The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Author:Tahar Ben Jelloun
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Political, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 9781612194660
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2016-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

XIX

Casablanca

November 6, 2000

I hate having to repay people’s kindness!

—CHRISTIAN-JAQUE, A Lover’s Return

The time came when everything in the painter’s life seemed like it was starting to get bent out of shape and was taking a different direction. The walls were closing in around him, the ceiling threatened to collapse, his voice trailed off, his body grew stiff, and his head was dizzy from spinning. Sometimes the painter’s body trembled all over, even when he wasn’t cold. Even though his assistants were never far away, he felt terribly alone. He felt as though he were living inside a dark tube and that he had to run in order to save his skin. Sometimes he felt he was being pursued by a shadow, others by a noise, others even by a wave of heat emanating from a ball of fire. It was like being in a film where his body was exactly like it had been before his stroke, but his mind was that of an invalid. Two overlapping states of consciousness: one where his body had seized up, been crippled, and was now under repair, while the other featured a young and lively body. He was hounded by misfortunes. His wife would surely have claimed this was due to the evil eye, or had been caused by a spell cast by a neighbor. But inside that dark tube, the painter never stopped running, then falling down, then getting up again, and then falling down again, getting swallowed up by a big black hole. The fall had left his entire body shaking and in distress, but his mind was as sharp as ever.

It’s often said that depression is the quintessence of solitude at its most cruel. During his worst nightmares, the painter would find himself inside a cave where the neighborhood rats used to gather. He’d always been horrified by those pests, in fact he had such an irrational fear of them that he couldn’t even bear to see them in a picture book. It probably dated back to his childhood when he used squat toilets. A rat had bitten his ankle once. He’d been saved by a young doctor who’d given him an injection on the spot. In his nightmare, the painter was forced to live with those rats and put up with the horror they inspired in him. His body wouldn’t obey him while he was in their midst. Who could have put him in such a dark, macabre place filled solely by the sounds of those pests, who were capable of exterminating a whole city with the plague? Among those rats, his young supple body had disappeared and been replaced by a cumbersome and diseased one. The rats would climb up his legs and blithely run along the length of his body, squabbling next to his head, biting him here and there and dragging him wherever they liked. All of a sudden, a big black rat drew close to him, lunged at his genitals, and bit them with all its might.

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