Monkeys in My Garden

by Valerie Pixley

  Alone in the Nhamacoa and without a telephone to keep up with these events, I was completely unprepared for what was to happen next - in the afternoon of the very day the journalist had his meeting with Judge Magaia.

  Biasse was down by the river, taking his usual afternoon bath and I was in kitchen making a salad when I heard the car. Thinking it was a customer I didn’t go outside for a look. Frank, no doubt, would come and call me when he needed me.

  About half an hour later, I heard the sound of voices approaching and so I went outside. I was just in time to see the Administrator of Gondola, accompanied by an entourage of 5 people, about to climb into a government pickup parked outside my bedroom window.

  As the Administrator had never paid us a visit in all our years in the Nhamacoa and as it was usual for government officials to send you a letter informing you of their intention to visit your business, his omission to do so was ominous. And so was the fact that he had made his visit on a Wednesday, a day when everyone knew that O’D would be in town.

  “Boa tarde,” I greeted him.

  He turned towards me.

  “My husband isn’t here,” I told him, “but could I offer you something to drink? A coffee? Or some …”

  The Administrator’s hatchet face turned harsh with dislike. “Oh, I can’t be bothered to speak to her,” he brusquely told his entourage, “her Portuguese is too bad,” and rudely turning his back on me, he climbed into the pickup.

  His entourage followed, he said something about me which set them all off laughing and then, as they drove away, he leaned across the driver and waved his hand mockingly at me – just like a baby waves his hand - but in a gesture of extreme contempt.

  I sat down on the verandah and waited for Frank.

  When he came, I said “Well, Frank, what was that all about?”

  “It is not good, Madam,” Frank told me.

  Chilled by his words, I said. “Tell me.”

  “The Administrator called us all together,” Frank began “and then he started off by saying that you were bad people and that everyone in the area of Chikuvu hated you.”

  “Go on,” I said, feeling anger beginning to stir inside me and replace the chill.

  “He also told us he was going to give your second class planks away to the people and that he was going to make you buy us clothes and shoes.”

  “What a cheek!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes, Madam, but that is nothing,” Frank went on. “Then he asked if we had any complaints against you … and the two sons of Biasse spoke up. They told him that the boss treated the workers badly, that he hit us, beat us ...”

  “What?” I exclaimed, stunned by the lie.

  O’D had employed Biasse’s two sons as temporary grasscutters, as a favour to him. They had been working in Zimbabwe as labourers on a farm but had lost their jobs when War Vets had invaded it.

  “Yes, Madam,” Frank said, and added “then the Administrator told us that he was going to put it on the radio that the boss beats the workers.”

  “Did our other workers also complain about us?” I asked.

  “No, Madam.”

  While I waited for O’D to return from Chimoio, I puzzled over the Administrator’s visit. He had been out to make trouble, but why?

  In the evening when O’D told me that he’d had another meeting with the journalist from Chimoio Radio and that Judge Magaia had called us ‘troublemakers’ and threatened us if we publicised the court case, it all became quite clear to me.

  The Aministrator’s visit was no coincidence. They were out to make trouble and to make us look bad!

  The Administrator’s visit had some consequences even he would not have foreseen and the following day a particularly nasty incident occurred.

  At the morning roll call, our workers told O’D what Biasse’s sons had said to the Administrator. This caused a terrible uproar. Biasse’s sons screamed hysterically at our workers, threatening to kill them for relaying their words to O’D. Then, when O’D fired them for their threats, they demanded to be paid instantly, there and then.

  Since Samsone Joao’s attack, we no longer kept much money in the house and so he told them they would have to wait for their money until the following day.

  They didn’t like this. Getting hold of some large empty plastic containers and planting themselves in front of our house, they proceeded to give us the same treatment they had seen the War Vets give the Zimbabwean white farmer when they had invaded the farm on which they’d been working.

  Hour after hour, they banged and drummed on the containers, yelling and shouting and singing.

  I closed all the curtains in the rooms to shut out the ugly sight they made.

  Biasse came up the back stairs into the kitchen, silent and with his face set and wooden like a small brown mask.

  “Tell your sons to go away, Biasse,” I ordered.

  Without a word, he turned his straight little back on me and returned to the cook hut.

  “Biasse!” I called after his back. “Tell your sons to go!”

  The drumming and screaming went on all day. I couldn’t understand why Biasse did nothing to control his sons and he refused to explain himself.

  O’D ignored them but whenever he walked over to the house from the workshop, Manuel, the older of Biasse’s sons, tried his best to provoke him. Dancing around O’D, he stuck his face insolently right into O’D’s face over and over again, wanting O’D to hit him, wanting an excuse to go to the police, to be on the radio, to suck up to the Administrator …

  Peering through the gap in the sitting room curtains, I whispered “Don’t hit him, O’D, don’t play into his hands …” even though I myself wanted to resort to violence, to tweak Manuel’s nose and pull it out until it was as long as the lying Pinocchio’s nose.

  Unable to break through O’D’s control, they started shouting something at Biasse.

  I walked down the back stairs. Azelia was leaning out of the cook hut window, a shocked expression on her face.

  “What are they shouting, Azelia?”

  “Dona, they are telling Biasse that if he doesn’t stop working for you, they are going to beat him! Their own father!”

  Now it was my turn to be shocked. What kind of children were these? Had Biasse’s sons lost their minds? The madness in Zimbabwe was obviously infectious.

  Finally, just to put a stop to everything, I called Biasse to come and speak to me and when he came, I said “Take off your apron, Biasse.”

  Biasse gave me a bitter look. “Thank you, Madam,” he said and untied his khaki apron and handed it to me. Before I could say another word, he turned on his heel and disappeared down the stairs. Through the gap in the curtains, I saw the would-be War Vets stop their drumming. Biasse had joined them. They turned away from the house and walked down the forest track together … two sons, with the father they had threatened to hit … and then, they turned the corner and vanished from sight.

  I had not, of course, fired Biasse. I had only intended to put an end to the ugly scene that was being played out in front of my house. However, it seemed he thought I had told him to go - permanently - and that’s just what he did.

  O’D wrote a letter of complaint about the Administrator’s behaviour to the Governor, and Dona Louisa (the Governor’s secretary) came down to see us, bringing the Administrator with her.

  While we all sat on the verandah, the Gondola Administrator put on a performance that filled me with wonder. Was this the same harsh, rough, rude man who had come to the Nhamacoa to make trouble for us? How he had changed! Now his face was amiable, his voice soft and gentle in its reasonableness. Surrounded by the little entourage of sycophants who had accompanied him on his first visit to us, he denied everything. His sycophants backed him up. The Senhora’s Portuguese was so bad she had misunderstood things!

  To Dona Louisa’s credit, she wasn’t taken in. No doubt she was used to the masks African government officials put on and take off to fool people.

 
; Knowing that he would never apologise, she did it for him, in his name. “On behalf of the Administrator,” she said, “I am very sorry.”

  September melted into October and still the Chimoio Judiciary did nothing to execute Westh’s Sentence.

  We consulted our friends again.

  “Get another lawyer,” Jinho advised us.

  “Who?” we asked, angry that we were being forced deeper and deeper into the murky mire of what passes for Mozambican ‘justice’.

  “There’s one called Pawindiwa,” he told us. “I don’t know how good he is but he can’t be worse than Nelson!”

  Without an alternative, O’D paid Pawindiwa a visit.

  The lawyer agreed to take on the case and set out his conditions – an upfront payment of 30 million meticais – about 1,000 pounds sterling!

  Naturally, O’D balked at this outrageous demand and Pawindiwa finally settled for 10 million.

  O’D’s letter to Nelson dispensing with his ‘services’ brought a letter in reply which clearly indicated the total insanity of the Chimoio judiciary.

  Furious at being fired, Nelson told O’D that any claim he had to the court case was as illegitimate as his claim to be Caetano’s partner! That Caetano had taken legal action against Westh in his private capacity and not as a representative of our company and that he, Nelson, had been acting on behalf of Caetano and not on behalf of our company.

  That said, he now demanded payment for his services from us, claiming 20% of the money Westh was supposed to pay back to us but had not paid back - the sum of 135 million meticais, amounting to about 4,000 pounds!

  Ending the letter off with a threat, he gave us his bank account number at BIM Bank and told us that if the money wasn’t paid into the account within FIVE DAYS, he was going to take action against us.

  Naturally, we ignored Nelson’s letter and his demented demands.

  Now, O’D embarked on a long series of meetings with our new lawyer. At first, when Pawindiwa told O’D he had had talks with Magaia and would be able to bring the Westh case to an end by 10th November, we were hopeful that we were at last getting somewhere. However, time dragged on and nothing happened. And then one day, towards the end of the year, Pawindiwa took us by surprise. He disappeared out of our lives without saying anything to us.

  He was now working on something terribly important down in Beira, his receptionist told us and no one knew when he’d be back.

  In the end, O’D went to see the Procurator about the lack of action and at first the Procurator was friendly. However, after the man had spoken to Judge Magaia about the case, his tone changed and he became as angry and threatening as the Judge.

  He told O’D that O’D was ‘confused in the brain’ and that if he wasn’t careful, Judge Magaia would be well within his rights to take O’D to court for besmirching and maligning Magaia’s name!

  Thwarted on every side to see justice being done in Mozambique, there was nothing left for us to do but to give up the unequal struggle.

  Westh had won. The thieving Dane from squeaky-clean Denmark had got away with his crime because Caetano had died. How fortuitous for Westh …

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  MOZAMBIQUE UNMASKED

  The year 2003 began with Missy’s death.

  She was a sweet little cat, with a pointed face and the greenest of eyes. Despite being the last of Miss Sydney’s kittens to be born and the smallest in size, Missy wasn’t a pushover. No doubt this was due to Miss Sydney’s fighting feminist genes that she had passed on to her daughter. Missy knew her rights as any of the other cats that tried to bully her had soon found out! Quite often, when I placed a bowl of milk on the kitchen floor and Spike, Raji and Jasper crowded around to drink, Missy would wade in there and using her furry grey elbows in a most unladylike manner, would jab and shove at her brothers until she had pushed them out of the way and taken the bowl over for herself.

  Like Raji, she wasn’t a very domesticated cat, spending a lot of her time during the day sleeping in the long tall yellow grass not far from the water tank and this may have been the cause of her death.

  The problem with Missy’s health started with some invisible mites that lived either in the ground or in the long tall yellow grass. At first, there was just a small bald spot on the back of her neck where she had scratched at the itch, but then, as the days went by, the bald spot grew larger and she scratched so much at it that a strip of skin came loose and hung flapping away. This loose piece of skin terrified her. She thought it was some kind of alien creature that had attached itself to her and she ran around the house like a mad thing, trying to get away from it. Eventually, we managed to catch her and hold her just long enough for O’D to carefully cut off the flapping skin but then she went and hid herself on the roof of our house and while she was up there, there was a heavy rainstorm and she got soaked to the skin.

  Mr. Matola, the Vet in Chimoio wasn’t up to much with animals unless they were farm animals and by this time, there were no longer any good Vets left in Mutare. Missy developed a high fever and then pneumonia set in.

  Knowing there was nothing we could do and not wanting Missy to drag herself off into the bush to die alone, I put her gently onto a large comfortable cushion on the floor next to our bed and listened to her struggling to breathe. She was thirsty, I knew, but couldn’t drink the water I had placed in front of her.

  “Oh, little Missy, I’m so sorry we can’t help you,” I told her and stroked her gently on her little head. Ill as she was, she still managed a purr at my touch. “But all the Vets have run away.”

  Animal lovers will know how sad and painful it is to watch their beloved pets dying before their eyes and being helpless to do anything for them. We couldn’t even put Missy to sleep to spare her from her agonizing death.

  The end came one dark and early morning at four o’clock. I heard Missy struggle off the cushion and when I turned on the light, there she was, trying to force herself through the mosquito net in order to get under the bed. She opened her mouth wide in a last desperate effort to gasp for a breath and then with a loud despairing shriek, she drowned in the liquid that was filling her lungs.

  The beginning of the year also brought another bolt from the blue. More trouble boiled up for us with another government official, this time in the Forestry Department.

  Rungo had it in for us, it seemed, and now he showed his hand. With Caetano gone, he set out to bring us to our knees in the most callous of ways.

  Sending a team of no less than six Forest Rangers to check out our felled logs in the forest, Rungo decided we’d broken a new law. It appeared that we now needed a document from the Forestry Department to transport our felled timber the short distance from the forest to our sawmill and as we had neglected to obtain this document, Forestry were going to confiscate all our logs!

  Horrified by the sight of the Forest Rangers gleefully painting the letters DPA all over our timber, O’D appealed to Bertuzzi for help. Bertuzzi had formed the Association of Foresters and he, in his capacity as Secretary and another forester called Nunes who was the President of the Association made an appointment with the Provincial Director of Agriculture to talk about our problem with Rungo.

  When the Provincial Director agreed that Rungo was out of order and overturned his decision to confiscate all our logs, Rungo was furious.

  Foiled in his attempt to get hold of our logs, he now delayed with the issuing of licences for our sawn timber at the sawmill and unable to sell any timber without these licences, our business ground to a standstill.

  Customers who made the long trip down to us to buy wood went back to Chimoio empty-handed and what little money we had left, began to dribble away.

  Then, one day when O’D went into the Forestry Department for another attempt to get Rungo to see sense, he was told some grim news by Rungo’s deputy, Abdullah.

  “Rungo’s not here,” Abdullah told O’D, with something of a smirk. “He’s gone to Germany.”

  German
y! O’D felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. “When will he be back?”

  “Oh, in about three months’ time,” Abdullah replied carelessly. “And he didn’t leave any instructions about your licences with me, so it’s no use asking me to help.”

  The blow was enormous. How were we going to survive for three months without being able to sell our wood?

  As if all of this wasn’t enough, in July, one month after the anniversary of Caetano’s death, Miss Sydney disappeared.

  By this time I had replaced Biasse with a young Zimbabwean refugee called Lloyd. Lloyd had once been a waiter at Meikles Hotel in Harare and although he couldn’t cook, he helped around the house. There was something wrong with Azelia - asthma, she said the doctor had told her - and she was becoming terribly, terribly thin.

  At lunchtime, Lloyd told me, young boys slipped onto our land and rummaged around in the hole we had dug for our garbage. When he saw them at it, he shouted at them and tried to catch them but they were too fast for him, first pulling faces and sticking their tongues out at him before running away through the trees.

  On the morning of Miss Sydney’s disappearance, I saw her wandering off in the direction of the bushes near the rubbish hole. I called her name and she stopped for a second and looked over her shoulder at me. “Come,” I called. “Come here.” But with a last wilful look at me with her green eyes, she darted away into the undergrowth.

  When Miss Sydney didn’t put in an appearance for her supper or her breakfast of boiled mackerel and rice the following day, we started looking for her and calling her name. Our searches turned up no sign of her or even a hint of what had happened to her until about ten days later on a Sunday, when O’D and I heard the sound of voices down by the rubbish pit. The boys were on our land again. They started to run when they saw O’D but he caught one of them and the boy confessed. They were the children of the prophetess who lived across the river and they had killed my little Miss Sydney. Killed and eaten her.

  Rungo returned from Germany and O’D drove off to the Forestry Department to pay him a visit.