The Happy Marriage

He told himself that he was at the mercy of an insect, a tiny insect. Whereas when he’d been in good health, a simple mosquito would have sent him spiraling into an incomprehensible fit of fury. As a child, he would abandon himself to chasing mosquitoes at night, when he would crush them under huge books whose covers displayed traces of blood to this day. Because they seemed just as indifferent to poisonous plants where he lived as they were to detergents and toxic waste products. His wife had even summoned a sorcerer to write some talismans and recite prayers to chase them away. But they had proved stronger than everything. They spent the night sucking the blood out of human beings only to vanish at dawn. Vampires.

On that afternoon, the fly had come to avenge the Moroccan insects the man had massacred throughout his life. The man was a prisoner of his paralyzed body, but no matter how much he cried out, shouted, and begged, the fly didn’t budge in the slightest, and made him suffer all the more. Not a great deal of suffering, just a vague discomfort, which eventually overexcited his nerves — which wasn’t at all advisable in his current condition.

Then, little by little, the man managed to convince himself that the fly wasn’t bothering him anymore, that the itching was all in his head. He’d begun to triumph over it. Not that he felt any better, but he’d realized that he needed to accept reality and stop cursing it. His perception of time and things had changed over the past few months. His accident had been a test. He’d already stopped thinking about the fly. All of a sudden, the two caretakers who were playing cards in the adjacent room had come to check on him and the fly had immediately flown away. There was no trace of it now aside from a quietly seething anger, a contained anger that spoke volumes about the psyche of that man — a painter who could no longer paint.

I. Casablanca, February 4, 2000

I have the capacity to love, but it’s all been bottled up.

— INGMAR BERGMAN, Scenes from a Marriage

The two sturdy men who’d carried him and then left him in that armchair facing the sea were out of breath. The invalid was also having trouble breathing and the look on his face was full of bitterness. Only his conscience was alive. His body had grown fatter, he’d become very heavy. As for his speech, it was slow and mostly incomprehensible. They often asked him to repeat what he said, and he hated it because it was both tiring and humiliating. He preferred to communicate with his eyes. When he looked up, that meant no. When he lowered his gaze, that meant yes, but a reluctant yes. One day, one of the Twins — this was how he referred to his caretakers even though they weren’t brothers — thinking that he was doing the right thing, had brought him a clipboard with a felt-tip pen attached to it by a string. The man had gotten furious and summoned the strength to throw it to the floor.