The Happy Marriage (27 page)

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.