The Happy Marriage

At the clinic where he’d been hospitalized following his stroke, the painter had shared a room with a twenty-seven-year-old Italian pianist called Ricardo. Ricardo had also suffered a stroke while holidaying in Morocco. His doctors and his family had been waiting for his condition to improve slightly before sending him back to Milan. Ever since he’d regained consciousness, Ricardo had kept staring at his hands. He could no longer move his fingers! And thus wept in silence. His tears flowed incessantly. As though nothing could stop them, he would shut his eyes and turn his head to face the wall. His life had fallen apart and his career cut brutally short. A woman, perhaps his wife or his friend, would spend each day at his bedside, comforting him. She would rub his fingers, caress his face, dry his tears, and then leave the room, devastated. She would leave the clinic to smoke a cigarette then return, looking sad. The woman had once sat on the painter’s bed and started talking to him. He had listened to her and nodded his head.

“Ricardo is the love of my life, he had an incredibly bright future ahead of him, but his enemies won in the end. I’m Sicilian and I believe in the evil eye, it’s no coincidence that jinns are almost always cruelly beaten. Jealousy, envy, and malice. I’ve been told that people in Morocco believe in the evil eye. It exists and I have the proof. Ricardo and I were planning to get married a month after our trip to Morocco. His parents had been against the match — you see, as they belonged to the Milanese upper classes they could hardly stand by and watch their only son marry a fisherman’s daughter from Mazara del Vallo! But we had a plan, we’d had the idea to move to the United States as soon as we’d married, where his agent had told him he would always be in demand. And then the day after we arrived in Casablanca, he collapsed in our hotel room. I don’t know what happened. I knew that he’d often told me about how stressed he was, about the perfectionism that he wanted to achieve, an ambition that gnawed away at him, he couldn’t tolerate the slightest mistake or oversight. He would become ill before a concert, he wouldn’t eat or speak to anyone, I could feel him twisting himself into knots, as anxious as a bullfighter entering the arena. What will become of us? Please forgive me, here I am talking to you and I don’t even know you … I haven’t even asked you what your name is and what you did before your stroke … I’m just so upset!”

He had tried to mouth some words. She had understood that he was in just as bad shape as Ricardo. An artist struck by the same misfortune, the inability to practice his art. She had lowered her gaze and tears had streamed down her cheeks.

He had observed her, without her knowing it, admiring her wild beauty: a Southern girl, dark, tall, elegant, and lacking in manners. “What a waste!” he told himself. Life had been truly unfair!

Ricardo left the clinic a few days later and was sent back to Italy. As she’d been preparing to leave, the girl had scribbled a few words on the back of a prescription that she’d left on top of the painter’s bedside table, and then planted a small kiss on his forehead. She had written down their address and phone number along with a little message of hope where she wished they could meet again one day and sit around a table in Sicily or Tuscany. She had signed it “Chiara.”

His new condition as an invalid reminded him of his visits to Naima, a cousin whom he’d loved like a sister, who’d been struck down by Lou Gehrig’s disease at the age of thirty-two. He had watched the disease evolve, and witnessed her body’s slow but inexorable deterioration, which was gradually losing its muscle mass. He’d greatly admired that young beautiful woman who was confined to a wheelchair and yet was still so brave and optimistic. She couldn’t speak and was completely reliant on her nurse: a fearless lady who was so devoted to Naima that she never left her side, who not only considered herself a member of the family, but also an extension of her hands, arms, and legs.

He knew that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was incurable. Naima was perfectly aware of that too, and begged God every day for a little more time so she could maybe see her children complete their studies or perhaps even see her two daughters get married. She prayed and put her trust in God’s hands.

The painter wanted to emulate her example. Yet he wasn’t enough of a believer to dutifully attend to his prayers. He believed in spirituality, so every once in a while he would invoke the tender mercies of the higher power that governed the universe. He was a skeptic who was inclined to explore the ways of the soul. An artist could not work with certainties. His entire being and body of work were plagued by a sense of doubt.