Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [88]
“Let me show you some old Mozambique,” said Mapenga, suddenly veering off the road and onto something wide enough to allow for a couple of goats. We drove for some distance through a scrubby wasteland of bush, and then suddenly we broke through the scruffy backcountry into a clearing. Here, there was a small, dusty village that had crowded itself around a single, tiny shack serving as a grocery store.
“This used to be a town in Pork days,” said Mapenga. “Believe it or not. Nice place, they say. There was a club, and a hardware store, restaurant. Now look.”
A single telephone pole leaned against a solitary stone building, which blinked under the relentless sun. Its roof and back wall had been blown off, revealing a cross section of remarkably thick walls. A massive mango tree grew out of one of the windows.
“They arrested me a few years ago and tossed me in there for three nights,” said Mapenga. “The usual hunna-hunna about, ‘You wazungu think you can come here and do anything.’ You know how it is? You fire some lazy bastard and his brother is the local policeman, so they come and arrest you and keep you until they admit they haven’t got any evidence against you.” Then Mapenga repeated the word with a Shona accent, “Heavy-dents. Ha!
“So I tell the policeman, ‘What’s stopping me walking out of here?’
“He said, ‘We shoot you.’ ”
Mapenga laughed. “See?” he said, slapping my knee. “Heavy-dents. That’s what they say. They say, ‘That is not a bullet hole. It is a heavy-dent.’ Ha! Ha!”
Mapenga changed gears and the engine whined. The pickup lurched into a slower pace. “So for three nights I am stuck on this slab of concrete and there are chickens and kids and dogs wandering in and out and there’s a gondie in the mango tree with an AK-47 with the barrel pointing straight at my brain. The kids fetched me burned mealies and water, though. And the guy in the tree with the gun threw mangos down for me once in a while. We became quite good mates. Sometimes I come through here and give him a packet of kapenta.”
A group of four or five women standing by the side of the road, with plastic containers and buckets on their heads, shouted and waved as Mapenga drove past. “My girlfriends,” he said, winking at K and slamming on the brakes, so that we were enveloped in a cloak of white dust. He reversed the pickup and the women climbed into the back. Mapenga leaned out the window and said something in Shona; they shrieked and laughed in response.
K glanced behind at the women. “The Porks weren’t afraid of dipping into the oil drum, hey.”
“Plenty of goffles around here,” Mapenga agreed. “Beautiful as well. There are some that are almost white, I promise you.” Mapenga lit a cigarette. “It’s tempting, sometimes. There’s a bar in Maputo that I go to where all the prozzies hang out. You know, the classy ones. The ones with Pork blood in them. You’ve never seen such women. More beautiful than wazungu women, I’m telling you.” Mapenga cleared his throat. “Ja, so last month I was there and the owner is the slimiest fucking Pork you’ve ever met.
“He tells me, ‘Hey, Mila is in the back room. She’s so drunk. She’s giving it away.’
“And Mila, I promise, she’s the most beautiful mawhori you’ve seen. And about eight guys have already been in there and done her.” Mapenga shook his head. “Death sentence, man.
“I told the owner, ‘No thanks. I’ve seen plenty of The Very Disease. I don’t need to go looking for it.’
“He said, ‘No problemo, she’s clean.’
“I said, ‘If she was clean an hour ago, she certainly isn’t now.’ ”
By now we had cleared the village and we were driving through