Tahar Ben Jelloun - The Happy Marriage

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.

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.

My husband doesn’t believe in spirits, ghosts, and energies carried by waves.

My husband isn’t generous. Every time he gives someone one of his paintings as a present, they’re always small and he never signs them.

My husband is a hypochondriac.

My husband is a gutless chauvinist.

My husband is like a tree with a dead hollow trunk.

My husband is so clumsy that one of my friends has kept a list of his gaffes.

My husband pretends to read when he doesn’t paint, but reading always puts him to sleep.

My husband doesn’t know how to lie.

My husband is the worst kind of cheater.

My husband doesn’t act like a husband.

My husband claims he loves women too much, which is a lie, he can’t even love his wife.

It seems that in order to hate someone, you have to really love them first. Maybe that applied to me too. I loved Foulane, but very reluctantly. My mother once told me: “Love comes with time, little one, I only met your father on our wedding night, I learned how to live with him, to get to know him, and we gradually realized we were made to be with one another. So be patient, my daughter, love is life, and it’s better for life to be calm and pleasant.” Like all girls my age, I believed her. I idolized him, thought of him as a prince, a strong man I could rely on, someone I could lean on. At first, we had some truly happy times. He took care of me, was attentive, especially when I got pregnant. He was fantastic. Those are some of the happiest memories I have of us. He was loyal, never left me alone for a minute, took care of all the errands, and when the maid didn’t come, he did all the dishes, took the laundry to the dry cleaner’s, vacuumed, and left me all the time to relax. I would look at him and tell myself: “Now look at that, the famous artist washing the floor, I should take a picture of him and send it to the newspapers!” I’m kidding, of course. He was like a different man. I later understood that he’d been so nurturing during my pregnancy because he and his family simply saw me as an incubator. Besides, his family always looked at me as though I were a stranger. I was told that one of his sisters had said: “You should pay her to leave and we’ll take care of the little one!” I wanted to throw acid in her face. But I cooled off. “It’ll pass,” I told myself. Not, “It’ll get better.” No, I knew it would never get better. He just let them talk and never stood up for me. I’m certain of that.