Mataachi Inc

@Two Men

“Everything I touched was gold, and everything I loved got broken, on the road to Mandalay.”

                                                                         Road to Mandalay, Robbie Williams

Evenings were sacred to my father. Even when he was at home. He was not to be disturbed and we did not need our mother to tell us that. It was the way my father sat slumped on his side in his favourite sofa, the radio to BBC Focus on Africa loudly tuned. Sometimes I used to think he might be sleeping but whenever I crept past the sitting room where he was, I could see by the lowering of the Johnnie Walker in his glass, he had not been asleep. In that time no one dared approach our father, not even our mother. The heartbeat of the house on tiptoes, waiting, waiting for that bellow when he would demand, “When is the food ready? Isn’t the food ready?”

I spend most of my evenings alone. When I can be at home. Which is often these days because usually Madeline has not yet returned from University. I check in on the children who sit around the dinning table grappling with their school homework before I can let them watch TV, call Maria the cook to inquire how she is doing in the kitchen but I tend to be alone much of the evening, in the room that is supposed to be our home library. Yes, sometimes I do take down a book and read from one of the many books I used to buy when I was living on my own but what mostly amuses me flicking through the pages are the margin notes I made then when I still believed that life could be learned from books.

Most of the time, in the dark in that room, only the shaded desk lamp on, I listen to music. I play over and over the music that I used to listen to. Some new music that I like. On some evenings when I do not think that Madeline will come later than usual, when I have borrowed the weekly cartoon DVD for the Aaron and Tezira, instructed Maria that I must not be disturbed, I bravely listen to the music that was our music. The music that brings Madeline, Mustafa, my father, and everything flooding back. Assured that no one will see the way I become, listening to Michael Learns to Rock, Some Day, the red gleaming bursts of the radio in the dark counting down the songs, flickering like the happiness that I thought would last forever, able to shrug off easily the sadness of those years, clawing to protect them all. Failure unimaginable. I listen to that music. Friday evenings usually.

When Madeline returns far too late, after 11pm, I like to think that she has been out trying to capture what she used to scorn of my festive Friday nights out, when she was pregnant with Aaron and I would not stay home with her though her eyes begged she wanted me to stay. I like to think that she was the woman who made heads turn to see her drawing up in the Mercedes Benz I bought her three months ago when she successfully made it to her second year Masters Course and only the research bit is left and she is doing it so well. I like to think of her with her girlfriends, in a corner, the table theirs, loudly chattering, the drinks flowing, and I like my imagination to stop there. I will not let myself imagine further than that. I dare not. Friday nights are the hardest.

When she is very late on Friday nights, I do not call anyone, hauling myself from my sofa in the library room. I wait because she has never failed to come back and I know she will. I walk through our home in the dark, sure of where the corners are, where the steps start and how they are, the curtains are drawn but I know the views beyond the great windows which the curtains conceal. I stride in the carpeted dark the entire house waiting.

When she does come home, in our room, I sit by our bed, watching her disrobe to go for a quick shower. Sometimes she has not been that sober and it is to crazily stagger out of them to be able to sleep without hindrance, nude and warm beside me. I can at least say I have mastered my longing. Disgust will not stop the desire from coming alive in me watching her, one part of me wondering who has been running their hands all over her, the other oblivious to all that but the wonder of how her breasts jerk as she releases them from their bra, the smooth gentleness of her rising and falling stomach, her back as she turns away from me to place her earrings in her jewelry box on her side of our bed, her thighs, I’m helpless in my wanting her inspite of everything and wanting no one else. …Marge…My Madeline…

I will reach for you, the rebuffs hurtful but not deterring, reach again till you stop fighting me, prayerful my urgency this night will communicate my sorrowing confession into redemption, my caressing fingers sink into you my unwilling exile, my lips you evade my fervent never diminishing faith in us; somehow after all this, restore what time and I destroyed, earn your forgiveness one last time, admitted once more into the sacred sanctum of your heart. Begin anew life. It is for this why I still wait up for you when my discarded pride would never have let me. To let you know. For you attempting forgotten crescendos. Urging your return. Asking you to try again like you used to. Refusing to give up. Because you are the beating of my heart. I’m the beating of your heart. I still believe this.

@Two Men

“I don’t know how you do it, making love out of nothing at all.”

I can say right now, in this moment, that I completely, absolutely, devotedly love Madeline, the mother of my children. It is not something I’m always certain of. Part of my uncertainty is motivated by fear. I have often wondered if Madeline still loves me. I know she once did, when we were still in school, when my father’s name was recognizable and I had not dropped it from mine. That is not so long ago but there is a way three children make the time before they were born seem like all that happened in another time, even another century, that far.

I hope Madeline is happy. I have tried to provide everything that could make her happy, that she said would make her happy since those years when I had so little to give her.  Madeline used to say that the reason why she did not want to admit to me what she felt for me for so long was because I’m so proud. She was afraid that if she had told me then that she had fallen in love with me even before I ever noticed her, I would look down on her.

She had told me this when we had been watching some old time movies. Madeline is crazy about those black and white Hollywood movies. She was first to sleep over in my second rented house because of those classic black and white movies, coming over to see where I had moved and finding that I had finally brought myself to carry a stash of movies that my father had purchased during his student years in Pennsylvania and said I could have if I ever wanted them. I had never, until then, seen her as uninhibited as she had become, seeing them in a CD case next to my TV and DVD player, totally ignoring those then recent acquisitions, she had slumped down on her knees, nearly toppling them all over, on a weekday afternoon that I will never forget. Taxiing there.

I’m paying for her Masters’ Course right now. I have little idea where the obsession comes from but even back then when I was already sick of school, in my second year of university and she was in her final year in secondary school, she already had made up her mind that she was going to study until she made Professor. I will be lying if I do not say I thought the pregnancies and responsibilities might make her forget about all that. Aaron and Tezira did not make her abandon her dreams, they had made her more determined.  There were times in those years when I wondered if she might hate our children because it seemed like they and I were the ones holding her back.

I could not blame her for unexpressed sentiments that maybe I had got her pregnant as a trick. I know her and the last thing she wants is to live in poverty and for some of our most crucial first years, it had seemed like that would be our fate. To live a life of struggling to survive, investing our future in the wellbeing of our children who we would hold ransom in our old age to pay back for the deferment of our own dreams. She had thought I was a rich man’s son and because I had once been and did not think much of money, I had not disabused her of that impression until the realities of our lives together then did. In my moments of doubt, I think the Madeline I loved died in those years, tearing as she blew a charcoal stove to a blazing coal efficiency.

I look at Madeline sometimes now and I wonder. I wonder if Aaron and Tezira are the shield she has between me and her. I wonder if I’m the fallen hero of her old dreams, a man already in her past she has just not yet told this. I wonder, as each semester a negligible amount goes to pay her tuition fees from my business, I’m nursing the asp that will strike me fatally when she no longer has need of me. In pausing to reconsider, life is lived in the memory of choices you could have made but did not, wondering if perhaps you made a mistake. There are times when Madeline makes me think I made a mistake. Not in marrying her, not in her becoming the mother of my children, but in delaying the passage of her dreams with some of the choices I made.

Have you ever made love to a woman and she was not there with you? Sometimes I wonder if I’m to spend the rest of my life atoning for the initial disappointments I inflicted. I know I cannot leave Madeline. It is not cowardice that holds me fast to her. It is not Aaron and Tezira who keep me from leaving her. It is not because everyone knows her as my wife. It is not because her beauty is beyond compare.

In a Nokia phone stolen from me eight years ago from me walking along Wilson road, in that Nokia phone’s text messages’ folders lies the answer. If that phone still exists and has not been torn apart for spare parts. A friend had subscribed to those network quotes and had forwarded me one: In love, you must hold back. Madeline had taught me not to hold back.

I have never told her this. Insincere confession was my father’s getaway card and all my life I have striven not to be like my father. The greatest tragedy I suppose that can happen to a man is to marry a woman who is as unlike his mother as the sun is to the moon. In living my life to never disappoint my mother again I seem to have lost my wife, I sometimes think. All these are thoughts when she is not in my sight. When I cannot reach out and stroke her arm, when her side of the bed is empty and only the scent of her hair is in her pillow, not hearing her voice. In my worst sleep waking nightmares, I doubt the quality of her love. The truthfulness of it all. Everything else notwithstanding. We are not our reputation and no one understands that better than I.

“I played every game in the book but you changed my perspective.”

                                                                Dream, Ne-Yo

I used to think it was a competition. I tried to take it as one. Unresolved grievances a natural part. No one was more surprised than I was when you stayed in spite of everything. On my part insistent with logic I could understand why you did. Calculate the duration of this affair beforehand. Timetable our meetings in a life it had taken me an intense year four years earlier to calibrate to every hour for the next decade. Obsessive like that. The secret details stickler.

Meeting me late at my then favourite video library, afternoon spent in the salon, you used to begin before asking me if I liked your new hair style, “I know you don’t like it but…” complaining that I was hard to impress. Blissfully unaware of the competition, my compartmentalizing life securing you from ever suspecting there was anyone else, against which self-deluded I thought I was measuring you up. Ignoring the commentators who grabbing the ball of my shoulder, creasing the corner of my shirts, kept on hoarsely declaiming, “My God, you’re lucky! Where did you find her?”

No photograph fanatic, from a taciturn family, I had never owned an album of photographs. The only photos of me that for many vital growing years exist are passport size photographs in discarded school Identity cards, then where I worked first in child labour engaged. The unconscious teacher passing down the value of documented memories, hundreds of photographs for every year of your existence, many albums filled, surprising jealousy creeping upon me. Angry that I had never been a part of your life earlier than I became.

After the mentor who often bailed me out of trouble, the one I could call any time of day or night, paid my fees when my own parents could no longer meet the costs, who inspired me to save up somehow and own a mobile phone when it was criminally costly to own a phone; your phone number is the only other one I have indelibly inscribed in my memory. The only phone number I can type on my phone’s screen and dial without consulting my phone’s contacts’ directory. I like to think now I knew we would fall in love from the start. My boastful self confidence always irritated my mother, my absent father, and it was a while before I understood that it is one of my qualities that makes you love me so much.

Forgetting when you used to send me those SMSes that you were certain I did not love you. Cancelling a few hours before we were supposed to meet unbeknownst to you because I had achieved a long desired date with some of your competition that often turned out to be a waste of my time and they thought my money paying when I was not paying, my intricate re-organization and negotiation paying off. Evidence of subdued revenge has never ceased to amuse and your apparent innocence of deviousness shock me then delight me. Like you are the one who did not get away and only I understand that.

Then there was 8^th October 2008, Wednesday, until then, until you, convinced purities did not exist for me. In shocking abundance confronted by what you were offering me. Unasked for, un-demanded for, you there; confronted by what until then was beyond my prematurely disillusioned imagination and undemanding nature. At the gift wondering. Falling in love with you when I thought you should be falling out of love with, finding you loved me more.

Accepting for the first time that, “I never saw a woman with so much beauty and heart. My heart was always a failure until you helped me pass.” Humbled. 8^th October 2008, Wednesday, in love with you more than I ever thought possible.

I’m the swimmer against the tide, the runner to the center of the maelstrom while with flaming clothes leaps for the lifeboats are made. Thomas Eakins was my hero and Winslow Homer paintings are ever in my minds eye. I’m going back, coming back to you who all others are forsaking, coming home. I have moved back.   

This is not a defeat but a reassessment. A return to nurturing roots riches. The harvest is coming in! at www.jackmataachi.blogspot.com

The day Fiona called is the day I left my house on the hill in Ntinda. The day Fiona called is the day I never went home again. The day Fiona called is the day I stopped using my first Mango line. The day Fiona called was the first evening I did not walk Kampala road, my workday done, my friends all gone, but I did not want to be alone in a room thinking. The day Fiona called is the day I finally realized how much I had needed her to call me but had never admitted to myself just how much. And the day Fiona called me, a phone call I did not want to answer, was like the first day of life after death. My heart in my fingertips in the seconds paused over the faded YES button of my ringing Samsung phone. In the ticking seconds, hearing before I had picked up, what I had for months waited to hear breathed out, “Yes, today, if it’s okay, we can meet. City Square, yes, then we can decide.”  

Thursday, busiest day of my week, in the afternoon after a snack of warm glassed orange juice and two big oily doughnuts, working through lunch, she calling. The Beethoven Ode to Joy startling the napping room in my direction. Angry glances urging me to pick up. I lived and died and came back to life in the seconds my eyes staring at Fiona’s caller photo flashing on my screen, ascertaining that the glare from my computer was not making me see a number I had willed myself to stop hoping was flashing on my screen whenever my phone vibrated before the crash of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy forced me to pick up. A willing that had taken me months to achieve and then when it was done, she called.  My stomach was gone, a cliff fall yawning emptiness there. I could not feel my legs; my knee caps all that were left. I was sure I did not have any voice left, a dry croak surely all I could summon from my parched throat if I tried answering. But beyond all this, I was certain that getting up from behind my old black Dell desktop computer facing the gray wooden door into the partitioned office meant never coming back here, on that Thursday afternoon when she called. After ten months, wanting to see me again.   

Crash my naivety some more. Prove to me again and again that there are no goddesses. That I have been fooling myself. I have come to you over and over, like the dog that loves to be kicked, to be shown again how false are all my illusions. This is the year when I lose all my innocence and it seems I’m fated to learn from you who I love the most. I have grown beyond jealousy, beyond sad reproach, beyond gagging nausea, I have gone beyond the shell shocked survivor’s silence. All my tics have ceased.

Inspite of all this, I cannot say goodbye to my dream, kiss the last of you and accept goddesses do not exist anymore. I have tried and tried. God knows how many raised glasses in the night I have raised promising with the last bitter swallow that burns my throat, I will not be a fool anymore, I will not be a believer longer. I will delete your pictures, remove your number from my phone book, stop answering your mail because I know, I know, you show me everyday, there are no goddesses left. Yet still I look. Still I search. I come back. I keep coming back.

For a very long time, she wanted to destroy him. Wound him. Take something from him like he had taken from her. And she tried everyday. But he was impervious, imperious.  The day he left though, she knew she had wounded him but she did not know how. She would never know because they would never meet again to talk. He would never tell her.  It was not something she had said to him. It was something she had said oblivious he was listening to her best friend over visiting, “Break up with him? Why? Let him get tired and go away.” That’s all she said.  

I hate it that I cannot be with you.

I hate it that you made me fall in love with you.

I hate it that I let myself fall in love with you though I knew better.

I hate it that I cannot tell you that I love you.

I hate it that I know you are the one and I know that you know it too and you will never tell me either.

I hate it that I have settled for her and settling for her I have forced you to settle for him too.

I hate it that I’m the guy here and I know what I should do and you’re waiting for me to do it and I cannot because if I did, you would not want to be with me in the end.

I hate it that I know if I were with you I would never love you forever, I would get tired of you like I’m tired of her.

I hate it that I know that I’m so changeable.

I hate it that I know I can never change.

I hate it that I know that I’m going to break your heart.

I hate it that I know that even if I know I’m going to break your heart, I’m still going to go ahead and do it anyway.

I hate it that even if I do know all this, I do not hate myself.

You were the last one standing. You have fallen. What else can I say? You have fallen. Ruined grandeur speaks more eloquently than the completely finished, didn’t you know? Once I had faith, my faith is diminished.   

If you see me in the street, vacant-faced, do not ask what ails thee? Faith ails me. I’m a believer in search of a faith. You were my religion, my faith, now you are no more. Why should I have expected more from you? I don’t know. I just did.   

I have fears now. I did not know fear when I believed in you. You were my bulwark and I did not know. I will shiver now when a breeze blows through the open window. My fumbling fingers will search across the wall for the switch before I enter a dark room. I will want to see my Coca Cola bottle opened before my eyes. I will be me but I will no longer be who I was.  

I should not be doing this to me, to you, but I do. I cannot love without adoring without worshipping. It’s my nature, I cannot change it. You were my god though I never told you. You were on my pedestal though I claimed I had smashed all my temples and idolatrous prayer was not for me. How can I blame you when I never told you? I cannot.   

I just know this. I’m less now than I was before. This is growing up? I have lost again.

(This Post is for Scotchbiscuits, Dennis Matanda, Ishta, Jackfruity, Magintu and my new notebook. You guys brought me back in more ways than you’ll ever know.)

“I’ll try to make the sun shine brighter for you. I will even play the fool, if it makes you smile…After all is said, after all is done, I would do anything for you. Come in here, close your eyes.”
Come With Me, Phil Collins

This is like the beginning, again. Only then it was in different rooms, different years, different us, me nervous. This is like the beginning. But there was no end. Really. For I never stopped thinking of you. Not once. Fiona. Not a day, not an hour, were you never on my mind. I could never forget you. So here we are again. You asking me, seated in my Kitchen hard-backed chair, hands grasping mine in your laps, asking me, and I telling you, again, what I never got to tell you. How it was, how it sometimes still is, now that we are no longer together and you have come back to see me, in my house on the hill, Ntinda, Saturday, afternoon turning into evening. Will it make you happy to know that….

When it rains, these are the hardest times, in the morning, in bed, no electricity on, no kerosene in the unlit lantern, nowhere to go but remain in bed, resolutely on my back, my blanket pulled to my chin, watching the peeling wall, trying to think of the day ahead, trying not to turn onto my side. Because this is when it happens. This is when it all comes rushing back, like you never went away, like I have not been alone all this time, in this bed, in the mornings that have become worse than nights, after I took finishing the airtime on my phone every evening and not buying more until the next day was safely began so I should not be tempted to text you in the night or call you in the morning to say, “Hi,” “Just hi,” and my longing and loneliness come tumbling out soon after with all the promises of how much I miss you and how I now make my bed when I get up in the morning before I leave the room that used to be our bedroom and how I pray, how I never forget to pray, like you always wanted me to learn how to and how I never pray for myself alone anymore. No airtime on my phone because I did not want you to know how much, though it is I who left, how so soon I was missing you, how in fish frying restaurants all over the city watching her, my horror sunk in more and more of the awful mistake I had made, would try to undo unsuccessfully, uselessly remorseful now, you would never listen to me now, now when my trembling lips in stuttering hesitation tumbled out more truths than I had ever spoken all my life with you for you.

So I took to going home with a phone that did not have calling or texting credit though I was alone in my house on the hill most of the time, alone even sometimes when she was over, in my mental rooms on my own even when she wanted me to be with her, thought I was with her, thinking of you much of the time, how only you knew how much I loved to sit in silence in the evening after work, the lights off, my smoking habit given up, listening to the wails of blues men and women 1950s and 1960s Uganda coming to life and how she could never understand that; but no credit on my phone to tell you, that I had since begun the habit again, home for an hour, before I went out to meet her and the ipod on my Samsung was loaded with Eclas Kawalya so he was with me even when I was in angry late evening taxis honking furiously for the traffic to move which I did not hear.

I had stopped loading my phone with credit because I did not want to tell you anymore. Because I did not want you to know about the mornings, before dawn, in bed, gentle drizzling, with you coming back. Coming back. Oh Lord! Coming back. Coming back so, I was terrified of turning on my side to face you not there. Because to turn on my side, Oh God, you were almost there, in bed with me again, the morning sleepy head I was kissing reluctantly to wakefulness. One hand of mine on your curved sleeping hip, my other hand under your neck my palm nestled between your breasts, blowing hot breath into your squirming ear, kissing your warm ticklish neck to hear your indistinct murmuring protests, the giggle like a ripple not far beneath.

To be in bed in the morning, the drizzle coming down outside, no electricity, hours before dawn, awake, with you, the day belonged to you, my day belonged to you. And I, lying in bed alone knew this. For months I knew this. Even when I now believed you would never come back, I still knew this, a musing man in bed alone in the morning with memories more living than all the rest of the yet lived day could ever be, I knew this.

You were more with me when you were gone, more as I tried to forget you. You were with me. But especially in the mornings, hours before dawn, no electricity on, rain drizzling outside, you were with me. You were with me. It’s been months and months, Kim’s coming over, and you are here with me.