The Happy Marriage

Prologue

Obsessive, unsettling, amusing, diabolical. I am a fly. Restless and resolute. Gluttonous and stubborn. A fly, just a worthless fly. To be unceremoniously hunted down, swatted, and crushed when caught. Something to be despised, but also feared. There’s nothing nice about flies. Nothing to be proud of either. Unlike the queen bee. Black, gray, shameless, and unscrupulous. Yet it’s free, and it amuses itself with those who chase after it. Doesn’t care about anything. Doesn’t have a house, or belong to any country. Arrives on the back of an evil wind and just settles there without asking anyone’s permission. It’s only discouraged by the rain or the cold. It dares to do whatever it likes. It flies into fashionable salons, mosques, and alcoves, sneaking its way into the most intimate and secret spaces: bathroom cabinets, kitchens, laundry rooms, following its instincts wherever they lead it. It disturbs the dead, and bites into their lifeless flesh, then wanders off somewhere else. It bites into a baby’s soft skin, causing it to swell up. It goes wherever it likes and is unstoppable. Free and stubborn. I’m going to be a fly this morning. It’ll amuse me. I’ll enjoy being fearless and shameless. I’m going to become a fly in order to annoy my husband. I’m very good at that. I’m happy whenever I can settle on his nose and watch him being unable to swat me away. I giggle and cling to him. I tickle him, make him itch, and make his life hellish. I like that. A small kind of revenge. Let’s put it this way: a taste of what’s in store for him.

It’s crazy how men are so afraid of being alone. What a sin! I’m not afraid of being alone. I even go to the length of creating that solitude and allowing it to reign. It doesn’t make me neurotic. I’m just like a fly, I’m independent-minded and don’t like compromises. My man thought I was rigid. He’s certainly right, but I don’t like that word. It reminds me of death. As for solitude, I get along with it just fine. There’s no need to whine about it to other people, people who are probably all too happy to despise you. I am solitude. Solitude is the fly that takes its time and refuses to budge. I am the solitude that crawls under my man’s skin. I’ve stopped calling him that. He’s never been “my” man, but has instead always belonged to other women, starting with his mother and those two sisters of his, both of whom are witches.

Today I’m a fly. We’ve lived in solitude for a long time, way before his accident happened. I’ll admit I’m exaggerating a little, dramatizing this as much as I can. I’m left without a choice. I suck blood out of the tip of his large nose. I bother him, bump into him, insult him, spit on his skin, and there’s nothing he can do about it, he can’t even move his arms, hands, or fingers. He’s been taken hostage by his illness and I try not to neglect any details.

I’m nothing but a fly, any old fly, stupid and stubborn. I’m obstinate. It’s in my genes. The only way I know how to be. It’s just the way things are. I know that’s moronic, but that’s how it is. There’s nothing I can do about it. I am — and always have been — stronger than he ever was. Just like a fly. I have eyes on the back of my head and I’m suspicious of everyone, and I think this suits me very well. This is how it is and nothing’s ever going to change my mind. I’m a fly, a dangerous fly.

My Version

Before giving you my version of events, I must warn you that I’m nasty. I wasn’t born that way, but when people attack me, I defend myself by any and all means, and I give as good as I get. Truth be told, I don’t give as good as I get, I inflict even worse damage. That’s how it is, I’m not nice, and I hate nice guys, they’re weak, vague, and they’re all alike. I like my relationships with people to be direct, frank, free of compromise and hypocrisy. Yes, I’m inflexible. Flexibility is for snakes and diplomats. I’m not ashamed to say what I’m like because I’m an honest woman. I don’t lie. I cut to the chase. I don’t equivocate. I sprang out of rocks and prickly pears. I was born in an arid land, devoid of all water and shade. There were no trees or plants where I grew up. But there were animals and men. Wretched animals and women resigned to their fate. I rebelled against all that. I reacted to droughts by becoming hard. As far as I’m aware, animals don’t bother with civilities. I’m tough because nice people always wind up dead, wondering why people treated them so badly.

I don’t know the meaning of fear. I’ve never been afraid. I don’t know the meaning of shame. Nobody’s ever been able to shame me. That’s how it is. No shame, no fear. I’m not afraid of anybody. I’m ready to die, anywhere, any time. I forge ahead, and I don’t look back.

I endured hunger, a great deal of hunger. I endured thirst. I endured the cold. Nobody ever came to my rescue. Very early in life I understood that life isn’t an endless series of dinner parties where everybody loves everybody.

I’m right, and I keep my head high. I don’t allow anyone to push me around or betray me. Betrayal is the worst thing someone can do as far as I’m concerned. I’m capable of killing anyone who betrays me. That’s how it is. I don’t hide my intentions; besides, I don’t have any intentions to start with. I follow through with my decisions. I belong to the night, to a cruel, unforgiving world.

I wonder why I felt the need to warn you. It’s not like me at all. I don’t waste time on chatter. I act. But all I’ve done here is talk. At the risk of failing to act.

My name is Amina, and I am the woman mentioned in this story. I’m tall, five seven, and have brown hair, my natural color. I love life, I’m comfortable in my own skin, and I like to help people. I’m not formally educated, but I’m curious and I’m an autodidact, I read and look things up all the time. I’m telling you all this because I want you to know who I really am. My husband took a lot of liberties with the truth.

I come from a dry, rotten land where nothing grows, that’s dotted only with rocks and prickly pears. It wasn’t even a village, or a douar, but a cemetery inhabited by the living. Sometimes the dust was gray, sometimes it was ochre. It would depend on the day. The dust clung to the wild weeds, to the young girls’ faces, and on the hungry dogs and cats. The rest of the world couldn’t have cared less about my village. It was just a nameless place in the middle of nowhere. Some called it Bled el Fna, the village of nothingness. No saint or prophet ever stopped by there. What would have been the point? Why would they have bothered? For some miserable peasants and a few starved animals? Nothingness, that’s right, the village of nothingness.

My father wanted me to be a shepherdess, and I obeyed him right up to the day when I discovered school. Instead of collecting firewood and looking after the cows, I followed my cousin to the school that lay an hour’s walk from the village. I covered my head in a gray scarf and blended in with the other children. Since most kids hardly ever showed up, the teacher didn’t notice me until I squabbled with a classmate who’d refused to lend me a pencil and a piece of paper. I’m violent, and if anyone refuses to give me something, I just take it. That’s the way it is. I snatched her satchel away from her and started to use it. Then she screamed, and the teacher stepped in and made me spend the whole morning standing in the corner. My father was told about the incident. In any case, he’d never wanted his girl to mix with boys at the local school. “What’s the point of learning how to read and write?” he’d told me. “It would be better if you learned how to birth a calf or an ewe.” My mother didn’t share his opinion and wanted me to study to help dispel the gloominess that sometimes took hold of me and made me very sad. But she had no say. My father was kind to her, but he said it was better for everyone to know their place and to resign themselves to it. He forbade me from going back to school and entrusted me into the care of his uncle Boualem, a grocer in Marrakech who treated me as though I were his maid. Boualem was a miser, a real miser. He spent all of his days in the shop counting tins of sardines, then moving them around and counting them all over again. He never washed very often and thought the ablutions before his prayers were enough — it was his way of being pious! His grooming was incredibly basic. His clothes stank of sweat. He was skinny as a rake, not an ounce of fat on his bones. It was said that skinny men lived for a long time. My aunt would scream at him. Once, he struck her ferociously. She cried. I cried. He forbade us to eat that evening. I was always hungry. On one occasion, I snuck into the grocery shop, which was connected to the house, and stole a jar of jam. I’d never tasted jam before. The next day, he slapped me so hard it almost knocked my head off my shoulders, without even asking me a question. “That’s the price I had to pay for stealing a jar of jam,” I told myself.

The day Boualem told me he was going to send me to live with strangers, I was frightened and yet relieved. He dropped me off in front of a house where the gate opened by itself. There was a sign that read: “Vicious dog.” I advanced slowly, carrying all my belongings inside a plastic bag. I saw a lady who seemed to find it difficult to walk come toward me. “Come here, little one,” she said, “I’m going to show you your room.” At first, I didn’t understand what I would have to do there; those people were very nice to me and bought me some new clothes (yes, that was the first time anyone had ever bought me any clothes, my mother would usually dress me in hand-me-downs), and they gave me plenty to eat and let me sit at the table with them. I didn’t know how to behave, I found using a fork and knife difficult, so I ate with my fingers, which shocked them. I had to learn to cut my meat and bring it to my mouth gracefully with a fork. They told me about distant countries and the travels they’d been on. They said they were happy to be my new parents. I didn’t understand everything they said, but Zanouba, their maid, translated them for me. I cried and I tore up my new blue dress. They bought me some more dresses and enrolled me in a private school that didn’t have many pupils. They would drop me off there in their car and give me a snack they’d wrapped in a piece of very shiny white paper. I didn’t say a single word at school. I made grimaces and gesticulated, pricked my ears wide and learned French. I remembered everything, I had a great memory. In the evening, I would tell them what I’d learned that day. I got words and things mixed up. Whenever I missed my parents a lot, I would go to Zanouba and cuddle up to her. She would whisper kind, reassuring words and console me. I was lucky, she told me. Yes, lucky to be torn away from my parents and siblings. I never missed the bled, but I couldn’t forget my grandmother. My difficulties at school made things more difficult. The French couple hired a young man to tutor me. He was handsome. I think I fell in love with him. He was a high school student. I didn’t dare look him in the eye. I must admit that he helped me a lot. He taught me how to read and write. My life changed completely from that moment on. One day, I bled all over my panties. I was ashamed. Fortunately, Zanouba explained it all to me and cleaned me up. I was in love then, and so I started paying attention to what I wore. I wanted to draw the young man’s attention. But by the time the summer arrived, he left and I never saw him again.

I saw my parents twice over the course of three years. They came to bring me my share of oil and honey that my cousins had distributed amongst the villagers.

One day, my new parents told me that they had to return to France. We went to the bled. I felt weird, as though I were a stranger in that village that was devoid of water. There were children covered in flies playing with a dead cat. They had snotty noses and nobody was looking after them. My father came out to meet me, and I thought he was going to kiss me like my foreigner parents did, but instead I was the one who had to kiss the back of his large hand that smelled like dry earth. Without looking me in the eye, he told me: “We’ll see one another again someday, my daughter.” Then he spoke to me about a trip and papers that had to be signed. I saw bundles of banknotes being exchanged between the French couple and my father. I suddenly understood what had happened. My father had sold me! It was dreadful! I started to cry. The lady consoled me. She told me that my father would always be my father. They hadn’t been able to adopt me, so they’d needed a letter from my father so that I could leave with them. That’s how I got my first passport. It was green. The man from the wilaya told me in a menacing tone: “Be careful, this is valuable, if you lose it we won’t give you another one, and you’ll spend the rest of your life without a passport and you won’t be able to go anywhere.” When I was about to leave the office, the same man grabbed me and whispered in my ear: “You’re lucky that these Frenchmen are looking after you, so make sure you don’t embarrass us. Don’t forget that this little green booklet means you are representing Morocco!” But he was wrong, I wasn’t representing anyone, not even my mother, who’d stood motionless while she watched me leave. Maybe she cried too. I shut my eyes and decided I would never think about that unhappy village ever again.

A few weeks later, I left with the French couple in a ship bound for Marseilles. They didn’t speak throughout the entire journey. They were in a bad mood. The woman cried in secret. She told me that she didn’t want to leave that wonderful country but that her husband had to go back to look after his parents, who were old and ill. I told myself that he was a good son. But there was something else that was wrong with this couple who had never managed to have children. I could feel things even though I wasn’t able to call them by their names. They would argue over trifles. The woman wanted to be in charge and her husband would resist her, while I would watch them and remember that my parents had never raised their voices.

We went to live in an apartment that wasn’t very big. Our neighbors, who were Armenians, came to welcome us and brought us marzipan cakes. They had a daughter who was very beautiful, tall and with brown hair. She was seventeen years old even though she looked like she was in her twenties. She quickly became my friend. She often invited me over so she could show me photos that people had taken of her. She wanted to become an actress. “And what about your studies?” I asked her.

“You don’t need to study to become an actress!” she replied, laughing. She already worked as a fashion model and had been fairly successful. As we were the same size, she told me: “You know, if your parents agree, maybe you should try your luck too. People are interested in girls like us now and it’s our turn to become famous. Never cut your hair, instead let it grow and get it blown up, so you’ll look like a lioness!”

I thought that was funny. I loved my hair and took good care of it, I used henna that gave it a nice red color with brown highlights. My friend then undressed herself, asked me to do the same, and started comparing our measurements: waist, chest, and hips. She said that if I wanted to, I could be a big hit in the fashion world.

I attended high school and took my studies seriously. My Moroccan parents had simply disappeared, whereas my French parents were often nostalgic for Morocco. Then a bunch of their time was sucked up by a complicated drama over their inheritance after my French father’s parents died. For the most part, they gave me a lot of freedom and their absolute trust. I would take advantage of this and accompany my Armenian friend to her fashion shoots. That’s how a guy with red hair asked me to walk in front of him as though I was carrying a jug full of water on my head. I tried to picture what that might look like and walked carefully. “Watch out,” he shouted, “the jug’s going to fall and shatter into a thousand pieces!” So I took a deep breath and walked normally. A woman took me by the hand, undressed me, and told me to put on a weird dress that was full of holes. In fact it was see-through. I didn’t want to wear this dress that made me look like I was naked. So she gave me another dress that was more presentable and told me to walk around the room.

In the space of a few moments, I had become a model at the mere age of seventeen and a half! An exceptionally good job that meant I left each shoot with armloads of presents. My parents turned a blind eye to all of this. On one condition: that I wouldn’t fail my final exams. I didn’t listen to their advice and in June I was forced to take remedial classes. It was a slap in the face. I’d never thought of myself as a poor student. I hadn’t realized how many significant gaps there were in my learning. I was so arrogant that I thought I’d be able to catch up in no time. After all, it wasn’t my fault that I’d had such a chaotic and troubled education. I didn’t even know who I was anymore! Was I Lahbib Wakrine’s daughter, or did I belong to Mr. and Mrs. Lefranc? Was I Arab or Berber? French or Belgian? Mrs. Lefranc had Flemish roots …

I attended my remedial classes and managed to barely pass my exams. My French parents had nothing to say in that regard. I enrolled at the university, but never set foot there. I preferred to waste my time on far more futile endeavors and went to photo shoots. I was an adult by then and I didn’t realize how time was slipping through my fingers.

Although I’m not exactly sure as to how it happened, my Armenian friend got herself sucked in by a producer and featured in some explicit scenes in movies that were never shown in Marseilles’s bigger cinemas. She got into a big argument with her parents and disappeared. That drama made me snap out of my waking dream. I left that filthy scene behind and started taking my art history course seriously.

But all of a sudden, from one day to the next, I found myself on my own. My French parents wound up separating, and I barely noticed, since truth be told I’d been spending so little time at the house. They divided up all their possessions and I got caught in the middle. Mrs. Lefranc asked me if I wanted to go live with her or stay with her ex-husband. I was embarrassed. But as luck would have it, everything worked out: a court decree authorized my right to family reunification. My father, who’d set himself up in Clermont-Ferrand, sent for his wife and two of his other children. Forgetting all the sadness I’d suffered in the past and the pain I’d felt when I was abandoned, I suddenly felt the urge to join them. The botched adoption had merely been an interlude that had allowed me to have a fairly normal education. My parents were still my parents. My name was Amina Wakrine even though the Lefrancs called me Nathalie. As it happens, I never figured out why they’d chosen that name. At school, everyone had called me Natha. As for the guy with red hair, he wanted to call me Kika. And why not? My name seemed to change all the time, but I was still the same person, my parents’ daughter.

Once I got to Clermont-Ferrand, I felt like I was having a panic attack. That city felt like a prison to me. It was ugly, gray, and stifling. I wanted so badly to leave it and never return. Seeing my distress, my father decided not to say anything and allowed me to leave for Paris so that I could continue the studies I’d begun in Marseilles. He opened a bank account for me and deposited some of the money that the French couple had given him. It was a considerable sum, especially since it had been supplemented by the money orders that Mrs. Lefranc had been sending me ever since she’d gotten divorced. Leaving for Paris was a turning point for me. I was finally independent and free of all the guilt I’d ever felt toward my parents. I was determined to make the best of it. I would never have dreamed at that time of the monumental failure that would await me with the painter many years later.

I must admit that it wasn’t very long after I’d moved to Paris before I’d acquired a lot of boyfriends. But I remained a virgin, as I wanted to save myself for marriage. Go figure why a rebellious girl like me who’d known such a difficult life would care about keeping her hymen intact. Traditions and customs appeared to be stronger than I was.

My future husband never knew any of this. I never wanted to tell him and he hardly ever asked me any questions about that time in my life. Maybe he thought that everything that had happened before we met was ancient history — Jahiliyyah, the time of ignorance, as the Muslims call the centuries before the arrival of the Prophet Mohammed.

I only saw Mrs. Lefranc one last time after that, when she was in an old people’s home. She wasn’t even that old by then, but she had nobody to look after her or keep her company. She hugged me tight and I could feel her crying. When I left, she gave me a little suitcase. “You’ll open it on the day you get married,” she told me. But I couldn’t resist the urge. I opened it as soon as I got home. I was impressed: it was filled with jewelry, photos, a notebook with addresses, some of which had been scrawled out, a Moroccan dress that she must have bought at the souk on Place de la Kissaria in Rabat, and lastly a letter addressed to Maître Antoine, Esq., 2 bis Rue Lamiral, etc. I didn’t open it and I still have it somewhere in my files. One day I’ll go visit this Maître Antoine …

The Secret Manuscript

You must be asking yourself: how did I come to learn of the existence of the manuscript you’ve just finished reading and which I’m now rebutting point by point? By stealing it. Yes, by stealing it. I knew that one of his best friends, an amateur who wrote in his spare time, was up to something. But I suspected that they would try to conceal the fruit of their labors. So I started spying on them, taking care that they didn’t notice anything. Here’s how they went about it. Over the space of six months, his friend would come visit him very early in the mornings. They would spend hours talking and then he would pull out his laptop and edit their conversation, polishing it up into a proper text. When he was satisfied with the results, he would immediately print out the pages of that strange kind of biography and locked them up in the studio’s safe, to which I had neither the combination nor the key. A month ago, I took advantage of the fact that my husband would be spending the day at the hospital to run some tests and I called a locksmith to open the safe for me. After all, there was nothing strange about that, it was my own house and no locksmith would refuse to open up a safe, simply assuming I’d lost my key to it. I raided its contents and grabbed everything inside it. Before leaving, the locksmith asked me to think up a new combination code and so I’m now the only one who can access the safe. The manuscript was inside a folder marked “confidential.” I had a blast reading it. I breezed through it and made notes on it in the space of a single night. I was beside myself with rage, but for the first time my desire for vengeance was well-founded. His friend never came back. I believe he fell gravely ill. My prayers bore their fruit.

When my husband realized what I’d done, he didn’t do anything. I thought I heard him complaining to himself. I brought him an herbal infusion, but he gave me a look to signify he didn’t want it and then made it clear that he wanted me to leave. On my way out, I deliberately knocked a pot of paint onto an unfinished canvas. I regretted having done something so petty. I ruined a painting that could have one day made me a lot of money. Now let’s move on. We never act the way we should. My instincts often trump my ability to think rationally.

Foulane owned a collection of rare Arabic manuscripts. He was very proud of it, he would show it to his visitors and talk about it at length. I took advantage of him leaving the house to go for a medical checkup to steal them. I hid them at Lalla’s, since she owned a large chest. I will use them as a bargaining chip one day or another. I made sure he noticed their disappearance, which sent him into a fury. He went all red in the face and his body started shaking as though he’d been having an epileptic seizure. I stood right in front of him, and savoring my victory over him, I said:

“Now you’re going to pay. I’ll never let you go and this is but a taste of what’s to come. You’ll never see your precious books again. When I decide to burn them, I’ll wheel you out to see it so you can watch them burn! You’ll be stuck in your chair and won’t be able to do a thing about it!”

I’ll start from the top, just like in a police report. No hesitations, emotions, or concessions. Reading that manuscript left me feeling unexpectedly invigorated. Being at war suits me just fine. I feel alive. I’m ready to kill and I’m always sharpening my blade. It’s going to be a fight to the death. After all, after having read about all he’s said and done, I have no qualms about speeding up his demise. I’m not well educated, I don’t have any fancy degrees, and I’m not sophisticated; I’m straight up, direct, and sincere. I can’t stand hypocrisies. I don’t try to sugarcoat things. His family’s always done plenty of that. Let’s go straight to the facts.

I hope you noticed that he never referred to me by my name throughout the entirety of his manuscript. I was nothing to him, a gust of wind, a smudge of dew on the window, not even a ghost. Just like his father, who never called his wife by her name. He would just shout, “Woman,” and she would come running. Very well, I’ll do the same. From now on, I’ll refer to my husband as Foulane, an Arabic word used to refer to “any old guy.” I know, it’s a little contemptuous, perhaps even a little pejorative. “Foulane” means someone who doesn’t really matter, a man just like any other, without any distinctive characteristics. When people are talking quickly, they often drop the “ou” in “Foulane” and pronounce it “Flane,” meaning someone whose actual name and origins are unknown. Besides, it was precisely his origins and roots that led to the failure of our marriage. He often spoke of how important his roots were to him and talked about them as though he were a philosopher: “Our roots follow us wherever we go, they reveal who we really are, they show our true colors and subvert our attempts to try to be something we’re not.” One day, I finally understood that despite all his gobbledygook, he’d always looked down on my peasant origins: on the fact I was the daughter of poor, illiterate immigrants. He disliked the poor. He gave out alms, but always wore an expression of disdain. He would give his driver some money and tell him to distribute it among the beggars at the cemetery where his parents were buried. On Fridays, he would ask the cook to prepare large quantities of couscous for the needy, thus performing his duty as a good Muslim. After which his conscience would be clear and he would be able to devote himself to his paintings where he imitated photographs and gave them such shameless titles as “Shanty-town,” “Shanty-town II,” and so forth.

What exactly was he hoping to accomplish with this novel — what I read of it clearly indicates that it is a novel, especially since his friend the scribe called it such below that ridiculous title, The Man Who Loved Women Too Much? Did he want to publish it? Why? Who would bother to read such a pointless web of lies? There isn’t an ounce of truth or originality in it, starting even with the title, which is a rip-off of François Truffaut’s film, The Man Who Loved Women. Foulane simply added his two cents and tagged “too much” on the end of it to be a smart-ass. As for his friend, he was hardly a great writer. He self-published his books and nobody read them, so the copies just piled up in his garage. The book is just a series of falsehoods and allegations, each more intolerable than the last before it. Doesn’t one get the distinct impression that I caused his stroke by the time one gets to the last page? It’s a terrible insinuation. Isn’t it criminal and irresponsible? I may have been nasty and devilish, but certainly never criminal, not even close!

He already suffered from migraines, high blood pressure, tachycardia, and a host of other nervous disorders by the time I met him. They were congenital and I had nothing to do with them. You’ll have noticed that before describing the scene that caused his stroke — which I must stress was the sheer product of his artist’s imagination, which was intoxicated with his own success — he devoted a number of beautiful pages to me, even going so far as to say that he loved me. Don’t fall for any of it — he was utterly incapable of the slightest praise, he never had a kind word to say in the morning, no tenderness before going to bed, nothing, he lived in his own world, and I had to dwell in his shadow and cower in it. Oh, that ubiquitous shadow, it was bleak and heavy, followed me everywhere, harrying me and overwhelming me to the point that it immobilized me. It pushed me into a corner and kept me there. A shadow doesn’t speak: it hovers over you menacingly and crushes you. I would wake up exhausted and empty in the mornings. The shadow had haunted me all night. I didn’t have anyone to talk to, and besides, who would have believed me? Struck by a shadow! People would have thought I was crazy, which would have played into his hands. It must have taken a lot of effort for him to ever say anything sweet. So he avoided it and closed in on himself. He would reach his hand out and rub my knee whenever he wanted to make love. That was the sign, his way of asking me to welcome his advances, as though I should be constantly at his disposal, willing and available, all so Foulane could reassure himself that he could still get it up. He was always in a hurry to satisfy his needs. He would push himself inside me a little forcefully and fuck me in a robotic manner for a few minutes until he came, at which he’d puff out, like a toy whose batteries had gone dead.

For instance, he never once bought me some roses. Buying someone flowers is easy, it makes them happy, it makes a statement. But he never bought me any. When he came back from his trips abroad, he would occasionally bring me a piece of jewelry, a necklace or a watch, as though to ask my forgiveness. But he always managed to find a way to tell me how much it had cost him. That’s just how he was, petty and miserly. He lived in his own world, inside the bubble of a famous artist, except that he always forgot he only started getting successful after we met. He never admitted that his career prospered thanks to our marriage. I brought him stability, inspired him, and even had a hand in the development of his radical new style. Before we met, his paintings adhered to a bland, unimaginative realism. He just copied whatever he looked at. Simply improved on photographs. But, as you might have guessed, nobody could tell him that lest he fly into a fury. Yet once he was with me, he found the courage to develop his style and technique. His paintings became lively, surreal, flavorful, and human. He never had the honesty to admit that my presence and sensibility had enriched his work. I looked after everything when we lived in Paris, the house, the children, everything, while he would lock himself up in his studio, which was situated in a different neighborhood. Was it really a studio? Yes and no. I knew that he used it as a pad where he could meet with his other women, whores and those innocent young girls who swooned when they looked at his paintings. One day I asked him: “Why did you set up a bed in your studio?” “Why, it’s obvious, so the artist can rest,” he’d replied. But he never slept alone. His circle of acquaintances always included at least one or two women who would jump in a taxi whenever he called so that they could have a little “siesta” (as he put it). I knew all of this and yet made a superhuman effort not to burst in on them and make a scene, like any normal wife would have done in my stead. I was dimwitted and naïve. I was never scared of what I might find, I’ve never been afraid, instead it was an undefinable feeling. I just didn’t want to bother him. Yes, that was my intention, I knew that he worked hard, and I didn’t want to burst into his studio because I knew my wrath would be difficult to control. But one day when he was abroad on a trip, I noticed that he’d forgotten his keys to the studio in his satchel. I couldn’t resist the temptation to visit the lair that he used to cheat on me all the time. I went in, I was ill at ease, shaking a little, steadying myself to be slapped in the face by a reality that I’d hitherto refused to see. The bed was unmade, there was a painting that he’d barely begun, and a half-empty bottle of wine on the bedside table with two glasses next to it, one of which was stained with lipstick. A banal and clichéd snapshot of adultery in all its splendor, and as a bonus I also found a bottle of my own perfume, which he must have sprayed on his women in order not to stray too far outside his comfort zone. As though guided by my instincts, I went over to the trash cans and found two condoms filled with sperm. Instead of flushing them down the toilet or putting them in a trash can outside his studio, the idiot had instead left irrefutable proof. I wanted to save a little of his sperm inside a bottle so I could give it to one of my sorcerers, but how could I do that? Some of his sperm would have been perfect for a potion that would make him impotent. I also went through his drawers. I found quasi-pornographic love letters, various photos, presents, dried flowers pressed between two leaves of paper that also bore the imprint of a kiss, and scented Chanel No. 5. I sat down in his armchair, lit a cigarette, opened one of his bottles of wine (far superior vintages than those he brought home), and began to reflect. I couldn’t just pretend as though I’d never been in his studio or forget what I’d discovered. I wasn’t going to forgive him or act oblivious, agreeing to share my life with a man who led his real life in that filthy shithole. I needed to react. Calmly. React so I could put an end to that abnormal situation. He was mocking me, and had been doing so since day one. I’d always known that, but seeing the undeniable proof made me want to throw up. I had to act as quickly as possible. I said to myself: “For once I’m going to plan things out and be rational about it. The wine is good, I’m calm, and I need to have a precise idea of what I’m going to do next. I can already picture him on his return, wearing that grin of his, with his potbelly, his raffish air and arrogance. I feel like putting out his eyes, or better yet cutting off his hands, just like they do to thieves in Saudi Arabia. A painter without any hands, now that would be a sight! No, it would be far better to slice off his prick, not that there would be much to slice off, but at least it would hurt. I should stop babbling since I’m not actually going to shed his blood. The best thing to do would be to keep quiet about what I’ve discovered so I can destroy him all the more when the time is right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to keep my mouth shut. I’m hot-blooded. But one thing’s for sure, he’ll never touch me again! First I’m going to put the fear of God in him, and that fear will gnaw away at him, wreaking havoc in his life. I spent the first ten years of my life ridding myself of fear. It was a matter of life and death, so I know all about fear, one could say it’s my specialty. I’ve endured droughts, thirst, hunger, I survived them during heat waves and glacial winters, and while fighting off snakes, scorpions, and hyenas … I had no other choice. I tamed my fears and now I know how to instill them in both men and animals.”

I picked up all the proof that I’d found and went to see a lawyer to ask him if this was enough to ask for a divorce. I also called my mother, who suggested I travel to the south of Morocco to consult one of our ancestors who was endowed with extraordinary powers: “He’ll know how to punish Foulane, loyalty matters before everything else in our family!” I told everybody. I had to avenge the insult and the shame. He had to pay. One of my brothers offered to slash all his paintings; another offered to send a couple of tough guys to teach him a lesson. I told them not to. If anyone was going to do anything it was going to be me, and only me.

After he’d returned from his trip, Foulane pretended to be tired, using the usual excuse that he had a migraine. I asked him where he’d been and he told me: “You know exactly where I’ve been, in Frankfurt, so I could talk to my gallerist about the coming exhibition. It was a difficult trip, the people were nice but I didn’t like the city, so I tried to get everything done quickly so I could back home. So, what’s for dinner tonight?”

Without hesitating I replied: “English condoms in rotten white sauce to be followed by angel hairs cooked in sweat and a few drops of Chanel No. 5.”

He wasn’t amused. He remained frozen in his chair. He picked a magazine up from the floor and began flipping through it. At which point I threw a large glass of water at his head, although I would have preferred vinegar, but that’s what I had in my hand at the time. I hated him for not reacting to it. He just stood up, coolly wiped his face, and left the house. He came back five minutes later and just as coolly packed some changes of clothes, stuffed them in his suitcase, which he still hadn’t unpacked, and left again. Later I called him at his studio and hurled a bunch of insults at him. I was in tears and threatened to sue him. In fact, I said whatever went through my head at the time. I was hurt, really hurt. Betrayal is a terrible thing, an unbearable humiliation. Just unacceptable. The children heard me shouting and crying. They slipped into my bed and slept beside me, murmuring: “We love you, mummy.”

He spent the next three months living in his studio, or rather his brothel, to be more exact. During that time he received a letter from my lawyer, which was intended to scare him. Something else that he was careful to avoid mentioning in his manuscript. Then one day I cracked, went to his studio, and slipped inside his bed, because I was still in love with him, that’s right, I admit it. I remember it all very well, he was watching television, and he didn’t push me away, we made love without exchanging a word, and the next day he was mine again, he came home and our lives went back to the way they were. A grave error. My mother disapproved of my decision. She had to go seek out our illustrious ancestor in the southern reaches of Morocco to stop him in his tracks. If you’re going to get back together with your husband, he might as well be in good shape, she told me.

I thought Foulane had understood, that he’d realized he would have to start behaving properly from then on. But he very quickly reverted to his old bachelor habits, without caring about how that might make me feel. He traveled, went out in the evenings for dinner—“work dinners”—only returning late at night and smelling of another woman’s perfume. I kept my mouth shut and swallowed the bitter pill of humiliation. I would look at my children and weep in silence. When he slept with another woman, he would rush into the bathroom on his return and take a shower. Although he usually only showered in the morning just like everyone else. Whenever I tried to get close to him, he wouldn’t even get hard. He’d used up all his energies on someone else. His balls were all floppy and his pecker was in a pitiful state. He was depleted, completely depleted. It was intolerable! I put up with it for years. I was incapable of doing anything else. My morals, ethics, and upbringing forbade me from cheating on him. In our culture, a woman who cheats on her husband no longer has any rights, everyone thinks badly of her, even if she was victimized by a lying, violent husband. Everyone in our village knew the story of Fatima, the only women in our village who ever dared to have a lover. She was banished and spent a few years begging on the streets of Marrakech, until one day she threw herself under the wheels of a bus not far from Jamaa el Fna. Poor Fatima! May God rest her soul and forgive her!

I would have liked to have flings of my own, and have scores of lovers, but at no point did my soul or my pride allow me to do that. My friends encouraged me to do so, urging me to get my revenge and return the insult fivefold, but I resisted. I wasn’t even attracted to other men. I loved my husband and didn’t want to give myself to another man. I was courted by handsome, interesting, freethinking, and generous men. But I rejected them all despite being flattered to be the object of such interest. “You’re very seductive and beautiful and yet your husband neglects you; it’s a crime against love that should be punished with love.”

I loved him and yet didn’t let him see it: it was a question of modesty. My parents had never kissed one another in front of us, and had never exchanged tender words. So where did this love come from? He was the first man I’d ever loved. The men I’d been with during my years in Marseilles didn’t count because I hadn’t been myself at the time. So I simply flirted a little with some friends, nothing more. He intimidated and dominated me. I needed to shift the power dynamic in our relationship and so I dared to defy him and knocked him from the public pedestal he’d set himself up on. What I admired most in him was his maturity, his experience, and his fame. I wanted him all to myself, there was nothing unusual about that, no woman ever wants to share her man, as far as I’m concerned any woman who sleeps with a married man is a whore and a slut. I can spot them a mile away and I hate them. I even started to hatch plans for how I would kill these kinds of women, plotting these crimes carefully, with a serial killer’s rigorousness. Oh yes, I would take my time with them, make them fall into a trap and then disfigure them, one after the other. I loved to visualize those moments down to the smallest details, thinking about how I would approach them, gain their trust, and especially how I wouldn’t leave any traces behind, the perfect crime. A female serial killer! I dreamed up plenty of scenarios, but never put any of them into practice of course.

You might not believe me, but I never cheated on Foulane. He was well aware of that, but yet he cast doubts on my loyalty in his manuscript. That he had the nerve to suspect me! It was certainly true that I spent a lot of time out with my girlfriends, and that since he traveled a lot I had plenty of opportunities to betray him. But I never crossed that line. However, I must confess that I regret that now. I was an idiot, constrained by principles that put me at a constant disadvantage. I thought about Fatima’s story, but it’s not like we were living in that village of virtue. We were living in Paris at the time, and we had a social life. He was in the public eye and I was the pretty little thing on his arm. Once, during a reception at the Élysée Palace, he turned his back to me just as he was talking to the president. Against all odds, François Mitterrand turned to address me and broke into a big smile. He asked me where I was from and what I was studying. When I told him I was married to the artist he’d just been speaking to, he said: “Oh, now I understand, you’re his muse.” He was right about that. I was his muse, his slave, his property, the trophy wife he could parade at receptions and soirées. This bothered me at first, but then I got used to it. Nobody was going to give me any complexes. I knew who I was and what I was worth. I didn’t feel the need to pretend, or to be a hypocrite like his sisters, who’d all had plastic surgery, felt uncomfortable in their own skin, and were all fat and charmless. I would watch them strut about at weddings, acting like peacocks, while I would remain isolated in my corner. I was the foreigner, the stranger, the bad apple that had to be avoided at all costs. I polluted the clean, limpid air of a society that was well-versed in all manner of hypocrisy and at keeping up appearances.

I suffered a long list of humiliations and I’m going to tell you all about them, I won’t make anything up. After all, I’m not writing a novel. I’m going to get it all off my chest. He was always keen on smoothing things over, avoiding scenes, no scandals or noises, it was better to remain calm and stay flexible. “To turn a blind eye,” as Foulane was fond of saying. But I’ve always kept my eyes wide open. I’m not flexible, and I never will be. What does being flexible really mean anyway? To always turn the other cheek and keep your head down? No, I’ll never do that!

Our Wedding

Let’s go back to the very beginning. Our wedding. What a disaster. Oh, I’ll remember that Friday in April for the rest of my life. All brides look back on their wedding day with joy, but not me. That day will forever remain a black day, a sad day, a day when I cried a lot. Newlyweds usually cry because they are leaving one family to become a part of another, but I was crying because I was leaving my family to plunge into an unimaginable hell.

Allow me to set the scene for you.

My parents had leased a holiday home on the outskirts of Casablanca. It must have cost them a great deal of money. They had wanted to make a good impression on their future in-laws, whose urban origins intimidated them. People from Fez think of themselves as superior to all other Moroccans. They look down on the rest of Morocco as though their culture was the only one worth anything, behaving as though everyone else has to cook like them, dress like them, and speak like them. They have a natural propensity for intolerance and don’t make any efforts to conceal their contempt. It’s not that they’re nasty, just cynical. My parents were set against my marriage for several reasons. My mother told me that my father, who rarely spoke, had told her: “We don’t belong with them and they don’t belong with us!” He’d also said: “I’m not sure our daughter will be happy in that family; that her husband is older than she is might not be such a big deal, but his family scares me. I never know how to welcome them or how to act, they belong to a different world and we’re simply unpretentious folk. It makes me wonder whether we even believe in the same God! Well, there we have it. Tell her to do what she wants. Tell her I’m sad.”

I remember that conversation with my mother and how I couldn’t really disagree with her because I knew she had a point. But it was too late by then, I was in love. What did being in love mean to a girl who’d had to tackle so much misery so early on in her life? I thought of him as though I was living in a kind of modern fairy tale. I ignored all the defects I noticed. I thought he would live up to my expectations. But romantic love is in fact a fiction invented by novelists. I’d read several novels set in nineteenth-century Scotland. I would dream of those rainy landscapes, delicate characters, and those declarations of love that were imbued with poetry and promises. I thought of myself as one of the heroines of those novels and believed in all of it. The transition from fairy tale to reality proved difficult, very difficult indeed.

I remember how one day, before we’d gotten engaged, Foulane had waited for me in his apartment on Rue Lhomond. I had taken the train and on my arrival at the Saint-Lazare station I felt an incredible weight on my chest. For the first time in my life, I was frightened. I went into a café, ordered a cup of tea, and spent hours smoking and thinking, watching the film of my future life flash past my eyes. I had a certain knack for predicting how my future would turn out. Even though I was in love, I wasn’t under any illusions. I knew that his family wouldn’t miss an opportunity to remind me of my humble origins and how inadequate an addition I was to their family portrait. I knew that he wouldn’t stick up for me and that he shared their ideas. I could clearly see that I was about to make a mistake, but I stupidly told myself that I was fated to marry him. I had read many French novels and identified with petty bourgeois characters from the provinces, and like them, I convinced myself that I had an intense inner life.

Foulane was waiting for me, but I didn’t call him to say I would be running late. I didn’t want to make that meeting, knowing that I would be lost if I crossed that threshold. When I’d smoked my pack of cigarettes, I got up, looked up the train schedules, and saw I couldn’t get on one until 10:10, but that it was only 8:00 by then. So I started to walk, jumped on the 21 bus, got off at Boulevard Saint-Michel, and headed toward his apartment.

It was cold and I was only wearing a light jacket, so I was shivering. He took me in his arms, kissed me, warmed me up, cooked some delicious fish, and then we made love. It was the first time I’d given myself to him. I got up in the middle of the night and wanted to smoke, so he took the car to get me some cigarettes. He also bought some croissants for the following morning. I had a class that day and showed up late, so the professor of philosophy held me back after class. He made it clear that he wanted to take me out to dinner any time during the week except on Saturday or Sunday, which was when he saw his kids since he was divorced. Partly out of defiance and partly out of curiosity, I decided to take him up on his offer and agreed to see him on Friday. His intentions were clear: he wanted me to be his mistress. He was a handsome, intelligent man and was rather seductive. I refused his advances several times, then stood to leave, using the excuse that I had to catch a train. He grabbed my hand, kissed it, and said: “Don’t worry, I’ll drive you home.” I tried to explain that it was over thirty miles outside of Paris, but he insisted, hoping he would thus have the time to convince me not to get married. Everyone knew that I was going to marry a famous painter. It had even been mentioned in a newspaper.

A month later, Foulane came to visit my parents in Clermont-Ferrand, accompanied by six of his closest friends, so that he could formally ask for my hand in marriage. It was a Saturday and my father was home from work. It went fairly well, certainly better than on the wedding day itself. His friends found out that I belonged to a family of immigrants and saw that we came from a humble background. This had never been a problem between Foulane and me. He knew where I came from, but I didn’t know about his origins, or what his life had been like before we’d met.

The following week Foulane introduced me to his parents at a restaurant in Paris. He’d bought their airline tickets and called a friend of his who loved his paintings and worked at the French consulate in Casablanca to fast-track their visas. I heard his mother say behind my back: “This can’t be the girl he was talking about, she’s not … She’s not even white.” I pretended that I hadn’t heard her. My skin was fairly dark because I tanned very easily. I smiled. His father was far more sympathetic. He immediately asked me a number of questions about my village, my father’s property, and our traditions. He even asked me: “Is it really true what people say, that you people have magical powers?” I laughed and said, “I have no idea.” But deep down he too disapproved of the match. You can’t hide such things, I could see it in his face and in his eyes. I didn’t know if he was talking about me, but I heard him say “media mujer” several times — which is Spanish for “tiny woman,” an expression he often used to refer to his wife’s small frame. I also heard him use the word khanfoucha, meaning “beetle” in Arabic; was he talking about me? I’d landed in the middle of a family of lunatics! They spoke in innuendos and metaphors. I wasn’t used to those kinds of jokes. My parents never insulted anyone and never spoke ill of people. Some of the women who worked for my mother-in-law took me aside to warn me that my life would be difficult, that it was a matter of class complicity. One of them said: “You know, little one, Fassis don’t like us much. There’s nothing that can be done about it, they think they’re better than us and they don’t really respect other people! So watch out, your husband is a nice man but his sisters are absolutely terrible!”

I could have changed my mind, called everything off, and gone back to my parents’ house. There was nothing stopping me. I can’t quite understand what made me embark on that dangerous adventure. Love, of course. But I still ask myself whether I ever really loved him. I liked him and found him alluring and charming; besides, he was an artist, and I’d always wanted to rub shoulders with that wonderful magical world of musicians, writers, and painters. It was like a dream. So despite those worrisome signs, I pressed ahead and plunged headfirst into married life.

At the time, Foulane was all sweetness and light, always very attentive, cheerful, and loving. He always wanted to please me, and he’d rush to the other side of the town just to buy me a present. He’d put an end to his former days as a bachelor and ladies’ man. But there were still traces of that former life in his apartment. A bra, a nightgown, designer shoes. I threw them in the neighbor’s trash the first chance I got. Foulane didn’t even realize that they’d gone missing. Or if he did he never mentioned it.

I found hundreds of photos in one of his drawers. Some were related to his work, but others depicted him in the arms of other women: blondes, redheads, brunettes, tall, short, Arab girls, Scandinavian girls … “What kind of a hole have I gotten myself into?” I asked myself. “Why me? What do I have that they don’t? Oh, I get it now, the guy’s pushing forty and so he’s decided to listen to his mother and have kids, so I’m going to be his surrogate mother. Until he eventually trades me in for a younger woman.”

My parents were very traditional. The marriage took place in the village hall. Once they’d arrived — late, of course — Foulane’s family was completely shocked, especially the women. How could their son — the famous artist — possibly get married in a rented room just like immigrants did when they returned home? They exchanged knowing glances of the kind I would have to endure for years, then pulled some grimaces and went to greet my mother and my aunts. The men assembled on the other side of the room, where the adel was going to preside over the signing of the marriage contract. Foulane was wearing a white djellaba with slippers that kept falling off his feet; he was embarrassed and ill at ease. He felt that the union of those worlds was a losing combination. He was sorry about it, sorry about the fact his relatives were racists, sorry that my relatives weren’t well educated, sorry that I belonged to a tribe that didn’t know the kind of good manners that the people of Fez were accustomed to, because in their eyes our good manners weren’t all that good.

I must admit that the dresses his female relatives wore — his mother, his aunts, his sisters — were incredibly beautiful and expensive. Our own dresses were no match for theirs. We were of humble stock, yes, but we were also proud. What did we have to be ashamed of? Of being who we were? Never. I don’t think Foulane ever understood this character trait that was shared by all members of our tribe. We were incredibly proud. We had our dignity and our honor. All their pomp didn’t make our heads spin.

The time came for the signing of the marriage contract. I had to say “yes” and then sign it. We were kept in different rooms. A door stood between us. I clenched my mother’s arm until it hurt her, and I cried like a little girl whose doll had been stolen from her. I saw Foulane’s father grimace as though to indicate his disapproval. One of his friends kept tugging at his sleeve to remind him not to make a scene. I would have really liked him to. It would have saved me, and frankly it would have also saved his son.

I wiped my nose, dried my tears, and whispered, “Yes.” I had to say it again, then I covered my head and signed the certificate of my slavery, confinement, and humiliation.

The men prayed for the groom and the bride to be blessed by God and His Prophet, to keep them on the right path, to retain their faith, and for their souls to be cleansed of all impurities, and for them to be worthy of the happiness that God had in store for them!

Then they raised their hands to the heavens and began to recite verses from the Qur’an, then exchanged greetings amongst one another, with each family wishing the other a happy and prosperous life.

Our village orchestra played a selection of songs that belonged to our heritage. My relatives started to sing and dance, while his remained trapped inside their fine clothes. One of his aunts motioned me to come over to her and said: “Why have they been playing the same song over and over again?” How could I explain that the musicians had played at least twenty different songs? She then ordered me to sit beside her and said: “Do you know whom you’ve had the privilege to marry? Do you know what kind of family you’ve become a part of? Why can’t you speak Arabic properly and what’s up with that accent? Are you Moroccan or half French? Very well, you must come stay with us in Fez so that I can teach you how to cook, how to comport yourself, and how to address people when they speak to you.”

I was stupefied. I burst into laughter, nervous laughter. I laughed until I started to cry, not knowing whether they were tears of happiness or sadness. Repressed anger. Subdued wrath. I didn’t answer her but kept my gaze fixed on the floor, like a mad, distraught woman.

Dinner was served late. The women didn’t like our cooking. The plates had been barely touched by the time they were sent back to the kitchen. The men ate as normal. My father, who hadn’t had the time to change, was exhausted. My mother, poor thing, was very unhappy. My aunts stared at me as if to say, “Serves you right!” I observed my husband from afar and noticed how unhappy he looked. He wasn’t smiling and wasn’t eating. Maybe he wanted to run away. He would have done us a great service if he had. He came to take me away at around four o’clock in the morning, as per our custom. His friend dropped us off at our hotel. The room was a mess. There weren’t any flowers, no chocolates and no greeting card. This time it wasn’t Foulane’s fault, but rather that of the hotel, which didn’t deserve its five stars. Our wedding night had begun with bad omens. There were even cigarette butts floating in the toilet bowl. But who could we talk to at that hour? Foulane sent the hotel manager a fuming letter the following day. The party was over. In fact, there had never been a party in the first place, just a ceremony that we had to fulfill out of a sense of duty.

A photographer friend had spent the entire evening taking shots of us. My husband had some of them enlarged. We hung them up in the living room of our first apartment in Paris. The people who came to visit us would look at them transfixed: “Oh, it’s like One Thousand and One Nights! How pretty the bride looks! How young! You look ravishing, darling, why didn’t you invite us? What a shame! A big Moroccan wedding! What a party it must have been! And how happy you look!”

Nobody knows how to really read a photograph. How badly I’d wanted to tell those people: “But you’re completely wrong! It wasn’t a party, just a chore where everyone was uncomfortable, unhappy, and outside their comfort zone, which was celebrated to the sounds of Berber drums and flutes, which it turns out was a mistake, a monstrous mistake. What you can see in our eyes is a profound sadness, deep regret, and a crushing sense of fatality.”

We always gave people the impression we were a happy couple. Those who didn’t know us well held us up as an example of a model couple. I suffered under the weight of this impression, which bore no relation to reality. My husband acquired the habit of shutting me up whenever we had guests over. He behaved toward me in a way that he would never allowed himself to do with anyone else. One day, when he’d been entertaining his nieces and their husbands, he’d had the insolence to translate my words into “proper French,” adding that he always had to provide subtitles for whatever I said! At which point his guests had laughed, amused by the way he treated me, and I just let him to do it, like the fool I was.

On another occasion, he told an English painter who was represented by the same gallery that he never took me abroad because he loved to travel free and without any luggage, that he didn’t want to be encumbered by a wife who would doubtless have caused him a thousand problems. The painter had been confused by why Foulane would feel the need to talk about me like that, but since Foulane had given his words a comedic inflection, he’d limited himself to a polite laugh. Then there had been the time when a musician friend of his had come to see us to tell us he’d gotten married, at which point Foulane had cracked a few stupid jokes about marriage and quoted Schopenhauer’s gloomy aphorisms on the subject.

He didn’t just disrespect me in public, he also never stuck up for me in front of his family. He sometimes even joined the choir, fueling their rejection of me, not to mention their hatred.

And so our marriage began badly, continued badly, and ended badly.

Money

This is a painful, complicated topic. Foulane got angry whenever I talked about money. A typical reaction for a cheapskate.

Thanks to time and experience, I can safely say that this artist who made a lot of money was in fact a miser. At first I had thought he was thrifty. But now I know he was cheap. I spent my entire life tightening my belt, looking for bargains, and waiting until the sales so I could buy clothes for the children. Although we had a joint account, he hardly ever put any money in it. I was always short of cash. He would love to brandish the letters from the bank saying the account was overdrawn. “You see? Your reckless spending is going to ruin us!” What reckless spending? It was barely enough to cover the basics, I didn’t spend it on anything superfluous or extravagant. My friends would buy designer clothes at full retail prices whereas I got by thanks to clearance sales. I never wore designer clothes or expensive jewelry.

Each time he went abroad Foulane would give me a small sum of money and tell me to “be careful with it” as though I were one of his children. He never paid for anything while he was abroad because he was always somebody’s guest. But whenever we traveled together, he would forbid me from using the minibar because he didn’t want to pay for the additional charges. He was completely miserly. When we would leave the hotel, he would pull his usual scene and complain about all the luggage I’d brought with me. Even though I would try to explain that it was full of the children’s clothes, he would say: “Oh, stop it, will you, I’m perfectly aware that those suitcases are full of presents for your family, I’ve had it up to here!”

Foulane wasn’t generous. You’re not going to believe me because the impression he gave you was the complete opposite. He kept track of every single penny. He never spent a dime unthinkingly. He had a calculator in his heart. Nothing eluded him. He accused me of being an obsessive consumerist, someone who couldn’t tell the difference between different kinds of banknotes and who thought a credit card was a bottomless well of money, and that since I’d never worked much, I didn’t even know the value of money, and that I’d never even learned how to count properly. He also believed that I would have been far happier and more satisfied if I’d married a man who was as poor as I was. But what did he know about that?

I’ve lost track of how many times he went abroad without leaving us any money. I even had to turn to one of our friends so that I could borrow enough money to run some errands and feed the children.

He had bank accounts in just about every country. He’d made arrangements to ensure that the proceeds from the sales of his paintings would be deposited in accounts that I couldn’t access. One day I accidentally discovered he had an account in Gibraltar because he’d left the receipt of a transfer lying around. I photocopied it and kept it in my files, alongside a bunch of other account statements, receipts, and various other records. I also kept photocopies of all the documents concerning his assets in France, Morocco, Italy, and Spain. I had my suspicions that he’d even bought a property in New York, but I was never able to prove it. My legal counsel asked me to assemble everything into a file in case anything fishy ever came up. All I would need to do was alert the Moroccan tax authorities and Foulane would be arrested in a heartbeat. I also discovered another safe whose combination I didn’t know. I asked the locksmith to come back and told him that I’d forgotten the combination code to that one too. It took him half an hour to open it. I found countless things he’d been hiding in there: money, jewelry, invoices, receipts, packets of condoms, and even packets of Viagra. I was astounded. I emptied the safe of all its contents and stashed them away. How could I share my life with a man who kept so many secrets? How could I put up with the fact that he’d been leading a double life? Or even a triple life? That he’d been cheating on me I’d known for a long time, but now I’d uncovered his financial secrets too. Never having been able to trust him, I started putting money aside in a savings account. I knew he was capable of divorcing me and leaving me penniless. So I started making up house repairs that needed to be done, things that the children needed to buy, and would siphon off some of that money into the savings account. On one occasion, he refused to buy me a piece of jewelry that I really wanted, and that same evening he gave his eldest sister a large sum of money so she could get a boob job. I also learned that he’d ensured that a large part of his estate would go to his younger brother, who was married to a witch who hated me and had tried to do me harm by any and all means, including casting the evil eye on me. My taleb confirmed this. Years later, Foulane helped his brothers and sisters again when he bought them a splendid apartment on the Mediterranean coast.

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.

As for my sexuality, I’m still young, and people tell me I’m beautiful and alluring, so I hope that one day I’ll finally meet a man who’ll make up for all the frustrations, humiliations, and constant disrespect that Foulane put me through.

Jealousy

I admit it, I was jealous, incredibly jealous. I was never jealous of my friends, only of Foulane. He had a vicious knack for bringing out the worst in me, those awful — yet legitimate — feelings that drive couples crazy. Of course, his perversity only ever manifested itself in stealthy ways. He would compliment women with hideous hairdos and hideous dresses when we had guests over just to get on my nerves. He would take an interest in their lives, their children, asked them about what they liked to read or what they did to amuse themselves. Always employing that honeyed tone of his, which I loathed. On one occasion, we were invited to a party hosted by people in show business. A young starlet had been there wearing a dress with a scandalous neckline. Foulane’s eyes never drifted from her bosom and he spent the whole night talking to her. I even caught him entering her number in his phone. I didn’t do anything about it, but later that night I stole his phone and deleted all the numbers with women’s names, starting with the young starlet, who called herself Marilin—“with an ‘i,’ ” as she put it. He pulled a scene the following morning, talked about respecting boundaries and privacy, giving me one of his lectures about morals that made me want to puke. In fact, my jealousy wasn’t fueled by my frustrated affections for him or by a desire to win him back. It was simply a reaction to his attempts to belittle me in public.

This other time, his Russian mistress — or was she Polish? — who was either a musicians or a painter, I don’t remember which except that she had artistic pretensions, actually called at the house: “I would like to zee my old loover again, you zee I’ve knoon him for a loong time …” The nerve! I hung up on her. Later that evening, Foulane laconically said: “Oh don’t mind her, she’s a lunatic.” That’s the way he treated the women he claims to have loved!

One day, he asked me to help him pick out a necklace he wanted to buy for his gallerist’s wife. He wanted to do something nice for her because they never came empty-handed whenever they visited us. We bought her a stunning Berber necklace made of coral and silver. I wrapped it up in gift paper. But a few months later I spotted it around the neck of a Spanish gallerist who must have certainly been his mistress. When I asked him why, he started stammering like a liar who’d been caught red-handed. Women called at the house from time to time, and I would give them his number so they could call him at his studio. Surprised, they would ask me: “But aren’t you his assistant? Or his secretary?” “I’m his wife!” I would shout back. Then they would hang up on me and he would never offer any explanations. He always used the same excuse: “I’m not responsible for the letters or calls I receive.” Then he’d add: “If you want to feed your pathological jealousy, you might as well focus on things that actually matter, and not these trifles that have got nothing to do with me!” What were these things that “actually mattered”? Marriage, love, a harmonious relationship? He would confess without revealing anything of import. Now that’s what I call insincerity, which is something I loathe.

Foulane had mastered the art of wounding my pride, and he would poke at the deep wounds that had their roots in my childhood, and he would twist the knife just to hurt me. He hurt me a lot. He scoffed at my experiences as a model, saying that having the right proportions wasn’t the same as being talented. He would use what I’d told him in confidence to grieve me and remind me that my parents were illiterate immigrants. To think he’d painted a mural in honor of immigrants! What a show-off! What a fascist! He painted the mural for the city of Saint-Denis, and a few months later the mayor bought a couple of his paintings, one of which he hung in his office, while the other was hung in the entrance lobby of city hall.

I was jealous of some of his friends. He was always at their disposal. Always kind and always available. There were these two exiled Chilean politicians who were truly inseparable. Their wives never said anything, they just accepted the situation: friends always came first, and their wives and children last. At first I suspected they might have been gay, but that wasn’t true, they were just friends, and their friendship didn’t leave any room for anything else. One evening, when they’d been invited to dine at our place, one of them had the audacity to tell me: “Take care of our friend Foulane. He’s a great artist. You must be kind with him, we’re very fond of him, and we’re in awe of his immense talents!” I couldn’t restrain myself, my wild streak took over and I slapped him. I left him speechless and gaping and the dinner came to an abrupt end. I never saw them again. Foulane obviously berated me, hurling a bunch of abuse at me, and the ensuing fight reached unprecedented heights. Voilà, my jealousy was nothing other than anger and extreme aggravation. Nothing more. But nowadays Foulane is weak and stuck in his wheelchair, so he can’t do anything to me. He needs me whenever he needs to sit, eat, stand up, or even shit. He’s at my mercy. My jealousy has become pointless.

The Mistake

I remember the night I didn’t come home — which Foulane mentioned in his manuscript — as clearly as he does. Some girlfriends I’d met up with that afternoon told me that I looked awful and unhappy. So they decided to take me out that night. We had dinner at a good restaurant and we wound up at a fashionable nightclub. I danced like a madwomen, flirted with some blond guy, and later that morning I picked up some croissants and went home. Foulane was there waiting for me, car keys in hand, and he asked me where I’d been. So I told him: “At a nightclub!” He slammed the door behind him, rushed down the stairs, and left. It wasn’t until later that I learned that he’d showed up at my parents’ house to complain like people do in conservative families. Where the daughter, despite being married, is always seen as a little girl, and her parents, who always side with the husband, even have the right to punish her, beat her up and lock her away. But my parents didn’t trust him as much as they trusted me. They didn’t believe him, muttered a few stock sentences, and then discreetly called me to inform me of his sudden visit. They didn’t like him. They found him arrogant and spiteful. They knew that he didn’t make me happy, but we don’t divorce in our culture, it’s part of our tradition. Instead, my mother recommended I go see Hajja Saadia, who was capable of casting good and evil spells alike. I refused. Not that. Not yet. How many times had I slipped a potion into his coffee to make him devoid of willpower? A potion that apparently consisted of powdered hyena brains along with other African and even Brazilian ingredients …

I shouldn’t have gone back to the house that day, it’s true, but our son was six months old and I couldn’t just leave him. After that episode, I felt like leaving him often, but whenever the thought occurred to me, I would quickly change my mind and tell myself: “He’s going to change, he’s an old bachelor who doesn’t know how to share his life with someone and be responsible, but he’ll wake up eventually and assume his responsibilities, he’s going to understand that this isn’t just about him, that he’s got a family and has to act like it.” So I would give him some time and the chance to give up his old solitary habits.

Not long afterward, he was awarded a prestigious international prize for his painting, which was followed by a number of trips and exhibitions. He took me everywhere with him: Egypt, Brazil, Italy, the U.S., Mexico, Russia, and so forth. I loved those trips, the fancy hotels, the great food, and the chance to discover the beautiful cloths and jewelry of the Far East. Whenever we traveled, we got along a lot better, even from a sexual point of view. But when we came back home, he would go into a sulk and lock himself up in his studio, where he found it difficult to get any work done because all the traveling had interfered with his painting.

By this time the 1980s had drawn to a close and he began to be hospitalized for various ailments, which would gradually lead to his stroke. I would worry about him because he looked so agitated, pale and stressed. I wasn’t sweet toward him, because I thought that it would be better for me to remain strong and deal with the pain, especially because his prognoses weren’t that alarming. He spent whole nights without sleeping, preventing me from getting any, blaming me for the parasite he’d contracted in China, a country he’d wanted to visit without me. It served him right! While he was in the hospital, I prepared his food, took care of his correspondence and canceled all his engagements. His American agent came to see him: not because he was worried about his client; quite the contrary, he came to weigh up the situation! If Foulane suddenly died, the price of his paintings would go through the roof. Armed with a box of chocolates he bought at the airport, he went to the sick man’s bedside. Once he’d inquired after his health, he jumped back on the plane and went back to calmly inform the gallerists he worked with.

Foulane was overjoyed that his agent had come all the way from New York just to see him. When I expressed some doubts as to the real reasons behind his visit, Foulane flew into a fury, despite the fact he was wearing an oxygen mask. Three days after he was discharged from the hospital, Foulane lost one of his closest friends — who’d been among those who’d accompanied him when he asked my parents for my hand in marriage — to a rare disease. This loss affected him deeply, especially since he’d just had a close brush with death. Foulane was surprised to see I didn’t share his grief. But I’m not the sort of woman who laid it on thick, or said or did sweet things. That’s just the way I am. My father didn’t kiss me after the age of three or four. Throughout those months, I had to put up with a hypochondriac who roamed around the house like an old man, never going out in the evenings, and who spent all his time drawing in his sketchbooks. He stopped painting. His gallerist called him and sent him an advance for his next exhibition. Since he loved money, he got back to work. No more illnesses, no more laziness. He would get up very early in the morning and go to his studio, and in the evenings he would tell me what he’d done that day. Now I’m going to have to see even more money slip through our fingers, I told myself. I knew he wanted to help a relative of his whose business had gone under. So I called his American gallerist and asked him to wire the royalty payments directly to me. His reply was curt: “We’ve had express orders from Foulane not to do so as long as he’s alive.”

I was dumbfounded. I mumbled an apology and started to cry.

My mistake was to think people can change. None of us change, not least of which a man who’s already lived out most of his life. I entered his life at a time when he’d decided to stop having fun and settle down, because the anxiety of his encroaching death had begun to creep over him. I was the little flower who was going to take the reins, except that Foulane was the one who took my youth and innocence.

We were not made to be together. That was my mistake, our mistake.

The In-Laws

Foulane’s indifference and the war his family waged against me were calculated to drive me crazy. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, even though the room was warm. A sign of the evil spells they’d cast on me. Foulane said he didn’t believe in such things, but I had proof that the women in his family were using sorcery against me. My taleb told me everything and I was fully aware of what they wanted to do to me and when. At first they tried to wreck our relationship, to force us to separate. My man stopped touching me or wanting to sleep with me. Then he became indifferent to my presence, as though he were allergic to the touch of my skin. Being close to me didn’t arouse his desires. That wasn’t normal. I later learned they’d been able to procure a lock of my hair and some of my sanitary napkins. I suffered, experienced sudden panic attacks, and would roam around the house in circles, incapable of calling for help, losing my strength and my sanity. During that time Foulane was nevertheless able to work, go out, and travel, completely at peace.

I followed the taleb’s instructions and cleaned the house from top to bottom. My friends helped me and we found little packets wrapped in tinfoil all over the house, tucked under each bed and inside the toilets. The house was overrun by spells designed to make me ill.

That day I discovered that I was in danger, under surveillance, and that I had to act in order to protect myself. My taleb wasn’t up to such a task. He told me about an old, powerful woman in Marrakech who would be able to help. He also told me I should slaughter a ram on the threshold of my house and burn some incense to repel their spells.

I went to Marrakech. I had to wait for days to secure a meeting with Wallada — people called her that because she’d been a midwife in her youth. As soon as she saw me, Wallada said: “My poor girl, I’m glad you’ve finally come to see me; good, come and sit right there in front of me and give me a little something so we can begin our session.” I pulled out a two-hundred-dirham note and placed it next to her. She was a very powerful woman. She wasn’t a clairvoyant, but she could read people’s faces and was adept in palmistry. She told me all about my life as though she’d been there every step of the way. She knew everything and described the malevolent people in my life. I was impressed with her talents because she could tell who I was just by looking at me, and figured out the root of my unhappiness. Wallada came from the countryside and was illiterate, but she could write incomprehensible signs endowed with magical powers. I could see she was already hard at work while she was still talking to me. She dipped her reed into some sepia ink and drew a series of mysterious symbols, each more cryptic than the last, that I would be able to use to ward off evil spells.

My session cost me a thousand dirhams, but it brought me some relief, and I left equipped with the means to counteract all that Foulane’s sisters had dared to inflict on me. It helped me to give up on my husband’s family. I was polite to them whenever I saw them, and I would mouth my insincere As-Salaam-Alaikums. The woman from Marrakech and my taleb continued to work to ensure I was protected. I remained on my guard. I carried my taleb’s talismans with me at all times. Once every six months, the taleb would melt some bronze in a saucepan and mix it with a brew made of water and herbs that came from various places, which he would put in a bottle and hand over to me. I would use some of that yellowish liquid on my body before showering. During the worst of their attacks, I felt as though I was losing my mind, and surrounded by Evil, by powers that wanted to harm and destroy me. I could see it in Zoulekha’s eyes. She was Foulane’s nastiest and most envious sister, filled with absolute hatred. She looked at me as though she wanted to set fire to everything I did. One day she gave me a ring made of gold and silver. When I showed it to the taleb, he ordered me to take it off and give it to him. It was a booby-trapped ring, which had been made to counteract all the protective spells that he’d prepared for me. When I gave it back to her, she looked all surprised. I told her it was too tight for me and that I was allergic to gold. She smiled at me and pouted, as if to say, “Don’t worry, you’ll get what’s coming to you!”

This is how I put up a fight against his family.

Foulane was right when he said my family often came to see me. They protected me and I could count on them. He was also right that a few girls from my village came to live with us so they could help out with the children. Yes, my family always came first, and no, I never liked any of his relatives. I had my reasons but he didn’t want to understand them. I refused to let any of his nephews and nieces come over, because they were brattish and disrespectful. On one occasion when one of his nieces — a fat, stupid girl who’d failed her exams — was staying with us, I refused to let her loaf around the house, so I asked her to help me clean the children’s bedrooms. She refused, so I asked her to leave. Her reply was: “You don’t have the right to boss me around, I’m at home here, this is my uncle’s house, you can’t kick me out.” So I threw all her belongings out onto the street and she went running to her uncle’s arms. Foulane heaped a bunch of abuse at me that night.

His family always hated me. But I eventually stopped caring. It didn’t get to me anymore, but he was the one who refused to see them for who they really were. He didn’t believe me when I told him about all the amulets I’d found scatted around the house. “You’re sick,” he told me, “you’re just making it all up.”

Our Friends

We didn’t frequent the same people, partly because of the age difference, but also for class reasons. My friends were mostly immigrants. His were intellectuals, internationally renowned artists, writers, politicians, and they were all full of themselves. They looked at me condescendingly, often with the sort of kindness with which adults treat children.

I remember how, right at the beginning of our relationship, an Algerian woman — or was she Tunisian? — who was ugly and vulgar and married to a much older French man had screwed her face up so that she looked even uglier and said: “You’ve won the jackpot!”

“You’re an idiot!” I’d replied.

The jackpot! Yes, a jackpot of troubles and contempt. I was always suspicious of the people around him, but he stood up for them and preferred their company to mine. But when they screwed him over, he always came crying to me, at which point I would happily tell him to get lost.

After all those years of married life, we only managed to have a few mutual friends. There weren’t many of them and I was never fully at east with them because they had such admiration for the great painter whom the king had bestowed his honors on after purchasing a dozen of his paintings at full retail value. What truly bothered me was that nobody gave me any recognition for always being right there for him, pushing him to work, and taking care of all of life’s essentials in order to free him from all responsibilities.

I raised our children on my own. I would tell them that their father needed to work and that he couldn’t be disturbed. I spared him all the hassles. Which explained why I always told his friends — whether they were his real friends or so-called friends — that I was one of the big reasons behind his success, but that my efforts went unrecognized, which was the fate that befell the wives of famous men, especially artists’ wives.

As we didn’t have the same friends, I told him to leave me alone whenever I went out with mine from time to time. I usually only hung out with girls, because we had more fun that way, we spilled our guts, swapped gossip, jokes, laughed, let ourselves go, and hardly noticed how the time flew by. But Foulane would always call me and ask me to come back home. I would tell him to leave me alone: “I’ll come back when I feel like it!” He hated me for saying that. Whenever I returned, he wouldn’t be able to sleep and would blame his insomnia on me. At which point he would go sleep in another room under the pretext that I stank of booze.

His friends often meddled in our business. They would call me and ask me to come see them because they had something important to tell me. Once I got there, they would lecture me: “Don’t you know how lucky you are to share your life with such a great artist? People both admire him and are jealous of him, you must help make his life easier and not bother him with such silly things. He gets easily depressed, and he only wants a little peace so he can work. You see, he feels overwhelmed by your family, he can’t put up with them.”

On one occasion, instead of replying, I just shouted at them to stay out of our lives.

At which point Foulane lectured me: “How could you treat my childhood friends like that? They’re only trying to help.”

There were always misunderstandings, whether with him or with his friends.

Until the day I met Lalla, which changed everything. Foulane’s jealousy for her gnawed away at him and made him furious and violent. He refused to speak while at the dinner table, but simply gave commands with his hands. All because I’d finally found someone who understood me, who helped me endure all the things he or his family and friends did to me. I was tired of being seen simply as a mother. I wanted to fulfill myself, to have a life of my own, and overcome all the defeats I’d suffered. When I met Lalla, I had the strange feeling that I’d met my soul mate, someone who knew the contents of my heart and my mind. She possessed a natural sweetness that she’d acquired during those years she’d spent in India studying with a guru whose name I’ve forgotten. She’d given me his books and we spent a lot of time discussing them. She opened my eyes and showed me a path, teaching me that I was a sensitive person endowed with incredible potential that my husband had always stifled. She helped me to see the wounds that my marriage had dealt me. She had a positive outlook on life. New horizons opened up before me. I felt like a child who’d been introduced to the school of life while in her presence. I realized how much time I’d wasted trying to fix things. Lalla held out her hand to me, and I will never forget that. In her, I’d finally met someone who was interested in me but asked for nothing in return. I spent hours at her place and we’d talk ourselves to sleep. Foulane immediately suspected we were lovers. Men are crazy! As soon as two women get together they suspect them of being lesbians. Lalla wasn’t a lesbian. She liked men and made no secret of it. I even suspect she had lovers, but we never talked about that. Her reputation completely distorted who she really was. Men envied her freedom, beauty, and generosity. She was someone who spent all her time helping others.

Foulane’s jealousy wasn’t incomprehensible. I certainly spent more time with Lalla then I did with him or the children. Which was not unusual considering that every time he saw her he would start shouting at her and insulting her, which I couldn’t stand. He was just like all those other bourgeois men he frequented, who were all prejudiced against her because she’d dared to divorce her husband because he didn’t satisfy her and was almost always absent. They had managed to separate without any acrimony and were still friends. I too would have liked for my marriage to end like that. But my husband was a grotesque man who thrived in conflicts and wanted to control everything to suit his own ends. Lalla had understood all that. More perceptive than any psychiatrist, she had seen through to our biggest mistake: that we’d decided to continue our relationship which had actually been doomed from the start.

I wasn’t the only one who thought Lalla was wonderful. There were five other women, all of whom had been disappointed by marriage and betrayed by their chauvinistic husbands. All of these women were looked down on by Casablanca’s petty-bourgeois society. We would meet and share our problems, trying to analyze them. Lalla would burn some incense, put some nice Indian music on the stereo, and we would sit there contemplating one another in the warm glow of our friendship.

Lalla, who’d been born into a large family that could claim its descent from the Prophet Mohammed, had a gift for eloquence and knew how to open up our senses. We would sit in a circle around her and listen to her in silence, pierced by the truth that rang out of her words:

We are here to allow our energies to combine, to merge, to channel what is best in our souls into our collective soul so we can then walk hand in hand down the path of our primal wisdom, freeing our humanity from minds that no longer trouble us. We sit here in our purity, refusing to let in the weight of others’ selfishness, those who see us as fields to plough, or incubators, or inferior beings who are meant to submit and resign themselves. Sisters, it’s time for us to be free and we have to keep our ears pricked to listen to that freedom’s rhythm and song. We are energy, and our positive waves can repel the negative ones cast out by our enemies. We are not objects enslaved to their desires, we are not objects at all, we are living energies climbing toward the summits of the highest mountains, where the air is as pure as the contents of our hearts and souls. We are on the right path, we won’t submit ourselves any longer to men who think they are strong, we won’t allow ourselves to be humiliated by their demands any longer, or to be sacrificed on the altars of their ambitions. The freedom of our energy is in our hands, the sensuality of our energy is in our hands, the beauty of truth is in our hands, so let us take charge of them and use them to eradicate our fears, our shame, our submission, our resignation, our conformity. Our energies will meet, converse, and propel us forward in a liberating momentum. Yes, we’ve freed ourselves, freed ourselves for good. Let us walk ahead without looking back, because the men who exploit us know we’ve become stronger than them and are ready to take our destinies, lives, and energies into our own hands.

Let us climb the mountain of our positive energies. Let us leave them our negative energies and let them bury their heads in the sand. Let us refuse to have anything else to do with those who hound us like shadows hoping to see us stumble and fall. We’re not crazy, we’re wise, freethinking women guided by the echo of our primal scream, we’re clearheaded, an unfathomable sea, we draw our energy from the fire of life, and amidst the trees and forests of life. We are strong and united, and we refuse to be anyone’s victim.

This is the truth, and this truth helped to free me from that royally selfish man. All this I owe to Lalla, the only friend I ever had who was always by my side when I needed someone to lean on. Thank you, Lalla. Thank you for saving me and opening my eyes.

My Husband Is …

Foulane found a thousand reasons to explain why we fell out of love. Here are mine:

My husband has many positive qualities, but I’ve only ever seen his flaws.

My husband is an old bachelor at heart, selfish and fussy.

My husband eats really quickly, and that annoys me.

My husband heads to the airport three hours before his flight.

My husband is bad-tempered and nervous when he’s with me, but charming with others.

My husband is impatient.

My husband snores and shifts around in bed.

My husband doesn’t like to drive and hates the way I drive.

My husband is a misanthrope and would rather be on his own.

My husband is naïve, weak, and indecisive.

My husband is a sucker. He’s been betrayed by his closest friends (women could always disarm him with their smiles, and his agents always stole from him).

My husband hates physical activity, doesn’t go to the gym, and has a belly.

My husband loves black-and-white films and always quotes lines from their dialogue, which pisses me off!

My husband is two-faced (I love this expression and it really upsets him).

My husband is a loser and only made money because he was lucky.

My husband doesn’t like to fight; he claims he hates conflict.

My husband has often been an absent father.

My husband doesn’t have any dreams or fantasies (his paintings are evidence of this).

My husband’s never smoked hash or drunk any vodka.

My husband’s never gotten drunk or lost his composure.

My husband harangues me whenever I smoke a cigarette or drink some wine.

My husband is an Arab, and shares all their defects and archaisms.

My husband sings out of tune.

My husband doesn’t believe in spirits, ghosts, and energies carried by waves.

My husband isn’t generous. Every time he gives someone one of his paintings as a present, they’re always small and he never signs them.

My husband is a hypochondriac.

My husband is a gutless chauvinist.

My husband is like a tree with a dead hollow trunk.

My husband is so clumsy that one of my friends has kept a list of his gaffes.

My husband pretends to read when he doesn’t paint, but reading always puts him to sleep.

My husband doesn’t know how to lie.

My husband is the worst kind of cheater.

My husband doesn’t act like a husband.

My husband claims he loves women too much, which is a lie, he can’t even love his wife.

Hate

It seems that in order to hate someone, you have to really love them first. Maybe that applied to me too. I loved Foulane, but very reluctantly. My mother once told me: “Love comes with time, little one, I only met your father on our wedding night, I learned how to live with him, to get to know him, and we gradually realized we were made to be with one another. So be patient, my daughter, love is life, and it’s better for life to be calm and pleasant.” Like all girls my age, I believed her. I idolized him, thought of him as a prince, a strong man I could rely on, someone I could lean on. At first, we had some truly happy times. He took care of me, was attentive, especially when I got pregnant. He was fantastic. Those are some of the happiest memories I have of us. He was loyal, never left me alone for a minute, took care of all the errands, and when the maid didn’t come, he did all the dishes, took the laundry to the dry cleaner’s, vacuumed, and left me all the time to relax. I would look at him and tell myself: “Now look at that, the famous artist washing the floor, I should take a picture of him and send it to the newspapers!” I’m kidding, of course. He was like a different man. I later understood that he’d been so nurturing during my pregnancy because he and his family simply saw me as an incubator. Besides, his family always looked at me as though I were a stranger. I was told that one of his sisters had said: “You should pay her to leave and we’ll take care of the little one!” I wanted to throw acid in her face. But I cooled off. “It’ll pass,” I told myself. Not, “It’ll get better.” No, I knew it would never get better. He just let them talk and never stood up for me. I’m certain of that.

But nowadays I hate him, I admit it. I don’t just want to hurt him, I want to do more than that. I’m only calm when he isn’t there. The moment I can feel his presence, even in his current condition, I get all tense and nervous. One day he told me: “Hate is easy, love is more complex, we must lower our guard and just let it happen.” What a bunch of mumbo jumbo. He always used those kinds of explanations to belittle me, as though he just wanted to remind me that he’d studied philosophy whereas I hadn’t. Just like that story about the embroidered tablecloth he’d insisted on covering the round table in the living room with. I’m not as stupid as he thinks I am. If I took it away it’s because I knew that it was so precious that it deserved to be framed, and not left on top of a table where it could get dirty or torn to pieces. If he wants proof he can go look inside the big chest in our bedroom and see for himself how carefully I stored it away.

I started to wish he would just disappear. We’ve all felt those kinds of desires at one point or another, if only for a few seconds. But once, during a party when he wouldn’t stop buzzing around a flirty blonde, I suddenly realized I couldn’t stand him anymore. I picked up my purse and left the party. He followed me out into the parking lot, grabbed the door handle, and wouldn’t let go. I sped off and he fell, but I didn’t stop, I just kept driving. If there had been a car behind me, he would have been run over. He got up and his face was covered in blood. Nothing serious, just a few scrapes, I later found out. I still remember that evening down to its slightest detail. He reproached me for it for a long time afterwards, blaming me for not having taken him to the hospital and for having left him behind. But after all I’d had to endure from him, I certainly wasn’t going to let him open the door and talk with him as though nothing had happened. It wasn’t that dissimilar to when I refused to be his chauffeur on his return from China. I had wanted to punish him for refusing to take me with him. I suspected he’d gone there with someone else. So, sick or not, I wasn’t in the mood to drive him around.

I admit it, I’m a violent woman. So if he knew that, why would he keep provoking me?

He often reproached me for not admiring him. He was right. How could I possibly admire such a mean-spirited man, such a mediocre husband? As for his being an artist, I couldn’t have cared less, it was useless to me. Being Foulane’s wife might have been a stroke of good luck as far as others were concerned, but it made my life a living hell. He identified with Picasso and the way the latter coarsely went about making his romantic conquests. We’d even seen a film about Picasso where Foulane had openly confessed to admiring him. But I didn’t admire my husband, I hated him, and seeing him enfeebled by his stroke did not inspire the slightest pity in me. Every time I looked at him, I couldn’t help but see the monster who’d taken the best years of my life and then abandoned me. He claimed it was all my fault. It’s easy to blame his stroke on me. The doctor had warned him to stick to a diet and to stop smoking and drinking. But he continued to live as though he were thirty years old. He was always stressed and anxious whenever we went abroad. He would show up at the airport incredibly early, hated taking care of the luggage, couldn’t stand to wait in line, and would rush onto the plane as though someone was going to steal his seat. He’d already been a very stressed man by the time I met him. Thus it was that his stress, the lack of a healthy lifestyle, and the nights he went out carousing with his friends — who adored him because he always picked up the tab — all contributed to his stroke. If I had any responsibility, it was that I helped precipitate the situation. He eventually recovered a little, thanks to Imane, or so he claimed, who pretended that she was his nurse even though she slept with him despite the state he was in. She was just an ambitious girl who was taking advantage of an old man. The truth was that I was the one who looked after him. Which is something that I bitterly regret to this day.

I’ll never leave Foulane, I’ll never leave him alone. He has to assume his responsibilities. I couldn’t care less about his health, mood, or state of mind. I’ll never stop hating him so long as my thirst for revenge isn’t quenched. One day I’ll rebuild my life, but not before he’s paid the price. So long as he refuses to atone for what he’s done to me, or publicly confess in front of everyone, I’ll refuse to let go! I’m too proud to leave him. I’m full of hate, and if anyone were to shake me, drops of poison would inevitably fall out.

I hate his smell.

I hate his charm.

I hate the smell of his breath.

I hate his mouth.

I hate his smirk.

I hate his hypocrisy.

I hate his friends.

I hate how quickly he eats and how he slobbers all over himself.

I hate his stress and his anxiety.

I hate his insomnia, which prevents me from sleeping.

I hate how weak he is and how he refuses to react.

I hate his hearty laughter.

I hate his single malt whisky.

I hate his Cuban cigars, which he guards jealously.

I hate his collection of luxury watches.

I hate the way he makes love.

I hate his pregnant silences.

I hate his indifference.

I hate his hypocritical outlook on religion.

I hate his long absences.

I hate his selfishness.

I hate his love handles.

I hate his passion for the cinema.

I hate the jazz he listens to at high volumes.

I hate all the women he met before me.

I hate and despise all the women he was with after me.

I hate how passive-aggressive he is.

I hate his mannerisms (he always bites his lower lip when he’s angry).

I hate the way he used to call me just before he went to fuck someone else (he would always call me on the landline to make sure I was home).

I hate his paintings, his studio, his bed, his sofa, his pajamas, his toothbrush, his comb, his razor, I hate all his toiletries, his luggage, and especially that little leather suitcase that follows him everywhere.

I dream of destroying him, of seeing him at my mercy, on his knees, stripped of all his goods and assets, naked and ready to slide into the funerary shroud that I gave him on our wedding day.

I also began suffering from insomnia; after all, it’s not like the artist exercised a monopoly on that. So I would examine my life and put things in perspective. Then I would amuse myself by thinking up ways to get to him, to hurt him. My need for revenge would become twice as ferocious during those sleepless nights:

• Burn his collection of ancient manuscripts, which I stole from his studio. I know, that’s criminal, but if it makes him suffer, then that’s what I’ll have to do.

• Stalk the mistresses of his I’ve been able to track down and keep Foulane apprised of my actions and the reactions of the women who wrecked my life.

• Take advantage of his guard being momentarily lowered to get him to sign over power of attorney (I already have the letter) so I can transfer all his assets into my bank account. As he loves money, this will drive him crazy.

• Have medical experts declare him of unsound mind and thus have him placed under my tutelage.

• He’ll only piss when I let him. He’ll call and call but I won’t come to help him to the bathroom. I love thinking about him feeling his hot piss run down his legs. He’ll be so humiliated.

I’ve got plenty of other ideas. But I’m going to do this step by step. No sudden, impromptu moves.

Love

Sometimes I still ask myself: did I ever love this man? Perhaps I didn’t love him as I should have done, but these days, after having gotten everything off my chest, and after having talked about it and reflected on it, I can safely say I was only ever spurred by love. Not just any kind of love. The sort of love that had neither rhyme nor reason to it. Something different. I loved him because I had no other choice. I came from a faraway place, a land few people knew much about. One day, when my family had been celebrating an engagement, I’d gotten very troubled. I looked around myself and everything seemed so unlike the life I led with Foulane. I felt I was utterly unlike those people: the women were satisfied, the men looked happy and comfortable, and the children were allowed to run loose around a dusty, filthy courtyard. I looked at my aunt, whose daughter had just given birth to a baby, and asked myself: “Do she and her husband love each other?” I observed them in their respective nooks: my aunt busy preparing dinner while my uncle played cards with the other men. Love, the real kind of love that sweeps everything in its path, was nowhere to be seen anywhere around me, and was certainly not to be found in that house in the middle of that desolate bled where everything was neatly arranged and in its place. Not the slightest trace of conflict … the women knew their place, and the men knew theirs. Nature and traditions followed their own logic, while I felt out of place in that gathering where everyone was happy and content. I had to make sure I didn’t disturb it. I stepped away and observed that happiness following its own rhythm, adhering to a ritual I could not understand. I had become a stranger in my own homeland. My father had told me on numerous occasions that our roots were always a part of us, and I could see his point, but it felt as though mine hadn’t followed, or better yet, that they had abandoned me; and when I went to look for them, all I found were the ridiculous traces of a crude, impoverished peasantry.

I learned about love by reading novels and watching a handful of films while I lived in Marseilles. I would identify with the heroine, who would eventually triumph and fall happily into the leading man’s arms. I still couldn’t tell the difference between romantic love and real love.

By the time I turned eighteen, I was still asking myself: who should I love? Who should I turn to? I wasn’t attracted to anyone around me. I was ready to fall in love and was waiting for a man to burst into my life like an actor onto a stage. I longed for him, drew a picture of him in my head, conjured him out of thin air, and visualized him: tall, blue-eyed, elegant, handsome, and more importantly, kindhearted. I was ready for him. I struggled through my classes and waited for my lover to show up at night.

I was distant and absentminded the day I met Foulane, I was looking elsewhere and he was the one who approached me and started asking me a bunch of questions about my background, my life, and my future. He grabbed hold of my right hand and pretended to read the lines on my palm, then did the same with my left hand. He said all the right things. He was insightful. He talked a lot about Morocco, France, art, and his desire to go on holiday, a long holiday. I thought he was handsome but something about him unsettled me. He kept looking at other women while he was talking to me. His eye would wander around the exhibition hall and come to rest on other women’s bodies. I pointed out that one of those women was returning his glance. “He’s a ladies’ man, forget about him!” I told myself. At which point he asked for my phone number and said he wanted me to go see him so he could show me something important. When I asked him to elaborate, he said he wanted to paint my portrait, which was how he lured women to his studio. I couldn’t tell whether he was being serious or not. I turned him down politely and fate had it that our paths crossed again not long after at a party hosted by the professor who taught my course on the history of modern art. He wouldn’t leave me alone all night. He walked me home to the little studio apartment in the banlieues where I was living at the time.

Thus our love was born. I couldn’t get him out of my head and caught myself hoping for a sign from him, a telephone call, a postcard, or an impromptu visit.

Coming Alive

Voilà, I’ve gotten it all out of my system, and unlike him, I kept it brief and to the point. Regardless, I know that you’ll believe his version of events rather than mine, because his work will outlive our miserable love story. After all, I’m just the country girl who entered his life and wrecked everything. He never made me happy and yet I still made many efforts to ensure his life was pleasant. I regret having turned a blind eye to many things. Seeing him now in his wheelchair with half his body paralyzed fills my heart with pity. Pity isn’t a wonderful sentiment; however, I have no wish to see him regain his health so he can start betraying me again. From now on I’ll take care of him, be his nurse, his mother, his wife, perhaps even his friend. I’ve put a stop to the divorce proceedings. I’m going to change my behavior and alter my tactics, which will surprise him and he’ll realize he cannot do without me. I’m going to love him like I did in our early days, I’m going to love him and keep him close. I’m going to rid myself of my nastier urges; I’ll give up on exacting my revenge, I’ll be good to him and put myself at his disposal. I’ll stop asking myself whether I love him or not because I know he’s utterly incapable of love, or of giving and receiving. I’m not a monster, even though he’s depicted me as a harbinger of death and disease.

My first gesture will be to bring him some broth, and then I’ll give him a nice long massage just like his beautiful Imane used to do. She’s now living just a few miles away from here. One day around the beginning of August I went to see her and brought her a present, a pretty dress that I haven’t worn in a long time, and invited myself over to the tiny apartment in a poor neighborhood that she shares with her mother and brother. I was blunt with her and said: “I’m going to look after my husband myself, he needs me. I want him to get better so that he’ll get back to his paintings thanks to me, because I’m his wife. He’s a great artist, and so I’m asking you not to look after him anymore, I can see that this bothers him and it’s affected his blood pressure, which is dangerous. I know I’m asking you for a favor, so I’m going to offer you something in exchange: I’ll get your brother a visa so he can go to Spain and I’ll keep paying you until you leave for Belgium. It can all be easily arranged, you can teach me how to give him his injections and to help him with his physical therapy. You’ll also need to appease him and tell him that you can’t come anymore because you’re going to get married and your fiancé is on his way to take care of all the arrangements. I’ll handle all the paperwork and I don’t think it’ll be complicated because your situation falls under the “right to family reunification” category. As for your brother, I’m sure it’ll be easy, I know the Spanish consul well and Javier never says no to me. He’s a good friend of my husband’s too.”

Imane was initially shocked by my visit and my proposal, but she had a good heart and thought it was normal for a wife to want to look after her sick husband. She told me she thought of Foulane as an uncle or father, that she’d just been doing her job, and that she loved her fiancé. I pretended to agree with her and stuck to practical questions. She showed me how to give him his injections, taught me how to massage him and revitalize his muscles. It was a very informative afternoon. She gave me her brother Aziz’s passport and handed over her visa application to live in Belgium, which had been turned down. We hugged and I left, feeling proud of myself.

I’d gotten my plan off the ground and the trap was closing around him. All that was left to do was to approach Foulane and sweetly explain to him how his new life was going to unfold. I would have to practice in order to do that. Lalla helped me. She played the part of my husband, while I played myself. It was fun. At one point we burst out laughing. Lalla even said that our plan was going to be far more successful than all the incense the taleb from the mountains could provide. We opened a good bottle of wine to celebrate.

I’ll be at his beck and call day and night. I’ll offer him a truce for the sake of our children. It’s the best way to avoid him slipping out of my grasp, so that he can finally become the man I always dreamed he could be. I’ll look after him and become indispensable to him. I’ll love him for what he is and I’ll never try to change him again. I’m not a monster; I have feelings too. I can be a little wild and brutal, it’s my nature. I hate all the playacting and hypocrisy that’s so common in his family. I’ll love him and give him everything I didn’t during those years of disagreements, and I’m also going to admire him, even though I’ve always done all I could to prevent him from seeing how proud I was of him. I want him to see how much I love him, and to realize that I’m not his enemy, and that I’m the only woman who actually loves him, especially now that he’s an invalid and his life has been stunted by his illness and its ramifications. I’ve acquainted myself with his condition and I’m told he’ll make a full recovery. But will he recover full possession of his motor skills? Will he ever be able to paint like he used to? The doctors can’t say for sure. There’s nothing to do apart from watch his progress and be happy that he’s able to pick up a brush again. I’ll keep him close, no other woman will ever be able to get near to him, I’ll be right here and he won’t be able to budge from his wheelchair. The Twins, as he calls them, will help me when he needs to go to the bathroom or to go out. But from now on I’ll be the one who washes him, so I can see him be utterly dependent on me, just like a child, and he won’t be able to grumble, threaten me, or insult me like he used to do in the past. I’ll be out of his reach. I’ll sleep beside him, make him herbal tea, give him his medication, and even slip him some sedatives, so that he’ll be able to sleep properly. The time has come for me to prove I’m a good selfless wife who’s ready to sacrifice her youth yet again so that he can have a good life. I’ll be attentive and never leave him alone. I spoke to his doctors and they think this is a good idea. After all, we promised ourselves to be good to one another, “in sickness and in health” as the traditional Christian vows say. In our country, people promise to help one another through illness, and that’s what I’m going to do.

I’m going to take charge, but I’ll do so with such tenderness that he’ll be surprised, and it’ll make it easier to handle him. I’ve already put all of his affairs in order. No documents can be signed without my consent. I’ve hidden a few of his paintings in the basement and locked the door with a padlock and I’m the only one with the key. He won’t be able to give them away to people anymore. I called his agent who immediately told me that the price of his paintings had shot up and that it would be a good idea not to sell any for the time being. He explained that the fewer of his canvases are in circulation, the more prized they’ll become. So regardless of what Foulane thinks, his painting days are over. In any case, he’ll never be able to execute the kind of large paintings that go for such large sums. It’s done, fini! He’s mine now and I can do what I like with him, and I want him to be calm, obliging, maybe even happy.

There’s still an important detail that I need to take care of: ensuring he hasn’t fathered any other children. I found a photo in his chest that depicted a little boy in the arms of a blonde woman …

The meek wife who endured all those slaps is a thing of the past. I, Amina Wakrine, penned this response to my husband’s manuscript on the night of October 1, 2003, and I have decided to love him despite the state that he’s in. My feelings won’t wander down dead-end streets anymore. It was a carefully considered decision, which I came to largely thanks to Lalla. She was the one who came up with the idea that I should salvage the marriage. She’s very clever. If it hadn’t been for her, I would be moping around and crying in a corner. She even suggested I should bring him a woman from time to time if it would please him, but I don’t know whether I’ll be able to do that. No, I shouldn’t exaggerate. This will be my revenge, and it will travel down the path of goodness, kindness, and generosity. It will be born out of love and redemption. I’ll fill him with a deep, boundless love, a love that will leave him moonstruck, and envelop him with a sweetness that he doesn’t even know can exist. I’ll be docile, ask for his forgiveness, obey his every wish, and learn to anticipate his desires, to the point where he’ll no longer be able to doubt my goodwill and desire to smooth out all his troubles and be his to command. Yes, I’ll submit to him and resign myself, in the hopes of carving myself a permanent niche by his side. I’m grateful that fate has afforded me another chance to recover my place, which I should never have lost. Foulane won’t be able to go back to his old ways once he understands what’s going on. I’ll do everything I can to make him into my object, my invalid, completely and utterly reliant on me and me alone. I will relish these moments. I’ll revel in this blessing. Free at last, I’ll finally be alive.