The Happy Marriage

“But, my poor Imane, I’m neither young nor muscular, I’ve always been horrified by the thought of sports and working out. What would you have me do at my age? I’ve got nothing to offer you and besides, I’ve taken an intense dislike to anything resembling marriage. Do you know what Chekhov used to say about marriage? ‘If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.’ I would be more of a burden to you than a companion. You’d quickly tire of me and my habits, because — I’ll be honest with you — I’m obsessive-compulsive, a pain in the ass. I want things to be in their proper place; I don’t like clutter; I don’t like people who aren’t punctual, who act in bad faith, or are hypocritical — and I especially love being alone, it seems unbelievable I know, but that’s the way it is, I love being left alone without anyone to bother me. I sleep alone out of respect for my wife since I believe that my bouts of insomnia shouldn’t annoy the person who shares my bed. My wife always thought I was trying to avoid her, whereas the truth is that I was worried about disrupting her sleep and calm. Our entire life has been a long series of misunderstandings. If I arranged them end-to-end, our fights would look like the longest train in the world. I’m starting to lose my thread here but I promise you that we’ll talk about this again the next time you come over. But I meant what I said, I don’t want a different nurse and physical therapist. That’s out of the question. Don’t worry. I know what to say to my wife.”

Imane broke into a smile and looked even more beautiful than the first time he’d seen her. She remained silent and then said: “Until tomorrow, then.”

XXI. Casablanca, November 20, 2002

We are God’s police. People suppose that when they die all their difficulties are solved for them. It is not as simple as that.

— the angels in black suits to Liliom, when they come to take him to heaven

FRITZ LANG, Liliom

On that morning, the Twins had helped him into a bathtub filled with warm water and left him alone with his thoughts. Speaking in Arabic, he told them: “Leave me alone for just an hour, I want to take advantage of the heat and the silence to listen to my bones.” Whenever he used to come back home from school he would find his mother lying on a couch in the living room and she would tell him: “I took advantage of your absence to listen to my bones!” That expression always made him laugh. How can you even do that? Where would you put your ear to listen to them? And what would they have to say? What if those bones started to fidget, play hide and seek, or exchange courtesies? They would simply go back to their rightful place. The warm water was helping to relax those bones, even though it was his muscles that were the true beneficiaries of that.

He loved those peaceful moments where nothing disturbed him. On that day, he started thinking about Ava again, beautiful Ava, the woman who’d left an indelible impression on his forty-year-old self. They’d managed to slip away for a few days to a magnificent hotel in Ravello. They swam, spent hours talking about books and films, ate simple dishes, drank good wine, made love several times a day, and shouted their happiness from the rooftops like children who’d been freed from all constraints. In the evenings, they would take a warm bath together and she would massage him with some restorative oils, light some candles, and tell him: “I love you, and I’ve never loved anyone like this before.” He would reply that he couldn’t find the right words to express how he felt. Instead, he used colors, or stars whose names and histories he knew, told her about films she’d never seen or operas she’d missed. Sometimes they’d been so happy that they’d started to cry, because they knew it couldn’t last, that reality would eventually catch up to them, especially in his case, since he was cheating on his wife but didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty about it. Whenever he spent time with a woman who was simply his friend, he never thought about cheating on his wife; this was the first time in his life that he’d been so passionately in love with someone, and he no longer belonged to the woman he loved. He’d given himself over to Ava wholly and utterly, and he was happy about it.

This love affair had completely revolutionized his style of painting. It had left him brimming with ideas and he’d wanted to put them all into practice as quickly as possible. He’d made some sketches, scribbling the names of the colors in pencil, but most of all he felt that this happiness, this love, this passion, which he’d long looked for, would nourish his creativity and help to illustrate it.