Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  Held almost in a trance-like grip, I didn’t know whether I was asleep or awake.

  In the morning, I dragged myself out of bed, totally exhausted.

  When O’D and Caetano arrived back from Machaze at about midday, I mentioned my tiring night.

  “Funny you should say that,” O’D said, “Caetano and I had quite an argument with Ataid and the Machaze Administrator. The last thing we heard was that Ataid had gone off to see a witch doctor. The witch doctor must have decided to do something to you.”

  “To me? Why me?” I asked, outraged.

  “Witch doctors often call on the spirits to attack the people who are the closest to the person they want to harm,” Caetano explained, “The closest and the weakest. People like the wives and the children.”

  O’D and Caetano didn’t succeed in sorting out Ataid. He sorted them out, instead. While he carried on felling with impunity, Geronimo, the Director of Agriculture at this time, sent them a letter, telling them they had committed misdemeanours under Article something or other and that he was, therefore, expelling them from Machaze.

  Enraged, O’D and Caetano decided to contest this expulsion and made an appointment with Geronimo.

  Their visit appeared to put him on the spot. Unable to explain the obscure Article that had been used to expel them from their area, Geronimo resolved the problem by tearing the letter in half and throwing the pieces into his wastepaper basket. Then he brought the visit to an end, leaving O’D and Caetano in limbo.

  The reason for our expulsion from Machaze soon became clear when we discovered who was taking over our felling area in Machaze. A Portuguese forester called Souza, who had teamed up with none other than the Machaze Administrator!

  Deciding to take their complaint higher, O’D and Caetano made an appointment with Felicio Zacharias, the Governor of Manica Province. As well as talking about their unfair expulsion from Machaze, this would also be an ideal opportunity to talk about the terrible destruction going on in the Nhamacoa.

  The visit with the Governor didn’t go as well as they had hoped.

  Glaring at them with dislike across his empty desk, Felicio Zacharias had given O’D and his complaints short shrift.

  “Foresters are nothing but trouble,” he told them coldly. “If it was up to me, I would ban all timber companies and foresters from operating in Mozambique.”

  And when it came to the wholesale deforestation that was going on all over the country, it was the foresters, he told them, who were the cause of this. THEY were the people who were to blame for the loss of this valuable natural resource; THEY were to blame for the fact that future generations of Mozambicans would not be able to enjoy their indigenous forests in the years to come!

  For a few seconds, O’D and Caetano sat in amazed silence, digesting the Governor’s tirade. The way he was deliberately turning a blind eye to the activities of the population and blaming us for the appalling desertification of the Nhamacoa was particularly infuriating, not to mention downright insulting.

  O’D opened his mouth, preparing to give the Governor an angry blast but before he could even utter a word, Caetano’s big size twelve shoe pressed down hard on top of O’D’s size eight shoe, crushing O’D’s foot with this by now well-known signal of Caetano’s to cool it, to reign in his temper and to watch his words. A confrontation with such a man as Felicio Zacharias would do us more harm than good.

  Heeding Caetano’s warning, O’D closed his mouth again.

  With nothing left to say, O’D and Caetano stood up, glad to leave the hostile atmosphere of the Governor’s office.

  Being kicked out of Machaze by a crooked forester and a corrupt government official put both O’D and Caetano into a black mood for a while.

  Then Caetano rallied and put the loss behind him. “Never mind,” he told us. “We’ll just have to look for something else.”

  The new area on which Caetano’s eyes fell was situated in Guro and although he had gone through the usual bureaucratic route and had been granted the area, it soon became clear that here, too, something peculiar was afoot and blocking our way.

  The stumbling block, Caetano discovered, turned out to be a charming Italian with long floaty grey hair, twinkling little eyes and a character that could only be described as unutterably roguish. Our old enemy, Bertuzzi, who had stolen a large amount of timber out of our area in the Nhamacoa by fraudulently enlarging the forestry map of his area to include part of ours!

  “He’s also got an area in Guro,” Caetano told us. “It’s near the one we’ve been allocated and now he’s laying claim to ours as well, even stating that our area has been registered at the Land Office as his!”

  While O’D and Caetano were trying to sort out this complication at the Forestry Department, Bertuzzi came up with what he thought was a foolproof plan to get his hands on our area.

  Furtively meeting up with Caetano in Chimoio, Bertuzzi made him an offer he was sure Caetano wouldn’t be able to resist. A partnership, a car and the sum of a hundred million meticais - if Caetano signed our area in Guro over to him!

  “Do notta tella O’D aboutta dis,” Bertuzzi advised Caetano.

  When Caetano told O’D about Bertuzzi’s offer, O’D flew into a tremendous rage. Alone, he drove furiously over to Bertuzzi’s house in Chimoio and burst inside without even knocking on the front door.

  Confronting the long-haired Italian in his sitting room, he shouted “What the hell do you think you’re up to, Bertuzzi? What the hell do you think you’re doing, trying to bribe my partner away from me!”

  “I am an old man,” Bertuzzi defended himself. “I have to look after myself, before it is too late!”

  “Well you’re bloody well not going to do it at our expense!” O’D shouted and stormed out of the house again, slamming the front door shut with such force that it almost fell off its hinges.

  Sitting at the Sports Clube with Caetano, O’D still simmered with rage while he nursed the hand he had hurt by slamming Bertuzzi’s front door.

  “I’d like to make his life difficult for a change,” he said. “What can we do to the little mafiosi?”

  A thoughtful glint came into Caetano’s eyes. “Romana, my sister, works at the Finance Department,” he said. “Perhaps I can drop a word or two that Bertuzzi is evading his financial obligations to the country.”

  For the next three days, Bertuzzi’s Landcruiser was parked outside the Department of Finance while he explained himself.

  Then, Caetano heard that Bertuzzi was about to lose his area adjoining ours in the Nhamacoa. Busy with his other areas, he had neglected to work it for some time and the Forestry Department now considered that he had abandoned it.

  “Get hold of it, quick!” O’D told Caetano.

  Bertuzzi objected to our application for his area in the Nhamacoa but this time luck was with us - for a change! - and it was given to us.

  Towards the end of the year, Seven unexpectedly returned to work, cheerful and supple, and now it was Biasse’s turn to undergo tragedy.

  “My daughter is sick, Master,” he told O’D one day, standing next to the barefoot twelve year old girl dressed in a pink cotton dress. “She has pain in the stomach and is not able to eat.”

  Chimoio hospital diagnosed stomach cancer and when Biasse saw that the doctors there were unable to do anything to save his daughter, he ignored their objections and brought her home to die amongst the familiar faces of her family who loved her.

  One afternoon, soon after his daughter’s death, Biasse came into the sitting room and began dusting.

  “You know, Madam,” he said without looking at me and flicking his yellow duster erratically over the bookcase, “I think someone in Nhamacoa put a curse on my daughter, to make her sick, to make her die.”

  Sighing inwardly, I put down the pen I was using to fill in the Forestry Registry book. Always the witchcraft. “No Biasse,” I said, “this hasn’t happened because of a curse. People in Europe also get this sickness and no one i
n Europe puts curses on people.”

  Unconvinced, Biasse stopped his distracted dusting.

  “I would like to take my thirty days’ holiday, Madam, and go away for a while.”

  “Of course, Biasse. I’ll give you your holiday money and you can go right away if you like.”

  “It is because my head is not right, Madam,” Biasse told me, still not looking at me. “Something in my head is not right.”

  Thirty days passed and each day after that I waited for Biasse to come back.

  There was no word from him and then I heard from one of the workers that he had moved his whole family away from the Nhamacoa and had gone back to his home in Antennas. There was another new Administrator at the Tabex farm, a bachelor from Portugal, and Biasse was working for him now.

  I was upset that Biasse had disappeared back to the Tabex farm without saying a word to me, especially as we had been together for so many years. I missed his cheerful presence. I also missed his cooking. Now I would have to go back to the wretched cook hut! The very thought of slaving away in its smoky, fiery furnace of an interior filled me with rebellion.

  “Cook in it yourself, if you want hot meals,” I told O’D. “I’m only going to do salads from now on.”

  The threat of salads galvanized O’D.

  He drove down to Beira and returned with large cardboard crates in the open back of the Toyota pickup. A gas cooker, all the way from Brazil! A large gas/electric deep freeze from South Africa! A Defy Automaid washing machine, also all the way from South Africa and … a white enamel bath!

  The cooker from Brazil was a little scary. When I gently ran a soft, damp sponge over it to clean it, all the oven temperatures displayed on its white enamelled front and numbered one to five, disappeared! After that, it was all down to guesswork.

  The washing machine was a thing of wonder to Azelia. Completely fascinated by it, she often knelt down in front of its window to watch the washing going around and around in a sea of bubbles as if she was watching a particularly engrossing soap opera on television.

  Azelia still used the charcoal iron when the generator wasn’t running and although she was a good ironer, there were times when she was a trifle careless when it came to errant little pieces of red hot charcoal falling out of an overloaded charcoal iron.

  One morning, after she had carried a pile of newly ironed clothes into the sitting room and had carefully placed the pile onto a chair, I noticed a burn hole in my newest pair of jeans. And there, in the identical spot, another burn hole in O’D’s jeans!

  Marching down the back stairs to the laundry room, I placed the jeans on top of the ironing table and turned to confront Azelia and Seven.

  “What is this?” I asked sternly, pointing a finger at the two burn holes.

  Seven and Azelia bent their heads over the jeans and examined the holes in interested silence.

  At last Seven looked up. “It is a hole!” he told me, triumphantly.

  “Yes!” Azelia looked up, sharing his triumph,“it is a hole!”

  “I KNOW it is a hole!” I said annoyed, and rephrased my question. “What I would like to know is HOW DID THESE HOLES GET THERE?”

  Once again, Seven and Azelia bent their heads and made an examination of the holes. “The iron!” Seven finally told me.

  “Yes!” Azelia agreed excitedly. “The iron! It is the iron that made the holes!”

  Although O’D found the time to install and plumb in our new modern appliances, the white bath lay next to a wall on the verandah, neglected and unused. And although I reminded O’D over and over again that the little tin bath in the bathroom needed replacing, my words fell on deaf ears.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  MR. YING, MR. CHANG AND MR. DELIGONG

  1998

  At the beginning of the new year, O’D and Caetano decided to expand their horizons.

  They had always wanted to start up a small factory to make quality furniture for export and so they put together a project to apply for finance from the International Finance Corporation.

  “I think I’ll deliver the project myself,” Caetano decided. “Then we’ll know for certain that the IFC got it.”

  The thought of Caetano travelling to Maputo on his own worried me. Although South African tourists were beginning to rave about the city, a three-day stay in the 5-star Polana Hotel, eating prawns and enjoying the nightlife hardly gave anyone indepth knowledge of the real Maputo. The real Maputo had a very murky side away from the tourist haunts and was well known for its crime, its drug and human trafficking, it’s violence and murders. And then there was the memory, still fresh in my mind, of my own very nasty encounter with those woodbuyers from Maputo …

  There were bad guys out there!

  Although Caetano was adept at karate, thanks to the Koreans, I thought he could still do with some extra protection.

  “How about taking my Habanero Pepper Spray along with you, Caetano?” I suggested, holding up the personal defence weapon I had recently bought in Harare. In large white letters printed on its black wrapper, the can boasted a ‘NEW IMPROVED KNOCKDOWN FORMULA!’

  Caetano didn’t say no.

  A few days later, with my Habanero Pepper Spray safely tucked away in his jacket pocket, he boarded a bus for Maputo and set off on the 1,200 kilometre trip.

  When he arrived back in Chimoio all in one piece and came down to the sawmill, I asked for the return of my spraycan.

  To my surprise, this request brought a strange reaction from O’D and Caetano. They exchanged looks and then promptly burst out into loud roars of laughter.

  “What?” I asked. “What’s so funny?”

  “He used it,” O’D grinned.

  “On the bus,” Caetano laughed.

  “On the bus!” I exclaimed.

  Caetano’s use of the Habanero spray, it turned out, had been an unplanned action, with consequences that could well have provoked dangerous ‘bus rage’ among his fellow passengers.

  During the long and hot journey inside the crowded, stuffy bus, the passengers had grown drowsy and had fallen asleep. Caetano had also dozed off, quite unaware that he had dislodged the cap of the spraycan in his jacket pocket by sitting on it and that his weight had been pressing down on the nozzle, releasing its contents.

  The first indication he’d had about the peppery gas escaping from his jacket pocket was when a peculiar buzzing sound like the sound of angry bees had penetrated his drowsy torpor and he had felt a painful burning, stinging sensation in his eyes. Waking up, he had looked around the bus through a blur of tears and had found a scene of agitation and indignation. His fellow passengers heaved and surged around in their seats. Tears of pain rolled down their faces. They exclaimed, they began to shout, to get angry.

  It hadn’t taken long for Caetano’s quick mind to put two and two together. A furtive feel of his fingers in his jacket pocket confirmed his suspicions that the NEW IMPROVED KNOCKDOWN FORMULA! had been to blame for the pandemonium and immediately, his strong survival and self-preservation instincts had kicked in. Knowing the character of his fellow passengers and fearing they would beat him up, throw him off the bus and dump him in the middle of nowhere, he had joined in with the noisy upheaval in order to divert the finger of suspicion from being pointed at him.

  “What’s going on?” he had shouted, mopping at his burning, streaming eyes. “What’s happening? Open the windows! Let the air circulate!”

  The air had finally cleared and to Caetano’s relief, the mystery of the strange and peppery attack on the travellers’ eyeballs had remained just that. A mystery.

  “Well,” I said. “At least we now know that this Habanero pepper spray does actually work. I’ll get another one, the next time we go to Harare.”

  The new year also brought us some new and rather eccentric customers. They were the advance party of what was later to become something of an invasion from a far off country. A country that already had strong ties with Africa, not only by supporting its liberation m
ovement with military training and guns but also by selling the many products that we all so reluctantly had no alternative but to buy. Yes, China!

  One late evening in the Nhamacoa, when the sun was just on the point of vanishing down behind the trees and turning everything the mauve of dusk, Ying Investments paid us a visit. They jolted along the rutted forest track towards our house in their white Toyota 4 x 4 and parked under the eucalypt tree near our bedroom windows.

  I was in the bedroom at the time and although I peered out of the window, I couldn’t make out who our visitors were because their faces were completely obscured by the thick red dust that coated their windscreen.

  “Who on earth are these people?” I asked O’D who was standing outside, not far away. “Do you know them?”

  “Yes …” he told me, somewhat thoughtfully, “it’s … the Chinese.”

  The Toyota’s doors flew open and Mr. Ying, Mr. Chang and Mr. Deligong clambered out, accompanied by Fernando, their Mozambican interpreter. Smiling broadly, they rushed over to O’D and surrounded him, greeting him by vigorously pumping his hand up and down. There was a lot of loud chattering and a lot of what sounded like “Ha! Augh!” and “Hai!”

  Turning away from O’D, they went back to the Toyota and began to pull something out of it. I leaned out of the window.

  “O’D,” I asked ominiously, sensing that everyone knew something I didn’t know, “what are the Chinese doing, coming to see us NOW?”

  A peculiar look spread itself all over O’D’s face. A sort of … uneasy look. “They say they’ve come for supper …” he said slowly “… and that they’re going to spend the night in our house.”

  “WHAT!” I cried, horrified.

  Under normal circumstances, I might just have been able to put up with four unexpected guests for the night, but these weren’t normal circumstances. And to make things even worse, we had just eaten the last of our food this very evening! I now had nothing in the house to give anybody, not even a can of beans or a slice of bread. The cupboard was completely, absolutely bare - except for an unopened one-litre bottle of virgin olive oil all the way from Portugal.