The Happy Marriage

One of the painter’s close friends was a Greek named Yiannis. The painter confided in Yiannis, who was also helping him learn Greek. At some point in the future, the painter wanted to go live on the small island of Tinos. Yiannis had a great sense of humor, with a special fondness for black humor, and he shot films about contemporary artists and occasionally wrote pieces for some of his country’s newspapers. He was also a Casanova, a ladies’ man, even though he had the physique of neither a Greek god nor an American basketball player. He more closely resembled Professor Cuthbert Calculus, and observed the things that happened to him with an ironic remove. They always met in the same restaurant along with Father François, another friend of theirs, who wasn’t a priest, but a poet and a great writer who preferred to keep a low profile. It was Yiannis who loved to call the good-humored, radical atheist “Father.”

Like Yiannis, François had taken part in the delegation that had gone to the suburb of Clermont-Ferrand to ask for the hand of the painter’s future wife. It was a trip that had been very memorable for the painter’s friends, since it had been the first time they’d set foot in such exotic, desolate lands. It was where they’d discovered the evils of those banlieues, where immigrants and their children had been abandoned and stigmatized as dangerous troublemakers.

Yiannis and François had been worrying about their friend for some time now. They’d seen how frustrated and exhausted he’d become after all those arguments, clashes, and tantrums, which were growing more and more frequent. The painter had confided in them, and the two of them — independent and freethinking — were helping him free himself from a marriage that was doomed to go nowhere. And they were afraid for him, because they knew his blood pressure was out of control.

One day, Yiannis had accompanied the painter to a department store where he’d purchased a small voice recorder. Yiannis hadn’t understood why he would need it for work. Perhaps in order to dictate his correspondence? But he knew that his friend never wrote letters.

“My wife contradicts herself all the time, doesn’t know whether she said this or that, so I’ve decided to secretly record what she says so I can play it back to her.”

“But what good will that do?”

“In the hopes that she will one day admit to at least one of her mistakes, so I’ll then have the pleasure to record that admission and play it back to myself, so I can hear her say ‘I’m sorry, I got confused,’ or ‘I was wrong,’ or even ‘You were right,’ or better still ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have,’ to which I’ll add ‘Thank you, darling,’ something which she’s never said to me …”

“I didn’t know things were going so badly between the two of you. I must confess that I find all of this quite shocking. You know, I ended up getting divorced for a lot less than that … I don’t even have much to reproach my ex-wife for … in fact, I was the one who talked a lot of nonsense …”

The painter never had the chance to use his tape recorder. On the only occasion that his wife had admitted she’d made a mistake, he hadn’t had the tape recorder close to hand. He hadn’t even cared about recording her confession. He’d still been reeling from what had happened the previous day: she was driving too fast because she’d been tired and had almost had a bad accident with the whole family in the car. A truck had come at full speed toward them, and her reflexes had barely reacted in time. It had been an incredibly close call. The children had screamed, and the painter had frozen in his seat, incapable of mouthing a word. That terrible moment had been followed by a deep silence. Once they’d gotten back to the house they hadn’t even looked at each other, or exchanged a single word.

Ever since that day, he’d decided he would never again get into a car with her. He didn’t want that kind of life anymore. But he’d come to this conclusion so many times before that it hardly mattered. He needed to act, to react, and, if possible, to escape. What he was sure about was that a mountain of difficulties awaited him before he even got to that decision. That was the time when he’d gone back to the psychiatrist in order to strengthen his immune system, as though he suffered from a disease that gnawed away at his muscles, his mind, and his life.

The psychiatrist had told him:

“You can only hope that your wife decides to get some therapy, but as you know, only she can decide. Nobody — not her friends, and certainly not you — can show her the way forward.”