Tahar Ben Jelloun - The Happy Marriage

The painter had carried the memory of that woman’s unspeakable grief for a long time, without ever being able to share it with anyone. He could have lived with her because she’d given him an ensuring sense of serenity. She’d soothed him and loved him. Every moment he’d spent with her had been sheer bliss. They’d met when they’d attended a retrospective of Billy Wilder’s films. The painter loved films from Hollywood’s golden age, especially Ernst Lubitsch’s and Frank Capra’s. They’d spent entire evenings talking about the various cuts of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil . If her illness hadn’t ended her life when she’d been so young, beautiful, and energetic, he might have spent the rest of his days with her. He told himself that in order to keep her memory alive. When he learned that her ashes had been scattered in Africa, where she’d grown up as a child, he’d been thrown into a state of panic and confusion. How could the body that he’d pressed against his own have disintegrated into ashes and been lost in the sands of a distant land? The idea of it tormented him. He put it out of his mind and focused on the image of her when she’d been most alive. He could still hear her sweet voice and peals of laughter. One day, her daughter had called him and said: “I dreamed of mama, she was so happy and she told me to call you, to tell you to take care of yourself and that she loves you!” He’d been taken aback, had lain down his brush and reread the letter she’d sent him that he kept hidden in a locked drawer.

She’d given him pride of place in her dreams, but wouldn’t be coming to see him. He struggled to remember her and was gradually forgetting her features, as usually happened to him whenever he experienced strong emotions.

Instead, it was Ava’s face that superimposed itself on hers in his mind. First with her bright gray-green eyes, her lioness-like hair, her impressive height, her naturally sensual voice, and that slender body of hers that always made his head spin, leading her to bust out in fits of giggles. Ava had entered his life a few months into his secret period of mourning, entering it like a storm or a burst of summer rain that made him marvel and kneel before her. An encounter right out of the pages of Nabokov or Pushkin, or even Gone With the Wind or Pandora and the Flying Dutchman , where his Ava could be played by Ava Gardner, except that his Ava wasn’t a femme fatale who sowed misery and destruction in people’s lives. His Ava stood for love, sweet madness, and adventure. She had an air of mystery about her and a solemnity in her eyes, but also a joie de vivre. He’d known they would have an intense affair the moment he’d met her. He’d completely changed the moment she’d sent him a note where she’d reproduced a drawing by Matisse by way of introduction. She’d written her phone number on the back of the note and had signed her name in the shape of a shooting star. When he’d called her, she’d answered with a burst of laughter, as if they’d known each other forever and had a shared past. She’d told him: “Your paintings break my heart! Life’s already left too many scars on me, and you don’t have the right to add any more!” Then she’d added: “Nonsense, nonsense …”

Ava understood that she’d entered the painter’s life at a time when nothing had been going right with his wife. He was afflicted, miserable, tired of fighting against headwinds and still hopeful he could put an end to it all and free himself. He’d told his wife as much and she’d answered him: “That’s not my problem! You’ve put children into this world and now you have to endure the responsibilities!” He’d tried to explain to her that there was a way in which they could separate without hurting the children, that one couldn’t force destiny, and that all their attempts to reconcile had failed, but she’d refused to hear a word of it, and he’d been left utterly dismayed by her determined obstinacy. He was fighting all on his own. His words simply vanished into thin air, like dust. She refused to listen to him and she would push him away before he’d even had the chance to reach out to her. She only gave in a little when presented with facts, and even then she would suspect the influence of some sorcerer or evil female mastermind hell-bent on wrecking her home. She would become ill and shut herself away in her room, letting the house fall apart and telling the children that she was suffering because their father was a monster, crying, losing weight, and making the atmosphere unbreathable. The doctor had taken him aside and told him: “She’s using depression as blackmail, but she must take care lest she actually becomes depressed — that is, unless it’s already happened!” She would take her medications, but would refuse to see a psychiatrist.

This was around the time that his work had met with great success at the Venice Biennale. Several galleries in Europe and the United States wanted his work. He needed to produce more paintings, but he was preoccupied by the breakdown of his marriage. His wife had found out about Ava’s existence, but hadn’t managed to learn more than that. She didn’t know her name or where she worked. She’d begged him to tell her who she was, but he’d held steady and refused to say a word, minimizing the affair since he didn’t have the courage to come clean at the risk of provoking another huge upset. In her irrationality, his wife was highly capable of causing a lot of damage. She would throw everything she could get her hands on at him, calling him names so as to make him feel guilty. The children witnessed all those theatrics and would ask themselves what their father was guilty for. He would refuse to involve them, but his wife would do so in his stead and upset them. She felt betrayed, and was doing everything she could to avenge herself, wanting to inflict five times the harm that had been done to her. He would remain silent and then run away, abandoning her to her distress. He didn’t talk about it with Ava; they could only enjoy a few moments together, and he was keen to live them to the fullest. He felt a strong desire to leave his wife, but his weakness — or rather what his wife called his “cowardice”—prevented him from making such a decision.

The mystery of the night was compounded by bouts of insomnia, a cruel kind of suffering that left his body and mind feeling battered. He also had high blood pressure and tried to look after it without managing to keep it entirely under control. He experienced peaks that rose to worrying levels and then returned to normal. The night scared him, as did the risk of apnea. He dreaded the coming of night and the moment when he would have to go to sleep. He slept in his studio, but tremors ran up and down his limbs, enervating him. He would get up, pace around the meticulously tidy space where he stored his canvases, his equipment, his collection of art books, and his documents. He would drink some water, take a second sleeping pill, go back to bed, and wait. Nothing would happen. He could follow the progress of the clouds through the sky of Paris through the skylight on his roof. Exhaustion would assail him toward dawn and he would then finally be able to sleep for an hour or two.

He’d acquired the habit of calling Ava every morning at the same hour, just before she left to go to work. He would wish her a wonderful day and spend the rest of his time waiting for her.

Sneaking around made their encounters more pleasurable. They would say: “We’re like thieves! Our happiness is our secret and our love is how we survive! We refuse to be thwarted! We live this love and know that we’ll one day be inconsolable creatures!” Then came the break. It was brutal, definitive, and cruel. She finally left him because she knew he would never leave his wife to go live with her. She’d guessed right. He was afraid of how his wife would retaliate. It was an insurmountable fear. He was stuck, unable to move, unable to turn his back on a miserable life and go somewhere else with the woman he loved. That was when he’d accepted a suggestion that a friend of his who was well versed in stories of witchcraft had made him. The friend had said: “Leave it to me and please let me know what happens. Give me leave to go consult an old man who lives in the mountains far from the cities, a man who is blessed with extraordinary powers and knows what happens between people, he has a gift for that. He’s a holy man who only uses the Qur’an — he doesn’t use any gris-gris or black magic. He just reads the Qur’an and uses numbers!”