The Happy Marriage

• He’ll only piss when I let him. He’ll call and call but I won’t come to help him to the bathroom. I love thinking about him feeling his hot piss run down his legs. He’ll be so humiliated.

I’ve got plenty of other ideas. But I’m going to do this step by step. No sudden, impromptu moves.

Love

Sometimes I still ask myself: did I ever love this man? Perhaps I didn’t love him as I should have done, but these days, after having gotten everything off my chest, and after having talked about it and reflected on it, I can safely say I was only ever spurred by love. Not just any kind of love. The sort of love that had neither rhyme nor reason to it. Something different. I loved him because I had no other choice. I came from a faraway place, a land few people knew much about. One day, when my family had been celebrating an engagement, I’d gotten very troubled. I looked around myself and everything seemed so unlike the life I led with Foulane. I felt I was utterly unlike those people: the women were satisfied, the men looked happy and comfortable, and the children were allowed to run loose around a dusty, filthy courtyard. I looked at my aunt, whose daughter had just given birth to a baby, and asked myself: “Do she and her husband love each other?” I observed them in their respective nooks: my aunt busy preparing dinner while my uncle played cards with the other men. Love, the real kind of love that sweeps everything in its path, was nowhere to be seen anywhere around me, and was certainly not to be found in that house in the middle of that desolate bled where everything was neatly arranged and in its place. Not the slightest trace of conflict … the women knew their place, and the men knew theirs. Nature and traditions followed their own logic, while I felt out of place in that gathering where everyone was happy and content. I had to make sure I didn’t disturb it. I stepped away and observed that happiness following its own rhythm, adhering to a ritual I could not understand. I had become a stranger in my own homeland. My father had told me on numerous occasions that our roots were always a part of us, and I could see his point, but it felt as though mine hadn’t followed, or better yet, that they had abandoned me; and when I went to look for them, all I found were the ridiculous traces of a crude, impoverished peasantry.

I learned about love by reading novels and watching a handful of films while I lived in Marseilles. I would identify with the heroine, who would eventually triumph and fall happily into the leading man’s arms. I still couldn’t tell the difference between romantic love and real love.

By the time I turned eighteen, I was still asking myself: who should I love? Who should I turn to? I wasn’t attracted to anyone around me. I was ready to fall in love and was waiting for a man to burst into my life like an actor onto a stage. I longed for him, drew a picture of him in my head, conjured him out of thin air, and visualized him: tall, blue-eyed, elegant, handsome, and more importantly, kindhearted. I was ready for him. I struggled through my classes and waited for my lover to show up at night.

I was distant and absentminded the day I met Foulane, I was looking elsewhere and he was the one who approached me and started asking me a bunch of questions about my background, my life, and my future. He grabbed hold of my right hand and pretended to read the lines on my palm, then did the same with my left hand. He said all the right things. He was insightful. He talked a lot about Morocco, France, art, and his desire to go on holiday, a long holiday. I thought he was handsome but something about him unsettled me. He kept looking at other women while he was talking to me. His eye would wander around the exhibition hall and come to rest on other women’s bodies. I pointed out that one of those women was returning his glance. “He’s a ladies’ man, forget about him!” I told myself. At which point he asked for my phone number and said he wanted me to go see him so he could show me something important. When I asked him to elaborate, he said he wanted to paint my portrait, which was how he lured women to his studio. I couldn’t tell whether he was being serious or not. I turned him down politely and fate had it that our paths crossed again not long after at a party hosted by the professor who taught my course on the history of modern art. He wouldn’t leave me alone all night. He walked me home to the little studio apartment in the banlieues where I was living at the time.

Thus our love was born. I couldn’t get him out of my head and caught myself hoping for a sign from him, a telephone call, a postcard, or an impromptu visit.

Coming Alive