The Happy Marriage

“Illusion travels by streetcar!” An inner voice often murmured that sentence. It reminded him of something else, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. All of a sudden, as though in a flash, he saw a beautiful brunette with her hair combed in the 1950s style. She was sitting down and was propping her cheek up with her right hand, while her left lay on a man’s shoulder. The man had a pitiful look to him and his arms were crossed, and his shirt collar was unbuttoned despite the fact that he was wearing a tie. It was a black-and-white image. Then, as though in a dream, he suddenly recalled the woman’s name: Lillia Prado. It shone out of his memory’s murkiness. Lillia Prado! But who was she? Where had she come from? He recalled an old Algerian friend who shared the same name, but who looked nothing like this Lillia. And besides, why did illusions travel by streetcar? He asked himself that question several times and then the name Luis Buñuel rose out of his innermost depths. The sentence that had come to him was in fact the title of a film shot in 1953 by the filmmaker when he’d started living in Mexico after fleeing Franco’s Spain. The title the French producers had chosen—On a volé un tram (A Tram Was Stolen) — was ridiculous. They had stripped it of all its poetry and mystery. He was pleased to have solved that conundrum, it was a sign that his memory was starting to work once again.

III. Paris, 1986

If a man and a woman are two halves of an apple, then two men are quite often two halves of a couple.

— SACHA GUITRY, Nine Bachelors

By the mid-1980s, the painter still hadn’t put down roots anywhere. He never kept the same studio for more than a few months, traveled without any luggage, and most of the time he’d been happy to work with only a notebook and pencils for his sketches. His first meeting with his future wife had utterly changed everything. A week after their first kiss, he’d decided to spend less time in his studio and to devote it to her instead, and they exchanged vows and swore to keep them a month later. Those who knew them best couldn’t believe their eyes. The painter had been able to guess what his friends must have said about him when they crossed paths in Paris: “She’s too young for him, and too pretty too!”

They had been wrong to bad-mouth them, because throughout the first two long, pleasant years of their married life, the painter and his wife were the happiest couple in the world. She’d known how to keep him happy, had quickly learned how to adapt to his mannerisms, habits, and whims. She had accepted them with a smile and would sometimes even mock him a little about them. There had been no conflicts of any kind. “Not a cloud in the sky,” she would say with a smile.

He had rented a little house for her on Rue de la Butteaux-Cailles. It was a charming place: one would have thought that it was in the middle of the open countryside instead of smack in the center of Paris. They led a smooth life that was completely devoid of conflict. He still looked back on those days with a deeply felt and sincere nostalgia. His wife had been very loving then and had thrown herself into their conjugal life with a great deal of intensity. They hadn’t gone on a honeymoon, but they had decided that she would accompany him wherever he was invited: exhibitions, symposiums, or contemporary art fairs. They always extended their visits by a few days in order to properly visit the country, guidebooks in hand. The painter, who’d already traveled a great deal, had found it very moving to introduce his wife to the great cities of the world: Venice, Rome, Madrid, Prague, Istanbul, New York, then San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia … She would buy him everything that he liked and always brought presents back for his family. The painter, for his part, spared no expense. On their return to Paris, she would call her friends and relatives and tell them about their wonderful journeys down to the slightest detail. She would humbly tell them that she felt blessed to have such opportunities. When she would hang up, she would whisper in his ear: “You know, I’m the one who was lucky to have met you!” He thought that marrying a twenty-four-year-old woman had been something exceptional for a thirty-eight-year-old man, a privilege reserved for a select few. In his mind, never being like anyone else had always seemed like a guarantee of eternal happiness. And then, he’d thought, the time had come to settle down, start a family, and change the rhythm of his life. She was the ideal woman for that new life.