Tahar Ben Jelloun - The Happy Marriage

He’d never thought about suicide after suffering his stroke. His desire to live had grown stronger, and giving up would have been too easy. Even though he wasn’t in good shape, he had gradually started to find pleasure in everyday things again. Dark thoughts had stopped clouding his mind, not entirely of course, but he’d become more adept at chasing them away and not wallowing in them. What would be the point in whining about it? Probably to paralyze his thoughts. His mother had taught him never to complain, first and foremost because it was useless, and secondly because it annoyed people. One had to endure one’s suffering, even if it meant crying alone at night. Full of irony, his mother would tell him: “I’ll have so many things to say to my gravediggers! As for the angels who guide us on the day of our funeral, they’ll lift my soul all the way up to the sky. It’ll be the nicest trip I’ve ever taken!” How could that fail to summon the image of the two angels in black suits who came to fetch Liliom’s soul — played by Charles Boyer — in Fritz Lang’s film? Still, he believed that the angels who came to lift his mother’s soul to heaven would be smiling, welcoming, and dressed in white. He could picture them and was convinced that his mother deserved to make her final voyage in the arms of those angels described in the Qur’an.

In the mirror, he could see that his physical deterioration had been spectacular. He would have to accept that he was no longer the same man, that he no longer matched what people thought he looked like, that he would have to put up with his new face and grow used to it — this was what he would have to endure if he was ever to resume his place among the living. He felt that he’d started to resemble a crumpled-up piece of paper, as though he were nothing but a caricature of his former self. He mused wryly about how he looked like a Francis Bacon painting. He had noticed this in the eyes of some of the relatives who came to visit him. He noticed their shock as they gazed at his deformed, diseased body, which he could barely move. The shadow of death had paid him a visit and it had left its traces on his leg and his arm. But it had just been a brush with death.

Perhaps his visitors could see themselves in his place, spying their own reflection in a mirror held out to them for a few seconds, at which point they would say to themselves: “What if this happened to me one day? Is this how I would wind up, sat in a wheelchair pushed along by a healthy man? With half my body paralyzed and unable to speak properly? Maybe my relatives would also abandon me … I would become a painful burden for my nearest and dearest, I would become useless and boring, people never like to see other people’s bodies suffer!” Then they would all rush to see their doctor and get checked up. Besides, everyone was curious to know how the accident had happened. They really wanted to know how to prevent it and avoid becoming victims of the aberrations of the machine that feeds the brain. They grew suddenly afraid when they were told that the brain was in fact a complex organ composed of hundreds of billions of nerve cells working in unison to allow for the smooth running of our daily lives. They didn’t dare ask him how the whole thing had happened. They talked about it amongst themselves, went on the Internet and read everything they could find about strokes. The worst came when they found out either from the Internet or their physicians that strokes could happen to anyone at any age, but that there were still contributing factors. Hamid, one of his childhood friends, had been so shocked and distressed that he’d stopped smoking and drinking. He had shown up one day, white as a sheet, with a rosary wrapped around his fingers, and bent down and kissed his old friend on the forehead: “Thanks to you, my life has changed! I was the only one to profit from your misfortune. I was so scared that it taught me a valuable lesson!” He had known for a long time that excessive smoking and drinking could trigger that kind of illness; he had started taking care of his high blood pressure and avoided sugar because he had a history of diabetes in his family, but he’d been unable to do anything about stress, that silent and often fatal killer.

Stress — the kind of aggravation that left holes in one’s vital organs. He thought of it as a machine that disrupted everything in its path without anyone noticing. Stress was his evil doppelgänger, who demanded that he worked harder and harder, underestimated his real capacities, and made him think he could exceed his limits. Stress seized hold of the heart, clenching its grip, knocking it around and impeding its normal functions. He knew all of this and had analyzed it umpteen times.

In the days when he’d been healthy, whenever he got bored, which didn’t happen all that often, he would stop working and examine this frame of mind, when time came to a standstill, pausing while he harped on about his set ideas. Boredom was a byproduct of insomnia, a refusal to let himself fall down the black hole of the unknown. He would go around in circles, then let it all go and wait for it to pass. He would thus contain stress in this space, situated between his sleepless nights and the stillness of his waking hours.

In the studio where he now spent all of his days, far from the noise of the city, he asked himself how the stroke could have destroyed his body to such an extent. He was having a tough time stomaching how battered his body was, which prevented him from moving freely and doing what he wanted. He had played football on Casablanca’s beaches as a teenager. He had been an excellent striker and his friends would always carry him in their arms at the end of the matches because he had scored all the goals. He might have even become a professional footballer but at the time this would have meant moving to Spain and joining one of their big teams. His parents had preferred that he took up painting instead, even if it meant he would never earn a dime. Anything would be better than living in exile among the Spaniards who hated the Moors!

He would once again observe his reflection in the mirror. He looked hideous, or better yet, banged up. He recalled the lyrics to Léo Ferré’s “Vingt Ans”: “Pour tout bagage on a sa gueule, quand elle est bath ça va tout seul, quand elle est moche on s’habitue, on se dit qu’on n’est pas mal foutu; pour tout bagage on a sa gueule qui cause des fois quand on est seul … quand on pleure on dit qu’on rit … alors on maquille le problème.” He remembered the time he’d spent with Ferré when the latter had come to perform in Casablanca. They had drunk a cup of tea on the patio of the Royal Mansour hotel and he had observed the man’s small eyes, his mannerisms, his almost permanent bad mood, but especially the overwhelming weariness that marked his face. He had always thought of Ferré as a poet, a rebel whose songs did much good for those who took the trouble to pay close attention to them.

During the first months of his illness, he had mostly kept to himself, sheltered in the safety of his studio. Surrounded by his unfinished canvases, he had relied on himself, experiencing a feeling of supreme solitude, because suffering can never truly be shared. Needless to say, he had received many a get well soon card. This had brought him much pleasure, and he’d been stunned and moved to see some people whom he barely knew find exactly the right words for the occasion. For instance, there was Serge, with whom he’d only crossed paths from time to time because they lived in the same neighborhood. Yet only fifteen days after he’d left the hospital, Serge had come to visit him and had spoken on terms of the utmost frankness. Serge had quickly gotten into the habit of visiting him once a week, asking how he was doing, and generally helping to lift his spirits. Right up to the day that the painter learned that Serge had suddenly died. It wasn’t until Serge had died that the painter learned what had been eating away at him. He’d felt like crying. So much friendship and humility from a man who didn’t even belong to his inner circle of friends had left its mark on him. Serge had been completely different to some of the painter’s friends, who’d suddenly grown silent. They had just all vanished. Fear. The Great Funk. As though strokes were contagious! Someone had told him that one of his friends kept insisting that he didn’t want to go visit him because he was ashamed of being in good health. Of course there was no reason to suppose the man was lying. But whenever invalids feel they’re being abandoned, suffering instantly grows more insidious and cruel.