Ironically, after she left, while discussing what to make for the college Christmas party, Atija and Ancha suggested cakes.
‘How? We are still waiting for a door for the new charcoal oven.’
‘No problem, we can make an oven out of a big pot – we do it all the time,’ Atija said.
True to their word, they rigged up burning embers under a giant pot and covered the lid with embers, hot ash and stones, and baked three perfect sponges.
I felt incredibly stupid: it had never occurred to me to ask if they knew how to bake. None of them had the money to pay for the ingredients for a cake so I just assumed they didn’t know how to make one. Yet long ago, in Fabulous Chocas-Mar, someone had taught them. And voilà! We had two chocolate and one plain sponges, each light as a feather and absolutely delicious. Cut into ninety pieces, there was a mere wedge for each of us, but it wasn’t a fluke. They have now baked cakes again and again, cracking each egg into a separate bowl in case a little, fetid chick plops into the mix.
XXV
Pacino, the Enraged Baboon
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2005, Lolly went to Nampula to see her new boyfriend and came back with a baby. This was not in the brochure for her weekend off. She called me on her mobile from Naguema to warn me that she and the driver, Mussagy, were not returning alone. There was also a three- or four-day-old baby baboon which had jumped off someone’s shoulder onto her arm and clung to her for dear life, refusing to let go. Any attempt to remove the tiny monkey resulted in screams and even tighter clinging. She continued to forewarn me: ‘There were twenty people there at the market, but he chose me. So we have to look after him.’
An hour later, Lolly arrived back with the newly christened Al Pacino in her arms. He was small enough to fit into the palm of my hand. He was almost dehydrated with his pink skin sagging on his bare shoulders. His face was disconcertingly humanoid and his bum was a disconcerting shiny red. From time to time he pursed his lips and made a low, aggrieved call. Pacino’s forlorn ‘Ooh’ sounds very like Robbie Coltrane playing Hagrid in the Harry Potter films when Hagrid says, ‘Ooh. I shouldn’t have said that, should I?’ Only Pacino’s forlorn little cry has an extra note of recrimination, as though after his ‘Ooh’ there is an implied ‘You shouldn’t have done that, should you?’
He was practically hairless and all skin and bones. Mussagy reported that it seemed the mother had met with an accident, but such was the reticence of the market group at Naguema that the ‘accident’ was quite likely that of having been killed and eaten by the same person telling the tale. All game is fair game to the hungry and ‘bush beef’ is not an unknown meat around Naguema. The infant baboon had wandered into a mud hut alone and no one knew quite what to do with it. Only the rich buy milk for their children; no one rich or poor would squander money on milk for a monkey.
We gave him some watered-down condensed milk in a syringe and he guzzled it. After which, every hour or so, we gave him a little more. He was sweet and cuddly, clingy, and traumatized. At a certain point, Lolly put him on the ground and the baby primate transformed into what looked like an enraged, hairy tarantula, screaming and shrieking. Every time he was held, he was a surrogate dozy baby. But every time he was put down, he went berserk. Suffering the indignity of being peed and shat on by a monkey, Lolly kept him with her all night. By morning, he had gained enough strength to sit up more and pay attention, but he still did not have the strength to climb. By the afternoon, Pacino had recovered enough to be convinced that he had the strength to climb at least around Lolly’s torso. As a result, he kept falling, and catching him became quite tricky. At one point we both missed and he fell on the floor and knocked his head. A large bump formed and turned blue.
As the days passed, the joys of motherhood began to pall and Lolly decided she could not have him running around her bed from four every morning, jumping on her neck and face and clawing at her hair in his efforts to master climbing. For daytime, we concocted a sling, and for night-time we rigged him up a big basket with a lid. As the early riser, it fell to me to rescue Pacino from the basket each morning at around 4.30 and feed him.
Having first imprinted on Lolly and persuaded himself that she was his mother and protector, Pacino made a fickle switch and began to attach himself to me. Time-consuming as he was, I found his company charming, that is, when he was neither incontinent nor enraged.
Gradually, he began to venture a few metres away from me to play and explore, always rushing back to grab my leg and cling on if he encountered anything unforeseen or if anyone else approached.
I managed to get a baby’s bottle in Nampula and he calmed down a lot after that, drinking three or four ounces of milk and ground peanuts and then sucking the empty bottle in his sleep. When the bottle broke – almost everything breaks sooner than it would elsewhere because almost everything available is a cheap and poor-quality Taiwanese or Chinese replica of something else – we found an empty quarter-litre Travel Gin bottle, which Pacino clutches like a little drunkard. The teat is rock hard and broken so that milk and peanut splash out and half choke him. He has found a way round this by lying down with one cheek on the ground with the bottle flat beside him and thereby pacing his drinking.
Fond as I am of this baby baboon, he was a lot sweeter when he was tiny and afraid, and sleeping for most of the day. Now that he has plumped out and rehydrated, grown muscles and developed all sorts of climbing and jumping skills, he has become the college delinquent. Morripa and the guards tell me that when fully grown – to a height of over one metre – he will be a formidable bodyguard. Meanwhile, he is a miniature simian Dennis the Menace and is both too young to know what he is doing and too young to leave on his own for any length of time.
When not swinging and leaping from pillar to post with varying degrees of success, or stealing bulbs, spoons, lids, pens and anything else he can scamper away with, he spends a great deal of time either clinging to my right calf or clawing his way up and down my clothes, rendering them filthy in the process. He insists on keeping me, his surrogate mother, in his sight.
Apart from his attempts to eat broken glass, wet cement, stones, matches, paint, nails and almost everything he sees, I find his most disconcerting habit is his attempts at affection. Several times a day he goes for what I suppose in monkey terms is a big kiss. For this, Pacino leaps, mouth wide open, up to my face. Each time he goes for the running kiss I have visions of him as a fully grown baboon with a mouth that could pretty much bite my head off, and I cannot receive his endearment in the spirit in which I know it is given. So he leaps and I catch his small body in my fist.
While looking forward to the day when he grasps that it is not a good idea to try and jump out of a moving car’s window or jump off a three-metre-high veranda or down an eight-metre-deep well, or bite Smokey’s (the guard dog’s) nose, or chase chicks when their ferocious hen mother is nearby, or grab scalding hot coffee, we still have our bonding moments at dawn and dusk. As the sun rises, Pacino is so pleased to see me and be released from his monkey house and given his first bottle of the day that he clings happily to the crook of my arm for a quarter of an hour or so.
After that, he lives on adrenalin and circus tricks, which he teaches himself and then shows off. At night, after a frenzied neo-clockwork run around, he always stops abruptly and without any warning falls asleep. One minute he is clambering, slithering and somersaulting over me, and the next he is almost completely limp, just holding on to my shirt with his long delicate fingers, but not holding on enough not to fall off. For these times, I have a capulana sling, which I tie round my waist. Transferring him to his own box bed varies: sometimes he hardly stirs in his sleep; at others he transforms back into the enraged tarantula leaping up and down and screaming in shrill outrage.
The first time I took him to Varanda, he had a fine time playing in the dunes and climbing in bushes until he half leapt, half flew into a thorn tree and got all clingy for the rest of the afternoon. Since I wanted to swim, I dumpe
d him on the beach and ran into the lagoon. He shrieked and ran after me, leaping into the sea. Although he could swim, he did so while crying and swallowed a lot of seawater. Choking and slowly sinking, he had almost reached me when I rescued him. He was more afraid of being abandoned again than he was of drowning.
The next time I went to the beach, I thought he would hate the water after his first experience with it, but he merely clung tightly to me and stayed very still. The lagoon water is tepid and has a gentle current. He closed his eyes and nestled before falling asleep on my shoulder mid-lagoon. We stayed in the water for half an hour and he didn’t stir once. I kept his mouth and nose above the water as I lay on a submerged sandbank, and we spent the quietest time we’ve had together in over a month.
Now, once or twice a week I take him up for a submersion. He gets thoroughly clean and rested and I get the time to remember that he is my dear little friend and not the pain in the neck he keeps trying to be. Morripa assures me he will get easier when he is older. Alas, that will not be for nearly two years. Meanwhile, a year into our partnership, my future bodyguard and I are learning each other’s ways. The workers assure me that one can learn a lot from a monkey. ‘For instance, anything a monkey eats, we can.’
But obviously not yet, because broken glass, wet cement, stones, nails, earth, paint, Coca-Cola lids, all have to be removed from his mouth because Pacino tries to eat anything.
He is going through what Henry James might call his ‘awkward age’. His enormous agility is marred by clumsiness. He shows off and grabs at Atija’s ankles. He knows Atija hates it, and he kept running up to Dona Sofia, full knowing that Sofia hated him.
Bringing up Pacino often overlapped with Mees being away and my feeling lonely. In the evenings, when everyone else has gone to bed, I spend several hours with Pacino, who is less delinquent in the dark. Intuitively, he is afraid of it, stays close to me and manages to resist the temptation to wreck everything in my room. Sometimes I catch myself talking to him as though he could actually understand. Unlike chimpanzees, baboons don’t understand very much human speech. Pacino has managed to grasp his name more, I think, by tone than actual word recognition; he knows when he has gone too far and when I am really cross with him. He never shows any repentance for his acts, but he doesn’t like my being cross with him or rejecting him. Thus when he ate my USP stick and my camera card, stole and chewed my mobile, favourite sunglasses, etc., he was not sorry, just sad.
He has become my companion and I find myself missing my little friend when I am away for anything more than a day. When out for walks, as he runs away and back, students warn me that he might run away and then I would be sorry. I have grown so fond of Pacino that I hope one day he does run back to the wild, but I fear it is unlikely because he was so new born when he came and there are no bare-bummed orange baboons in the Cabaceiras. The local black-faced vervet monkeys are unlikely to break a lifetime’s habit and accept a giant ginger stranger into their tribe.
When he is older, maybe I shall consult with the regulo of Naguema to see if he has any magical suggestions as to what should be done. The regulo is a wise man, and when not farming he solves the problems and settles the disputes of several thousand subjects. On the other hand, maybe putting Pacino’s fate back into the hands of the people of Naguema is not such a good idea, given the local penchant for bush beef.
The college baboon may not be the most intelligent of creatures, and he certainly is not the best behaved, but he does have a little fan club. Foremost among his fans is Jacobo, who came to visit from England and half adopted Pacino. Rather as one would be with a difficult child, I feel grateful to anyone who takes a shine to my little maladjusted friend and can discern his sweet nature under his troublesome acts. Such was Jacobo’s affection for the baby ape that he is formally Pacino’s co-guardian. I like to think that Pacino is aware of this, but (to Lolly’s consternation) I like to think he is aware of many things.
Adamji (another member of Pacino’s fan club) says when Pacino is older he will teach him to be a guard. During his current delinquent phase, I feel there is more chance of teaching me to carry a fifty-kilogram sack of manioc on my head than teaching Pacino to do anything. Watching him day by day, though, it is interesting to see what he can teach himself. For instance, he has now learnt to lift his Travel Gin bottle up and drink it while standing. He can perform somersaults from one branch to another. His learning curve on this one was quite painful to watch as time after time he smashed to the ground until he perfected the action. And he can unlock the door of his monkey house.
He is also extremely telepathic. If I stub my toe or get stung by a wasp, Pacino screams and cowers. What he won’t seem to learn is to walk more by himself, so a lot of our walks through bush, sand and gardens are conducted with Pacino clinging to my right ankle and resting on my foot like a prisoner’s shackle. For the time being it just looks very silly and slows down my pace. If he keeps it up, he will become too heavy for me. When I take him off my foot he does that local thing of transforming: in his case back into an enraged hairy spider, leaping and levitating in a monkey tantrum.
XXVI
Nampula, Capital of the North
THE FIRST TIME I VISITED Nampula, I couldn’t wait to leave. After Maputo, with its stately avenues and Portuguese colonial grandeur, its bars and shops and numerous explorable streets, its bay and its undeniable, if rather sleepy, buzz, Nampula was a big disappointment. Back in 2003, though, it was the only access airport for Ilha and the coast, so the only way to Mossuril was via that characterless, littered, colourful, frantic sprawl of a place. I felt cheated. I had arrived predisposed to like at least some aspects of everywhere I went. And I am a travel writer specializing in the ‘hello birds, hello trees’, experience. I can find a rubbish tip beautiful if I set my mind to it, so why was whatever hidden charm Nampula had eluding me? I was location-scouting and needed to find ‘filmic’ places. I think I have always been harder on Nampula than I probably should be because it disappointed me so greatly at first sight.
That was some years ago. Since then, that first sight has had a serious makeover, together with much of the city centre. It will never be a beauty, but the handful of fine buildings it does have now stand out, and some serious and mostly successful inroads have been made into the litter. There is even a shopping centre now with luxury shops and 3 new four-star hotels.
Over many later visits, I have become quite fond of the city. Sometimes I find this alarming and ask myself what next? If I stay here for another five years, will I develop a taste for chemical Jolly Jus, or start thinking that it is fun to travel on the back of a chapas pick-up truck in the burning sun with thirty other passengers and their luggage?
Am I deluding myself, or have I really found things I like about Nampula? Objectively, I know that no future tourists are likely to ask themselves: ‘Where shall I go for my summer holiday this year? Shall I go to Bali, Capri or Goa, Capetown, Mombassa or Maputo, or shall I go back to Nampula?’
It doesn’t have tourist charm, but it does have some hidden charms and it is interesting for short spells of time. For people living in its province, it has the obvious attraction of being the place where you can buy things, and do things not to be bought or done anywhere else for a very wide radius. Living in Mossuril District, I have to go to Nampula sometimes, whether I like it or not. It is where the airport and airline office is, and the car hire, and the train station. It is where there are actual doctors and a proper hospital. It is where chemists’ shops have a choice of pharmaceuticals. All government offices are there, from the car registry to the immigration office. All the provincial heads of department are there: from culture to health, education to environment. Most of the banks are there and the moneychangers. All the hardware stores are there, and the food stores, the proper markets and shops.
We can buy so little locally that it would be impossible, say, to restore a building without importing materials from Nampula. Now that we have our market gar
den, we can manage to eat reasonably well by shopping in Mossuril District and Ilha and using our own produce. Before we had the garden, though, the food situation was bleak and we had to top up at least once a fortnight in Nampula.
All the basic urban amenities Nampula has I find useful but I don’t consider them reasons to like or dislike a city. We don’t like Jaguars or Audis or Ferraris because they have wheels: they are cars, cars are meant to have wheels, so any car judgement has to start after standard criteria have been fulfilled. It is the same with cities: they can’t get on the Beauty Map or even on the Towns of Interest list by having shops and banks, filling stations and medical facilities. The bottom line is that they are there making the place a city in the first place. Otherwise, like Pompeii, it would be on the Map of Ruins.
When it comes to cities, my standards are high – no doubt from having lived in Italy for twenty years. For me, it is Ilha that has beauty, not Nampula; but I know people who hate Ilha and think it a dirty dump and who find Nampula aesthetically pleasing. I am giving my impressions here; on matters of taste, they cannot be judgements. Architecturally, Nampula has its vermilion Museum of Ethnicity, an externally pleasing cathedral, a Government House and a street of pretty, faded villas on the Station Road. The rest is not really to my taste. I find Florence more attractive than Milton Keynes, but if others don’t, vive la différence!
Nampula does have one selling point over and above the call of duty as an urban centre and capital of the north; and it is a selling point. It has a huge local market that people flock to from a radius of 200 kilometres. On Saturdays and Sundays all roads to Nampula are full of mostly barefoot people trudging along with vast bundles on their heads: baskets, rush mats, wooden furniture, wooden planks, doors, cooking pots, water holders, jerry cans, capulanas and dozens of mysterious bundles the contents of which will only be revealed at the fair (feira).
Mozambique Mysteries Page 27