Married But Available

by B. Nyamnjoh

  “Wow!” exclaimed Lilly Loveless. “Are you a writer by any chance?”

  “I’ve never written a line of poetry or whatever in my life, but everyone is a writer who listens to the voice of love.”

  “Well put. May I quote that? All rights reserved, of course.”

  “You may quote anything…”

  “Thank you, thank you indeed… I’m moved.”

  “My imagination was my closest companion then, and it felt so real and sweet, when it led me just where my heart and feelings most wanted to be.”

  “You mean your fantasies?” asked Lilly Loveless.

  “My creative imagination, or whatever,” said Desire. “Just one example, so you know what I mean. One afternoon I was sitting out in my little garden, when I noticed that the plants weren’t doing so well. Just then, I imagined Sexwale sitting there with me. He agreed, when he saw the straggly tomato vines forlornly creeping from the planters onto the cement. We withdrew to the room. Our voices were touched with sadness and nostalgia as we conversed. We eventually began touching, fondling and kissing each other hungrily. It didn’t take long before we were making love, gently, then more energetically. At one moment, a grimace came over his face, and he asked me to put my hand by his testicles. I stood up and let him guide me. I saw the white bud of a flower and pulled on it gently as he continued to grimace. It came into my hand. In my palm, the bud opened slowly, then flew into the air. We marvelled. Again, that same grimace came across his face. I brought my hand to him. This time a pink bud from him bloomed into many petals and shades of red and flew from my hand. Soon, no matter where I put my hand, it would draw flowers. I touched the bend in his leg, behind his knee cap, and roses arose. From between his toes came violets and yellow margaritas. A gentle touch to his armpit brought tropical varieties. And on and on… like magic, like a magician endlessly pulling scarves from his fist or birds from her blouse.

  “Exhausted, he asked me to lie down. And he spread my legs. He brought forth a bushel of every colour imaginable and unimaginable. Flowers continued to fill the room. The intermixing scents created one that was unique and indescribable. I sensed the flowers overflowing through the window onto the courtyard, and out the door of the room onto the balcony. We had been making love, in a penetrating, interpenetrating way. Now people walking around the courtyard or down the street would surely wonder what was blooming, as we did ourselves.

  “Fearing we might suffocate, from the intensity, I sighed tenderly. All of a sudden, the flowers retreated, absorbed by the walls and ceiling and floor. Half sitting, half lying, we caught our breaths and, looking around us, realized the white walls were now papered with flowers. A lavish flowery carpet covered the floor. It had not been there before.”

  “It must feel great to have a creative mind like yours, a mind capable of summoning absence to appear in such a lifelike way,” commented Lilly Loveless, truly marvelled.

  Desire smiled and said: “The imagination, however creative, can never truly stand in for the real thing. Physical presence is needed, and no amount of virtuality or fantasy could match that.”

  “But you have a better mind than most people, and that must help when what you love is not what you get.”

  “Love can be so cruel,” said Desire, “long distance love, especially. Once I saw someone who was leaving for Muzunguland, and found myself writing: ‘I’m so jealous! How I would love to join him! Not only because I so feverishly long to see you again (if only you knew how much!), but also because Muzunguland has gained such a grip on me that I’m constantly scheming and dreaming up ways of migrating there.’

  “There were nights I just couldn’t sleep: ‘Sexwale, Sexwale, writing to you like this makes me long for you even more: there’s so much we could share! If only you were here with me – I would gladly rearrange my place to make room for you! I wonder if you received my most recent letters? I have not been so good about sending photocopies as well just to increase chances of you receiving them – generally I’m too lazy, rushed, and hope to save time in the mail by posting the letter just before the post office closes for the day. Have I done something wrong? Are you angry with me for some reasons unknown to me? Are you in love with someone else? Please, please tell me if you are? Of course I would be jealous, but really I would understand if that happened. Trust me.’

  “There were days when my self confidence took a serious bashing: ‘Last night I had a strange dream about you. Somehow you’d managed to get a ride (!) to Nyamandem, where I was doing archive research on Women’s Movements in Colonial Mimboland. You arrived at my hotel (which actually seemed more like a hospital, white and anonymous) unexpectedly, and when I saw you I was so overwhelmed with gladness that I could do nothing but cry. I took you in my arms and put my hands under your shirt, and the touch of your smooth skin enveloped me completely, filling me with sadness and joy and a hopeless hunger to make love to you until the end of time. But when I asked you to come to bed with me, you refused.’”

  “What? Refused?” Lilly Loveless was astonished.

  “Yes, refused,” affirmed Desire. She continued: “‘Every time you opened your mouth to tell me why, something happened to interrupt – the phone rang, someone knocked at the door, all kinds of maddening trivialities. I’ve never felt so helpless, having you so close to me while you were in some other world. I was furious, wondering what lady had stolen your tender touch from me and telling myself that I didn’t care, if only you’d be mine for one moment. Alas, whatever it was that was keeping you from me remained, looming large behind your peculiar silence, and I had to make do with the memory (oh so strong!) of the touch of your smooth skin, the sweet smell of your neck. The stone that nestled itself somewhere in the depths of my stomach when we parted in Sawang made itself felt again, and it has been with me all day. What is wrong, Sexwale? Do you believe in dreams? I do, and I cannot stop wondering what this one means. Maybe it’s the fear that when/if you come to Mimboland, you won’t want me anymore, the fear that in the long months of our separation something will have changed, and the fear that everything will look different in light of your Muzunguland experience. But I long for you so much, so completely! If only I could really feel your skin as I did in my dream. Sometimes it hurts too much, this missing you. Please give me a sign of life soon!’”

  “I hope he did,” interjected Lilly Loveless, anxious.

  “It was a particularly long wait, that one. I remember writing: ‘I have gone to bed (relatively) early. It’s cold and lonely and I’m longing for you fervently. Again, two days have passed and the post office had no news from you. Please, please don’t let me suffer in silence like this. If the flame has died down, at least tell me, so that I can try to deal with missing you forever. Sexwale, if only you knew how I burn inside when I think of you; if only you knew how I dream of you; if only you could imagine the longing I feel when I remember your touch, your voice, your sweet smell. Each and every day I’m aware of the stone that lodged itself in my stomach when we parted in Sawang. Each and every day I ponder the peculiarity of our bonding at that first lecture of yours I attended as instructor under your mentorship. You being you, you felt much beyond words, and was able to psyche me out just by studying my eyebrows! I like being physical and everything else with you, because it makes our relationship more spiritual somehow, more whole. I like losing myself totally into you sometimes and having you lose yourself in me. I suppose you’d use different words. You’ve led me to believe or I’ve let myself believe I actually love you. Each and every day I recall – shivering – the passion of Mountain Valley where we were like a bottle of champagne, joy bubbling up, celebrating life. Sometimes recalling even a word of yours, a look of yours, can make me close my eyes and go deep. It is in giving that we gain and share. You’re the man of my dreams. I just dream that some of your smartness could rub off on me somehow…

  “‘Where are you? Why must you be so faraway from me? Why oh why are you so silent? Will you come to Mimboland, yes or
no? Please, I want to know! I want so badly to take you into my arms and make love to you until dawn, until I no longer know where I start and you begin, until I can feel our souls meet. I want to talk to you, listen to you, work with you, be with you completely, eat, laugh and drink with you, dream, sleep and think with you, see, feel and consider little Sexwale with you… I must confess that little Sexwale was on my mind a lot today, too. You know that I badly want a child, and you remember also that we spoke briefly of the possibility that you be the father. I wondered today if that idea wasn’t overly hurried and impulsive. But I also like the idea and realise that such decisions are always, to a degree, irrational and impulsive. And I also find it difficult to discuss it long-distance.

  “‘Last night I dreamt we were together, intimately divine, your warmth travelling to me through my tummy that you palmed gently, thoughtfully. Later you drew me onto you. I felt you in me and you drawing me closer and closer, gently and forcefully, with wild and controlled pushes and pulls of trust, of love, of desire. I can’t get the look in your eyes out of my mind. If I close my eyes I see yours, translucent, becoming transcendent. Was this look there before and I just never saw it? To begin, it was like looking deep into a well. You drew me in, you took me far away. Your eyes, they were… like a pond or a lake with many outlets. I fell into them and started swimming, the breast stroke. Gracefully, elegantly, head bobbing above the water regularly for breaths of air. I felt myself smiling while my own eyes rained tears that merged into the surrounding waters … “‘But where are you? Sexwale, Sexwale, your silence makes me so unsure, so impatient. Am I asking too much? Maybe. But when you don’t write I start to wonder if the love that I thought I felt was only a figment of my imagination, I start to wonder if it was all in my mind; perhaps it meant more to me than to you, perhaps I was too naive to think that your love for me was real? I will try to sleep now, taking you with me in my thoughts…’”

  “And finally…?” It was Lilly Loveless, still anxious.

  “Finally, something trickled through and I drank like someone crossing a desert without water. I let him know how therapeutic that was: ‘you cannot know how overcome with relief and happiness I am, having received your letter this morning. After so many weeks – it felt like years – of silence, at last I hear you speak kind and reassuring words to me again, and I’m overwhelmed by a longing for you that seems to increase in intensity every time I reread your letter, absorbing every detail, listening to your voice behind the written words. I have come to suspect the postal system once more of playing havoc with our love life. Perhaps it is not the postal system which is to blame, but rather the incredible slowness of time: every day without word from you seems like an eternity.’

  “And whenever there was word, my imagination would run ahead of every single word he wrote. My mind was more than fertile, and phrases like these were salted in my thoughts: ‘Special time with you makes me want to push away the days we would run out of things to share. When you said you could imagine me trying to figure out where I was going to set a jus4us tea cup I thought you were going to say you could imagine yourself on my lap, me trying to figure out just what to do, where to look … with my eyes…’

  “At a point, the temptation was great to raise money at all cost to visit Sexwale. I thought of this filthy rich guy who was chasing after me, the type students these days commonly call Mboma. What if I went to him for money to finance my trip? Tempted though I was, I decided against it. I could not ask this man because that would imply meanly taking advantage of his feelings for me without intending to return those feelings. In the event that I accepted travel money from him, I would be heightening his hopes that I might fall in love with him. It might just rekindle the same old story about being in love with me and me having ‘used’ him all along and misleading him into thinking that I felt more for him than I do. I suppose he would be right to a certain extent, I did accept a good deal of help from him, and though I – to my knowledge – was quite clear in my refusal of romance, perhaps it is not possible for him to see friendship for the sake of friendship as a real possibility. And no doubt he has indeed been misled and used frequently in the past, not least by women who thought to gain something by associating with him. He always makes his doings sound highly strategic and essential, but really my impression is that he has very little to do but dine with hotshots here and there, and for the rest is extremely bored. While it is quite conceivable that such exaggerated airs of importance may have facilitated his vulnerability to being exploited, they have not helped his case with me. It is too easy to abuse someone who is suffering from unrequited love: he would do almost anything to have me near him, if he thought it might make me want him. I am afraid my conscience could not cope with that. I may not be in love with him, but I do have friendly feelings for him, and even if I didn’t, I could not possibly abuse him like that.

  “Poor man! Even though I told him outright that I wasn’t interested in romance with him, of course he still cherished hopes that he could convince me. Unrequited love must be one of the most difficult things to bear. And how illogical love can be! And persistent! I suppose that the fact that I could not be bought made me attractive to him, and he tried hard to win me by offering me whatever my heart desired. Little did he know that what I wanted, namely Sexwale, was not for sale either. Anyway, his disappointment was not my problem. But I would be the last person to take it to the point of making a fool of his love by asking for money in the interest of my love for someone else.”

  “How cruel reality can be. Money always seems to be in the wrong hands,” said Lilly Loveless.

  “Luck did strike, though,” said Desire. “I received a most pleasant surprise. Sexwale announced that he had saved up enough money to pay for me to come and visit. I could not wait for the day to board the plane, and made my anxious excitement known in the letters I wrote him: ‘Easter vacation seems very soon and at the same time so far away – how will I manage to contain myself in the days before we meet again? I have imagined thousands of times how we will meet: I fantasize about a multitude of details (where will it be? at the airport? at a train station? at the harbour? what will we say? what will he be wearing? what will I be wearing? how will he look at me? where will we go?), but all the details soon become irrelevant in the light of the burning passion, able at last to flow freely and carry us away to a world where details like words and clothing have no significance. I hear you say Easter but I dare not rely on that date, for fear that something might happen to force the trip to be postponed.”

  “No such thing happened, I hope,” Lilly Loveless was eager to know.

  “I flew out and we met, celebrated the reunion the way only lovers do, and for two weeks virtually redefined paradise.”

  “Wow! You do know how to tell a story.”

  “Then the time came for us to separate. Much as I intended not to mull over our two weeks together before arriving home, my mind was full of memories jostling around, struggling to gain my attention. Certain parts of the two weeks replayed in my mind like a movie, only to be interrupted by “real life” on the plane back home. Sometimes it is impossible to say whether some things are a consequence of time/distance, or whether they are inherent in all relationships. For example, I caught myself thinking that it is next to impossible for us to really get to know each other profoundly, as I wanted us to, because we were forced to live such distinct lives in such distant places. But, on second thought, I knew, too, that even if Sexwale lived in Puttkamerstown, I would continue to try to find out who he really, quintessentially is, without my curiosity ever being fully satisfied. That is one of the most fascinating, addictive (and at times frustrating!) aspects of any relationship, I suppose. No matter how close, one person can never truly know the other. I think that when we were together, I was often – though usually not consciously or intentionally – collecting data, integrating the new data into the image I already had of who he was, and holding the new image up against the light to see if
it still fitted, revising here and there, erasing previous misconceptions, refining details, adding new ones, altering the shades of colours, trying to make the picture complete and true to life. It is a continuous process, of course, as my own premises of observation were constantly changing, as well as the object of my investigation. And of course it was a futile exercise, in that I could never capture the total complex of his soul, and yet it was addictive, and valid besides: as with social science endeavours, the ultimate truth, if it at all exists, cannot be grasped, but that does not negate the need for, or the legitimacy of, the search itself.