Devotion

Short Story Philani Nyoni
HE loved her in his youth; she was the muse of his teenage dreams. And day dreams. In some picturesque scene, a sunny dale on the river edge, the water flowing gold, her face polished in the gilt of the yawning sun. She came on herown accord, occupying his silent moments; every love song the tongue of his desire. He never undressed her in his imagination, and that is how he knew he truly loved her.

Like every boy soon gets to know the price of a woman’s heart is seldom honesty and words. The price is higher when she is young, has options and every eye is a transparent veil of the wanting within. Besides, she was beautiful, exceptionally beautiful and the words never came when she was close, he could hardly utter a coherent greeting. After each meeting he would kick himself with “I should haves” and make vows to the wind, of how he would. He would. He would. But more meetings came and he never did.

So he suffered within, it was like a heart-wrenching secret his bones ached to give out. But his tongue was matted down, days became weeks and soon his beard was thick and she was gone. He never asked where she was, he suspected the answer would ruin him. He knew it at the back of his mind, a girl like that does not survive too long in the real world. Some men are braver, some men have more than dreams, and what did Bob Marley say? “Some people have hopes and dreams; some people have ways and means.” He had dreams; another with means would not hesitate to pluck up that flower and vase it on his mantelpiece to warm his bones more than an infernal blaze. Even if she was to come again, she would be lost forever.

She appeared one day, a lazy Sunday. As custom dictated he was standing by the corner, with the usual accomplices bleaching the nightmare of reality with hard liquor. She came like a sunny day after a cyclonic pour, like a drizzle on a Sunday afternoon. He was elated, and adorned with the courage of the Dutch for the first time he spoke to her, really spoke to her. They walked, they laughed, she punched his arm. She told him to call whenever. She gave him hope.

But the hope was rooted in a soggy marsh. For a while everything went well, neither could acknowledge ever being happier with another soul. He had the desire to hold her but nothing more, maybe a kiss, but he was too scared to ask, or steal one from her dazzling laughter. He worried he would lose her. He wanted to be more in her life, to have her word that although things were not altogether fair and all animals unequal, she could yield her whole to him, blinkered with devotion all the days of her life. But he didn’t ask, he was content with what she offered, any piece of her was enough.

Sundays pulled him off the corner and into her company. The whole thing lasted about a month, until one day with no warning, startling even the heavens she crumbled and dissolved her pretty eyes into a gush of tears. When she calmed down she told him she could never see him again because she was learning to love him. He asked why it is such a bad thing, isn’t love, so praised by poets and madmen the very essence of defiance, the bond that unites people despite any reality? She said she wished she had known him a while before. Things would have been easier then, but now she had made a promise to another.

But she wore no ring. But he had already appeared before the patriarchal pantheon and been accepted: him, his cattle and his fleet of cars. Our subject could not help but stare down at his shoes. No diamonds on their soles, just the gaping front where stitches had finally given in, it looked like a crooked smile of one revelling in another’s misery.

His shoes were mocking him. No matter how much he wanted to protest everything would be fine, the shoes dared him to say it. His spirit sank as he realised he was finally coming to terms with the truth. Whatever gave him the absurd notion that these calloused hands had a claim to climb her mountainous peaks? Or that his hunger-breath-stale mouth was worthy to clasp hers and spread its fire into her being? And his heart, whatever gave it the notion that it would ever beat the same notes as hers? Reality was keen, cruel and bitter.

“But do you love me?” he ventured desperately. He knew he loved her truly then, for the first time he had spoken of feeling.

“It doesn’t matter, I am carrying his baby.”
His heart sank with her last syllable. Babies are people; they don’t just go away like a broken arm.
“But do you love me?” It was a plea, as though her proclamation would vanquish the foe yeasting in her belly.
“That doesn’t matter. I must do what is right.” She ran off, he stood there wondering what his life meant, so near yet so far from the rosy paradise of her submission.

A week passed and he didn’t see her. The dollar-whiskey took the weight of his suffering. He stood there all Sunday and eventually crawled home, his ray of light hadn’t appeared even once. The next Sunday was the same. He drank more, was carried home by slightly less-drunk accomplices. On Wednesday he began stitching his life together, he would start with a garden. There wasn’t much he could do, but he wanted his dignity, he would plant and water seeds and somehow his dignity would sprout, it would give him a sense of purpose, that his life was not merely wasted on living, wishful thinking and “only ifs”. And gardening had always been therapeutic. Of course he maintained his presence by the corner, it was culture, it was their church, standing by the corner and fellowshipping, drinking communally like Communion. Ganja incense, it’s the church of loafers.

Three Sundays after their excruciating parting he finally saw her. She was riding off to her new home in a black SUV, he never forgot the way those eyes lingered on him; they were heavy with the sadness of a horse that knows it’s being taken to the knackers. I watched the withering of a callow heart.

Of course they met again. She had come back home, the baby was crawling and crackling with laughter, perfuming the dingy halls of that ancient abode she had crawled herself at his age. Her marriage hadn’t worked out. When beauty is the only thing that lures one to another it soon proves worthless so her marriage had deteriorated until it was a cold heap of ash. Her smile remained on ancient photographs, her face dried up and aged un-watered with affection, a simple “how was your day”, a warm touch, a smile.

The silences became eerie, the nights lonely in the penitential expanse of brick and mortar she was meant to call home. Those she told her plight to said a woman must be strong but she couldn’t understand how, why she must remain in that open-gate prison. His love had dried up like a winter leaf, if it had ever bloomed. Soon she realised she was just a trophy to be paraded whenever the need came. Her ample figure, her delightful face would serve to siphon envy from his family, friends and business associates. She was just another ornament in his expensive life.

She wanted to leave but she had to stay.
When she finally left it was in an ambulance. She had asked him why he didn’t love her or touch her as much. He told her she was being childish. She screamed at him and he said nothing, she tugged on his shirt as he walked away, he turned and hit her, didn’t stop, pounded her, stomped her, told her she was nothing, spat his venom onto her form lying on the carpet, formerly writhing then motionless. She didn’t hear it, unconscious. The baby screamed, later sirens whirled, she would never walk again, her family would never let him see her, or the child ever again. So they took her back, she was their child after all.

Since she couldn’t walk she spent her days gazing out from the veranda. Once she caught herself wondering if this boy now a man who earnestly loved her with sun-to-earth devotion would have bashed her like that too. He wouldn’t have, she knew this from the way he loved her despite her brokenness. She could not stand to display her perfect form that even the baby could not destroy but he loved her all the same, she felt it most when he said nothing but just sat beside her. Such times she would run her fingers over the steel of the wheelchair and draw happiness into her entire being. “He loves me”, she would think, “despite it”.