Tahar Ben Jelloun - The Happy Marriage

“The older you get, the more you start to look like your father.”

This was not a compliment, at least not from his wife’s lips.

“What do you mean by that?”

“That you’re getting increasingly bitter, nasty, two-faced, and hypocritical.”

She’d burst into his studio unannounced while he’d been in the midst of preparing a complex mixture of pigments for his latest canvas. He pretended that he hadn’t heard her. She then renewed her assault.

“You see? You don’t even try to deny it …”

The painter continued to focus on his work, while she disappeared and then returned carrying an Arabic magazine where he had been photographed in the company of a young Lebanese actress. She threw the magazine at him, causing the palette to slip out of his hand and hit the canvas. The painter turned around and calmly told her:

“Please leave me alone, I’m in the middle of painting and I can’t talk to you right now. I have to think about the painting, and nothing else. Leave me be.”

“You’re nothing but a coward.”

She left. The painter locked himself inside his studio, but as soon as he’d done so he realized he’d lost all desire to paint, so he sank into his armchair and felt like he wanted to cry. He thought about his father, to whom his wife had just compared him. What a faulty comparison that was, he was so different from him! His father had certainly had a bad temper, but he’d been anything other than mean. His father had never been very attentive toward his wife, but that had been the way things were done in those days, and their way of life was completely removed from the painter’s own, which always required him to travel since he was so highly sought after. All in all, the painter’s parents had loved each other, even though they’d never been effusive or conspicuous about it, but something bound them together, whether it was habit or tradition, or perhaps more simply just affection or a kind of mutual respect. Their arguments had never approached the levels of violence that characterized the ones between the painter and his wife.

To cheer himself up, the painter had called his friend and confidante Adil — a wise old man and a longtime devotee of yoga and tai chi — and told him about his wife’s latest outburst. Adil told him: “Your physical and psychological health must come first. Don’t go through life wearing horse blinders, or stick around to watch the ship sink. You have to take the bull by the horns. Keep your spirits high and make an effort to stay calm. I know, separating from your wife will lead to heartbreak, but you must be certain that it’s the right decision for you. Your children will thank you for it later. Death also causes heartbreak, but it helps to put matters into perspective. Life ends in the blink of an eye, it’s a spark that flickers and fades. Time is an illusion. We live and learn to coexist with that illusion. By the time we die, all the little aches and pains life inflicts on us stop mattering. Be brave!”

Imane arrived late the following morning. She was in a bad mood and kept apologizing while she got on with her work. The captain was now nothing but an ordinary sailor. The painter was taken aback by the sudden change in her, but left her alone. While she was busy massaging him, he turned his mind to the painting he would work on after his session. Imane’s hands came to a stop on his left calf, and she looked up at him, her eyes full of tears.

“Those tears are going to fall if I start talking, won’t they?”

“Yes, I’m very unhappy.”

“Would you like to tell me what’s making you so sad?”

“No, captain.”

She picked up her bag as soon as she’d finished her work.

“This will be my last session, you must find someone else. I can help you with that, give you some addresses …”

She started crying again.

“No, don’t go. Let’s brew some tea and talk about it.”

The painter understood that his wife must be behind all this.

“So she came to see you …”

“Yes, she offered to pay if I would agree to give up working for you. She was kind, she wasn’t violent and she didn’t threaten me, but she was determined. She told me: ‘He’s my husband and I want to repair our marriage and keep him. Nobody’s going to stand in my way.’ I refused to take her money, but I promised her that I would leave.”

“Let me talk to her. I’m the sick one, not her, so please keep doing your job and don’t worry about her meddling.”

“All right, but I’ve already given her my word.”

“Your word, that’s exactly right. I love the sound of your voice and I need to keep hearing it. I need you to keep doing your job and need to feel your presence.”

“OK, but I need to speak to you about that. I would prefer to leave because I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing by looking after you and then spending extra time in your company.”

“I know, I know, it’s not just about how you take care of me … but what can I do about that? We’re only human after all … in any case, keep in mind that thanks to you I’ve made such progress that the doctors were completely amazed. I can paint, I can walk, and I can talk. That’s all thanks to you. Even though I had to put some effort into it myself, and go through all my exercises on my own when you weren’t here. Meaning I just can’t do without you. My own feelings aside, I’m perfectly aware that you can’t have a future with me, you have the right to fall in love with a nice man of your own age and your own choosing, while I’m just an old shoe, and nothing more. I just wanted to tell you how much I was in your debt and you’re free to do as you like.”

Imane hung her head, raised the captain’s hand to her lips, and kissed it, as though to thank him. Avoiding his gaze, she told him:

“I think about you all the time, I don’t know what to do. My boyfriend came back from Brussels two weeks ago so we can get our marriage license, and the nearer the time draws, the less I want to marry that man. He emigrated to Belgium and drives a bus there. He’s big, young and strong. He’s even kind, too. But I don’t want to be a bus driver’s wife, I have other dreams. I’ve got nothing against him, but I don’t have good things to say either. I want to read, go to museums, mingle with artists … a bus driver won’t be able to give me all those extravagances. Besides, he’s already warned me that I’ll be living with his mother, and that’s making me sick to my stomach. Do you realize what that’s going to be like for me? She’ll keep her eyes pinned on me and spy on me all the time. Oh no! I have a friend who was forced into living with her husband’s mother, and it all ended badly, fighting, police, divorce … I’m sure he’ll make a good husband, he’s muscular, we flirted once or twice, and we didn’t have anywhere to go so we could be alone so we went to the movies. We kissed. He’s fiery, after all, and, well, none of that really matters — you’re the one I want.”

He looked at her tenderly.

“But, my poor Imane, I’m neither young nor muscular, I’ve always been horrified by the thought of sports and working out. What would you have me do at my age? I’ve got nothing to offer you and besides, I’ve taken an intense dislike to anything resembling marriage. Do you know what Chekhov used to say about marriage? ‘If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.’ I would be more of a burden to you than a companion. You’d quickly tire of me and my habits, because — I’ll be honest with you — I’m obsessive-compulsive, a pain in the ass. I want things to be in their proper place; I don’t like clutter; I don’t like people who aren’t punctual, who act in bad faith, or are hypocritical — and I especially love being alone, it seems unbelievable I know, but that’s the way it is, I love being left alone without anyone to bother me. I sleep alone out of respect for my wife since I believe that my bouts of insomnia shouldn’t annoy the person who shares my bed. My wife always thought I was trying to avoid her, whereas the truth is that I was worried about disrupting her sleep and calm. Our entire life has been a long series of misunderstandings. If I arranged them end-to-end, our fights would look like the longest train in the world. I’m starting to lose my thread here but I promise you that we’ll talk about this again the next time you come over. But I meant what I said, I don’t want a different nurse and physical therapist. That’s out of the question. Don’t worry. I know what to say to my wife.”