Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  This time it was my turn to laugh. “Eileen, does it snow in the Kalahari?”

  O’D and Chuck returned late that evening. There’d been a problem with the green Gaz. All the way back from Beira, it had stopped and started and as a result progress had been very slow.

  “I don’t think it’s anything serious,” Chuck told us. “The engine probably just needs a good clean and a bit of maintenance.”

  Chuck managed to get the green Gaz running well and with two lorries on the go, things began to look up.

  Things began to look up in another direction too. Although cooking in the little cook hut had been fun for a while and a bit like being on a camping holiday, the effort of running up and down the kitchen stairs loaded down with pots and pans soon began to pall.

  Then one evening, O’D came back from Chimoio with some news which sent both my spirits and Eileen’s spiraling upwards with hope.

  “I heard today that Biasse isn’t working at Tabex anymore,” he told us.

  “Oh, has he been fired for breaking all their cups and saucers and plates?” I wanted to know.

  “No,” O’D said, “leaving Tabex was his own idea, apparently.”

  “Go and get him, O’D,” I said, “before somebody else does!”

  Biasse arrived a week later. He settled down well in the Nhamacoa and soon he and Seven were great friends, if you took into account all the talking and laughing that floated out from between the cook hut poles. The meals he produced were as tasty as ever and his culinary abilities seemed completely unaffected by the change from modern electric cooker to primitive mud-brick stove.

  He hadn’t been back with us for very long when I began to notice the unwelcome trickle of people into the Nhamacoa and to see for myself the start of the conflict between man and nature - and the devastating effect this was to have on both of them. Naturally enough, I was completely unaware that Biasse, my very own cook, was also playing a part in the deforestation of the Nhamacoa until the day I had a conversation with him about his family.

  “This is very nice place, Madam,” he told me enthusiastically one morning while he was preparing lunch. “Good for machamba!” He held up one of Alberto the gardener’s large white cauliflowers, grown with water from the hole we had dug in the Nhamacoa River. “Maningui vegetables in your garden down by the river! Eeeeee! Good for mealies, too!”

  “I’m glad you like it here, Biasse,” I said, “but aren’t you missing your family?”

  “Ah, no, Madam,” he told me cheerfully.

  “Oh,” I said, surprised to hear this from a man who was such a family man.

  I soon found out why Biasse was not missing his family. The reason, it turned out, was because they were now all with him in the Nhamacoa!

  Like so many other Mozambicans who were to come after him, he had met a man called Kashangamu and this man had sold him a piece of the forest.

  “What!” I cried, aghast. “This is illegal, Biasse! This Kashangamu had no right to sell you land. The land belongs to the government. It’s a forest. People aren’t allowed to open machambas in forests!”

  Biasse was unfazed. “It is land of Kashangamu, Madam,” he explained. “Father of Kashangamu worked for Magalhaes. Magalhaes give to Kashangamu when he leave this place before the guerra.”

  “Nonsense, Biasse! This forest never belonged to Magalhaes, so he couldn’t have given land to Kashangamu’s father. This man Kashangamu is just tricking you!”

  Although money had changed hands, there had been no Deed of Sale or even a receipt from Kashangamu to record the purchase of the land by Biasse. However, this didn’t worry Biasse in the least. As far as he was concerned, the land he had bought in the Nhamacoa from Kashangamu belonged to him.

  While Biasse worked for us, his family worked on their newly acquired land. They built rudimentary huts out of poles and grass for themselves and chopped down trees, clearing the land to make it ready for the growing of maize when the rains came … if the rains came …

  Almost three years had gone by since the start of the drought and there was still no hint of a break. Sometimes, a violent wind blew up and whipped across the forest. It ripped off parts of our grass roof and dislodged the rocks holding the black plastic down over our windows. With the wind came a rainstorm. A furious downpour of a rainstorm, bursting in through the holes in the roof and the walls and flooding all the rooms in our broken down house, while we rushed around, moving soaked bedding and wet furniture and books to safer and drier places. As quickly as it came, the wind and storm would disappear, leaving clear blue skies and the baking sunshine that turned the earth into cracks and dust.

  Without rain or water in the rivers and dams, food was very, very scarce and so, during his fuel buying trips, O’D regularly scoured the Chimoio shops for sacks of maize meal for our workers and their families.

  The maize he managed to buy from the shops in town was always stamped on the outside of the sacks with large black letters that read ‘U.S. AID – NOT FOR SALE’. From this we deduced that somewhere along the line, someone was diverting American food aid to Mozambique – or to Zimbabwe – off the ships at the Ports and making a healthy profit by selling it to the shops. Shop owners took their cut too and, as usual, those who needed Western charity most of all were made to pay for it by their own venal and profiteering countrymen. So much for brotherly love in times of trouble!

  Despite the lack of rain, the trickle of people coming into the Nhamacoa to open machambas continued. In the evenings and at night when I looked out of the windows and dazzled my eyes with the beauty of the starry skies of Africa, I often saw another more alarming sight as well. Fire! The red glow of fires mushrooming in the distant leafy hills and valleys of the Nhamacoa. Fires started by the people invading the forest.

  Lying on my camp bed, I worried about these fires. I had seen how quickly grass burnt and we were surrounded by the stuff. And even worse, our roof was made out of grass! If a spark blew onto our roof and set it alight, would we wake up in time to save ourselves from the flaming, falling thatch?

  While I lay awake, waiting for an ominous warning crackle or two, I marvelled at the sounds that filled the night. How busy the forest was after the sun had gone down!

  Night apes screeched against the high-pitched background of a vast orchestra of cicadas. Owls hooted. Something made a grunting noise like a giant prehistoric pig. Something else, which I later discovered was a buck, gave a breathy warning BWAH! BWAH! A night bird joined in with its lovely bubbling call. And then there were the drums … always the drums.

  Living like this in the forest and under such primitive conditions, I sometimes had the weird sensation that I had somehow flipped back in time and was living in the 1890’s instead of the 1990’s! It was as if I was reliving the life my ancestors had lived all those centuries ago when they had first sailed to Africa and settled in a continent that was alien to them in every way.

  One morning, at about half past eleven, the grass just below the hill where we were living started to crackle.

  A strong wind was blowing that day and the vegetation, of course, was tinder-dry from years of drought.

  Fanned by the wind, the fire spread quickly and in no time at all we were enveloped in smoke so thick we could hardly breathe.

  Tears streaming from their smarting eyes, O’D and Chuck ran from place to place, shouting orders to our workers, “Back burn! Back burn!” and they started fires of our own and burnt the land in front of the approaching fire in an attempt to stop it in its tracks.

  I was standing not far from the house, mopping my own streaming eyes and watching the fire coming towards us, when I noticed a commotion going on above a tree directly in the path of the oncoming inferno. The tree was a thorn tree and its branches were weighed down with nests filled with newly hatched little weavers.

  A small tragedy was about to occur, the first of the many little tragedies I would be witnessing during my years in the Nhamacoa.

  Knowing what was g
oing to happen and helpless to prevent it, a great cloud of the parent weavers circled frantically around and around over the top of the thorn tree, crying out their alarm. Too young to fly, the young hatchlings were going to be incinerated!

  “No! Oh no!” I shouted, adding my own cries to those of the weavers as the fire roared towards the tree.

  Only at the last minute, did the parent weavers stop their frantic circling over the thorn tree. When the fire reached the tree and its leaves began to catch alight, they knew it was all over. Flying off to another nearby tree, they settled down on its branches to watch.

  They watched as the fire engulfed the tree and they watched as it consumed their nests and they watched as the little birds inside the nests were burnt to death.

  And then, when it was over, they all rose up in a great cloud again and flew away, to the west. And to this day, fourteen years later, I have never again seen this particular type of weaver build a nest here in the Nhamacoa.

  Despite our efforts to contain the fire, it spread. No sooner did we manage to stop it in one place, than it broke out in another. Soon, it encircled us on all sides. Caught in the middle of this hellish inferno, everyone tore small branches off the nearby trees and desperately beat at the flames.

  “The rabbits!” Chuck shouted. “The fire’s coming up towards the back of the house now! The hutches are going to go up!”

  While they were beating out the flames around the rabbit hutches, one of the workers also suddenly remembered something. “A crianca!” he shouted, “The child!” A little boy of about three or four years old, left by himself in a hut not far from the river!

  “That’s it!” White in the face with fury, O’D threw down his branch and ran over to the Land Rover and jumped inside.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted.

  “I’m going to Macate to fetch the police!”

  “It’s not safe! You’ll get burned!”

  Without answering, O’D put his foot down and drove off down the track, disappearing into the smoke.

  By the time he returned with two Macate policemen and the Chefe do Posto, a short and stocky man called Sainete, the fire had moved on, roaring over other hills and through other valleys, leaving us surrounded by charred and smoking blackness.

  While the rabbits and the young boy had been saved, the roof of one of the houses we’d been in the process of repairing had been completely destroyed. Some off our workers’ huts had also gone up in flames, causing them to lose the few possessions they owned. In a country that had nothing, even the loss of an old blanket, a tattered shirt, a pair of trousers was hard to bear.

  “Kashangamu,” one of our workers told the policemen. “The wives of Kashangamu are opening a machamba and they started the fire.”

  I pricked up my ears. Kashangamu … I knew that name. Biasse’s estate agent!

  “Ask him to come here,” one of the policemen told the worker.

  Kashangamu, it turned out, was not only the local Renamo representative in the area but also an important tribal chief and this probably explained why he appeared unperturbed by the presence of the Macate police. On good terms with them, he chatted away amiably, unrepentant about the damage his two careless wives had caused. After all, no one had died, had they? As for compensation … he gave a shrug …what did he have to give?

  While O’D stood by, glowering and furious at the lack of concern the Mozambicans were showing about the damage the fire had wrought, Sainete also chatted away amiably with Chuck. Conversing in Shona, they talked about a subject close to both their hearts; chickens, ducks and goats.

  “A goat …” Chuck’s pale blue eyes lit up at Sainete’s offer of the gift of one of his male goats. Unaware of the impact the animal was going to have on his future, he clapped Sainete on the shoulder. “I’ll come and collect it from you the next time we fill up with water in Macate,” he said and they both laughed happily.

  The goat, when it came, had a dark, silky brown coat. He lived in the room under the house with the chickens, of course, and during the day left a trail of goat pellets all around the house. I noticed this when I sat down outside on the old paving to read a book and saw all the goat droppings under my feet … hundreds and hundreds of them … gosh, how much more unhygienic could Chuck get!

  I was soon to discover just how much more unhygienic he could get.

  One morning while we were eating breakfast, Chuck rubbed his stubbly chin thoughtfully and said “You know, I’ve been thinking. There’s not much point in having just one goat. The next time I’m in Macate, I’m going to ask Sainete to sell me another one of his goats … a female, this time.”

  O’D looked up from his paw paw with a frown. “In that case, you’d better organise a pen for all your animals, Chuck. And don’t forget to do something about those chickens of yours as well. I’m fed up with being woken up at three o’clock in the morning with cocks crowing on top of the roof.”

  And so Chuck added another animal to his growing menagerie and as he never got around to building a pen for the goats or a coop for his chickens, the manure around our house grew and grew.

  CHAPTER NINE

  CAETANO AND MR. GONCALVES THE WITCH DOCTOR

  “Aaah … beautiful,” Chuck said, with a sigh of contentment. Without taking his eyes off the sky, he drained the tea in his cup and set it down on the small Umbila coffee table he had made at Matsinho. The top of the table was the off-cut of a plank and the base was part of a log. “This is just like watching television, only a million times better.”

  “Yes,” Eileen agreed and picked up the teapot to give Chuck’s cup a refill. “And unlike television, there are no repeats. You can look at the sky every evening and never see the same sunset.” She glanced down at her wristwatch. “Shall we turn the radio on? It’s almost time.”

  We only listened to the radio now for one hour every evening, when Zimbabwe Radio One broadcast its music programme and the news. This was to conserve batteries. Our fortunes had suddenly taken a nose-dive and money had become extremely tight.

  Sometime during the summer, Socinav, our one and only customer had unexpectedly disappeared! There were rumours that they had gone to the Cameroon or the Congo but wherever it was, their departure had left a large financial void in our lives. Timber buyers, as we had found to our dismay, were thin on the ground in Mozambique.

  While O’D and Caetano searched for another customer, our money dwindled away and our debts piled up. We denied ourselves so we could pay the workers their wages every month and buy fuel for the tractor and lorries to keep things going.

  Faruk, O’D’s Indian friend, gave us limitless credit to buy the things we needed from his shop in Chimoio – more debt! – and we bought dried beans, rice, a chicken or two, salt, cooking oil, bath soap, toothpaste and shampoo.

  We scraped along for what seemed like an eternity, deprivation beginning to take its toll on all of us.

  Still keeping his eyes glued on the sky, Chuck leaned back in his chair. “It would be a pity to break up this panoramic view with windows and glass again,” he said thoughtfully. “I think we should leave it as it is.”

  While Eric Clapton sang a song on the radio telling us how he had shot the Sheriff, I gloomily surveyed the long wide hole in the sitting room’s west wall. “The way things are going, we’ll probably never have the money to buy glass for the windows.”

  “Oh, things could change,” Chuck said, and remembering the terrible time when he and Eileen had lived on a handful of sadza a day, added reassuringly “anyway, whatever happens, I’ll stick by O’D. I’ll never forget how he helped us out when we were starving at Matsinho.”

  “Yes,” Eileen agreed again, “we won’t let O’D down now that things are going wrong for him, and at least we’re not starving here, what with Alberto’s vegetables and all the bananas, guavas and paw paws from the trees around the house.”

  “If only we had the money to buy a borehole pump,” Chuck said, “then we could use the saw t
o turn the logs into planks. Planks are a much more saleable item. But planking’s out of the question, because without a continuous supply of water to cool the saw blade, it will overheat.”

  “I know,” I sighed. “Oh, why are there all these stumbling blocks and hindrances always stopping us from going ahead?”

  A mysterious smile lit up Eileen’s face. “Well,” she said, “why don’t we find out?” She heaved herself out of her chair and stood up. “I know just the right person to ask. Penny!”

  Eileen went off to her bedroom to collect Penny and returned, carrying a white, pink-tinged crystal attached to a silver chain.

  “Let’s sit down at the table,” she told me. “It’ll be easier.”

  Eileen’s relationship with Penny the Pendulum was a curious one. To her, the pendant was not just a little lump of rock and a length of metal chain, but it had a persona of its own, a feminine one, as well as being imbued with a kind of supernatural intelligence.

  Leaning her right elbow on the table, she held the end of the chain up in the air between her thumb and forefinger so that the crystal was suspended over the table. “She answers questions with a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’,” Eileen explained to me. “When she swings around in a circle, it means ‘yes’ and when she swings backwards and forwards, it means ‘no’. Now, are you ready?”

  Not sure who Eileen was speaking to, me or the pendant, I said “Mm.”

  “Right,” Eileen said, “lets begin.” She cleared her throat, “Hm, hm,” and greeted the pendant politely, “Good evening, Penny. We’d like to ask you some questions and we’d be very glad if you’ll give us some answers.”

  Penny appeared to quiver slightly on her chain in response.

  “Good,” Eileen said, and then, in a trembly voice, asked a question that surprised me. “Is O’D a good man?”

  Penny thought about this for a while and then began to move around in a slow circle.

  “She says yes,” Eileen told me unnecessarily and gently stopped Penny’s progress with her left hand, in preparation for her next question.