Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  I was brushing up my school French and Patrice, who was charming and wore a pink chiffon scarf rakishly tied around his neck, was supplementing his income by giving me lessons at five pounds a lesson.

  My lessons took place in Patrice’s house where he still lived with his parents. His mother, a woman with sharp black eyes, black hair and an olive complexion, viewed me with an equally black and deep suspicion, convinced that I had intentions towards her son and that these intentions were not good.

  No doubt her suspicions had been fuelled by Patrice’s choice of a location for my tuition. In the house for my first lesson, he had waved a hand towards some dark wooden stairs and had tried out his French-accented English on me. “Pleeze climb zeese banisters up to my bedrrroom,” he had told me.

  As we had climbed the stairs, I had pointed out the difference between banisters and stairs. If Patrice had been embarrassed by his faux pas, he had hidden it well. “My English girlfriend from Kent went into an electrical shop the other day to buy a fuse,” he had informed me with a laugh. “Instead of asking the assistant for a ‘fusible’, she mispronounced the word and asked him for a ‘fusil bleu’ – a blue gun!”

  In his bedroom, we sat demurely side by side on two hard wooden chairs in front of a desk facing a blank wall. Books on grammar lay open in front of us, full of the conjugations of the verbs Patrice was drumming into my head. Although learning all these verbs was extremely tedious, my lessons were enjoyably enlivened from time to time by sudden and unexpected interruptions.

  These interruptions took place when Patrice’s mother could no longer contain all the suspicions she was harbouring in her breast and rushed wildly into the room, flinging the closed door open so violently that it would bounce against the wall. Always hoping to catch us out by the unexpectedness of her appearance and always foiled when she found us doing nothing except sitting innocently in front of a desk, she would saunter around the room, trying to think up flimsy excuses for her explosive entry. Had Patrice remembered to put his white shirt into the laundry? Did he have any idea where she had left her car keys?

  I was settling down nicely in France when our ordered lives began to slip out of our control and we began to take our first steps towards Mozambique.

  It was a chance remark, or so I thought, that brought us to Arrojela in Portugal. Arrojela, which was to be our training ground where we would be taught to do certain things to prepare us for what was to come, a sort of halfway house to gently ease us out of the comfort and safety of the developed part of the world and into the primitive, dangerous lifestyle that was waiting for us in an African forest.

  But although many of the things that happened to us at Arrojela were foreshadows of our future, there was nothing that could really prepare us for all the shocks and hair-raising experiences we went through in the Nhamacoa Forest. After all, who in England would ever see a woman turn into a demon in front of their eyes, who, even in Portugal, would open their car bonnet and find a Spitting Cobra coiled up on the engine and waiting to shoot its venom into their face, and who in the West would ever find themselves threatened by a fat, corrupt Judge wearing a pale pistachio green suit?

  No, nothing could prepare anyone for that sort of thing!

  And nothing could ever have prepared us for the truly dreadful experience of having to watch a lovely indigenous hardwood forest, filled with the most beautiful birds and butterflies, tree orchids, buck and monkeys, being completely destroyed all around us and being absolutely powerless to stop it from happening. The Nhamacoa wasn’t the Amazon and so nobody out there in the Western World cared.

  Our journey towards Mozambique began one day when we were back in London. One afternoon, during a conversation with my sister-in-law, Caroline, she told us about her recent holiday in the Algarve. Her description of the people and the countryside was so glowing that it caught our imagination and O’D and I decided to go and have a look for ourselves. This was in 1985, before Portugal became part of the EU and lost its charm.

  Arriving in the Algarve on a sunshiny summer’s day, we were enchanted by what we found and when we chanced upon Arrojela, we were lost.

  We bought Arrojela because there was something about it that reminded me of Africa. Perhaps it was because the sky was the same blue as the blue of the African skies or perhaps it was the stillness, broken only by the sound of the hot October breeze rustling silkily through the leaves of the enormous cork oak tree that stood not far from the dilapidated old mud brick house. But whatever it was, when I first saw Arrojela, I felt as if I had finally come home.

  Arrojela was seven hectares of two hills and a valley, set conveniently only 19 kilometres from the bustling little town of Portimao and halfway between the sea and the Monchique Mountains. There was a stream and springs, orange orchards and olive groves. The air was fresh and clean and scented with the wild herbs that grew on the hillsides. It was beautiful, very beautiful.

  It was this very beauty that blinded us to the fact that there were certain important and necessary things that were missing from the old mud brick house, such as electricity, running water, plumbing, a bathroom, a lavatory and a telephone. There were large empty spaces on the ancient tiled roof and the floors in every room were hard-packed dirt. Plaster crumbled off the walls, there was no glass in the windows and the doors and wooden shutters hung askew on their hinges. The house was a wreck! Were we nuts?

  Fortunately, Remy Bongarde, the gorgeously good looking Swiss Estate Agent who had sold Arrojela to us, had also had the foresight to introduce us to Jan and Lia Kosterman, the Dutch couple who lived at the beginning of the dirt track leading up to our house.

  They overwhelmed us with warmth and took us under their wing. Jan, who was already old and in his seventies, became our mentor, strengthening and reviving us with numerous ‘slokkies’ of brandy and giving us the benefit of his expert advice and experience when it came to providing our own electricity and water with generators and pumps.

  To begin with, he told us, we should build a temporary tower next to the house, with a water tank on top and then fill the tank by pumping water up from the stream. Once we had done this, we could fill a large drum with water and heat it up over a wood fire. This would give us hot water for bathing every day.

  When O’D had built the tower and wrapped it in huge sheets of black plastic for privacy, it became our rather dark and murky bathroom. Here, I bathed in a small tin tub and O’D washed his workday dust away under an Algarvean shower.

  This shower was a remarkable piece of equipment and showed the ingenuity of the Algarveans in their slow advancement towards modern plumbing technology. It consisted of a large galvanised bucket with a plug in the bottom and dozens of holes sprouting out everywhere! With the addition of hot water and a pull on the plug, this delightful contraption gave such luxurious showers and worked so well that all these years later I wish we had one right now, here in Mozambique.

  Finding people to help renovate the house wasn’t difficult. Jan brought Francisco, his strong and stocky old gardener and a bricklayer called Dominge.

  Dominge was tall and swarthy and looked a bit like Lucky Luke, the French cartoon cowboy. He didn’t speak a word of English and so, at lunchtime, when we sat around the table eating bread and cheese and olives in our tumbledown kitchen, he taught us to speak Portuguese. He did this by picking up a fork and saying “garfo!” and expecting us to repeat the word perfectly. Pointing to a knife, “faca!” A plate, “prato!”

  Dominge was the only Algarvean we ever met who didn’t drink any alcohol at all. This, we discovered later on from his mother, was because she had become so fed up with his drunken binges that she secretly put a certain herb into his black morning coffee that made him throw up instantly whenever a drop of alcohol passed his lips.

  This secret herb not only had a physical affect on him but, it seemed to us, it may also have been responsible for some of Dominge’s other habits, which were more than a little quirky to say the least.


  Once, while we were eating our usual lunchtime meal of bread and cheese and olives, Dominge noticed that his wristwatch had stopped working. In an attempt to get it going again, he took the watch off and shook it around violently in the air by its strap for a few minutes. When this still didn’t do the trick, he opened it up and began to tinker around among its small parts with his penknife. Finally, with a face darkening like a thundercloud and his black moustache quivering, he pushed back his chair and stood up.

  “I’m going outside to fix this watch,” he told us, grittily.

  Wondering how Dominge was going to repair his watch outside when he couldn’t repair it inside, O’D followed him.

  Outside, Dominge put the watch down on top of a large boulder and picked up a hammer … raised the hammer up in the air … brought it down … again and again … until he had smashed his watch to smithereens.

  Back in his chair in the kitchen again, O’D said, “Remind me never to leave my watch lying around when Dominge is here.”

  Francisco also enlivened our lunches. Apart from teaching us how to plant tomatoes, fava beans and potatoes and flood-irrigate them with little canals, he also taught us Algarvean poetry and Algarvean history, with himself as the main character. The poems were very short because Algarveans don’t like anything involving a lot of effort and were about a subject very dear to their hearts – food and drink.

  “Laranja na guela,” (Orange in the throat,) Francisco would declaim, popping an orange segment into his mouth and chewing it ...

  “Vinho depois dela!” (Wine after this!) he would end, throwing an entire tumbler of dark red wine down his throat.

  Our history lessons centred on the period of the dastardly despotic ruler, Salazar, because this was the time when Francisco had been young. Life had been harsh and in order to earn a bit of money, he had laboured on the estate of a rich landowner in the Alentejo for the mere pittance of six escudos a month. Imagine, SIX escudos! Here, cruel Overseers with whips had stood over Francisco and his fellow labourers, giving them a lash every now and then, to make sure that the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.

  Still, there had been time for fun. He remembered dancing in the big main room in this very house we were busy fixing up - it was seventy five years old, ten years older than he was - and after the dance, stumbling along on his way home in the black night, he had fallen head first into a well! Of course, this would never have happened if he hadn’t drunk so much of that local aguadente, medronho … and talking about medronho … had he ever told us about the time he had mistakenly donned his wife’s cuecas? (knickers?) No? Well, this had happened one night when, in the dark, he had got out of bed and struggled into a pair of underpants for a hasty trip to a bush (Algarvean peasant houses didn’t have lavatories). He had hazily wondered why the underpants had been so strangely tight all of a sudden but it was only after he’d jumped out of the bedroom window and almost broken his neck because of the way they had tangled and constrained his leg movements that he’d realised what he’d put on!

  We’d been working on the house for about two months when a very peculiar thing happened. It occurred after O’D and Dominge had just finished putting new red terracotta tiles on the front half of the roof and although we naturally didn’t know it then, it was to be our introduction to … something … that we would meet again in the Nhamacoa Forest, that would be waiting for us there almost exactly ten years later.

  When the last tile was laid, O’D and Dominge climbed off the roof and down the ladder, leaving behind the long plank they had used to stand on while they worked. Down on the ground, we all stood looking up at the roof, examining the straightness of the tiles and admiring the house’s new look. And then, out of nowhere on this hot, still, windless day, there was a furious rushing sound and a strong gust of wind lifted the plank up, swept it off the roof and sent it hurtling through the air straight at O’D!

  It happened so fast that he only had time to put his left arm up in front of his face to ward off the flying wooden missile. The plank hit his wrist with a glancing blow and then fell to the ground.

  Not a sound came out from between O’D’s lips but his face turned paper-white with the pain from the blow.

  “Are you alright?” I asked, shocked.

  “I think so,” he said, supporting his wrist with his right hand. “I don’t think anything’s broken.”

  “Strange. That was so strange,” I said. “It was almost as if … something … picked up that plank and aimed it straight at YOU!”

  O’D flexed his fingers gingerly, and dismissed the incident. “Strange, yes. But freak accidents do happen.”

  I didn’t dismiss it. For one thing, apart from that solitary strong gust of wind, the day had gone back to being still, without even a hint of a breeze. Another thing that made me uneasy was that as the plank had flown off the roof towards O’D, I had, for a split second, sensed a shimmer of malevolence, of hatred, in the air. I was sure I hadn’t imagined it. And then, there had been plenty of open space for the plank to travel but it had headed directly towards O’D. If he hadn’t put his arm up to protect himself and it had hit him in the face, he would have been terribly injured, or even killed … Could the old mud-brick house be haunted? Oh, what a ghastly thought!

  “Of course it’s not haunted,” O’D laughed later at my fears. “This house has got a lovely feel about it.”

  It took us two years to finish the work on the old mud-brick house and during this time we had quite a few visits from family and friends. They were remarkable people. They slept in rubble-filled rooms and used our murky bathroom in the black tower. They were fascinated by our Algarvean shower and made us photograph it at work while they stood under it with cascades of soapy water tumbling over their heads and shoulders. They picked oranges straight off our trees and ate so many of them that they got bad diarrhoea from overdosing on Vitamin C. They fell into the stream. They even spent some time in the grim-faced, black-clad Mrs. Ventura Pinto’s blue-painted bar at the end of our track, eating Tremocos (Lupins) and drinking Cristal and Sagres beer with sun-wrinkled Algarvean men wearing old felt hats.

  Although the interior of Mrs. Pinto’s blue bar was as stark and as unwelcoming as herself, when you got to know the place, it was where unusual and sometimes even heart-stopping events took place. This was where Rui had once had an argument with Luis and in the heat of the moment, when passions had run high and the blood had boiled in their veins, Rui had pulled out a pistol and had shot Luis right in the groin – the groin, of all spots to be shot! The shooting and wounding had been hushed up, of course. No need to call the police and to have them poking their interfering noses into things that didn’t concern them.

  O’D, too, often had a few surprises when he stopped off at the blue bar for a beer and a chat. One evening, after a bibulous couple of hours, he climbed into his Land Rover, which he had left parked under the trees not far from Mrs. Pinto’s front door, and started off on the drive along the track back home. During the drive, the Land Rover’s performance was uncharacteristically sluggish and this puzzled him. He wondered what on earth could be wrong. It was almost, he thought, as if the brakes were binding, as if some heavy weight was dragging on the vehicle. As he turned a corner on the track, the Land Rover slewed to one side and in the rear view mirror he caught a glimpse in the moonlight of a large dark shape with long pointy ears that appeared to be following him!

  “What the …?” he asked himself.

  Startled, and with his heart pounding, he put his head out of the window for a better look and discovered that the dark shape was not following the Land Rover but was in fact attached to it, attached to it and resisting this attachment by digging its heels into the ground! Slowing to a halt, O’D steeled himself to get out and there, tied to the back of the vehicle by its reins was a plump grey donkey.

  Although all donkeys look the same to everyone except their owners, O’D immediately recognised this donkey when he put his hand out to give it a
calming pat and it bared its big dirty yellow teeth and gnashed them irritably at him. He recognised it because he had on several occasions watched the donkey walking along a narrow path behind its owner, Old Manel, and baring these very same teeth to impatiently give Old Manel’s skinny bottom a couple of nips to hurry him along. Besides all this, he had only a few minutes before bought Old Manel a glass of Mr. Pinto’s homemade medronho in the blue bar. Obviously Old Manel had now taken up the new habit of carelessly using the back of the Land Rover as a hitching post at the blue bar and unaware of this, O’D had accelerated away from the bar, dragging his reluctant donkey half way home with him.

  Old Manel was our nearest Algarvean neighbour and lived at the bottom of our hill in a tiny, crumbling mud-brick house. At night, he slept wrapped up in a dirty grey blanket on a bed made out of twigs and branches and during the day, he worked in his fields, growing sweet potatoes and looking after his small flock of sheep. He was poor, as poor as any poverty-stricken African but despite this, he was surprisingly happy.

  Our visitors liked Old Manel. They smiled back at the enchanting toothless smile on his impish face and when he held it out, they shook his outstretched friendly hand. They were also pretty darn quick though, I can tell you, to rush off as soon as they decently could to wash their hands after touching his. I didn’t blame them at all for doing this, because I used to do the very same thing. The state of Old Manel’s two grimy hands deeply ingrained with the earth of his fields and his ten dirt-encrusted black fingernails was a shocking sight to people who lived in cities.

  Although our visitors put up with all sorts of things, their courage failed when it came to O Doido, ‘The Crazy One’.

  Doido was another of our nearest Algarvean neighbours and he was a lumbering, blocky, middle-aged man who looked after his brother Antonio’s cows and goats. During the day, he wandered around the hills and valleys while the animals grazed; at night, he slept amongst them in an old barn, and from the strong noxious odour of manure that hung ripely around his large figure, I would say that his ideas of hygiene were on a par with Old Manel’s. In fact, I might even go further to say that from the state of Doido’s spiky, greasy, brown hair (which, now I come to think of it, appears to be the height of Western fashion) I also had the feeling that Doido didn’t even own a bar of soap and thought that water was only for drinking.