The Happy Marriage

His mind turned to a book by Jean Genet that a friend had given him on his birthday, The Tightrope Walker. He’d read it very excitedly and had pictured the kind of tension that the acrobat must have suppressed with each movement he made. He had thought about drawing some illustrations for that book someday, but he’d been told that Genet wasn’t an easy man to deal with and that he would probably refuse to give his consent. He would reread it from time to time and focus on a wire extended between two fixed points, and picture himself balanced on top of it, his body drenched in sweat, his trembling arms holding onto the rod, then watch himself slip, fall, and shatter all his limbs. He’d even go to the lengths of inventing a whole backstory behind that injured tightrope walker, who’d wound up like that because he’d fallen while performing in a circus. That accident was physical, not psychological. That man wasn’t a vexed, anxious painter, but an acrobat who’d broken his body thirty feet below the wire.

He was pleased with the discovery he’d made. Not a single tear had slipped down his cheek. His spirit hadn’t flagged. He touched his leg using his limp, heavy hand and didn’t feel a thing. “We’ll get better. Hang in there, sonny boy,” he said to himself.

He hadn’t seen his wife since their last quarrel — and the stroke that had immediately followed in its wake. He was now living in his studio, which he’d had equipped with all the things he needed in order to get by and overcome the trial of that illness. She occupied the other wing of their house in Casablanca, which was very large. The Twins had been instructed never to let her anywhere near him. But he might as well not have bothered. The distance between them rather seemed to suit her, and she hadn’t shown the slightest interest in looking after an old sick man. He had wanted to take stock of their twenty-year marriage. From that point of view, the break that his stroke had imposed on their relationship had been fortuitously timed. He would sometimes see her make herself pretty to go out from one of the studio’s windows that gave out onto the inner courtyard of their villa. Nobody knew where she went, which was for the best. In any case, he had decided to neither keep an eye on her nor suspect her.

In the past, when he’d been healthy, he had fled, gone on a trip, and disappeared off the face of the earth. That had been his usual response to his frustrations or their marital disputes. He used to keep a journal where he only wrote about the problems in his marriage. He didn’t mention anything else in that notebook. Over the course of twenty years, the transcripts of their quarrels, aggravations, and tantrums hadn’t varied a great deal. It was the story of a man who believed that people could change, overcome their defects and strengthen their positive qualities, and improve themselves through constant self-examination. While he’d never necessarily wanted his wife to one day grow docile and submissive, he had always harbored a secret hope that she would at least become loving and obliging, calm and reasonable, in short, a wife who could help him build a family life and then share it with him. It had been his dream. But he’d been misguided and he had instead oppressed his wife, forgetting to acknowledge his share of responsibility for that failure.

II. Casablanca, February 8, 2000

Every sacrifice is possible and tolerable in a couple until the day when one of them realizes that there were sacrifices to make.

— SACHA GUITRY, Give Me Your Eyes

As soon as he woke up, the painter asked the Twins to bring him a mirror. It was the first time in the three months after his stroke that he felt strong enough to dare to gaze upon his reflection. When he saw himself, he burst into a huge laugh because he didn’t recognize himself at all and thought his reflection looked completely pathetic. He told himself: “What would I have done in your place? Kill myself? I’m not brave enough for that. Would I have refused anyone who tried to give me a mirror? Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly what I would have done! I wouldn’t have looked at myself, so as not to realize what I’ve become. I would have avoided tearing open another wound in my suffering at all costs!”