The Happy Marriage (31 page)

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.