“Is Caetano a good man?”
The ridiculous nature of these questions had an unfortunate effect on me. A laugh threatened to burst out of my chest and before I could curb it, transformed itself into a smile that bloomed all over my face. Eileen noticed and gave me a look from narrowed, witchy looking eyes.
In answer, Penny began to swing around in another circle.
“Alright,” Eileen said, “now that we’ve got that out of the way,” she gave me another look, “we can get on to the important things.”
Penny told us several things in the next few minutes and when it came to the most important question of all as to whether or not we were going to make a success of the business, she was more than enthusiastic. Flying around in wide and exuberant circles, she assured us that by the end of October we would be on our way to riches!
Towards the end of October, things were no better and we were still held fast in the grip of our financial doldrums. Penny the Pendulum’s ability to predict the future, it was obvious, was a dubious one.
“I can’t understand it,” Eileen said, “she’s never been wrong before!”
Why we couldn’t get on our feet was a mystery to all of us … with one exception, of course …
One morning, while we were eating a breakfast of toast and margarine and drinking coffee of an extremely fluffy and inferior type, we heard the sound of a familiar voice. It was a very distinctive voice and it was a voice that made you want to laugh when you heard it. It was speaking Portuguese very, very fast and the faster it spoke, the higher it rose until it sounded just like the voice of Speedy Gonzales, the Mexican cartoon mouse I used to watch on television decades ago when I was young.
“Caetano’s here,” I said, “and he’s upset or excited about something.”
We always looked forward to Caetano’s visits and to seeing his happy, cheerful face. Nothing ever seemed to get him down and his optimism always raised our dented spirits. Now, however, even he seemed worried.
As he always did before coming inside the house, Caetano removed his dusty and broken size twelve shoes and left them outside before joining us in the sitting room. Sweating from his trip to the sawmill in the open back of a battered chappacem (taxi pickup) and then the six kilometre walk down the forest track, he sat down on a chair at the table and gratefully accepted a large glass filled with Mazoe Orange Juice.
“We must bring a witch doctor to the sawmill as soon as possible,” he told us. “We need to find out why we’re having all this terrible luck.”
Eileen looked up from her toast. “Well, I hope you can find a real one this time, Caetano. I’m sure the one who held that ceremony here last year was a fake, tricking us into giving him a goat and all that alcohol.”
Caetano nodded his head slowly. “Perhaps that’s why we’re having problems,” he said. “Perhaps it’s something to do with that ceremony …” an expression of fear flitted across his face “… perhaps, instead of placating the Spirit of this place, we offended it!”
Although he’d been baptised into the Roman Catholic faith, like many of his countrymen Caetano was still held captive by his culture and the things Mozambicans believed in. Things like witch doctors and evil spirits and the magical powers that animals could pass on to humans.
Once, when he and O’D had been driving around Guro (they travelled around a lot together and were soon to become as inseparable as twins), Caetano had become terribly excited when he had noticed a certain substance which had been deposited on the ground by one of Africa’s largest animals.
“Stop! Stop! Stop the car!” he had shouted urgently at O’D. Thinking Caetano had spotted trouble, O’D had braked hurriedly. He’d been a bit puzzled when Caetano had jumped out of the vehicle, grabbed a hessian sack out of the open back and then loped off to the side of the road towards an enormous mound of what looked like dung. There, he’d bent down and had started shovelling it into the bag.
Returning to the car, Caetano had thrown the sack into the open back again. “Elephant dung!” he had explained to O’D with a great big grin all over his face. “I’m going to mix this with Denis’ bathwater (Denis was his five year old son) and then he’ll grow up as strong and as powerful as an elephant!”
Another time, in the Nhamacoa, when O’D had obliviously driven over a puff-adder not far from our front door and squashed it as flat as a pancake under his tyres, Caetano had been overcome by this stroke of good luck. Like his fellow Mozambicans, he firmly believed that if you find a snake in your house or your garden, someone who wished to harm you had sent it there.
“I wonder which of your enemies sent this snake to you?” Caetano, the Mozambican, had pondered. “Could it be Ataid in Machaze … or is it someone we don’t even know about?”
“No one sent this snake, Caetano,” O’D the Englishman had replied. “We’re bound to get snakes around us. After all, we are living in a forest.”
“That’s the difference between Africans and Europeans,” Caetano had mused. “To you, a snake is just a snake. To us, it’s a deadly weapon sent to harm us by an enemy.”
Caetano believed that witch doctors could make lightning crackle in a clear, cloudless blue sky and send lightning bolts straight into the houses of your enemies, frizzling them to death.
Caetano believed that witch doctors could put curses on people you hated and make them die and that they could call up spirits to visit you in your sleep to give you horrible dreams.
Caetano believed that a certain witch doctor at Dombe could even make you immune to bullets … by boiling you in a drum of water into which a magical potion had been mixed.
I’m sorry to say that when we had heard this last fantastical claim, O’D and I just hadn’t been able to keep a straight face and had both burst out laughing uproariously at the pictures his words had conjured up in our minds.
“I wouldn’t like to try this out for myself, Caetano,” O’D, who liked to try out almost anything, had laughed.
“It’s true!” Caetano had insisted, quite put out by our reaction.
It had been the Mozambican belief that spirits live in rivers, in mountains, in valleys and forests, that had made Caetano tell us we had to hold a ceremony at the old Magalhaes sawmill before Chuck could even begin to do any work there.
“If we do anything … ANYTHING AT ALL … without asking permission from the Spirit of the place … the Spirit of the Nhamacoa …” Caetano had warned O’D ominously, “we will have nothing but bad luck!”
Respectful of Caetano’s culture and knowing that he wouldn’t rest easy without a ceremony, O’D had agreed. “Alright, Caetano. Arrange it.”
However, as the ceremony hadn’t exactly turned out as Caetano had anticipated, it seemed we were now going to have to arrange another.
The witch doctor Caetano found this time to bring down to the sawmill was an extremely powerful witch doctor. His name was Mr. Goncalves and he had agreed to come down to the Nhamacoa on Sunday at twelve o’clock. O’D would have to collect him from Chimoio, of course, as he had no transport.
Biasse was not at all pleased when I told him to prepare a larger than usual Sunday meal of fried chicken, chips and salad for visitors that included a witch doctor.
His wrinkled face turned grim. “Witch doctor no good, Madam.”
“He might be able to fix your back, Biasse.” Biasse had been suffering a lot from backache.
Biasse’s little figure stiffened at the thought of being touched by such a person. “Ah! No, Madam!”
“But this is your culture, Biasse. Don’t you all go to witch doctors when you’re sick?”
“Is not my culture, Madam,” he told me proudly. “I Christian! Witch doctors are very bad men, very very bad! Kill people! My Church tell me never to go to witch doctor!”
Shortly before midday on Sunday, O’D arrived back at the sawmill in the Land Rover with Caetano and our visitors. Accompanying the witch doctor was a woman who turned out to be Mr. Goncalves’ wife. Everyone came
inside the house and we all settled down around the table in the sitting room.
While our visitors relaxed after their jolting, bone-rattling drive down to the Nhamacoa, I examined Mr. Goncalves. I had never met a witch doctor before and had expected him to look out of the ordinary and different from the rest of us. However, there was no aura of evil surrounding him that I could make out and he seemed a nice enough person, softly spoken and neatly dressed in a white open necked shirt and brown trousers. No, there was nothing at all in his small, lean physique or in his manner that gave even a hint that he was a witch doctor.
“Would you like to eat lunch now, Mr. Goncalves?” O’D asked.
Mr. Goncalves shook his head. “No, but I would like a little wine to drink.”
As Caetano had told us Mr. Goncalves had requested red wine for the event, we had used some of our dwindling funds to buy a bottle. O’D opened the bottle but before he could pour more than three small mouthfuls into Mr. Goncalves’ glass, the witch doctor held up a hand and stopped him. “It is enough,” he said.
Closing his eyes, Mr. Goncalves drank down the wine in his glass.
He sat still in his chair for a few minutes, while we all watched him in silence and then he stood up. He picked up a small bag he had brought with him and walked over to a corner of the sitting room, near the east facing windows. Then he began to take off his clothes.
He slipped off his shoes and shrugged off his shirt. He unbuttoned his belt and stepped out of his trousers.
Clad only in a pair of black shorts, Mr. Goncalves opened his bag and pulled out a large square of black cloth. Spreading this out on the floor, he knelt down on it and began to prepare himself. He tied a thin white bandana around his forehead and wound a python skin around his waist. He opened a small pouch and, as if he was playing a game of dice, threw small stones across the cloth.
Then he closed his eyes and while he knelt there on the cloth, his wife leaned over him.
Mr. Goncalves had disappeared and in his place was the very powerful witch doctor Caetano had found.
As I examined his light brown and fine featured face closely for any trace of fakery, the witch doctor gave a convulsive jerk, and then another, as he went into a deep trance ... deeper … and deeper … and then he began to speak, calling up the spirit of the Nhamacoa.
It was a hot, still October afternoon, with not even a hint of a breeze but suddenly there was a small, strong gust of wind and out of nowhere a dust devil rose up out of the ground not far from the house and danced and whirled towards the window. Grains of sand blew into the room and sprinkled down on us all, onto our hair, onto our faces and onto our bare arms, almost as if we were being baptised.
Was this the spirit of the Nhamacoa, coming in the form of a dust devil? Feeling a little uneasy that a spirit might perhaps have touched me, I looked around at the others and raised my eyebrows. They ignored me.
The witch doctor’s conversation with the spirit was a complicated one. For some reason, the spirit of the Nhamacoa only spoke Zulu and it was this language that came out of Mr. Goncalves’ mouth in his entranced state. As none of us, naturally, understood Zulu, this was where Mrs. Goncalves came in, translating the Zulu into Shona for Caetano. Caetano then had to translate the Shona into Portuguese for O’D.
The spirit of the Nhamacoa was more than ready to tell us what was wrong. When words began to tumble out of the witch doctor’s mouth in an aggrieved torrent, I leaned over towards O’D and whispered “What’s he saying,” Caetano’s Portuguese was much too fast for me to understand.
“He’s complaining about the ceremony we held here last year,” O’D told me in a low voice, confirming Caetano’s fears.
Suddenly, the tone of the witch doctor’s voice changed. The volume increased alarmingly and the spirit now began to speak angrily … and accusingly …
Caetano gave a great start at its words. His eyes bulged out of his head with fear and tiny droplets of sweat popped out on his forehead.
“What’s he saying?” I asked O’D in another whisper.
“The spirit’s castigating Caetano,” O’D muttered back at me “and blaming HIM for neglecting to see that the ceremony had been properly conducted ... no respect … no one had shown him any respect …offering him nothing at the ceremony … everyone eating everything … drunk … without giving a thought to him”.
Leaving Caetano sitting limp and crushed in his chair, the spirit began to talk about something else that was on his mind. This time, it was Chuck’s turn to give a violent start, his turn for his eyes to bulge out of his head with fear and little beads of sweat to pop out on his forehead!
I leaned over towards O’D. “What’s he say …”
“SShh!” O’D told me. “Apparently Chuck’s got a curse on him.”
I leaned back in my chair and glared at Chuck. A curse! It was just like Chuck to come to us, bringing a curse with himself and not telling anybody about it. It was no wonder we were in such a fix!
Chuck raised a hand and nervously fingered a thin strip of leather around his neck. I had never noticed this before but now I saw that there was something attached to the leather, like a kind of amulet.
“He says Chuck brought this curse on himself,” O’D told me, “by cheating and lying to Nelson who retaliated by going to a witch doctor at Matsinho. That thing he’s wearing around his neck isn’t strong enough to ward off the evil. He needs something much more powerful.”
The spirit of the Nhamacoa talked to Mr. Goncalves for a very long time. Trapped in my chair, my eyes glazed over and I stopped listening and asking questions. Instead, little pictures began to form in my mind … little pictures of golden, crispy chicken legs … scrumptious chips as only Biasse could make them … tomatoes sweetly ripened in the sun …
Activated by my thoughts, my stomach gave a loud growl. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Four o’clock! No wonder my stomach was grumbling. It had had nothing but a slice of toast and margarine all day!
I wondered what the spirit would think if I disappeared downstairs into the cook hut? Would there be more bad luck?
When my hollow stomach gave another protesting growl, I stood up slowly and slipped out of the room.
Downstairs in the cook hut, Biasse was nowhere to be seen, but there, on the worktop was a large platter, piled high with golden pieces of fried chicken just waiting to be devoured.
I was ravenously eating my second chicken leg when a dumpy shadow fell across the doorway of the cook hut.
“I thought this was where you were going when you slipped out,” Eileen said, grabbing a plate, “so I thought I’d join you. I’m so hungry, I feel quite faint!”
By the time Eileen and I had finished eating, the scene inside the house had changed. When we guiltily crept up the back stairs, we found Mr. Goncalves now busy cleaning our house. Still on his knees and using an imaginary little broom, he was making his way around the sitting room, sweeping ‘bad spirits’ out of the room before him.
Not knowing what to do, we all trailed behind him in a line, stopping every now and then when he found a particularly recalcitrant ‘bad spirit’ and had to attack it more vigorously with his invisible little broom.
Although it would have been a painful thing for most of us to travel across cement floors on our bare knees, Mr. Goncalves didn’t seem to feel a thing. He made his way down the corridor … sweeping, sweeping … all around Chuck and Eileen’s bedroom … sweeping, sweeping … and then into ours. The bathroom was next and then after a quick trip around the broken kitchen, he made his way out of the front door, still brushing away and now going down the old cement paving next to the house, until with a final flourish of his imaginery broom, he swept everything away into the air.
When Mr. Goncalves finally stood up, I gave an inward sigh of relief. It was over at last and we had come to the end of a very long day. But … oh, no! … it was not the end after all!
Going back into the house, Mr. Goncalves gathered together some littl
e white pouches. These had the power to stop evil people from coming into your property, and walking normally on his feet again, he went from entrance to entrance around the sawmill and buried them.
In a hurry to get home to Chimoio now, Mr. Goncalves declined O’D’s offer of food. This was just as well. After our visit to the cook hut, Eileen and I had left barely enough chicken for anyone!
It was only later that I realised that none of us had given a thought to holding a second ceremony to placate the spirit and we had also done exactly what the fake witch doctor and his people had done, eating almost everything and finishing off the wine.
In Africa, Africans take spirits and witch doctors seriously. O’D and I did not take them seriously. And that may … or may not … have had something to do with what was to happen to us some years later.
CHAPTER TEN
ANIMAL FARM!
Soon after Mr. Goncalves’ visit, our fortunes changed again when Empacol, another customer, arrived on the scene. Of course, this had nothing to do with the witch doctor and was probably the reason why none of us gave even a passing thought to arranging a second Mozambican ‘good luck’ ceremony.
Empacol was a Mozambican sawmill in the port of Beira and although they didn’t pay as much as Socinave had paid us, we were spared the expense and extra work of transporting our logs to the Chimoio railway station and loading the timber onto trains. This was because Empacol sent their own transport in the form of ancient Mercedes Benz 20 ton lorries to collect our logs from the Nhamacoa and to laboriously drive them back down to Beira.
The relief we felt at the slight easing of our financial problems didn’t last long. About a month after the witch doctor’s visit, trouble reared its head in a new, but not unexpected, direction. While all of Chuck’s animals were living free range lives, the four of us were kept cooped up in one small, broken down Portuguese house and our personalities began to clash in earnest.
One morning, Chuck returned from a water-collecting trip in Macate with two ducks.
“Ducks …” I gave an inward groan. As well as the chickens and the goats and all their droppings, we were now going to have duck droppings as well!
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