The Happy Marriage (29 page)

Foulane was only avaricious when it came to me or my family. I must admit he wasn’t stingy when it came to the children; still, one day our youngest daughter told him: “Papa, we’re rich, why do you deny yourself things? Look at my classmates, their fathers are a lot poorer than you and they always have the latest video games!” In theory I actually agreed with him when it came to not wanting our children to be enslaved to technology, but this wasn’t a matter of principles …

Money lay at the root of our biggest fights. On one occasion, I wanted to steal one of his paintings so that I could sell it, but unfortunately he hadn’t finished any new ones around that time. I suspected him of being purposefully slow when it came to finishing them and only signing them at the last possible minute. He always took precautions. I compared myself to the other wives in our circle of friends, in particular the wife of a Spanish musician who always handed everything over to her when it came to money, including contracts, sales, and royalties. As the musician put it to us one day: “I play the gigs, and she rakes in the cash!” Another of our friends, a rich, celebrated writer, also let his wife handle their finances. He never had any money on him. His wife always took care of the bills.

At first I hadn’t wanted to handle his finances, I just didn’t want to be at the bottom of his list of priorities, an afterthought, as if I was nothing, as if I didn’t mean anything to him. But he always trusted his agent more than he did his wife, even though his agent actually stole from him. I’d also started to notice that our children’s inheritance was quickly going up in smoke. I had to act and stop that hemorrhage. His family, friends, and agent almost lived off our backs. As far as I was concerned, that was simply unacceptable. It was because Foulane was weak and naïve, and always got screwed over by the first person who came along. I’ve lost track of how many times I warned him against some of his so-called friends who seduced him with their words and flattery to further their secret, shameful agendas, which he never seemed to see through. That’s how people had not only been able to steal paintings from him, but in one case also a lot of money—the little man whom Foulane wrote in his manuscript that he’d seen during one of his hallucinations, and who turned out to be an international con artist, a nasty, bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed man who laughed hysterically and whose eyes often reddened with jealousy. All because he had artistic pretensions and yet nobody bought his paintings. So he opened a gallery in Casablanca, exhibited Foulane’s work, and sold out the show. He then quickly filed for bankruptcy and Foulane
realized he’d been swindled and had no legal recourse. This story even found its way into the press, but by then the crook had switched trades and had opened a travel agency devoted to pilgrims wanting to go on the Hajj or the Umrah. He would sell those poor devils package tours and once the pilgrims arrived in Saudi Arabia they realized they’d been cheated and that everything they’d been promised was a lie. On their return home, they would also discover that they couldn’t file any claims because the travel agency had in the meanwhile been replaced by a butcher’s or a grocer’s. Foulane had been friends with this con artist and hadn’t even noticed how he’d been planning to make his move throughout the course of their relationship. To think that my husband had even loaned him some money to open his gallery. I’d always distrusted that guy, but Foulane had never listened to me, telling me: “You’re just jealous of my friends and you’re trying to come between us!” and so forth.

That’s why money lay behind so many of our fights. One day I told him: “You’ve got serious problems when it comes to money, you should get some help.”

I never forgot his reply, which made me cry for a long time: “I’d rather see my money go into my friends’ pockets than in your family’s.”

As if my family ever needed his moolah. What a disgrace! It was then that I understood that he was out of his mind and that his family—meaning me and the kids—would always come after his friends, his sisters, his nephews, his nieces, and his cousins.

When I filed for divorce, I did in fact try to get my revenge and get my hands on as much of his money as I could to prevent the next woman who fell into his lap from taking it all. He was simply incapable of managing the family’s finances, which was why I had to take charge once and for all.

Oh, I forgot to mention an important detail. Whenever he gave me a present, it was almost certain that he hadn’t paid for it. He didn’t buy me the traditional golden belt that Moroccan husbands usually
gave to their wives; instead, his mother gave me hers. I had wanted one in a more modern style that would go with my figure and my dresses. But no, instead he asked his mother to give me hers because she’d gotten ill by then and never attended any parties or celebrations anymore. I never wore it. He also never took me on a honeymoon. Always because of money. He said that since we always got invited to go abroad, it was like being on a permanent honeymoon. He would even buy himself a business-class ticket so that his butt would be nice and cozy while forcing the children and me to fly economy because he didn’t want to pay for an upgrade. He said that it didn’t matter because we were all on the same plane and heading to the same destination. “You’re all young, but I’m not young anymore.” He would never admit he was old. He liked to pamper himself and was incredibly superstitious.

When my uncle and his wife spent some time at one of our old houses, which we didn’t use and which was all boarded up, he insisted on charging them rent. How embarrassing! How disrespectful! That he would ask my poor uncle for money when he was making millions. Whereas my uncle was actually doing us a favor by living in a house and thus helping to keep it up, since empty houses depreciate in value, not to mention the fact my uncle was a migrant worker who barely made more than the minimum wage.

Whenever we ate out at restaurants, he would forbid me from drinking wine, under the pretext that this would fuel my burgeoning alcoholism. Whereas the truth was that he didn’t want to spend any money. Besides, all Moroccan men consider themselves superior to their wives, and he couldn’t stand to see me drink, thinking it was a sign of how disobedient and liberated I was. So I would drink to excess purely to make him uncomfortable and force him to reveal himself for who he really was: an ayatollah in Western clothes.

He was always very generous with our staff and paid them a lot more than the going rate, even going so far as to buy our watchman a sheep for Eid al-Adha. But when it came to me, he counted all the
pennies. None of my friends ever had money problems with their husbands. I guess I was unlucky. It was my destiny. I always had to ask him for anything I needed; in fact, he made sure it worked out like that so I would have to rely on him and his generosity, as though I were a stranger or one of his children. He made a note of all the expenses in a ledger and every time he gave me some money he would say: “You spent a lot last month, it’s too much … especially since you don’t lack for anything!” One day I tore the ledger out of his hands, ripped it up, and threw it in the trash. He stared at me with an appalled expression on his face, as though I’d just ripped up some banknotes.

I never wanted to make things easy for him and went out of my way to upset him, waiting for the most inopportune moments, like when he was busy working, at which point I would burst into his studio and ask him for money. He would write me a check just to shut me up. One day he forgot to fill in the sum. So I rushed to the bank and asked the teller if the account was in the black. She said I could withdraw a hundred thousand dirhams and so I left with my purse stuffed full of banknotes. I felt light and carefree because my purse was full of moolah, his moolah! I paid for my parents’ pilgrimage to Mecca, bought myself a nice watch and a few other trinkets.

I also purchased some very expensive cloths and asked the upholsterer to send my husband the bill. He was a gifted upholsterer but he charged wild prices. Which was why my husband hated him, even though he settled the bill in the end.

Despite his being suspicious of any kinds of merchants, one of Foulane’s cousins managed to swindle him. He claimed to have found a Mexican collector who wanted to buy one of Foulane’s finest paintings. The Mexican had even offered to pay an advance as collateral. The cousin delivered the painting to the Mexican, got his money, and Foulane never saw him again! A clever trick! Foulane didn’t trust my family, but got conned by his own … And that’s the truth.

Sex

Did you notice how Foulane almost never mentioned our sex life? If you asked him why, he’d tell you that it was out of modesty. Not that he ever concerned himself with modesty when it came to painting naked women in compromising poses. But whenever the subject of our sex life entered the equation, he fell strangely silent. He listed all his conquests in his manuscript and described those women down to the slightest detail, portraying himself as a Casanova or provincial Don Juan, then suddenly started to complain that old age robbed him of his libido, a situation he attributed to me and his stroke.

He preferred to remain silent about what had happened—or rather didn’t happen—between us. We rarely made love, he was always so rough and in a hurry to finish, coming without even asking if I’d climaxed too. I must admit that I didn’t really lust after him either. We would fall asleep, tell each other goodnight, and he would watch a film, getting up several times in the middle of the night to eat some fruit or yogurt, switching on the lamp, grumbling because
he was finding it difficult to sleep, shift around in bed, then, as if that wasn’t enough, he’d switch on the radio. I would go to sleep with the children and leave him alone with his insomnia. He would wake up in a bad mood in the morning, drink his coffee in silence, without so much as a smile, jump into his car, and head to his studio, where he could finally be in peace, as he put it.

I knew that he was never peaceful on his own, and that he took advantage of my being far away and busy looking after the children to fuck girls he picked up on the streets. He would come back home in the evening looking exhausted. My intuition told me he’d been having sex, even though he was completely impotent when it came to me. But no, he was actually reserving his sexual energies and desires for other women, some of whom were single, others married, but all of whom always hoped he’d leave me for them.

At least one of those affairs ended quite badly, a Moroccan girl who was studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She’d come to ask him for some advice and was distantly related to him, a second cousin twice removed. Barely twenty years old and still a virgin. She got pregnant a couple of months after they met. To save face, she immediately had an abortion, and in order to conceal the fact that anything had ever happened, she got her hymen restitched at a specialist clinic. Foulane told me all about it, but was careful to omit the fact he was the father.

“I have to help her,” he’d told me, looking all innocent, “her parents are very conservative, they’ll be very upset and her boyfriend is penniless, and in any case he ran away!”

Foulane paid for everything, but as soon as she’d had the abortion, she completely vanished. I waited a month, then called her and went to see her, taking a bottle of wine with me since I knew she loved red wine. We drank, and once her inhibitions had broken down, she spilled her guts and told me the whole story down to the smallest detail, how he would fuck her and put her in positions that helped him come, how she sucked him off, and how he licked her feet, and
probably her ass too. She even told me how they’d had a threesome with an Italian journalist who’d been in town to write about the Contemporary Art Fair.

When it was time to leave, I thanked her and asked her to do me a favor: “Give me a heads up when you go see him again.”

But alas there wasn’t a next time. Foulane broke it off with her and refused to pick up her phone calls. I had wanted to surprise him and catch him red-handed. Yet did I really need more proof?

What kind of woman would put up with these things? With her husband pretending he had a migraine when it came to her, then having threesomes with other women?

It’s true that one day I sent him a text where I said:
“You don’t satisfy me either sexually or financially!”
He never replied to that.

My friends would often tell me about their evenings with their husbands and I would remain silent, not daring to tell them the truth. I would suppress my frustrations and be ashamed of it. My friend Hafsa told me about how her husband used to shave her, which was apparently quite exciting. Maria’s husband would spend a long time kissing her all over her body. Khadijia would wear sexy lingerie and she and her husband would do some role-playing where she played the foreigner. Most of them made love a few times a week. But I always had to wait until he felt like it. If only he’d taken his time and looked after my needs too!

I was lucky to meet Lalla, my neighbor, whom Foulane hated and tried to distance from me. Lalla saved me. She opened my eyes, gave me the means to defend myself. She’s an exceptional woman: selfless, beautiful, wholesome, generous, and with the soul of an artist, who refused to make compromises, unlike Foulane.

Lalla talked to me about sexuality and explained that a woman my age needed to be satisfied at least once a day. I wouldn’t have hoped for so much, but she was right, I had to leave that selfish, perverted monster who’d managed to make me lose my mind. I know that Foulane didn’t like Lalla. She helped me to discover what he was
up to: he was trying to drive me crazy so he could leave me, start a new life, and still keep everything.

I owe Lalla a debt for helping me to start achieving my freedom. He was jealous of her, very jealous. He would shout and scream, supposedly because he loved me. What a hypocrite! He’d spent his life being interested in just one thing—his ego—and when someone opened my eyes to that, he couldn’t bear it. He thought that he’d married a quiet little shepherdess who wouldn’t look him in the eye and would swallow all of his bullshit! Oh no! He was fooling himself, he had no idea what that little country girl had in store for him.