Discretion (37 page)

My father’s spirit rises from the earth and circles me in this place where he once lived. He loved my mother, he loved me, he tells me, he lies to me, but he understood the dangers of holding on to what he had already lost. He understood the futility. He avoided the torment.

I let myself be comforted by this thought, this lie. I had done the right thing not to fight for Marguerite, not to try harder to persuade her to stay with me. Now, I must try to do as my father had done with me. I must try to let go. I must try to free myself of the futility of longing for Marguerite, of the torment of hoping for a future with her.

I find other solace, other reassurance, on these lands where I have built my country house, that place where my mother had obeyed her father, where she married a man she did not love,
where she wept for the man she did love. I tell myself another lie that brings me false solace, false reassurance: My mother could have found happiness here, at least contentment. She was the one who brought sorrow to herself by holding on to a past she could not regain, by not letting go. She caused her own death when she left my father, when she turned her back on her home, on her family, on her son. When she walked away.

I make myself remember this. I let my mother’s life serve as a lesson to me, a warning. There would have been death for me, too, had I turned my back on Nerida, on my home, on my children—confusion, failure, as my mother’s life had been a failure.

History roots us, I remind myself. I teach myself again. History gives us sustenance, our sense of place, of time, of position in the world. Without history we are set adrift. We are lost. We cannot know who we are, where we came from, what we will become.

Nerida gives me history. I can look back into the years and find the person I am in the places we have been together, in the things we have done. In the children we have raised.

I can find myself in the bricks of my house, in the wood slats of my floor. These, too, bind me to Nerida: the trees I planted where my father’s house once stood. Nerida was with me then. She had watched when I dug the ground. The trees, the ground, the bricks in my house fuse me to Nerida, connect me to my father, to my mother, to my ancestors. To my children.

I come here to my country house where my griot sings of the past of my people and I find my place here. I know there is much here I love, much I cannot leave, much I cannot give up.

“Who else in Africa is more blessed?” my griot sings of me.

I return to Nerida refreshed, her husband again. We do not sleep in the same room, but still there are nights she admits me to her bed. I am grateful for those nights, for in the city I am afraid to be alone. Even in the daytime I seek the companionship of friends who believe I am a happy man, a contented man, a man to be envied. They—Nerida, too—are buffers between me and the pain I know awaits me at daybreak.

I go to church often now, seeking affirmation, comfort, reassurance. I hold close to my heart a sermon the minister once gave on the Book of Genesis.

“God so loved us, He gave us free will, the will to choose God or to choose evil. Which of us is so foolish as to follow Adam? Which of us would lose Eden again for an apple?”

On the holidays, when my children are gathered together around Nerida and me, I tremble for the choice I could have made, the things I could have lost, the life I would not have if I had chosen the apple, if I had not chosen Nerida, if I had walked away from her.

Nerida talks now of grandchildren. She prods our daughters and our son to marry, to fulfill her dream for them, for us. She speaks to them of the importance of history, tradition, continuity. She tells them we know who we are because we have kept our traditions, because we did not sever our links to the past.

I try to avoid the lie in her words, the contradiction. I try to ignore the hypocrisy so rampant among the élite in Africa, among the educated, among the wealthy, the powerful. They, too, like Nerida, speak of history, tradition, continuity, yet they embrace Christianity, the white man’s religion. They—we the élite condemn polygyny. We speak sanctimoniously about monogamy. But I have seen the consequences to those we once honored: first wives, mothers of the firstborn. They are now discarded, rendered useless, set out to pasture, like barren cows, to graze on brown grass. For we know, I know, that as long as we limit ourselves to one wife—
one wife at a time
—we have the blessings of Christians, we have their approval, we can be trusted by investors from the West. For we prove ourselves to be modern Africans. We prove we are not hostage to the past, to impenetrable traditions that could bind us, that could affect the decisions we make, the way we see the world.

I think this way and my cynicism engulfs me; it spreads through me like an infectious disease. Contagious. Its sickness drips over all I see, all I love. I question everything then. I doubt everything then. I put everything under scrutiny, even Nerida.

Innocent Nerida, I had once thought her, always in the dark about the truth behind the lies I told her. Now I wonder. Now I
question. Now I remember that when she first came to me, she came with a lie intended to deceive me. She knew there was a chance I would not marry her if I discovered that she had been to the university, if I knew she had a degree.

Now I remember other things: how when we were first married, when we lived in Washington, I believed she had decorated the apartment for me, to remind me of Africa; how later, in Africa, it was plain to me that the colors she had chosen were her colors, the furnishings her taste; how when she persuaded her father to restrict my work to Washington, she wanted me to believe it was my health she was worried about—the fatigue I suffered after each trip I took to New York; how now it was obvious to me it was not me she had been thinking of, but herself; it was not concern for me, rather distrust of my motives that had sent her to her father petitioning for my release; how, though I had thought I had hidden my dreams of Marguerite from her, she had known all along the truth of the nightmares that had woken me up in a sweat; how, now, though twenty-five years had passed, she could still recall an insignificant detail: a quarrel over a visit to an art gallery.

She had sent Bala Keye to spy on me. I am certain of that now. It brings clarity to the puzzle that had troubled me: Why had the president sent Bala Keye on our mission to the UN when he knew his brother disliked me, when he himself had little or no respect for him?

But the president could not refuse his daughter, he could not deny her the favor she asked of him.

Bala Keye had told Nerida about the roses, about my distraction at meetings. About my weekends away from my apartment. She had decided to come to New York to set me straight again, to put me on her course again.

She knew she would win. She believed she knew me. She knew her talk of history, tradition, continuity would rein me in, bring me back, put an end to my juvenile wanderings.

But late at night, when only the stars light the sky, when I am alone, when Nerida is deep in sleep, I ache for Marguerite, I long for Marguerite. I want to merge myself into the darkness of the
night and go to her. I want her arms around my neck, her kisses on my lips. I face the truth Nerida wants to hide from me. I am not afraid to let myself know that though humans may live without love, they cannot live without passion. That without passion, we only exist. We merely pass through life as would an animal.

On those nights I am not consoled by history, by tradition, by continuity. I am my mother’s son. I am a man first before I am an African. I am an individual, unique, before I am a husband, before I am a father.

My mother was a woman first before she was an African, before she was a wife, before she was a mother.

I am Oufoula. I have needs, I have desires. I want my needs, my desires fulfilled. I want personal happiness. I think neither history nor tradition nor continuity is worth the sacrifice of my person. I tell myself that to sacrifice my happiness is to spit in the face of God.

I do not blaspheme. There are men in the Bible whom God condemns for wasting their talent, for throwing it to the wind, for casting it on stony ground. I do not want to throw my life to the wind. I do not want to sacrifice my happiness.

On nights like these I become Faust. I would exchange all I have for Marguerite, for the feel of her breath on my neck. I would cut the bonds that have sustained me. I would set myself adrift in her arms.

Willingly I admit I had first pursued her to satisfy prurient desires. What man alive does not have traces of darkness lurking within him? Call this darkness moral turpitude; its common manifestation is almost always sexual. This darkness lurked within me, too. But my search for the incarnation of a fantasy I had created to protect myself from a woman who had spurned me did not lead me to damnation. It led me to Marguerite. It led me to the light.

I have done as Marguerite has asked me. I have obeyed her wishes. I have not contacted her. But, once, when a man I knew was going to New York, I asked him to inquire of her for me. He returned with a brochure filled with pictures of her work. He had found it in
a gallery in SoHo. He was not looking for her then. He just happened to come upon a painting of a man with such a likeness of me, he knew it was by the artist I had asked him to find.

He read a review of her work to me:
An exceptional talent. An artist who sees into the souls of men
.

She had seen into mine. She would know, if she saw me now, I am a crab scuttling backwards.

Yet life does not give this reprieve. We take the present with us when we go backwards. We must endure, too, the past beyond the past we want to retrieve. I did not want to retrieve the past before Marguerite, nor the past when I longed for her. I wanted only the past of those last weeks we had spent loving each other.

I had believed my private life would destroy my public life. Now I have lived to know the reverse. For marriage belongs to our public life. Passion, the flame that ignites the private self, endangers the public life, puts it at risk. I had been afraid to lose my public self. Now I pay for that fear with the loss of joy in my private self.

On the surface where the public can witness, my marriage is good, even perfect. My life is good, even perfect. I am wealthy. I have power. The griot still sings for me. On the inside where I really live, I am hollow. I live the life of the living dead, the life my mother refused.

Marguerite feared she would grow old alone. I fear to grow old without her.

Nerida does not give me the illusion of permanence. Once I believed it was marriage that offered this consolation, but I was young, afraid of change, afraid of what Mulenga had done to me, what passion had done to my mother. Now I know the illusion marriage offers can be a hollow one, transparent, its source often fear, cowardice, desperation. Habit.

Each day I stay with Nerida I am aware of the passing of time, of the ending of another day without Marguerite. Does this mean I do not love Nerida? I want to love Nerida. She is my wife.

But I do not feel immortal with Nerida. I felt immortal with Marguerite. From that first time we made love, when I remembered the
swans on O’Malley’s lake and felt no rage, no shame in loving her, I believed our love would never die. That we would last forever.

More and more I dream of Marguerite. I dream of what was. What could have been. I do not know how long I can live this way with dreams, with the emptiness. I do not know how many more breaths will flow through my lungs, how much longer I can exist without her.

The nights are more frequent now when I shout into the wind: “Marguerite, I am suffering.”

I hear her answer me. “So am I, Oufoula. So am I.”

Her answer brings me comfort.

I was fortunate to have an insightful editor, Anita Diggs, and a supportive agent, Ivy Fischer Stone. I had friends who offered encouragement and advice, among them Anne-Marie Stewart, Patricia Ramdeen Anderson, Norman Loftis, Arthur Flowers, and Francis Carling. Daveida Daniel typed my first draft from longhand. The Paden Institute, run by two generous philanthropists, Alice Green and her husband, Charles Touhey, and The Yaddo Corporation gave me space to write away from the distractions of my daily life. To all these good people I am eternally grateful, but none more so than to my son, Jason Harrell, who continues to be the bright light in my life.