The Happy Marriage

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!”

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.

Jealousy