Discretion (13 page)

“And do I get a prize for that?” I asked her.

She kissed me. “I love you,” she said.

Her answer was not enough for me. I had to ask my question again. “And are you jealous of me? Of the time I spend away from you?”

She knew the real question I was asking. “Oh, Oufoula!” She put her hand on my forehead and smoothed away my furrowed brow. “You have no need to be jealous. You know I am always with you.”

That was not what I wanted. I wanted her to say that she could not live without me, that nothing in her life mattered to her more than me. That when I was not with her, she spent her time dreaming of me.

“What I know,” I said, nursing my hurt like a spoilt, overindulged child, “is there are many days when we are apart.”

She became serious. “Those separations do not matter. We are never apart. You should understand that. You were born in Africa. You know our spirits can travel. You know that we can put ourselves wherever we want at any time. Nothing can prevent us, not people, not things, not distance.”

I had heard that sort of romanticized view of African beliefs before. Mostly from black people outside of Africa who were desperate for an identity, a past that took them beyond the brutality of slavery. But I had heard it, too, from white people who needed to reassure themselves of their superiority. They made us their barometers and measured their success by our failure: our failure to reject the mystical, our failure to base
all
our truths on the tangible, the seen, the scientific. For both these people, black and white, Africa had to remain in the bush. Their sense of self, their identities, depended on that fantasy.

I smiled to hide my irritation. Marguerite found my smile condescending and lashed out at me.

“Maybe you should have read Soyinka. Maybe you need to read
Death and the King’s Horseman
. Even though the son of the Horseman was educated in England, he wasn’t so brainwashed that he denied that his people had the power to move their spirits.”

She was chastising me, and I became contrite. I decided to put aside my cynicism and listen to her.

“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me about
Death and the King’s Horseman
.”

“I saw the play, here, in the city,” she began. “White people began walking out even before it began. The drumming made them uncomfortable. I think they were scared when those masked men came up the aisles. The ones covered in straw. You know who I mean?”

“The Egwugwu,” I said.

“Yes.”

She was pleased I was listening to her, that I could give her the African word she needed. She forgave me now. I had proven I had
not forgotten my past. “Well, in the story, the king’s Horseman must will his spirit to leave his body so that he can prepare the way for the king, who has died and now must live in the world of the dead. It takes a while for the king’s Horseman to do this not because he cannot, but because he will not. Everybody knows that if he wills it, he can make his spirit go to where the king is. Everybody expects him to do that—the people in his kingdom, his wives, his children. Even his English-educated son.”

She looked sternly at me. I had the presence of mind to look properly chastened.

“The son packs up his bags to return home when he hears that the king is dead. He knows that his father is dead, too. That he had willed his spirit to be with the king.”

I understood what she wanted to say to me through this story. I did not need her to speak the words.

“That is what I do when I am not with you,” she said. “I will my spirit to be with you. I am never not with you.”

My guilt deepened. She loved me. I had practically badgered her for this admission. But could I say the same? Could I say she was always with me, every time I was in bed with Nerida? I had not known how much she loved me until then. I had not loved her as much as I loved her then.

Marguerite would teach me other lessons, lessons about integrity that I could not allow myself to take to heart without jeopardizing the relationship I had with her. She never stopped trying to find ways to remind me that my profession was a profession of compromise. Some event would make the news involving a diplomat, and she would say to me: “I wonder what lie he had to tell to get what he got for his country.”

I would try to convince her that compromise was not a bad thing in itself. “If what we want is good for the majority,” I would say, “then it is worth it if a minority suffers.”

“Only if that minority is not made of flesh and blood,” she would respond. “No compromise is good if people suffer, even a single person.”

She had definite views on capital punishment. “It dehumanizes
us all,” she said. “Human life is too sacred, even the life of our worst enemy. We lose our dignity when we fail to acknowledge that. We bring ourselves down to the level of the murderer when we take his life. No, lower than that, for we take his life without passion, in a cold, calculated way, with injections or electric wires. It’s even more disgusting when we have the priest and the doctor there—one to save his soul and the other his life when our intention is to have neither occur.”

She was adamant about the importance of truth. Lies, she said, always hurt the person they are intended to deceive, if not at the beginning, then at the end of the relationship.

I was beginning to be more and more afraid that she would discover the lie I had not articulated. I did not know which terrified me the most: that she would leave me because I had not told her the truth, or that she would leave me if I told her the truth, or that I would have to leave my wife if I told her the truth. That last I knew I could not do because though I loved Marguerite with every fiber of my being, I loved Nerida, too. She was my wife, my friend, the mother of my son. Sister from my homeland.

It was Nerida I was thinking of and the life we had in Geneva and now in Washington, a life I loved, when I said one day to Marguerite that I used to think I was a happy man. I said it not because I was unhappy with Nerida but because every day I spent with Marguerite I was discovering how much happier it was possible for me to be.

“And weren’t you always a happy man?” Marguerite asked me.

“I thought happiness was wanting what I had. I know better now.”

We were in bed. We had just made love. Perhaps it was the ecstasy of our lovemaking that had made me reckless, forgetful of my customary caution.

“And what was that?” She sat up in the bed and looked at me.

“What was what?”

“What you had? What used to make you happy?”

She was jealous. Hadn’t I longed for this evidence that she loved me? But that longing was a double-edged sword: I could destroy
myself with the answer I gave her. “You,” I said. “You make me happy now.”

I tried to pull her down to the bed with me, but she wriggled out of my arms.

“I mean before me.” She turned and faced me.

I kissed her.

“What made you happy before me?” She pushed me away.

“My life before you seems dull now,” I said.

“And yet you said you were happy.”

“I did not know what happiness was.” I ran my hand through her hair. She stopped me.

“I want to know what made you happy before me. Tell me.” She was speaking softly now, but I could hear fear quivering beneath her words. She knew. She had not been indifferent to those times I was away from her.

“The same things that make me happy now,” I said. “Only they make me happier because of you.”

She shut her eyes, but before I could bring her back to where we had been, locked in each other’s arms until ecstasy had led me to make my foolish statement, threatened to ruin me, she opened them again. “Besides me?” She probed me for more.

“Besides you?”

“What makes you happy besides me?” She was looking steadily at me. Lie, her eyes seemed to say. Lie.

“My job,” I said. “I get to travel. Meet people like you.”

I think she saw the stop sign then, the one held in front of her. I think she sensed the danger in going any further. She opened her eyes wide and flung back her hands in mock surprise. “Meet people like me?” she asked.

“Meet you.” I lifted her hair and nuzzled the back of her neck.

She brushed me away. “Just like a man.”

But it was a halfhearted rebuke. The crisis had passed. She was rebuffing me in jest, playing with me.

“Just like a man to find happiness in your job.” She buried her face in the pit of my belly.

I joined her, laughing, pretending machismo. “And don’t you forget
I am a man.” I turned her on her back and climbed on top of her. “Don’t you forget it!”

Our lovemaking was no different than it had been before. We kissed the same way, held each other the same way, reached orgasm the same way. But something had changed. Something had intruded. Someone. Nerida. I felt her unspoken presence between us, my lie suspended heavily between Marguerite and me. Marguerite’s lie, too. For I knew that she knew that I was hiding something from her. That it could not have been my job that had made me happy. My job did not mean to me what art meant to her. I had told her how I got it. How it was a series of circumstances that had led me into the diplomatic service. I had not sought my position. It was given to me. I was simply a man who was in a certain place at a certain time, an African man who spoke two European languages. I had thought to do no more with those skills than to teach.

But Marguerite asked no more questions, and now I knew the answers to mine. Though she would say she did not mind the long periods of time when we were apart, because she had her art, though she would insist that she did not need to call me, because her spirit was with me, she was afraid. She had lost her nerve. She who claimed she could handle the truth, she who found no room for compromise, for half-truths. She did not want to know what I did when I was not with her. She did not want to know with whom. She wanted to shield herself, to shield us from the answer she sensed could hurt us.

Marguerite and I entered a silent conspiracy on that day. It would eat away at our happiness one nibble at a time. It would erode the confidence we had in each other. It would force me finally to reveal the truth to her to save us both.

I
had never seen Marguerite draw or paint. When I arrived at her apartment, her easel would always be covered with a cloth or stacked against the wall. But the next time I came there, she had left a drawing uncovered on the easel. It was different from the others I had seen in the restaurant. She had drawn only the head of the woman, not the entire body, and the style she used was not realistic. I barely recognized nose, lips, and chin from among the angular lines that shaped the woman’s face, but the eyes struck me. I felt pulled to them. They were large and mysterious and seemed to contain a wisdom that had been garnered over centuries. Yet I knew they were not the eyes of an old woman but of a woman not long past her teenage years.

“Who?” I asked Marguerite.

“Why should there be a ‘who’?”

“She reminds me of someone.”

“She should,” she said.

I came closer to the drawing. “You?”

“Yes, me. It’s a self-portrait.”

I studied it. “Yes, yes. I can see that.”

“Do you like it?”

Like? I would not have used such a term to describe its effect on me. I could not say whether I liked it or I did not like it. I found it at once familiar and disturbing. A likeness of Marguerite, yes, but of someone else I had known.

“Does it look sad, like you thought the others were?” she asked when I did not answer her.

“No, I wouldn’t say sad.” Then I remembered. The year before my mother walked to her death, she had taken me to the shed behind my father’s hut. I had seen faces like this one there, mysterious and all knowing, laced with cobwebs. I had returned to the shed twice when I was a teenager, before my father traded the wood carvings for some brass pots that he had taken a liking to. Many years have passed, but I have not since witnessed any thought or feeling that had worked itself on a man’s or woman’s face that was not there in that shed, sculpted out of wood. “It reminds me of the masks of faces we make in Africa,” I said to Marguerite.

She seemed pleased with my answer. She smiled and kissed me. “I would have thought you would have said, like the copycats Picasso drew.”

I did not know what she was talking about. Then she told me that Picasso and the Cubists had copied their style from the African masks. “Now everybody has forgotten their source,” she said. “They believe Cubism began with Picasso.” She removed the drawing from the wall.

“Here,” she said. “It’s for you. So you will remember me when I’m not with you.”

It was another step in our conspiracy of silence, our agreement not to give voice to the thing that could cause our unhappiness. But it was a more fragile step. More dangerous. She was giving me a likeness of herself, a likeness not so easily identifiable, but a likeness of a woman nonetheless—a portrait of herself. She wanted me to take it with me, to hang it in the place where I lived. She didn’t say that. She said only,
Here. It’s for you
, but I knew what she meant. We had not spoken about where I lived. She had never asked me to take her there, but she wanted her portrait there. She was daring me to hang it there. To put it where I slept.