The Happy Marriage

Once, a magazine had asked him how he defined happiness. Without even thinking about it, he’d replied: “Lunching with friends under a tree on a summer day in Tuscany.” Despite a few betrayals, he loved friendship; he also loved Italy, and felt happy while sitting in the shade of a huge tree, as though it protected him or blessed him, recalling his parents, or his devotion to spirituality.

XX. Casablanca, November 2, 2002

Katarina thinks I’m a spineless lump of jelly.

— Peter, to his friends Johan and Marianne

INGMAR BERGMAN, Scenes from a Marriage

It had been nearly three years since his stroke. Thanks to his doctors’ and Imane’s talents, the painter had recovered the use of his hand. He could now hold a brush and paint on small formats without his hand trembling. His leg still hurt him, but he could get around by himself in a wheelchair. He had recovered his power of speech, and he could talk fairly normally and sustain a conversation. An exhibition of his new works had been planned. His preparations for it were meticulous because it had assumed a special significance: it marked his triumph over his illness. In addition, his style had also gone through yet another transformation. His canvases had acquired a spareness and simplicity, exuding a feeling of profound serenity. The experts dedicated to his work had been quite struck by this new development.

His wife had grown closer to him. Although they hadn’t seen much of each other in two years, she’d started to visit him in his studio; at first she only did so from time to time, but then her visits had become more regular when they’d started being able to talk to one another again. She was the first person to congratulate and encourage him when he went back to work and put the finishing touches on his first new painting. She even organized a little party to mark the occasion. They were able to resume some semblance of married life in both the house and the studio. The painter would use his wheelchair to go see his wife after he’d finished working his studio in the afternoons. He took his meals with his wife and children and spent his evenings with them. Yet even though his body was recuperating, he quickly realized that his marriage would never heal. Soon enough, arguments began to creep back into their daily lives, to the point that he started to yearn for those months when he’d been paralyzed and confined to his bed and his wheelchair, but at least far removed from her.

“The older you get, the more you start to look like your father.”

This was not a compliment, at least not from his wife’s lips.

“What do you mean by that?”

“That you’re getting increasingly bitter, nasty, two-faced, and hypocritical.”

She’d burst into his studio unannounced while he’d been in the midst of preparing a complex mixture of pigments for his latest canvas. He pretended that he hadn’t heard her. She then renewed her assault.

“You see? You don’t even try to deny it …”

The painter continued to focus on his work, while she disappeared and then returned carrying an Arabic magazine where he had been photographed in the company of a young Lebanese actress. She threw the magazine at him, causing the palette to slip out of his hand and hit the canvas. The painter turned around and calmly told her:

“Please leave me alone, I’m in the middle of painting and I can’t talk to you right now. I have to think about the painting, and nothing else. Leave me be.”

“You’re nothing but a coward.”

She left. The painter locked himself inside his studio, but as soon as he’d done so he realized he’d lost all desire to paint, so he sank into his armchair and felt like he wanted to cry. He thought about his father, to whom his wife had just compared him. What a faulty comparison that was, he was so different from him! His father had certainly had a bad temper, but he’d been anything other than mean. His father had never been very attentive toward his wife, but that had been the way things were done in those days, and their way of life was completely removed from the painter’s own, which always required him to travel since he was so highly sought after. All in all, the painter’s parents had loved each other, even though they’d never been effusive or conspicuous about it, but something bound them together, whether it was habit or tradition, or perhaps more simply just affection or a kind of mutual respect. Their arguments had never approached the levels of violence that characterized the ones between the painter and his wife.