Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  Mozambique was beginning to stir out of the ashes of war and reconstruction was finally in the air.

  Word spread quickly that there was a small sawmill producing much needed timber and soon Government departments began to order our wood, along with Aid Agencies and Missionaries. They needed to repair existing schools, hospitals and clinics and to build new ones. The schools needed wooden beams for their roofs, doors and window frames, as well as desks and chairs for all the new pupils starting to get an education. Hospitals and clinics needed cupboards in which to keep their medical equipment. Churches needed benches.

  Lorries began to arrive at the sawmill from Manica, from Inchope and even as far afield as Maputo!

  And then there were the needs of the ordinary people …

  Jethro and Manuella who owned the little shop called Daisy Commercial in Macate bought planks for shelving and a widow called Argentina, who had little money, bartered for wood in a novel and most unusual way. Astutely deciding that O’D’s weak spot was a sweet tooth, she offered a product of her own which she knew he just wouldn’t be able to resist. Cakes! Every time Argentina needed some planks, she baked a delicious cake for O’D and after placing it on a tray, covered by a clean embroidered cloth to protect it from flies, she sent it off through the forest to us on the head of a young barefoot boy.

  In no time at all, dozens of carpenters from Chimoio also began to make their way down to the sawmill. They came every day, on foot and clamouring for wood. To reach us, they caught chappas (beat-up old pickup taxis) at the market and travelled down in the open backs of these vehicles as far as the turnoff at Lica where they were dropped off. From the turnoff they walked the six kilometres down the forest track to us and then, after choosing their planks or beams with the help of Frank, our Cubicador, they walked the six kilometres back to the main road and sat and waited for another chappa to come along and take them back to Chimoio. A round trip of 76 kilometres. How about that for a shopping trip!

  As we always cut our planks according to the size of the log unless a customer asked us for a special size, we had looked around for someone who could measure the volume of our planks and calculate the price of each individual piece of timber.

  Hearing on the grapevine that we had started sawing, a small, bearded and often drunken man called Frank had approached O’D in town one day and had begged for a job. Frank had once worked at Tabex until O’D had fired him for being constantly drunk at work.

  “I don’t employ drunkards, Frank,” O’D had told him sternly.

  “I will mend my ways,” Frank had promised. “I will only drink at weekends.”

  As Frank had been the only candidate for the job, it hadn’t taken much begging from Frank for O’D to relent. “Alright, Frank,” he had said. “See that you keep your promise.”

  Frank had turned out to be a pretty good Cubicador and as he spoke English very well, he soon became indispensable to me. He helped me out when I had trouble understanding a customer or they had trouble understanding me. As I’ve said before, unlike O’D who has a natural talent for languages, my Portuguese wasn’t (and still isn’t) exactly wonderful.

  Although every now and then we caught a whiff of Nippa on Frank’s breath, he always insisted that this was only the residue of a couple of tots over the weekends and that he was keeping to his promise.

  He did have one habit, though, which while it amused me, drove O’D to distraction. For some reason Frank always called me “Sir” and O’D “Madam”.

  “You’ve been drinking again, haven’t you, Frank?” O’D would accuse him, irritated at being called Madam. “I am Sir and this”, O’D would say, pointing at me, “is Madam!”

  “Yes, Madam … er … Sir,” Frank would stutter.

  No matter how O’D went on at him, Frank continued to reverse our roles and as the years went by, O’D finally became reconciled to being called “Madam …er …Sir” and in my case “Sir … er … Madam”.

  As our sales increased daily and more and more people came down to us on foot, in pickups, in lorries and tractors with trailers, we realised we needed a day guard to supervise the activities of our customers. Customers who just might get carried away and walk off with some of our equipment instead of buying our timber.

  The Mozambican we employed as our day guard was called Uonatomale Tepo but he insisted that we call him ‘Cinco Metro’. He was very proud of this nickname as it means five metres and had been given to him because he was unusually tall for a Mozambican.

  Raimundo built a wooden guard hut for Cinco Metro a short distance away from our house and together with a wooden pole as a barrier and an exercise book and a Chinese ballpoint pen, he set about controlling our customers.

  Selling timber to a mass of customers who had no transport meant that we had to provide the transport. So, twice a week, O’D loaded our customers’ wood onto the back of the blue Gaz and drove it into Chimoio where, at the estaleiro Caetano had rented from his friend Joao de Conceicao, he was besieged by a crowd of waiting carpenters, all waving their facturas (receipts) at him. When their wood was off-loaded, the carpenters hired chovas (a large type of wheelbarrow) and pushed their planks to their houses or primitive little workshops.

  Now that we finally had customers, the money we were earning not only went into paying off the awful BPD bank loan a little faster but we even had some left over to buy a much needed item or two, as well as some bags of whitewash.

  And so Seven, a young man of many talents, tied a plastic bag suicidally over his head to protect himself from paint splotches and set about turning our old ramshackle Portuguese house into a vision of sparkling white.

  With the coming of the rains, it seemed our long financial drought was also over.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A SITTING TENANT CALLED UWE

  One morning, O’D woke up feeling terribly ill. The whites of his eyes had turned a dull yellow and he told me that he thought he had malaria. Even worse, that he thought his malaria was cerebral!

  “You’ll have to tie me down if I go off my head and start thrashing around and raving,” he warned me.

  His words horrified me. Tie him down! A doctor, O’D had to get to a doctor! But how?

  “I can’t drive the blue Gaz!” I cried. I didn’t have the strength to drive this lorry and besides that, my feet couldn’t even reach the pedals.

  O’D climbed groggily out of bed. He pulled on some clothes. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can drive myself to the hospital. I’ll take Avelino with me.”

  While I stayed at home, worrying and on tenterhooks, O’D somehow got himself to the hospital. There, Pepe, a nurse O’D knew well, confirmed that he had malaria, bad malaria, and injected him with Halfan.

  Managing to drive himself back home again, O’D collapsed weakly into bed. Sweating and freezing and complaining of an agonising headache, he vomited a thin stream of yellow into the plastic bowl I held under his chin.

  This time, I knew, he was surely going to die. I had never seen him look so ill, not even when he had been brought down with that hepatitis he had caught from Mr. Mabaleza, the witch doctor.

  In the bathroom, I poured water into the plastic bowl, rinsing it out and flushing its contents down the lavatory.

  A terrible dread filled me and I tried to stamp it down. Oh, what were we doing in this wild and isolated place, all alone and miles away from medical help? Without even a telephone?

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at O’D helplessly. “God,” I begged silently, “please don’t let O’D die. Oh, please, don’t let him die…”

  O’D opened his eyes and caught me staring at him. Understanding my fear, he gave me a ghastly smile of reassurance. “Don’t worry,” he muttered, “I’m not going to die.”

  “Promise,” I said, wanting to cry.

  “Promise,” he said, and closed his eyes again.

  That night I dreamed a strange dream about O’D and my father. In the dream, I saw O’D climbing h
igh mountains until he finally arrived at a small village in Tibet.

  A little white road led up past a row of wooden houses on the mountainside and O’D walked up this road until he came to a house with its shutters thrown wide open.

  Standing under the window, he looked up and called out, “I’m here!” and although he didn’t put in an appearance, a voice that I knew was my father’s called back to him, “It’s not time yet!”

  When I woke up in the morning, I knew O’D was going to be alright. The meaning of the dream had been clear.

  While O’D lay sick in bed, customers continued to pour into the sawmill and as we had no way now of transporting their purchases to Chimoio, the piles of planks and beams waiting delivery rose higher and higher. What we needed was a reliable driver who could stand in for O’D and wouldn’t smash up our one and only good vehicle. But where to find one?

  About five days after O’D had fallen ill, Frank appeared at the east-facing sitting room window, accompanied by a tall and well-built Mozambican with a pleasant face and a wispy beard that ended in a straggly point.

  “This is Mr. Fernand, Sir … er … Madam,” Frank introduced us. “He is a driver and needs a job. He wonders if you would like to employ him now that the boss is ill.”

  “Are you a real driver with a real driving licence?” I asked Fernand.

  He pulled a small card out of his shirt pocket. It claimed to be a Mozambican driving licence and came with a photograph. Carefully, I checked the photograph, comparing it with Fernand’s face in front of me. Everything looked alright, but I knew that papers meant nothing in Mozambique. As for his driving ability, we would only find out about this when he had driven off into the distance with our precious Gaz.

  In the bedroom, I showed Fernand’s driving licence to O’D. “Well, what do you think?” I asked. “Shall we let him drive the blue Gaz?”

  “We haven’t got any choice,” he replied weakly.

  For once, luck was with us. Fernand turned out to be a capable and reliable driver and it seemed we had found a treasure. While O’D languished in bed, work continued. Logs were brought in, sawn into planks and beams, bought and paid for by our customers and transported to Chimoio every day by Fernand who never put a dent into the blue Gaz.

  Fernand also kept us in contact with Caetano and the outside world and began to bring faxes back to us from the post office. These faxes were from Willy in the Algarve and they were not good news.

  He had put Arrojela on the market, Willy told us, and although there had been a lot of interest, there was a problem. A big Germanic problem. Despite being given several weeks’ notice to move out, our German tenant, Uwe Heitkamp, was still in the house! And not only that, but he was also behaving in such an obnoxious manner that he was driving away dozens of potential buyers.

  When Willy arrived with people who were interested in buying Arrojela, Uwe turned nasty. Rudely refusing access to our house, he sometimes even slammed the door shut right in Willy’s face.

  So much for Uwe’s promise to O’D that he wouldn’t cause any problems if we should put Arrojela up for sale! The pony-tailed German had turned himself into a ‘sitting tenant’, another bullying Hitler, illegally occupying territory that didn’t belong to him.

  “Send a fax to Willy,” O’D instructed me from his sick bed, “and tell him to remove our generator and the two water pumps from Arrojela. Cutting off his electricity and water will be sure to get Uwe off our land!”

  The fax we received back from Willy astonished us. He had been in contact with a lawyer, he told us, and it appeared that Uwe could take US to court if we took away his right to electricity and water.

  “But Uwe’s in our house, illegally!” I exclaimed. “Don’t we have any rights?”

  “Send a fax to Willy,” O’D instructed me weakly from his pillows. “Tell him to get a Court Order to remove Uwe from Arrojela!”

  The fax Fernand brought back from the post office in Chimoio filled O’D and me with incredulity. “Can only get a Court Order if you take Uwe to court,” Willy told us, “and that might take months - even a year.”

  So much for the Algarvean system of justice!

  Faxes flew between Mozambique and Portugal but Uwe remained obdurate and now even began to threaten us! He had been to see his lawyer in Lagos and she … She? Could this be Carmen again? … had told him that we had been in the wrong to rent Arrojela out to him in the first place; that we had neglected to obtain a certain paper from the Council certifying that Arrojela was in a habitable state and as a result, Uwe could take us to court for renting Arrojela out to him under false pretences!

  Uwe’s arrogance enraged me. How dared this German carry on like this in MY house!

  No one had forced him to rent our house and he had lived in it quite happily for almost six years, paying only a nominal rent of one hundred and ninety eight pounds a month.

  And how, I wanted to know, did someone like Uwe get to have more rights to MY house than I did?

  We were fast approaching the two year deadline of John Phillip’s loan to us and with Uwe messing around like this, there was the danger of Arrojela falling into John Phillips’ hands for a quarter of her value, leaving us with absolutely nothing. Trapped in the Nhamacoa by malaria as well as a lack of money for an airfare to Portugal to sort things out, O’D and I wracked our brains on how to deal with the German. How were we going to get the wretched man out of Arrojela before time ran out for us?

  We were still in a deadlock with Uwe when O’D finally felt well enough to get out of bed. Driving up to Chimoio in the blue Gaz, he met Caetano and Caetano had a suggestion. Mr. Goncalves had disappeared but there was another witch doctor in Chimoio and he was sure the man would know how to get Uwe out of our house, out of Arrojela and out of our lives.

  In his little brick house in a crowded suburb of town, the witch doctor listened intently to what O’D had to tell him.

  “You must write a letter to the German” he told O’D, “bring it to me and I will put a curse on it. The letter must be put into his hand personally and it will make him leave your house and your property immediately.”

  The fact that the cursed letter to Uwe would have to be sent in the form of a fax didn’t faze the witch doctor. Letter or fax, a curse was a curse. The only thing that O’D had to ensure, however, was that the cursed fax had to be put into Uwe’s hand personally by the person who received it at the other end.

  Once again enlisting Willy’s aid, O’D sent the fax off to the Algarve. Now Uwe would have to watch out! Now Uwe would get his comeuppance!

  Convinced that our German squatter would shortly be fleeing Arrojela for unspecified reasons, O’D turned his mind to more pleasant things and went back to work.

  Unbeknown to O’D, however, when the cursed fax came out of the fax machine in Willy’s house in the Algarve, his plan began to unravel.

  Loathe to endure another unpleasant encounter with the belligerent German on his own, Willy persuaded Tom Waterer, a visiting cousin of the Pixley brothers, to accompany him to Arrojela. When they arrived at the house, they found no one there - much to Willy’s relief! - and so he decided to ignore the witch doctor’s instructions to personally hand O’D’s message to Uwe. Getting out of the car, he slipped the cursed fax through the crack under the front door and then, duty done, he got back into the car and he and Tom drove away.

  In the meantime, O’D and Caetano were making preparations to begin felling in Machaze, the new felling area Caetano had found. They had sent equipment and a group of our workers to set up a base camp there but already it was becoming obvious that this was going to be a difficult place in which to operate. It was far from us, the roads were in a terrible condition and the local Administrator, his assistants and the police were unfriendly, unhelpful and extremely corrupt.

  Within a few weeks, our small band of workers was in trouble with the locals. Enticing women away from their husbands, they were embroiled in fights and wrote letters, written on s
crappy pieces of paper torn out of exercise books, telling us they had been thrown into jail and begging us to get them out.

  And then trouble of another sort reared its head when we sent Fernand off to Machaze in the blue Gaz loaded down with equipment and pulling a tractor on a trailer.

  While waiting several hours at the market for Caetano to give him a paper from the bureaucratically slow Department of Forestry, Fernand, flamboyantly dressed for the journey in cowboy boots and a white cowboy hat glittering with sequins, got bored and decided to overcome this boredom in the usual Mozambican way. By the time Caetano arrived, our driver was too drunk to stand and was lolling around on the ground against one of the Gaz’s front tyres.

  “What are we going to do with him?” Caetano asked O’D.

  “Fire him and look for another driver,” O’D replied.

  Caetano found another driver called Tacarinduwya and warning the man about drinking while driving, O’D entrusted the blue Gaz to him. Travelling up to Machaze without a problem, Tacariunduwya deposited our equipment and more workers at base camp and returned safely back to the Nhamacoa. Thinking that all was now going well in our new area, O’D and Caetano put Machaze out of their minds for a while.

  In October, we received a marvellous order from John Fortescue of Msasa timbers for his door manufacturing company in Zimbabwe. The order was for twelve cubic metres of first class Umbila and would go a long way towards paying off our debts.

  Luck, it seemed, was at last on our side and our fortunes had finally turned around.

  When the Msasa timber order was completed, Fortescue and his partner Clive Walsh drove down to visit us and to check on the quality of the planks. Pleased with what they saw, they told us they would be sending their driver and lorry to transport the wood to Zimbabwe. Fortescue would deal with the paperwork on his side of the border and we would, of course, deal with the paperwork on the Mozambican side.

  Caetano dealt with our export paperwork and was surprised when the official at the Chamber of Commerce in Beira handed one particular paper back to him, telling him it wasn’t needed. For a moment, Caetano thought about questioning this but then, deciding that the bureaucrats knew what they were doing, he gave a shrug and travelled back to Chimoio.