Tahar Ben Jelloun - The Happy Marriage

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.

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.