Tahar Ben Jelloun - The Happy Marriage

When Imane arrived, he’d been in the bathroom while his assistants groomed him. He always found those moments particularly painful and humiliating. Grooming was when he felt that the weight of his disability was truly unbearable. Having one man wipe you while another washed you and barely being able to stand while they scrubbed your intimate parts always made him angry, although he kept quiet about it. He thought, “This should be my wife’s job, at least in theory, but nothing in the world would make me want her to do that. I just want her to leave me alone and allow me to recover my ability to move.”

But once he’d been washed, shaved, and clothed, he felt a little better and he managed to forget those unbearable moments. He smiled as soon as he saw Imane and detected her scent, Ambre Précieux. “Today,” she told him, “we’re going to spend the whole day together. It’s my day off and I’m going to massage you, give you your injections, and feed you a few little things I cooked. Afterwards I’ll tell you the rest of my story, unless you want to do something else or you would prefer I went home …”

He was excited. Imane was so sensitive that she restored his hopes and helped to speed up his recovery. “How can I possibly thank you?” he asked her.

After a moment’s pause, and while she was massaging his leg, she said, without lifting her gaze:

“You know, you’re old enough to be my father, and yet that’s not the way I look at you. We’re almost thirty years apart in age, but I find that your art and your temperament express a kind of humanity that is sorely absent in today’s youth, especially here in Morocco where everyone wants to become a success as quickly as possible and make a lot of money, and where appearances are considered more important than substance. I love spending time with you and trying to help you find some relief, having my hands try to massage the pain out of you and throw it far away from you, that’s why you see me shake my fingers at the end of each session after I’ve removed the suffering inside you. It’s as if I’d soaked my hands in black water and then needed to shake them to get rid of it. An Indian guru taught us this technique during a training session in Rabat.”

Following the session, she suggested that he lean on her while he tried to walk a few steps. He told her: “But that’s what my assistants are here for, I’m too heavy for your delicate shoulders.” She helped him get out of bed and handed him a cane, and they started to walk slowly around the room. He stopped and asked the Twins to help him into his going-out clothes. He wanted to look elegant while leaning on that beautiful woman’s arm. When Imane came back, she was surprised by how different he looked. The artist was a handsome man. She took his arm in hers. He felt her body against his and was embarrassed to see he’d gotten hard. The doctor had told him: “Erections are controlled by the medulla oblongata and impulses are channeled by the spinal cord.” His left arm hugged her waist while they walked and their bodies grew closer and closer together. He wanted to hug her, to kiss her and bury his face in her hair, but he restrained himself. Besides, in his condition he couldn’t even stand in front of her without being assisted. He wondered whether she’d noticed his erection. She was talking to him, but he wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying, his mind was preoccupied, and so he asked her to help him sit in his armchair so he could stretch his legs. She sat down on the floor next to him and propped her head against his left leg. Then she suddenly stood up, made some tentative dance steps, and said: “It’s time for lunch. Leave it to me. I know your cook is fantastic, but I’ve got some of my grandmother’s recipes, which are really amazing!” He wasn’t hungry but he forced himself to eat and swallowed what she fed him with her hands. In any other circumstance, he would have found these gestures fairly erotic, but in this case they were purely utilitarian. She was feeding him just like one would a baby or a senile old man. When she slid a straw into the bowl of soup, he told her: “No, thank you, I’m full.” Even though he loved that kind of soup, the thought of drinking out of a straw in front of a beautiful woman depressed him even further.

The Twins took him to the studio and Imane followed them. They installed him in his wheelchair.

“Do you want to keep making me happy, Imane?”

“Of course, my captain!”

It was the first time she’d called him that, probably in reference to the sailor’s cap that was hanging in one of the studio’s corners. It had belonged to one of the painter’s friends, with whom he’d fallen out of touch.

“I’m happy to hear you call me captain. The last person who did that was my eldest daughter, it used to amuse her a lot. Good, now grab that Pléiade edition of Baudelaire’s works and open it in the spot marked by a yellow leaf, where he wrote about Eugène Delacroix, and read it out to me. I love that passage.”

She drank a glass of water to clear her throat and began to read. The captain closed his eyes so he could better savor her words. Imane’s voice had a severe tone to it. If she worked on it, it could become quite beautiful. When she stopped, having finished the passage, he told her:

“You see, when that artist spent a few months in Morocco in 1832 he was able to capture something of the country’s soul. He produced many drawings and sketches, but he never painted anything here. I regret the fact he never left any of his works in this country, by way of offering his gratitude and recognition. When he was in Algeria, he painted the women of Algiers in their apartments, which are truly wonderful canvases. There, I’m going to lend you a big book on this painter, my dear Imane. Look through it and you’ll see how that genius reinterpreted this country. And if one day you get a chance to read his Journal , you’ll be surprised by what he said about our ancestors. He didn’t have any nice things to say! But those sorts of ideas were quite common at the time.”

The time came when everything in the painter’s life seemed like it was starting to get bent out of shape and was taking a different direction. The walls were closing in around him, the ceiling threatened to collapse, his voice trailed off, his body grew stiff, and his head was dizzy from spinning. Sometimes the painter’s body trembled all over, even when he wasn’t cold. Even though his assistants were never far away, he felt terribly alone. He felt as though he were living inside a dark tube and that he had to run in order to save his skin. Sometimes he felt he was being pursued by a shadow, others by a noise, others even by a wave of heat emanating from a ball of fire. It was like being in a film where his body was exactly like it had been before his stroke, but his mind was that of an invalid. Two overlapping states of consciousness: one where his body had seized up, been crippled, and was now under repair, while the other featured a young and lively body. He was hounded by misfortunes. His wife would surely have claimed this was due to the evil eye, or had been caused by a spell cast by a neighbor. But inside that dark tube, the painter never stopped running, then falling down, then getting up again, and then falling down again, getting swallowed up by a big black hole. The fall had left his entire body shaking and in distress, but his mind was as sharp as ever.

It’s often said that depression is the quintessence of solitude at its most cruel. During his worst nightmares, the painter would find himself inside a cave where the neighborhood rats used to gather. He’d always been horrified by those pests, in fact he had such an irrational fear of them that he couldn’t even bear to see them in a picture book. It probably dated back to his childhood when he used squat toilets. A rat had bitten his ankle once. He’d been saved by a young doctor who’d given him an injection on the spot. In his nightmare, the painter was forced to live with those rats and put up with the horror they inspired in him. His body wouldn’t obey him while he was in their midst. Who could have put him in such a dark, macabre place filled solely by the sounds of those pests, who were capable of exterminating a whole city with the plague? Among those rats, his young supple body had disappeared and been replaced by a cumbersome and diseased one. The rats would climb up his legs and blithely run along the length of his body, squabbling next to his head, biting him here and there and dragging him wherever they liked. All of a sudden, a big black rat drew close to him, lunged at his genitals, and bit them with all its might. The pain made him scream, but it was useless to call for help because his voice had been extinguished in his nightmare and nobody could hear him. By the time he’d resigned himself to a slow death, an even more ferocious bite took him by surprise and he abruptly woke up. He was drenched in sweat, and tears were streaming down his cheeks in an endless flow. He’d had enough: he was fed up with his condition, fed up with that house, and fed up with all the people around him. He couldn’t take it anymore, but he suffered in silence.