Discretion Read Free Page A

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 beingwilling 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 spokeFrench. 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.
    My president, who used to live outside the city, outside this Paris before our independence came, did