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Matome

Matome was always the first one to wake up: “People, I’m waking up.”

He always said that in a way that would make you think you were responsible; that you were somehow making him sleep against his will.

“People, I’m waking up.”

Then he’d slip into some sandals and get himself into the bathroom. He’d open the hot tap and there would be the sound of water filling the bath and being replaced in the geyser, then the flush of the toilet.

I don’t know why it was, but every time he got into hot water his manhood felt the warmth and hardened; every time he had a bath he had a full erection with it. But, that was the only place he ever got one – in hot water.

Medium height, dark skin and charming, he had something in him that made all people want to trust him.

I trusted him from the moment I saw him, and we had been together from that first week, in our first year in dream city. Thursday of that same week I moved in with him: I was studying broadcasting and he was doing sound engineering. The next day I had to give him R350, which he was supposed to add to his R350 for the month’s groceries. I don’t know if he ever did add his money, but when I came back that afternoon there was a party at my place (as he put it). It was my flat party, the first of the many something parties that I was to party in this city.

I was very surprised. I was overwhelmed that so many people came to enjoy a flat party for me. I drank and got drunk.

The next morning he woke me up, saying, “We are going to buy groceries now. I’m not your wife.”

We got to the friendly supermarket and he had a friendly talk with the security guards, like he knew them from long ago. Then he asked to have a friendly one-to-one with the manager, but he wasn’t there, so he took a trolley, put some plastic bags in it and we proceeded.

“Do you like this?” he asked.

“Do we need that?” I answered.

But he ignored me and said, “Well, do you like it? I don’t have all day.”

He took everything he wanted without even considering its price. When we got to the till he started packing the groceries into the plastic bags right in front of the cashier.

“Are you paying for this?” I asked.

He looked at me and said, “Where do you think I’d get the money from? I’m not working and we drank all your money yesterday.”

I just walked out, leaving him there. I wasn’t scared. I was angry. How could he be so irresponsible with my money and expect to walk into the supermarket, charm the security guards, and then take whatever he wanted and walk out? But that’s exactly what he did, the security guards helping him with the bags. Matome smiling like he was walking down a red carpet. The groceries must have cost R900 or more and that was without the meat that came from the butchery.

“You want to pay for everything? If you have the money, pay, but I will take. I don’t like taking, but if you ask, you won’t have,” he said, looking at me with burning eyes, dead serious. “Sometimes you have to do things, bad things, in order to get to a peaceful end.”

Matome was a man of all seasons: I took him for a baobab tree, the tree that decided one night that it was going to be different from all trees and swapped itself upside down, so that, unlike all the other trees, its photosynthesis took place underground, right next to the water.

People believe in things. Some people believe in God. Others believe in money. Matome was a person who believed in himself. It was like he gave birth to himself. He never, in all the years that we lived together, mentioned anything of his past. Whenever the conversation got to the point where he would have to tell someone something about his past, he would say, “We are here now, forget the past, and think about now, today and tomorrow, which is where we are going. You can only say sorry about the past, and it doesn’t matter whether you are sorry or not. It has passed.”

Matome’s past was a closed case. He would listen when anybody was telling a story about something from their past and he’d laugh, if it was funny, or be sorry, if it needed that, but he would never tell of anything of his own.

Women always wanted him, they fantasised about him. They would make advances, but he just floated and then, later, he would make one big joke about it, like he didn’t care. And, of course, he didn’t. We all envied him and the cheese boys wanted to befriend him, but he was everyone’s friend whatever your background was. As he put it: “Your background is your background; it’s yours, I don’t care about it. I only care about the eyes, the soul, the human being, the face.”

He had many friends. Everybody was his friend. In his world the term ‘stranger’ was nonexistent, but just because everybody was a friend to him did not mean that he didn’t have enemies. He had a trainload of them, all in third class, and most of them were of the female species. Only because they loved him at first, and even slept in the same bed with him for a couple of nights, but then quickly discovered that to Matome love was not about sex. And then they hated him for that. And some even made allegations of this and that.

Like that beautiful girl Debra. God knows, I wished she was making all those advances at me.

One night we were having a party and the war against Isando was not going to end very soon thanks to Matome’s charm. Some of our guests were already lost to the war and one of them had already thrown up.

Debra, as one of my uncles always observed of most of the girls who grew up in Mamelodi, was a true lelaenara, and that night she proved him very right. She was standing just in front of her boyfriend, stroking him with her soft hands. Standing there, she called to Matome and said, out loud for everyone who could hear to hear, “Since the day I first saw you I have always wanted to fuck you.”

Excuse the language, but that’s exactly what came out of her mouth.

She continued, “And you are always fucking running away, what’s wrong with you? This guy!” She was preaching now. “I want to give it to him for free, but he doesn’t fucking want it. Others have to sweat for it, but I’m giving it to you for free. Free!”

Her eyes were pleading, and Matome, who rose to every occasion, smiled, stroked his manhood and said, “This one, sweetie, you won’t have to sweat for it, you’ll have to die for it. You’ll have to fucking die for this one, sweetie.”

Matome danced on and she concluded, “I’m going to fucking rape you one of these days.”

She turned back to her boyfriend, with an innocent-guilty smile and a shake of the head, as if she didn’t know that he was there, and said, “I was just playing.”

Matome had love for the female species. He had nothing but love and tender care. And he made them all happy, made them laugh until they complained about having headaches and God knows what else he made them feel. Matome loved them, but not the way you and I will tenderly love those members of the female species. He had innumerable girlfriends, one after the other, and the same thing always happened. From Matome all they got was love and no sex. One of them asked me once, after sleeping with, and being loved by Matome for about a month or so, she asked, “What kind of a man is Matome?”

Dimakatso was what they called her and, true, she was all that and more. From a township called Ikageng in Potchefstroom, she was here in the city making a dream come true.

Mind you, it was a fair question, because I was right there too; my bed was just a metre and a half from his. We would talk and they’d play puppy-love-play and, finally, thinking bad thoughts, I’d drift off into a very sweet sleep. But, how could I answer that kind of a question, because clearly the question had implications. The real question was obviously: Why is it that Matome doesn’t have it with me? Does he have a problem with his thing or is it me?

“What do you think?” was the logical thing that came out of my big mouth and with that I invited no further questions, and then I felt sorry about shutting her down, so I said, “He is your man, you tell me.”

Then she smiled and shook her head, not knowing what to tell me. I reached out and touched her. I could feel her heart beating faster, the pulse increasing, and the sorry-sadness drifting away. She smiled a smile that said I should not stop, so I did what I do, believing it was for the best.

“Tell me the difference between love and sex?” Matome asked her a long time afterwards.

She looked at him, trying to come up with a quick answer, an answer that wasn’t there, and so he told her, “Sweetie, love is a process, sex is an act. Sex ends, but love doesn’t end.”

“I never thought of it that way,” she responded, and Matome told her, “Don’t think, I’m giving you the facts here! I love you and I want you. If I’m not having sex with you, it doesn’t mean that I don’t love you. And it doesn’t mean I can’t have sex with you, it’s just that I don’t want to have sex. I want to be loved, but I don’t want to have sex at this time in my life.”

Dimakatso looked at Matome as if trying to connect this statement with Matome and her understanding of him, but it was as if she didn’t want to be in the state of understanding which Matome had reached.

“Remember, sex is an act but love is a process. Do you understand me?”

And she said, “Yes.”

And with that I got myself a girlfriend. First Dimakatso was Matome’s and then she was mine and we were still living in the same room.

“Remember, love is a process, to be cared for and understood at all times,” Matome told her, but throughout his search for a companion, one who understood love at his level, he never found one.

It was just unfortunate, the Dimakatso thing, but then another name for sex is making love and there’s not much difference between making love and sex to you and me, I think.

“I can go out now and buy sex. What they are selling is an act that ends; even between two people, who love each other very much, it, sex, still remains an act: it ends. It is never love, as it has nothing to do with love,” Matome concluded.

Smile, sweetie, it will be all right.

That was the way Matome always wanted them, smiling, happy. He could keep everybody smiling; after all, he was always smiling, even in the darkest of times.

Even when he lost his mother, he smiled as always, like nothing really happened, throughout the whole week. On Thursday, we were laughing as always, having one of those connections when I wished he was my blood brother, and it was then that he asked me to go with him to his home in Bolobedu. I agreed; we were writing an exam the following morning at nine o’clock and after that, we would leave the city.

He said nothing until we got to Bolobedu, where, to my surprise, I found out that we were there to bury his mother. I felt sorry and angry. I never knew he had just lost his mother. I felt sorry for him, which was, of course, the reason why he hadn’t told me. He knew that if he had told me I would act sad, and he hated it when people did that.

That day Matome wasn’t sad, it was like he was happy that she had died. I asked him if he loved his mother and he said, smiling, “The day you die is better than the day you were born.” Without any remorse but with conviction.

But there are things in our world that will touch your heart no matter how you try to avoid them. There are things that can shake an unshakeable heart, squeeze it so hard that the pretence of happiness fails and crumbles.

A few days later, I got back to the flat and discovered that Justice was having a bath – the whole flat smelled of him. Justice was the homeless man who lived around the corner.

I laughed at first, not laughing because there was anything funny, but in admiration of Matome, the Jesus-ness in him. Then he started apologising and, as my girlfriend was with me, I did not know what to say.

We always passed Justice in his corner. Sometimes I would talk to him or Matome would have something for him, but most of the time we just passed him by.

“I could not pass him today,” Matome said, innocently.

He gave him some of his clothes and food, then he shared his bed with him. My friend and I didn’t sleep a wink; you know how the female species are.

He stayed with us for four days and nights, then he disappeared out of our lives just like that and we never saw him again. We left him in our home and, when we returned, he wasn’t there and the door wasn’t locked. The clothes that we had given him were washed, hanging on the makeshift washing line in the bathroom, but he was gone.

On the bed we found a piece of paper with a cartooned face of Justice, smiling and happy, and underneath a caption that read: I have met two people in my life and they made it meaningful.

Justice was from up north. He came to dream city to make his dreams come true. You don’t have to ask what happened, just draw a conclusion for yourself; but there are people like Matome, who don’t want to talk a bit about themselves but love to listen to others.

Justice’s father had been a successful businessman, but he had lost his dear mother and father in a car accident the very same day he turned twenty-one. They had been driving back after celebrating the important day with their son.

With that he inherited everything.

When he was eighteen he had come to dream city to further his education, but Justice failed the first year and the second one and then the third. He had a car when he came here and a flat, with a washerwoman who came every day. He had a billion friends and saw the underwear of almost all the girls who were going to Wits.

“If you ever meet anyone that was a student at Wits in those years, ask them: ‘Do you know Ice?’ ” Justice said, smiling, thinking of those days that are gone and never coming back. They called him Ice in those wonderland days of his.

It took him three years, some expensive sports cars, which were written off, some expensive fashion, some travelling around this God’s green earth, a hundred thousand rands’ worth of drugs and alcohol, an innumerable number of orgasms, and then, finally, it was all gone, together with his mind.

“How much money?”

“Enough.”

“How much is enough?”

“Four point two.”

He was talking to Matome. There was a pause as Matome calculated the what ifs, giving away a smile with the thought of every what if . . .

“You were young?”

Then silence, as the truth fell on us that maybe we wouldn’t be alive if we were in his shoes. Then Matome said, “But didn’t you think of anything that would keep you off the streets?”

Justice kept silent for a moment and looked at Matome, as if he wanted to see his soul first. Then he smiled, like he had seen Matome’s soul, and, now he had seen it, it would understand.

“Ntepa.” He said it hard, and paused as if he disapproved. “Ntepa.” He said it again, this time a little softer, as if there was nothing better. “Ntepa,” he concluded in a lower tone, a deep voice that sounded like he had given in, had surrendered to it and it had taken him prisoner.

“Ntepa is a worthless, useless, shitty thing.” He said it again like the first time: hard, with anger. “No, I’m lying. It is a very powerful thing that needs to be respected, and if you disrespect it . . .”

He looked at himself from the chest down to Matome’s old shoes and then up into Matome’s eyes.

Flip the page.

On the other side he had drawn Matome, me and an exact replica of my girlfriend – with all her beauty enhanced and emboldened. She was the only one that he had drawn from head to toe. Matome and I were only half-bodies. My hand was stroking my girlfriend, but despite that I didn’t look happy. Matome was drawn with his permanent smile. Underneath, the caption read: Life is treacherous quicksand with no guarantees . . .

That was definitely from one of Head’s books, but I couldn’t remember which one.

I understood the other side, the picture and the message, but I couldn’t connect the picture and the message on this side.

That morning was the last time Matome and I saw Justice. A homeless man was the only thing in this life that I ever saw shake Matome’s heart. And the cruel part of it was that there was nothing he could do about it. Justice was gone.