Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  The Assistant to the Governor had his own ideas about the attack. Dismissing the money Mr. Bonjasse had given to me as the motive, he added insult to injury by making an insinuating suggestion. “Perhaps,” he told O’D thoughtfully, “the Senhora was attacked … because she ill-treated your worker…?”

  I stared at him with disgust – how DARED he? – and restrained myself from ill-treating him by battering him over the head with my handbag. So that’s the direction we were going to take, was it?

  “Right!” I said. “I’ve had enough of this!” and without another word, I stormed out of the room and clattered noisily down the stairs.

  We met Caetano for lunch, in a clean and pretty little restaurant in the fairgrounds. He and O’D ordered curried prawns on a bed of rice. I ordered a Heineken beer.

  While they ate and I drank, Caetano told me the witch doctor at Dombe had refused to do anything about Samsone Joao unless I personally went to see him.

  The thought filled me with repugnance. “No,” I said. No way was I going to be lured by a witch doctor into sitting in his murky, smoky hut while evil swirled all around me and contaminated me.

  Caetano let out a sigh of irritation. “But you must go,” he said, “otherwise Samsone Joao will get away with what he did.”

  Not wanting to hurt Caetano’s feelings - after all, he had made a three hundred kilometre trip to avenge me - I made an excuse I knew he would accept.

  “I can’t, Caetano,” I told him. “It’s against my religion. God will be terribly angry with me if I killed anyone.”

  With another sigh, this time of resignation, Caetano nodded his head. He understood. It was just that, living in a country without justice, who else could you go to for help if you didn’t go to a witch doctor?

  He began to talk to O’D about other things and while they talked, memories of Seven came drifting into my mind. Poor Seven, maybe he’d still be alive if I hadn’t been so impatient with him and his fetishes; with those imaginary razor blades and nails he always thought an enemy had sent to lodge in his legs. I heard an echo of his voice, as it had been on that day I’d told him it was all nonsense. “Yes, Meddem,” he had said softly, “Yes, Meddem,” and that had been the last I’d ever seen of him. Oh, what a waste of a life. He’d barely reached the age of thirty.

  Tears I couldn’t stop began to stream down my face. They plopped into my glass of beer and onto the pink tablecloth. Caetano and O’D stopped talking and shifted uneasily in their chairs.

  “You’re embarrassing Caetano,” O’D told me.

  “Why?” I sniffed. “He cried in front of you at the Sports Clube when his wife was dying, didn’t he?”

  When the Governor returned from his holiday, he read O’D’s letter and sent Wilson, the Head of the Gondola police, to visit us. Wilson and his constables spent more time squabbling with Majuda about the missing eighty thousand meticais than worrying about a killer on the loose and so, in the end, we pinned Samsone Joao’s photograph up on the Shoprite notice board with a warning to everyone buying their groceries to watch out for this man, because he was dangerous.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  BETTER EYESIGHT WITHOUT GLASSES

  A few weeks later, almost exactly one month after Samsone Joao had tried to blind me, another dream I’d had, this time in 1998, came true.

  The dream had been a very simple one. In it, I had seen myself sitting in a chair and reading a book - reading WITHOUT the reading glasses I’d had to use ever since I’d left the Algarve.

  In the morning when I’d woken up, I had told O’D about the dream, saying “Oh, if only it would come true!”

  I was now on my second pair of reading glasses and my eyesight without them had deteriorated so much that I couldn’t see anything close up. My face in the mirror was a blur and the print in a book or a magazine was a faint, grey, wavering line.

  Then, two weeks after my dream, an uncanny thing had happened.

  We had driven across the border to Mutare to do some shopping and while I’d been browsing around the magazine rack in Meikles Department Store, my bespectacled eyes had caught sight of a book incongruously placed amongst the “Fair Lady” and “News Week” magazines. It had been a white paperback and on the front, in large bold black print, were the words

  W. H. BATES, M.D.

  BETTER EYESIGHT WITHOUT GLASSES

  Well, I had thought to myself, if this isn’t an omen, what is? It was almost as if someone had deliberately placed the book in the magazine rack, especially for me!

  Naturally, I had bought the book and on the drive back home had eagerly started to read it.

  I had spent the next couple of days poring over Dr. Bates’ book and had discovered that we held the same opinion about spectacles.

  He was scathing about glasses, calling them ugly little optic crutches, and even went so far as to state that they made people’s eyesight worse!

  “Persons with presbyopia,” Dr. Bates stated, “who put on glasses because they cannot read fine print, too often find that after they have worn them for a time, they cannot, without their aid, read the larger print that was perfectly plain to them before.”

  Yes! This was exactly what had had happened to me in the Algarve!

  “I couldn’t agree with you more, Dr. Bates,” I had said, speaking out aloud.

  The remedy for bad eyesight according to Dr. Bates came down to nothing more than relaxation and exercising the eye muscles.

  As I had read on, it had begun to occur to me that there was something a little strange about Dr. Bates’ book, a slightly old-fashioned air about his words, such as his paragraph about lying down while reading a book. This, he said, although generally considered by his fellow ophthalmologists to be bad for the eyes was, in his opinion, a most delightful position in which to read!

  And as for Dr. Bates’ eye exercises! I had read about covering my eyes with the palms of my hands and imagining the blackest of black, standing outdoors and moving my head from side to side to let hot sunshine fall on my eyelids, shifting and swinging, and the reading of the tiniest of print in a dim room. It had been hard to believe that anything so simple - and so weird – could actually have a positive effect.

  I wonder … I had said to myself, and turning to the front page of Dr. Bates’ book to see where and when it had been published, had got something of a surprise ...

  New York … 1919 …

  Dr. Bates’ ideas had first seen the light of day almost eighty years ago!

  Slowly, I had put the book down, wondering if it was worthwhile reading to the end. After all, if Dr. Bates’ theories and exercises had worked, why were millions and millions of people all over the world continuing to wear glasses right up to the end of the 20th Century?

  Still, what did I have to lose by trying out the exercises? I had picked up his book again and had read on.

  I had read on until I had come to the part where Dr. Bates told the reader that his exercises wouldn’t have any effect unless they threw away their glasses and then, I had balked. I needed my glasses to fill in the forestry registers, to write out facturas and guias, to count our customers’ money. Oh no, I couldn’t do away with my glasses. I wouldn’t be able to do any work without them.

  And so, instead of putting away my glasses, I had put away Dr. Bates’ book.

  It was a long four years later, in the middle of February 2002, when Dr. Bates’ book made a sudden and unexpected comeback into my life.

  I was sitting in a chair near the bedroom window on a Sunday morning and reading another of Anne Rivers Siddons’ books, this time an intriguing tale about a discarded Coca-Cola executive’s wife, some swans, two old lesbians and a one-legged man, when I heard the loud chattering sound of a Vervet monkey. Looking up from my book, I saw the monkey sitting on a branch of the tall eucalypt tree just outside my window. This was a bit of luck, I thought. Up till now, I’d never been able to get near enough to a Vervet to photograph it because Bandit kept as close to me as a shado
w and, thanks to Lovad, had the habit of chasing anything that moved. Now, however, Bandit had gone for a walk with O’D and was safely out of the way.

  Throwing my book down, I rushed over to the cupboard and pulled out the camera. Back at the window, I looked down to take off the lens cap … and it was then that disaster struck.

  My reading glasses, which I had forgotten to take off in my hurry, slid down my nose and before I could put out a hand to save them, slipped off and fell onto the cement floor with a small smashing sound.

  All thoughts of photographing monkeys forgotten, I put the camera carefully on top of the dressing table and with a sinking heart, bent down to pick up my glasses. Oh, no … what a thing to happen … this was awful … awful! The left lens was completely shattered. What was I going to do now? They were the only pair I had. There weren’t any opticians in Chimoio and no chemist or shop where I could buy one of those stand-by reading glasses over the counter. How was I going to read and write, paint or sew?

  And even worse, what about all those prawns I had taken out of the deep freeze to defrost for lunch? It was Biasse’s weekend off so I had to de-vein them. Would I even be able to see the veins with my naked eyes to remove them?

  Holding my broken glasses in my hand, I sank back down onto the chair and burst into a flood of tears. Africa … Mozambique … was really, really, getting me down.

  Some time later, after I had mopped my face and pulled myself together, I stood in front of the worktop in the kitchen. I picked up a limp, defrosted prawn and stared at it. I could barely make out its black vein but it was too late, now, to put the wretched things back in the deep freeze.

  I picked up a sharp knife and, straining my eyes to see, began to cut. It all went very slowly because there were dozens of the damned things and my eyes began to hurt and then tears started running down my face with the incredible pain of trying to focus on pulling out all those little black lines.

  Just as I was finishing off the last prawn, O’D and a panting, grinning Bandit came into the kitchen, back from their walk.

  “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?” O’D asked, taken aback by the sight of me, weeping over a pile of prawns. He picked up a prawn and sniffed at it. “Don’t tell me they’ve gone bad overnight.”

  I turned away from the prawns and buried my face in his chest. “I’ve broken my glasses!” I howled, wetting his shirt as my tears of strain turned into tears of despair and self-pity. “I can’t do ANYTHING without them!”

  O’D gave me some comforting pats. “Maybe I can fix them, temporarily,” he said “Go and get them.”

  Although O’D was very good at fixing things, even he couldn’t do anything about the shattered lens. “Beyond repair,” he told me, “it looks as if we’ll have to go across the border. You’ll just have to hold out for a few days.”

  On Monday, O’D drove off to Chimoio to buy fuel and food and when he came home in the evening, the news he brought was bad.

  He had tried to phone J. Doaks, the opticians in Harare who had supplied me with my last pair of glasses, but there had been no reply.

  Then, he had discovered that because it was the run-up to the Zimbabwean elections, Mugabe was now refusing to let anyone with EU and U.S. passports into Zimbabwe!

  The bad timing of my glasses breaking just when Mugabe was putting his anti-foreigner action into practice overcame me. I felt I was being personally persecuted. Why, oh why, had my glasses broken NOW and not at another more convenient time? Why? WHY?

  “I wonder how Mugabe would feel without his glasses!” I said bitterly.

  I moped around for a week, not able to do anything at all. My books lay unopened. My typewriter rested idle and silent on my desk. My watercolour box remained closed. It was incredibly boring and I fumed with frustration. How long, oh how long was this going to go on for?

  And then, at the end of the week, I noticed something peculiar. Was it my imagination or had my eyesight actually improved a little?

  “Why don’t you try out those eye exercises in that book you bought all those years ago?” O’D suggested.

  “I think I will,” I said, “if I can find it after all this time!”

  It took me a while to search for Dr. Bates’ book but at last I came across it, tucked away at the back of the big bookcase in the spare bedroom.

  Back in the sitting room, I cleaned four years of dust off the cover and opened it at random. The lines of print on the pages were wavy, the faintest of grey and completely blurred. Just as I knew they would be. How was I going to read the book now, without help? I moved over to the window. Perhaps I would be able to make the words out with sunlight streaming onto the page and lighting them up.

  “Some … people …” I read aloud, while tears of pain streamed from my eyes with the strain of it all “... who … break … their … glasses … find … that … their … eyesight … improves …while … they … are … waiting … for … their … new … ones…”

  I looked up from the book. How remarkable that I should have opened it at this particular page and read something that seemed to apply directly to me. Yes, I had noticed this very thing. It was almost as if the dead Dr. Bates was speaking to me!

  As the strain to read any more was too much for me, I had to ask O’D to help me out by reading the exercises to me. For some reason, this made him grumpy, especially as I asked him that evening while he was reading a book of his own in bed. “What’s the first exercise you have to do?” he asked, impatiently flipping through the pages of Dr. Bates’ book.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “You know I can’t see a thing.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to know what you’ve got to do?” he grumped.

  “Just read the Contents,” I said grittily. “That’s why books have them.”

  O’D irritably turned to the beginning of the book and read down the list of chapters. “What glasses do to us … Strain … Central Fixation … Palming …”

  “That’s it!” I told him. “Palming. Read it out to me.”

  With a sigh, O’D obeyed. “What next?” he asked and read down the list of chapters again.

  “Shifting and Swinging,” I told him.

  After a few brief explanatory sentences, he put Dr. Bates’ book down and picked up his own. It was a Louis L’Amour and although it had been written about fifty years ago, there were passages in it about how we were destroying our environment and the only home we humans had to live on. Obviously Louis L’Amour had been aware of what was happening long before our modern scientists woke up to what we were doing.

  It wasn’t easy to do Dr. Bates’ exercises when O’D was away or busy and oh, how I struggled.

  I palmed, trying to imagine the blackest of black but never succeeded. I planted my feet one foot apart and swung my arms and body in a semi-circle from side to side, my eyes following the swing. I pinned the Snellen Eye Chart that had come with the book on the sitting room wall and tried to read the letters.

  Barely able to make out Dr.Bates’ instructions, I strained to make out his words. This was excruciatingly painful, until one day I actually managed to read one of his sentences without O’D’s help. “Staring at a word causes strain,” Dr. Bates had written. “Don’t stare. Shift!”

  Suddenly, it all fell into place. Of course! That was it! As I moved my eyes along a line of words without really trying to read them, I discovered I could make them out - not perfectly, but at least without the pain.

  My next instruction from Dr. Bates was to read the smallest print I could find for about five minutes every day … and in dim light!

  I wondered where I was going to find tiny print. O’D and I didn’t have anything that small in the house - or did we?

  I found my tiny reading matter in the bathroom. First on the tube of Colgate toothpaste ‘… change your toothbrush every three months. Visit your dentist twice a year …’ and then on the back of bottles ‘… one tablespoon of Dettol to a medium size bath of warm water will kil
l the Bilharzia cecariae …’ and on the tubes of mosquito repellent ‘… harmful to some furniture, plastics, rubber and painted surfaces …’

  As you may imagine, there is nothing more boring than reading the words on toothpaste tubes, deodorants and shampoos over and over again and I would probably have given up with this exercise if, one day, I hadn’t come across the little Bible with the wooden cover when I was dusting the books off in the bookcase. The Bible had been given to my father when he had gone off to fight in the Sahara desert during the Second World War and had become mine after he had died.

  I had never read it but now, finally, I opened it up. The words were tiny and the print had almost faded away with age in some of the paragraphs. To add to my difficulty, the English was the old English of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ but I forced myself to read a chapter, anyway, of the New Testament every day.

  “I WILL see without glasses,” I told myself. “I WILL!”

  As I hopped around the Gospels, I came across some interesting verses, some of which appeared be speaking directly to me. One of these was John 10, Verse 27. ‘My sheep hear my voice,’ Jesus said, ‘and I know them …’

  His words made me sit up and think. Hear His voice …

  ‘My Father, who is greater than all,’ He went on, ‘has given them to me and no one is able to snatch them out of my Father’s hand …’

  No one … no one … is able to snatch them out of my Father’s hand …

  It took me a mere three weeks to get my eyesight without glasses back. Now, when I looked at a book, a magazine or a newspaper, the words on the pages were no longer blurred or faint and grey, but almost black. Despite my progress though, there was still some faint double imaging around the letters. This made me feel impatient.

  I picked up Dr. Bates’ book and, as so often happened, it fell open at a page that gave me some good advice. ‘You wouldn’t expect a man who has been ill and spent months in bed recuperating, to suddenly get out of his bed and run a marathon, would you?’ Dr. Bates admonished me. ‘The same applies to people who have been wearing glasses for some time. Discretion must be used.’