Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  Lovad and I were standing outside on the grass near the verandah at about six o’clock when the call of the wild exerted its final and powerful pull on Black Kitty. For the last time and without even a backward glance at me, he started off down the forest track and disappeared around the bend.

  I never saw Black Kitty again, and I missed him. I missed him a lot.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MATAQUENHA AND OTHER WILD ANIMALS

  1999

  It was Conceicao, Maciel’s wife, who had first warned me about that hideous little Mozambican creature, the Mataquenha. “You must be careful, Vaal,” she had told me all those years ago on the Tabex farm, “you must never walk around barefoot or wear open sandals. The Mataquenha is very, very dangerous!”

  In the Nhamacoa, our workers often fell victim to this dreadful little worm that lived in the soil and burrowed into your toes, laying its eggs right near the nails. They dug the worms out with a needle and then poured petrol or diesel into the holes to sterilise them.

  The thought of one of these Mataquenha wreaking havoc in my toes terrified me and so I was very, very careful.

  One afternoon, when I walked over to the garden to check on the tomatoes and the lettuce, my right foot sank into a patch of soft ground and soil filled the grey leather moccasins I was wearing. “Uh oh,” I thought to myself and immediately turned for the house. Rushing into the bathroom, I took off my shoes and washed my feet in the bath. I gave my shoes a clean as well, shaking them out and wiping them inside with a wet, soapy cloth. Hopefully, these precautions would keep me safe.

  I was standing in front of my easel a week or so later, finishing off a watercolour of some ragged children playing in the road of a small Mozambican town, when I felt the twinge. It was sharp and painful and was followed by a second and a third twinge a few seconds later. What was this? I wondered. Sitting down on the sofa, I examined the little toe on my right foot. Nothing. Everything looked quite normal. I stood up again. Perhaps the twinges had only been a sort of cramp, or pins and needles from standing so long at the easel.

  We were spending a weekend in Harare when the twinge turned vicious. It woke me up at two o’clock in the morning, stabbing at my foot like red-hot knives and leaving me gasping and clutching at my foot with agony. A doctor! I needed a doctor!

  By the time the sun had come up and we were on our way to see Dr. Featherstone, the mysterious pain had subsided - but not for long, I knew.

  “Lucky this happened to me now, while we’re in Zimbabwe,” I said to O’D during the drive. “At least I can be sure of getting good medical attention here.”

  When he stopped the car under the Jacaranda trees next to Dr. Featherstone’s surgery, I got out and limped over to his door. It was closed and there was a notice on it. Dr. Featherstone, the doctor who had looked after us since our arrival in Southern Africa had left … and gone off to England!

  Panic began to rise up in me. “He’s gone!” I cried, getting back into the car. “What am I going to do now?”

  “We’ll just have to find another doctor,” O’D told me.

  “But where? WHERE?” I asked, my voice rising. There had been a steady drain of professionals like Dr. Featherstone from Zimbabwe over the last couple of years. President Mugabe’s murky diamond-mining ventures with the Zimbabwean Army in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had seen to this. They were costing the country a fortune. There was a problem with foreign currency, another problem with fuel and as a result businesses were beginning to suffer. Our small ethnic duvet business with David and Caroline, so successful a year ago, was beginning to struggle now, what with the ever-increasing cost of electricity, fuel and fabric from David Whitehead Textiles. This unaccustomed hardship was making Zimbabweans restless. Some were leaving for greener pastures and others were complaining, complaining about Mugabe quite openly and aggressively on radio phone-in programmes!

  The Medical Centre wasn’t far from Dr. Featherstone’s deserted surgery and there, much to my relief, we found a Dr. Watermeyer who was prepared to see me if I was prepared to wait. Naturally, I waited, and while I sat there, the plump and elderly receptionist made her feelings known about doctors who ran off to England and left their patients in the lurch.

  “Dereliction of duty!” she sniffed huffily. “Just out for the money and couldn’t care less about the sick!”

  “Well, he does have a large family to support,” I defended Dr. Featherstone. “He’s got a wife and five children.”

  “That’s no excuse,” she snapped. “Times are tough for all of us. How are ordinary Zimbabweans going to cope if all our doctors run away to Europe and America because they want more money?”

  How, indeed? I had no argument with that. Living in Mozambique, I had long ago come to realise how frightening life was when you were ill and you more or less had to doctor yourself.

  Dr. Watermeyer was young and tall, with a long blonde ponytail that bounced around her head when she moved. She glanced down at the card her elderly receptionist had handed to her. “Mmm … one of Dr. Featherstone’s patients,” she said disapprovingly. “What’s the problem?”

  “I keep getting a terrible pain in one of my toes,” I told her. “There seems to be a tiny yellow mark there, and” I held up my left hand “I’ve also been getting the same pain in my left index finger.”

  Without touching my finger, Dr. Watermeyer examined the tiny yellow mark on it. “I don’t know what this is,” she told me, “it looks like an infection.”

  “Perhaps if you opened it up, we’d find out,” I suggested.

  In her examination room, she reluctantly pulled on some surgical gloves and picked up a needle. I held out my finger and she made a small incision where the yellow mark was.

  A little white worm with a black head popped out of the incision and Dr. Watermeyer stepped back from me, a look of revulsion on her face. Ugh!

  Without speaking, she removed the worm from my finger and after placing the needle and the worm on a white saucer, gingerly dabbed my finger with cotton wool soaked in Eusol. Then she peeled off her surgical gloves and placing a foot on the pedal of a white rubbish bin, raised the lid and carefully threw the gloves inside.

  “What about my toe?” I reminded her.

  Dr. Watermeyer turned a blank face towards me. It was obvious she had no intention of subjecting herself to the sight of yet another disgusting worm. “It looks like an infection caused by wearing tight shoes,” she told me dismissively.

  “But I never wear tight shoes,” I objected.

  Ignoring my denial, she sat down at her desk and began to write out a prescription. “You can deal with the infection yourself, when you get home,” she told me. “Soak your foot in a bowl of hot water with green soap and then squeeze out the pus.” She held the prescription out to me “and this is for a course of penicillin.”

  Back home in the Nhamacoa that night, I followed Dr. Watermeyer’s instructions, soaking my right foot in a plastic bowl of hot water with a lump of green Sunlight soap wrapped around the little toe to draw out the ‘infection’. Then, when O’D and I thought my toe had been soaked for long enough, O’D carefully cut into the tiny yellow mark with a sterlised razor blade. Half a worm emerged …

  “Where’s the other half?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t seem to be here,” O’D said thoughtfully, examining the tiny cut he had made.

  “Must have disintegrated during that soaking with the green soap,” I said.

  “Well, it’s gone now,” O’D said, giving the little cut a dab with disinfectant. “Your finger doesn’t bother you anymore, does it?”

  “No,” I said, “my finger’s fine.”

  Although I took the penicillin Dr. Watermeyer prescribed, the painful twinges in my toe didn’t go away. They were especially bad at night and by the middle of the week, I had made another worrying discovery. Dr. Watermeyer’s antibiotics were proving as useless as her diagnosis.

  “What’s happening?�
�� I asked O’D one night while I lay on the bed with my foot on top of the blanket. “Why isn’t the penicillin working?”

  “Give it time,” O’D told me.

  “But my foot seems to be swelling up,” I said, an icy feeling of terror beginning to form in my heart “and there’s a black mark - a black mark, O’D, that’s getting bigger too!” I sat up and bending my head, fearfully sniffed at the toe. “I’m sure I’m getting … gangrene!”

  “Of course you’re not getting gangrene,” O’D told me, reassuringly. “That’s just a little bruise on your toe.”

  By Friday, I had to sleep with my foot hanging down over the side of the bed. The pain was ratcheting up and paracetamol was useless. On Saturday night I couldn’t sleep at all. Waves of agonising, excruciating pain knifed and rampaged through my foot without a break and in the end I left the bed and hobbled into the sitting room where I lit a paraffin lamp.

  The pain was unbearable … unbearable… as if a shoal of piranhas was eating away at my foot, tearing and shredding at it with sharp teeth … oh, what a nightmare this was turning into! I was going to die, I knew … I’d been to a doctor, a doctor in Harare… and now, here I was, going through this hell … how was it possible …

  Another terrible pain ripped through my foot and I felt myself beginning to break, to lose control, to disintegrate under its power. “God! Oh God!” I cried as tears of agony poured down my face. “Help me! Oh, help me, God! God! Oh, God!”

  Oh, what a pity Dr. Featherstone had gone to England … oh, this would never have happened if I’d been able to see him …

  The thought of Dr. Featherstone triggered off a memory. The pills! Oh, of course … the pills!

  I hobbled over to our First Aid box, opened its lid and frantically began to rummage around in it, looking for the very powerful painkillers I had managed to talk Dr. Featherstone into prescribing for us. I didn’t know what they were but he had prescribed them - reluctantly - when I had told him we would be in the bush, miles away from hospitals and doctors and might need them if we had a terrible accident, like the loss of a leg or something …

  When my trembling fingers at last found the little plastic packet of pills, I filled a glass with water and drank down the painkillers. Aaah … magic, just like magic, their effect was almost instant. Within a few minutes, the terrible pain started melting away.

  In the morning, we set off for Mutare and help. Although I’d been able to conquer the pain with the runaway Dr. Featherstone’s help, daylight had revealed a shocking sight. During the night my foot had swelled up enormously and was now the size of a small melon. My toes resembled fat sausages about to burst out of their skins and the black mark had grown frighteningly larger. Even my ankle rippled ominously with swollen, stretched skin.

  During the drive to the border, my thoughts were as black as the mark on my toe. I had put my faith in modern medicine and a presumably well-trained doctor and this was the result. Possible gangrene … and amputation! I would have been better off if I’d gone to Mario, the nurse at Macate, or even a Mozambican witch doctor or curandeiro! Now I might have to lose a toe or … the thought made me shudder with horror … even lose a foot!

  My entry into the small clinic in Mutare caused something of a sensation. The waiting room was full of people who all appeared to be in the full bloom of enviable good health. As I hobbled towards an empty chair, clutching onto O’D’s arm for support, everyone gaped at the awful sight of my foot.

  Two African nurses dressed in pale green uniforms appeared in the doorway of an examination room and, trying unsuccessfully to hide the horror in their dark brown eyes, asked “Are you diabetic?”

  “No,” I told them, “I’m not diabetic. This is the work of a worm.”

  “A worm?” They gasped. “What kind of worm would do this to you?”

  I felt like bursting into tears, breaking down into sobs. “A Mozambican worm,” I said. “A Mozambican worm called … The Mataquenha!”

  Ten minutes later and accompanied by O’D and the two nurses, I lay back on an examination couch while a youngish African doctor in shirtsleeves inspected my foot and gave me some alarming news.

  “I’m not qualified enough to deal with this sort of thing,” he told me. “I’ve asked the nurses to try and find a Specialist. In the meantime,” he picked up what looked like a long drinking straw, “we’re going to try and draw out the infection.” Without giving me time to flinch, he plunged the straw-like object straight into the top of my swollen foot and then stood back to watch the result.

  While we all stared at the straw in silence and waited for something to happen, grisly images of myself began to unfold in front of my eyes, like a film. A horror film.

  At first, I saw myself stomping around the sawmill with a cheap brown plastic foot. Then the pictures grew worse and I saw myself hopping around without a leg. Deteriorating even further, my imagination travelled a ghastly path until it brought me to the final scene where I lay in a coffin, having died in dreadful agony, while African doctors and nurses stood looking on, helplessly wringing their hands and not having a clue what to do!

  At last, the doctor bent over my foot and pulled out the empty straw. “Nothing,” he said.

  There was a sudden commotion at the door and a whirlwind of a man blew into the room and filled it with his energy. “Ah, Dr. Umbawa, the Specialist!” the young Doctor told me, with relief evident in his voice.

  Short and stocky, Dr. Umbawa spoke with an American accent, having trained in Chicago and there was something infinitely reassuring about his presence. This was a man who knew exactly what he was doing. Overcome with the same relief the young Doctor had felt, I had to restrain myself from throwing my arms around Dr. Umbawa. I was safe now, I knew. I wasn’t going to die after all.

  Dr. Umbawa gave me different antibiotics to take and two days’ later when the swelling in my foot had subsided we drove across the border again to see him. He hadn’t liked the look of the black mark on my little toe. It seemed my fears about gangrene hadn’t been so fanciful after all. The Mataquenha had stopped the blood circulating in my toe.

  “The skin on your toe has gone rotten,” he told me, “and the only way I can save your toe is to shave off all the skin.”

  At the little Mutare clinic, I lay down in the examination room, accompanied again by O’D and the two nurses.

  “This is going to hurt like hell,” Dr. Umbawa encouraged me and raised the giant needle he was about to inject into my foot. “You’d better hold on to one of the nurse’s hands.”

  A nurse standing next to me held out her left hand and I grasped it. The needle plunged into my foot. I gave a shout and crunched her hand. “Sorry!” I gasped. “It’s okay,” she smiled.

  For a while I watched Dr. Umbawa skillfully at work on my toe with his scalpel. “I’m gonna get the worm that did this!” he muttered fiercely, as he cut away at the enemy. “I’m gonna get that worm!” And then, when my toe had turned into a bloody little red stub, I looked away, out of the window where small fluffy white clouds floated serenely across the blue sky. I was lucky, I knew, oh so lucky that Dr. Umbawa had been on the scene. That he hadn’t joined those other doctors who had gone to other countries and left us to suffer and perhaps die because there was no one to help us. Lucky too, that he’d trained in Chicago, America … unlike Dr. Watermeyer who had made a wrong diagnosis, prescribed the wrong antibiotic and suggested the wrong treatment and who had probably trained herself … probably from one of those teach yourself books … A ‘Teach yourself to be a Doctor’ book …

  My recovery was slow and lasted for more than a month. Warned by the nurses not to put a foot outside the house until the bandages were ready to come off, I spent my time sitting on the sofa, reading books and hobbling around the kitchen on the heel of my bandaged foot to cook meals. Bathing was a bit awkward too, as I had to put my foot in a plastic bag to keep it dry and bath with my right leg on the outside of our small tin bath.

  To le
ssen the trauma of my experience, people started giving me gifts.

  One day, after a trip to the clinic to see the nurses for a check up, we arrived back home to discover that Alfixa had paid us a visit. He had come down to the sawmill with an old maize sack slung over a shoulder and had handed its contents over to Seven for safekeeping. “For the Senhora,” he had told Seven.

  When we walked into the sitting room, Seven pointed at a large plastic bowl he had turned upside down on the floor. “A gata,” he told me, and raising one side of the bowl off the floor, he showed me the tiny kitten he had imprisoned inside it.

  Skin and bone, but with a distended stomach as round and hard as a golf ball, the little kitten was a pale grey tabby with black feet and huge green eyes.

  Like Black Kitty, it didn’t take long for Miss Sydney, as I called the kitten, to make herself at home. In the night hours and feeling lonely, she made her way out of the sitting room and into our bedroom, where she jumped onto our bed and using a fold in the mosquito net as a hammock, went blissfully to sleep on top of O’D’s obliviously snoring head. This caused a bit of disturbance, as you can imagine.

  Feeling a hot, furry little weight on top of his head O’D woke up and, mistaking it for one of those huge hairy spiders that run around the Nhamacoa, lurched out of bed with a strangled shout of alarm “Whazzat?”

  During the day, Miss Sydney sat on my lap and kept me company while I read and I would have had no idea at all what a vindictive, jealous, little bully she was until Achim, a German missionary who held the strong belief that love always conquers evil, also decided to give us a gift.

  On the drive back from another check up at the clinic in Mutare, O’D turned in at Moyo Mukuru, Achim’s Mission. “Just stopping off to collect the puppy,” he told me. “She’s a sort of Rhodesian Ridgeback.”

  Miss Sydney’s reaction when the puppy ran into the house was alarming. Taking one look at the interloper, she raised her tiny body up into a hoop shape, puffed out her fur as if she’d been electrified and let out a frightening banshee shriek. Then, launching her tiny body forward, she stuck a painful claw into the pup’s nose as a declaration of war.