While it brought no comfort at all, Monica’s death saved me from making a hard decision. How could she, after surviving the aftermath of a terrible accident, decide to take her own life? Was there no other way of living a normal life, even without me? After all, I had not even decided as to what I should do about her misplaced priorities.
The pain of losing her drove my anger to the fringes of my emotional experience. The anger I had struggled to manage as I watched her agonising return to health had evaporated, but the pain that filled my heart like tonnes of burning sulphur would not possibly abet.
My mind searched for her among the dead, even after her burial, but she was nowhere to be found. Yes, my last look at her lifeless face before they loaded her remains into the hearse that ferried her to the Yeovil Cemeteries confirmed to me that she was gone, yet I could not keep the image of her lifeless face long enough in my mind.
My thoughts were flooded with memories of our days as young lovers, two university lovebirds managing double commitments and sailing through despite being sucked into the deeper distractions that made romanticism the very essence of our existence.
Impossible to efface from my memory was the first day I held her in my arms. I remember the ground on which our feet rested melting away, and we were floating on a boundless sea, like a merman and a mermaid. I remembered the teats of her breasts piercing my ribs with a hardness that contradicted the tenderness of her voice as she bared her feelings to me. “I swear by the ground we are standing on that I will always be there for you and I will always need you.”
“I swear by the body I hold against yours, every breath of my lungs and every beat of my heart that my love will never wander away from you,” I had responded.
Our marriage was solemnised after our graduation, and in Monica, I found everything a man ever needed from a woman.
Having done Software Engineering, it did not take me a long time to get a job with a private company. Monica, who had done Business Administration, got a job two years after graduation.
I remember admonishing myself for not investing in a proper wardrobe for her. We had to explore all the fashion boutiques of Mutare to buy the proper costumes to go with her new duties.
***
Seven years down the line, the love I felt for Monica had kept its freshness, like the tender shoots of a rejuvenating shrub at the onset of spring. A rare peace prevailed between us. Our relationship was spared the mind-blasting quarrels that prevailed among working couples.
Then came the accident that nearly claimed her life, the horrendous picture of the car in flames, featured on ZBC TV news, the shell of the same vehicle splushed on the front page of the Manica Post, the traumatising story of how a business executive and his secretary had escaped death by the breadth of a string.
The car had veered off the road along the Nyanga/Mutare highway and hit a tree, the jolting effect throwing the duo out of the car before the vehicle went up in flames. It had just been like any accident when I watched the news at lunch break in the boardroom, but when I later learnt that my wife constituted half the number of the casualties in the horrible accident, I felt my world crumbling around me.
While my wife’s boss had suffered broken limbs and a fractured skull, Monica’s problem was more of a shock than physical injury. She had escaped death with bruises on her knees and elbows. The medical practitioners at Mutare Provincial Hospital were optimistic that her life was out of danger. I was hardly comforted. Although she looked very much alive, she could not speak. Inasmuch as her eyes were open, her expression suggested that she saw nothing. She did not know where she was, let alone what had brought her where she was.
Back home, I had the unenviable task of lying to our only child, 6, that mommy had been attacked by a malaria fever and would be soon discharged from hospital.
“But why don’t you take me to the hospital to see her?” the little boy had asked.
“Because children are not allowed in hospital wards unless they are patients.”
“When you visit her again, I wish to talk to her on the phone,“ my lad said reasonably.
“Doctors do not allow patients to take phone calls,” I said, dodging the little one’s eye.
“Do doctors allow anything?” my boy said, frustrated.
I was deeply disturbed when I visited Monica’s employer with her hospital bills. “Hey, we are sorry about the accident,” said the Personnel Manager, “but we feel comforted that your wife is now out of danger. The Assistant Personnel Manager is not so lucky. He will have to undergo a second operation in a month’s time,” he said.
“Very unfortunate indeed.” I genuinely felt sorry for the man, before stating the purpose of my visit. With as much confidence as I could muster, I asked the PM why I should pay for my wife’s medical expenses when she had been involved in the accident while on duty.
“Yes, the car my junior was driving is a company car. Company executives can use company cars, even when on leave. Your wife too was on leave,” the PM said, extracting a box file from the shelf adjacent to his desk.
“What?” I asked, trying to make sense out of what he had just said.
I watched him nervously as he perused through the file. He seemed to grow bigger and bigger before my swimming eyes until he filled the entire room. Then after pulling a few papers from the file, he started shrinking back to his original body size.
He handed me a few leaves of stapled papers, “Your wife’s leave forms,” he said with a touch of sympathy to his voice.
I went through the forms with brimming eyes. To my shock, my wife had applied for three months vacation leave, and two months down the line, she had been leaving home early in the morning, Monday to Friday, “going to work” and returning home after 6 pm.
This was the Monica whom I had given the power to keep me within the confines of her shadow. She had held my faithfulness to ridicule. The flame I had burnt for her had proven not to be warm enough.
I do not remember how I found my way to my car when I left the office, and how I was able to drive back home, but I arrived home safely.
I began to feel the emptiness of a life without Monica. We definitely had to part ways. I thought I had made up my mind, but I kept the innocence of my knowledge about her infidelity to myself, as she steadily recovered. I was nearly comforted at her first attempt to say something, but then the first word that passed her lips was “Trevor” the Assistant Personnel Manager’s name. So, in her post-accident trauma, Trevor was superimposed in her thoughts, and despite my presence before her unblinking eyes, Trevor’s name bounced off her lips! She had finally made airborne, the noiseless current of her relationship with Trevor.
With the vain hope of disinfecting her mind of Trevor, I left the hospital. Two more visits to the hospital confirmed that she was winning the battle against post-accident trauma. The doctor assured me that they would discharge her within three days. Monica asked a few things about our son, and nothing in her manner seemed to betray any guilt feeling.
The morning of her discharge came, and the sudden feeling that I should not file for divorce took possession of me. Was it not possible, even after betrayal of trust to love my woman again?
I was washing my car, preparing to drive to the hospital when two police officers appeared at the gate.
“Is this where Melvin Chinyanga stays?” one officer enquired.
“I am Melvin Chinyanga,“ I answered, my voice on my tongue.
The officers told me how my wife had allegedly committed suicide by hanging herself in one of the hospital toilets.
It devastated me. Just as I had been struggling to come to terms with my wife’s infidelity, I would have to learn to come to terms with her death, and how the love one feels for the woman one has chosen remains in place, even when hers has found a new nest, only that it persists as an infernal pain to the heart.
