Discretion (3 page)

My president, who used to live outside the city, outside this Paris before our independence came, did not speak French, nor did millions of his countrymen. When he rose to power after two world wars had reduced Europe to its knees and its control over its colonies had collapsed like a stack of dominoes, my president found himself in the painfully embarrassing position of having to rely on French interpreters to do business with the French.

I was a savior to him when he blasted the French government for its negligence, which he characterized as criminal, in leaving behind a populace of which close to 80 percent could barely read or write though their people had decimated acres of our farmland in their savage pursuit of uranium and gold. I pleased him with the accuracy with which I conveyed his anger (shortly afterwards, the French ministry sent a letter promising financial support and personnel), and he arranged with the missionaries for me to leave off teaching and work with him. Soon I became his personal interpreter and his most trusted companion. I knew his secrets and I kept them. Because I also spoke and wrote English, I was not only his interpreter with the French but also with the English. In time there was no one he relied on or trusted more than me.

He made me an assistant to his ambassador to the United States the year my country was suffering from a terrible drought and our children were dying like flies, their stomachs bloated from dysentery and starvation. He hoped that with my help as interpreter, his ambassador could stir the consciences of the world. I was twenty-eight then. Four years later, I would be ambassador myself.

For the honor of being named assistant to the ambassador, my president asked me one favor: to marry his daughter and take her with me to America. It was not a favor that was difficult for me to grant him. Nerida was a beautiful woman. She had a soft smile and shy, gentle eyes. Her skin was dark brown, at least three shades lighter than mine. It reminded me of the color of cocoa. She was wearing our traditional dress when her father introduced me to her, and though it covered her from her neck to her ankles, I could see that she was lovely.

I was not disappointed on our wedding night. She had the figure a man dreams his wife would have: small breasts, narrow waist, wide hips. It was the figure of my mother. What I remembered of my mother before I was weaned from her breasts when I was four years old. I remembered sitting on my mother’s lap cushioned between her hips. When I made love to Nerida the first time, the memory was so strong, I wept. Nerida asked me why I cried. I said, “Because I am happy.”

It was not a lie. I was happy, or rather I became quite happy with Nerida within a very short space of time.

Not long after our marriage, her father, my president, sent me to Geneva for six months’ training in the diplomatic service before I would assume my post as assistant to his ambassador to the United States. Nerida accompanied me and, in those six months away from her family, she blossomed.

I discovered I had a wife who was not only beautiful but intelligent, not only intelligent but of such character that I grew to admire her. Never once did she complain that she was lonely or that she missed her home, though I would often leave her alone in our apartment all day and night as I honed my diplomatic skills: developing
sprezzatura
, learning to keep my thoughts to myself until they mattered, and then, presenting them, always to appear harmless, affable. I acquired this talent not only from watching others negotiate around the conference table, but from observing them trade favors at the dinner parties and lavish cocktail parties that were frequent in diplomatic circles.

Nerida came with me sometimes to these parties, but more
often than not she stayed at home. She found these occasions boring and surprised me by saying she felt useless.

“Like a piece of decoration with no function,” she said.

I had thought that this was what most women lived for: to be seen, to be admired, to be complimented for their beauty, for the way they wore their hair, for their jewelry, their clothes. But this was not true for the woman I had married. It was the first of the many surprises I would discover about my wife.

I did not know, for example, that she had been to the university and that when she married me she already had a bachelor’s degree in history. Her father had probably thought it unwise to tell me of this since he believed, as the men of our times believed, that a man could not be master of his home if his wife was equal to him in matters outside the home.

My male friends (and, of course, I at the time) would have approved if Nerida was an excellent cook, which she was; if she knew how to keep an attractive home, which she did; and if she could take care of the children when we had them. But more than a few of them would have thought it was a mistake to marry a woman who not only could challenge me intellectually, but had the means to earn a living if she wanted to. Such a marriage, they would claim, could not last. At the least provocation my wife would leave me.

“You can’t have two man-rat in the same hole.”

It was a creed they lived by.

Nerida knew our men thought this way, and so I cannot blame her for not telling me that she was a university graduate. Nor can I blame her father for making it a condition to my marriage to her that I take her to America. He saw the arrangement as a compromise with his conscience. Nerida would be a wife, a wife who understood and carried out her wifely duties, but she would be a wife in America, where there were books and libraries and places that could feed her curiosity, satisfy her hunger to know more.

I was young when I married Nerida. Today I would marry a woman even if she had a doctorate. Then, I do not know. I still had much growing up to do. As it was, it was Nerida who taught me most of what I learned, not only about women but also about history.

“I’ll go to the library,” she said when I asked her if she would not be bored staying at home. For three nights in a row I had had to attend official functions. Nerida had accompanied me once, reluctantly. I was trying to persuade her to do so again.

“What will you do there?”

“Read.”

“Read?”

“History books. Keep up with my studies, you know.”

It was then she confessed she had a bachelor’s degree in history.

Later, I grew to appreciate her knowledge. She taught me better than my teachers in Geneva about the history of the United Nations. It was from her I understood the motives the European countries had for sending diplomats to sit with us at the table—the people they had once enslaved, the people they later colonized. Two world wars had so devastated Europe that it could no longer afford to maintain its armies in our countries. Without its armies it was not as easy as it had been before to lay claim to our land and the abundance of minerals that lay beneath it.

Nerida made me understand the power of the table—the new battleground where prizes were won and stolen. She taught me the importance of my job. I learned from her that it was my duty to fight for all of Africa, to stave off those who would suck us dry.

In Geneva, Nerida became my sole counselor and adviser, my friend, my lover, as she was to be for years to come. But that was before Marguerite reentered my life. That was before having schooled myself in the wisdom (and in the moral rectitude, it embarrasses me to add) of keeping my distance from her, I no longer had the will or the desire to deny myself the woman I believed I was born to love.

I
would hear Marguerite’s name for the first time in Geneva, in 1966, but I would not meet her until two years later when I was in America. Catherine, the wife of a Jamaican diplomat, told me about her, though to say told me about her is inaccurate. Catherine had merely mentioned her name and it sang in my head like the call of a lovebird: Margarete, Margarete.

“She is my best friend. She was the one who warned me when John joined the diplomatic service that it was the beginning of the end for us.”

Catherine and I were at yet another of those obligatory cocktail parties that diplomats, and those of us in training to be diplomats, were required to attend. These were the laboratories where we were observed, the classrooms where we were tested to determine how well we had acquired the accoutrements of civility: the proper way to hold the wineglass, to dispose of napkin and toothpick after the hors d’oeuvres, to carry on a conversation with food in the hand tempting the mouth. The correct modulation of voice for greeting dignitaries, for arguing a point. The right pitch for pleasantries, especially for laughter. The eye contact that avoided intimacy, that
maintained neutrality, particularly with the women (above all, with the women), the wives of important men from important countries.

Nerida, as had become usual, did not accompany me, but Catherine, as usual, was there with her husband, John. Catherine was the kind of woman my friends and I had been told to stay away from. She was bright and articulate. She had won a scholarship from her island in the Caribbean to study literature at Oxford. She had met John there, and when he graduated from law school and entered the diplomatic service, she deferred another scholarship to graduate school to marry him.

It was love, she said. She was too in love with him to live apart from him. I could have foretold her future when she said this to me. My mother also had been too in love with a man to live apart from him.

Catherine was beautiful, tall, slender, full-bosomed, with skin the color of tamarind shells. That evening she was wearing white—a slim silk dress that flattered her figure. Her skin glowed against it. Yet I did not think John noticed how beautiful she looked. I did not think John ever noticed how beautiful she looked.

She said to me more than once that John never made a decision that was not in his best interest politically. I often thought that when she said that she wanted me to understand that his marriage to her was one such decision. It was rumored that she had written his papers for him at the university and that without her to guide him, John would not have survived the minefields of the diplomatic world as long as he had. But I never thought she married him for convenience. She loved him. She was besotted with him. They had a two-year-old son, Eric, whom they both adored. “Everywhere John goes, Eric goes with him,” she once told me. “And everywhere John and Eric go, I go with them.”

We were sitting on the couch next to the wall, opposite to the bar, when she said the name of my beloved. From where we were, we could easily see John surrounded by a group of Swedish diplomats and their wives. I had noticed, from across the room, when John had walked away from Catherine. And when I saw her gazing
vacantly over her glass in his direction, I excused myself from the man I was speaking to, and I went to sit with her.

I suppose it could have appeared that I did so because she seemed so alone, so abandoned. Catherine had often said to me that I was an unusual African. An unusual man, for that matter.

“You talk to me in public as if you think women have something to say,” she said.

But I had not joined Catherine because I thought she had something to say. Nor had I joined her because I pitied her. I had joined her because I was drawn to her, and I believed she to me, by what, in retrospect, I know was a kind of incompleteness we recognized in each other. A yearning that neither of us understood or could name but was visible and identifiable to people like us who felt a nagging at the soul, an irrational dissatisfaction.

I say irrational because I believed then that I had everything a man would want: a wife who loved him, and the reassurance of a future of prestige and power. For I was certain that within a few years my father-in-law, the president of my country, would name me one of his ambassadors. There was no reason then for me to be dissatisfied or to have feelings of longing or yearning. What could I have longed for or yearned for? How could I know then it was for Marguerite?

And yet when Catherine said the name of her friend, my ears rang with the shrill whistle of the lovebird.

“Marguerite,” she said. “That’s my friend’s name.”

I want to say now that I do not believe in juju or in any kind of magical spiritualism. I am a Christian. But Marguerite would tell me later on, after she became my world, and life without her seemed impossible, that culturally I am African.

Once, because she worried that I had adopted the myths and beliefs of Europeans, she asked me if I remembered when the missionaries came for me. I told her they took me from my village when I was very young.

“How young?” she asked.

“Seven,” I told her.

“The age of reason. You had already passed the age of myth.”

Perhaps, then, it was fear that led me to say what I said next to Catherine. Perhaps I thought that in saying it I could reassure myself that my conversion was secure. That it was not juju that filled my head with the call of the lovebird, but a memory. A memory of a woman who existed only on the pages of fiction, make-believe, a woman who once upon a time had both fascinated and terrified me.