The Happy Marriage

I’m happy to know you’re busy painting. I have faith in your high standards of dedication, which you must see as urgent and all-encompassing. I miss you. I know how much you loved me, I never doubted that, just like I can never forget that you didn’t know how to choose us. I’m all yours, a tender memory, sweet and smiling. I continue to share the great emotion that will bind us beyond the reckoning of time.

The emptiness of my night sometimes overwhelms me. I’m growing up, but I’m trying not to become too old. I snuggle up inside words. I wait for the flower to bloom, I become acquainted with my pain. Sadness has settled at the bottom of my soul. I’ve withdrawn, unable to step further into the light, afraid of the shadow that will come to block it out. I remember your shut eyelids. I stroke your face, slowly, lengthily.

He’d also sent her letters, as well as poems, cheerful drawings, caricatures, and occasionally even painstaking, meticulously detailed drawings of flowers. She’d kept them all and guarded them jealously. She scolded him whenever he was late in answering one of her letters. “So, we’re being lazy this morning?”

She was a romantic and her life had been neither easy nor carefree. A girl who’d been wounded at every turn in life and who kicked her feet in deep waters whenever she was about to hit the bottom. Then she would resurface, fighting with all her might, propelled by her need to love, thirsty for life and happiness.

The painter had forbidden himself to feel any regrets because it would serve no purpose. He would tell himself: “Regrets and nostalgia are merely the trappings of our weakness and helplessness. They are lies that we camouflage with words to soothe us and help us to sleep. They make our defeat seem less cruel.”

He hadn’t known how to choose her. He’d had his reasons, but what good could possibly come of revisiting that happy period of his life? Sometimes he tried to picture what his life might have been like if he’d divorced his wife and stayed with Ava. The scenarios he conjured were worthy of a horror film. He pictured Ava as a disloyal, malicious, and insatiable wife … no, he stopped watching that film. It was impossible. Ava could not have had such an evil doppelgänger.

The painter knew he’d thrown away the opportunity to have a real life, he’d missed out on the woman who had meant the most to him. For a long time, Ava’s ghost governed his days and nights, guiding and advising him. He needed her intuition, her intelligence, and her romanticism, even though it sometimes made him laugh. Ava had been the love of his life, and she’d just passed him by, leaving him stuck on the docks, weighted down with guilt and chained by his conjugal bonds, frozen in fear. The only thing he hadn’t messed up in his life was his art. When he’d told his psychiatrist that even though his marriage had been a failure, his career had been a success, the latter had retorted: “You can’t think of this as a system of communicating vessels; each phase of your life has had its fair share of failures and successes. One does not make up for the other, or vice versa. Otherwise life would be too easy!”

XXII. Casablanca, December 1, 2002

I find you utterly repulsive. In a physical sense, I mean. I could buy a lay from anyone just to wash you out of my genitals.

— Katarina to Peter, her husband

INGMAR BERGMAN, Scenes from a Marriage