The Happy Marriage (3 page)

When he was a child, his father used to urge him to visit the sick and the dying. “This is what our Prophet counsels us to do,” he would say, “we must visit those who suffer and who are waiting for their appointed hour, which is slow in coming. Visiting a dying man allows you to be both selfish and generous. Giving up your time to visit a man who is nailed to his bed is a good way to learn humility, to learn that it’s the little things that really make a difference in life, and that we are but grains of sand who belong to God, to whom we will return! Those who are afraid of other people’s illnesses must overcome that dread and learn to familiarize themselves with what lies ahead for all of us. There you have it, my son. These may be platitudes, but they have a kernel of truth!”

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.

During one of the first nights he’d spent in the studio, he’d suddenly suffered a severe cramp and the urgent need to change his position in bed. But the bell hadn’t worked. However much he had tried to make his thin, reedy voice audible, however many times he tapped on the bed’s handrail, it had been to no avail. The Twins, who’d been sleeping in the next room, hadn’t heard him. He’d been in pain, the
entire left side of his body had twitched and then stiffened. A final effort to move his body had caused him to abruptly fall off the side. The noise he’d made during the fall had been so loud that it had awakened the two men, who’d rushed to his side. Luckily, he hadn’t broken anything in the fall, and was unscathed aside from a few bluish bruises on his hip. Once more, his thoughts had turned to Naima, and to the terrible nights she must have endured.

Naima’s illness had radically altered his outlook on the world of disabled people. He knew more about it than most of his friends. Every time he’d crossed paths with someone who was disabled, he had tried to visualize what their daily life must have been like. He would give them a great deal of attention and take an interest in their case. Good health, both physical and psychological, always conceals reality; it prevents us from seeing the vulnerabilities of others, the occasionally cavernous wounds of those who are struck down by fate. We simply walk past them, and while in the best of cases we feel a pang of pity, we ultimately continue on our own path.

Thus he had one day accompanied his friend Hamid to a meeting for parents of disabled children. Nabile, Hamid’s son, had been born with Down syndrome. The painter had witnessed the desperate stories of those mothers whose life was a complete struggle due to the fact that Morocco did not have any adequate facilities to take care of these children. “Afflicted by a disease nobody cares about!” as one of the psychologists present in the room had said. After the meeting, the painter had had the idea of inviting Nabile back to his studio. He’d given him a canvas and some colors. Then he’d shown him how to use them. Nabile had been happy and had spent the whole day painting. They’d left in the evening along with his paintings, which his parents had had framed and hung in the living room of their home.

His stroke had provided him with the opportunity to reconsider everything in his life. He was completely convinced of that. Not just his
married life, but also his relationship to work and the act of creating. “I would love to paint a scream like Bacon did,” he said to himself, “or even fear, that certain something that makes my blood freeze or makes me vulnerable. To paint fear so accurately that I would be able to touch it, as well as render it useless, rub it out, and banish it from my life. I believe in the magic that comes out of painting and acts on reality. Oh yes, as soon as I can move my hands and fingers, I will unleash my attack on fear, a fear that is as horizontal as railroad tracks, an amorphous fear that constantly changes its colors and its appearance, a fear that will extinguish all lights. Indeed, I will catch that fear and lay it out in front of a sea whose blueness will spill over the whole canvas. I will gaze at it in the same way that I think about death. Death no longer frightens me now. But I must be especially careful not to get caught up in my style. I’ll have to create a new rhythm, a music that will repel fear!”

He eyed his lifeless leg and laughed softly. One evening, when he’d been meditating on his fate, he had convinced himself that his paralyzed leg had become the sanctuary of his soul, and that this was where his liberation would begin. The soul is alive and cannot put up with what is stiff and motionless. He was happy to think that his soul had lodged itself in his leg and was working on restoring his ability to move. Sure, it was a bit of a crazy idea, but his belief in it was unshakeable. Since he could no longer paint, he spent his time dreaming and reinventing life. He liked to tell himself that he was living in a little hut from which he could watch the world go by without being seen. Nevertheless, his pain, which was still raw, and his difficult physical therapy exercises had quickly pulled him out of that sickly child’s universe.

One day, when he’d gone back to the clinic for a checkup, he received a phone call. One of the Twins had given him the handset and told him: “It’s Madame Kiara!” which he’d accompanied with
an incomprehensible gesture. He’d immediately recognized her voice and was stunned that she hadn’t forgotten him. She had asked him for news, but had quickly realized that he still found it difficult to talk. She told him that Ricardo was doing spectacularly better. They had spent some time in Italy, but had soon been able to travel to set up a new life in the United States, where Ricardo’s physical therapy had completely changed him. His agent had taken care of everything. Ricardo could now move his fingers and when they sat him in front of the piano, he could still play, albeit slightly off-key, just like Glenn Gould, who interpreted Bach in his own inimitable way. His agent had immediately decided to exploit this new angle to Ricardo’s style. “Producers always have their heads screwed on,” she’d added, “but what we really care about is for Ricardo to regain the full use of his reflexes.”

The painter had been pleased to receive news of his old roommate. He told himself that hope could be found on the other side of pain.

Once he’d returned home after his checkup, he had amused himself by imagining how rumors of his stroke had spread and what they must be saying behind his back: “You didn’t know he’d had a stroke? Poor guy, he can’t even paint anymore … now is the perfect time to buy his canvases!” Or even: “He was arrogant and selfish and now God has given him a sign: it’s a warning, the next time will be his last!” Or even more cruelly: “He’s completely fucked now, he won’t even be able to get an erection, a tragedy for someone who loved women the way he did!… As for his wife, that poor lady he treated so badly, she can at least rest assured now that his willy isn’t good for anything apart from pissing! There’s a poetic justice to that, isn’t there?” “The great seducer will now become acquainted with our solitude. I must admit we were jealous of his conquests, and after all that, his paintings even sold well!” He tried to picture what his art dealer would have said to the
buyers: “Whatever you do, don’t sell, wait a few months!” And what about his wife, what had she been up to ever since she’d learned the news? Would she not try to exact her revenge? No, no, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t ask those kinds of questions. He didn’t want to fight with her, he wanted peace, so that he could heal.

Whenever you’re struck by misfortune, either through an illness or an accident, the people around you suddenly change. There are those who scurry off the sinking ship, like rats, those who wait to see how the situation develops before making their next move, and finally those who remain loyal to their feelings and whose behavior doesn’t change. Those friends are both rare and precious.

He was surrounded by people who belonged to each of the three categories. He’d never deluded himself about this particular fact. Before taking up painting, he had devoted himself to studying philosophy. He had especially loved Schopenhauer and his aphorisms; those cutting remarks of his had made him laugh, and they had also taught him to never trust in appearances and to watch out for their traps. For a while, he had even resisted studying philosophy, because he had believed that painting and reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were irreconcilable. But he knew how to handle pencils and brushes better than anyone he knew, and his art teacher had strongly encouraged him to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Those encouragements had helped him put his dreams of being a philosopher to the side.

And so one fine day he’d left Morocco for Paris. He hadn’t even been twenty years old at the time. In his mind, Paris had stood for freedom, boldness, and intellectual and artistic adventures. This was the city where Picasso had risen to fame and glory, and he had first discovered his vocation when admiring the master’s early canvases, especially those where the fifteen-year-old Picasso had painted his mother on her deathbed. Picasso had left a profound impression on
him, and he had wanted to follow in his footsteps. He perfected his style at the École des Beaux-Arts and found his own voice. He had distanced himself from the great names to forge a unique style of his own, a kind of hyper-realism that would eventually become his signature. His canvases, which were rigorously precise, were the fruit of long, painstaking work. He could not create art in any other way. He’d never been able to understand how his contemporaries could splash a bucket of paint onto a canvas or doodle a few lines. He thought their hands were guided by what came easiest to them, and that was exactly what he hated the most. He detested anything that came too easily, without any effort or imagination. He had wanted his painting to be like his philosophy (which he’d nevertheless abandoned): a precisely built edifice that left no room for vagueness, generalities, clichés or approximations. This had been the foundation on which he’d erected his life. As far as he was concerned, it was about being demanding. He took special care over the projects he worked on just as much as he took care of himself. Even the state of his health had become a constant concern, not because he was a hypochondriac, but because he’d seen people close to him die simply out of negligence, or because they hadn’t taken their doctors’ recommendations to heart.