Later on that evening, when he and Caetano had met at the Sports Clube to talk about the mess Carmen was making of their plans, O’D had said, “I’d like to wring that bloody woman’s neck!”
Nodding his head in agreement, Caetano had thought for a moment. “We can get a Hit Man from Maputo to do it. They’re very cheap. Only fifty U.S,” he had said, “although there would also be the added expense of the airfare to Portugal and back.”
Ignoring Caetano’s suggestion, O’D had gone on, gloomily, “She thinks she’s safe because I’m thousands of miles away … and she’s right!”
In the end, he had bowed to the inevitable. Thanks to Carmen, we were rapidly running out of time. Gritting his teeth, he had written the letter of apology she had demanded.
It was while our lawyer had been behaving more like our enemy than our lawyer, that O’D had made himself unpopular with someone else closer to home and had found himself in the Primeira Esquadra.
On his release from jail, he’d been kept hanging on tenterhooks for some time. Would Carmen do the honourable and finish the job she’d been paid to do before time ran out? And what would happen if he was thrown back into jail again? With our future no longer in his hands but dependant on the whims and caprices of a Portuguese lawyer and a Mozambican policeman, his nerves had been stretched to the limit.
We’d been spending the weekend with David and Caroline in Harare when Willy had phoned. With the help of a Notary called Dona Louisa and no thanks at all to Carmen, Willy had been instrumental in the drawing up of a correct Deed of Loan and it had finally been signed on the 6th December - a marathon twelve and a half weeks for what should have been a very simple legal matter.
Although we had all drunk a celebratory bottle of wine, Carmen had put us through such a long and drawn out and stressful ordeal that none of us had really felt as if we’d had anything to celebrate at all. Especially as O’D and Caetano now had only a mere 25 days in which to buy the larger and more expensive items of equipment in Zimbabwe, not to mention also having to arrange for the necessary customs documents involving their export out of Zimbabwe and import into Mozambique and then their transportation down to the Magalhaes sawmill in the Nhamacoa as well.
More worrying, though, was the fact that they now also only had 25 days in which to fell timber before the cutting season ended.
In Mozambique, foresters aren’t allowed to cut down any timber at all in the months of January, February and March, because these are the months when it normally rains the most and as a result, these three months are considered to be the growing season.
Uneasy questions filled our minds. Would we be able to fell enough timber before the 31st December in order to start paying off our loan to John Phillips?
And would we even be able to cut enough timber to help us financially to get through those three months when we were forced to be inactive?
Or would Carmen’s procrastination cause us to fail … and to lose Arrojela and our investment … before we had even had a chance to begin?
CHAPTER FIVE
BIASSE
O’D’s misdemeanour concerning the Head of Traffic hung over his head like a dark cloud for some time. Like a dog with a bone, the Head of Traffic just wouldn’t let the matter rest and kept us dangling while we waited to see whether he was going to haul O’D off to jail again or not. Then, a week or so after the Deed of Loan had been signed, the man had finally come to a decision.
One afternoon, while I was lying on the sofa and reading a book, I heard the sound of O’D’s pickup pulling up next to the house. As he’d come home earlier than usual, my heart gave an anxious jump. What now? I wondered. Expecting trouble, I closed my book and stood up.
“Biasse! Biasse!” I heard O’D shout. “Come and help me with these boxes!”
“Coming, Master!” Biasse’s voice shouted from the back of the house.
“What’s up?” I asked, opening the screen door for them as they walked across the verandah carrying two cardboard boxes. The boxes clinked with a familiar and festive sound. “Are we having a party?”
“No,” O’D said, dumping his box down on the floor in a corner of the sitting room. “Put that one down here too, Biasse,” he ordered. “The Head of Traffic’s finally agreed to forget about me. These are gifts for the people who’ve been keeping me out of jail. Twelve bottles of Johnny Walker Red for Commandant Weng San and another twelve bottles of Johnny Walker Red for Pedro Paulino.”
“Oh, great!” I said, relieved to hear that it really was all over now. “And what are you going to give to the Head of Traffic? As he’s supposed to be teetotal you can’t very well give him whisky, can you? Oh, I know! What about giving him twelve Tanganda tea bags?”
“Not likely!” O’D said, and sitting down at the dining room table, he opened his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of white paper. “That would be like waving a red rag in front of a bull. I don’t want to spend eight years in a Mozambican hellhole just because I sent some tea bags to a policeman! What he wants is an abject, grovelling, letter of apology.”
He uncapped the maroon Waterman pen I had given him for one of his birthdays in England some years ago and while I looked over his shoulder, began to write his second insincere letter of apology in a month.
“Your Excellency,” he scribbled in Portuguese, “I would appreciate it very much if you would accept my apology …”
“Your Excellency?” I interrupted. This seemed to be taking grovelling to the extreme. What would civil servants in England think if you addressed them like this?
“You always have to address Mozambican bureaucrats this way,” O’D explained, “even if they’re only minor government officials. They have a strong sense of their own importance. It’s a hang-over from Portuguese Colonial days.”
With all the obstacles now out of his way, O’D prepared for the future by handing in his resignation. We would be leaving Tabex at the end of January, 1995.
Although we’d lived on the farm for two and a half years, I hadn’t grown attached to it. The only thing I was going to miss when I went off to my new life, I knew, would be the company of a skinny little old Mozambican man.
I’d grown very fond of Biasse and it was this fondness that caused me to leave him behind when we went to live in the Nhamacoa forest. It had been a self-sacrificing act on my part and later on when I found myself slaving over pots and pans on a mud-brick stove in a smoky makeshift kitchen of poles and grass, I could have given myself a kick for being such an idiot!
Biasse, it seemed, was going to miss us as well. While we packed our few possessions into cardboard boxes, he wandered around the house like a lost soul.
“Please take me with you, Madam.”
I looked up from a box. He was very upset, his wrinkled face wore an anxious expression and there was a frightened look in his dark brown eyes. No doubt he was afraid that the new Tabex Administrator wouldn’t be as easy-going to work for as we had been. Especially when he started dropping things on the kitchen floor and breaking them!
“No, Biasse, you must stay here,” I said, and added, “it’s for your own good, Biasse. If you leave your job here on the farm to come with us and then our business doesn’t work out, you’ll end up with no job at all. What will you do then?” Jobs were hard to find in Mozambique at this time.
“It doesn’t matter, Madam.”
“Of course it matters, Biasse.” I decided once and for all to allay his fears. “And you don’t have to worry about the new people who are coming to take our place. The boss has met them. They’re from Zimbabwe and he says they’re very nice. They’ll be kind to you, you’ll see.”
“No,” Biasse told me stubbornly. “They won’t be kind. They won’t be good people. I know it, Madam!”
O’D was also nervous and a bit strung out. He was cutting all his ties with a multi-national company that had provided a certain security for us in a wild African country, as well as also giving us a regular, guaranteed income every month
. Now that the time had finally come for the start of his great adventure with Caetano, the full impact of what he was about to do was making itself felt.
Looking for reassurance, he wandered into the sitting room where I was packing up our books. “Do you remember what my father said when he came for a visit and saw Arrojela for the first time?” he asked me.
“Mmm,” I said, remembering the expression on Ti’s face as he had taken in the tumbledown mud-brick house and rubble-filled rooms. “He said … My word, O’D, THIS time I really do think you’ve bitten off too much to chew!”
“I wonder what he’d say now if he knew I was going to rehabilitate an old sawmill in a Mozambican forest?” O’D mused.
“He knows what you’re capable of doing now,” I said, picturing the beautifully restored Arrojela in my mind’s eye. “If he was younger, he’d probably come out to Mozambique to help you.”
Although O’D was leaving Tabex to go and live in the Nhamacoa, I wasn’t going with him at this time. O’D had decided that conditions at the sawmill were still too basic and primitive for someone like me to endure in silence.
“I don’t want you getting in our hair and complaining all the time and distracting us,” O’D had told me. “You know what you’re like when you’re uncomfortable.”
I didn’t argue. I didn’t like basic. I didn’t like primitive. I’d seen the awful long-drop hole-in-the-ground lavatory Chuck had constructed for Eileen and himself. It was outside, at the back of the house they were living in and although it was closed in on the sides with hessian bags, it was open to the sky and if you stood at the top of the back stairs of the house, you could actually look down on the person in there, sitting with their knickers around their knees. What had Chuck been thinking of? Hopefully, by the time I came back to Mozambique, it would be gone.
No, I would be much better off staying with my family in Mossel Bay for the next couple of months … just as Biasse would be much better off staying on at the Tabex farm with the new people.
I would miss Biasse, of course. Except for a couple of occasions when forgetfulness on his part had given me some unwanted new experiences – such as the time he had mixed up the bottles of vinegar and boiled water in the fridge and I had thirstily gulped down half a tumbler of pure vinegar all in one go! - he was the perfect cook and housekeeper.
He flitted around the house in his immaculate white uniform and his veldskoens dusting, sweeping and mopping. When he wasn’t doing this, he was busy in the kitchen, chopping up vegetables or washing our clothes in the bath and then ironing them impeccably when they were dry.
He kept our house clean and neat and was so unobtrusive that often we were quite unaware of his presence - until we heard the crash of a plate or a cup on the floor.
I knew a lot about Biasse because sometimes, while he worked away in the kitchen preparing our meals, I leaned against the wall next to his worktable and we chatted about his life before Tabex.
Already old for a Mozambican at fifty six, Biasse had never learnt to read or write and when the end of the month came around and it was time for him to receive his wages, he signed for his money with a big, wavering cross. Despite this lack of education, however, he’d had an adventurous and chequered career.
“When I was young, very young,” Biasse told me once, while he chopped up some purple-skinned onions for one of his delicious and fiery curries, “my father took me to work in Rhodesia. At the custard-making factory. You know Willards? Willards custard-making factory in Salisbury … now Harare?”
I nodded my head, eyes smarting a little from the strong-smelling onions. “Yes, I know Willards,” I said, and knowing Biasse’s love for sugar and all sweet things, added “that must have been a very nice job for you, Biasse.”
“No,” Biasse replied with some force, surprising me. “I not like this custard-making! I cry, cry, cry, all time! In the end, the foreman tell my father, “Alright! You better send your boy home again!”
“Oh,” I said. “So what did you do after that?”
Biasse’s little wrinkled face grew grim. Obviously, leaving the custard-making factory had been a bad move. “I go back home to Mozambique, Madam, and one day the Portuguese come for me. Come for ALL young men in my village. Catch us and tie our wrists together, like so,” Biasse dropped his knife down on the chopping board and held his arms out in front of him, as if they were tightly bound. “Then they push us in lorries and take us to work on farms.” He picked up his knife and began chopping at the onions again. “Here they beat the workers with palmatoria.” His knife chopped in time with his words. “Beat, beat, beat!”
Catching sight of the puzzled frown on my face, he asked, “You know palmatoria?”
I shook my head. “No, I’ve never heard of such a thing, Biasse. What is it?”
The palmatoria, it turned out, was an instrument of Portuguese punishment resembling a ping pong bat but with several round holes in the bat. According to Biasse, it was used often and lavishly to beat the palms of innocent Mozambicans who had done absolutely nothing to warrant such cruel treatment.
The foremen on the Portuguese farms and plantations were the ones who used the palmatoria, at the command of a Portuguese superior, of course, and the beatings would always begin when the Portuguese lit up a cigarette as a signal and started smoking it.
While the Portuguese took a casual puff or two on the cigarette, the foreman repeatedly hit the labourer on the palms of his hands until the holes in the bat raised welts in the soft flesh and the skin broke and turned into a mushy and bloody and excruciatingly painful wound.
The beating only ended when the cigarette burned away to the filter and the Portuguese threw the stub down onto the ground.
“Beat the hands forty, fifty, sixty times!” Biasse told me. “Very much pain. And then worker told ‘Go back to work in fields now-now!’ With hands full of blood!”
“Did you also get beaten like this, Biasse?”
“Ah no, Madam. Never. But Master Aubrey, HE hit me!” Biasse lunged forward over the chopping board, clenching his thin, small hands into two fists. “Hit me like so … Whap! Whap! Whap!” A carrot and half a green pepper fell down onto the floor from Biasse’s violent movements.
I was aghast. Aubrey, a Zimbabwean, had been the Tabex Administrator before O’D had arrived to take his place. “That’s terrible, Biasse!” I bent down and picked up the carrot and green pepper and rinsed them off under the cold tap before putting them back on his chopping board. “Terrible! Why did he do that?”
“I dunno, Madam. Just hit me. Hit me for nothing! I go to police and police put Aubrey in jail.”
During supper that night, I repeated Biasse’s story to O’D. “Apparently, Aubrey was a nasty big fat man who used to hit Biasse,” I told him. “Imagine hitting a skinny old man like Biasse!”
“I can imagine it,” O’D said, a somewhat grim smile flickering across his face as he took stock of all the breakages we had sustained in the kitchen. “Biasse probably broke Aubrey’s favourite beer mug.”
After the Portuguese had released and then tied Biasse up twice more and taken him off to work on their farms, he had decided that enough was enough and had run away from Mozambique, crossing the border into Rhodesia.
This time he’d gone to work for a Chinese woman who owned the Bamboo Inn restaurant in Salisbury. He’d been the chip cook and he’d enjoyed working there, even though his Chinese employer hadn’t been able to pronounce his name and had decided for some reason to call him “Fred” – a shorter name but which, Biasse told me, she also had trouble pronouncing.
To show me what he meant, he put on a high-pitched womanly voice and imitated his Chinese employer’s cries for me. “Fled! Fled!” he cried in a Chinese-sounding falsetto that made me laugh. “Come here, Fled! Go there, Fled! Are flied chips ledy, Fled?”
When civil war broke out in Mozambique, Biasse left the Bamboo Inn and came back to look after his ever-growing family.
“Samora no
good,” Biasse told me grimly, criticising Mozambique’s President Samora Machel who had been killed in a plane crash in suspicious circumstances during the civil war. “There was nothing to eat, Madam, and no jobs. No clothes, no shoes, no NOTHING! When I wanted seep - you know seep?” - I raised an enquiring eyebrow and he picked up a bar of green Zimbabwean Sunlight soap on the sink - “Seep!” - and brandished it at me. “When I want seep I have to go over the mountains into Zimbabwe.”
As he had no passport, his trips to Mutare were along steep paths through the mountains under cover of night. It was during one of these journeys that he’d been caught by the Zimbabwean Army but on hearing that he was only going to buy soap, they had let him continue on his way, warning him not to forget to return to Mozambique. On his return, he’d been caught again, this time by the Mozambican officials at Machipanda Border Post. Although they had helped themselves to his money, they had been charitable enough to leave him just enough to get back home to his family. This theft, however, rankled with Biasse forever more. “They are tsotsies! Tsotsies, Madam!”
Biasse’s English wasn’t too good but I soon got used to the unusual way he pronounced some of his words. The same couldn’t always be said of O’D, who, although he was a linguist of note - speaking Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian - was hopeless when it came to Pigeon English.
One Friday morning, unusually mindful of Biasse’s habit of only discovering that we had run out of something after O’D had driven off into the distance, O’D asked “Have we got enough milk in the house for the weekend, Biasse?”
Biasse looked at him blankly. “Milk? What is this milk, Master?”
Biasse’s sudden ignorance annoyed O’D. “Oh come on, Biasse,” he said irritably, “you know perfectly well what milk is. We use it all the time!”
Biasse stood his ground. “I dunno what this milk is, Master,” he insisted stubbornly.
O’D’s voice rose with exasperation. “Biasse! That white stuff in the blue box. We keep it in the fridge. It comes from cows. COWS!”
Monkeys in My Garden Page 13