Mozambique Mysteries Read online

  Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s first novel, Keeper of the House, won the Somerset Maugham Award and was followed by The Slow Train to Milan, which won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. She has written seven novels, poetry, short stories and three volumes of memoir, including the bestselling The Hacienda and her autobiography Memory Maps. Her most recent novel is Otto. Snce 2005 she has lived in Mossuril District in North Mozambique with Mees van Deth, where she runs the charity Terán Foundation helping local communities to help themselves.

  By the same author

  Keepers of the House

  The Slow Train to Milan

  The Tiger

  The Bay of Silence

  Black Idol

  Nocturne

  Joanna

  The Palace

  Otto

  The Marble Mountain (short stories)

  The High Place (poetry)

  Off the Rails (memoir)

  A Valley in Italy (memoir)

  The Hacienda (memoir)

  The Virago Book of Wanderlust and Dreams (edited anthology)

  Southpaw (short stories)

  Elements of Italy (edited anthology)

  Memory Maps (memoir)

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN 978-0-748-12780-1

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Lisa St Aubin de Terán 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Mees

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  By the same author

  PART ONE

  I

  Squeezed Between the Bush and the Ocean

  II

  Dream Catching

  III

  Parallel Lives

  IV

  If Not Now, When?

  V

  Meaning and Distance

  VI

  The Lure of Mozambique

  PART TWO

  VII

  How I Found Mees or How He Found Me

  VIII

  Pioneering in Mossuril

  IX

  When Business and Pleasure Are One

  X

  Home-made Tools and a Giant Learning Curve

  XI

  The Workings of a Heart

  XII

  The College

  XIII

  Varanda: A Slice of Paradise

  XIV

  Beachcombing

  PART THREE

  XV

  The Tradição

  XVI

  Natural and Supernatural

  XVII

  Macua Rituals

  XVIII

  A Visit from the Curandeiros

  XIX

  Mossuril and Fabulous Chocas-Mar

  XX

  The Remains of Slavery

  XXI

  Ilha

  PART FOUR

  XXII

  Morripa, the Local Hero

  XXIII

  The Staff and Students

  XXIV

  Vakháni Vakháni

  XXV

  Pacino, the Enraged Baboon

  XXVI

  Nampula, Capital of the North

  XXVII

  In Search of Our Lady of the Cures

  XXVIII

  Momade and the Farm

  XXIX

  Planting Dreams

  XXX

  Consider the Lilies, How They Grow

  XXXI

  The Two-kilometre Sea Snake

  Afterword

  PART ONE

  I

  Squeezed Between the Bush and the Ocean

  THE MANGROVES HERE IN northern Mozambique grow in the sea or on beaches that the sea reclaims sporadically. The sands they grow in are disinfected daily by the tide. The vast expanses of watery forest are clean, fresh and beautiful. Yet their name ‘mangrove’ has unfortunate connotations, conjuring up images of the sweet-water mangroves of other countries with their swamps, mud, mosquitoes and crocodiles. Images of the likes of Dustin Hoffman struggling to survive in their unhealthy vapours have helped give mangroves a bad name.

  Generically, sea mangroves missed a press opportunity and a world whitewashing when the tsunami devastated Asian coasts. Many of the damaged areas had until recently, been protected by mangroves. Had those mangroves still been there to break the force of the tsunami, thousands of lives and homes could have been saved. Alas, millions of hectares of mangroves have been destroyed in the past forty years and millions more are being wantonly cleared to make way for prawn farms and holiday resorts. Mangroves are an endangered species in need of protection. They are also inspiring plants to be around: quite literally, they effervesce the air and the water around them, thereby de-stressing every living creature near them. Their warm waters are a tactile lullaby.

  Fish know that these Mozambican mangroves are a good place to be and a good place to breed. The safe pools between their roots are the nursery of the Indian Ocean: a breeding ground of multicoloured fish, prawns, lobsters, starfish, crabs and picture books full of sea creatures all coexisting in an orderly fashion within this seemingly endless sparkling tepid bath. By day, shoals of miniature silvery fish leap out in what look like choreographed flashes. By night, tiny electromagnetic sparks light up the warm natural champagne in the salt rivulets and lagoons. It is as though nature were giving a slide-show on the natural harmony of land and sea and all their plants and creatures. Every aspect of the landscape exudes peace.

  When the local people disturb this harmony by taking life, they tend to pray for forgiveness. No crab, fish or chicken is killed without acknowledging the shame of disturbing the environment. Even nasty insects like the 15-centimetre-long centipede fatter than my thumb which dropped at my feet from an acacia tree one day are allowed to live. My first reaction was to kill it, my second was to imagine being sprayed by its juice if I did, and my third was to ask Adamji, a fearless guard, to kill it instead. But he picked it up with a stick and threw it far away muttering, ‘Let it live.’

  Adamji’s beneficence doesn’t extend to rats, which he chases and stabs with a sharpened bamboo cane without any qualms or regrets.

  Not all animals, it would seem, are God’s chosen creatures here. A few serve renegade masters, bad spirits – aminepani – and can be slaughtered without so much as a backward look. Some can be killed and the taking of their life absolved. Harming others, like the dolphin, the rare nashekura (a brown stork) and the common African crow, is strictly taboo. The same rules apply on land and sea and in the no-man’s-land between them. There are no borders here between the one and the other, and yet there is no doubt that the sea is the ultimate ruler.

  Very early on in my love affair with Mozambique, I learnt to respect both the mangrove and the tide. Instead of taking the long bush road to the Mossuril coast, I was coming in by sea with an itinerary I found so romantic that I got lost in the contemplation of it, to the exclusion of foresight.

  Morripa had called my partner, Mees, and me several times during the day to stress at what time a local fishing boat would pick us up on Ilha de Moçambique, the island harbour a few kilometres off the coast. And he called us again on Ilha with strict instructions to be at the fortress beach no later than 2pm to catch the sailing dhow back to Varanda, where M
ees had just become a project owner. This was the first and only time I have disregarded our local hero’s advice.

  We were at what was then the only restaurant on Ilha, Reliquias, a cavernous and curious converted warehouse decorated with maritime relics and photographs of old Ilha. Mozambican restaurants in general are very slow to serve. So slow, in fact, that our idea of starting a College of Tourism grew in great part from the hours and hours of waiting in bars and restaurants for a very simple meal. Reliquias was no exception. When I lived in Venezuela it took me years to get used to the Latino concept of ‘mañana, mañana’. Here, with so many life-threatening obstacles between the waiter and any certainty of a tomorrow at all, slowness seems to spill over into the more secure realm of eternity.

  The delicious lobster we ordered and eventually ate that day almost had time to complete its annual migration from the moment we chose it to the moment it arrived on our table. Two o’clock came and went before there was any hint of the lobster heading our way. Over a bottle of chilled Portuguese rosé, with the smell of grilled fish wafting out of the blackened kitchen, it was easy to gaze at the gentle sea from the comfort of our palm-leaf shade and see no real urgency to get a move on. Why abandon our lunch after such a long wait in favour of trudging down to the beach under a burning sun to sail back on an empty stomach when there were still over three hours of daylight left?

  Morripa called yet again to remind us that the boat would be there from 2pm sharp. I thanked him and he thanked me: there are a lot of thank-yous traded in Portuguese. Then I reasoned that the dhow captain was getting paid for the day, so he would not mind whether he waited or sailed a few hours earlier or later. It wasn’t until after 3pm that lunch finally arrived and it was nearly 4pm by the time we got through the bill-paying ceremony and down to the dock.

  As planned, a small, chipped sailing dhow was waiting for us. The burly captain commented that the tide was not good now and the wind was frail and would slow down our crossing. We didn’t mind. It was a beautiful view, and the rosé gave everything an extra glow.

  Night fell while we were still at sea. The captain had somewhat understated the slowing down: we were becalmed for over an hour mid-channel. When a wind rose, it was a rough one and brought too many waves for us to be able to steer through the coral to Varanda. The captain explained he would have to take us to Cabaceira Pequena, from where we could walk through the mangrove back to our camp. This was not ideal because we were arriving from Nampula, the provincial capital, and had a lot of luggage with us, including a laptop and heavy film equipment. Under the circumstances, there was nothing we could do. The dhow had no motor and its course was dictated by the wind and waves.

  As we sailed towards the flickering pinpoints of oil lamps and the village, the boat leaked faster and faster. A boy in a ragged T-shirt and indecently wrecked shorts was bailing for all he was worth with a baobab seed scoop. We were the only sailing craft out on the sea. The captain kept calm and manoeuvred his home-made mast and sail and then punted us to the shore with the odd grumble about the perils of night sailing.

  As we clambered out of the boat into thigh-high water and waded onto the beach, hundreds of children lined the shore and stared, cheering and laughing. Three of the workers from Mees’s project at Varanda, who lived in the village of Cabaceira Pequena, were there to greet us, headed by Ibraimo, who took charge of most of the bags.

  Walking through the village to Ibraimo’s house brought several hundred more people onto the narrow street and a further swarm of half-naked children. We moved in a procession, dripping water from our disembarkation and hoping we would be able to head off quickly to camp. It had been a long day and the excitement had blended with the wine and the large lobster to induce a sudden need for sleep.

  In the old days, when the Mossuril coast was fashionable, visitors could fly in via the tiny airport of Lumbo. Subsequently, this facility closed down. Needing to take aerial photographs of the area, we had hired a private jet and flown down in great style to this disused airport in the bush. Being the one who organizes things, I was concerned beforehand how we would get from the airport to Ilha. We had luggage and it was a twenty-two-kilometre walk, including the four kilometres of road bridge. Mees assured me that local people would see us fly over and land and we could pay a local child to go and find us a lift into the island town. Having never flown into the unknown before, I wasn’t very happy about this; but sure enough, on arrival, a dozen children ran up to us and within half an hour, one of them had found a truck willing to give us a lift.

  With hindsight, knowing now how difficult transport is in Mossuril District, that lift was little short of a miracle. It would be quite possible to wait all day for a truck to pass and another day to find one that would change course for the airport to pick us up. But we had been lucky and our trip was going according to plan – until we decided to linger over lunch. Actually, we lingered over drinks before lunch and ate at a gallop.

  I asked Ibraimo if we could head on to Varanda soon but he was adamant that the crossing on foot was impossible for many hours. These were early days for me and Mees, and what we wanted had not yet fitted itself to what could or could not be. So we discussed our options and decided to brave the sea and get to Varanda before the tide got any higher. Ibraimo absolutely advised us not to do this. We knew from Morripa that the local people see the mangrove as taboo at night and are afraid of the restless spirits of their ancestors there. So we mistook Ibraimo’s reluctance for fear of spirits rather than fear of drowning. Neither Mees nor I had ever seen the mangrove in full flood from the village side and had no idea that when a Cabaceirian says, ‘Don’t go there,’ he means it. In the light of Ibraimo’s continued warning, I tried to call Morripa in neighbouring Cabaceira Grande to ask his advice, but the sing-song ‘Liga mais tarde’ (Call back later) showed that the phone network was down.

  We checked the distance to our camp at Varanda: it was less than two kilometres. We had three guides with us to help carry the bags and each of them crossed the same mangrove at least twice a day. We were wet and tired and not much enjoying being the Akunha – the white person, or outsider – entertainment for a large crowd of gawping children and teenagers, so we told Ibraimo we had decided to go anyway, and five minutes later we set off following his reluctant footsteps. There were many stars and the night was balmy but almost pitch black. A screech owl followed us for the first part of our way. A dozen of the children who had stuck to us like limpets from the time we disembarked also followed us to the edge of the inland water, but where the sand started to be wet and a hem of salt foam gathered, they drew back as though stung and ran away, whooping and shouting.

  We entered the mangrove at the end of the village beyond the ruined warehouses where a line of giant lilies grows between whitewashed stones to mark an ancient cemetery that is slowly being drawn back into the sea. The water was warm and gentle, but my Japanese thong slippers were not ideal water-walking shoes and the right one (which was looser) kept slipping off. Ibraimo offered to carry my laptop, but I decided that if anyone was going to drop it it had better be me.

  For the first fifteen minutes, with the water still only knee deep, Mees and I wondered what all the fuss had been about. Then, almost without warning, the water was waist-high. Ibraimo said we could still turn back and he advised us to do so. It was nice in the water, soothing and peaceful, and we didn’t want to turn back, so we overruled him and waded on.

  Only now, after several years of working together, would Ibraimo or any of the other guards have the confidence to put their foot down and defy their boss for safety’s sake. Back then, Mees was their new employer and no one dared countermand his will. Many Mozambicans lack self-confidence: their low self-esteem is borne of centuries of subjugation. No one talks much about the past brutality of the Portuguese, but the collective memory of it still weighs people down. In the Cabaceiras, to this day, not only will very few villagers contradict a ‘boss’, very few will stand up for themselve
s in the presence of any kind of authority.

  On the night in question, Ibraimo knew we were walking into doom but he didn’t dare insist that we stay back. He suggested it timidly several times, but he didn’t say, ‘If we go on we will all drown.’

  And Morripa knew that we had to get the boat by 2pm. He knew the tide would be impassable after that. By calling me with gentle reminders he was actually trying to say the same thing: it is dangerous to sail back later, but he too was wary of sticking out his neck.

  So we two stubborn Akunha were wading through the mangroves with the streaming tepid water up to our necks. I was balancing my laptop on my head while holding it steady with one hand. The moon was not up yet and it was dark. But for Ibraimo and the two guards ahead of us, I had no idea where I was heading. Mees had a torch which he used in a gentlemanly fashion to show me where to walk underwater. Ibraimo had said more than once that we were to place our feet exactly where he placed his. It is slow work wading through deep water, and what with my Japanese slippers and the laptop, I was slower than the others and kept lagging behind. Thankfully, Mees waited for me time and again until I caught up. One of my slippers finally got irretrievably lost, which meant I could keep up better but my bare right foot was prey to sharp coral rocks jutting out of the sandy bed.

  Mees knew the area and he also knew the guides, but, like me, he didn’t know where exactly we were and he didn’t understand a word of the local language. The water was streaming faster now and it was quite an effort to stay upright in places. Wading the two kilometres was taking much longer than we had imagined and our insistence on crossing now was no longer looking like the good idea it had seemed back in the village.