The Happy Marriage

The tone had been set. There had been no outstretched hands, or open arms, and no hypocrisy of any kind. The painter’s aunt had assumed the leadership of the refusers; she didn’t mince her words, even though she had purportedly only been addressing her sister, daughters, and nieces: “Look at those people! They’re not worthy of mingling with us! Look at that father who never smiles and who didn’t even have the decency to wear a clean suit, he just showed up in a crumbled gandoura and wants to speak to us as though he were our equal! As for the food, let’s not even go there. It’s quite obvious we don’t have anything in common, we don’t share the same tastes or even the same standards, we’re just strangers. It would have been better if he’d at least married a Christian girl, some woman from Europe. They don’t share our faith, but at least they have manners. One of my other nephews married a French woman and her family never gave us any grief. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I speak my mind, and simply voice what everyone else in the family is thinking. This story began badly and it’s going to end badly. Let’s hope he eventually wakes up and the scales fall from his eyes. Otherwise she’ll bear him even more children and it’ll be too late. It’s an old trick: each child weighs a ton, and so you’ll prevent your husband from ever leaving!”

Toward midnight, having made every possible effort to shield his wife from these hostilities, he had found her huddled in a corner crying. He’d dried her tears and consoled her. Had she heard his aunt’s malicious gossiping, or had the fact she was leaving her parents to start a family with him suddenly upset her? The painter recalled his sister’s wedding, where everyone had cried because her husband had come to take her away forever. That wedding had taken place in Fez a long time ago, and it had lived up to the purest of traditions, which his aunt worshipped. The two families had come together then. Everything had taken shape without anything being spelled out; everyone had known their role by heart, and the play couldn’t have failed because everything had been planned and calculated in advance, the ritual had unfolded without any hitches, the families had mingled and there had been no bad surprises, and nobody had made any inappropriate or tasteless speeches. Whenever anyone had made the slightest slip, there had always been someone who’d intervened and restored the balance.

Yet on that day, the painter knew why his wife was crying and could not answer him. The attitude both families had adopted had rekindled a feeling of rejection that she’d believed she’d overcome once she’d started living with the painter. The memories of those unbearable humiliations she’d suffered during her childhood due to the modesty of her background, as though a secret wound had suddenly ripped open again.

The painter had told himself that he should have defended her more. That he should have laid the ground before their marriage. Told her that he loved her regardless of what anyone in his family said, which he couldn’t have cared less about. He could have easily proven to her that their love was stronger than any bump in the road they might face. But he hadn’t taken those precautions, believing that his love was so obvious and visible that it would silence those malicious tongues. This marriage was like screaming his love from the rooftops, shouting to anyone who would listen that he loved that girl from the bled, publicly declaring how proud he’d been to defy a whole social caste for love.

Alone on the street, his fists in his pockets, his mind dwelled on those old stories as he vainly tried to find the means to bring their arguments to an end and recover the essence of the love they had for one another.

V. Marrakech, January 1991

It would be terrible to have to depend on you in any way.

— Marianne to Isak Borg, her seventy-eight-year-old father-in-law

INGMAR BERGMAN, Wild Strawberries