The Happy Marriage Read Online Free

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 writtendown 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, theentire 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