The Happy Marriage

Lower-class people are simply less sensitive. They look at a wounded bull and their faces are completely emotionless!

— a middle-class lady to her friends before the play

LUIS BUÑUEL, The Exterminating Angel

That barrage of insignificant memories was followed by long reveries and terrifying nightmares. The doctor had warned him that this would happen, but the painter hadn’t expected such frenetic cerebral activity. The first dream had allowed him to see his wife back when he’d still been in love with her, as though she’d been standing right in front of him. He’d been very attentive toward her and she’d been gentle and considerate. She never annoyed him or disagreed with him, to the point that he’d feared she lacked self-confidence or was too submissive. He’d thanked the heavens each day that such a woman unlike any other he’d known before had fallen into his lap. After having been a bachelor for a long time, and never sticking with the women he used to meet, he’d been very moved by that young woman’s eyes. She’d made him want to become serious. Toying with her youth and innocence had been out of the question. They were almost fifteen years apart in age, but he hadn’t thought it would be a problem. Then the dream had taken him through the first two years of marriage, which had been happy. No fights, no arguments, and not a single cloud in the sky. They’d traveled, had fun, laughed, and made plans for the future. It had been marvelous. Too good to last. She’d been irresistible to him with her long brown hair and her impressive height.

But he also experienced some horrifying nightmares. In particular one in which a short, squat man had snared him in a trap and extorted a large sum of money from him, as well as a few paintings. He’d introduced himself as an art dealer, but had actually turned out to be a failed painter who’d reinvented himself as a businessman or rather a swindler who worked in cahoots with a brother of his who was a gigolo in the villas of the Côte d’Azur. Before his stroke, the painter had managed to forget him and contemptuously consign the memory of him to the trashcan of oblivion. He’d preferred to ignore what had happened instead of spending years stuck in the corridors of the law courts, especially since the only proof he had was a handful of phony receipts with made-up addresses, signed with a stolen signature stamp. But now that little man had come back again to mock him, just as he’d become physically infirm. The painter watched him as he walked around his canvases with a torch that had been soaked in alcohol and was ready to be ignited. The painter had shut his eyes, but the devil himself had appeared and burst out in hysterical laughter. The painter began to think of the ways in which he wanted to butcher him. He pictured him being crushed in a cement mixer and his bowels being spit out onto the mud, choking in the face of death after long agonizing hours.

Then he chased those thoughts of revenge from his mind and asked God to one day mete out His justice, at which point the stocky scam artist suddenly disappeared, this time for good.

At night, the Twins helped him into the car to go to the studio. Yet since his wife was away on a trip, he asked them to take him back to the house instead and told them to call Imane so that she could come over as soon as possible to recommence his physical therapy sessions. He settled into the room, which he’d long since vacated. It smelled like his wife’s perfume, it was littered with her things, and her clothes had been scattered willy-nilly. There were countless beauty products in the bathroom. He asked the maid to change the sheets and tidy the house.

Over the years, the painter had grown indifferent to how jealous others were of him. He’d come to terms with it and turned his indifference into a philosophical outlook. The most jealous people he’d had to deal with had been the women he’d loved and fellow painters who neither understood nor acknowledged his success. He’d put himself through much self-examination and had reached the conclusion that it was better to be envied than ignored and talentless. Nevertheless, his wife’s jealousy still got to him and he wasn’t able to be indifferent to it. She had to be stronger than he was and more determined than the others, steamrolling ahead without looking back to see just how much damage her repeated bouts of jealousy — which bordered on madness — had caused. There are many different kinds of madness, and his wife’s wasn’t extreme, but it was just enough to make his life a living hell. There was nothing he could do apart from suffer through it or flee, slip away or face more violence and cruelty. He chose to suffer through it, though under protest.