Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  “Eh!” Biasse’s voice said suddenly from his position near the front door. ‘EH! The mosquito saved you, Madam!”

  “The mosquito?” Being saved by a mosquito would be a first!

  “The mosquito! The mosquito!” he repeated impatiently, getting to his feet and walking into the sitting room. “The mosquito around the bed.”

  “Oh, the net.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Without the mosquito, you would be dead now. Dead …”

  His voice trailed off and a look of pure horror spread over his wrinkled face “… and when the Master came back from Maringue and found you dead, I would have been in trouble. Eeeeee! Maningui trouble! Maningui! Maningui! MANINGUI! EEEEEEEEE!”

  “Oh, don’t be silly, Biasse. How could anyone blame you?”

  “Because I was supposed to protect you, Madam! Eeeee! If the mosquito hadn’t saved you … eeeeeeeeeeee!”

  I poured another glass of milk, not sharing Biasse’s relief. My attacker might not have killed me with his knife but I was still dying … poisoned … in a Mozambican forest. Oh, how ironic, how weird that my life should end like this! I had never planned on coming back to Africa and it certainly hadn’t been my idea to live like a recluse in a forest ...

  “Madam,” Biasse’s voice interrupted my bleak thoughts, “I go look for Samsone Joao now.”

  I looked out of the window. Although it was still dark, the night sky had lightened a fraction and dawn wasn’t very far away. “Alright, Biasse. I’ll come with you.”

  Leaving the house open, we started walking towards the little wooden guardhouse where Samsone Joao had been told to spend the night. I went with some reluctance, dreading what we were going to find. As we picked our way over piles of bark and around logs, my imagination took flight and hideous pictures of Samsone Joao filled my mind. Pictures of the poor boy lying dead on the floor of the guardhouse and in a great pool of blood; bright red sticky blood, from the long gaping gash in his throat ...

  “He is not here,” Biasse muttered, as we walked up to the guardhouse. We looked inside. Except for the small fire that still flickered on the dirt floor, it was eerily empty.

  “I wonder where he is?” Biasse asked himself thoughtfully.

  “Perhaps he’s dead, Biasse,” I said fearfully. I looked around, wondering if there were eyes watching us. “Perhaps they killed him and dragged his body behind a bush.”

  Biasse gave a snort of laughter at my naivete. How was it possible for someone born in Africa and growing up in Africa to be so … stupid?

  “I go to speak to Majuda, the tractor driver, now, Madam,” he told me and turned away from the guardhouse. “He lives with Samsone Joao, not far away.”

  This time I didn’t argue. “Oh, alright, Biasse.”

  Back in the house, I just had time to dab more milk onto my face and drink down another glassful when Biasse returned with Majuda. I went outside.

  “Listen to this, Madam, to what Majuda has to say,” Biasse told me grimly.

  I turned to Majuda. He was a stocky, middle-aged man who was also supposed to be a witch doctor.

  “I was asleep, Senhora, when the door of the hut banged open and woke me up,” he told me. “Samsone Joao came running in. He grabbed his small bag and started throwing his clothes into it. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was taking his clothes down to the river to wash them.”

  This time I gave a snort of laughter. “What time was this? Do you know?”

  “Sometime around three o’clock.”

  Biasse looked at me with a ‘I told you so’ gleam in his old eyes. “It WAS him,” he said. “You should have let me go look for him, Madam.”

  I ignored him. “Majuda,” I said, “go to the police in Macate and tell them that someone has just tried to kill me. Tell them to radio the police in Chimoio. Perhaps we can still catch him. After that, tell them to come and speak to me.”

  Majuda nodded his head. “Yes, Senhora.”

  “Perhaps you can find a chappa to take you there,” I told him. “I’ll give you some money.”

  The round trip fare to Macate was only twelve thousand meticais but as Samsone Joao had run off with the tin of change, I had to raid O’D’s socks and give Majuda one of Mr. Bonjasse’s notes, a one hundred thousand meticais note.

  After Majuda had gone, Biasse and I walked around the house, wondering how Samsone Joao had managed to get in. It didn’t take us long to figure it out.

  “Oh look, Biasse,” I exclaimed, “look at this!”

  There, on the ground underneath the spare bedroom window, lay two rather grubby white trainers and a sweat-stained cap, neatly placed next to each other and waiting for the return of their owner.

  “Ah!” Biasse said with a triumphant smile, pleased that his suspicions were confirmed with concrete evidence. “Samsone Joao’s shoes and cap!”

  “There’s no way he could have got up there by himself,” I said, thinking that my dream had been right. There had been two men. “It’s much too high. He must have had help, Biasse.”

  I was surprised when Majuda arrived back from Macate by himself. Thinking, as we all do about our lives, that my life was of such supreme importance that the Macate police would pull out all the stops to catch my would be killer, I was taken aback by their lack of reaction.

  “A policeman will be coming soon,” Majuda told me.

  I held out my hand, palm upwards. “Where’s my change, Majuda? Twelve from one hundred equals eighty eight.”

  “The police took the eighty eight thousand,” he said. “The Sergeant’s in Chimoio and the constable wouldn’t come unless I gave him money to buy beer and wine.”

  “What!” I exclaimed, outraged. For crying out aloud, someone had just tried to KILL me and the police wouldn’t come unless they were given money to buy BEER and WINE?

  Biasse and I were standing outside the house when, quite some time later, we saw a policeman on an old black bicycle pedalling unsteadily down the forest track towards us. When he was almost abreast of us, he stopped pedalling and put on the brakes in the Mozambican way by taking a foot off a pedal and placing it down hard on top of the front tyre to stop it from going around. Dismounting, he leaned the bicycle against a tree and approached us.

  “Boa tarde!” I said sarcastically.

  “Bom dia,” he replied, my sarcasm going over his head. “I hope you appreciate the trouble I’ve gone to, cycling all this way from Macate to see you.”

  I stepped back from the cloud of sour red wine fumes he was breathing into my face and glared at him. “Have you spoken to the Chimoio police over your radio about the man who attacked me …” I showed him the knife “… with this?”

  He barely glanced at the knife. “No,” he said laconically, “the radio’s battery is flat.”

  “The Chefe do Posto’s got a radio in his office,” I reminded him crossly. “Why didn’t you use his?”

  “Locked,” he said laconically. “The Chefe’s in Chimoio for the weekend.”

  The constable fumbled around in his shirt pocket until he managed to pull out a ballpoint pen and a tiny notebook. He poised the pen over a blank page. “Name?” he asked, peering blearily up at me through a haze of alcohol.

  “P. I. X. L. E. Y,” I spelled out slowly in Portuguese.

  “B ... ?” the constable began,

  Suddenly, I’d had enough. The reeking policeman was dreadful. Useless. I threw my hands up in the air. “Oh, nao faz mal! Never mind!”

  There was the sound of a car and O’D drove up in the red Toyota. He stopped the pickup next to us and took in the scene. “You look awful,” he greeted me.

  Suddenly, I was mad. “You’d also look awful,” I said grittily, “if someone had tried to murder YOU!”

  O’D got out of the car. “Did he … touch … you?” he asked, voicing the fear that crouched like a leopard in the back of the minds of all of us who live in modern Africa.

  “No,” I said. “Apart from trying to strangle me,
poison me and stab me to death with a knife, he didn’t touch me.”

  The policeman staggered over to O’D. “Name?” he asked, enveloping O’D with his sour fumes while his pen trembled over his notebook.

  O’D stepped back from him. “Name? You should bloody well know my name by now, after all these years! You’re supposed to be the police!”

  The policeman squinted down at his notebook. “B … ?” he asked, and poised his pen over the page.

  With a brief and curt explanation of what had taken place, O’D sent the policeman back to Macate with a flea in his ear. No doubt, he would inform Mario as soon as possible and no doubt, Mario would take appropriate action.

  I was standing, still with the knife in my hand, under the spare bedroom window and showing Samsone Joao’s shoes and cap to O’D, when the white Toyota arrived. Caetano climbed out and walked over to us. His eyes took in the state of my face. “What has happened?” he asked.

  I opened my mouth to tell him but before I could say anything, Biasse butted in. “Samsone Joao tried to kill the Madam,” he told Caetano and although he hadn’t been anywhere near me at the time, he gave Caetano and O’D a vivid and graphic re-enactment of what - according to his imagination - had taken place.

  Playing two roles simultaneously – mine and Samsone Joao’s – Biasse attacked himself. His two hands flew up to his neck and while they tried to strangle him, he put up a tremendous struggle. Now trying to strangle himself, now trying to fight off the choking grip, he staggered around the grass. Eyes bulging with terror, he put on a high falsetto voice to represent mine and cried “Help! Help!” So desperate was his struggle for survival, that at one stage he almost fell over and ended up by having to put his arms around the trunk of the big old mango tree for support, coughing with the exertion of it all.

  Biasse’s performance was so funny that I burst out laughing and had to lean against the spare bedroom wall, myself, for support.

  O’D and Caetano stared at me.

  “This isn’t a laughing matter,” O’D told me pompously.

  I stopped laughing and felt myself start to fume. So far, not one person had asked me how I was feeling or had even offered any words of sympathy. No doubt, this was because they were men and were treating me exactly as they would have treated each other if someone had tried to kill them. A certain degree of resentment began to bubble up inside me at the ill treatment I was getting from everyone. “Don’t tell me what to do, O’D Pixley!” I yelled. “It’s MY murder and I’ll laugh if I want to!”

  In the short silence that followed my outburst, I felt a twinge in my lip and this reminded me of something. I turned to Caetano. “Samsone Joao put something … some kind of poison … on my face. It burnt like fire. Do you have any idea what it is, Caetano?”

  Caetano didn’t even have to think about it, he knew his fellow Mozambicans so well. “Battery acid,” he told me without any hesitation. “Battery acid, to blind you.”

  Battery acid! I touched the welts and blisters, so close to my left eye and blanched. What a narrow escape I’d had! If Samsone Joao’s hand had been just a fraction higher up my face, the acid would have gone right into my eye … or eyes …

  I shuddered. I was not a person, I knew, who would have been able to cope with a life of blindness.

  Caetano bent down and picked up one of Samsone Joao’s trainers. He took the knife from my hand. “I’m going to Dombe now,” he said grimly. “To that powerful witch doctor there. I’m going to arrange for him to strike down Samsone Joao with a bolt of lightning and kill him.” He climbed back into the white Toyota and started it up.

  “But he’s just come back from a four hundred kilometre trip,” I protested. “Dombe and back is another three hundred!”

  “He wants to do it,” O’D said.

  In the afternoon, Murray came to visit. I was sitting on the sofa when he walked into the sitting room. His step faltered as his eyes took in my battered and bruised face, one eye looking decidedly black. Warily he walked over to an armchair not far from me and sat uneasily down on it. Obviously O’D and I had had a humdinger of a fight and I had come off the worst!

  “Someone tried to kill me at three o’clock this morning, Murray.”

  “Oh,” he said, relieved to hear O’D wasn’t the culprit. He lit up a Madison and puffed out some pungent smoke. “Well, I’m glad I didn’t come to visit you only to see you being carried out through the front door in a box.”

  I spent the next two weeks cloistered in the house. Except for Caetano, Biasse and Azelia, I wanted nothing to do with the Mozambicans. They were treacherous people who smiled at your face while plotting to stick a knife in your back. “Frank can deal with all our workers and our customers,” I told O’D. “I don’t want to see any of them.”

  O’D had re-employed our bearded and often drunken little cubicador. After all, Frank’s misdemeanours paled when compared to Samsone Joao’s.

  Left alone, I washed the mosquito net over and over again in the washing machine to remove the unwelcome reminder of Samsone Joao’s presence in the room. The battery acid he had put on his hand had left a remarkably clear yellow-brown imprint of his palm and five fingers splayed across the net. When the imprint had faded until it was no longer unsettling, I sewed up the holes his knife had ripped in the net.

  I often thought about the voice that had saved my life, as well as my eyesight. It was the voice, I was sure, of the One I had spent so much time talking to since I had come to live in the Nhamacoa Forest.

  In the bedroom, I closed the door and sat down on the chair near the window, the chair I used when I had something special to ask God.

  “It was You, I know, who spoke to me and saved my life and my eyes,” I said, and burst into tears. “And I thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You left it jolly late, though … ”

  God had let Samsone Joao take me right to the brink - had let me look over the edge right into the dark and terrifying face of death - before he had rescued me, just in the nick of time. How amazing, and how … nerve shattering!

  There were quite a few other things to wonder about and to puzzle over. One was the warning dream I’d had two years before. What had been the point of it? It hadn’t shown me Samsone Joao’s face or that of his accomplice and there hadn’t even been any indication as to when it was going to come true.

  And as for that weird little incident where the mosquito net had risen up in the air and then had fallen down onto the edge of my bed ... Well, I never was able to work out what that was all about. It was a mystery then and it remains a mystery to me to this day.

  I put an end to my self-imposed seclusion one afternoon, at about two o’clock, by walking out of the front door and across the drive to some long wooden tables under a large and leafy shade tree. I had planted hundreds of panga panga seeds in little clay pots on top of these tables and now I was pleased to see they had all germinated.

  While I was examining the tender little pale-green leaves, I noticed someone walking down the forest track towards me. “Oh, it’s Seven!” I said to myself. “And how well he looks. I wonder why Azelia told me he looked sick?” But when the figure came nearer, I saw I was wrong and that the man was Maqui, not Seven.

  This mistake jogged my memory. I’d been on the point of trying to find Seven when Samsone Joao had attacked me and diverted my thoughts away from him. After that, I’d been so wrapped up in myself that I’d forgotten all about him. I had to find him, had to help him. I would definitely do something about him tomorrow, I promised myself, first thing tomorrow.

  The next morning just after roll call, when I was sitting up in bed and drinking a cup of tea, the door opened and O’D came into the room. He sat down on the carved mahogany chest opposite the bed.

  “Seven’s dead,” he told me baldly.

  Shock jolted through me. Dead? Seven, dead! I’d been thinking about him only yesterday. “When did he die?” I asked.

  “They found him lying dead on the fores
t track about two o’clock yesterday afternoon. Apparently he’d starved to death. He’d been living under a makeshift grass and pole shelter not far from here. He didn’t have any possessions. Not a blanket or even a cooking pot.”

  I felt my eyes begin to prick with tears. “He must have sold them for food,” I said, remembering the pots and pans I had given to him. “Oh, that poor, poor boy. Why didn’t he come to us for help?”

  When I was up and dressed, I called Azelia upstairs.

  “Seven is dead, Azelia,” I told her, although I was sure she already knew.

  She put on a sad face. “Yes, Dona.”

  “You knew where he was living, didn’t you? Not far from here. Why didn’t you tell me? We might have been able to save him.”

  Her face went blank. “Dona?”

  I gave up. “Alright. You can go back to your ironing.”

  The police never did make any attempt to catch Samsone Joao. Although everyone knew about the attack, Mario never came near us despite all the help O’D had given him over the years.

  “Police no good,” Biasse told me sourly. “Samsone Joao far away now. Maybe over the border in Zimbabwe, but ...” he hesitated “… but when he see police not even try to catch him, maybe he come back here.”

  “Come back … here?”

  “Maybe, Madam. He know the Master goes away often. One day, Maringue. One day, Tete. And you by yourself, here in the house.”

  “That’s a great thought, Biasse,” I said dryly. “Thanks!”

  As it was doubtful whether Mario had informed the Chimoio police about the incident, O’D decided to write a letter of complaint to the Governor of Manica Province and to give it to him in person.

  In the Governor’s building in the centre of Chimoio, the receptionist told O’D that the Governor was away on holiday for a month. However, the Assistant to the Governor was available.

  When the man appeared, O’D handed him the letter and told him about Samsone Joao.