I said I was.
“Then I must give you a serious answer. I can never marry a foreigner again.”
Without thinking, I said, “I’ll become an American.” As soon as I said it, it seemed so obvious a weapon to use against her that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before.
“You are serious!” Carol stressed the “are”.
“I am.”
She shook her head slowly. She smiled. “Sorry, Eugene. I can’t.”
After that, I brought up the idea of our marriage as often as I could. I promised to be as good a father and husband as Jason had been. I was always careful not to say better. But each time I asked her to let me take the South African’s place, I hoped I underlined a little more the fact that he had abdicated it and abandoned her. Without letting her know, I applied to become an American citizen. In a separate letter, which I was not required to submit with my application, I emphasized my academic and professional accomplishments. I had to reveal that I was divorced since I did not want to risk perjuring myself. But I was not required to say why I was divorced and I was not required to mention Ekua or Beatrice. I was bound only to reveal that I had been married and was now divorced. I promised to be a good citizen, above all, to be a role model for those Americans who had too few examples of successful men and women to imitate and learn from. America and I, I wrote, could have a mutually benefiting partnership. I could be as useful to her as she could be useful to me. Within a month, I received a letter citing the exceptional services I could offer my new country and granting my request to become its citizen.
Carol was at my side when I stood in the cavernous old armoury full of other would-be citizens, and held aloft my miniature American flag and put a hand over my heart and repeated the pledge of allegiance to my new country. After the spontaneous burst of applause when the ceremony was over, after the laughter and the happy crying and the congratulations offered and joyfully received by complete strangers, because we were now Americans, I invited Carol to a bar for a glass of champagne, and she accepted, and I asked her again to marry me, and her eyes, as I had hoped they would, opened wide with astonishment.
It had been my precise intention so to surprise her. For months I had been working secretly to refine the angry and execrable accent Janice had provoked me to in the cafeteria into an instrument that might convince Carol to marry me. For months I had fallen asleep listening to talk shows, interviews, congressional hearings and debates that I had taped. For months, in the privacy of my apartment, I talked aloud to myself and listened to myself on tape after tape after tape. I had proposed to Carol, this time in an accent so flawlessly American that Janice herself, if she had heard it on the telephone, would not believe that I had not used it all my life.
Carol seemed shocked, put her hands to her face, bent forward and placed them, still cradling her face, upon the table. Then she raised her head, looked at me steadily and began softly to laugh.
“You sound,” she said, “so white!”
I was too shocked to answer.
My hand was on the table. She covered it with one of hers, laughing and shaking her head and looking into my face as if I were a child who meant well but still had a lot to learn. I wanted to maintain my dignity. It had not occurred to me to imitate a mode of speech that would identify me, in America, as someone to be despised. But, watching Carol’s amused face, I felt more and more foolish. I began to think that my strategy had been flawed and that I could not retain my dignity and, at the same time, make Carol want to marry me.
I pretended to be hurt. But I was also reflecting that since I had not been able to have her by guile; that since I had tried, unsuccessfully, to meet the conditions she had set for marriage to her, now she would only have herself to blame for whatever happened between us.
She said, “I will. Yes, yes, I will marry you, you poor man!” She squeezed my hand. She seemed unable to contain her amusement.
Then she said, smiling, “But, first, you’ll have to learn how to speak.”
CHAPTER SIX
It was not long before I was the possessor of two distinct American accents. When I spoke with the accent Carol wanted me to use, the instant recognition that I had once easily dissipated with my foreigner’s accent persisted now on the faces of my listeners, and intensified, as if my accent confirmed I was the familiar object they had recognized. When I was not with Carol, I used my other American accent – the one she had laughingly described as white – because I had worked equally hard to obtain it, and spoke it so well, and did not want to give up using it. Then the look of recognition on my listeners’ faces was followed by one of puzzlement. I was recognized instantly by my listeners as American, but I did not speak like an American, who looked like me, was expected to speak, and that seemed to baffle them. People wanted to know where in America I had come from. I was perverse and lied to them. I gave them the names of places I had heard or read about. I familiarized myself with details about the places in America I mendaciously told my curious listeners I had come from to make my lies believable. In this way, I began to know the country. I became more knowledgeable about it than most of its bona fide citizens.
But the private satisfaction I derived both from the initial puzzlement on the faces of my listeners, and from dispelling it with lies about my origins as an American, could not offset the unwelcome change I felt taking place within me every time I spoke as Carol wanted me to. Unable to dispel the persistent and now intensified look of recognition on the faces of total strangers, I felt I was becoming, indeed, that I had already become, someone else, someone other than myself, whom I did not know and whom my listeners expected me to acknowledge I had become. It seemed to me that I could have no name to offer as my own that my listeners did not already know, no personal past to reveal with which they were not already familiar, no private experience that was uniquely my own to interest them with: that my past, therefore, was no longer important and I must give it up; and my sense of myself as individual in America was unimportant, too, and I must allow myself to be deprived of it.
I tried to protect myself. I reminded myself that what my listeners saw, heard and reacted to was not real, was only a pretence, a masquerade, a device intended only to fool Carol and enable her more easily to want to marry me; and that, deep within the unseen heart of my performance, manipulating and deceiving my listeners, I was safe from them.
I could not feel safe for long. My private sense of myself could not withstand the constant public assaults upon it. Every time I opened my mouth and spoke as Carol wanted me to speak, and endured the recognizing looks of dismissal or presumptuous familiarity from complete strangers who thought me their brother, I felt more and more that I had become the American that, for Carol’s sake, I wished only to seem. It occurred to me, then, that Carol had outmanoeuvred me; that, for her sake, I had foolishly given up something that was useful, even precious, to me in America – my foreignness – and exchanged it for something useless that had no power to protect me.
So, when I was with her, I spoke the way she had taught me to. But when I was not with her, I began again to speak with my foreigner’s accent. I noticed all over again – but this time with anger instead of relief – how much it had the power to protect me. As if I were really an American researching what it meant to be a stranger in his own country, I watched the initial recognition of me as local product disappear from the faces of my listeners when my accent revealed to them that I was a stranger, an alien, a man from another country. However, at the very moment that I seemed to escape from the presumptions of my listeners, I felt, bitterly, more than ever appropriated by them.
The make-believe America I was pretending to be citizen of became real for me then. And its ideals which, Carol at my side, I had solemnly sworn to uphold, became real, too – and important. I was American. I had taken my new country’s oath of allegiance. I had sworn to love it and honour it, to die, if necessary, for it. I should joyfully be proclaiming in my new country’s acce
nt that I was its citizen. Instead, I found myself calculatingly projecting in public the image of a man shaped by, and clinging to his past in another country.
Each time that I did so, I despised myself a little more. Each time that I lied to my fellow countrymen about my relationship to them, I felt that I abjured our common citizenship and insulted and dishonoured our country. Each time I pretended I was a foreigner, an alien, a man from another country, so as to escape from the contempt of my countrymen, from their ridicule and their fear, or from the unwarranted assumption that I was the long lost brother and ally they had been searching for, I saw myself as betraying, selfishly, merely for my personal wellbeing and comfort, our country’s ideals. I felt increasing contempt for these acts of betrayal and, increasingly, contempt for the person I was who committed them.
I no more wanted to have to endure my self-contempt for masquerading as an alien in my own country than I wanted to feel that I existed only to satisfy the social and psychological needs of those who perceived me as their countryman. But self-contempt, private, and known only to myself, was infinitely more tolerable than the feeling that I could no longer affect the perceptions of me by others and that I had to submit myself to their ideas about me. What is more, playing the part of stranger in America was no longer as simple as it had once been; I felt I no longer had an appropriate stranger’s accent to resort to.
Self-conscious now each time I used the English accent I had appropriated from Sarah, I saw how much I had projected with it, for my American listeners, the strange image of a man formed by, and belonging to a past, not in Africa or the Caribbean, but in Europe. I understood the curiosity I had aroused in America with it. In London, the surprise of those whom I sedulously aped had been less candid, less frank and open; there, supported always by Sarah, I had pretended not to notice it. Now, retrospectively, I acknowledged the smug, understated, slightly amused condescension that had often accompanied the compliments from people who saw themselves slavishly imitated by someone such as I, who was so obviously different from them. Now I, who had once thought of England as my home, was embarrassed by what my earnest acquisition of the language of the “best” of the English, their social manner and forms of dress, and their notions of themselves, revealed to me of my mistaken and foolish assumptions about my and my children’s places in the world. I could never use Sarah’s upper-class English comfortably again.
I longed for a foreign accent that would not draw attention to myself, one that, to my listeners, would seem appropriate for a man like me, and would establish clearly for them that, since I was not a local product, I could have come only from one of the other ex-slave colonies of the New World or from backward and undeveloped Africa.
But I had given up the lilting accent of the Caribbean in order to acquire Sarah’s aristocratic English accent and had not bothered to learn Ekua’s African-inflected English well enough to speak it convincingly. There was, now, in America, only my American accents available for me to use.
I spoke less and less in public, and to strangers only when I was compelled to. I stared back out of a blank face at them. I was often curt, not infrequently rude. Wary of being betrayed by Sarah’s upper-class English, I trained myself to speak slowly. I initiated no conversation that I was not forced to initiate, asked no question I did not have to ask and answered only if I could not avoid doing so.
One day, waiting with a group of people for the light to change so I could cross the street, I heard someone close to me say, “Sir, could you please tell me what time it is?”
I paid no attention. I felt a nudge and turned to see a tall, thin, young man looking through oversized dark glasses at me. The glasses were not large enough to cover the ugly birthmark on one side of his face. His suit looked new. A red and white patterned tie stood out correctly against his solid light-blue shirt. He looked, even with the angry blemish on his face, like a confident young executive on his way to or from the office.
He said politely, “Could you tell me the time please, sir?”
I did not answer. I looked at him blankly as if I had not heard what he said. He smiled and raised his left arm in front of him and pointed to his wrist showing whitely under the cuff-linked sleeve of his expensive shirt. I smiled and exposed my wrist to show that there was no watch on it. Then the light changed to end our little pantomime. We crossed the street and went our separate ways.
But for his hair, the colour of his skin and that livid, ugly blemish on the side of his face, he might have been me starting out, as I had confidently then thought, my new, secure life in England. And, in that split second it had taken me to smile at his assumption that I was deaf and dumb, instead of making me angry, he had made me think of a time when I had not been reduced to such bitter and resentful silence in public. It made me understand how much, irreversibly, I had already been transformed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Carol and I were married one hot afternoon in July in the city courthouse before two of her anti-apartheid friends. Selwyn and Paul did not attend. Selwyn’s company would not spare him, and Paul was in West Africa performing at the inauguration of the region’s first classical concert hall which, he wrote, was even more magnificent than Vienna’s Musikverein.
That night, as Carol and I consummated our wedding, she began to moan.
Melodious and drawn out, it seemed to emerge from ever more deeply within her, to rise and rise, and soar in the hot room as if it would never stop. There was a look of anguish or exaltation on her face, which moved frenziedly from side to side. Her eyes were closed. Suddenly, it seemed to me as I watched her face and listened to that sound, that it must be as unbearable for her to have to sustain it as it had become, for me, intolerable that it should end and I be deprived of the pleasure of listening to it.
But it stopped. Carol gasped several times as if there was not enough air in the hot room, then opened her eyes, a smile on her face. I buried my face in the space between her breasts, felt her hands caressing my back, thought of Jason and felt intensely jealous of the South African and tried to raise my head, as if I might see on Carol’s face a memory of him. Carol, her hands behind my head, kept my face between her breasts.
“Don’t move. Please!”
I didn’t move.
I thought of herself and Jason together, and for the first few months of our marriage, it was for me, in Carol’s hot apartment, as if she, Jason and I were always together. I felt increasingly that I shared her, that I would always share her, and, within a week I could no longer keep the South African to myself. At first, Carol laughed, said I was too jealous and did not answer my questions. But as my questions continued, she let me know – tactfully, then more and more bluntly – that it was most unpleasant for her to have to listen to them.
Naturally, I promised not to mention Jason again. Once or twice I was even able to keep my promise and any questions about Jason to myself.
But, by now, I was obsessed with the South African. My questions about him persisted. Carol began to find excuses for not making love to me. She had a headache, it was too hot, she was tired! Yet she was spending more and more time speaking on the telephone to her anti-apartheid friends.
We quarrelled!
Then, one night, when she would not let me get close to her in bed because she wanted to sleep and I was keeping her awake, I pummelled her with questions about herself and the South African.
Carol sat up, put her hands to her face and seemed to carry it painfully down to her lap. She said, “I can’t take this much longer. If you don’t stop, I’ll have to leave. For my own sake, I have to protect myself.”
I was furious that she should have chosen to speak of leaving me rather than answer my questions about Jason. I had become the American citizen she wanted me to be and could not understand how she could allow that South African, an ocean and a continent away, to come between us. But I tried to placate her. Told her I was sorry, said I was as sick as she said I was, and promised to consult one of my former
study-group colleagues, who were all now practising physicians, whilst I was at least a year behind them in becoming a psychiatrist.
The next morning, she was already up and speaking on the telephone when I awoke.
“You bet,” I heard her say, “they’ll feel at home here. They shouldn’t miss their South Africa too much.”
I got out of bed and entered the living room. The day’s paper was spread open on the table, and I read the headlines: “WHITE SOUTH AFRICANS ALLOWED IN BY CONGRESS”. And in smaller type: “VOTE CALLED HUMANITARIAN”. I heard Carol say, “This will put back the country one hundred years!”
In the early days of our marriage, when I was able to keep Jason to myself, she had seemed to like my kissing her breast through her bra. Carol, at the telephone, was in panty and bra and I went up to her and did so. She frowned and turned away from me, saying into the phone, “They’ll be comfortable here, all right, and stay as long as they want… stay as long as they want. It’s a shame,” she added. “They’ll all have passports. They’re not refugees like Jason.”
I said, “Carol!”, left the newspaper and the chair and went up to her. She waved me off with one hand and with a finger of the other hand to her lips, and a stern face, ordered me to be quiet. So I tried fondling her breasts beneath her bra. She frowned and pushed my hand away. It was as if I was her slave and she, my mistress, and it was inconceivable that a man like me could be in love with her. I remembered Sarah.
I said, “Sarah never refused to let me fondle her.”
Carol speaking to the telephone said, “I have to leave. I’ll call you later.”
She slammed the receiver down and turned to me. “Don’t you dare compare me to that white bitch.”
I said, “That white bitch never refused to make love to me.”
“To you and a lot of others,” Carol said icily.
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