DISCRETION

When I was a child no one envied me. I was born the son of a mannish woman and a womanish man. Who in Africa would envy me such a fate? My mother, I was told, was so beautiful that men traveled far distances for a glimpse of her face. I do not know if this is true, but I have heard that when she obeyed the wishes of her father and consented to marry the man who would become my father, her suitors began a fast that lasted days. And there was one, who, unable to conceive of life without her, put a razor to his throat. My mother never loved my father. But love was not a prerequisite for marriage in my mother's time. That she may have been in love with the man who killed himself because he could not bear to live one more day with the knowledge that she shared another man's bed was of no consequence to her family, and, thus, it was required to be of no consequence to her. I was just five years old when she left my father for good. No one said she left him because she did not love him, but the women whispered among themselves that my mother wept in secret uncontrollably on the days when it was her turn to sleep in my father's hut. My mother had left my father once before. It was on the eve of her wedding. Her brothers found her, hours later, a mile away from the village where the man, ten years her senior, whom it was rumored she knew (and that word was used maliciously in its biblical sense), was discovered that morning sprawled across the floor of his hut, his clothes stinking of stale palm wine, the cut on his throat so fine, so miniscule, that one would have missed it entirely if not for the stream of blood that had since thickened near his neck and formed a dark red pool, almost black, around his head like a halo. He was a surgeon, perhaps not called so by doctors in the West, for he was not trained in the ways of Western medicine, but a scientist nonetheless. A specialist in the art of slicing and stitching: repairing the human body. There was no doubt that he knew when he put his razor to the vein in his neck carrying his lifeblood freshly pumped from his heart that one movement of his hand, expertly applied, would stop the breath in his body. It was a deliberate act, a suicide. The wonder of it was its cause: that love could have such power, that it could lead a man to his finality! To the villagers' way of thinking, any man, supposing he was not sick or lame or disinterested in women, could easily replace one woman with another. A surgeon of the reputation of the dead man would simply have had to make his desires known and he could have had any woman of his choice, perhaps not one more beautiful than my mother, but certainly one with a dowry far richer than any her parents could have afforded. In the first five years of my life I heard this story a hundred times, so it seemed to my budding imagination, which, when it blossomed later, would be the cause of much of my anguish. The women would tell each other the story about this man and my mother as if the mere retelling could shed light on a mystery that baffled them, the most puzzling part of which was that my mother, who was to be married the next day, would jeopardize her future and that of her family for a dead man. For my father was a wealthy and powerful man, far wealthier and more powerful than the surgeon who lived in one of the six villages that had been won in wars by my father's ancestors, fierce warriors known for their brutality, and, paradoxically, their compassion. When they conquered a village, they took for themselves everything of worth: the beautiful women whether married or not, wood carvings that pleased them and the artists as well, whom they would commission to sculpt likenesses of themselves. I remember seeing these carvings when I was a child. My mother took me one day to a discarded hut at the back of my father's compound. Before wNunez, Elizabeth is the author of 'DISCRETION' with ISBN 9780345447319 and ISBN 034544731X.