Tahar Ben Jelloun - The Happy Marriage

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.”

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?”