Discretion (19 page)

“So you don’t paint anymore?” I was wracked with jealousy.

“Not as much.”

“But you were so good. It meant so much to you.”

“It didn’t mean more to me than my son,” she said.

A son! She had a son! I had braced myself for the worst, but I didn’t get the worst. This was better. It was a son, not a husband, she had chosen.

“You have a son?”

Air moved freely through my lungs; the muscles in my jaw slackened. Then, without warning, they tightened again and a familiar pain squeezed my heart. It was the image of my son. Ayi. He flashed before my eyes, rebuking me. Ayi, my son who turned his lips away from me, who would not be moved when his mother
pressed his face against mine.
Kiss Baba
. But he could tell, even though a child, that I was not worthy. That I had deceived his mother.

“Yes, I have a son. Paul. He’s eight,” Marguerite was saying. “I can take poverty, but I can’t deprive him. I can’t have Paul suffer for my sake. My husband, you see, is a politician without a job. He’s running for a seat in Congress, but that takes time and money. There are bills to be paid, so I work. Anyhow, my art wasn’t selling. It was gathering dust against my bedroom wall. Now I know how Catherine felt.”

“Catherine?” I was still struggling to force the image of my dead son from my mind.

“What she would have given up to have had her son!”

“Eric?”

“John never took him to her in Jamaica. She waited for him and he never came. Eventually John called her and said she could have her son in the summer months if she gave up her rights to all the assets they shared and to any alimony payments she may be entitled to. She told me that she didn’t hesitate one second to sign the papers he sent her. She gave up the beachfront land they had in Montego Bay, a wedding present from his father to both of them, all the money they had together in the bank. I think it was over fifty thousand U.S. She did all that to have her son for just three months out of the year. John insisted that Eric stay with him in New York to go to school. Going to work full-time so I could have money to give my son a chance for a decent childhood, and giving up my art temporarily so I could have time for my son, are nothing compared with what Catherine sacrificed.”

I could not look at her. I could not let her see my eyes, see the remorse and sorrow in them. Remorse for my selfishness, for my lack of generosity to my son and to Catherine. To my son who only wanted my love, the sincerity of my love that day for him and for his mother; to Catherine who only asked for me to intercede with John on her behalf. But I did not stop to think of my son’s feelings when I sat like a stone before him. I did not stop to think of
Catherine’s feelings when I mounted my case against acceding to her request.

How easy it had been for me to find excuses not to help Catherine. How easy it had been for me to convince myself that it was wrong to interfere in her relationship with her husband, to say that John was a brutal man, that it was useless to enter a war with him that I would surely lose. Would I say the same things today? Would I, now that I knew the pain of losing a son, losing a daughter?

“What?” Marguerite leaned toward me. “What? Is something wrong?”

I had remained with my head bent, not saying a word to her, tortured with regret and the pain of my memories.

“Is something wrong?”

I looked up at her and saw the Marguerite I had known, the Marguerite whose eyes were always full of tenderness for me.

“I should have done something to help Catherine,” I said.

She reached for my hand. “You did. You called me. Remember?”

I allowed her to believe that lie, for when her hand touched mine I felt such hope, slim though it was, that I did not want to take the risk of shattering it. I let her believe what she believed. That I had called her that first time because I wanted to help Catherine, because I wanted to connect Catherine to a friend who could console her. I did not tell her the truth: that I called her because I wanted to meet in the flesh the woman who had tormented me in my dreams. I slipped my hand above hers and held it. It was seconds before she withdrew it.

After dinner I asked her if I could see her the next day.

“It would be difficult,” she said, but I thought not with conviction.

“I am leaving tomorrow night,” I pressed her.

“I don’t know.”

“Even for lunch? I will be gone after that,” I said. “There will be three thousand miles between you and me.”

“Three thousand miles?” She fingered her napkin.

“You’ll be safe.”

“I don’t feel unsafe now.”

“I’ll be gone tomorrow.”

“I don’t know.”

“Please. For old times’ sake.”

She rested her fingers on her napkin. “For old times’ sake.”

“For lunch then?”

“Yes.”

“Here at one?”

“Here at one.”

T
hat night I lay on my bed in a state suspended between sleep and wakefulness, trying to hold on to a dream I did not want to end and yet so fearing its meaning I willed myself to wake, to prove to myself that the world in which I had entered was a dreamworld and everything in it was false.

I had dreamed of Marguerite but not of Marguerite alone. I had dreamed she was with my dead son and my stillborn daughter. I had dreamed of my son and my daughter many times before. Though I did not love the three children I now had any less than I had loved those two, it was they who often invaded my sleeping hours, who, when I put my head on my pillow, returned to me in the flesh as they were in life. On those nights I dreamed of them, I did not want to wake, and when I did, my grief returned so much more acutely than it had been before that Nerida was forced to part that curtain she kept closed between us, the curtain that protected her from remembering, from looking into the mirror of her pain.

She would tell me, then, I should go to their gravesites—Nerida who did not believe that the body stayed there, under the earth, to be redeemed on Judgment Day, Nerida who only had to look inside herself and around herself to find comfort and consolation. For
that was where she said her children resided: in her heart, in her soul, in the spaces around her, protected always by the ancestors. But she would be so pained by my grief that even when we were in Ghana, so many hundreds of miles from my country, she would book a flight for me back home, make excuses to the children for me, and urge me on: “Go. Go cry for them until your tears have dried up.”

But that night, the second that I spent in America, in the country where my two children lost their lives, the first after I had seen Marguerite and knew without doubt I would never cease to love her, the dream I had of my dead children did not bring me to tears on awakening. It brought me fear. Fear that I had lost Marguerite, fear that I had lost the woman I loved.

In that dream, I had returned with my children to the place where my mother had taken her life for love, where my father did not look back when missionaries from Canada took his eldest son, the first and only child he had from the woman he had made his second wife. Things had changed since. My father and his wives no longer lived in huts built with red clay and sand and encircled by the low wall that separated them from the rest of the village. My father had torn down the wall and the huts and replaced them with two large concrete structures, one for himself and one for his two wives. They stood there in the middle of the vast lands that he had inherited from his warrior ancestors, grotesque evidence of a modernity that was rapidly taking over parts of Africa and destroying the natural symmetry of land, sky, trees, birds, animals.

My father’s lands once stretched to the edge of the Sahara Desert. They were dry and barren. Before he married three more times, before he found a way to have others do his labor for him, I do not doubt that he had cursed his misfortune for being doomed to make his living on land that grudgingly yielded the sorghum, dates, and millet he farmed on it only by his sweat, by the long hours he was forced to spend tilling the ground, sifting out sand and stone, watering it with the heavy buckets of water he carried on his shoulders back and forth all day on that long trek from the
water wells. And yet my father’s lands were beautiful. Trees fanned out like giant umbrellas spaced at graceful distances from each other across brown grasslands. Giraffes moved in packs, their long necks arched against a perennially blue sunlit sky.

The birds that flew over my father’s land were enormous: vultures, birds of prey, the kind that fed on carrion and could fly great distances without water. Yet they, too, added grace to my father’s land and when my father sold most of this land to the Europeans, I was saddened that such beauty had passed so carelessly from the descendants of warriors, who had fought valiantly to attain it, to a people who saw its worth no more, no less than the value of the minerals that lay buried beneath it.

I say carelessly, because my father sold the land without inquiring of its worth. He wanted houses like the others he had seen in the villages around him. He did not want to farm any longer, to break his back in the burning sun. He took the European offer and did not regret it when they mined uranium from the earth and became richer than he could ever have imagined. My father reacted then the way he always did, the way he always dealt with adversity. The way he dealt with the news that my mother had left him, with the news that I was leaving with the missionaries to go to their school in the city. He shrugged his shoulders when people told him he could have been a wealthy man if he had not sold his father’s land to the albinos. He opened up the palms of hands and, with the same indifference, the same detachment with which he responded to my mother’s death and to my departure, he said: “What will be, will be.”

My father built his concrete houses on the lands that remained from his inheritance. Years later I would bring in bulldozers to mow them down. I would build my country retreat of wood and clay there in that place where a griot still sings of my father’s father and his father’s father, but not of my father. Not of the man who shamed them when he surrendered to the albinos land his ancestors had conquered in wars. Not of the man who gave the albinos his firstborn son. The griot sings of me—of my power and wealth.
Of the two rhinoceros with the speed of the harmattan that sit in my driveway. Of the justice come at last to my warrior ancestors through the things I have accomplished.

But in the dream I had that night after I saw Marguerite for the first time since she had forced me to reveal my lie, I had not yet built my house of wood and clay, and my father’s concrete houses were the way they were before he died, the yard that surrounded them as barren and as dry. For when my father got the money from the Europeans for the land he sold to them, he no longer farmed, he no longer watered his land. The water he needed for his domestic use he got from pipes he had laid underground, which stretched from his water wells to his houses, so that he did not have to carry the buckets of water he once lifted on his shoulders. Still, one great tree survived my father’s prosperity and the burning sun. My father had built a wooden bench that encircled it. On hot afternoons he would sit under its shade, watching his grandchildren play in the dirt. It was also in this open space, in front of that tree, that the people from my father’s village celebrated their feast days. It was about such a day I dreamed, when my father’s dirt yard pulsated with the beat of drums and the stomping of feet of the men, women, and children who danced in the dirt.

But in my dream, my father was not the one who sat on the bench beneath the tree presiding over the festivities. It was Marguerite. It was she who sat there, dressed in a long white gown, like a bride. She wore nothing on her head. Her hair had not been cut as it was when I saw her in the restaurant. It was the length it had been when I first met her, but it was not tied in a ponytail off her neck. It was plaited. Long braids fell to her shoulders knotted at the ends with ivory cowrie shells. She held a baby in her arms. A little girl. I knew immediately that the little girl was my stillborn daughter. At her side was a little boy. I knew, too, that the little boy was my son who had been crushed to death under the wheels of a car in the streets of Washington, D.C.

I did not remember that they were dead. In my dream they seemed alive to me. Both were dressed in the elaborate finery of our traditional garb. My baby daughter wore a long, white cotton
dress embroidered in gold threads; my son, a stiff, light-colored caftan and close-fitting cotton leggings.

I had been taking a shower in my father’s indoor bathroom when I saw them. From between the latticed white bricks that decorated the top of his unpainted concrete shower wall, I watched them, happy that they were together. I did not find it strange that no one else was dressed as they. That no one else’s skin was as cool and dry, their clothes as spotless. That everyone else was sweating profusely in the hot sun and their clothes were dusted with the dry dirt that swirled everywhere. I was basking in my contentment with the idyllic scene in front of me: my children gazing lovingly up to Marguerite, she beaming down on them.