The Painter by Rodger Millar Munthali

The doctor said I was very ill. He said I depicted a grotesque behaviour—he justified his postulation by stating such unique things I had started to do, like: conversing with creatures; known and unknown, near and far—and I did laugh suddenly when such conversions permitted me to; making perplexing faces, and walking backwards, to mention what was prominent—and was this bizarre enough for the police to arrest me, NO! In fact, if the police were enthusiastic enough to arrest someone, the man at the very entrance to the dispensary was very ill; he was psychotic. I was not told he was but he had schizophrenia written all over his face! His eyes were inked, they were exceptionally red; he was actually living in an imaginary world. He was reading too much and therefore dangerous —‘he is a professor’, a woman whispered to friend just in front of me and it fascinated me enough to ponder about what one gets from books: the absurdity of a man drenched in numerous volumes of encyclopaedias! Surely I would prefer appreciating the ingenuity of a monger parading through the streets of Blantyre with curios.

The professor had been, for precisely ten minutes I had been on the queue leading to the dispensary, scratching his pale skin, with occasional sputtering; and he had a short lady by his side with a bottle guiding the spittle. She had taken off her shoes; they could not bear the wrath of the shiny and slippery hospital floor.

The queue run to the left of the entrance and to its immediate left was a bench placed such that a security guard sitting on it was promptly leaning against a careful arrangement of dim bricks, that apart from making the dispensary non-existent to patients, gave it a dark and surreal look.

Well, it is not the professor’s spitting that I was infuriated with much then; it was this security guard in a tight-fitting pair of green trousers and a short-sleeved white shirt, with a single pocket just below the collar bone, sitting on the bench placed just to the left of the line. One thing I like about guards is their immobility; their unusual disposition, characterised by smiling at every man passing by, if need arises, and immediately changing their expression once the man has passed.  Ah! Here was a perfect individual that would maybe understand me, hence rescuing from these bandits, disguised as nurses and doctors.

            “Guard! Guard…here!”

The guard began walking briskly towards me with a baton in her left hand, taking a hat from his pocket and putting it on. There was a sudden change in my breathing, I felt like I was about to meet someone I had for so long longed to come across and have a worthwhile chat with, the feeling you get when you want to propose; yes that feeling, when your heartbeat becomes prominent as you are standing with intent directly in front of her and you are contemplating over whether to say those magical words, yet a certain part of your heart tells you ‘don’t tell her how you feel! She is probably with some other well-to-do folk already’ and the other part says ‘don’t you want to know how it feels like to have two hearts destined for each other walk along the shore while holding hands?’ and you, with either the stubbornness of the infamous Pharaoh or the gullibility of the Biblical Eve, you propose: yes that very feeling, a feeling that I came to understand when I met one a woman I thought loved me, a woman of such beauty and great manners I presumed, I felt it then with the exception that this was not the case.

I pushed aside my bag, consisting of priceless paintings, yes my paintings of course. But I hadn’t moved, not a bit since I got into this line… there was a gap between myself and the person in front of me, yet I didn’t intend to move up front anytime soon. All I saw scattered in front of me were huge fathomless pits: traps to render me dead, hence rob me of my hard-earned kingship—and before I got into this line I had been trying to convince the doctor that it would be utterly unheard of for a King’s words to go unattended to. I was trying to tell the doctor that this guard coming towards me should have been dispatched to another location for she would not know how to handle a crisis. The doctor stood up and put on her prejudiced glasses, only to brand me mad, insane, ridiculous, crazy strange fellow after I had showed him the numerous paintings that people had to queue for days and nights to get only a minute glimpse of!

If the doctor had only said the people who did wait to appreciate my paintings were insane, I would have walked out of his office a smiling man. Otherwise, as it turned to be, I will live to conclude prematurely that humans are probably the most bizarre creatures on earth; they seem to possess a yearning for fines arts yet are inevitably most frightened when an abstract or surreal painting heralds dire events. And it pains me, to look at people who sat cheerfully on my veranda, paid actually, to appreciate my talent call me insane—people who have no much small a talent to devour a few pages of compendium and start describing others as illiterates, branding a king as an illiterate ghost and a murderer! The iron bars in front me have been instituted to protect them from me, when it is supposed to be the other way round. Yes, am behind bars: for that is how euphemism has helped them conceal the offensiveness of this wretched place.

“Help me please—I’ve important information, very important information yet they are accessing it, they want to use it against me!”

The female guard was bewildered at the hearing of this, the quiet heaven and the crunching hell knew why she did. I was likewise bewildered, for the expression on her face was not one that I had associated with guards.

            “They are fighting in my mind, they have brought armoured vehicles, drilling machines…trying to harness the information in my brain!”

But this illustration did not help, did it now? For all the patients on the line gazed strangely at me, they looked no more sorrowful than they did before this enactment and I felt like digging mother earth to hide my shame!

            “Sir, do you need help moving forward?” She said in a very sweet voice of compassion, her lips moving up and down slowly to pronounce every syllable clearly and they did make a thumping sound that neither the patients on the line nor the guard herself heard—but it was very loud to me, it was as if someone had amplified it to suit a blind ear.

            “So you are all ear blind you can’t understand a word am saying.” I said poignantly.

The guard got down on both knees, got hold of my bag and shovelled it into my laps. She was a tall woman, black-skinned—every time I say the word ‘black’, images of a night-to-remember invade my mind: a man comfortably sitting in my bedroom with my wife beside him and their conversation goes like:

‘Why did you do such a thing, why did you marry a man you don’t love?’

‘I didn’t have much of a choice, did I now? He’s the father of my son; I don’t want to have children with separate fathers.’

‘Who did you meet first, me or the black man?’

‘You, but…’

‘Yet you find yourself pregnant of another man, how absurd.’

‘You weren’t keen on marriage…’

‘Marriage and pregnancy are two different cases, very different… and you know what else is out of place, that you find love in a black man, abandoning a white man,  a man you share skin colour—what is it with the black man? A painter, what qualifications does he have, what did he study? He is as useless as a pig, a psychotic black man…’

I couldn’t take any more insult, and being the quiet peace loving man that I was then, I did not disturb their conversation; I slept at a friend’s home.

If I must tell you how I met one Rolland, most of you will say it must have been one of those ‘love-at-first-sight’ serendipities. Frankly, I didn’t expect to get married to a foreigner of a woman. But it did. It was the least I anticipated to happen to me. I lost confidence in love after I had been severely wounded by someone before this chance. So, every day at the stroke dawn, I made my way through Goliyo, by H.H.I (Henry Henderson Institute) and Wenela to get myself into town. I would be in town till the time the atmosphere gives a rare glow near the horizon as the sun sets.

Much of the time I spent in town, I was busy with egg yolk, oils, acrylic paints and the like, trying to create a representation. I pictured myself as a surrealist, but I was not limited to such painting. People came asking for portraits and I did not refuse: my paintings were very beautiful and eccentric—I had created an imaginary world where I would just pluck one painting and put it paper, wood, wall or anything am provided with. I could paint any surface, the way it is without any alterations. It was because of my great artistic capabilities that I became famous. I was all year round booked in the year 2002; people booked my house to admire my paintings or booked myself to paint for them. It was on one of such occasions that I met one Rolland.

For those of you that have been in Blantyre for some years, you should know where curios were sold before the sellers were told to be plying their artefacts at one place. Usually, I sat just outside Chayamba—the once tallest building in Blantyre—and I faced in the direction that, with appropriate navigation, almost all roads encountered act as tributaries to the road that lead to Sanjika Palace. On such a hot day, Rolland approached my working space and it so happened that I was doing absolutely nothing. At first, I saw a white woman. Then I saw a woman in her, I could not help but look at her intently, forgetting the boredom that had occupied my mind, my senses, my intelligence. Whether she had trained herself to or not, but it so happened that if one was to draw a line joining the points she had stepped, a straight-line would be produced. She looked at one of my paintings, a portrait of a girl I came to know in my earlier life and she liked it. She asked if I could produce a portrait of her. With appropriate brush strokes, the portrait was ready in two hours. I will spare you the narration of what transpired between then and the time I found myself in love with a white woman, but it happened and we got married. Let me got back to my friend’s home, after I had been exiled from my own house by a man that claimed my wife, Rolland, loved.

I still had my bag: which contained paintings, brushes and numerous organic or synthetic substances that I would apply to a surface to create a presentation. When my friend got the better part of the day, and succumbed to sleep, I made myself busy. I got hold of my brushes and created two paintings; one was rather surreal but somehow realistic. The foreground consisted of thick bars and a male figure occupied the middle ground. This one did not give me much of trouble. The second one was very exceptional and I don’t know where to draw the line between prophecy and creativity. It happened that I was not in control of my brush, within an hour there it was: a woman dangling from the kitchen ceiling. Sinks, taps, cookers formed most of the background. Alas! That was the beginning of perfection, the possession of a talent man has so far yearned for years. An ocean in a drop, not a perceivable idea I agree. I felt numb—not the stoic kind. I stood motionless for some time, gazing awkwardly at my own creation. ‘I know this kitchen, I reckon I‘ve seen this kitchen somewhere else, its contents, my wife ain’t pregnant, we have a bouncing baby boy, and the boy does appear near the sink—but no! This is a mere painting; I don’t know how it has made itself available!’  It was the horror of facing what my own hands had conceived; the perpetual lingering of the mundane in a fathomless abyss of deception, perception, torture, indignity and absurdity.

What was said to come to pass should certainly do, just like all those told stories that came to pass. On the morning of a beautiful Saturday, it became apparent to me that my wife was pregnant, pregnant of another man; not the white man I left the house to on that night, but another black man. Nearly eight months pregnant yet I didn’t know of this. I couldn’t take the insanity, having already given up on love some years back. So, during the morning of the next Saturday, while Rolland was busy preparing breakfast in the kitchen, I stealthily entered the kitchen. Well, what tasty food she was cooking, its aroma certainly to shake off those dark thoughts from poignant hearts. Yet I went on still. I forced her head into whatever she was cooking, and she cried. She cried most vehemently. What should I do? What will they do? I wondered so aimlessly. I then looked at the burning soul exaggerating her ordeal. She had moved to the sink. She would survive, certainly I should have learnt from the many suicide or execution documentaries, movies or anything of that sought that has flooded our daily watch, providing easy access to information to those that need to take their life or untimely deprive another of life. What did I do then in defiance? I grabbed her dangling legs and lifted my feet, so as to increase weight. After her neck had succumbed to such viciousness of her weight and mine combining, she let go of the rope she had been trying to free from.

That was it! It was done in not less a respectable time to compare it to the labour that had brought her on earth. And I stood there still, surveying the ground for any drops of blood. I tried to recall if I ever heard her cry. My efforts were futile due to the emotional assault I had incurred; therefore I concluded that no one saw this, no one heard her if she did cry—for if she did my oversized pinna should have been the first to get hold of her shriek. So I left her there, convinced none saw me. But I was deceived, very deceived. I was arrested within hours only to be released later after my neighbour convinced the police I was mad. I was forthwith taken to a hospital, not far from Ndirande. And that is where this guard was, trying to vex me. 

            “Am told you are very ill...get up.”

“Am not sick, I’ve never been ill in my life, in fact it lies not in men to get sick…!” The doctor I had argued with earlier was striding towards us. “Don’t let him take me please, he is dangerous, he wants to hand me in…”

“Mr Litanga, I was going through your paintings and have concluded that you are a very gifted man, you don’t deserve this ill-treatment…” I was supposed to jump up and down that I was free at last, that I wasn’t sick. But I didn’t, I only managed a fake smile and said ‘thank you doctor, we need many of your kind in our country.’

“No doctor you can’t say this man here is fine…, he is insane, he has been eating sand the moment he got into the line...”  The guard was astonished. She alternatingly gawked at me and the doctor.

“I understand your concern, but he was sick that’s why he did all that. He is fine, with proper medication while he is at home, he will be very okay.”

“What has gone into you? He killed his own wife; he is dangerous very dangerous doctor yet you have the audacity to let him go free…”

“This is a hospital, not a prison to keep dangerous...”

“What is the difference? Get him to a police station.”

I lay just beside the guard all this time. My intuition told me she was to do something really infuriating. So I waited, patiently for the penance I was to face. It happened earlier than I expected it.

“…all this for a bunch of this waste.” She said pointing at my bag, which was in my laps then.  Then she raised her right leg and stumped heavily on the bag—the pain I endured, the suffering I experience, the horror she awakened! At that very instant, a nurse came running from the doctor’s office with a painting of the guard with a knife a couple of centimetres into her throat.