When time passed and Chuck didn’t return for his possessions, O’D gave all the animals away to Caetano. Seven cleaned their smelly presence out from the room underneath the house and I used this room to store all their old furniture, their books, their bedding and kitchen equipment.
This left us with only the bare minimum in the house until Raimundo, a doddery and ancient carpenter O’D had found, could manufacture some furniture of our own out of some of our newly sawn planks.
There were no furniture shops in the country and so, like everyone else, we had to have all our furniture handmade by local carpenters. This, as you may imagine, took time and wouldn’t have gone down at all well with Western people and their demands for instant gratification of their needs.
I had long since given up our little camp beds and for almost a year O’D and I had been sleeping on a mattress on the floor of our room. This had not only proved more comfortable for us, it had also been a popular move with the various insects sharing our abode. Stray scorpions, with hideous little scorpion babies piled up on top of their backs, clambered up off the floor and onto the blanket, while revolting fork-tailed and shiny blue-black centipedes slithered under a pillow or two. They all met with the same fate - squashed beyond recognition, either by a woman wielding a shoe or a Mozambican cook wielding a broom!
Now that we had the planks, Raimundo could make us a bed and we could sleep in safety, high up off the floor. And as well as our own table on which to eat our meals, he could make us chairs, window frames and much needed front and back doors.
Using his well-worn old hand tools from Portuguese Colonial days and aided by Luis Raoul, a much younger carpenter from the village of Macate, plus some war veterans who claimed they wanted to be trained as carpenters, Raimundo set to work.
Sawing and planing, nailing and glueing, the carpenters’ shed was a hive of activity.
At last, several weeks later, a small procession of people trooped over to the house, proudly carrying a table, six chairs and two small bedside cupboards all made out of Umbila.
Raimundo’s furniture was a little on the clumsy side, chunky with a ripple effect from the hand planing. It looked a lot like the sort of furniture Fred and Wilma Flintstone would have used in their home in Bedrock but I didn’t complain. When you lived in a country that had nothing, you weren’t fussy.
Now that Pocas had run off with Chuck, O’D cast his eyes once again over our workers. This time he decided to train no less than three of the most sensible ones to operate the saw, just in case Chuck made another sneaky hit and run raid on our resources.
Once he was sure the saw operators knew what they were doing, he went back to driving the blue Gaz early in the mornings into the forest, loading the little lorry with felled timber and bringing the logs back late in the evening to the sawmill.
Left on my own all day long, with only Biasse or Seven to talk to now and then, I turned to our shortwave radio for companionship. Knowing how I would need it now that Chuck and Eileen were gone, O’D always made sure I had a plentiful supply of batteries.
Without a telephone to speak to family or friends and in a country where an airmail letter took more than a month to reach its destination, the radio became my lifeline, connecting me in my isolation in the Nhamacoa to the rest of the world. It filled the empty silent house with music and voices, the voices of people who would never know that I existed but who became my friends and companions in the awful, awful loneliness I was now to experience.
Without my shortwave radio, I would have fallen apart.
The other thing I began to do, was to talk to God. When you’re all alone in an African forest, you soon get to know who is important in the world.
Once, with the exception of my father who claimed to be an atheist, my family had belonged to the Anglican Church but had been chased away from it by The Very Reverend French Beytagh, the portly priest who had presided over it. Shocked by the revelation that my grandparents had forgotten to baptise my father, The Very Reverend had curtly told my mother not to bother bringing my father to him for burial if Dad should die.
The Very Reverend’s threat hadn’t worried my father. “I wouldn’t want someone like him to bury me anyway,” Dad had said.
Then, when my sister Jennifer was born, The Very Reverend had done it again, telling my mother to stay away from Church for the next two weeks as she was ‘unclean.’ Deeply offended, my mother had taken The Very Reverend’s advice to heart, and had stayed away not for two weeks but for good.
Although my mother had never set foot in Church again, she had forced me to endure two years of Confirmation classes and many, many long Sundays sitting in a pew in the Anglican Cathedral and listening to The Very Reverend’s sermons. Sermons that were so unutterably boring and dreary, I never remembered anything he said. Immediately after my confirmation and the taking of Holy Communion, I had stopped going to Church. I had not found God in the Anglican Cathedral. It wasn’t the kind of place you ran to. It was the kind of place you ran away from. And now, here I was, not in a cathedral but in a forest in Africa and trying to find Him again after all these years.
I had never spoken much to God before – The Very Reverend had never suggested that this was something we could do - but now I had long conversations with Him about everything. Quite often, when Biasse came into the sitting room, he caught me talking aloud to God and gave me peculiar looks, no doubt wondering if I was becoming ‘bush happy’ – an old White Southern African expression for ‘nuts’.
“Just talking to myself, Biasse,” I would explain with a reassuring smile. “Just talking to myself.”
Clouds blew up and rain lashed the Nhamacoa. In the forest, O’D and his workers struggled in the deepening mud with the lorries and the tractor.
He had managed to find a driver for the green Gaz to replace Chuck. This was a rather fearsome looking man called Nunes who had once worked for Maciel at the Tabex farm until Maciel had fired him for something or other. Nunes was of Portuguese and Mozambican descent and had long black shaggy dreadlocks dangling wildly around his moustachioed yellow face that gave him an extremely villainous appearance. With Chuck and Eileen’s exit and Nunes’ entrance into our lives, we no longer looked like a bunch of hillbillies. We now looked like a bunch of South American desperados.
Our workers were afraid of Nunes and obeyed his orders without question. He had once worked for the Secret Police and this terrified them. With Nunes working for us, our production rose quite dramatically.
The rains brought more stress into my life. While O’D spent longer and longer in the forest, digging the lorries and tractor out of the mud, I sat alone in the dimly lit, broken down house in the evenings and as the hours dragged by, I worried.
I worried about O’D having an accident. I worried about how I would go about getting help without a telephone, without money, without friends. I worried about O’D never coming back from the forest ... disappearing …
I worried about bandits paying me a visit. I worried about getting sick, about coming down with malaria, tick bite fever, cholera, blood poisoning from a scratch that turned bad, and dying alone while O’D was stuck in the mud in the forest ...
I had never worried much about anything before but now, living in the Nhamacoa forest, I became a lone worrier.
One black moonless night while I sat in a chair in the sitting room and waited for O’D to return from the forest, a wild and terrifying electrical storm blew up right overhead. Gale force winds from the east roared through the trees and bolts of lightning flashed all around the house, exploding with earsplitting cracking sounds.
As I sat on tensely, wondering whether the house was going to be hit, the rocks and stones holding down the black plastic blinds went flying. Driving rain poured through the windows in a horizontal flood and the paraffin lamps went out.
Groping around in pitch-blackness, I stumbled for safety down the corridor just as another mighty blast of wind ripped off part of the grass roof an
d more rain poured in on me.
In the bedroom, I threw myself face down onto the mattress. I was feeling a bit mad and wild myself. I was afraid the whole roof was going to be ripped off, that the raging storm was going to come right inside my house, leaving me defenceless and with nowhere to shelter.
An intense and awful feeling of absolute depair, of being completely forgotten by everyone, overwhelmed me and I burst into tears. “So lonely, oh, so lonely,” I shouted into the storm, punctuating my words by beating at my pillow with my fists, “why … WHY am I so alone, alone, ALONE … ”
“But you’re not alone,” a calm voice cut into my cries.
I stopped beating up my pillow and sat up slowly. Although I had never heard this voice before, I knew to whom it belonged.
The sound of the storm receded, along with the terrible feeling of isolation, and another feeling flooded through me. This was a feeling of such peace and security that it made me feel I could deal with anything that was going to be thrown at me. “Thank you,” I said to the One I had been spending so much time talking to.
Of course I wasn’t alone.
One evening, O’D arrived back at the sawmill from a fuel-buying trip to Chimoio looking rather upset and preoccupied.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It’s Caetano,” he told me. “He’s got something on his mind and it isn’t our business. In fact, he seems to have lost all interest in the business. Maybe it’s because we’re not doing well and making any money. Maybe he’s thinking of going off on a venture of his own or with someone else.”
The thought of losing Caetano made my heart sink. He had become more than a partner by now. He had become a friend. How would we cope without his cheerful and optimistic presence?
“It’s always better to get the bad news over and done with quickly,” I said. “Ask him what’s wrong the next time you see him.”
A few days later, O’D met Caetano at the Sports Clube, a place they now used as an informal office. They sat down at a table near the window and ordered a coffee for O’D and a Coke for Caetano. While they drank, O’D braced himself to ask the question that might bring all his dreams crashing down.
“Is something wrong, Caetano?”
Caetano looked down at the table and there was a long silence while he struggled to control the emotions that were tearing at his heart.
Then, unable to contain himself any longer, he burst into anguished tears and covering his face with his hands, cried for a long time.
Aghast, and not knowing what to do, O’D stared at him. Not only a man but an English one at that, he wasn’t good at handling emotions.
At last, when the storm of Caetano’s tears subsided, O’D dug a hand into a trouser pocket and pulled out a crumpled handkerchief.
“Here, Caetano,” he said, knowing Caetano didn’t possess such a thing as a handkerchief, “you’ll need this.”
Caetano took the handkerchief and after mopping his wet face with it, blew his nose noisily. “Marcelina … it’s my wife …” Caetano managed to choke out eventually. “She’s been sick for months now, with terrible pains in her stomach. I think … I think she’s dying. I can’t find anyone to help her. Whenever I take her to Chimoio hospital for an examination, the only thing they do is to give her a handful of aspirin. None of the doctors or nurses will even tell me what’s wrong with her! I don’t know where to go for help … or what to DO!
Now that he was out of dangerous emotional waters and back in his element of practicalities and action, things he did best, O’D took charge immediately.
Pushing his chair back, he stood up. “Come on, Caetano. Let’s go and look for a doctor for your wife, right now. A good doctor.”
The search was not an easy one and when they eventually found the ‘good’ doctor, he would do nothing until he received an upfront payment of five million meticais - about three hundred U.S. dollars!
Managing to scrape this extortionate sum up from somewhere, O’D paid the doctor and although he put Marcelina on an intravenous drip in Chimoio hospital and it seemed to help, her recovery was shortlived and her agonizing pains returned.
“I don’t know what more I can do!” Caetano told O’D in despair.
“We’ll have to take her back to that 5 million meticais doctor,” O’D said.
“No,” Caetano shook his head. “That doctor is no good. He didn’t help her at all.”
Beside himself with fear and misery, Caetano ran wildly around Chimoio, looking for someone else to help his wife and this time came across a nurse. Once again O’D handed over an extortionate amount of money, only to see Caetano’s greatest fear come true. Marcelina died.
After the funeral, Caetano’s face took on a haunted look. To his days of mourning for his wife, were added fears for his own life.
“He’s having a lot of trouble from Marcelina’s parents,” O’D told me. “Not only are they blaming him for their daughter’s death but they’ve also told him that they’re arranging to get someone to kill HIM now, in revenge.”
“What kind of people are these?” I wondered.
“They’re from the Chitewa tribe,” he said, “and according to Caetano, the Chitewas are the most terrible people in the whole of Mozambique.”
With what little money we’d had now reposing in the pockets of an unscrupulous doctor and nurse, O’D decided to sell the Mbaua logs we had cut down and had been going to turn into planks. It was easier, unfortunately, to find a buyer for logs than to find customers for our planks.
Mbaua, as mahogany is called in Mozambique, goes under the botanical name of Khaya Nyasica. The trees are huge, wide and tall and grow on the steep slopes leading down to rivers and streams. We had felled them while Chuck had still been working for us and he had told me that we would never be able to pull them up the hills and bring them back to the sawmill.
His words had filled me with irritation. “Then why the hell did we go to all the expense and time of cutting them down, if we’re just going to leave them lying in the forest?”
Fortunately, O’D was not a Chuck. Enterprising and optimistic as ever, he had said, “Of course we’ll get them up the hills. We’ll winch them up.” And that’s just what he had done.
The buyer Caetano found for us came from Beira. He was Portuguese, middle aged and plump and arrived in a large and expensive white Landcruiser.
As his dark Mediterranean eyes took in our broken down house and our piles of unsold planks, he understood our circumstances immediately and naturally enough, decided to take advantage of them.
Standing amongst our Mbaua, he examined them with a deliberately jaundiced eye and shook his head. “Not good, not good,” he pronounced and sent our hearts sinking. “You have cracks! Bad cracks!”
It was true. Some of the logs did have several visible cracks as well as some small holes.
Plucking a long blade of dry yellow grass out of the ground, the Portuguese pushed it into the holes and cracks as far as it would go. In some cases, the blade of grass disappeared up to a length of 6 or 9 inches.
Sighing dolefully with the disappointment of a man who had driven two hundred and forty kilometres for substandard logs, he explained to us that the price we wanted for the logs was far too high. That they were hardly worth buying. That he would have great difficulty working out how to saw logs with such bad cracks and still get enough planks out of them to make it worth his while. However, he had driven a long way to come and see us …
O’D and I exchanged a look. We had hoped that what had looked to us like magnificent mahogany was going to pull us out of the financial desert we were in but now it seemed we’d been fooling ourselves.
The Portuguese offered us a low price and despite being unsure of himself, O’D haggled with the Portuguese. This went on for some time in the hot sunshine until finally, the Portuguese couldn’t be pressed any further and O’D gave in.
Our need for money was too desperate to turn the Portuguese down and he knew it.
Some days later, after the Portuguese buyer’s lorries had taken away the Mbaua logs he had chosen, we rolled a few of the logs he had rejected onto the saw for planking. Would they be as bad as the Portuguese had claimed … or had we, in our ignorance, been taken for a ride?
Augusto, our young and capable saw operator, started up the saw and as the log moved slowly forward, began slicing it into planks - wide, beautiful, pale pink planks that would turn a dark red-brown when they dried out.
“There’s nothing wrong with this wood,” O’D said as we examined each plank when it came off the saw for stacking. The cracks and holes the Portuguese had made such a song and dance about were hardly worth worrying about. They didn’t run the full length of the log and were only at the ends. “I had a feeling that Portuguese knew something I didn’t know - and I was right! All we have to do is cut off the ends which have defects and we’ll have perfect planks.”
“He saw we were babes in the wood where the timber business is concerned and he lied to us, to trick us,” I said.
O’D gave a resigned shrug. “That’s business for you. We’ll know better next time.”
By now, things were hotting up in the forest and there was a lot of activity going on. Activity that wasn’t coming from us, but from the Mozambican people.
It was becoming increasingly obvious to us that there was a war going on in the Nhamacoa. A war that had begun when the civil war between the ruling Frelimo party and the opposition Renamo party had come to an end in 1992. It was a war between the people and the forest, a war between the people and the animals, a war between the people and O’D, Caetano and me. And, alarmingly, it appeared that it was a war the people were going to win!
The trickle of people coming into the Nhamacoa had now turned into a stream. Day and night, we heard the chop chop chop of axes, the crashing sounds of trees falling over and the crackling of flames as the people set fire to the large areas of forest they were clearing in order to open new machambas to grow maize.
These new forest dwellers introduced themselves to O’D and his workers one day by starting a fire not far from where they were working. When O’D asked them quite politely to control their burning, they in turn behaved in a decidedly rude and un-neighbourly manner. Waving their pangas up in the air at him in a threatening way, they shouted belligerently “WE ARE MOZAMBICAN! THIS IS OUR LAND! WE CAN DO WHAT WE LIKE! IF YOU DON’T SHUT YOUR MOUTH, WE WILL CUT YOU AND YOUR WORKERS UP INTO LITTLE PIECES WITH OUR PANGAS - AND KILL YOU!”
Monkeys in My Garden Page 22