The Happy Marriage

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.