Tahar Ben Jelloun - The Happy Marriage

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.

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!”