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.”
