Discretion (4 page)

“Margarete,” I said. “The woman Faust sold his soul to the devil to get.”

Catherine stared at me. “You read Marlowe?”

“No, Goethe.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Ah, I knew there was a reason I liked you. A man who understands passion for the flesh.”

The bird shrieked in my ears at that moment. Its cry cut through bones, filled blood vessels. I doubled over in pain and clasped my hands across my ears.

Catherine touched my shoulder.

Only one word came out of my mouth.

“Headache,” I said.

It took all my willpower to walk, not run, out of the room.

L
et me explain myself. It was not the sound of Margarete’s name that had terrified me, the trilling notes it made, like a lovesick bird, the penultimate vowel piercing the ear to bursting, the final consonant offering such sweet release as tortured lovers pine for. It was the memory it evoked, or, rather, the memory I had tried to stifle with a fantasy about Margarete, that pure vision Goethe had wrought and which I had perverted for my own needs, to serve my own purposes.

Let me try again.

I had buried a past that had tormented me. I had needed to heal a broken heart. A year before the president saved me by offering me his daughter’s hand in marriage, I was the slave of a woman named Mulenga. I was young. I was foolish. I had not yet learned to avoid that abyss from which my mother did not return. In which her lover willingly gave his life.

Mulenga was the first woman I loved, the first woman I had allowed myself to love. I met her by accident. I was leaving the schoolyard at the end of the day when one of my students stopped me to ask a question about an exam I was going to give the next day. I became so involved in explaining to him the differences in
the metric beat of poetry, tapping out lines on my hand—trochaic, iambic, dactylic—that I missed my bus. Just as I was about to cross the street, the bus going in the opposite direction from where I lived pulled up. That was when I saw Mulenga for the first time. Her beauty took my breath away.

I will be specific: the long stretch of her dazzlingly beautiful thigh took my breath away.

The buses in the village where I was teaching were old, worn-out wrecks that had already done duty in the city. Few had steps to the main platform. Passengers would grasp on to the railing at the side of the door and pull themselves up on the bus. Sometimes this was too difficult for the women and someone would lend them a hand. Mulenga did not need a hand. She was young. She was strong.

I told myself it was that strength I was admiring that day, but I knew then, and I know for certain now, that I had lied to myself. What I was looking at, what fixated me to her, was that smooth, fluid stretch of brown skin rising, it seemed interminably, when she hitched her skirt and lifted her leg to climb on the bus. Did I hope to see more? Did I think I would see her panties? I was not conscious of those thoughts, though I may have had them that day. But if I had, I was immediately put to shame by her seemingly panicked embarrassment when she realized that her skirt had been caught in the weave of the basket she was carrying on her arm, and that when she lifted the basket to her head, the skirt went with it. In what I now know was false modesty—her sudden intake of breath, her confusion, her eyes brimming with tears as she flapped her arms around trying to push down the folds of her skirt—I constructed my image of her innocence and virtue.

I ran to her aid when she dropped her basket. It was full of ground provisions—yams, edos, cassava, bananas, as well as mangoes and plantains. They rolled off the bus when the basket fell. Mulenga came down to help me pick them up. When she was ready to climb back on the bus, I put my arm around her waist to help her onto the platform. She did not object. Even today, if I shut my eyes, if I allow myself to go back to that time, I can feel the heat that rose to my neck when I cradled her in my arm.

Of course, I boarded the bus and sat down next to her. I told her I was on my way to visit a friend. I would have accompanied her to her doorway, too, had I not believed she would have found me too forward. But I could have told her another lie. I could have said, I want to help you, though the truth was that all I wanted was to be near her. I could have insisted. That basket is too heavy for you, I could have said. But she was a tall, strong woman with firm arms and wide hips. It was easy to believe her when she said she was accustomed to carrying baskets heavier than the one she had. She was distracted that day, that was all. That was why the basket had fallen. I wanted to believe her, and was all the more convinced when she told me that her parents were ill and she had to do the marketing for the family.
My saint
.

From the window of the bus, I watched her until her image receded and disappeared as the bus took me farther and farther away from her. She walked with her back stiff and erect, and her shoulders held high, but her backside swayed up and down, right and left, as if to the soundless beat of the rhythms of highlife, the music that was popular with the young those days in dance halls mushrooming all over the city. My eyes remained fastened on those hips until I could see them no more with my physical eyes, but later, lying in bed in the darkness of my room, I re-created, down to the smallest detail, the movement and roundness of her backside, and more—the curve of her breasts, the muscle stretching up her thigh, the firmness of her flesh on her arms.

I did not admit this, of course, to my conscious self when I pursued Mulenga. I always found myself conveniently visiting my “friend,” conveniently at the bus stop when she came there (from where I did not ask her) with her basket full of ground provisions and fruit, and I always helped her climb up on the bus, and I always looked out of the window until her image disappeared, and I always reconstructed in my mind, in my bed at night, the lines and curves of her body, my imagination already beginning to store the building blocks.

It did not take long for Mulenga to invite me to her house. Yes,
there was a mother and there was a father; yes, there were siblings—two boys and two younger girls, but only by months. Mulenga told me she was her mother’s first daughter by another marriage to a man who had died long ago. But I would discover months later that that was a lie. Her mother’s present husband had been her only husband. In fact, her mother did not know which of the men she had slept with was Mulenga’s father. She told her husband that lie so he would marry her. It worked. He would see in her, as I so stupidly would see in her daughter—inexperienced as I was at the time with the ways of the world—virtue where there was none.

“Mango don’t fall far from the tree,” my father said when I left his compound the second time to accept the scholarship the missionaries had offered me to the university in London. I was ungrateful, he said. Just like my mother. He had wanted me to help him till his land.

For what should I have been grateful to him? Yet there was wisdom in his words, and had I accepted that wisdom, I could have saved myself the heartache that almost destroyed me when I discovered, within a matter of weeks, that Mulenga was no different from her mother. Time did teach me eventually, though, for in time, like my mother before me, I found myself lost in grief for someone who was not my spouse.

I never saw Mulenga’s parents and siblings after that first evening when I sat with them at their table for dinner. My mother and father are well now, Mulenga told me the second time I visited her. Their fever has gone. They are strong now. Indeed, they had seemed fit that evening when I saw them for the first and last time.

And the children?

They stay with my father’s mother during planting season when my parents are working in the fields.

And why not you? I wanted to ask. Why aren’t you in the fields helping them?

But I did not ask her that. The answer was obvious. She was too refined to work in the fields. She had been to school. To the ninth grade, she said. She had already finished the sixth grade when her
mother married. She was too good to work in the fields. But good enough to do what? Mulenga’s mother had no answer to her husband’s question.

To marry a rich man, my friends said to me. But they were wrong. I was not a rich man, and yet Mulenga let me court her.

It was a trap, my friends said. “If her mother cannot find a rich man for her, she will take a university man. A university man has potential,” they said. “Her mother leaves you alone with her because she has a plan.”

I did not care. So what? I said to myself. I was in love with her. “I may marry her,” I said.

There were rumors: Mulenga is not who she seems to be. I stopped talking to those who brought me such rumors.

Yet I never asked Mulenga what she did during the day, or how it was that she was always available to me whenever I wanted to visit her at her home. If these questions arose in my mind, I always banished them with proof of her virtue: She kept her front door unlocked and allowed me to enter her house without knocking. If she had anything to hide, surely she would not have taken that risk. Then, too, she had refused my advances. She was keeping herself for her husband, she said. Why shouldn’t I have believed her? And, oh, how I longed to be that husband she had saved herself for, to stroke those firm thighs, to let my fingers climb beyond those points where she stayed my hand.

I was in the habit of coming to her house on Tuesdays and Thursdays after the end of the school day. I would take the 2:30 bus and would arrive at her door at exactly 3:00, give or take fifteen minutes for the African sense of time. I would leave at 5:00 when the bus returned for the trip to my village. I would walk directly to her house and enter without knocking. She would be there waiting for me with pancakes she had just made, and a cup of tea. We would spend the afternoon talking. This was the pattern we established.

I realize now that it was I who would spend the afternoon talking. She would simply listen, holding my hand in hers. But isn’t this what endears women to men? Don’t we love it when they hang
on our every word and look into our eyes with the kind of adulation that says, Yes, you are my hero; yes, you are my conqueror; yes, there is no one greater than you? It was vanity that brought down Lucifer, and so it was with me: the pride I took in Mulenga’s seeming adoration, the praise I secretly heaped on myself for keeping my eyes on her face and not letting them stray to the places I wanted to see and touch—her satin-smooth thighs, her soft breasts, her undulating hips. We were both virtuous, she and I—she for her determination to remain a virgin for her husband, and I for not exploiting her vulnerability. There was no one home to protect her. No one would have blamed me for taking advantage of a virgin whose parents had left her at home, without a chaperon.

Yes, I planned to marry her. In spite of what the missionaries had tried to teach me, I did not believe that having sexual intercourse with a woman before I married her was sinful, but I wanted Mulenga to know that I thought she was special. I wanted to set her apart from the other women I knew. So I did not touch her, I did not make love to her, though every nerve in my body rebelled against my determination to let honor, and not carnal desire, rule my heart.

One day I missed my Tuesday bus. Mulenga did not have a telephone, so I could not get a message to her. I assumed she would be worried, that she was pining for me. I assumed that she would thank me for canceling my Wednesday plans to visit her, and so the next day I took the bus to her house.

I walked directly to her front door. There were no signs to warn me that I should have turned back, that this time, at the very least, I should have knocked on her door. Everything seemed the same as it was on any of the other days when I took that dirt road leading to her house. The children stopped what they were doing to stare at me, but they always stopped their play to wave to me. I did not notice that this time they did not wave to me. The women were at washtubs washing clothes or standing in front of those large wooden mortar pots in which they pounded the yams for the evening meal. They did not say a word to me, but they never spoke to
me. I should have paid attention to the laughter at my back when I passed them, but I dismissed the chuckles and sudden outbursts as ordinary laughter among gossiping women.

Mulenga did not budge. She did not get out of the bed when I opened her bedroom door. She simply looked at me. “Oh,” she said, “Oufoula. But it’s not your day. It’s Wednesday today.” The man beneath her groaned. “Come on,” he said. “Give me some more. Come on, Lenga.”

Lenga
.

My friends said I had to learn the hard way. They said I was so firm in my decision, so adamant, so convinced that she was the only one for me, so committed to the decision I made to marry her that nothing and no one could have persuaded me otherwise. I had to witness her deceit with my own eyes. I had made her into a saint, they said. Not even she could handle the rare air I wanted her to breathe from the mountaintop where I had placed her. She probably hoped you would catch her, they said. I did not believe that, but I could not deny that Mulenga had not shown the slightest sliver of remorse when I caught her in her bed naked, lying on top of a naked man. She was not alarmed or afraid. She did not jump out of the bed and plead with me to forgive her.
Oh, Oufoula. But it’s not your day
. That was all she said before she pressed those breasts, the breasts I thought so virginal I would not touch them, on the chest of her hairy lover.