit of truths. As a writer and a free spirit, who can rarely say ‘no’ to someone in need, I was not meant for the business world. I would never choose to enter it full time again or to live in a gilded cage again or to sit in an office trapped in the micro-drama of office politics.