Grazie but no grazie

To get to the printers before it shut, I had to battle rush hour traffic and road closures in a txopela (Mozambican tuk-tuk, and a word I can never spell the same way). It was touch and go but thanks to the, let’s say forthright, driving of Paulo, my usual txopela driver, I made it with minutes to spare to collect materials for an event tomorrow.

On the way back Paulo wanted to pick up another client going in the same direction. If I’d known he was a toxic Italian man with racist views, I would have refused. He was the type of expat who should have wound up his involvement in Mozambique years ago, as he was so bitter at the country after a series of failed business attempts. In Portuguese (and with the driver half a metre away) he was bemoaning Mozambique and Mozambicans and at one point said something about the cabeças duras (hard heads) of Mozambicans whilst feigning to knock on Paulo’s head. His attitude was truly vile. Despite telling him I was a conservationist he insisted on leaving me with some printouts of building designs, as well as his email address. There is no feasible way our worlds should ever overlap again.

I avoided telling him that trying to be more likeable, and going easy on the racism, could be winning strategies for his business ventures because I hoped he’d crawl back to a cave in the Apennines before too long.

After we’d inched painfully through the traffic and he’d left the txopela, I asked Paulo what he’d heard. All of it.

There’s always some washing of cars and scrubbing of pots behind the building below my kitchen window. I like the area of the city in which I live as it’s got more character than more sterile parts.