Discretion (16 page)

I concluded now that Marguerite was not in her apartment. I became
obsessed with this thought, finding relief only when I imagined that she had gone to Jamaica for a holiday. But that thought also did not bring me relief. I would remember that she had no money to go to Jamaica and that she had to stay in New York because she taught two nights a week at the New School. Finally, I was left to confront the only other probability. She was with someone else. She had moved in with him. There was someone to whom she was giving her love.

I was determined to find out if this was true, but it had become impossible for me to go to New York. Nerida had made good on her promises and had telephoned her father. He gave the ambassador strict orders to restrict all my responsibilities to Washington. I was not to be required to travel except in an emergency when my services were absolutely needed.

I did not know what Nerida said to her father to warrant this extreme injunction, though I could surmise what she could have said. She could have said to her father that I was becoming distant from her, irritable sometimes without reason. That I had been going to New York every two weeks, that often I stayed overnight. That the last time when I came back home after spending two nights in New York, I slammed my fist on the dining room table and made her and our son cry.

She could have said that when I started going to New York regularly, I began to bring back books I did not read. That more than twice I had asked her to come with me to an art gallery. That before that, she never knew I had any interest in art.

That I had brought back a drawing of a head of a woman and hung it on our bedroom wall.

She could have said that lately I was going to work before dawn and that late at night I would remember I had forgotten something in the office or that I needed to speak to someone in person. That I was overworked and tired most of the time. That I rarely slept.

Her father would have decoded her message. He would have known the truth. He was a man. He understood what men could do.

But I knew Nerida. I knew how much she loved me, how much she cared for me, how much she worried about my welfare. She
was a wife who thought it her duty to calm her husband’s nerves when he returned home from the hunt, who thought she must have patience when her husband needed to play.

That was what I told her when I decided I would go to New York on a Saturday to assuage my fears that Marguerite was living with another man. I said I needed the distraction. I needed to be with friends. I needed to relax. I needed to play. But I went to New York because I needed to reassure myself, to prove to myself that Marguerite still lived alone in her apartment, that no one else—a man—lived with her.

I told Nerida that one of my old friends from the University of London was coming through Washington on his way to California. He would have only a day in Washington, and I wanted to see him. Nerida was happy to let me go. Before I could say it, she said that she didn’t think she and our son should go with me. She said my friend and I would have things to talk about that she wouldn’t know. She had not been with me in London. She could only be in the way.

“Go, Oufoula,” she said. “You need to do something else besides work. Give your friend my regards.”

I had mastered the lie of omission. I was learning to master the lie of commission. How much more complicated that lie turned out to be. It left a trail behind it that required more lies to cover the lies I had already told. Before, there were no questions for Nerida to ask me. I was going to New York on business for the diplomatic service. What questions were there to ask? Why should she have guessed that my main reason for going there was to see Marguerite?

Now I had to invent reasons for my absence, and with each invention I pulled myself deeper into a web of deception. I learned better how to tailor my lies, how to make my inventions plausible. It was not by accident I made up the story of a friend passing through the airport in Washington. I had assessed the risks, anticipated the possibility of discovery. If I was seen at the airport by someone who knew Nerida and told her she had seen me, Nerida
would not be surprised. She would say she expected me to be at the airport. She knew I was there to meet a friend from England, whom she could not identify since I had taken care to give her neither a name nor a photograph, and, so, therefore, she was not in a position to know that I was there to take the early morning shuttle to New York. I was there to go to Marguerite.

I was in front of Marguerite’s apartment building by nine o’clock that Saturday morning. I knew she slept late on Saturdays and that she had breakfast in the coffee shop that faced her building. I decided I would wait for her there. I could see her when she came out of her apartment. I could be waiting for her in the booth where she ate. By eleven o’clock I was beginning to despair. There were women who came out of the building who looked like Marguerite: tiny women with bodies like Marguerite’s, the same small breasts, narrow waists, and rounded hips. But none of these women had Marguerite’s fluid movements—the graceful stride of a woman who had balanced heavy baskets on her head and knew how to keep her shoulders straight, her back erect while her hips glided like sailboats across a silken sea.

By eleven-thirty I had convinced myself that I had been right. Marguerite was no longer living in her apartment. She had moved in with a man. This thought was not as irrational as it seemed. Marguerite had told me that she knew that when her grant ended she would have to move to a less expensive place. She had told me she had an artist friend who had offered to share an apartment with her. She had not told me whether that friend was a man or a woman. Then, in my arrogance, when I felt the intensity of her love for me, I had assumed it was a woman. Then, there was no question in my mind that she would not live with another man, whether her relationship with him would be platonic or not. Now it seemed that there was never a doubt. That she had told me many times before that her friend was a man.

Frantic, I searched my brain for a name. And then I saw her. She was coming out of her building holding the hand of the very man I had imagined. She was laughing, turning her face up to him. She
had taken her hair out of her ponytail band. It swung free on her shoulders. She was wearing the pink shirt that I liked. She wore it over a white short skirt that exposed her legs, the legs I had kissed, the legs she usually concealed from the public under leggings or covered under pants.

The young man was African. He had the confident eyes of an African, the air of insouciance I rarely saw in African Americans, vigilant as they were to the nuances of American racism that we black foreigners often understood too late. I knew he was not Caribbean, either. He was lighter in complexion than me, but he was not mixed with other bloods as were the men from the Caribbean.

They crossed the street and came toward the coffee shop. I panicked. I did not know what I would say or do if they came inside. Would I snatch her hand from out of his? Would I push him down? Would I say to him she is mine? She is the woman I love, the woman who loves me. But I did not get the chance to do such things, to say such things. When they reached the front of the coffee shop, she tugged his sleeve and forced him to bend his head down toward her. What she said made the insouciant man laugh. He nibbled on her ear. Nibbled on my Marguerite’s ear. He fondled her neck. The back of my Marguerite’s neck.

I knew she had seen me. Now she looked straight in my direction. The eyes were my Marguerite’s brown eyes, but they were hard. Unyielding.

The man hugged her by her waist. She put her head on his shoulder, held my eyes for a second longer, and then turned and whispered in his ear again. He tightened his grip and led her across the street toward her apartment. I knew what they would do. I knew she had whispered to him about love. She had whispered like that to me.

Three days later I received a letter from her. She had mailed it to my office.

I would remember these words when I was named an ambassador for my country. I would remember when I had power and prestige bestowed on me that Catherine had said those very words to me in Geneva.

I
viewed the next days with the impassioned detachment with which the contrite sinner accepts his punishment. When I received mine, I knew that God’s justice had been meted out. I speak not only of the loss of Marguerite. That was to be temporary, though more than twenty-five years would pass by before I could say that with certainty. I speak of a greater penalty, the kind that lets us know that God’s laws must not be transgressed. The kind that made Adam understand that he had not lost Eden because of an apple. He had lost it because he had looked in the face of God and challenged Him. Because he was ungrateful.

God had given me everything. He had sent Christian missionaries to educate me, to give me a scholarship to a university in England. He had paved the way for the president of my country to take me under his wing, to open doors for me to a career that would bring me more successes than I could have dreamed of. He had given me Nerida, my devoted wife, and Ayi, my loving son. And yet I had risked them all. All for Marguerite, who in spite of my punishment, I would continue to love.

Perhaps my punishment was severe because I was not the Christian
I thought I was. Perhaps Marguerite was right. I had learned to be a Christian but I was not a Christian in my soul. Perhaps I had only memorized Bible stories, commandments, laws, but they had not become articles of faith for me. They had not penetrated my spirit, resided in my subconscious the way myths always do, the way the myths of my people had done—the beliefs I acquired as a child in my mother’s lap without consciousness or effort.

Perhaps the Margarete that first disturbed my dreams, the Margarete of my fantasies, was not spawned there by a European play I had read at the university in London about a tormented man who made a bargain with the devil in the hope that satiety with the pleasures of the flesh would finally bring him respite from his ceaseless yearnings. Perhaps the Margarete of my fantasies was not put there by a woman who had deceived me when I was too young to know that all that was said with sincerity was not necessarily sincere. Perhaps I had dreamed of Margarete because I had dreamed of what my father had, what his father before him had. Perhaps as a boy I had wanted, as they were allowed to have, two, even more wives.

Boys learn at the feet of their fathers to be men, and though my own did not care for me, perhaps I had still learned from him. Perhaps I harbored in my soul a secret longing for the life my father had, his happiness and his pleasure, too: the love of two wives, the pleasure of two wives. And when I learned to be Christian, when I was taught to trust my brain and not my heart, and reason informed me that the world of my ancestors was chaotic and the laws of the Christian God would bring order to my life, I became ashamed of my boyhood desires. I determined I would love one woman in the flesh as the Christian God had commanded. I would marry one woman.

Yet my desires persisted, and when I was deceived by the first woman I loved, when Mulenga betrayed me, I unconsciously blamed my misfortunes on my pigheaded insistence on the Christian way. Now I would have two wives, but since the one I wanted did not want me, I would create another, but she would burn with desire
for me and I would reject her. So I invented a fantasy, a destroyer of men who would not destroy me, and I confined her to my dreams, to that erotic cesspool of my nocturnal scavenging. Until I met Marguerite. Until I met Marguerite who was good and honest and beautiful. Marguerite with whom I fell in love. And I wanted her, too, as I wanted my wife.

This may have been the reason why I had asked Marguerite that question that led to her rejection of me. The impulse to ask her may have had nothing at all to do with the influence of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov on my psyche. It may have had nothing at all to do with guilt or my desire for catharsis. For I did not feel the need for catharsis. For I had not felt guilty for loving Marguerite. I did not feel guilty when I made love to her. For the truth was that when I asked her if she thought I should follow in the tradition of my forefathers and marry two wives, I had hoped she would say yes. As difficult as it is for me to imagine that possibility now, I had imagined it then. And it is for this reason I believed I was punished. Not because I had had an affair, not because I had broken the sixth commandment of the Christian God, but because for one long moment, for one immeasurable pause in time, I had considered the unthinkable: the reversion to a system of belief the missionaries had devoted their lives to eradicating from my soul and from the souls of Africans like me—the abandonment of all I had come to espouse, the submission to all I had believed no longer had merit.