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 herletter. 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.
No, I reminded myself when I discarded Catherine’s letter, when I decided not to answer it, it was the Europeans who destroyedeach other for the love of a woman. I thought of the ten years of war between Greece and Troy over the love Paris had for Helen; how Sampson let his people be devastated because of his obsession with Delilah. My people went to war over land, over disputes about patrimony. They traded goods when one of their own was humiliated by a woman from another tribe: thirty virgins for the one that betrayed their countryman. A hundred pounds of yam to compensate for the one who could not produce a son.
It would be war I would be entering into if I spoke to John as Catherine wanted me to do. I knew John. I had witnessed him plot revenge against a person who harmed him. There was no one I knew whose heart was more full of malice than John’s.
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 herletter. 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.
No, I reminded myself when I discarded Catherine’s letter, when I decided not to answer it, it was the Europeans who destroyedeach other for the love of a woman. I thought of the ten years of war between Greece and Troy over the love Paris had for Helen; how Sampson let his people be devastated because of his obsession with Delilah. My people went to war over land, over disputes about patrimony. They traded goods when one of their own was humiliated by a woman from another tribe: thirty virgins for the one that betrayed their countryman. A hundred pounds of yam to compensate for the one who could not produce a son.
It would be war I would be entering into if I spoke to John as Catherine wanted me to do. I knew John. I had witnessed him plot revenge against a person who harmed him. There was no one I knew whose heart was more full of malice than John’s.
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