Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  The afternoon wore on. There was no word from Maciel. The sun began to sink down below the horizon. Dusk fell. And then …

  A dilapidated Toyota pickup drove around the corner, past barns and tractors and pulled up next to the house. A door clanged.

  A wild haired and filthy man with staring eyes walked up the verandah steps and into the sitting room.

  I flung myself at him and burst into tears.

  In the morning, Biasse put breakfast on the table. “Good morning, Master,” he said, placing a dish of sliced paw paw down next to the toast. He always called O’D ‘Master’ as if O’D was a slave owner on a plantation in the American Deep South. His wrinkled face was inscrutable and he seemed unaffected by the fact that he was now working for an ex-convict.

  O’D’s crime was still a mystery to me. Immediately on his arrival back home, he had washed off the prison dirt and germs in a hot bath, which I had lavishly filled with half a bottle of Dettol as a disinfectant. Then while I had taken his discarded clothes, including his handkerchief, to Biasse and told him to burn them in the boiler fire, O’D had dried himself and had fallen into a deep sleep on the bed until morning.

  “So,” I said, while O’D spread Zimbabwe’s Gold Star Original Syrup over a slice of toast. “What jokes did you tell the police that made them put you in jail?”

  At the mention of the word ‘jail’, O’D looked up from his toast and his eyes glazed over with the thousand-yard stare again. I made a mental note not to use that word for a while.

  “There were roadblocks all the way back from Lica,” he began slowly, “and I got a bit fed up with having to stop and start and get out of the car over and over again. When I was stopped just after Chimoio, the police made me get out of the pickup again and asked me what I had in the open back. As it was plainly obvious to anyone who wasn’t blind that I only had five tyres in the back, I said to them ‘What does it look like I’ve got? Hand grenades? Bombs? Rockets? ”

  “Oh, dear,” I said.

  “Yes,” O’D agreed. “They didn’t like that. They were grim to begin with but now they became grimmer.”

  He chewed on his toast for a while, reflecting on his next bad move.

  “It got worse when I noticed that one of the policemen had very red, blood-shot eyes and asked him if he was drunk. All hell broke lose then and they arrested me.”

  “Gosh,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  “Yes,” O’D agreed again, and drank some coffee before continuing.

  “The red-eyed policeman I accused of being drunk turned out to be the Head of Traffic. He was furious. Claimed to be a teetotaller.”

  I was incredulous. A teetotal policeman in Mozambique? How was this possible? They all drank like fish.

  “Anyway,” O’D went on, ‘they hauled me off to the Primeira Esquadra where the Head of Traffic ordered the other police to beat me until I had to be taken to hospital. He told them he would take full responsibility for this.”

  “Ah!” I said, shocked, as images of blows and broken skin and splintered bone rose up in my mind.

  “The police didn’t want to hit me, so one just gave me a token blow across the kidneys with his truncheon.” O’D gave a rueful smile. “It hurt like hell, so I can imagine what it would have been like if they’d all joined in! Then they put me in a small room, took away my belt and shoelaces and interrogated me. After that, they threw me into a cell.”

  “What was it like?” I asked.

  O’D was silent for a while. “If they had jail cells like this in Europe, they wouldn’t have any criminals. It was completely dark, because there weren’t any lights. There was a foul smell of shit. I couldn’t see what was on the floor and because I didn’t want to sit on some excrement, I spent the night standing up and leaning against a wall. In the morning, I discovered there were some holes in the floor for lavatories and that some of the stink was coming from another cell, which they were using as a rubbish dump. The rubbish attracted flies and my cell was full of them. The floor was also crawling with fat white maggots.”

  “Oough …” I said, disgusted. “Thank goodness you never sat down.”

  “I wasn’t alone in the cell,” O’D went on. “There were truck drivers and even a soldier, who had been shot at and then arrested because they had all driven through the barriers. They said they had thought that bandits were manning the roadblocks.”

  “They weren’t wrong,” I muttered.

  O’D ignored me. “There was even a man there who had been arrested and jailed for stealing an egg.” He shook his head in amazement. “Imagine! One egg! I gave him 10000 meticais (about one U.S. dollar) so that he could get out of there. He was out before I was.”

  “That was good of you.” I said.

  “During the night, more and more people were thrown into the cell until it was jam-packed. The cell was so full, that some young boys, who had been arrested for not having Identity papers, leaned against the door and it opened … because the police had forgotten to lock it! Then, in the morning, when the police discovered the open door, they gave all the boys the ‘tatu’ as punishment for attempting to escape.

  “The tatu? What’s that?”

  O’D raised a hand and showed me, by rapping the first set of his knuckles against the top of my head a couple of times.

  “OW!”

  “That wasn’t hard,” he told me. “Imagine how painful that feels when the police use their full force.”

  After breakfast, O’D got into the Toyota to go off to work in Chimoio. “Oh,” he said, leaning out of the window. “I forgot to tell you. Chuck and Eileen are coming over tonight for a shower and a meal.”

  “Okay.” I said. “I’ll tell Biasse to roast the leg of lamb. We can celebrate your release from jail. What a relief it’s all over!”

  “It’s not all over,” O’D told me, as he accelerated away.

  “What? What did you say?” I shouted after him.

  But he was gone.

  Back in the house, I walked into the sitting room and glanced at my charcoal portrait of the zebra on the mantelpiece. I did a double take, and then let out an anguished cry. The zebra appeared to have evaporated overnight, leaving only a faint grey zebra outline on the white paper!

  My cry alerted Biassse and he hurried into the sitting room. “What’s wrong, Madam?” he asked anxiously.

  “My drawing, Biasse. Look! It’s gone!”

  Biasse examined the faint zebra outline and a guilty look bloomed all over his face. He tore his eyes off the paper and shot a quick downward look at one end of a yellow duster that was hanging out of the pocket of his spotlessly white apron.

  “It was the duster, Madam,” he finally and reluctantly admitted. “The duster did it.”

  “Aaah …” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, and went on to tell me how, during his dusting duties, the yellow duster had suddenly taken on a life of its own and had flicked all over my drawing, obliterating it.

  “I’m sorry, Madam.”

  “That’s all right, Biasse,” I said, forcing myself to be calm and kind, although it wasn’t all right at all and I felt more like jumping up and down and having a tantrum. That zebra had been the best drawing I’d ever done of an animal! “Never mind. Just be more careful with that duster in future.”

  “Yes, Madam.”

  “Oh, and before I forget, take the leg of lamb out of the deep freeze and defrost it. Mr. Chuck is coming for supper and we’ll eat it tonight.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHUCK AND EILEEN, AND MITZI, OF COURSE.

  Biasse was basting the lamb in the oven and dusk was falling, when a delightful and chunky little blue Russian lorry called a Gaz, drove slowly up to the house and jerked to a stop by the side of the verandah.

  “No brakes!” Chuck’s cheerful face looked down at us from the window. “We were speeding around that roundabout - you know the one with the mural of the Mozambicans giving the Portuguese Army a thrashing - when I put my foot
down on the brake pedal and … yikes … nothing!” He leaned over towards Eileen in the passenger seat and with a hearty laugh, gave her a poke in the ribs. “Old bag of bones, here, almost went flying out of her window!”

  Eileen opened her door, ignoring Chuck’s ungallant endearment. She was used to it. She picked up the small snuffling Pekinese dog that had been lying on her ample lap during the trip from the sawmill and kissed it several times on top of its furry head, accompanying this shockingly unhygienic action with loud kissing sounds. “Mmptch! Mmptch! Mmptch! Mitzi wasn’t afraid at all, not with her Mum to look after her, were you Meetee-Meetee-Mitzi?” She held the dog out to O’D. “Please take Mitzi, O’D, so I can get out.”

  Chuck jumped down from the lorry and when Eileen’s dumpy figure dangled down out of her door, gave her a steadying hand and eased her to the ground.

  They were an odd couple. Chuck was tanned and pleasant-looking, with sandy hair and pale blue eyes. He was fairly tall, well built and very fit for a man of his age, which was on the brink of fifty. Eileen, on the other hand, looked like Chuck’s mother and at the age of 74, could quite easily have been his mother. Although they’d been together since Chuck was eighteen and he called her his “sort of wife”, they had never married. They doted on Mitzi and like most animal lovers who had never had children of their own, undoubtedly thought of her as their “sort of child.”

  We all trooped inside the house. Biasse came out of the kitchen and beamed at Chuck and Eileen.

  “Oh, manheru, manheru!” he greeted them good evening in Shona.

  “Oh, manheru, Biasse!” Chuck replied. Having grown up in the Zimbabwean bush, he spoke Shona fluently. “Bought any more new wives lately, madhala?”

  Polygamy was common in Mozambique and Biasse had three wives and twenty two children. Although having an abundance of children in Africa was regarded as having an old age pension, Biasse’s huge family was draining him financially.

  “Ah, no,” Biasse looked a trifle sorrowful. “No money for lobola. I think three is enough now.”

  “One is enough for me!” Chuck said, with a guffaw.

  While Chuck bantered with Biassse, Eileen looked down at her shapeless cotton shift dress and ran a plump hand through her short grey hair. Both her dress and her hair were streaked with red dust. “I’d like to shower before supper,” she said. “That road from the sawmill really is terrible. It’s nothing but potholes and corrugations. And the dust!”

  After they had washed the dust off themselves, O’D poured creamy Amarula into a wine glass for Eileen and Chuck helped himself to a large glassful of what most of us in Southern Africa consider to be the best orange juice ever produced in the world - Zimbabwe’s Mazoe Orange Juice.

  Chuck noisily gulped down most of his orange juice in one go. “Aaah,” he sighed, “this is the way to wash away the dust!” He poured himself a refill and sat down on the sofa. “So, you’re a free man now, O’D?”

  “Not quite.” O’D said. “I had to see Weng San today. He’s the Head of the Provincial Police. Apparently, if it hadn’t been for Pedro Paulino, I’d still be in jail, with no charges brought against me. It seems that the Head of Traffic wants to turn this into an international incident by …”

  Chuck, Eileen and I all gaped at him.

  “International incident!” Chuck exclaimed.

  “… by complaining to the British High Commissioner in Maputo and …” O’D continued.

  “British High Commissioner!” Eileen exclaimed.

  “… and claiming that I made racist remarks …”

  ‘RACIST REMARKS!” I exclaimed.

  O”D gave us an annoyed look. “I wish you would all stop repeating everything I say like a bunch of parrots,” he said irritably.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that we’re all so amazed.”

  “That’s what Weng San thought too. He told me that when he heard I’d been arrested for making ‘racist remarks’ he hadn’t believed it, and had driven to the Primeira Esquadra in the middle of the night and looked through a hole in my cell door to confirm that it WAS me the Head of Traffic had arrested.”

  “What now?” I asked. Would this silly incident never come to an end?

  “Well,” O’D went on, “while I was sitting in Weng San’s office, he opened up this massive tome on Mozambican law and, flipping through the pages, told me that the punishment for those who offend, abuse or insult anyone of authority in the State is a jail term of eight years.”

  “Jeepers!” Chuck gasped.

  Eileen echoed his gasp. “Oh, my good grief!”

  “EIGHT YEARS!” I cried.

  “Weng San told me to write an abject letter of apology to the Head of Traffic and said he’ll try to persuade him to accept it. If he does, the case – whatever it is – will be closed.”

  Biasse came into the sitting room with a welcome interruption. “Scoff’s on the table, Madam, Master!”

  “I don’t know if I can eat now, after hearing that,” I said. “I mean about the eight year jail term.”

  Chuck moved over to the dining room table with alacrity. “I can,” he said, and gave an uncaring laugh. “Nothing stops me when it comes to food!”

  We all sat down around the table. O’D picked up a carving knife and sliced into the lamb. We had bought it from Tim’s Butchery in Mutare and it was perfectly, exquisitely, cooked. To accompany the lamb, Biasse had made Portuguese tomato rice and green beans and carrots from Maciel’s vegetable garden.

  While Eileen sifted through the lamb on her plate with her fingers for the best titbits to give to Mitzi, who was sitting on the floor by her feet, Chuck piled his plate high and then set to with gusto. He ate ravenously and fast, overloading his fork with lamb and rice and thrusting his next forkful of food into his mouth before swallowing down the first. He chewed with his mouth open, he spoke with his mouth full of food and because of all of this activity, breathed heavily through his nose as if he was running up a hill.

  Chuck’s awful eating habits always reminded me of a Bud Spencer and Terence Hill Spaghetti Western I had once seen. They had ridden through the desert until they had arrived at a little shack. This was home to their parents, a rather rough couple. They had sat down at the table for a meal and had ALL chewed loudly with their mouths open, talked with food in their mouths, grunted, belched, and thrown bones over their shoulders onto the floor.

  Chuck loaded his fork with another piece of lamb and added green beans, carrots and rice to it. He put the load into his mouth. “You know,” he began, spraying rice grains up into the air, “it’s funny how everything seems to have gone wrong since Caetano arranged that good-luck ceremony with that witch doctor down at the sawmill.” Two green beans and a half chewed carrot fell out of his mouth and back onto his plate. “You get thrown into jail, O’D, your lawyer, that woman Carmen Andrade whatsit in Portugal, sends you a fax full of abuse and the Gaz brakes fail.”

  “Caetano thinks he was conned,” O’D said, “and that the witch doctor wasn’t a real witch doctor.”

  “Well, I did think it was a bit strange,” Eileen said, “that the ceremony was all over before we arrived. You would think that it was important for us to be there, but by the time we got there, the witch doctor and his people had eaten the entire goat and they were all lying around on the ground, dead drunk. You know what I think …”

  We never knew what Eileen thought, because she suddenly gave a frightening wheeze and clutched at her throat with both hands. Her face turned deep purple and she started to choke and splutter and cough loudly. Chuck sprang up from his chair, almost knocking it over, and ran to Eileen to help her. While he pounded her on her back, she went on and on but eventually, the purple faded into pink, the spluttering subsided and her breathing returned to normal.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, I’m sorry about that!” Eileen gasped weakly, and reached for a glass of water with a shaky hand.

  Back in his chair again, Chuck picked up his discarded fork. “She�
��s been like this ever since we lived in Atlantis,” he told us.

  “Atlanta?” I asked, thinking I had misheard the name. “I didn’t know you and Eileen had been to America, Chuck.”

  Eileen gave a laugh, which ended in a cough and another strangled splutter that made Chuck glance up from his plate for a second. “Oh, no, no, no! Not Atlanta,” she corrected me, “ATLANTIS. The Lost City of ATLANTIS. Chuck and I were both drowned there when the city sank beneath the ocean.”

  “We’ve been together ever since then,” Chuck said, “throughout the centuries.”

  Although we had come to know quite a lot about Chuck and Eileen during the past year, these were new things they were now revealing about themselves - new and even more alarming things than we already knew. I shot a quick look at O’D and caught his eye. This was the man he had employed to manage our sawmill! O’D’s face was impassive and gave me no hint of what he was thinking. He poured some more ruby-red Portuguese Dao into his wine glass.

  “How … extraordinary!” I said. “How did you find all this out?”

  “Well,” Eileen began, with another series of little splutters, “when we first met, Chuck and I had this very strong feeling that we had known each other before. So one day we went to see a Spirit Medium in Harare, a very nice woman. She was amazing … she knew everything about us, didn’t she, Chuck?”

  “Yes,” Chuck agreed, wiping his plate clean with a slice of bread and somehow managing to cram the whole piece into his mouth. “She was the one who told us that we’ve been together since Atlantis and that these choking, spluttering fits Eileen has are from that time, when she was drowning.”

  “Another thing we learnt from her,” Eileen went on, “was that Chuck had been guillotined during the French Revolution. He was a woman at the time.”

  I shot another look at O’D. His face was still impassive and now he was busy helping himself to more slices of lamb.