Discretion (2 page)

It was not a difficult achievement. My father was still a valuable prize for the most desirable of women. Fathers brought their daughters to him; he did not go seeking wives. They knew he could provide for their daughters and employ their families on his farm. And the women were not burdened with my mother’s tragic sensibilities. They did not need the pretext of love to consent to his offer of marriage. They were practical, cognizant of their dependence on him, and so were grateful. When my mother left my father for the second and last time, they, like the women in our village, pondered no more on the reason for her flight that first time, on the night before her marriage: Someone had put a curse on her years ago and it had not worn off.

My father did not seem to care when my mother left, so I was told. He shrugged his shoulders, opened up the palms of his hands
and, with an insouciance bred from a laziness that comes from having little to desire, he said, “Let her go. She’ll return.”

I knew, although I was a boy, that it would not have mattered to him, either, had she taken me with her, and for years I carried a deep resentment toward my mother for abandoning me. This anger I harbored released such poison in me that I refused to allow myself to feel any tenderness toward her even on those nights when the natural desire of a child for its mother brought me dangerously close to tears.

Sometimes, though, when missing my mother caused me such pain I could not sleep for days on end, I allowed myself to find relief in the fantasy that my mother’s decision to leave without me was not hers to make. I thought then, on those dark nights, that it was her brothers who had forced her to come to this conclusion, convincing her that they would have been left to the mercy of a man whose forefathers had been known for their brutality. My father, they would have told her, would not have rested until he found me.

But in the light of day I faced the truth. I knew my mother’s family laughed at my father behind his back. I knew they called him the worst of names: a womanish man, a man who had lost the will to fight.

Yes, he would have let my mother go. He would not have hunted her down, even if she had taken his son with her, his eldest of three male children, a direct descendant from a long line of warriors. But it was also true that my mother’s family would have been relieved that she had left me behind. Even though he was a womanish man, my father still owned the land they lived on, and I, given the natural course of inheritance, would one day own it all.

I did not see my mother again when she left my father’s compound that fateful evening. She was dead within weeks, and it would take me years after that, when I was a man, already with a wife and children, to understand why the decision she made to leave my father was no decision at all, no deliberate act dictated by the brain. I would come to know she had no choice. I would
discover how the loss of one’s love could defeat the will to live, how it could eradicate all joy, all purpose to existence, how life could become unbearable if one could no longer touch the skin of the person you loved, hear her voice, kiss her lips; if one no longer had the happiness that came from those inexpressible moments, those intimacies of sharing one’s soul with one’s beloved, knowing one was understood, believed.

My mother, I am convinced, died when her lover died. She lived a living death with my father until she could live no more. I believe that when she left, she left to die. She left without clothes or money or food or water. She woke up one morning, handed me to my father without a word, turned her back on him, and walked steadily out of his compound, not once hesitating, not once looking back, though I was told I screamed and begged her not to leave me.

Those who saw her said she had put a spell on them so that they would not be able to stop her. But I believe they did not want to, or they were afraid to. They said she looked like a woman who had already become a spirit. She was walking to that other world where the man she loved was waiting for her.

Years later I would know well what they meant. For I, too, one day would walk that road, my spirit parched for a woman who was not my wife, for Marguerite, my passion burning my heart to ashes. I, too, would become a ghost though I wore the trappings of a man: skin covering bones, flesh containing blood.

My mother was a skeleton when they found her, her flesh glued to her bones from starvation, her eyes bulging from their sockets. People came from far and wide to watch her die.

Naturally, I was not embraced by my relatives in my father’s compound. My mother had dishonored her people. She was a mannish woman, a woman who took it upon herself to follow her mind. (No one stopped to consider it was her heart, not her mind, that she had followed.) Most of all I was not embraced because it was believed that my mother had been cursed and that that curse could be passed on to anyone who sympathized with her. When the Canadian missionaries offered to take me to their boarding school
in the part of our country the French had colonized, my mother’s people advised my father to let me go. Once again my father shrugged his shoulders, opened the palms of his hands, and said: “Take him. He’ll return.”

When I was twelve and had been with them for five years, the missionaries decided I was bright enough to go to high school, and so they sent me to their main school in the English colony. My father did not protest. My mother’s family did not protest. They believed that if I spent more years in a city, I would turn my back on the hardships of farming on an unyielding land. They had already ingratiated themselves with the mother of my father’s second son, who was next in the line of inheritance, and had made themselves indispensable on my father’s farm.

I, too, did not protest. I did not want to return to my father’s farm. My mother’s suicide and her abandonment of me still lay heavy on my heart, and because I had now learned from the missionaries that taking one’s life is an abomination to God, I was also filled with shame for my mother and for myself. I thought myself the most unfortunate child in the world. Not only did I not have a mother, but the mother I once had had sinned against God and was condemned to burn for eternity in the fires of Hell. And why? Because of love. It was for me, then, when I was young, when life had not yet schooled me, had not yet humbled me, the most shameful, the most dishonorable, the most incomprehensible reason for taking one’s life.

And yet I was not the most unfortunate child. Even friends who know my story, my beginnings as the son of a mannish woman and womanish man, say the silver spoon was still firmly planted in my mouth. “That Oufoula Sindede,” they say, “nobody can take his silver spoon out.”

Perhaps that is true, for the missionaries arranged for me to go to the University of London, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature. When I graduated, I was not only fluent in my native tongue but also in two of the most important languages of European diplomacy. I spoke, read, and wrote French and English.
I knew the writings of the most important men and women of letters from England and France. This knowledge of their literature and their language would serve me well, for I was destined for a career in the diplomatic service. Though no one envied me when I was a child, I would be envied then by men older than me, wiser, and, perhaps, more worthy of the prestigious positions I would hold in my lifetime.

I
am told that I am a handsome man. My skin is the color of black plums. It is pitch black, but my blood shows through it and gives it a richness many admire. At fifty-five I still have a young man’s physique and vigor though my back is bowed slightly at my shoulders. It is a habit I developed from talking to men shorter than me. An instinct for diplomacy I had even as a teenager when I had already reached a height few in my part of the world ever attain. Though at first I bent merely to hear more clearly, it soon became evident to me that others saw this simple act of lowering my body toward theirs as an indication of my generosity. For in my country, as in Western countries, physical height is often mistaken as a sign of virility. My seeming modesty, my willingness not to flaunt an advantage that could bring into greater relief this particular area of sensitivity in others, gave me a reputation for kindness before I had done anything to earn it.

My hair is beginning to turn gray now, but it is doing so slowly, powdering my thick nap of tight curls sparingly, but more densely along my temples. I consider myself fortunate that my hair did not gray early, for, like many of my colleagues, I could have been persuaded to dye it. Like physical height, black hair reassures a man of
his masculinity. But had I dyed my hair, I would have regretted it. I perspired profusely when I played tennis, soaking the collars of my shirts with my sweat. On more occasions than I care to remember, I have been witness to the embarrassment of my partners who discovered too late, when we were off court, having cocktails or engaged in some diplomatic social activity, that the rinse they had used to dye their hair had stained the back of their collars.

Tennis, it did not take me long to discover, is the game of the diplomatic world, a world in which I have spent most of my adult life. The tennis we diplomats played, not the gladiatorial spectacles one sees on tennis courts today, requires
sprezzatura
, an ability to make the game seem easy, to mask the effort needed to achieve that ease, and to conceal one’s anger and jealousy when beaten by a rival. When I discovered this word
sprezzatura
, I liked it because it applied so well to a skill that was essential to possess in my profession, where appearance counted for everything.

You wore a white shirt, white pants, white socks, and white shoes when you played tennis. You sweated in the sun chasing after a little yellow ball. When the game was over, you shook your enemy’s hand. You returned to your camp, apparently unscathed, your white shirt, your white pants, your white socks, your white shoes as clean as before. Damp with perspiration, yes, but unstained. Nothing to betray where a blow had left its mark.

The collars of my shirts remained unstained even when I played tennis into my fifties. I cannot say the same for my colleagues, friends or foes.

It has also been said of me that I am a presence when I enter a room and that people tend to gravitate toward me. Though I always hope that they do this because I have earned their respect, I have to admit once again that my height eases the way. Nevertheless I have learned that this reputation I had for attracting the attention of others, deserved or not, was no small factor in the decision of my president to appoint me one of the youngest ambassadors from any country in Africa.

I was thirty-two then. Perhaps not all that young for today’s times when it is fashionable for young boys to win favor by being
willing sycophants to those they neither like nor respect. Of my many faults, I do not hold that one: I have never served a man or a cause I did not believe in. I have never licked the boots of any man, even when it would have served me well and would have served my country, too.

I am not proud of the latter. Its source is the same hubris that was my undoing when I looked in the face of my good fortune and, like Adam, still reached out to pluck the fruit that was forbidden. When, though I had everything—wealth, power, the respect of my countrymen, a beautiful wife, three loving and successful children—I risked my Eden for the taste of Marguerite’s lips on my mouth, the scent of her hair in my nostrils, the warmth of her skin against mine.

Perhaps at thirty-two I was too young to appreciate the uniqueness of my good fortune. Even by today’s standards, it is not usual that one gets to be named ambassador at such a tender age. I was certainly naïve then. I underestimated the envy my appointment engendered. In my foolish innocence I did not realize that I had made enemies of men older than me who had waited for years in patient service to my president for this honor that had been bestowed upon me. I did not know there were serpents in my garden watching my every movement, waiting for that moment when I would slip and they could help me fall. Above all, I underestimated Bala Keye, my wife’s uncle, who would be there when I wrapped my fingers around the forbidden apple. Who would save me when I did not want to be saved.

Luck was in my favor, as it would be in years to come. I was in the right place at the right time. I had the right skills. I had returned home to my country after graduating from university, but I did not return to my father’s village. The missionaries offered me a teaching job in the elementary school that I had attended as a child. The president of my country, at fifty-one a fairly young man himself for his position, had come to the school for a meeting with officials from the ministry of education in France and I was asked to be his interpreter.

Though the official language of my country is French, it was only so because the colonizers were French, for very few of us spoke
French. I suppose the French liked to keep it that way so that we would not know how much they were stealing from our country. They had created a sort of tropical Paris in the city, with boutiques, art shops, restaurants, and bars that fed their illusion of power and security. Nearby, these
blancs
, as we called them, had built themselves a residential compound—houses of stone and our finest timber, manicured lawns they watered even in the dry season, swimming pools always brimming with blue water, and gardens full of roses, their petals withering under the sun in spite of the everlasting mist sprayed over them like fine-spun gauze.