Discretion (7 page)

I had chosen Mulenga in spite of the fact that none of my friends approved of her. I declared my love for her openly and withstood the ridicule of those who disliked me. It is to her I am indebted for the invaluable lesson I learned of keeping my own counsel, of not committing myself to any act, deed, or word until I was certain of the results I wanted.

The decision I made to marry Mulenga when I was a young man and in love was the last I made without some assurance of a positive outcome. It was the last time I made a commitment to anyone or anything that had not been presented to me, the facts laid out beforehand. I had not sought out Nerida. I had not pursued a career in the diplomatic service. Both had been presented to me.

If I feared meeting Marguerite for the first time by myself, it was because I feared she could change all that, that she could awaken
in me a passion I had long since suppressed when I cried like a woman, not because I had been betrayed, but because in spite of my betrayal I longed for the woman who had made a cuckold of me before my friends. Then, like Ulysses, I needed someone—something to lash me to stillness from desire.

I feared being alone with Marguerite when I met her for the first time, it was because in spite of the schooling I gave myself, I needed Margarete to live and grow in my imagination, to feed my fantasies. This fictive woman, the lascivious fantastications I had spun from her innocence and forced surrender, protected me (so I thought) from the passion that could ruin me. The passion that ruined my mother.

Margarete, or what I had made of Faust’s Margarete, ruled my nights, she inhabited my dreams. She kept me from surrendering to Mulenga. Then I heard her name in the name of a woman in the flesh.

Now, faced with the reality that I could meet her, I feared I would prove myself indeed my mother’s son. I would willingly seek my doom to be in the arms of my lover. Nothing anyone would say or promise, no matter what the price, would dissuade me. It would take only the first step and I would keep on walking, as my mother had done, never stopping until all breath had left my body.

It was the first step I feared. I would meet Marguerite in the daylight, protected, if not by friends, then by strangers. I would not take that risk of meeting her in the flesh, as I met her in my dreams, alone, and in the night.

T
his is the letter that gave me the excuse to telephone Marguerite.

I broke off reading. “Not so for my father. Not my father,” I whispered to myself. How raw that ache remained in me! And as suddenly as it returned, it vanished and I refocused my eyes on the letter before me.

I memorized the number greedily, and everything else Catherine had written to me vanished, disappeared, became unimportant, insignificant in the angles and curves of those ten blue digits. It was as if a boulder had suddenly been lifted from the memory that in recent times, content with Nerida in Washington, I had managed to suppress, and I relived at that moment the same thrill and fear I felt when Catherine told me, at that unfortunate cocktail party, that Marguerite lived in New York and in a fit of irrational desire I made that impossible leap from one world to the next.

For what man made of flesh and bones, of spirit, too, but not only, could calm the rising rivers of blood pounding through his
veins if he had the chance to meet in reality the sexual fantasy of his nocturnal emissions?

Marguerite!
“And she is more beautiful than Margarete,”
Catherine said.

I could call this Marguerite. I could speak to her. I could hear with my ears the voice of the woman who spoke to me only through my dreams. I could see her. I could touch her.

I tried to steady myself, to remind myself that I did not know her, that I had no need to know her, to meet her. I had a wife. I wanted no one but my wife. Marguerite was an illusion, a figment of my imagination.

It was not enough to dissuade me. Perhaps I had gone mad, but how different was I from the rational man who goes to his therapist once a week to recapture dreams I could recapture with a telephone call, a visit?

I reasoned—I let reason beguile me—that when I saw Marguerite, when I spoke to her, I would finally put an end to the incomprehensible yearning that still persisted even when I made love to Nerida, a longing for a thing I could not see or touch or name. Perhaps, I convinced myself, calling Marguerite would strengthen my marriage, rescue me for Nerida alone.

I
do not consider myself a callous man. I can sympathize with the pain others feel. I am moved when they weep. I am happy when things go their way. I dance at weddings, I visit the sick. I cry at funerals. I am a kind man. I put money in the tin cans beggars proffer to me. When I lived in Washington, D.C., my colleagues used to laugh at me because I did this. They told me I wasted my time, that I was a fool to succumb to beggars in a city where begging can be as much a man’s job as diplomacy was mine.

It was the wrong comparison for them to make. Begging was what I did for a living and because it was, I knew too well its cost to a person’s dignity. Though in the diplomatic service we tried to compensate for that loss with the airs we put on, the trappings we surrounded ourselves with, the titles we gave ourselves, the obsequiousness we required from those who served us, it was never enough to dull the humiliation when we were rebuffed, particularly when the thing we begged for was, as so often was the case, a matter of life and death for our people.

So I did not refuse beggars. I could not have a man beg me for food and deny him, or a woman beg for my help and ignore her. And yet, ultimately, that was what I did to Catherine. I tore up her
letter. I never called her. I never wrote her. I never saw her again. I never heard anything more about her except through Marguerite.

I told myself I had done the wise thing by destroying Catherine’s letter and not doing as she pleaded with me to do. There were many reasons I used to justify my actions. I reminded myself that first of all it would not have been manly for me to chastise a man for his treatment of his wife. Women, I believed, belonged in that arena. They were the counselors, the censors of the unfaithful, the healers of the brokenhearted. Men had to avoid that quicksand of empathy, for men knew that when they stepped on it they could be swallowed by emotions that could take them off course, make it impossible for us to make hard decisions when such decisions had to be made. Men did not have the luxury of yielding to emotions as women had. Men had households to support, women and children who relied on them for food and shelter. A man could not squander his future in the abyss of emotions. Not a manly man.

For in those days, not yet made wise and human by my love for Marguerite, I categorized everything. I put everything in a place, I gave everything a function, a role. For me, then, the private self did not belong in the world of the public self. I was convinced that not to separate the two was to court chaos, to invite disorder and confusion. A man could not know his own thoughts when the private self intruded into the public self or the public self into the private self. He could not know if he was persuaded to think the way he thought, to decide the way he decided because of his feelings for this or that person, his concerns about this or that interest.

My ancestors were warriors. I believed they were victorious because they knew their own thoughts. If they had entered wars each time one of their men had suffered a broken heart, and not when it was the right thing to do, the wise thing to do, our people would not have survived. We would not have been, as we now were, among the richest and most powerful of clans in my country. It was because of my forefathers that I had a place that one day my children could call their own.