Tahar Ben Jelloun - The Happy Marriage

Foulane paid for everything, but as soon as she’d had the abortion, she completely vanished. I waited a month, then called her and went to see her, taking a bottle of wine with me since I knew she loved red wine. We drank, and once her inhibitions had broken down, she spilled her guts and told me the whole story down to the smallest detail, how he would fuck her and put her in positions that helped him come, how she sucked him off, and how he licked her feet, and probably her ass too. She even told me how they’d had a threesome with an Italian journalist who’d been in town to write about the Contemporary Art Fair.

When it was time to leave, I thanked her and asked her to do me a favor: “Give me a heads up when you go see him again.”

But alas there wasn’t a next time. Foulane broke it off with her and refused to pick up her phone calls. I had wanted to surprise him and catch him red-handed. Yet did I really need more proof?

What kind of woman would put up with these things? With her husband pretending he had a migraine when it came to her, then having threesomes with other women?

It’s true that one day I sent him a text where I said: “You don’t satisfy me either sexually or financially!” He never replied to that.

My friends would often tell me about their evenings with their husbands and I would remain silent, not daring to tell them the truth. I would suppress my frustrations and be ashamed of it. My friend Hafsa told me about how her husband used to shave her, which was apparently quite exciting. Maria’s husband would spend a long time kissing her all over her body. Khadijia would wear sexy lingerie and she and her husband would do some role-playing where she played the foreigner. Most of them made love a few times a week. But I always had to wait until he felt like it. If only he’d taken his time and looked after my needs too!

I was lucky to meet Lalla, my neighbor, whom Foulane hated and tried to distance from me. Lalla saved me. She opened my eyes, gave me the means to defend myself. She’s an exceptional woman: selfless, beautiful, wholesome, generous, and with the soul of an artist, who refused to make compromises, unlike Foulane.

Lalla talked to me about sexuality and explained that a woman my age needed to be satisfied at least once a day. I wouldn’t have hoped for so much, but she was right, I had to leave that selfish, perverted monster who’d managed to make me lose my mind. I know that Foulane didn’t like Lalla. She helped me to discover what he was up to: he was trying to drive me crazy so he could leave me, start a new life, and still keep everything.

I owe Lalla a debt for helping me to start achieving my freedom. He was jealous of her, very jealous. He would shout and scream, supposedly because he loved me. What a hypocrite! He’d spent his life being interested in just one thing — his ego — and when someone opened my eyes to that, he couldn’t bear it. He thought that he’d married a quiet little shepherdess who wouldn’t look him in the eye and would swallow all of his bullshit! Oh no! He was fooling himself, he had no idea what that little country girl had in store for him.

As for my sexuality, I’m still young, and people tell me I’m beautiful and alluring, so I hope that one day I’ll finally meet a man who’ll make up for all the frustrations, humiliations, and constant disrespect that Foulane put me through.

I admit it, I was jealous, incredibly jealous. I was never jealous of my friends, only of Foulane. He had a vicious knack for bringing out the worst in me, those awful — yet legitimate — feelings that drive couples crazy. Of course, his perversity only ever manifested itself in stealthy ways. He would compliment women with hideous hairdos and hideous dresses when we had guests over just to get on my nerves. He would take an interest in their lives, their children, asked them about what they liked to read or what they did to amuse themselves. Always employing that honeyed tone of his, which I loathed. On one occasion, we were invited to a party hosted by people in show business. A young starlet had been there wearing a dress with a scandalous neckline. Foulane’s eyes never drifted from her bosom and he spent the whole night talking to her. I even caught him entering her number in his phone. I didn’t do anything about it, but later that night I stole his phone and deleted all the numbers with women’s names, starting with the young starlet, who called herself Marilin—“with an ‘i,’ ” as she put it. He pulled a scene the following morning, talked about respecting boundaries and privacy, giving me one of his lectures about morals that made me want to puke. In fact, my jealousy wasn’t fueled by my frustrated affections for him or by a desire to win him back. It was simply a reaction to his attempts to belittle me in public.

This other time, his Russian mistress — or was she Polish? — who was either a musicians or a painter, I don’t remember which except that she had artistic pretensions, actually called at the house: “I would like to zee my old loover again, you zee I’ve knoon him for a loong time …” The nerve! I hung up on her. Later that evening, Foulane laconically said: “Oh don’t mind her, she’s a lunatic.” That’s the way he treated the women he claims to have loved!

One day, he asked me to help him pick out a necklace he wanted to buy for his gallerist’s wife. He wanted to do something nice for her because they never came empty-handed whenever they visited us. We bought her a stunning Berber necklace made of coral and silver. I wrapped it up in gift paper. But a few months later I spotted it around the neck of a Spanish gallerist who must have certainly been his mistress. When I asked him why, he started stammering like a liar who’d been caught red-handed. Women called at the house from time to time, and I would give them his number so they could call him at his studio. Surprised, they would ask me: “But aren’t you his assistant? Or his secretary?” “I’m his wife!” I would shout back. Then they would hang up on me and he would never offer any explanations. He always used the same excuse: “I’m not responsible for the letters or calls I receive.” Then he’d add: “If you want to feed your pathological jealousy, you might as well focus on things that actually matter, and not these trifles that have got nothing to do with me!” What were these things that “actually mattered”? Marriage, love, a harmonious relationship? He would confess without revealing anything of import. Now that’s what I call insincerity, which is something I loathe.

Foulane had mastered the art of wounding my pride, and he would poke at the deep wounds that had their roots in my childhood, and he would twist the knife just to hurt me. He hurt me a lot. He scoffed at my experiences as a model, saying that having the right proportions wasn’t the same as being talented. He would use what I’d told him in confidence to grieve me and remind me that my parents were illiterate immigrants. To think he’d painted a mural in honor of immigrants! What a show-off! What a fascist! He painted the mural for the city of Saint-Denis, and a few months later the mayor bought a couple of his paintings, one of which he hung in his office, while the other was hung in the entrance lobby of city hall.

I was jealous of some of his friends. He was always at their disposal. Always kind and always available. There were these two exiled Chilean politicians who were truly inseparable. Their wives never said anything, they just accepted the situation: friends always came first, and their wives and children last. At first I suspected they might have been gay, but that wasn’t true, they were just friends, and their friendship didn’t leave any room for anything else. One evening, when they’d been invited to dine at our place, one of them had the audacity to tell me: “Take care of our friend Foulane. He’s a great artist. You must be kind with him, we’re very fond of him, and we’re in awe of his immense talents!” I couldn’t restrain myself, my wild streak took over and I slapped him. I left him speechless and gaping and the dinner came to an abrupt end. I never saw them again. Foulane obviously berated me, hurling a bunch of abuse at me, and the ensuing fight reached unprecedented heights. Voilà, my jealousy was nothing other than anger and extreme aggravation. Nothing more. But nowadays Foulane is weak and stuck in his wheelchair, so he can’t do anything to me. He needs me whenever he needs to sit, eat, stand up, or even shit. He’s at my mercy. My jealousy has become pointless.