Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  “You have bronchitis,” the doctor told Caetano, “and you have malaria, as well. Malaria of the ‘one cross’ variety.”

  Although his malaria was not of the serious kind, being ‘one cross’ malaria’, it was the type that was difficult to treat and cure. Feeling too tired and weak to go back home and treat himself with pills, Caetano decided to put his trust in the Fatima Clinic. He booked himself in.

  We were all relieved when we heard Caetano was in the Fatima. He was in safe hands, we thought, safer than he would have been in Chimoio Hospital.

  On Saturday, at lunchtime, O’D paid Caetano a visit at the Fatima. They didn’t talk much because Caetano was busy throwing up. While he was there at his bedside, O’D saw the doctor giving Caetano three large Fansidar tablets to drink down and when Caetano lay back on the bed again and gave him a weak grin, O’D said, “I’ll see you on Monday, Caetano.” He could see Caetano was going to be alright.

  Fansidar is a powerful anti-malarial drug and it seemed to do the trick, because by the afternoon, Caetano was standing on the Clinic’s verandah, cheerfully talking to a daughter he had never known he’d had. The girl had appeared out of nowhere all these years later and Caetano had been delighted to meet her, exclaiming with surprise and laughter at her existence.

  “He’ll be out of the Clinic soon,” O’D told me, “probably at the beginning of next week.”

  I was in the bathroom on Sunday morning when I heard the car. I was giving O’D’s dirty clothes a pre-soak and a pre-scrub in the bath before putting them in the washing machine.

  Wondering who was paying us a visit so early on a Sunday morning, I went to the bedroom for a look through the window. Caetano’s white Toyota pickup drove past and I caught a glimpse of two men inside the cab. Oh, Caetano … and wearing dark glasses … he’d obviously made a quick recovery and was now well enough to leave the Fatima and to drive down to us in the Nhamacoa.

  Glad to see how much better he was, I went back to the bathroom to finish off my washing. I would go outside to greet him in a minute or so.

  I was holding one of O’D’s shirts up in the air over the bath and examining it for resistant dirty stains when he came into the bathroom and stood in the doorway. There was a strange look on his face, an expression I had never seen before.

  “Caetano’s dead,” he said.

  The floor seemed to shift underneath my feet. The wet shirt fell out of my fingers, back into the bath with a small splash and I heard the loud, high-pitched wail of an African woman - “Nooooooooooooooooo noooooooooooooo not our Caetano! Oh, noooooooooooooooooo not our Caetano!” - and realised that the wail was coming from me.

  I turned and fell against O’D’s chest. He put his arms around me. “But I’ve just seen him drive up!” I cried against his shirt. “Wearing dark glasses ... in the white pickup!”

  “That’s Mr. Leite, a friend of Caetano’s family,” O’D told me. “Treciano’s with him.”

  Outside, Mr. Leite and Treciano stood next to Caetano’s car. Their faces were stricken with grief and shock at the suddenness and unexpectedness of it all.

  “He seemed so much better on Saturday afternoon, when he stood on the verandah talking to his daughter,” Mr. Leite told us. “Nobody can believe he’s dead. One moment alive and laughing, the next moment … dead!”

  “How?” I asked, forcing the word from between lips that felt numb.

  “The doctor put him on a drip on Saturday night,” Mr. Leite said. “He had convulsions at four o’clock this morning … and died.”

  A drip? As well as the Fansidar? What kind of a drip?

  While Mr. Leite and Treciano and O’D talked, I paced up and down the brown winter grass. Overhead, the sun seemed too harsh, too brassy, in a sky too blue. Everything looked wrong, felt wrong, was wrong.

  Caetano dead. Caetano DEAD! How was this possible? No, it couldn’t be true. He’d been getting treatment in the Fatima. The Fatima! This was just a dream … another of those nightmares I sometimes had that seemed so real but were just dreams … yes, this was just another of those nightmares …

  I straightened up, suddenly conscious of a terrible pain in my stomach. Without realising it, I’d been pacing backwards and forwards bent over, with my arms clutching my stomach. Caetano dead! Oh, no, nooooooooooooooooooo!

  “I have to go into Chimoio,” O’D told me. “There are arrangements to make.”

  “Alright,” I said.

  After they had all driven away, I walked into the kitchen. “Mr. Caetano’s dead, Biasse,” I told him, although I was sure he already knew. His little face was as wooden as an African mask.

  Outside again, I sat down on a tree stump, my mind full of Caetano. Through a blur of tears, I looked down the forest track, a track filled with so many memories and so many images of Caetano.

  There was Caetano, walking towards me with broken, dusty shoes and red dust in his hair … Caetano speeding down the track on the motorbike … jolting down the track in the white Toyota pickup … Caetano driving three hundred kilometres all the way to Dombe and back, just to get a witch doctor to frazzle Samsone Joao with a bolt of lightning for me … Caetano pepper-spraying the passengers on a bus to Maputo … Caetano, almost throwing himself out of the red Toyota and into the traffic when he thought O’D was driving around with a Mozambican Spitting Cobra under the seat …

  Caetano, laughing and optimistic despite all our disappointments … still full of plans … plans for a cashew nut farm in Tete, a small hotel on the beach under the coconut trees at Inhassora … a holiday in Portugal to visit the Palace in Sintra …

  Holding us up … we’d been like three sides of an arch … and now that he was dead and his side was gone, the arch had fallen down …

  Caetano, dead … cut off in mid-life …

  How could he be DEAD?

  Tears poured down my face. Oh, Caetano … oh, dear, dear Caetano … how are we going to go on without you?

  “Why, God?” I asked. “Why did you let him die? You saved me, why didn’t you save him? Why? We loved him!”

  From that moment on, I stopped talking to God. He had let us down and I couldn’t understand it.

  O’D returned from town in the late afternoon. He had spent some time with Caetano’s family, giving them money to organise the funeral. They were all in a state of shock … disbelief. Caetano’d been in the Fatima, the FATIMA! He’d been getting better … they’d seen it for themselves!

  They hadn’t been able to find a coffin large enough to fit Caetano and so Romana, his sister, had had to drive across the border into Zimbabwe to buy one in Mutare. The funeral was set for Tuesday, in two days’ time.

  When O’D sat down tiredly on the sofa, he told me some news that made my heart leap with wild hope. “Apparently Caetano’s body was still warm at eight o’clock this morning.”

  “Perhaps he’s not dead after all, then!” I cried. “Perhaps they’ve made a mistake and he’s only in a coma!”

  “No,” O’D said heavily. “He’s dead alright.”

  A terrible feeling of vulnerability and loneliness swept over me, adding to my feelings of grief and anguish and loss. “I don’t want to live here anymore, not now that Caetano’s gone.”

  “I don’t either,” O’D said, and bending his head down into his hands, he burst into tears and wept for a long time for his friend.

  The adventure was over.

  The next day, after O’D had driven off to Chimoio to make more arrangements for Caetano’s funeral, Frank appeared at the sitting room window.

  “Yes, Frank?” I asked.

  “You know, Madam,” Frank said, for once getting it right and not calling me ‘Sir’, “I was in Chimoio on Saturday afternoon and I came across the mother of Mr. Caetano. She said she had just been to see him at the Fatima. ‘You don’t have to worry about your boss, Frank,’ she told me. ‘He’s so much better he’ll probably be back at work next week.’ It is very strange, Madam. Very strange that he is now dead.”<
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  I let out a sigh and shook my head. “Frank,” I said, “You’re not the only one who thinks it’s strange. We all do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  THE FUNERAL

  I dreaded Caetano’s funeral.

  When the day came around, I dressed in the drabbest of my clothes. O’D put on his grey suit and his old Etonian tie, in honour of his friend.

  At Caetano’s house, the house he had shared with his mother and Denis, his young son, we joined the large crowd that had gathered there. They were waiting for the car to arrive from the morgue with Caetano’s coffin.

  While we were standing, waiting, Caetano’s old uncle walked over to speak to O’D. “I have to tell you something,” he said urgently. He was agitated and it was obvious that something was weighing on his mind. “I have to tell you about something strange that I noticed about Caetano at the morgue.”

  The old uncle had been with the family when they had gone to the hospital morgue to get Caetano. Except for the old uncle, they had all been too afraid to touch his dead body and so he had been the one to haul Caetano’s corpse up into the coffin.

  “As I put my hands under his armpits and pulled him upright,” the old uncle told O’D, “a very peculiar thing happened. A large gout of yellow liquid gushed out of his mouth like a river. This liquid had the very strong smell of medication and …”

  The arrival of the Station Wagon containing the coffin cut short the old uncle’s story. Some men took the coffin out of the car and carried it over to a table that had been placed under the trees next to the house. Once the coffin was safely on top of the table, they opened the lid. Women began to sing. The song was soft and sad and incredibly sweet, made sweeter by the perfect and beautiful silky harmony of their voices. “Why have you left us?” I heard them sing, although I knew I was imagining the words as they were singing in a language I couldn’t understand. As everyone started to move forward in a slow line to look at Caetano’s face for the last time, we forgot the old uncle and whatever it was that he had so urgently wanted to tell O’D.

  When O’D walked over to the coffin and looked down at Caetano’s face, tears ran down his face. A Mozambican standing nearby called out to him. “Be a man!”

  I remembered the shortest sentence I had read in my father’s little Bible. ‘Jesus wept.’ If Jesus himself had cried for his dead friend Lazarus, then it was perfectly alright for O’D to cry for his friend. I opened my mouth to tell this to the Mozambican but then I closed it again.

  Caetano’s Zimbabwean coffin was white and when it was my turn to say goodbye to him, I saw that it was still too small for him. They had had to bend his knees and turn him sideways at the waist to fit him in and to hide this, they had placed a lacey white cloth over him up to his shoulders.

  The lace didn’t hide the ugly brown suit his sister Romana had bought for him. In life, Caetano had hated suits and had never worn them. Now that he was dead, he was being buried in one.

  I looked down at his face. “Goodbye, Caetano,” I said softly, even though I knew he was somewhere else and that there was nothing but his empty shell in the coffin. “Goodbye.” The coffin lid was closed and the men carried it back to the Station Wagon.

  In the red pickup, its open back loaded down with mourners, we joined the long convoy of lorries, old pickups and cars driving slowly on the road out of Chimoio to the cemetery. On the lead car, someone held up the large cross that was always held up to show that this was a funeral procession.

  The cemetery was a sea of sand. There were no headstones, just little mounds of earth and some handwritten signs made out of cardboard to indicate the site of a grave.

  The gravediggers were still working on Caetano’s grave. His size had taken them by surprise. The coffin wouldn’t fit and while we waited, they dug away to enlarge the hole.

  The women sang their beautiful, silky song again and when at last Caetano vanished into the sandy earth, I looked up. It was a sunshiny day and high overhead an eagle soared along on the wind currents in the clear blue winter sky.

  A woman thrust a red Barberton daisy into my hand and as the crowd surged forward towards the grave, I was pushed along with them. We placed our flowers on the new mound of sand and then I walked back to O’D. An old man with sad eyes and long straggly grey hair was standing with him. Bertuzzi. He opened his arms wide and I walked into the arms of our old Italian enemy and cried all over his khaki-clad shoulder.

  “Oh, that beautiful boy,” Bertuzzi mourned. “Oh, that beautiful, beautiful boy.”

  We drove back to Caetano’s house, with the thought of saying a few words to Caetano’s mother and his sister but when we stepped into his small house, we stepped into the deepest of black. All the windows had been covered, it was stifling and airless and as we fumbled our way towards a room, we heard a scream and then a voice crying out, “Romana! Romana has fainted!”

  “We’ll speak to them another time,” O’D said.

  On the drive out of town, I said “I don’t want to go home. I want to be with my kind of people. Let’s go and see Murray.”

  The Chibuku factory was a hive of activity. The car park was full of expensive 4 x 4s with their yellow Zimbabwean number plates and inside the large, barnlike main room, Murray sat behind a desk, smoking a Madison and drinking a beer. The room heaved with people. Mostly farmers like Murray who had been kicked off their farms, they were looking for a safehaven and a new start in life. The room vibrated with the stress and trauma of the shock and loss the Zimbabweans were experiencing.

  Murray eyed our clothes.

  “We’ve just been to a funeral,” I explained. “Our partner died.”

  A Zimbabwen woman wearing a scruffy navy anorak looked up. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Was it someone we knew?”

  “No,” I replied. “Our partner was Mozambican.”

  The sympathetic look vanished from her face. “Oh, only a black,” she said dismissively.

  I opened my mouth to tell her that what she had just said was the reason she was now in Mozambique instead of Zimbabwe but for the second time that day I closed my mouth and said nothing.

  We stayed for a while, talking and drinking a beer and then we drove home.

  They weren’t my kind of people after all.

  One night, about a week after Caetano’s funeral, a rather disturbing thing occurred.

  O’D was already in bed, reading a book to take his mind off events and I was brushing my hair in front of the mirror when everything seemed to change and to slip out of kilter, as if I was caught between two dimensions. All of a sudden, in front of my eyes, I saw a thick white outline like an aura surrounding my reflection in the mirror, my hand and the hairbrush I was holding, even the mirror itself …

  And then, in the left side of the mirror, Caetano appeared. He was wearing a mustard-coloured sweater with a hole in the elbow and the expression in his dark eyes was infinitely sad. “Don’t worry, Senhora,” he told me gently. “Don’t worry.”

  Startled, I stepped back from the mirror and noticed that the white aura was outlining everything else in the room as well … the mosquito net, the chair, the bed, O’D ... the sight was so disorientating, it made me lose my balance and I fell against the bed.

  O’D looked up from his book. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  I pushed myself upright and all of a sudden everything was back to normal again. “I thought I saw Caetano in the mirror,” I told him. “He was wearing a very ugly sweater I’d never seen him wearing before.”

  O’D gave me a blank look, not understanding.

  I got into bed. What had happened was just caused by stress, I told myself. My imagination playing tricks on me.

  My head sank down onto the pillow and I closed my eyes. Yes, just stress. That’s what it was. Wasn’t it?

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  THE PISTACHIO GREEN JUDGE

  A few days after the funeral, Nelson Batista, the IPAJ clerk Caetano had employed to deal
with the court case, contacted O’D. Judge Magaia had recovered from his illness and Westh’s sentencing was now set for the 24th June.

  We had dreaded Caetano’s funeral and now we dreaded going to the Court House. With Caetano gone, we had the feeling that things weren’t going to go well. Still numb from the shock of his unexpected death, we looked around for some support. Apart from the small pocket tape recorder I was taking with me to secretly record the proceedings, we also needed human witnesses and friends to give us advice.

  At the Court House, a nondescript building that looked like a block of flats built in the 1960’s, we met up with Treciano, Jinho and Joao de Conceciao who had let us use his land for our estaleiro in Chimoio.

  We climbed the stairs to the first floor and were met by Nelson. We would have to wait, apparently, because Judge Magaia was still working on the Sentence - writing it all out by hand!

  With nowhere to sit, we stood in the long corridor. Men and women holding papers and files bustled importantly past us, amongst them a particularly stocky man who strode towards us with arms pumping and footsteps cracking like gunshots on the cement floor. With his yellow face and strange dark eyes that looked as if they had been outlined with kohl, he looked as if he had come straight out of an Egyptian wall painting.

  Jinho bent his head towards me and whispered, “That’s the Judge President. Judge Sambo.”

  At last a clerk appeared and motioned for us to enter the courtroom. We went in and sat down. I had wanted to see the man who had been the cause of our troubles but I was disappointed. We were the only ones in the room.

  I looked over at Nelson who had seated himself in a chair next to the wall, away from us. “Where’s Jan Westh?” I asked.

  He answered with a shrug.

  There was a commotion at the door and a very plump, very dark and smooth-skinned man swept in. He was dressed in a well-cut and eye-catching pistachio green suit and looked just like a large pale green ice cream with a black currant decorating the top of it. A clerk handed him a black robe and he put it on over his suit.