Discretion (6 page)

When that question left my lips I was not aware that I wanted to ask it. So it is the subconscious plays tricks on us. But when it did, I knew it was the question of all the questions I had asked that night that I most wanted an answer to. But Catherine did not seem to have heard my question. Her mind was on her unhappiness, on John’s infidelity, and what she wanted to tell me about Marguerite had nothing to do with the answers I wanted: Was Marguerite single? Was she free?

“Marguerite said it is the most corrupt institution there ever was,” Catherine was saying to me now, not masking her bitterness.

So I pressed her again. “Well, is she married to a diplomat or not?”

It was by mere luck she did not hear the anxiety in my voice.

“No, she’s not married. What difference does it make? She lives in New York. She knows about corruption.”

She was unmarried, living in New York
.

Now I wanted the evening to end. I wanted to get away from Catherine, but she was not finished with me.

“Marguerite said the diplomatic service is so corrupt, it does not know it’s corrupt.”

I became defensive. “Are you saying I’m corrupt?”

“No,” she laughed, a dry laugh. “You are on your way to being corrupt. Very soon you’ll become ambassador from your country and people will bow to you as they do to John and they will call you Your Excellency. Heady stuff. It leads to corruption.”

A waiter passed. Catherine called him to her and asked him to refill her glass.

I do not drink. Sometimes, especially at social occasions, I regret this decision, for without the stupefying haze of alcohol, one sees things one may not wish to see: the private selves of people that
they expose indiscriminately when alcohol invades the brain and removes inhibitions. Old wounds are laid bare—hatred, fear, lust, rage, longing. I am embarrassed by the intimacy.

“I don’t think you should drink this,” I said. I took her glass from her hand.

She snatched it back. “Don’t do that again or you’ll regret it.”

I withdrew my hand.

She became chastened by my acquiescence. “I was complimenting you, not criticizing you, when I told you you’ll be ambassador soon,” she said. She stopped me when I began to object. “You’re the most intelligent and honorable man I have met since I have been here. Your country very much needs you, and your president knows what I am saying is true. But to become a successful diplomat you will have to learn how to lie.” She looked over at John. “John is a successful diplomat.”

“Is that what you think diplomats do?”

“You can’t make any deals for your country unless you lie.”

“Diplomacy,” I said, “is the art of persuasion.” I believed that was what I believed.

“Diplomacy is the art of lying so it appears as the truth even to the teller of the lie.” She laughed again. “That’s what I think will make you able to survive, Oufoula. When you lie, you’ll believe you’re telling the truth. From the core of your being, you’ll think you haven’t lied.”

She was managing to disturb me, to ruffle my calm exterior. I glanced at John. He was saying something to the woman, about the drink in his hand, I thought. She leaned over, put her lips to his glass, and grimaced when the liquid reached her tongue. They laughed. It seemed a private joke. Her husband frowned.

“I won’t lie,” I said.

“Then you won’t be ambassador,” she said. “But I predict you will be.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do in the future. I may return home after this drought crisis is over.”

“There you go. You know that is not what your father-in-law plans for you, or what you want. See, you have learned to lie
already. Lying, my dear, is not always by commission. Mostly, it is by omission. That is the art you’ll perfect. At all cost avoid the truth. Never commit yourself. Do not make decisions. Allow others to make your decisions for you. Always insinuate. That way no one can hold you responsible for saying anything. You will learn soon how to withhold information, how to say and not say. You’ll learn the art of innuendo and nuance. You’ll learn to smile when you do not want to smile. To make love when you do not want to make love. To be a husband when you no longer want your wife.”

A tear rolled silently down her cheek. She swiped it away with the back of her hand, but another one followed. Her unhappiness so evident now, the tragedy of her marriage, made me realize again how fortunate I was. There was peace in my home. Harmony. Nerida was waiting for me. My lovely, beautiful, faithful, loyal Nerida. My wife. How much happier was I than Catherine, how much more contented than John. I did not need to forage, to hunt. I was lucky. All that I wanted, all I could have hoped for was there, waiting for me. I offered Catherine my handkerchief. She turned away from me, threw her head back, and drained her glass.

I went to John and told him his wife was not well. I told him he should take her home and he should do so immediately, and I pulled him away from the woman who was now looking unabashedly into his eyes.

After John left with Catherine, I ran to my car and sped home as fast as I could, Catherine’s predictions weighing heavily on my heart:
A husband when you no longer want your wife
. But I wanted my wife. I wanted Nerida. I repeated those words like a prayer, as if they could protect me.

I made love to Nerida that night washed with gratitude to her for being my wife, desperate to prove Catherine wrong, to prove myself loyal, true. A man who stood by his word. Nerida was amazed by my passion and counted that moment as the time I fell in love with her. She has told me this many times since and I have never disputed her, for even then I was well on my way to mastering the art of diplomacy.

Perhaps I lied when I told Nerida that night that I loved her, but
I did not know I lied. How could I when there were no words to convey what I could not understand? No words to express the yearning, the nagging feeling of incompleteness, the feeling of wanting more, needing more—an awareness I did not want of a truth I could not avoid: that though I loved Nerida, I did not love her as I wanted and needed to love a woman. That though I did not want to betray her, I would betray her; that though I did not want to lie to her, I would lie to her. I would reach for more though I had much. For my soul had already reached out to Marguerite and I wanted her. And the folly of it all, the mystery, was that I had not even met her.

S
hortly after Catherine predicted that my father-in-law would have plans for me, he sent me to Washington, D.C. It was a major step forward in my career, and I was excited about the opportunity to put into practice the diplomatic skills I had acquired in Geneva for the good of my country. Yet I must admit that I was keenly aware that I would be in the country where Marguerite lived. I knew, too, for my friends had told me, Washington, D.C. was less than a day’s drive to New York City, where Marguerite had an apartment. I did not know her phone number or her last name and I could not ask Catherine for either without subjecting myself to her questions, to her suspicions. More than that, I did not want to risk the chance that Catherine would bare her soul to me again and force me to peer into the intimacies of her marriage.

In time, however, it ceased to matter that I did not know Marguerite’s last name or her phone number. In time this intense desire I had to meet her began to subside. In time I ceased to feel the thrill that coursed through my blood when, in brief spates of what surely was nascent insanity, I believed my fantasy lived. In time I ceased to repeat in my head
Margarete, Marguerite
, merging one name into the other until only Marguerite remained.
Marguerite
.
This happened partly because I enjoyed my work, partly because I liked my life with Nerida, but mostly because I wanted to believe what my friends said of me: that I was a happy man by nature, a man who was never sad, a man who rarely seemed burdened by troubles.

I had been in Washington two years when Catherine wrote to me. During those two years I had had a son, Ayi, and Nerida was pregnant with our second child. I had all I wanted. So I made an effort to put Marguerite out of my mind. Yet when I read Catherine’s letter, so filled with her unhappiness, the thought above all else that came to me was that at last I had an excuse to call Marguerite.

I would meet Marguerite two days after I received Catherine’s letter. She would invite me to dinner at her apartment when I called her, but I would not go. I did not trust myself to be with her alone and after dark. I wanted the full protection of the daytime when I saw her. I wanted to be surrounded by people. I did not know if I could stop myself from saying to her words that I had spoken to her only in my dreams. I could not trust myself to remember that my dreams were not reality and that in reality I had a wife I loved, a wife who loved me. Above all I would not go to her apartment because I did not know what she looked like and what I would do if she was, as Catherine had said, more beautiful than Goethe could have imagined a Margarete for his Faust. I did not know how I would react if she did not like me. For I knew, within minutes of meeting her, it would be clear to me whether she did or not.

Catherine was right: even then in my early days in the diplomatic service, it had begun to dawn on me that the cardinal rule of my profession was never to speak the truth directly. More than once I was reminded that words can never be recanted. That truth can be conveyed in other ways, subtle ways where the message is communicated without risk of commitment, where the speaker can deny, object, claim that that was not what he meant when what he meant becomes a liability for his country.

I was learning to speak with my eyes, my tone of voice, my body.
Each movement was calculated to add, to detract, to emphasize or deny what my mouth spoke. I was beginning to know who were my enemies and who were my friends by the way their eyes focused on me or shifted away from me when they talked to me, by the expansiveness or the niggardliness of their hand movements. Soon I was able to detect a laugh that meant disapproval, a smile that warned me of the futility of attempting to negotiate an agreement.

I knew, then, that when I met Marguerite, within a short time after talking to her I would know from the way she held her fork, from the way she tilted her head, from the way she smiled or frowned, or cried (for the news from Catherine that I was bringing to her was not happy news) whether she liked me or not. And if she did not, I did not know what I would do, finding myself alone with her in her apartment with the dreams and fantasies of many restless nights crushed to smithereens with one look, one glance, one turn of her body.

I am told that people who are always surrounded by people are insecure, that they fear rejection. I do not think that this is true for me. I do not need confirmation that people like me or admire me. I know that I am liked. My wife, Nerida, loves me.

Perhaps initially I was useful to my president in the diplomatic service because of my skills in English and French. But I have long ceased to be an interpreter or a trainer of interpreters. Now I am called upon by my country and by other countries in Africa as well to negotiate agreements and to settle disputes. I am told I inspire confidence in others and put people at ease. But there are many who dislike me (Bala Keye, my wife’s uncle, foremost among them), still not enough to make me so insecure that I fear rejection. Yet this talent I have for making people like me was in its incipient stage, undeveloped when I met Marguerite, and I was afraid she would reject me, that she would not like me. And I wanted her to like me.

Long after I met Marguerite, she told me that it was not insecurity but rather my natural propensity for caution that made me take such care about when and how I would meet her for the first time. I am a man, she said, who calculates the risk he would take. Catherine
had told her that if I were Adam I would never have taken the apple Eve offered to me. I would have looked around Eden and calculated what I would have lost.

“Catherine said you could have been the savior of mankind,” Marguerite said bitterly. “There would be no original sin in the world. No need for God to sacrifice His only son.”

But Catherine had not known me well enough, though she knew me well enough to be right when she commented, after I told her how I met my wife, that I took no risk when I married Nerida. I took no chance on love. Like my mother, I married the person who was offered to me, the woman who would secure my future.

But my mother did not marry her husband willingly, and when she did marry, she paid with her life for her obedience to tradition, her loyalty to family. I, too, like my mother, was in love with someone else—Mulenga—but I married Nerida willingly. I did not die for the woman I loved. Instead, in time, I grew to love the woman who was given to me to be my wife. I grew to love Nerida.

Perhaps, though, Catherine knew me better than I knew myself in those early days in Geneva when I was beginning my career in the diplomatic service. Perhaps I am a natural-born diplomat. I have avoided making decisions. I have allowed decisions to be made for me. I had not always done so.