The Happy Marriage (19 page)

Imane broke into a smile and looked even more beautiful than the first time he’d seen her. She remained silent and then said: “Until tomorrow, then.”

XXI

Casablanca

November 20, 2002

We are God’s police. People suppose that when they die all their difficulties are solved for them. It is not as simple as that.

—the angels in black suits to Liliom, when they come to take him to heaven

FRITZ LANG
,
Liliom

On that morning, the Twins had helped him into a bathtub filled with warm water and left him alone with his thoughts. Speaking in Arabic, he told them: “Leave me alone for just an hour, I want to take advantage of the heat and the silence to listen to my bones.” Whenever he used to come back home from school he would find his mother lying on a couch in the living room and she would tell him: “I took advantage of your absence to listen to my bones!” That expression always made him laugh. How can you even do that? Where would you put
your ear to listen to them? And what would they have to say? What if those bones started to fidget, play hide and seek, or exchange courtesies? They would simply go back to their rightful place. The warm water was helping to relax those bones, even though it was his muscles that were the true beneficiaries of that.

He loved those peaceful moments where nothing disturbed him. On that day, he started thinking about Ava again, beautiful Ava, the woman who’d left an indelible impression on his forty-year-old self. They’d managed to slip away for a few days to a magnificent hotel in Ravello. They swam, spent hours talking about books and films, ate simple dishes, drank good wine, made love several times a day, and shouted their happiness from the rooftops like children who’d been freed from all constraints. In the evenings, they would take a warm bath together and she would massage him with some restorative oils, light some candles, and tell him: “I love you, and I’ve never loved anyone like this before.” He would reply that he couldn’t find the right words to express how he felt. Instead, he used colors, or stars whose names and histories he knew, told her about films she’d never seen or operas she’d missed. Sometimes they’d been so happy that they’d started to cry, because they knew it couldn’t last, that reality would eventually catch up to them, especially in his case, since he was cheating on his wife but didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it. Whenever he spent time with a woman who was simply his friend, he never thought about cheating on his wife; this was the first time in his life that he’d been so passionately in love with someone, and he no longer belonged to the woman he loved. He’d given himself over to Ava wholly and utterly, and he was happy about it.

This love affair had completely revolutionized his style of painting. It had left him brimming with ideas and he’d wanted to put them all into practice as quickly as possible. He’d made some sketches, scribbling the names of the colors in pencil, but most of all he felt that this happiness, this love, this passion, which he’d long looked for, would nourish his creativity and help to illustrate it.

On his return to Paris, the painter had locked himself away in his studio and spent weeks working in a feverish state of excitement. Ava had come to visit him, look at him, admire him, kiss him, and bring him fruit and wine. They hid away, living in fear of being discovered and their love being shattered. She had wanted a child but he had put off that notion without directly telling her no. She was thirty years old and wanted to become a mother with or without him. This fueled their first dispute. She realized that he was incapable of leaving his wife, that he was afraid of her carrying out the reprisals she’d threatened, and that he wanted to try to reconcile the opposing forces in his life. Ava was more self-assured and braver. That applied to his wife too. He wanted to keep the two women in his life at arm’s length from one another. It was his most detestable character trait: the desire to please everyone, to be friends with everyone, avoid all conflicts, be a mediator, and he always struggled to avoid making choices, so that he’d never have to cut anyone off. Apparently, he preferred to endure a faint but lasting ache over an intense pang of pain, even though the latter would be short-lived. He hated fighting. He’d never understood the concept of power or those who fought to the death trying to attain it. It just didn’t interest him. He’d never left a woman, it was always women who got angry with him and left him. He always tried to remain friends with them, and unfortunately for him he usually succeeded. He would be happy to see them again and occasionally resumed his former relationship with them. He was pleased with the ambiguity of these situations and how flexible they were, even though deep down he knew he couldn’t keep that artificial and unhealthy balancing act going forever.

The painter had kept Ava’s love letters locked in a safe to which he alone possessed the combination. He would occasionally pull them out and read them, just like a teenager. He told himself that they gave him the strength he needed to paint.

The road of regrets is strewn with promises and reflections. A love lost in the embrace of the night, a love drenched by rains concealed within the clouds, a love that becomes a most exalted pain, a faint star that digs its grave besides those of lovers who were ruined by the long wait
.

I went to the Centre Pompidou this morning and spent a long time looking at the only painting of yours exhibited among other contemporary artists. I was very proud. It was the painting you were finishing around the time we first met. I remember how you told me: “It’s a strange piece, a harbinger of happiness to come, even though the colors aren’t happy!” This painting exudes a kind of energy that borders on dread. Do you remember how you told me that you thought dread exercised a tremendous hold on your body and mind? I quoted Kongoli to you by way of reply: “She was just like me, incapable of committing suicide, and so she tasted death throughout her life.”

This may seem strange to you, but that sentence truly summed me up before I met you. Today I’m going to go out and enjoy my life, you are a part of my life and my life is a part of love. Love and its flowers: desire, laughter, sweetness, abandon, the act of sharing; there are also thoughts, the gold button/buttercup
.

You’re my love, my everything, my joy
.

He’d kept everything, including the last letter she’d sent him after they had broken up.

I’m happy to know you’re busy painting. I have faith in your high standards of dedication, which you must see as urgent and all-encompassing. I miss you. I know how much you loved me, I never doubted that, just like I can never forget that you didn’t know how to choose us. I’m all yours, a tender memory, sweet and smiling. I continue to share the great emotion that will bind us beyond the reckoning of time
.

The emptiness of my night sometimes overwhelms me. I’m growing up, but I’m trying not to become too old. I snuggle up inside words. I wait for the flower to bloom, I become acquainted with my pain. Sadness has settled at the bottom of my soul. I’ve withdrawn, unable to step further into the light, afraid of the shadow that will come to block it out. I remember your shut eyelids. I stroke your face, slowly, lengthily
.

He’d also sent her letters, as well as poems, cheerful drawings, caricatures, and occasionally even painstaking, meticulously detailed drawings of flowers. She’d kept them all and guarded them jealously. She scolded him whenever he was late in answering one of her letters. “So, we’re being lazy this morning?”

She was a romantic and her life had been neither easy nor carefree. A girl who’d been wounded at every turn in life and who kicked her feet in deep waters whenever she was about to hit the bottom. Then she would resurface, fighting with all her might, propelled by her need to love, thirsty for life and happiness.

The painter had forbidden himself to feel any regrets because it would serve no purpose. He would tell himself: “Regrets and nostalgia are merely the trappings of our weakness and helplessness. They are lies that we camouflage with words to soothe us and help us to sleep. They make our defeat seem less cruel.”

He hadn’t known how to choose her. He’d had his reasons, but what good could possibly come of revisiting that happy period of his life? Sometimes he tried to picture what his life might have been like if he’d divorced his wife and stayed with Ava. The scenarios he conjured were worthy of a horror film. He pictured Ava as a disloyal, malicious, and insatiable wife … no, he stopped watching that film. It was impossible. Ava could not have had such an evil doppelgänger.

The painter knew he’d thrown away the opportunity to have a
real life, he’d missed out on the woman who had meant the most to him. For a long time, Ava’s ghost governed his days and nights, guiding and advising him. He needed her intuition, her intelligence, and her romanticism, even though it sometimes made him laugh. Ava had been the love of his life, and she’d just passed him by, leaving him stuck on the docks, weighted down with guilt and chained by his conjugal bonds, frozen in fear. The only thing he hadn’t messed up in his life was his art. When he’d told his psychiatrist that even though his marriage had been a failure, his career had been a success, the latter had retorted: “You can’t think of this as a system of communicating vessels; each phase of your life has had its fair share of failures and successes. One does not make up for the other, or vice versa. Otherwise life would be too easy!”

XXII

Casablanca

December 1, 2002

I find you utterly repulsive. In a physical sense, I mean. I could buy a lay from anyone just to wash you out of my genitals.

—Katarina to Peter, her husband

INGMAR BERGMAN
,
Scenes from a Marriage

The painter, who was obsessed with labyrinths, and had spent much time mulling over the subject after reading Jorge Luis Borges’s stories, now found himself right in the middle of one, except that instead of opening up to let him through, the walls were increasingly closing in on him, so much so that he felt he was suffocating. His condition still got on his nerves, but it didn’t bother him as it once had. His mind was perfectly lucid, in fact more remarkably so than ever before. He could now clearly grasp his situation without embellishing it. One thing was certain: he had to free himself from his wife’s controlling influence
and her destructiveness. He would have to toughen up in order to achieve that. He often recalled Nicolas Chamfort’s final words: “the heart must either break or turn to brass.” But how can a heart turn to brass? Or be replaced with a rock? Some people are born with a piece of metal inserted where their heart should have been, while others are born normal. People who belong to the latter category are more numerous, but they often become victims.

His wife had a good heart, and often ran to the rescue of anyone in need, especially if they belonged to her tribe. She was generous, always warmly welcomed her friends and never went to a dinner party empty-handed, calling her hosts the next morning to thank them. She had a good heart indeed, but whenever she felt wounded, every fiber of her being mobilized to avenge herself. The other woman inside her took over. She turned into a savage, became completely irrational, and was ready to do anything in order to sate her desire for retribution. Hers wasn’t an act, she would loudly proclaim her intentions and then carry them out. He remembered an incident where a poor seamstress had ruined one of his wife’s caftans and yet had refused to refund the payment or admit she’d made a mistake. His wife had subsequently ruined that woman’s reputation in the space of a week and had succeeded in destroying her business.

He’d understood he would never be able to escape from her now. She had forgiven too many of his mistakes and absences. Sick or not, he would have to suffer through this until the bitter end.

Why should anyone pay so dearly for having fallen out of love? A Spanish member of parliament had introduced legislation to criminalize breakups. Meaning that when a man or a woman fell out of love with their spouse, they would be liable to pay a fine, and, why not, perhaps even spend a few years in prison. Exactly how many years would one spend in jail, and how much would the fine be? This was exactly the sort of punishment his wife would have liked to exact, who, feeling betrayed and humiliated, would have loved for a judge
to make an example of her husband, a man who’d had the audacity to stop loving his wife and to go around spending his children’s money on other women. When she’d stumbled across proof of his affairs, he’d refused to apologize. Besides, he’d just about done everything to ensure he’d left a trail she could follow. After all, why should he apologize when this could contribute to his being freed from a situation that he could no longer put up with, a life built on lies, hypocrisy, tantrums, and outbursts of uncontrollable anger?

He could hear Caroline’s voice telling him: “Why should anyone suffer? Is there a law that says one must suffer at someone else’s hand? Don’t forget that you are your own capital, there is no other!” Which was pretty much what his psychiatrist told him. Nothing can justify you being trampled on. As for his mother, she’d told him: “Nobody has the right to wash their feet over you!”

His nihilistic Swiss friend had given him the usual speech: “In the end you’re an artist, and you’re entitled to some respect despite all your screwups and bullshit: after all, who doesn’t eventually screw up? Just run away, and remember, we live alone and we die alone. From time to time we manage to break through that solitude to enjoy moments of pleasure, but make no mistake, these moments are fleeting, my friend, fleeting! Do as I do, go live in a hotel, spend your money, go for a dip in the best swimming pools of the world, and as for your children, they’ll go on with their lives, work, and don’t ever think they’ll come to sit by your bedside when you’re dying in a hospice like poor Francis, the great luminary of French culture, who’d been so disfigured by illness that when he was sat drooling in a chair he couldn’t even recognize the people who’d come to visit him. One must always visit friends who’ve been ravaged by illness. It’s a good lesson to keep in mind. Once you’ve taken all of this into account, it’s certainly wise to stake your future on lightness!”