The Happy Marriage

She drank a glass of water to clear her throat and began to read. The captain closed his eyes so he could better savor her words. Imane’s voice had a severe tone to it. If she worked on it, it could become quite beautiful. When she stopped, having finished the passage, he told her:

“You see, when that artist spent a few months in Morocco in 1832 he was able to capture something of the country’s soul. He produced many drawings and sketches, but he never painted anything here. I regret the fact he never left any of his works in this country, by way of offering his gratitude and recognition. When he was in Algeria, he painted the women of Algiers in their apartments, which are truly wonderful canvases. There, I’m going to lend you a big book on this painter, my dear Imane. Look through it and you’ll see how that genius reinterpreted this country. And if one day you get a chance to read his Journal, you’ll be surprised by what he said about our ancestors. He didn’t have any nice things to say! But those sorts of ideas were quite common at the time.”

XIX. Casablanca, November 6, 2000

I hate having to repay people’s kindness!

— CHRISTIAN-JAQUE, A Lover’s Return

The time came when everything in the painter’s life seemed like it was starting to get bent out of shape and was taking a different direction. The walls were closing in around him, the ceiling threatened to collapse, his voice trailed off, his body grew stiff, and his head was dizzy from spinning. Sometimes the painter’s body trembled all over, even when he wasn’t cold. Even though his assistants were never far away, he felt terribly alone. He felt as though he were living inside a dark tube and that he had to run in order to save his skin. Sometimes he felt he was being pursued by a shadow, others by a noise, others even by a wave of heat emanating from a ball of fire. It was like being in a film where his body was exactly like it had been before his stroke, but his mind was that of an invalid. Two overlapping states of consciousness: one where his body had seized up, been crippled, and was now under repair, while the other featured a young and lively body. He was hounded by misfortunes. His wife would surely have claimed this was due to the evil eye, or had been caused by a spell cast by a neighbor. But inside that dark tube, the painter never stopped running, then falling down, then getting up again, and then falling down again, getting swallowed up by a big black hole. The fall had left his entire body shaking and in distress, but his mind was as sharp as ever.

It’s often said that depression is the quintessence of solitude at its most cruel. During his worst nightmares, the painter would find himself inside a cave where the neighborhood rats used to gather. He’d always been horrified by those pests, in fact he had such an irrational fear of them that he couldn’t even bear to see them in a picture book. It probably dated back to his childhood when he used squat toilets. A rat had bitten his ankle once. He’d been saved by a young doctor who’d given him an injection on the spot. In his nightmare, the painter was forced to live with those rats and put up with the horror they inspired in him. His body wouldn’t obey him while he was in their midst. Who could have put him in such a dark, macabre place filled solely by the sounds of those pests, who were capable of exterminating a whole city with the plague? Among those rats, his young supple body had disappeared and been replaced by a cumbersome and diseased one. The rats would climb up his legs and blithely run along the length of his body, squabbling next to his head, biting him here and there and dragging him wherever they liked. All of a sudden, a big black rat drew close to him, lunged at his genitals, and bit them with all its might. The pain made him scream, but it was useless to call for help because his voice had been extinguished in his nightmare and nobody could hear him. By the time he’d resigned himself to a slow death, an even more ferocious bite took him by surprise and he abruptly woke up. He was drenched in sweat, and tears were streaming down his cheeks in an endless flow. He’d had enough: he was fed up with his condition, fed up with that house, and fed up with all the people around him. He couldn’t take it anymore, but he suffered in silence.

The moments when the painter was attacked by something but couldn’t fight back were the ones he feared the most. He tried to resist falling asleep as best as he could, doing everything he could to stay awake, but unfortunately his medications and his boredom would finally overwhelm him and he would fall asleep. Never one to give up, whenever this happened he would press the bell and call for coffee, “Yes, coffee! Even if the doctor forbade me to drink it, I want to be wide awake!”