Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  We had been plagued with rats and had battled with them ever since we had arrived in the Nhamacoa and although we bought traps at the market, the rat population had been too overwhelming to exterminate until, that is, Black Kitty had come onto the scene.

  A formidable little hunter, he had cleared the house of rats and the entire area around it and then had gone on to bigger things, such as rabbits, which were often much larger than Black Kitty himself. Using the house as his den, he stored the dead rabbits either in O’D’s tool cupboard in the spare bedroom or in the gap underneath the bookcase and made us feel quite queasy when we came across him munching on them with a lot of cracking and crunching of bones. A voracious eater, he left nothing behind, even eating up all the fur.

  Fearless as he was, there was one animal that terrified him.

  One afternoon, the baboons arrived and began to forage in the mango trees outside the sitting room window. Black Kitty had been sitting on the wide windowsill at the time and the sight of the creatures made him tremble violently from head to foot.

  “Are these the ones who bit off your tail?” I asked Black Kitty.

  Someone or something had either cut or bitten his tail and although it had healed completely, it was only half the length it should have been.

  Black Kitty and I spent a lot of our time together. He became my companion and whenever I went for a walk down to the saw or along the forest track, he would come with me for the walk just like a dog. He liked being carried and when we turned to go back to the house, I would pick him up and he would purr with happiness.

  One afternoon, when I was carrying him back from the saw, I felt his small body suddenly stiffen and heard his purrs turn into a menacing and rather frightening growl. Wondering what was wrong, I stopped walking and looked in the same direction he was looking. And there, on the branch of a small tree right next to me, I saw it. A long green snake! Attuned to the natural world as I was not, Black Kitty made me realise how I blundered around in the forest, completely oblivious of all the creatures living so close around me. Unaware that they were watching me, I rarely saw them or heard them until they, themselves, gave me a warning hiss or a fright when they slithered or darted away.

  I noticed Black Kitty’s appreciation of music one afternoon when he was lying sprawled out on the carpet in the sitting room. Zimbabwe’s Radio One was playing a particularly toe-tapping tune at the time and Black Kitty’s short tail was keeping perfect time to its rhythm. Twirling his tail joyously from side to side, Black Kitty swung it to the left and then to the right, following the beat of the music as it went faster and faster and then slowing down as the tune slowed down. When the music came to an end, Black Kitty’s tail gave a final flourish in the air before it stopped moving and lay still.

  One day, Black Kitty disappeared. He vanished as Mitzi had vanished, without leaving any clues behind. At first we thought that his hunting expeditions had taken him further than normal but when the days passed and there was still no sign of him, we began to think that something terrible had happened.

  “The baboons,” I said, tearfully echoing Eileen’s words of so long ago, “perhaps the baboons have killed him.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” O’D who loved Black Kitty as much as I did, told me. “He’ll be back. I’m sure of it.”

  We were standing outside the house one late afternoon when we heard the faint weak miaow. “What’s that? Listen,” O’D said, just as Black Kitty came out of the long tall grass, dragging himself towards us, along with the snare that he had walked into.

  He was a pitiful sight. For three days and three nights he had fought a desperate battle for survival while the wire of the snare had tightened and tightened so much around his neck that it had cut a bloody groove deep into the skin and had twisted between his legs, leaving wounds there as well. Exhausted and wounded and weak, he had fought on until, miraculously, the wire had snapped and he was free.

  “The pliers! Get the pliers!” O’D ordered and when I came back with them, he carefully and gently cut the wire around Black Kitty’s bloodied neck and removed the snare.

  “Is he going to be alright?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” O’D replied.

  Without a Vet, there was nothing we could do to help Black Kitty except to bring him into the safety of the house and give him water to drink and a little food. Tired out by his ordeal, he fell into a deep sleep and when he woke up, he began licking and licking at the wounds he could reach.

  After about ten days, Black Kitty’s injuries had healed and he was almost back to his old self again - almost, because later on when his fur grew over the scars, he was no longer a pure black cat. A fine white line of fur, like a necklace, now encircled his neck where the wire had bitten into it and another white strip ran down the inside of one of his legs.

  Now that it was too late to save Arrojela, we were, ironically, earning a lot of money. As Chimoio’s banks were notorious for their inefficiency, we hid this money in O’D’s clothes cupboard, on the shelf where he kept his socks and underwear and T- shirts; a shelf that was always so untidy we were sure it would be too off-putting for any thief to contemplate searching.

  Sometimes there was more than ninety million meticais hidden under O’D’s clothes and after we had paid off all our debts, we decided to spend our profits on a much-needed article. A brand new Toyota pickup!

  It’s quite true to say that you only really appreciate something when you’ve been through a long period of deprivation.

  The shiny white Toyota delighted us. It spelled freedom. Now we could drive across the border into Zimbabwe to see family and friends and buy the things we needed. When O’D parked the pickup under the shelter next to the east-facing sitting room windows, I ran my hands over its smooth shiny surface, touching a headlight, a windscreen wiper, as if I had never seen a car before.

  In the house, one evening, O’D tried out the car alarm. “I wonder if I can lock and alarm the pickup from inside the sitting room,” he said.

  Lovad just happened to be ambling past the pickup when O’D squeezed the little plastic disc and the pickup made a high-pitched beeping sound and flashed its lights at him. “Aargh!” Lovad gave a startled shout and backed away from the empty pickup, examining it warily from a distance. Ah! The new car had a spirit in it!

  Despite the dusty roads, the white Toyota always left the Nhamacoa in a spotless and gleaming state. Seven saw to that. He liked to keep things clean, although there were times when his enthusiasm for cleaning things carried him away and made him forgetful of past mistakes.

  One Saturday afternoon when O’D and I were relaxing in the sitting room and reading books, Seven appeared in the doorway and hovered there, timidly.

  O’D looked up from his book with irritation. He never liked being bothered by workers over the weekend. “Well, what is it, Seven?” he asked.

  A picture of misery, Seven crept further into the room and shoved a tray at O’D.

  We stared at the tray. There was a tiny shoe on top of it, a shoe that would have fitted a child of about five years old.

  Suddenly, O’D let out what could only be described as a loud whooping howl.

  Seven started back in fright at the sound.

  “It’s mine!” O’D spluttered, with another howl of suppressed laughter. “It’s one of those animal skin shoes I bought at that safari shop in Zimbabwe. Seven’s gone and miniaturised it by boiling it in a pot of water!”

  Soon after the debacle of O’D’s shoe, Seven decided to get married and like Daringua, he made an unwise choice. Although the girl he chose as his bride was beautiful and sparkling, she was also the deaf mute daughter of a Prophetess.

  One day, Biasse came to me with a worried look on his face.

  “It is Seven, Madam,” he told me, “he has found an evil object in a corner of his hut. He thinks the Prophetess, his mother-in-law, has sent it there. She hates him and is wanting to kill him.”

  “To kill him? Oh, sure
ly not, Biasse. He’s probably just imagining all of this. You know how superstitious he is.”

  Biasse’s face turned grim. “I think not, Madam.”

  We burned the evil object in a small clearing Seven made among the trees not far from the house. It was a thin cord on which seeds had been strung and I thought it could have been a clumsy attempt by someone to make a necklace but Biasse and Seven wouldn’t have it. This was a fetish and they knew all about these things. The object was definitely evil and had been deliberately put into Seven’s hut in order to harm him.

  After Seven had thrown the evil object into the fire, he knelt down on the ground and repeated a prayer of protection I had found in the new Bible I had bought to replace the one I had given to Steven. Biblically ignorant as I was, I had spent hours rifling through its pages until at last I had come across something, coupled with a threat from God about what he did to wicked people, which I thought might suit Seven’s situation. Standing behind the kneeling Seven, I read the passage out and he repeated it aloud in Shona.

  A few days later, Seven did not appear for work. Although it had been burned, it seemed the evil object had done what it had been sent to do. His young wife had run back to her Prophetess mother and Seven now lay as stiff as a plank in his hut, completely paralysed from head to foot!

  “I’m sure it’s got absolutely nothing to do with that thing he found in his hut,” I told O’D. “It’s just in his mind.”

  Seven, like all Mozambicans, firmly believed in the power of witchcraft. Once, he had come to me to ask for money because he was suffering from bad pains in his legs. Thinking that he intended going to the Macate clinic for medical treatment, I had given him the money. Instead, he had gone to a curandeiro (a traditional healer) living in the forest not far from us and had returned, completely cured.

  “Look, Meddem,” he had told me, holding out a hand, “look what the curandeiro found in my legs!”

  For a moment I had stared blankly at his outstretched hand. In the palm lay four rusty and bent nails and two razor blades. How was this possible?

  “An enemy sent these things into my legs,” Seven had explained excitedly, seeing my lack of understanding, “to hurt them and give them pain! And the curandeiro took them out!”

  I had pictured the crafty curandeiro’s slight of hand. Well, no matter. His rusty nails and razor blades had probably had a better effect on someone as gullible as Seven than a couple of Western pills would have had.

  Now Seven lay as stiff as a board, convinced that the Prophetess’s fetish was at work.

  “You’d better take him to the hospital,” I told O’D.

  Two workers carried Seven over to the Toyota pickup. One held him under his arms while the other held him by his ankles. Stretched out straight and stiff between them, his body resisted gravity and didn’t droop in the middle as a body would normally have done. They lay him down in the pickup’s open back.

  At Chimoio hospital, doctors and nurses examined Seven. They could find nothing physically wrong with him, they told O’D. However, they had seen this condition before. It was something to do with a fetish.

  Seven’s lips, the only part of him that wasn’t paralysed, moved. “A witch doctor,” he begged. “There is a witch doctor who can help me. Take me to him.”

  The witch doctor Seven insisted on seeing lived deep in the bush and apparently was the only one who had the knowledge to cure him.

  Once again, our workers put Seven into the back of the pickup and O’D drove off with them all. When the dusty bush road petered out and the Toyota could go no further, he stopped the car and the two workers climbed out. For several kilometres, they staggered through the bush carrying Seven’s rigid form between them until finally, they arrived at the witch doctor’s hut.

  It was to be about four or five months before we saw Seven again. The fetish, it seemed, had been a powerful one and took time to remove.

  Fortunately, Seven’s absence did little to disrupt work in the house. By this time, I had employed Azelia to wash our clothes and she now took on Seven’s duties as well

  Azelia was Frank’s pretty wife and she was as tall and slender as a model. She often sang while she ironed our clothes with the old fashioned, heavy charcoal iron. She was happy because she was earning money to spend on herself and didn’t have to rely on Frank who often drank up his wages. After Seven had turned into a human plank and had disappeared into a faraway witch doctor’s hut, she was happier than ever. She and Seven hadn’t been too fond of each other, often bickering while they worked, and now, to her delight, he was gone.

  In June, a rather ugly little incident occurred which showed me quite clearly to what extent I could rely on day guard Cinco Metro (and Frank!) for protection.

  About a month earlier, three men in a white twenty tonner with Maputo number plates had appeared at the sawmill and had chosen seven first class panga panga planks. As they hadn’t had enough money to pay for the planks, they had asked me to accept a small deposit in order to keep the planks for them until their return with the balance of the money two days later. I had agreed, and had told Frank to put the wood aside for them.

  The weeks had flown by without a return visit from the Maputo men and then, during a run on timber when carpenters from Chimoio had even been standing in a bunchy queue by the saw itself, waiting to buy planks from logs in the process of being sawn up, Frank and I had decided to sell Maputo men’s panga panga planks to a desperate customer.

  “After all, Sir … er … Madam,” Frank had told me, “we agreed to put the planks aside for two days only and it is now more than a month.”

  “Yes, Frank,” I said, “and when …or if … they do come back, we’ll just return their deposit.”

  As luck would have it, the Maputo men put in an appearance the very next day and on one of the three days a week when O’D was always away from the sawmill.

  “You sold OUR planks?” they asked incredulously, standing in a group with Frank and Cinco Metro outside the east-facing window of the sitting room.

  Inside the sitting room and on the other side of the open window, I handed back their small deposit. “Sorry,” I told them, “but you told us you were coming back in two days’ time and that was over a month ago. We don’t normally hold timber for people, anyway.”

  One of the men moved closer to the windowsill and glared at me. “You must pay us compensation,” he demanded menacingly. “Compensation for our fuel. We drove all the way from Maputo to collect our planks and now you tell us you have sold them. You have wasted our fuel!”

  Growling in agreement, his two companions also pressed closer to the windowsill.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” I retorted, knowing full well that they hadn’t driven a distance of over one thousand kilometres just for seven planks. They had had other reasons for coming to Chimoio, other business. “I’m not going to pay you anything!”

  The man’s right hand shot out and shoved hard at my left shoulder, “We want compensation!”

  The force of the shove jerked me backwards and I felt a flash of fury.

  “Don’t touch me!” I told him.

  In answer, he gave my left shoulder another hard shove with his right hand. “GIVE US COMPENSATION!”

  “Alright,” I said tightly, “you asked for it,” and turning away from the window, I walked quickly over to the corner of the sitting room where we kept Lovad’s rifle. It had no bullets in it as O’D always took the magazine out in the morning but that didn’t matter. With the element of surprise in mind, I walked back to the window making sure to keep the rifle out of Maputo men’s sight.

  Standing in front of them again, I hissed “Get out of here,” with a menace of my own and slowly slid the barrel of the rifle threateningly over the windowsill, pointing it straight into the eyeballs of the man who had shoved me. “Get out of here, right now!”

  The reaction I got was satisfying.

  Ten panic-stricken eyes bulged with terror and Frank and Cinco Me
tro shouted, “No, Sir! No, Madam! No, Senhora! Don’t shoot!” and pushed Maputo men down to the ground to protect them from me before dropping down themselves.

  I looked over the windowsill at all the men, including Frank and Cinco Metro, now cowering down on the ground with their hands covering their heads. “I told you to go,” I said coldly. “Now, GO!”

  Slowly, they all stood up. The man who had shoved me looked at me with pure hatred. “You’d better never leave this place,” he spat out. “You’d better never come to Maputo … because if we ever see you there …” he made a slitting movement at his throat with his hand “… we will KILL you!”

  I raised the rifle and, making sure he would notice, slowly squeezed at the trigger with my finger.

  “Go!” Frank pushed at the man, “Go on!” and at last they walked off towards their lorry. The twenty tonner started up with an angry roar, gears clashed and as they drove away, the man who had shoved me shouted something I didn’t hear over the engine noise and made another slitting motion at his throat. And then they were gone.

  “Cowards,” I muttered. They would not have behaved like this, I knew, if O’D had been around. African men always thought they could browbeat a woman on her own.

  And as for Frank and Cinco Metro ...

  I stared at them with disgust. They had completely failed to protect me. “Well, what are you lolling about for? Get back to work.”

  My safety in the Nhamacoa, it seemed, lay in my own hands.

  When O’D and Caetano went to Machaze, my belief that Seven’s paralysis was ‘all in his mind’ and nothing to do with witchcraft took a bit of a battering.

  Ataid, a Mozambican forester, was felling trees in our area and they had driven off to sort him out, leaving me alone in the Nhamacoa for two days and two nights.

  During the night before O’D’s return, my sleep was continually disrupted by bursts of incredibly bright light that dazzled my eyes and came from dozens of little creatures, dancing and twittering around me.