Death under the Jacaranda tree.

Chicoso’s bed is arranged in the shade of the Jacaranda tree at the beginning of every day. Against the chill of the early morning his sister-in-law Kutemwa lights a fire and brews something that is neither soup nor tea, but it brings heat to the cold, wakening bodies of her bleary-eyed family, and the sun begins its daily struggle from behind the grey, faintly visible hills in far-off Mozambique. It’s a nourishing, heartening brew, one of the few foods Chicoso’s ravaged body can tolerate now. While Kutemwa busies herself with the fire and the cooking, her husband, Tinkani, and their older sons wash themselves behind the house; she has already filled the bucket from the pump at the edge of the village and the water is cold.

With breakfast over the hoes and the pangas are gathered together ready for another day’s work. The last household chore for the working men is to make Chicoso comfortable for the day. Two of Kutemwa’s sons carry the only proper bed frame the family possesses from the small, brick house over to the trees some twenty metres away. The thin mattress and the rag of a blanket are piled on top of the bed and Tinkani carries his brother. By now Chicoso has become too weak to walk the short distance that last year he could have sprinted in a few seconds with very little effort. When he is settled with his water jar and a stick for chasing away inquisitive dogs, the men leave him behind with Kutemwa and the other women and the children, while they set off for the river and the fields and take with them the purposeful, productive world of men.

At this late stage of his illness Chicoso has already lain under the green, feathery canopy of the Jacaranda tree during the digging of the fields and while they were planted. He lay on listening with delight and regret to the younger boys as they sat guard over the ripening cobs of maize day and night to chase away thieving monkeys. Towards the end of the brief, heavy rains the lace of the canopy had become spotted with purple, and was soon laden with masses of trumpet-shaped blooms while Chicoso lay on his bed for the full length of the harvest. Now he measures the scattering of his strength against the changing colours above him: he is certain that he will not live to hear another season of tired, satisfied working men’s voices laughing and sighing to the rhythm of the yearly turning of sunshine and rain.

The days pass slowly but steadily for Chicoso, and with much sickness. Young children are sent from time to time to ask if he wants anything; Chicoso suspects that the real reason is to check if he is still alive, still a burden. Now and then eddies of stale, warm air ruffle the bruised blooms that have fallen untidily around the bed, and pile them into soft, mauve mounds against the exposed roots of the giant tree.

With the men gone the noise and busyness of that phase of daily village life soon subside, and Kutemwa goes off chattering with her neighbours to wash clothes at the pump and replenish the drinking buckets. They take their babies on their backs and their younger children scamper about at their feet.

Chicoso is left alone amid the empty huts and the flies. Chickens peck and scrape in the dust and the dogs begin to seek out the shade of over-hanging roofs to escape the heat of the ever-rising sun. They lie sprawled and panting with frothy saliva slobbering around their gaping pink and black mouths; their spit trickles down onto the dry ground, creating foamy puddles of mud. Yesterday’s blooms fall around Chicoso like tiny parachutes and enormous, black seed pods bomb him from the tall, sprawling majesty of the Jacaranda.

Time drags. Chicoso waits, but Thursday seems to come around so quickly. In the ghostly emptiness and heat of midday the atmosphere is suddenly violated by the harsh, raucous chundering of the Mines Plane. The shattering roar comes fresh to Chicoso’s ears every time that it disrupts the morbid stillness of the village, even though it is long experienced and expected. The ancient, black and green mottled DC3 never gains much height even by the time it has covered the fifteen or so kilometres from Chileka airport and Chicoso can make out the details of the undercarriage as it passes above the lacy green and purple screen of the Jacaranda. On it flies, belching and shuddering, droning on long after it has disappeared from view, and the thick, grey smudge of fumes has fallen into the river and onto the crops.

When he was a boy Chicoso had watched with envy as the “plane took its cargo of labourers to the mines in South Africa, away to the land of wealth and freedom where, when the time came, village boys like him could go to earn their fortunes and live as independent men, free from the dictates of the seasons and the village elders. But the stories his uncles told as they came back from the mines were tales of hardship, illness and crime; they were stories of disappointment which, in his impatient innocence, Chicoso chose to dissociate from the strange beauty that lumbered heavily over the village early every Thursday afternoon. He convinced himself that the uncles had either been unlucky or that they weren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate life beyond the narrow scope of Cheradzuzo. The uncles returned every four months and repeated the unlikely tale that when they were working underground, far from the love of the sun, sore and parched with thirst, they would encourage each other with the thought of lazy afternoons sitting together again under the wide skirt of the Jacaranda tree, laughing with their wives, playing with their children. Chicoso suspected that sometimes they told their tales of woe to win the sympathy of their wives, to make the women feel grateful for the sacrifice the men made for them so that they would let them rest and talk undisturbed under the tree. But now he knew differently.

It wasn’t the long hours of hard, physical work that disillusioned Chicoso when he eventually arrived for work at the mines on his seventeenth birthday. It wasn’t the agony in his arms and his back, nor was it the dust in his lungs or the continual redness of his eyes. It was the loneliness that pained him. Underground, away from the sun and in the company of quiet, brutalised comrades, he worked hard; but in the mist of the morning when he surfaced and coughed in air that was thick with the smoke from burning rubbish piled around the workers’ compound, he knew that he was far from home and from anyone who cared. Other men who he knew from his village had become hard. They expected Chicoso to be hard as well, and to act the man who believes he is bigger than hardship, above complaint. Chicoso played the man. Soon he found his way to the beer halls once in a while after the occasional daytime shift; soon it was after every shift. Soon the amount of money going back to Cheradzuzo was less than it had been. Soon he found his way from the beer halls to the shacks behind them, and into beds that were still damp from the visits of so many other men. He lay on those beds lonely in the company of laughter and pleasure, looking only for humiliation, punishment and shame in the final efforts of ecstasy.

Now he has made his way back to Cheradzuzo, broken and ashamed. His family explain to their neighbours and to each other that he’s “not feeling so well just now” and everyone understands what they mean. Now he spends these days that will be his last under the shade of the jacaranda tree that the uncles dreamed of, and that now he admits he dreamed of too.