Discretion (30 page)

Marguerite could never have guessed the fire that flared through me then. I could only contain it with silence, so stony that she was forced to pity me.

“He asked me to have lunch with him,” she said. “Of course, I said no. Of course, I did not accept.”

It was only her refusal that calmed me, but I began to fear the dreams I would have when I had to leave her, when my mission was over in America and I had to return to Africa. Who would intrude on the territory I had marked?

T
here were times, frantic to lessen the distance that geography had put between us, I wanted to tell Marguerite all. Not of my years with Nerida, but all that had shaped me, all that made me into the man I was, all that had happened to me when I was a boy in Africa. I wanted her to know me, to understand me. I wanted to fuse my soul with hers.

I told her about my mother. I told her that my mother had died for love. She did not think my mother had killed herself. She did not think it was suicide.

“It was grief,” she said.

I wondered what grief would cost me, how I would mourn her absence when I had to return to Africa. Would I be the same man I once was? Would my voice betray me? My eyes? Would I find myself remembering her when I sat at the table negotiating contracts for my country? Would my lips tremble, my eyes turn bloodshot red? I, of whom they said he kept his heart in his sleeves, his private self apart from his public self, who kept his personal thoughts, his personal feelings always out of reach of public scrutiny?

Marguerite said my mother’s death was not a suicide. She had not killed herself. Grief had killed her. I knew then that the questions
that had begun to trouble my sleep were troubling hers. She, too, was beginning to realize that it would not be long before I would be recalled to Africa. She, too, was beginning to fear the price our separation would impose on her. How would she withstand the pain? How would we? Would grief kill her, too? Kill me?

“How many years do you think we’ll have left together?” she asked me one night. It was late. We had turned off all the lights. The moon was high in the sky above the bay. It had left a trail of silvery gold shimmering across the water. I was trying to lose myself in the water, in the shimmering light. I was trying to silence the questions in my head. I wanted to drown them, make them go away.

I have noticed this about water, when I am close to a large body of water—the sea, a lake, the river that runs through my country in Africa: it is easy for me to lose myself, to let my spirit drift, to merge myself into a oneness with it. Water is forgiving, compassionate, healing, comforting. Perhaps this is so because it awakens in us a lost memory, a memory we never recall with consciousness but that consoles us all the same. A memory of that first place of safety, of comfort, of forgiveness. Our mother’s womb. The amniotic sac, where we swam free of worry, free of concern, protected. Perhaps we remember this, and that other Eden before the Ice Age, before we were forced to crawl on land in search of food. Marguerite had to dig her elbow into my chest to rouse me. I had already curled deep into the maternal arms of the bay in front of me.

“Do you think we have as much time left as we have already lost?”

I did not want to think of it—of parting from her, of returning to Nerida. Of being forced by grief to make choices I did not want to make. I loved Nerida. I loved my children. I loved my life in Africa.

“We will be together forever, Marguerite,” I told her. “Forever.”

But this time she wanted me to define forever.

“How many years?” she asked me. “Tell me.”

I bargained. I told her a story. It distracted her. It diffused for a moment the moment we both knew we would have to face. It bought us time. It gave me a chance to tell her more, to tell her how my reinvention began, my conversion, when the missionaries
came to my father’s compound and took me. When my father did not stop them.

“I do not know how many years we have,” I said to her, “because I do not know how many years old I am.”

This was the story I told her. It was the truth. I told her that not only had the missionaries given me their god, they had given me time.

“I was in my second year in the mission school. One day the teacher walked into our class and asked us our age. He was an old Frenchman accustomed to giving orders and having them obeyed. None of us could answer him accurately. All of us were boys from the village. Our parents did not mark time like the Europeans. For them, birth, life, and death were part of the same cycle. They saw no value in recording any part of it.

“I think Europeans invented time to fool themselves into believing they can control time. Time eludes them anyhow. It stops them with death. They do not stop time. The people in our village did not try to stop time, to mark this or that birth as if they could put a fix on time, prevent it from slipping away from them.

“The old Frenchman wanted to know if our parents had stopped time for us, if they had marked our birth, and when we could not answer him, he stopped time for us. The next morning when we came to our class, he divided us into two groups by height. I was in the taller group. The boys in the taller group were given the older age. We were told we were eight, the boys in the other group were seven. Then one by one we were given the month and day of our birth. I was given April. April twenty-fifth, nineteen thirty-four. That is the date on my passport. I do not know the day I was born.”

Marguerite did not calculate years after that. She did not try to add and subtract, to compare the years we had lost with years we could have together. But I knew the question still remained in her heart: What would happen to us when I had to leave New York? We did not have the courage to face the answer.

T
here was much else I told Marguerite without telling her of my life with Nerida. She had asked me how I came to be a diplomat. I told her it was an accident of fate. One day I had found myself in the presence of the president of the country when he needed an interpreter. I did not tell her that the president was the father of my wife or that when he gave me my first appointment he made me a present of his daughter.

“Accident or not, it was good that it happened. Diplomats don’t get as passionate about causes as you do,” she said to me. “They don’t get as committed.”

I had shared with her the papers I had written about South Africa, about the torture of men like Mandela who fought for freedom. Twice she had come to hear me speak. They were on the days she taught at night. I did not want her to interrupt her time for painting because of me, but she wanted to know more, to know if apartheid was practiced in other parts of Africa.

“Tell me about Angola,” she said to me one day.

It was the day I had noticed the prints of my fingers on her hips. I had held her there the night before when we made love.

I was already lying on top of her and could feel my desire for her
mounting, but she stopped me. “Stop, stop.” She wanted to try another way. She pushed her hands against my chest, pressed her knees into my stomach and turned.

I must have grabbed her hips roughly, squeezed her skin with my fingers when I entered her. I had already arrived at a state where it was too late for me to be gentle.

Yet if I had held Nerida as I had held Marguerite, there would be no marks on Nerida’s flesh.

When Marguerite lay beside me I saw the prints my fingers had left on her hips. Her blood had broken through the vessels. It had stained her brown skin red, then blue.

For no reason, except for the fact that we had been talking of my boyhood days in the mission school, I remembered a fight I once had with a French boy there. He was older than I and bigger, and he had started the fight. I had thrown him some blows, but he had beaten me viciously. I bled profusely where he had struck me. He was only bruised. Yet in the places where I had struck him, his skin turned red. The next day it was blue and I was the one who was punished.

When I saw the marks I had left on Marguerite’s skin, I remembered this, and I remembered at the same time that Marguerite had told me her great-grandfather was Portuguese.

“Tell me about Angola,” she said.

Her head was lying on my chest. I was thinking of the strokes the headmaster had cut across my back. I was cruel. “Your people,” I said, “were among the most vicious. They have put their claws into Angola like crabs and ripped the country to shreds.”

Her head barely escaped striking the metal edge of the bed rail when I pushed her off me.

Marguerite told me later that she had not missed the coldness that crossed my eyes when she first told me her great-grandfather was Portuguese. She said I had turned my back on the portraits of her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother as if they had offended me.

“My great-grandfather married an African,” she said. “What does that make her? What does that make me?”

Marguerite would ask me more questions like these. She would
stretch my world. She would teach me that life is complex: the serpent never leaves the Garden. Or the apple. Each choice we make contains its antithesis—something we hate, detest. Something that chafes against our smug view of ourselves.

I loved Marguerite. I would have to accept that I loved a woman through whose veins ran the blood of a people whose cruelty I abhorred.

I wanted Marguerite. I would have to accept that in wanting her, loving her, I was not who I was thought to be: a man to be admired for his fidelity to his wife, his Christian adherence to monogamy. A man whose reputation for honesty and loyalty was built in no small part on this: He could not be seduced no matter the temptress.

I did not want to leave Nerida. I would have to accept that in staying with her, I compromised myself, I compromised Marguerite. I compromised all that was good in the passion that bound us, in the passion that liberated us.

O
ur mission was going well. There were rumors that de Klerk would free Mandela and declare the end of apartheid by Christmas. We had good reason to believe that these were more than rumors. In October, de Klerk ordered the release of Walter Sisulu and seven political prisoners who had been imprisoned with Mandela on Robben Island for their involvement in the outlawed African National Congress that had fought so valiantly for the liberation of South Africa. Not long after that, de Klerk opened the beaches that had been banned for black South Africans and put an end to the humiliating Reservation of Separate Amenities Act that had imposed the same kind of segregation that Jim Crow had legalized in the southern states in America. My team rejoiced. I did, too, but my heart was heavy with the knowledge that my time in New York was coming to an end.

I spent most of my days and nights now with Marguerite, canceling any appointment that was not directly related to my work for South Africa. I stayed with Marguerite even on those days she had set aside for her art, telling myself she would have time enough when I was gone. She did not object. Though we had yet to speak
of that time when I would leave, she, too, had heard the good news about South Africa. She, too, knew our time was short.