Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  Their reactions didn’t inspire me with confidence. Surely even European soldiers who had had no experience of war for fifty years were aware that wars maimed and killed and destroyed? And as for the huts, didn’t they know that this was traditional Southern African architecture, as well as being environmentally friendly?

  “If we’re attacked,” I said, giving O’D my gloomy assessment of the Italians’ military prowess, “it’s my opinion that they’ll all cut and run. Or hoist a white flag of surrender above their tents.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” he told me. “They’re the Alpini, the best mountain fighting unit in Italy.”

  “Is that so …” I said thoughtfully. “Now why do you think they sent the Alpini to a country that’s mostly flat?”

  Although the UN soldiers were upset by the state of the Mozambicans, their compassionate feelings towards the people were mixed with another emotion as well … fear. Tensely holding their rifles at the ready in case of attack, they patrolled up and down the Beira Corridor Road in their white UN vehicles.

  When no attacks came from the war-weary Mozambicans, the soldiers stopped worrying about their safety and began to grow bored. To keep them occupied during the long, hot, dusty days. their officers thought up things for them to do. Some of these things included setting up roadblocks on the Tabex farm’s little dirt roads without telling anybody and as these roadblocks were set up around corners and out of sight without any warning signs at all, they were quite dangerous, as O’D and I found out one early morning.

  O’D has always been a fast driver and so we were bowling along at quite a pace when we rounded a corner and unexpectedly found ourselves about to smash straight into several white UN vehicles which had been parked in a zigzag pattern on the narrow road to close it.

  As if it wasn’t enough that O’D and I were a split second away from being mangled in a mess of metal, the sight of our pickup heading straight towards them shocked the young UN soldiers and they reacted by raising their rifles and pointing them at us as if about to shoot!

  Unable to stop, the only thing O’D could think of doing to avoid a disaster was to swerve our pickup in a violent chicane-like manoeuvre in and out between the UN vehicles. This manoeuvre was so sharp and in such a tight space that at one stage the pickup almost overturned, lifting up in the air on the driver’s side while we drove along on the left front and back wheels on my side. Just as I thought the car was going to roll, it thumped back onto all four wheels again in a cloud of dust and we were out of the tangle of vehicles and away. We didn’t stop because we really didn’t have anything to say to the UN at their roadblock but from that day on and until the UN left Mozambique, O’D drove warily and at a much-reduced speed along the farm roads.

  After practising their road blocking abilities on all of us, the UN decided to give an airing to some of the equipment they had brought with them and hadn’t had the occasion to use.

  Having prepared themselves for all contingencies – sending mountain fighters to a flat country - they now decided to test the performance of the amphibious personnel carrier they had brought to Mozambique during the worst drought in decades. As all the rivers were bone dry and even Lake Chicamba’s water level was running low, the UN’s eyes alighted on a small stretch of water conveniently close to home … the Tabex farm dam.

  Clive, one of the Tabex farmers, was driving past the dam when he saw the crowd of UN soldiers who had gathered to watch the carrier’s trial run on top of the muddy water and he stopped his pickup to watch.

  The personnel carrier started up and moved towards the water. Then, instead of driving buoyantly over the surface, it took a slow downward plunge and ploughed towards the muddy bottom of the dam until only its antennas were visible. While the brown water bubbled and gurgled, the submerged carrier’s occupants shot to the surface, muddy and gasping and entwined with long, slimy weeds.

  Clive knew the UN were embarrassed because when he drove home laughing his head off to get his camera and returned five minutes later to click off some pictures, soldiers shouted at him quite rudely - “No photo! No photo! Gettaway from here!” This was UN business and he had no authority to take photographs of their efforts to retrieve an amphibious personnel carrier out of its watery grave.

  In April 1994, the Italians based on the Tabex farm pulled out their tent pegs and prepared to go back home to Europe. Colonel Zambelli, their charming commander, sent out invitations to a farewell lunch at Chimoio Airport and we all went along to say goodbye to them.

  O’D and I sat at a table with Alfredo, an Italian game hunter who wore his blonde hair long, down to his shoulders, and some government officials, one of whom was Weng San, the large and burly Commandant of the Manica Province Police.

  The food was far from memorable and when the wine ran out halfway through the meal, we all looked forward to the tropical exotic fruit salad, which the menu promised was drenched in rum. Alas, the fruit salad never made its appearance and for the next two hours we were all forced to listen in complete sobriety to interminable and identical self-congratulatory speeches from the UN and Mozambican government officials, first in English, then in Portuguese and finally in Italian. The whole room fidgeted with the tedium and boredom of it all. In desperation, Commandant Weng San grabbed an empty bottle of wine and shook the few remaining drops into his empty wine glass. He raised the glass to his lips and gave us a doleful look. The drops weren’t even enough to wet his tongue.

  Mozambique had been a success story for the UN, although this was due more to the country’s war-weariness and desire for peace than anything else. With their departure, we were left without foreign military protection. We were all on our own now. At first, this was a little scary but as the peace looked as if it was going to hold, everyone began to think of the future.

  I also began to think of the future and of returning to Arrojela. We had saved quite a bit of money working for Tabex, enough to start all over again in Portugal, and Arrojela by this time had recovered from the fire and had regained its beauty during the years of our absence. Mozambique meant nothing to me and I yearned to go back to my own home.

  Unbeknown to me, however, O’D had been making some plans of his own and they didn’t include returning to Arrojela.

  He had met a man called Caetano Martins and they had spent many evenings at the Sports Clube, talking about Mozambique and its opportunities now that the country was no longer at war.

  Caetano had been a Captain in the Mozambican Army during the civil war and had travelled to North Korea, where they had trained him in various forms of fighting, including karate. When he had left the Army, he had got a job at Tabex as a their General Foreman.

  From a surprisingly small family consisting merely of a mother, a father and a sister, Caetano had been very well educated. His father, who had worked for the Administration Department at Catandica during Portuguese Colonial days, had seen to it that both Caetano and his sister Romana had received the best of the schooling available to them at the time. With the war now at an end, Caetano’s enthusiasm for the future knew no bounds.

  When Caetano told O’D that the timber business was definitely something to look into, O’D’s imagination was caught. Already fascinated by the country and its customs, he decided to go into partnership with Caetano. They would fell trees, set up a sawmill, turn the planks and beams into fine furniture for export AND grow small hardwood saplings from seed to replace the trees they felled.

  The first I knew of this, was the day we were driving into town to choose some films from Chimoio’s tiny video shop. We were just approaching the roundabout with the mural celebrating the Mozambican’s victory over the Portuguese when O’D suddenly said “There’s Caetano!” and pulled the pickup over to the side of the road.

  “Who’s Caetano?” I asked.

  “My partner,” O’D told me, watching a tall, neatly dressed young Mozambican of about thirty lope across the road towards us on long legs.

  “Partn
er? You never told me anything about this!” I was horrified. Since we’d been in Mozambique, we had met several foreigners whose Mozambican partners had tricked them out of the businesses they had financed and taken them over for themselves.

  “Of course I told you,” O’D insisted.

  “O’D Pixley,” I cried, “you did not!”

  “I’m sure I did.”

  “We’re going to lose everything we’ve got!”

  “Caetano’s different,” O’D replied.

  “Oh, yes?” I asked tartly.

  But when Caetano greeted me, with a funny little bow, and I looked into his open face, I could see that there was something very unusual about him. Here was a man who wore his heart on his face and it shone with intelligence and humour, kindness and another quality rarely found in our fellow humans - integrity. O’D was right about Caetano. He was different.

  It was Caetano who found the old Magalhaes sawmill in the Nhamacoa. When the Portuguese owners had left sometime in the 1970’s, a Frelimo co-operative had taken it over for a while. Then, there had been some kind of gun battle with Renamo and the co-operative had fled, leaving Renamo in control of this part of the country.

  For the next fifteen years or so, the sawmill had lain silent and the forest in the Nhamacoa had been left untouched by humans. Left to itself, nature had flourished.

  Small black-faced Vervets with powder-blue bums swung through the trees, baboons barked and Night Apes screeched their horrible cries after the sun had gone down.

  In the enormous red mahogany trees on the banks of the Nhamacoa River, Turacos feathered in olive green or blue, with a breathtaking satiny sheen of red under their wings, purred their breathy purrs and Kingfishers flashed blue and orange. The secretive Green Coucals nested in the thick undergrowth and hornbills, heavy with enormous casques on top of their bills, crash-landed clumsily onto branches. This was home to the Green Woodhoopoe with its wild, maniacal laughter, the aptly named Gorgeous Bush Shrike and the golden voiced Oriole. The Wattle-eyed flycatcher made its nests in the mango trees and the black and red Paradise flycatcher trailed its long tail across the sky. Lizard Buzzards with their stripy chests swooped down on their prey and the rare Vanga flitted through the Umbila trees.

  A birdwatcher’s delight, the Nhamacoa was also filled with other creatures which were more threatening. Pythons wended their majestic way through the long grass and there were the deadly black and green mambas, the Gaboon adders, the puff-adders and the Mozambican Spitting Cobras that flared out their hoods and shot their poisonous venom straight into your eyes ... as O’D was to find out for himself one day.

  There were large hairy spiders, emerald green caterpillars with little scarlet horns and black circles on their backs, lovely dusky pink moths and revolting shiny blue-black centipedes, scorpions and the ubiquitous green stink bugs.

  Although the Nhamacoa teemed with life, all this was hidden from me the first time I saw it. It revealed its enchantment only to those who made their home in it.

  On one blisteringly hot Saturday afternoon, O’D and I went with Caetano to see the old Magalhaes sawmill. We went in the Tabex pickup and drove along forty kilometres of dreadful dirt road. The road was so corrugated and bone-rattling that I had to hang on to the handle above my window with both hands to stop myself from being thrown around.

  Leaving a swirling cloud of choking red dust behind us, we travelled through sparsely populated bush until Caetano, who was in the back, hammered on the roof of the pickup. O’D slowed to a stop and Caetano leaned down towards his open window.

  “This is Lica,” he said and pointed to the left, where there was just a suggestion of a track leading into a mass of grass. “Turn down here and go on for about another six kilometres.”

  O’D turned into the track and the pickup disappeared right into what seemed like a vast ocean of tall thick yellow elephant grass. Claustrophobia immediately overwhelmed me. We were drowning … drowning in a suffocating, smothering, sea of grass. The stuff rose high up over our heads, crashed against our windscreen, began to clog up our radiator and whipped in through our open windows. Despite the heat and the feeling of being boxed in, I wound up my window just in case other things besides grass made their way into the car.

  O’D drove slowly, forcing the pickup along the narrow track that hadn’t seen a vehicle for years. When the track petered out at a small clearing, we stopped. Here, a man wearing a torn shirt and ragged shorts was sitting under a tree, patiently waiting for us. This was Joaquim, our Renamo guide whom Caetano had told us knew the Nhamacoa like the back of his hand. We needed someone who knew the area well because landmines had been planted here during the civil war.

  Caetano jumped off the back of the pickup, his hair no longer black but thickly coated with the red dust of the road. O’D and I got out of the front, also dusty but not as much as Caetano. Our tattered guide stood up and came towards us.

  “Boa tarde, Joaquim. Com esta?”

  “Aah … Boa tarde,” he replied, holding out a hand in greeting to Caetano and then to O’D. “Estou bem”.

  Joaquim led us down a tiny footpath through the long grass and we followed in close single file. Fearful of treading on a mine and getting blown to bits, Caetano carefully put his size twelve feet exactly where Joaquim’s hard, dusty bare feet had trodden. O’D followed Caetano, placing his size eight feet in Caetano’s footprints and I brought up the rear, with my size five feet walking in O’D’s prints. The sun blazed down on us and the only sound to be heard was the sound of our breathing and the dry rustling of the long grass as our bodies brushed against it … swish … swish … swish …

  Without warning, Joaquim stopped abruptly and we all bumped into each other, like a row of falling dominos.

  Caetano turned around towards us, with a great beam of excitement on his face. “The old sawmill of Magalhaes!” he announced triumphantly.

  I looked around, with disbelief. “Is this it?”

  Once, the Magalhaes sawmill had been the largest and busiest sawmill in Manica Province but after years of war there wasn’t much evidence of this and now it could only be described as more than derelict.

  “Look at that old steam boiler!” O’D exclaimed with awe, walking over to examine a monstrously large and rusty contraption made out of thick steel plates and huge bolts that had been built in England sometime in the 1920’s or 30’s. “Getting that thing down here through the bush all those years ago must have taken some doing!”

  From the state of the place, it was obvious that the only reason the old boiler was still intact was because it had been too heavy to move and impossible to dismantle. Everything else that could have been unbolted, taken apart, torn down, stripped and carted away, had long since vanished.

  All that was left of the saws were their heavy metal tables and all that remained of the four houses just faintly visible through the long grass were their walls, blackened with the smoke of forest fires and the mould of rain. Wooden doorframes and window frames had been hacked out of the plaster and electrical cable and plumbing pipes had been chopped out of the walls.

  “Why …” I wondered aloud, “why didn’t the people just live in these houses instead of taking them apart and leaving them in ruins?”

  “Because they’re superstitious country people,” Caetano, who lived in town in Chimoio and who was superstitious himself, explained. “They were afraid the houses were still inhabited by the spirits of the mzungu Portuguese who once lived in them.”

  “We’ll have to start all over again,” I said, already feeling burdened by the immensity of the task, “right from rock bottom.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” O’D told me. “We’ll employ people. And the first person we’re going to need is a mechanic. Someone who is used to the bush and not very fussy about how he lives.” He exchanged a thoughtful look with Caetano.

  “Someone like … Chuck?” Caetano asked.

  “Yes,” O’D agreed. “Chuck.”

  “
Oh no, not Chuck!” I exclaimed. “Not him! He’s the reason we’re standing here in this wilderness … in the middle of nowhere … the back of beyond!”

  Chuck was a Zimbabwean who could have played a bum in a Spaghetti Western without even having to take acting lessons, someone who didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, and as for his table manners … eating a meal with Chuck was like dining with a prehistoric cave man. And as if that wasn’t enough, he was indeed the reason we were starting off our new venture in the Nhamacoa.

  Some months before, O’D and Caetano had set their hearts on another sawmill conveniently very close to Chimoio. This was the Matsinho sawmill, which came complete with working machinery and was already operating. However, while O’D and Caetano had been negotiating with the government department IAC for the lease of Matsinho, Chuck had interfered and the deal, which had been almost in the bag, had fallen through.

  Oh, no, not Chuck … not him!

  “We really haven’t got any choice,” O’D told me. “Chuck’s the only half decent mechanic in the whole of Manica Province.”

  While O’D stayed on at the Tabex farm for the next few months, Chuck, our new manager/mechanic set to work to prepare the old Magalhaes sawmill for its new lease of life.

  And it was while Chuck was cutting eucalypt poles and grass to make a roof for the main house and uncovering ancient septic tanks, that O’D got into trouble in Mozambique … big trouble!

  CHAPTER THREE

  AN ENGLISH JAILBIRD

  November 1994

  We were sitting at the table in our house on the Tabex farm on a hot Friday night and eating one of Biasse’s fiery curries, a dish more suitable for the icy Novembers of northern Europe than for the steamy, sweltering Novembers of a Mozambican summer, when O’D broke his news. “I’m driving down to the sawmill in the Nhamacoa tomorrow,” he told me. “I’ll be leaving very early in the morning.”