“A … woman,” I said.
“I often come back as a woman,” Chuck told us, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. He held his plate out to O’D and, with a guffaw said, “I’d better have some more of that lamb too, O’D, before you scoff the lot! And more of that rice, if there’s any left.”
“Are you interested in reincarnation,” Eileen asked me.
“I’ve read quite a bit about it, “I said. “It’s an interesting subject.”
“Then I’ll introduce you to Penny one day,”
“Penny? Is this your Spirit Medium?” I asked. I had no intention, of course, of ever taking Eileen up on her offer.
“Oh no,” Eileen smiled conspiratorially. “Penny’s my pendulum.”
Chuck leaned back in his chair with a sigh and surveyed his empty plate with satisfaction. “I’ve always been a very fast eater,” he told us unnecessarily and without a trace of embarrassment, punctuated his words with an explosive belch of appreciation.
We had met Chuck and Eileen in 1992, through Arthur Slater. Arthur was a tall, white-haired Zimbabwean who usually wore a bush hat with a leopard-skin band around it and who looked a bit like the old movie star, Stewart Grainger. At that time, Arthur had been renting the Matsinho sawmill from the government department IAC, the Instituto de Agricultura de Chimoio.
Arthur’s sawmill had fascinated O’D. He had always had a love for wood and fine furniture and so he often went over to see Arthur and to watch the ancient German cross cut saws slowly slicing up logs and turning them into planks. The German saws were more than sixty years old and had broken down sometime in the 1970’s, after the Portuguese had been expelled and the Mozambicans had taken over.
When Arthur had first told the Mozambicans that he could repair the saws and get the sawmill working again, they had thought this hilarious and had laughed at the crazy muzungu (white man). Being laughed at hadn’t bothered Arthur because he had known something the Mozambicans hadn’t known, and it was this. The saws had been manufactured around 1930, in an age before big business had built defects into their machinery and products in order to encourage rampant consumerism and the throwaway society. If the saws were fixed up and given maintenance from time to time, they would still have years of work left in them.
Soon, Arthur had begun to export his sawn timber to Zimbabwe, where it was turned into furniture and then sold to Europe.
Trouble started, however, as soon as Arthur decided to employ a manager to run the sawmill for him when he returned to Harare in Zimbabwe where he had a boiler manufacturing business.
In Mozambique, honesty was (and still is!) a rare commodity. The first manager Arthur employed, a Dutchman, ran off with a large quantity of his timber. The second one disappeared with his money from the sale of his timber. Eventually, he employed a third manager and on the spur of the moment brought him over to our house while O’D and I were in the middle of eating our supper. Luckily, Biasse had cooked more than enough for us all.
During the meal, Chuck had told us that he liked nothing more than living in the bush and that before coming to work for Arthur, he had worked for Blair Laboratories, helping to contain the spread of malaria. In charge of teams of masked workers, he had travelled from village to village in the bush, spraying DDT on the walls of the villagers’ huts. His employment with the Laboratories had come to an end when it had been suspected that DDT caused cancer.
“Unfortunately,” he had said with a shrug, “since we stopped spraying, the mosquito population has exploded and instead of dying in twenty or thirty years’ time of cancer, people are dying in droves, right now, from malaria.”
Chuck had, naturally, cleaned his plate while O’D, Arthur and I had still been eating and so he had taken this opportunity to entertain us with some jokes which had amused O’D and Arthur immensely. They had especially enjoyed Chuck’s account of a practical joke he had once played on one of his Blair workers. He had given the man a jar of Nair hair removal cream and had helped him to rub this in all over his head, telling him that it was a hair invigorator. When Chuck had got to the part where the man’s hair had fallen out until not a strand had been left, O’D, Arthur and Chuck had all laughed uproariously.
We had seen quite a lot of Chuck after Arthur had brought him around to us that evening. Apart from coming to O’D for help when he had to deal with the mountain of paperwork the Mozambican bureaucracy demanded from all of us, he had often dropped in for a chat and a meal in the evenings, or to use our shower as Arthur’s house at the Matsinho sawmill was still in the process of being renovated. Sometimes, he’d even come to our house when O’D and I had gone off to Zimbabwe and then he would sit down in our sitting room and Biasse would bring him tea and they would talk for a while in Shona.
Chuck’s use of our hospitality had been lavish and so when his betrayal had come, it had taken us completely by surprise. It had never even entered our heads that he would repay us by sneaking around behind our backs and ruining our plans for the future.
It had happened when Arthur had decided that trying to operate a business in Mozambique just wasn’t worth the trouble. He’d had a long running dispute with IAC about the rent he paid to them for the Matsinho sawmill, as well as a lot of fines and had finally decided to quit. He’d gone back to Zimbabwe, taking his blue van with him but leaving Chuck behind. We never discovered whether this had been his decision or Chuck’s. Probably Chuck’s.
Arthur’s departure had given O’D and Caetano the idea that an opportunity had come their way and they had started negotiations with Nelson at IAC to take over the lease for the sawmill.
One afternoon, when Nelson had arrived at our house on the farm for a final talk about the sawmill, Chuck had dropped by unexpectedly. He had sat quietly and thoughtfully on one of the dralon-covered armchairs in the sitting room, sipping at a cup of tea while O’D and Nelson had talked away in Portuguese. I don’t know how much of the conversation Chuck had understood as his knowledge of the language had been minimal, but I do remember at one point noticing the faraway look that had come into his pale blue eyes. As if he had just thought of something ...
A day or so later, O’D and Caetano had been astounded to hear the news that Nelson had reneged on the agreement he had signed with them to rent Matsinho and that he had gone into partnership … with Chuck!
We hadn’t heard about this new development from Chuck himself because his frequent visits to our house had suddenly come to an abrupt stop and he had dropped completely out of sight.
After Chuck had scuppered the Matsinho deal, Caetano had scoured Manica Province for another sawmill or felling area. This had been quite difficult because every time he had found something that he thought might do, someone else had managed to get hold of it, ahead of us. Eventually, he had come across the old Magalhaes sawmill in the Nhamacoa. He and O’D had applied for it and Dona Ana Paula, the tall and capable woman who had been the Head of the Department of Forestry at that time, had given them permission to rehabilitate the sawmill and to operate in that area. Even then, two other foresters had tried to wrench it out of their grasp.
Just as the Governor of the Province had been about to pick up his Chinese ballpoint pen and put his signature of approval onto the relevant papers, an objection had come from a wealthy Indian called Bika. Bika, who already owned a sawmill and wanted to increase his area, had told the Governor that O’D and Caetano knew nothing about the timber business and had no experience, not enough money and very little equipment to make a success of the venture.
The other objection had come from Giancarlo Bertuzzi, an Italian with long, wild, grey hair. He had been operating in an area adjoining the one we had been granted and had also wanted to possess it in order to increase his felling area.
Knowing that Bika had been right in his claims about them, O’D and Caetano had been on tenterhooks for a while, certain that they were going to lose out on yet another area again. However, as it turned out, they needn’t have worried.<
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Irate that both Bika and Bertuzzi had ignored her and had gone straight over her head to the Governor to overturn her decision, Dona Ana Paula had made sure that they had got nowhere. She had, though, imposed a condition. O’D and Caetano would have to set up a saw and start operating in the Nhamacoa before the end of the year - otherwise they would lose it.
Now that O’D and Caetano had overcome the problem of finding a felling area, they’d been faced with another of the negative effects that Chuck’s double-dealing had had on their plans. Although we’d had more than enough money to take over the operation of a sawmill such as Matsinho, which already had a certain amount of infrastructure, we had now found ourselves in the position of having to buy all sorts of equipment we hadn’t planned on buying. And then there had also been other important factors which had made Matsinho so attractive and which the old Magalhaes sawmill was without.
Matsinho was close to the main tar road and only a short fourteen kilometre drive to Chimoio. There was ample water from a borehole and electricity from a generator. There was also quite a comfortable house Arthur had been living in and which he’d been in the process of renovating.
In the Nhamacoa, on the other hand, we would have to start off from scratch and this would cost more money than we had. We would have to have a borehole drilled, buy a saw from somewhere, get hold of a tractor, a lorry and trailers, and, most importantly, a generator. These were all major expenses and we had no idea how to find the extra finance. Borrowing from a Mozambique bank had been out of the question. At that time and for many years afterwards, they charged a killer interest rate of 44 % on loans!
What were O’D and Caetano to do? They were entrepreneurs - entrepreneurs without money or access to money!
“Arrojela,” O’D had said finally. “We’ll just have to take out a mortgage on Arrojela, otherwise we’re going to lose our area.”
“What?” I had been horrified. Arrojela was totally unencumbered and belonged to us completely.
Our bank, the Midland Bank in Guernsey, had been just as horrified as I had been when O’D had asked for a mortgage on Arrojela. Although Portugal was a member of the EU, the Midland had told us in no uncertain terms that lending money on a property in Europe was not something they would do.
In the end, it had been my brother David who had come up with a solution. Through various channels, he had found someone in England who had been prepared to lend us money privately against Arrojela and although the interest he had wanted had also been high at 25%, O’D had accepted it. There had been no other alternatives.
I had felt a twinge of anxiety at the news that an Englishman I had never met and who was called John Phillips was about to become co-owner of Arrojela.
“But what if something goes terribly wrong,” I had asked O’D, “and we end up losing Arrojela?”
David, who had been spending a few days with us on the Tabex farm, had spread some large sheets of paper out over the dining room table. The papers had been a viability and financial study he had drawn up on the proposed Nhamacoa sawmill for O’D and had been filled with columns of figures. “Look at this,” David had told me excitedly, tapping his fingers over the columns. “These figures are incredible! You can’t lose! Don’t worry, you’re going to make so much money you’ll be able to pay John Phillips back in a matter of months!”
Things had started to go wrong almost immediately, when John Phillips had insisted we use an English-speaking lawyer in the Algarve to deal with the legalities of the Deed of Loan. Although this had been an understandable request from someone who didn’t know any Portuguese, it had unfortunately meant that we hadn’t been able to use our own lawyer, the nice Mr. Brito.
Stumped by John Phillips’ request, O’D had turned to Willy for help. Willy’s lawyer had also only spoken Portuguese and so he had been forced to look around for someone else for us. This had taken some time until in August an English ex-patriot (who, I am now certain, had been a secret enemy of Willy’s) had recommended an English-speaking lawyer to him. This had been a woman called Carmen Andrade e Silva who had a practice in Lagos and who, apparently, had quite a high profile.
Pleased that he had been able to fulfill John Phillips’ wish and completely unaware that he was about to put our future into the hands of a Lawyer from Hell, Willy had set up a meeting with Carmen and John Phillips for the 12th September.
O’D and Caetano now had a mere three and a half months left to get everything up and running before Dona Ana Paula’s deadline on the Nhamacoa sawmill ran out.
The meeting with Carmen had gone off smoothly. Willy had told her of the urgency of it all and she had assured him that the Deed of Loan on Arrojela would be through within thirty working days. After all, it was a simple matter. Arrojela was completely free of debts and John Phillips had the cash.
During their meeting with Carmen, though, both John Phillips and Willy had noticed two rather unusual things about her; that she had made little attempt to take notes and that she also appeared to have had “a few bevvies” (as John Phillips would later put it) prior to the meeting. However, this hadn’t deterred them from going ahead with her lawyerly services. Leaving our future in Mozambique in the care of a non note-taking and pickled Algarvean lawyer, Willy had waved John Phillips off at Faro Airport and had returned home to send us a fax that all was well and that Carmen would contact us soon.
Now that finance had seemed certain for the larger and more expensive items they would have to buy, O’D and Caetano had begun the search for equipment for their new venture, a difficult task in a country that had nothing.
Forced to cross the border into Zimbabwe for his purchases, O’D had bought tools and machinery in Harare.
In Chimoio, Caetano’s search had turned up three 20 foot shipping containers and O’D had bought them, transporting them down to the old Magalhaes sawmill on the back of a hired lorry with a crane. Not only would the containers make excellent storerooms for all their tools and equipment, they would also be theft proof and keep everything safe while the sawmill was uninhabited.
It was at this time also that O’D and Caetano had heard some rather disturbing news on the Chimoio grape-vine about Chuck and Eileen.
It appeared that Chuck’s venture with Nelson at Matsinho had turned into something of a disaster. One of the reasons for this had been that Chuck had tempted Nelson away from our agreement by conning him into believing that he had money to put into Matsinho when, in fact, he had had none. When Nelson had discovered the true state of Chuck’s finances – or rather, the lack of them – he had begun to treat Chuck and Eileen very badly.
As it had seemed that Chuck needed a new job and O’D and Caetano were going to need a mechanic in the Nhamacoa, they had decided to pay a visit to Chuck.
Amazed, I had questioned the wisdom of employing a man who had had no qualms about stabbing us in the back when it had suited him, but O’D had said, “He’s the only fairly good mechanic in Chimoio, there’s no one else. And at least we know what he’s like now. If we employ someone new, we won’t know what we’re getting.”
The visit to Matsinho had shocked O’D and Caetano. Chuck had looked extremely ill and had lost so much weight that his normally well-built frame had been incredibly emaciated. Eileen hadn’t looked too good, either. It turned out that they had, in fact, been starving! What little money the sawmill had made, Nelson had taken and put into his own personal pocket. With no money to buy food, the only way Chuck, Eileen and Mitzi had managed to survive had been with the help of their drunken old cook, Sixpence. He had occasionally managed to scavenge or steal a handful of mealie meal for them and they had all existed on a diet of nothing but sadza.
Naturally, Chuck and Eileen had been only too pleased to see O’D and it had been decided that as soon as we were able to find a lorry, they would leave Matsinho and drive down to the Nhamacoa.
Until then, however, there had been the question of food. Before he had come back home to the farm, O’D had driven in
to Chimoio to buy some supplies to stock up the empty Matsinho larder and, in order to give them some independence, had handed Chuck some money to keep himself and Eileen going.
While Chuck had recuperated at Matsinho until the end of September, trouble had been brewing elsewhere for O’D and Caetano and in a quite unexpected quarter about six thousand miles away from Mozambique, on another continent.
Despite Willy’s optimism – and assurance - that Carmen had understood the urgency of the Deed of Loan on Arrojela, it hadn’t taken very long before O’D and I had begun to suspect that she did not, in fact, have our interests at heart.
Although she had received a hundred thousand escudos (half her fee) up front from us to begin the legal process, she had dragged her heels, made numerous errors that forced us to travel back and forth across the Zimbabwean border to get Powers of Attorney from the Portuguese Embassy in Harare and succeeded in turning a simple legal process into a monumental debacle.
With time passing by and nothing to show for it, O’D’s frazzled nerves had finally given way and he had cracked under the strain of it all.
In a state of incandescent fury, he had picked up the phone in his office at Tabex and dialled Carmen’s number in Lagos to vent his feelings at her incompetence. Unfortunately, she had been out of her office at the time and so, foiled by her absence, he had vented his feelings instead on the woman who had answered his call and then had dashed off an angry fax to Carmen as well.
Carmen’s reaction had been predictable. Taking umbrage at O’D’s accusations, she had gone on the attack. Unless O’D sent her a letter of apology, she would refuse to do anymore work on his behalf!
Fuming at her threat, O’D had driven back to the farm for lunch and had slammed Carmen’s fax down on the dark panga panga dining room table so hard that the plates had all rattled. “Blackmail, as well now!” he had stormed at me. “The woman’s been paid half her fee and she knows it’s too late to change lawyers!”
Monkeys in My Garden Page 12