Read Online The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun - Free Book Online

the Prix de Rome, and had been able to spend a year in the Villa Medici and get to know Italy. His dazzling success hadn’t compromised his modesty or altered his behavior. His parents were proud of him, women admired him and surrounded him at all turns. He continued to work just as he’d always done. Implausible rumors made the rounds, then evaporated, as all well know they do. A Moroccan newspaper accused him of profiteering by exploiting his country’s beauty … A Libyan newspaper called for his work to be boycotted: “This is a painter who sold out to the Zionists, whose agent is a Jew, and who exhibits his work in galleries that belong to Americans who support Israel’s criminal policies!” So many bad memories flashed past his mind, but they didn’t affect him. He knew there was a price to pay for success. His father had often told him: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”
    He was rational in all spheres of life, which contrasted sharply with the sumptuousness and extravagance of his hyper-realist paintings. The portraits he did from time to time, which were always executed in the strictest classicism, were the canvases that most closely resembled who he was as a man. Yet when it came to the rest of his paintings, he tended to vary the sources of his inspiration, and prove that his art wasn’t based on chance, but rather was the result of his thorough command of technique, which was the only way to transpose reality into a medium. He had a deep-seated aversion to schools that were either self-proclaimed or invented by art critics. As far as he was concerned, these were nothing but boxes where radically different artists were arbitrarily put together. He didn’t belong to any movement or school. When they asked him too many questions, he would simply tell them that he belonged to the Adoua School, which was a primaryschool in Fez frequented by the sons of Fez’s bourgeoisie, where he’d been enrolled by his father after completing Qur’anic school. That was where he’d learned to write and draw. Their teacher had been passionate about painting, and had often showed them books with reproductions of Van Gogh or Rembrandt. Some of the other children had laughed, but those reproductions had awoken a burning curiosity in him, which he still carried to this day.
    Light was scarce in the medina of Fez. When the weather was good, he would go up to the rooftop of his parents’ house and sketch whatever he saw. It had been difficult at first and he would tear up his sketches and start all over again so he could reproduce as accurate a portrait of the city as he could manage. All the houses looked alike: they were cube-shaped and fit together like the jagged pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He had to go beyond those appearances and re-create an atmosphere. Aged ten, he’d dared to show his teacher a drawing that he’d thought had turned out well. The teacher had encouraged him and had given him a box of colored pencils at the end of the year.
    Drawing had been a form of escapism for him, allowing him to experience the world in a different way. One of his neighbors had been a very pretty deaf-mute girl called Zina. Neither of them had known sign language, so he’d communicated with her through his drawings. He had spent whole afternoons making drawings for her so he could tell her sweet things and allow her to dream. He’d drawn portraits of her entire family for her. It played a decisive role in the development of his future technique. The desire to communicate with her had obliged him to become a creator. Once he would return home, he would draw stories for her that he would offer her the next morning. He’d been very sad the day when Zina’s parents had left Fez to go live in Casablanca. She had promised she would send him her new address. He’d waited a long time, but had never heard from her again. The memory of Zina made him smile, since she was definitely the first girl he’d ever