The Happy Marriage (28 page)

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.