Discretion (22 page)

Il faut savior gérer le malheur
. One has to know how to manage one’s unhappiness. A countryman had said this to me. He was a man I admired for his stoicism that never wavered even when the death of his favorite wife dealt him a blow from which few men recover. I, too, was learning how to manage my unhappiness—
gérer mon malheur
—how to live with the anguish of losing Marguerite,
with the knowledge of never seeing her again. But though this acceptance gave me reprieve during my waking hours, deliverance from the futility of longing for Marguerite, I had developed no such ability to control my dreams during my sleeping hours. Indeed, it seemed that the more I was able to accept the loss of Marguerite when I was awake, the less I seemed able to suppress my yearning for her when I was asleep.

More and more frequently I disturbed Nerida’s nights with dreams that woke me in a panic, sweat pouring down my face, my heart beating wildly, my breath coming short and fast through my mouth. They were dreams like the one I had the day before I saw Marguerite the last time. Always Marguerite was happy. Always she was with my dead children. Always I feared she, too, had died. Except now, in the past year, I would remember she was alive and in New York. That she had a husband.

It was at that part of the dream, the part when memory took me to her bedroom where she was making love to her husband, that I would bound up from my bed in panic.

Nerida would wake up, too. She would wipe my brow, press my head back against my pillow, and comfort me. It was a dream, she would say. A silly dream. It will pass. Everything will be fine. She was here. She was next to me here.

But I did not want Nerida next to me. I did not want her lying on the bed with me when I woke up with dreams of Marguerite. I wanted Marguerite. I wanted to make love to Marguerite.

It was guilt that finally drove me out of the bedroom. I told Nerida it was my work—the troubles I was having with some agreement I was trying to finalize. I will be back soon, I promised. But when I came back, six months later, after I had learned to sleep with the new dreams I was having of Marguerite, Nerida did not want me back.

At first I did not think she knew I was dreaming of another woman. I did not think she felt I had left her bed because I loved her less. She said to me that she slept better when she slept alone. That I could come to her whenever I wanted. Whenever I felt the need.

I wanted to believe her. I, too, slept better with my dreams of
Marguerite when Nerida was not next to me. Yet there were nights I wanted Nerida in the bed with me again, when I wanted to hold her in my arms and make love to her, but she made excuses and turned me away. She was too tired, she said. She was not in the mood. She was not feeling well. Eventually the times we made love dwindled from once a week to twice a month. In the past three years we made love fewer than once in six months.

Ultimately I grew to accept Nerida’s lack of interest in sex. My good friend Ibrahim Musima explained it to me, though I never quite believed that the reason he gave me was the only one there was. But to him the explanation was simple.

It comes with menopause, he said. Nerida’s disinterest in sex was not particular to me.

Ibrahim Musima was a Moslem. He had four wives, the fourth younger than his eldest daughter, the first my wife’s age—fifty-four. It was said it was his gap tooth that made him irresistible to women. But Ibrahim Musima thought otherwise. He said to me that he understood women, he knew what made them happy. And what would make my wife happy, he told me, would be for me to get a mistress.

Women desire us when we can be of use to them, he said. When we can fertilize their eggs and give them babies. When they have no more eggs, they lose interest in having sex with us. They want us to leave them alone. Nerida no longer desires you. Give her the peace she deserves. Get a mistress.

When I protested, when I told Ibrahim that I suspected I was the one to be blamed, that Nerida had not lost her desire for sex, rather, it was more probable that she had lost her desire for sex with me, he called me a foolish man, a vain and arrogant man. A man who did not have enough sense to know he could not change the laws of Nature.

The survival of the human race depends on men, Ibrahim said to me. (These were not his exact words, but they were the exact words he meant to say to me.) We are the ones who ensure that human life will not cease to exist on earth. Nature gave us men the
ability to impregnate a woman even when we are a hundred. God didn’t do that for a man to waste his seed on an infertile woman.

I continued to insist that it was not I who no longer wished to sleep with Nerida, but she who no longer wished to sleep with me. Ibrahim was not unsympathetic. He was a sensitive man.

I am not saying you should leave Nerida. I did not divorce my infertile wife. But Nerida has dried out. I don’t doubt she loves you, but she has lost her desire. Give her a rest. Get a mistress. You have a duty to get a mistress, a responsibility to impregnate a fertile woman, a young woman.

Ibrahim argued his case with me in front of his friends. Darwinians all, though I doubted they could identify a letter in the alphabet, they nodded their heads in agreement. They were his evidence that what he said was true. They all had more than two wives. They believed that the young women who agreed to marry them did so because they knew that not only could older men give them babies, but they could feed them, clothe them, give them shelter.

When you were a pup, could you take care of a woman as well as you can today? Ibrahim asked me. No, Oufoula. He slapped me on the back. With your money, God will punish you for not marrying another wife. Okay, you are a Christian, but God will punish you all the same for not having a mistress. Fathers will hate you for not taking their daughters off their hands. Daughters will despise you for leaving them barren.

And what about the young men? I asked him. What will be left for them if the old men take the prettiest women?

He shrugged. “Their turn will come,” he said.

I did not tell him about the new research I had heard about: The seed of old men is spoilt. It sometimes produces fruit with tragic defects.

Had I said this to Ibrahim Musima, he would have shrugged again. What I had heard was Western propaganda circulated by Western women who want to rule the world, he would have said. Ibrahim Musima had fifteen children. All his children were healthy.

But I was not persuaded by what Ibrahim Musima said to me. I
did not get a mistress. I did not turn to younger women when Nerida no longer wanted to sleep with me. There were only two women I wanted, two women I loved, one with the calm and serenity that come with a good marriage, the other with a passion that in spite of my best efforts remained alive, burning in me.

I threw myself more intensely into my work. It was her work, her art, that had distracted Marguerite in my absence, that had made it possible for her to suppress troubling questions, to prevent them from surfacing. Soon I found the intrinsic virtues in work that had quite eluded my father. For work occupies the mind, consumes it. Work tires the body, dampens the carnal passions, suppresses the libido. I discovered that it was not as difficult as I once thought for Mahatma Gandhi to deny himself sex. Work ennobles the spirit. It satisfies the soul, especially when one’s work transcends personal needs, when it aspires to the service of others.

Work is the Sisyphian climb up the mountain when we defy the pull of gravity, when we triumph over our lot, our fated mortality. When we breathe the air of the gods.

By the sweat of thy brow
. Work is the paradox in the original curse: in our condemnation is our salvation.

My work for the liberation of South Africa transcended my desire for personal reward. Its goal was the freedom of my black brothers and sisters, the end of their torture and suffering. I found my work ennobling. I found it fulfilling. It gave meaning to my life. Purpose.

Nerida compensated me in other ways—by her loyalty to me, by her friendship, by her commitment to our children. Now I relied almost completely on her opinion about the work I did. If she did not approve of an idea I had, I discarded it. If she did not review my plans before a negotiation, I postponed it. If she did not critique a speech before I was to deliver it, I did not present it. If she suspected that an invitation I received could incur negative political consequences, I rejected it.

I had already deferred to her in the upbringing and education of our children, less by intent than by the circumstances of my work
life that required me to be away from home for long hours, sometimes for days and weeks. She did not disappoint me. Our children were loving and kind to each other, considerate of others, generous and well mannered. They excelled in their studies. My son and one of my twin daughters were at the top of their classes in the premed program at the university. My other daughter brought home prizes for her photography. I never tired of boasting of them—of Nerida’s part in their success, of her dedication and commitment to them. Indeed, except for the dreams I had of Marguerite, I was a contented man.

And then I was asked to go to New York for six weeks to join the team at the UN.

Nerida was overjoyed. She, like me, believed that Mandela’s release was imminent. She, like me, was convinced that not only would he be free but he would become the leader of Black South Africa. Neither of us had dared to dream he would become president of a country that had once declared white supremacy legal, that had robbed him of his youth in his fight for the rights of his black brothers, that had denied his wife a husband, his children a father, he both wife and children. That had almost blinded him in the stone mines of Robben Island. That had tried but had never succeeded in breaking him.

But while Nerida was happy to see me go to New York for the sake of Mandela, I battled and lost against the temptation to anticipate other joys besides: the joy of seeing Marguerite again, the joy of being with her.

My male friends, too, believed that other pleasures awaited me in New York. How lucky I was, they said, to be free of my wife for six weeks, to have any woman I wanted in my bed all night. Women half my wife’s age, women who had bodies like the bodies they saw in magazines from America. They envied me.

But I did not tell them that these were not the women I wanted. That the woman I wanted was almost my wife’s age.

Marguerite, I estimated, was fifty years old now, a menopausal woman, a woman, my friends believed, long past the stage of being
sexually desirable. Yet it was she who occupied my mind when I packed my bags for New York. She I wanted. She I hoped still remembered passionate days when we made love like the swans on O’Malley’s lake, ripping off clothes like feathers, though not with the rage O’Malley pressed me to see through his jaundiced eyes. She I hoped had never forgotten nights when, like lost travelers rescued from the desert, we sated ourselves on love, devoured each other until gorged, until either she or I, exhausted, spent, broke loose only to try again. “Calm down. Calm down,” we told each other. Such was our thirst, such was our hunger, as I remembered.

I
arrived in New York at night. I called Marguerite at the New School the next morning. No one answered, but Marguerite had left a recorded message on her answering machine. I memorized it. I called her over and over that day just to hear the sound of her voice in my ear, to remember and to hope: “This is Marguerite Hollingsworth. I will be out of the country until September twentieth. You may call back then or leave a message after the beep.”

Marguerite Hollingsworth
. She had not said Marguerite Gifford. She had not used her married name. She was no longer married. She was no longer the wife of the man I had never met and yet hated. The man who entered my dreams at night, who had taken my place in her bed.

September 20 was five days away. Five days to be in the city where Marguerite lived. Five days to be in the place she called home and not be with her. Five days after fifteen years of smothering memories that broke free like embers from the ashes of a dying fire only to flare up again. Fifteen years of dreams I could not repress. I paced the floor of the tiny apartment my country had rented for me for the six weeks I was to be in New York, trying to block out the deadening drone of cars, buses, and trucks, broken
only by the ghoulish wail of a police siren or ambulance—life in New York. From the window of the twenty-fourth floor where I was, gray buildings rose from the streets like giant tombstones. At night, when the light from office buildings lit up windowpanes, I would think of them as prisons—stone walls through which slivers of light escaped from the windows of tiny cells crammed with inmates in business suits. Even the bright multicolored lights on the Empire State Building, meant to be festive, seemed cold and impersonal to me—manufactured.

I would not have come to New York if not for Mandela. I would not have come if not for the hope of seeing Marguerite. Cities depressed me. Since I had returned to Africa from my first appointment in America, I rarely stayed in one longer than my work required of me. I knew the insides of hotels, boardrooms, and restaurants like the markings on my hand, rarely anything about the life that passed before me on sidewalks. I had only stopped to ponder the miracle that life could exist at all in places where concrete and stone seemed to grow out of the earth—macabre vegetation strangling trees.