Discretion (5 page)

Perhaps it stretches credulity to find commonality between the names
Mulenga
and
Margarete
. Say the word
Mulenga
. It does not sound like
Margarete
; it does not sing into the air like
Margarete
; it does not bring to mind the call of a lovebird.
Mulenga
. It is a ponderous word. Say it and you feel the weight of those last two consonants which that richest of all vowels, that final
a
, cannot redeem.
Mulenga
. Say it. The breath leaves the lungs and falls heavily earthwards. But say
Margarete
. The breath flows as light as a feather upwards. To the heavens. This is perhaps why Goethe named his virgin Margarete, why Faust would dream of her.
Margarete
.
Faust, too, longed for redemption. He lusted for the pleasures of Hell, but it was in Heaven he hoped to spend eternity.

It was by mere coincidence that I was reading Goethe when Mulenga, that false virgin, deceived me. In my sick state of mind at that time when all virtue was vice in disguise, all goodness suspect, my tongue would linger on the lightness of the word
Margarete
only to deride it, only to mock the lie it concealed: She was no different, this pure woman Goethe created to tempt Faust with her sensuality, from that heavy-worded
Mulenga
—no,
Lenga
. So I created a fantasy to save myself, to protect myself from the abasement that more than ten times I would have inflicted upon myself when I would have gone back to Mulenga’s house to beg her:
There has to be some reason. Tell me, Mulenga, was that man raping you?

But a woman who is being raped does not press her breasts against the chest of her rapist. She does not say, when the man who loves her, when the man she claims to love, discovers someone in the act of plundering her virtue,
Oh, Oufoula. But it’s not your day. It’s Wednesday today
.

This is how I saved myself, how I bound my feet to keep myself from taking that bus to Mulenga’s house, how I stopped my mouth from saying her name, how I washed her clean from my memory: I replaced her with a woman who bore not the slightest resemblance to her, except she had presented herself, as Mulenga had presented herself to me, as a virtuous woman, a woman who could not be moved to surrender her virginity outside the bounds of matrimony. Faust had longed to screw his Margarete, and I had longed to screw Mulenga. In the end, Faust got his wish. The virgin surrendered. But I, believing that my saint could not be corrupted, restrained myself in honor of her.

A virtuous woman is a virtuous woman. She cannot be corrupted. But a lascivious woman, even if honored by a man who respects her—by a radiant angel, it would not matter—will eventually seek her true nature. Mulenga would leave my arms to prey on garbage. I should have known she was not who she seemed to be.

For days I locked myself in my room in the missionary house. Over and over again I read the tragedy of Faust until I converted
his Margarete, transformed her into the woman I was now certain she was—a woman of seeming virtue, a deceitful, lascivious woman who would open her legs for any man. Every night within the walls of this fantasy I had constructed, I made wild and passionate love to Margarete, stopping just at the point where I knew she was about to reach orgasm. I would withdraw from her then and spit out my seed on the bedsheets, turning my back to her hysterical pleadings.

I take no pleasure in recalling these times. I am ashamed of them. But the truth is that this was how I was able to erect a barrier to shield myself from a reality I could not face: I created a fantasy. It would both feed my need for revenge and satisfy those yearnings for that false virgin I once adored, yearnings that came at night no matter how hard I tried to dismiss them.

I was liberated the day I met Nerida. I was freed from Margarete’s prison. From that day I dreamt of her only sporadically, and sometimes, for long stretches, never at all. For this, too, I was grateful to Nerida. When her father offered her to me, I knew that at long last I had met a genuinely virtuous woman. I cannot say I came to this conclusion based on anything Nerida said or did. I was a cautious man when I met her. I had been taught caution by a specialist of deceit. I came to this conclusion solely on the reputation of Nerida’s father. It was said he was not a man to leave things to chance. He took few risks, and when he did, he calculated his risks so that almost always he got what he wanted. He got what he wanted from me. It was based on this, then, that I believed Nerida to be virtuous. I was not wrong to think this way. The bedsheets were stained on our wedding night.

After my marriage to Nerida, I no longer needed to protect myself from Mulenga. I no longer needed Margarete. Indeed, there were times I quite forgot that I had ever thought of her. I was caught off guard when Catherine said her name, perhaps because at that moment John’s indifference to Catherine had caused me to think about the cruelty of men, not about the cruelty of women. Margarete’s name slipped through the cracks of my consciousness, and I held up a shield to ward her off:
Margarete. The woman Faust
sold his soul to the devil to get
. But Catherine would remind me:
Ah, I knew there was a reason I liked you. A man who understands passion for the flesh
. Her words shrieked through my ears, seared through barriers I had erected, and laid bare a truth so unbearable, so shameful, that the nerves in my head stood on end and glowed like live wires.

I
would meet Catherine again at another cocktail party. It would be the last time I would see her. By the time we parted, her eyes were bloodshot red from her tears, for I had made her pay for finding me out, for guessing the reason for my sudden, panicked flight from the room that night. But she would get her revenge. Before she left, she predicted a future for me that frightened me. Frightened me all the more so because I knew that in spite of what she said, I would do nothing to prevent it. The danger she wanted to warn me about, a danger she said was endemic to the profession I had so blithely accepted, was a danger I could not avoid, would not avoid, for the lovebird had already sung to me. I already longed for Marguerite.

I waited until the party was coming to an end before I spoke to her. I had been avoiding her. I knew she wanted to talk to me, but each time she approached me, I walked away or became so engrossed in a conversation that it would have been difficult for her to interrupt me. I was afraid of her, afraid she had made a connection between my sudden headache and her last words to me, between my reaction to her friend’s name and Margarete, the name of a fictive woman. That she had seen deep in my heart and discovered
the darkness there, the darkness that sometimes seeped out under the cover of night, when I was in bed and safe, Nerida next to me breathing heavily, no one to witness my shame: Mulenga, a ghost from my past, the woman I loved before I found peace again with Nerida. Mulenga, who had trapped my heart, who had made me a prisoner of my passion, who had so bewitched me I forsook my friends for her and made enemies of those who loved me, those who tried to warn me of the suffering she would cause me. Mulenga, the scourge of days before I learned that passion could kill, before I understood that passion had killed my mother. Mulenga, from whom I tried to rescue myself with an illusion, an obsession with a woman who never lived, never existed but on the pages of a book. Mulenga, who, in spite of everything, I continued to desire. This was the memory I had wanted to deny, I wanted to pretend I had forgotten. The lovebird shrieked in my ears to mock me.

It was late; the cocktail party was beginning to wind down when guilt finally overrode my fear and shame. I had treated Catherine badly. John had abandoned her again. I could see her slumped down in a chair, forlorn, her glass hanging limply from her hand. I went to her.

“So, finally,” she said to me when I approached her.

I believed I was in control. I thought I had the upper hand, so I spoke to her without the slightest consideration of consequences, not the least mindful that she could find my tone offensive, condescending.

“Finally what?” I asked her.

“Finally you have the courage to talk to me.”

I sat down next to her. “And why should it take courage to talk to you?”

“You tell me. It certainly seemed as though you didn’t want to talk to me.”

“I didn’t get a chance until now,” I said.

“And have you come now because you feel sorry for me? You pity me because I am sitting by myself all alone?”

“How does one feel sorry for a beautiful woman?” I asked her. That night she was wearing red, a color I often thought made women
look gaudy. Nerida knew my taste and did not wear it, but it suited Catherine, more so that night when her eyes looked sadder than I had ever remembered.

“So you came to flatter me? Is that it?”

“I came to sit next to you.”

She laughed. “Careful. Don’t make it a habit. People will talk. You and me sitting alone again? The people who come to watch you may not like it.”

I brushed off her remark. “How are you, Catherine?”

“Why didn’t you return my call?”

“Nerida gave me the message. I was fine. Alka-Seltzer cleared up my head.”

I had answered her thinking I did not need protection, having persuaded myself that it was a trick of my imagination that had led me to believe she could have discerned the truth that lay beneath my spontaneous outburst:
Margarete, the woman Faust sold his soul to the devil to get
. But she had been waiting to punish me, to make me pay for not returning her call, for ignoring her, rejecting her. While I walked around the room scoring points with the older diplomats with my grand gestures of deference to them, my eyes averted from any possible suggestion of intimacy with the women, she had been preparing a question for me.

“Was that all that needed clearing?” She leaned toward me. “She’s not Faust’s Margarete, you know.” She pressed her hand on my knee and locked her eyes on mine. “She’s Marguerite.” She spelled out her name. “And she’s more beautiful than Margarete and kinder. She won’t make a man give up everything for her.”

I hated her at that moment, for I was certain she knew my secret, that she had discovered me, that she knew what Mulenga had done to me, how I had needed a fantasy to save me.

My voice was flat when I answered her, when I asked her the question I knew would undo her. “Isn’t she the one who told you that when John joined the diplomatic service it would be the end of the two of you?”

I should have known that evil always ricochets. That the bullet you send off always throws back sound to shatter your eardrums, to
wake you up at night, if you have a conscience, if you are human. It was not long before I was withering with remorse from the tears that pooled in Catherine’s eyes and the answer she gave me, knowing the words she said were true and there was nothing I could do to make them untrue, I who had forced her to face the truth again.

“Look at him,” she said. “Do you see him?” Her eyes traveled in the direction I had turned my head.

He could not be missed. John was a handsome man, the kind of handsome that worked like a magnet. Wives were drawn to him. Husbands feared him. He exuded the sort of confidence and self-assurance that sparkled from men who knew they had this effect on others. He was the son of a black father and an Irish mother. He had inherited the best parts of both: a swarthy complexion (the blending of two skin tones—pale and dark), his mother’s penetrating green eyes and reddish brown hair, and the fierce brow and chin I had admired on men I knew from the Caribbean. It was hard not to be mesmerized by him.

“He’s having an affair with her,” she said.

I knew what she was talking about. I had seen it, too. A quite ordinary grouping at the bar: a husband and wife in conversation with John, except Catherine must have noticed, as I had, the many times the woman leaned toward John, or the times he stroked her bare arm when her husband was distracted, either refreshing his drink or greeting someone who was passing by.

“Oh, Catherine,” I tried feebly to dismiss her fears.

“A woman knows,” she said.

Marguerite would say those same words to me years later and I would think of my wife and remember Catherine. Remember how easily she had read the secret signals that passed from the woman to John. Remember that I, too, knew when John’s fingers trailed down the woman’s bare arm that they were lovers.

“You and John make a perfect pair,” I said, my voice faking insouciance.

“Liar. But then that is what the diplomatic service teaches you to do. Marguerite was right to warn me.”

She said my beloved’s name again, though then, of course, I did
not know she would be my beloved, but when she said it, my heart raced in my chest and I feared the return of the lovebird.

Irritated for succumbing to a feeling that was so absolutely irrational, that could have no possible basis in fact, I shot out at her: “Your friend Marguerite doesn’t know a thing about the diplomatic service. Is she married to a diplomat?”