Mozambique Mysteries

by Lisa St Aubin De Teran

  As the former hub of colonial life in the Cabaceiras, the college is steeped in history, and yet its history is a local mystery. From an Italian priest I know that the building was once a monastery or convent, but we do not, for instance, know which part of it was the chapel. And we know that it was a Portuguese naval academy, but no one yet has been able to describe how it then looked inside. Among the local people, only those who cleaned it or worked as stewards would have ever set foot inside it. In the olden days, no local man, woman or child was allowed past the mango tree that stands guard over the path some two hundred metres from the side entrance (to the middle courtyard). It was there by the mango tree that villagers could state their business. Because few Mozambicans live beyond their forties, there is little chance now of finding anyone who ever went inside the college in its naval days.

  Beyond its high walls, though, market gardens flourished and these were seen and have been remembered by two generations of Cabaceirians.

  XI

  The Workings of a Heart

  I SETTLED IN MOZAMBIQUE IN mid-2005. While I stay put, this book is a bit like a fishing boat bobbing about in a raging sea. It gets buffeted by passion, dragged and beaten by the tides. It keeps being washed up on strange shores far away from its proposed course; and then it sets sail again in search of new shoals, fresh supplies, rest, repairs and endless new adventures.

  On my first visit to Mozambique, I was hooked. By my second trip I was in love both with the country and the man I was travelling with. Just as this emotional roller-coaster neared its peak, at the end of 2004, I was forced to slow down to accommodate a new and annoying heart condition. I was given the choice of cutting back on stress and giving up my long work hours or dropping dead.

  Simultaneously, the company I was running suddenly had no budget and the only way to save it was by increasing my workload and restructuring it. While exploring that particularly dark tunnel, a doctor switched on a light and released me. It actually took me some to time to fully realize this. I had fantasized about being released from my office contract, but when my first chance came, I couldn’t bear to abandon the fiction factory without a fight, so against doctors’ orders, I tried to keep juggling all the company’s projects while I found a way to delegate my work there.

  Within a week, I was back in the special paramedic’s ambulance and back to the same hospital in Amsterdam. It was only in the ambulance for the second time that I was able to let go of all the things I had been grasping for in the movie world. Literally, by the time my stretcher was carried into the Accident and Emergency ward, and a cardiologist came to my bedside, I had moved on and switched off.

  Within minutes, my maladjusted heart began to more fully embrace Mozambique. The possibility of being able to live there full time had been on hold because of business commitments in Holland. But as I lay in the hospital watching the machine-that-goes-‘bing’ binging unhealthily, I moved to East Africa emotionally. When a second cardiologist tut-tutted about my pulse rate of forty-seven, the shock of suddenly being weak and vulnerable was already mixed with a surge of joy: now I could play truant from my office. When a third and then a fourth opinion confirmed that I must only do the things I enjoyed, it felt as though my prison sentence had been reduced for good behaviour. Which, in a way, makes having a non-fatal heart problem a bit like having a winning lottery ticket. Like a convict with three more years of hard labour still to serve, I was unexpectedly ushered out of my cell and shoved out of the prison gate.

  Just a few weeks later, when the palace revolution within my company staged its final coup, the blow to me personally had lost its sting. For the next several months, from the outside, it may have looked as though I was there in Holland, but I wasn’t. My heart and soul had moved to Mozambique, and within a few months I would follow them there.

  Meanwhile, I transposed every sound into drum beats. In the hospital, I imagined drum taps in the clinking of medical instruments in a kidney bowl and in the slap and squeak of the nurses’ shoes on polished floors. After being released, everything crept into Macua rhythms, from the thuds of crates being unloaded from trucks on the street, to the chug and hiss of passing trams.

  Having been advised to take long regular walks to increase my sluggish pulse, I trudged through Amsterdam and finally got to know the city I had been living in for some years. During those wintry promenades, I became both closer to and farther away from it. Discovering its back streets and hidden places, a fondness for that small, noisy, sweet and stubborn city returned. Yet with each step, as my heart pounded, I recalled the drum beats of the Cabaceiras and looked forward to the many years ahead in which I could aspire to understanding what each rhythm meant and which drums are used for which ceremonies.

  After a two-month frenzy of restoration during the summer of 2004, and after the opening day, and after I left, the restoration of the palace’s fabric had stopped. Window frames that were half painted when the Minister of Tourism’s convoy turned into our parking lot the previous September had stayed half painted. Doors that were missing then were still missing. Rooms that had been hurriedly painted and occupied like indoor camping sites were time-warped to that opening day: not a shelf or hook had been added, not a poster had been put up or a mat put down.

  The struggle to survive had been too time-consuming to continue with any improvements. To all this there was one exception: the main kitchen, which had been a roofless ruin when I left, was well on its way to being a professional training kitchen by the time I returned. And the derelict storeroom beside it was finished. Mees had got a building team started under Morripa’s guidance and left them to it. He had warned me not to expect much to have happened when I went out, so it was a welcome surprise to see how much work they had just got on with and done while we were both away.

  Morripa and the master plasterers showed me around each shelf and ledge, pointing out the special design of the built-in grill and oven, the charcoal bin, the sink, the new gables and the roof frame. Despite their pride in the new kitchen, the workers were not happy: the college was not looking smart enough for all the hard work they had put in the previous year. I had promised them that we would make the building look splendid again, and yet apart from the kitchen it was not progressing. I apologized for my long absence and confirmed what they already knew about my recent battle with my recalcitrant heart and the months I had recently spent convalescing.

  Several of the workmen asked me how long I was staying and what was the exact date of my return flight to Holland and then how long it would be before I came back again. Mestre Tauacal told me, ‘A team is a team; and if someone leaves they leave it in the lurch. We liked it when we were all working together. And we think you should stay and …’

  He looked at Morripa rather shyly. Some of the other workmen were also nodding to Morripa, as they do when they have met and discussed something and delegated him to forward their findings. I began to get a bit worried because they were all looking so anxious. I dreaded what he might have to say. Morripa cleared his throat as though to make a speech and then he blurted out, ‘We all want to paint it yellow.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yellow.’

  ‘Yes, but paint what yellow?’

  ‘The palaceu, the college. In the olden days it was yellow and we want to paint it yellow again.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, much too enthusiastically for it to sound at all sincere and my voice took a sudden squeak.

  Having feared the worst, e.g. that they were fed up with our learning curve and were leaving, or that the government had scheduled a new airport in the village and the college was standing on what had been designated as runway two, I started laughing. I have a nervous laugh that sometimes comes at the most inappropriate times. I laughed alone for a few seconds and was then joined by first one and then another of the workforce until the yellowness of the building and laughter itself become a joint focus of hilarity.

  For several minutes we laughed our way back to their plac
e at the top of the hierarchy in that strictly hierarchical place. Some students came to see what the big joke was about and then gave up, shaking their heads.

  ‘Eeh! It’s going to be yellow,’ several workmen spluttered at once, pronouncing the yellow (amarelho) in a squeak similar to my own, thereby setting everyone off again.

  The students stared, puzzled, and left. But outside, I could hear them retelling the scene and starting a second wave of laughter as a counterpoint to our own.

  The college sits in three walled compounds. Its central compound is about eighty metres long and has buildings on three sides. The main wing is the oldest and was built at some time in the eighteenth century. Because the Portuguese left Mozambique in such haste in 1975, and because there were seventeen years of war after their departure, the historical documents and plans about a monument such as this college have disappeared from the national archives and (as yet) have not been tracked down anywhere in Portugal. Apart from the fact that the derelict palace building was a beautiful ‘silent mansion’ begging to be saved, it is also ideally suited to house a college because it used to be one. There are dormitories and bathroom blocks, kitchens and storerooms, a refectory (now used as the Casa Cultura/Cultural Centre) and numerous classrooms, a huge assembly hall and even a grand ballroom (now my office).

  Despite its sorry state in 2004, 90 per cent of it was structurally sound. And last but not least, its walled gardens are protected from the salt-bearing winds and are perfect for growing herbs and vegetables and even delicate medicinal plants. Potentially, the palace has room to take two hundred non-residential students and some twenty to thirty residential staff. To have built somewhere like it from scratch would have cost a small fortune. Whereas by restoring the existing building, we have managed to keep our costs down and save a beautiful building for posterity. After so many centuries of oppression, there is also some poetic justice in the local villagers having their community college in what is undoubtedly one of the grandest buildings in the province.

  When we first painted the building white, the painting turned out to be a huge effort in which everyone concerned joined in, from students to staff to volunteers and workers. The impression, midway, was good. The pockmarked, crumbling façade had lost its coating of green slime and the palace no longer looked abandoned. It took two coats of lime paint all over and then the main wings were ready in time for its opening on 27 September 2004. Yet after all the effort, the final result was disappointing. Mees and I didn’t dare say anything at the time because everyone had worked so hard, but white didn’t really suit the college. The sun is too bright and it produces a glare; the expanses of walls are vast and all the detail of pillars and cornices are lost in white. I sometimes thought that the beautiful palaceu had actually looked better in its ruined state. Yet the fact of the matter is that whatever I think about how its decoration should and shouldn’t look, the building isn’t mine, it’s theirs: the villagers.

  Luckily, in this case there had been a misunderstanding and both we and the villagers wanted the outside to be darker. Since there was a bit of extra cash in the building kitty, we went for their yellow, and where the palace’s walls first stood out like a sore thumb, it now sits quite naturally among its palms.

  One of the reasons I had been worried when Morripa approached me about repainting the college was that I knew there were tensions between the workers and various members of the college staff. On arrival I had felt the underlying tension, mixed with relief that I was back and grievances would be able to be aired. I had been away a long time: too long really for a project that was still locked largely inside my own head. The workers, in particular, had felt abandoned, and not understanding some of the actions of the volunteers, they had pulled back emotionally from the college they felt was theirs. Also, with virtually no funding, it had not been possible to keep buying materials for the restoration, thereby enforcing the lull in the main building work.

  Pleading poverty in a poor African village doesn’t really work: no one believes it. Westerners are all so rich compared to the local people that the idea of money running out is hard to grasp. Shoestring projects and vastly funded ones all seem the same. When money is not forthcoming, the general assumption is that one has chosen not to spend it, rather than imagine that a wealthy foreigner does not have the money to spend. And all foreigners are wealthy compared to all local people. A dead-broke backpacking student is wealthy compared to them. So I knew that the workers believed I had chosen to withhold materials for continuing to restore the main building, and they wanted to beautify their college.

  The following week we bought a hundred kilograms of yellow pigment in Nacala and four local painters began the huge task of painting the college. The home-made scaffolding went up on the portico steps and vats of lime were soaked in water and mixed with yellow pigment, to be hoisted up and down from the painting platform in cut-off jerry cans.

  We laughed about the paint and the pattern of our mirth was unusual because I started it. Yet every day, several times a day, the college rings and echoes with peals of laughter. All the workers and all the students manage to find subjects of intense mirth.

  While the eighty-metre-long and ten-metre-high façade was undergoing its facelift, I embarked on the inside. Since there were bags and boxes of miscellaneous decorations and decorating materials in the storeroom, my own first job was to upgrade the interiors of all the rooms, be they bedrooms or classrooms, kitchens or halls. Lolly, with her teenage knowhow of styling, was the first to join my new campaign to beautify the college. As each room was upgraded, the students and the guards learnt how to paint skirting boards, how to hang curtains and pictures. Ramon and Tigo developed a flair for painting window frames. Tigo turned out to be the only one of us tall enough, with the help of a table to stand on, to reach the top arch of each window and finish off each job. As each giant window frame was completed, he would step down the home-made sapling ladder three rungs at a time and exclaim, ‘Epa! ’ Tigo tends to start and finish most of his sentences with this exclamation, imbuing it with myriad meanings from satisfaction to despair.

  Sofia, the chef, who I don’t think had ever held a paintbrush before, became a demon painter. Each afternoon she would leave the kitchen and clamber on to chairs and tables with a pot of paint in one hand and a dripping brush in the other and attack the window frames with gusto. When we ran out of frames to paint, she started painting her bedroom floor, and when that was done she would sneak out at dawn to tackle door after door. Each day, as new curtains, cushions, pictures, mirrors and furniture converted cell-like rooms into something more resembling a home, Sofia blossomed, becoming more and more talkative and skittish, despite her fifty-five years.

  Eighteen-year-old Isabel, Sofia’s youngest child, had been living at the college for the past four months but had left the week before I arrived for hospital treatment in Maputo. As each improvement took place, Sofia would tell me how pleased Isabel would be to see it when she returned. And then Sofia would talk wistfully about the husband whom she had loved so much and who had died not long before, and she told me about the religious order she had cooked for in Maputo, and about her father, who disappeared from the face of the earth one day when she was a girl, and about Mattola, the place outside Maputo where she had lived all her life and which she had left to come and help breathe movement into the Cabaceiras. Still grieving for the recent death of her husband, she was another travelling soul finding her own life through helping other people.

  Painting and sewing cushions and curtains and cooking together, Sofia and I grew close. As she described her childhood, the mystery of her father’s disappearance, surviving twenty-seven years of war, pre- and post-independence, while bringing up her eight children, I realized how courageous she was. At the point when she and her son Tigo and daughter Isabel arrived at the college, they had travelled into the unknown. None of them had ever been to the north of Mozambique before. None of them had lived in such isolation, none of them spo
ke Macua, none of them had lived away from their very extended family; and yet they had all come to help.

  While Sofia made things nice for her daughter, I began to make things nice for Sofia as a way of saying thank you to her for giving up so much and giving so much to the village. At night, after everyone was asleep, I worked on. Every morning, she would notice even tiny nocturnal improvements like a soapdish in the shower, or a new ovencloth, or a rack to put the saucepan lids on.

  Having my own daughter with me also spurred me on to make life in the bush as acceptable as possible. For any teenager, the jump from sophistication to bare necessity, from consumer overload to below-the-breadline poverty and, most of all, from hectic social life to imposed loneliness, would have been enormous. For Lolly, who (unlike her shy and rather reclusive mother) has always been an intensely social person, the change was almost immeasurable. Having problems attending school in our fifteenth and sixteenth year seems to run in our family. And from what I see of friends’ children is not uncommon in general. Lolly is no exception to the pattern. Having switched schools in Holland in the hopes of settling better, she lost her foothold after a long illness and the concurrent absence and begged me to give her a year out and home school. Probably because I wanted to move to Mozambique anyway, but also because her brother had done it before her and managed notwithstanding to slip back into the system and get to university, I agreed. During the first months, before she found new friends, it was incredibly tough on her emotionally. Without MSN messaging, email or the daily routine of actually going to school, she was thrown very much on to her own resources.