The Happy Marriage

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.