Discretion (21 page)

There was no past, no present, no future for Nerida. Only the now that contained them all. She had not learned, like I had, to segment time, to struggle with it as if it could be conquered. She had not been allowed to leave her home, when she was a child, to go to schools taught by Europeans. She kept the traditional beliefs. The dead, the ancestors, were as present for her in her life as were the living. The future moved her toward a past when she would become part of the living, an ancestor who existed in the present.

I was not as fortunate as she. To live in the present I had to bury
the past. To exist in the now I had to conceive a future. I had buried my children, visited their graves, acknowledged they had died, confronted the reality that they belonged to a past I could never resurrect. Then I had planned the children of my future. I had told myself they would ease the pain of the past. I had covered Marguerite’s portrait, put away her books. In time I convinced myself that I loved only Nerida. I convinced myself of this because I could not bear the torment of the loss, the knowledge that never again would my lips press against Marguerite’s, my hands cup her breasts. I could not withstand the pain of that truth, so I invented another truth, a truth I could bear.

My mother’s courage to accept the fact that she loved another man caused her to take her life. I had not been so brave. I had been afraid. I did not know if I could face the truth and live. But all that had changed, now that I had seen Marguerite and knew I loved her, I had always loved her, I would always love her. Now I could admit to myself that the children I had could not replace the ones I lost. That Nerida could not fill the spaces in my heart that ached for Marguerite. How that knowledge would affect me I did not know.

There were times during those years when my job required me to return to New York. I stayed no more than two or three days. I dared not test myself beyond those brief periods. I did not call Marguerite. I did not try to see her. She was married. I was married.

Marguerite’s portrait remained hung above my bed. Nerida thought it was good I had put it where it had been when we lived in Washington. I now lived with the past in anguish, Nerida with acceptance, even contentment. At times I envied her—the ease with which she found peace in the knowledge that the present contained her past; her future written in the moment in which she lived.

There was a time when I thought people spent too much time planning the future. That was when I was a young man and I carried a fantasy in my heart: a past I spent my present hoping to meet
again. Then I met Marguerite and severed myself from that past. I believed then in the present, only in the present when I said yes to Marguerite, when I pretended my future with Nerida did not exist. When all that I wanted was the now, the present. Now I knew that now was the present, the future, and the past. I tried to have the courage to live with that knowledge, that insight.

M
y future continued as my life had been for the past ten years—redolent of good fortune. Even I was beginning to find it hard to contest the contention of my friends that I had been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, or the conviction of my enemies that a juju man was working his magic on me.

I was respected and in demand in diplomatic circles. More and more countries in Africa depended on my diplomatic skills and my understanding of the European mind. But I was trusted less for this skill in unmasking the European motives than for my loyalty to Africa. Time and time again when I was offered posts out of Africa, I declined. I could have been ambassador to France, Germany, Sweden—any European country I wanted. My president would have sent me there, or to South America, the Caribbean, Australia, India, China, Russia—wherever I wanted. But I did not want to leave Africa. I wanted to live on African soil. I wanted my children to grow up on African soil. I was praised for my patriotism. I was trusted because of it. It was believed that I could not be bought. That always I would put Africa first.

People, I think, say unkind things about Africa because they are afraid of Africa, afraid of the commitment Africa demands of them.
Everywhere you turn in Africa there is someone in need, someone who wants your help. Someone who has a hundred, if not a thousand times less than you. Someone wanting what you have. Not to give is to live with guilt. To give is to require sacrifice of yourself more than seems reasonable. Or fair.

Africa drains you. Africa demands of you. Africa asks you to be human. You leave her when you fear the high price of the toll she would exact from you.

I stayed in Africa because I wanted to help build a better Africa for my children. For the children of Africa. Many laugh at me. They say you can only be human out of Africa, for out of Africa you can acquire the things that make you human: the house with the convenient gadgetry; electronic equipment that defies space and time—the fax machine, the computer, E-mail, the Internet. Out of Africa you can buy cars that can be discarded when they break down; you can accumulate things you will never use. Things you dream about. But people who say such things have turned their backs on the routes to the heart, to the spirit. Why deny yourself? they ask. There is no need for sacrifice when you can have all that you want. You can be more human in the developed countries, they say. I have never said or believed that.

After Chad, I was sent to Zimbabwe. There, I became involved with the underground in South Africa, men and women fighting for the overthrow of apartheid and the release of Nelson Mandela. Nothing I had done so far in my life had given me such fulfillment. No work I had done, no assignment I had carried out, had made me feel so close to fulfilling my potential as a human being. I took risks with my life, meeting in places where I knew I could be assassinated, or worse, tortured, as I knew had happened to too many who were part of my group. But though I loved my life, though I loved my family, though I did not want to lose my life, and though I often thought of the pain the loss of my life would cause Nerida and my children, I never hesitated when I was asked to do something that would contribute to the destruction of the racist policies in South Africa, that would bring justice to a people so long denied it.

Many time I was offered money from governments in countries
neighboring South Africa that relied on my skills in diplomacy, on my tact and discretion to conceal their hands in incidents that were illegal, sometimes bloody, but always necessary for the liberation of South Africa. I never accepted it. Often I was called to temper the anger of those who could not wait, of those who wanted a free South Africa now. Of those who thought a bloody revolution was the only way out. I never accepted money for doing this either.

It was said that I was successful because I had the ability to make people feel at ease in my presence. I could make them laugh. I could take the edge off the most tense of negotiations. I seemed a man with no hidden agendas, a man with no troubles burdening his shoulders. A carefree man. A happy man.

More than once I had occasion to wonder if this personality, this talent I had, was not inherited. There were times I seethed with anger under my skin over injustices and cruelties painfully evident before my eyes. Yet few detected my anger, my outrage. I could shrug my shoulders even in such situations and adopt an air of insouciance. Those were the times I thought I was indeed my father’s child. My father who could throw open the palms of his hands and say without emotion:
What will be, will be
. My father who could appear indifferent when he was told of my mother’s betrayal, of her death near the village where her lover took his life because of her. My father who never stopped me once or protested once when I left his compound with the missionaries from Canada.

This control I had over my passions when I faced the white man who had persecuted or killed my brothers in South Africa was not a skill I had learned. It came to me without effort. I could appear calm no matter the situation. I could seem harmless to the enemy even while I laid the groundwork for his destruction. It was a talent that had fooled Nerida as well, though I never planned to hurt her. She did not see my longing for Marguerite until much, much later (so I thought). She never guessed that those times when I immersed myself in the books on the shelves near the portrait of the head of a woman I had hung on our bedroom wall, over our bed, that I was overcome by desires so acute, so unbearable, that I dared not speak to her. I dared not let her see my eyes.

Perhaps my father who had given me very little else when I was a child had bequeathed me this: his genes, his talent. It enabled me to deceive my wife, to conceal from her the pain of my need for Marguerite. It enabled me to become valuable to governments.

I was beginning to believe that my career in diplomacy was not accidental. It was not, as I once thought, the result of a series of unrelated events that culminated with my being in a certain place at a particular time when the president of my country needed an interpreter. I was beginning to think that it was possible that my future was determined at my birth. My father had those same skills that had made me useful as a diplomat. It was to his compound the people of the village came on the feast days. He was the one who made them feel at ease, who gave them the illusion of a life without problems. That they could eat and drink today and nothing would change tomorrow. He had turned his back on the problems that threatened to dull his joy. He had refused to burden his shoulders. My father’s friends liked him for this. For the respite he gave them from the harshness of reality. They let down their guard in his presence. They told him everything, even their secrets. They believed him a harmless man, a man too much in love with a life of ease to plot their destruction.

When I made this observation to Nerida she reminded me that nothing we do can break our connection to our ancestors. I was my father’s son as my father was his father’s son. My people were warriors. They knew the strategies of war. They knew how to make others yield to them. The people in my father’s village yielded to him. Heads of state yielded to me. The conference table was my battleground, she said, where I waged my wars. The stony grasslands of the African plains were the battlegrounds where my ancestors waged their wars. They won their wars. I won mine. The present, Nerida said to me, was the past, was the future.

But I was not a harmless man like my father’s friends thought my father. I did not allow the enemies of my country to use me, to make a fool of me. To use Africa, to make a fool of Africa. Even when I laughed with heads of state, I thought of Africa. Even when I plied them with drink, Africa stayed on my mind. I may have inherited
my diplomatic skills from my father, but I had made better use of them. I had not eschewed responsibility. I had not turned my back on my son.

And yet I could not say that my father had abandoned me. His skill for giving people the illusion that they had nothing to worry about, nothing to fear, had come naturally to me, had allowed me to earn my living. Because of this talent I inherited from him, I made more money than he and his entire village ever saw. But isn’t this the hope of fathers? Isn’t this what fathers want for their sons? Perhaps this was what my father wanted for me.

I
n September 1989, I was asked to go to the United Nations to join a team of representatives from African nations that had been trying to persuade the world to keep the pressure on the newly sworn South African president, F. W. de Klerk, for the release of Nelson Mandela. It was fifteen years since I had been to New York, fifteen years since I had seen Marguerite.

Three years since Nerida and I had stopped sleeping in the same bedroom.

I was the first one to leave our marriage bed. I did not leave because I no longer wanted to make love to Nerida. I had not then, nor have I since, ceased to love Nerida, though there were times when the memory of Marguerite returned with such intensity that being in the same room with Nerida became unbearable. But such times had long become infrequent.