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,
