I would have liked to have flings of my own, and have scores of lovers, but at no point did my soul or my pride allow me to do that. My friends encouraged me to do so, urging me to get my revenge and return the insult fivefold, but I resisted. I wasn’t even attracted to other men. I loved my husband and didn’t want to give myself to another man. I was courted by handsome, interesting, freethinking, and generous men. But I rejected them all despite being flattered to be the object of such interest. “You’re very seductive and beautiful and yet your husband neglects you; it’s a crime against love that should be punished with love.”
I loved him and yet didn’t let him see it: it was a question of modesty. My parents had never kissed one another in front of us, and had never exchanged tender words. So where did this love come from? He was the first man I’d ever loved. The men I’d been with during my years in Marseilles didn’t count because I hadn’t been myself at the time. So I simply flirted a little with some friends, nothing more. He intimidated and dominated me. I needed to shift the power dynamic in our relationship and so I dared to defy him and knocked him from the public pedestal he’d set himself up on. What I admired most in him was his maturity, his experience, and his fame. I wanted him all to myself, there was nothing unusual about that, no woman ever wants to share her man, as far as I’m concerned any woman who sleeps with a married man is a whore and a slut. I can spot them a mile away and I hate them. I even started to hatch plans for how I would kill these kinds of women, plotting these crimes carefully, with a serial killer’s rigorousness. Oh yes, I would take my time with them, make them fall into a trap and then disfigure them, one after the other. I loved to visualize those moments down to the smallest details, thinking about how I would approach them, gain their trust, and especially how I wouldn’t leave any traces behind, the perfect crime. A female serial killer! I dreamed up plenty of scenarios, but never put any of them into practice of course.
You might not believe me, but I never cheated on Foulane. He was well aware of that, but yet he cast doubts on my loyalty in his manuscript. That he had the nerve to suspect me! It was certainly true that I spent a lot of time out with my girlfriends, and that since he traveled a lot I had plenty of opportunities to betray him. But I never crossed that line. However, I must confess that I regret that now. I was an idiot, constrained by principles that put me at a constant disadvantage. I thought about Fatima’s story, but it’s not like we were living in that village of virtue. We were living in Paris at the time, and we had a social life. He was in the public eye and I was the pretty little thing on his arm. Once, during a reception at the Élysée Palace, he turned his back to me just as he was talking to the president. Against all odds, François Mitterrand turned to address me and broke into a big smile. He asked me where I was from and what I was studying. When I told him I was married to the artist he’d just been speaking to, he said: “Oh, now I understand, you’re his muse.” He was right about that. I was his muse, his slave, his property, the trophy wife he could parade at receptions and soirées. This bothered me at first, but then I got used to it. Nobody was going to give me any complexes. I knew who I was and what I was worth. I didn’t feel the need to pretend, or to be a hypocrite like his sisters, who’d all had plastic surgery, felt uncomfortable in their own skin, and were all fat and charmless. I would watch them strut about at weddings, acting like peacocks, while I would remain isolated in my corner. I was the foreigner, the stranger, the bad apple that had to be avoided at all costs. I polluted the clean, limpid air of a society that was well-versed in all manner of hypocrisy and at keeping up appearances.
I suffered a long list of humiliations and I’m going to tell you all about them, I won’t make anything up. After all, I’m not writing a novel. I’m going to get it all off my chest. He was always keen on smoothing things over, avoiding scenes, no scandals or noises, it was better to remain calm and stay flexible. “To turn a blind eye,” as Foulane was fond of saying. But I’ve always kept my eyes wide open. I’m not flexible, and I never will be. What does being flexible really mean anyway? To always turn the other cheek and keep your head down? No, I’ll never do that!
Our Wedding
Let’s go back to the very beginning. Our wedding. What a disaster. Oh, I’ll remember that Friday in April for the rest of my life. All brides look back on their wedding day with joy, but not me. That day will forever remain a black day, a sad day, a day when I cried a lot. Newlyweds usually cry because they are leaving one family to become a part of another, but I was crying because I was leaving my family to plunge into an unimaginable hell.
Allow me to set the scene for you.
My parents had leased a holiday home on the outskirts of Casablanca. It must have cost them a great deal of money. They had wanted to make a good impression on their future in-laws, whose urban origins intimidated them. People from Fez think of themselves as superior to all other Moroccans. They look down on the rest of Morocco as though their culture was the only one worth anything, behaving as though everyone else has to cook like them, dress like them, and speak like them. They have a natural propensity for intolerance and don’t make any efforts to conceal their contempt. It’s not that they’re nasty, just cynical. My parents were set against my marriage for several reasons. My mother told me that my father, who rarely spoke, had told her: “We don’t belong with them and they don’t belong with us!” He’d also said: “I’m not sure our daughter will be happy in that family; that her husband is older than she is might not be such a big deal, but his family scares me. I never know how to welcome them or how to act, they belong to a different world and we’re simply unpretentious folk. It makes me wonder whether we even believe in the same God! Well, there we have it. Tell her to do what she wants. Tell her I’m sad.”
I remember that conversation with my mother and how I couldn’t really disagree with her because I knew she had a point. But it was too late by then, I was in love. What did being in love mean to a girl who’d had to tackle so much misery so early on in her life? I thought of him as though I was living in a kind of modern fairy tale. I ignored all the defects I noticed. I thought he would live up to my expectations. But romantic love is in fact a fiction invented by novelists. I’d read several novels set in nineteenth-century Scotland. I would dream of those rainy landscapes, delicate characters, and those declarations of love that were imbued with poetry and promises. I thought of myself as one of the heroines of those novels and believed in all of it. The transition from fairy tale to reality proved difficult, very difficult indeed.
I remember how one day, before we’d gotten engaged, Foulane had waited for me in his apartment on Rue Lhomond. I had taken the train and on my arrival at the Saint-Lazare station I felt an incredible weight on my chest. For the first time in my life, I was frightened. I went into a café, ordered a cup of tea, and spent hours smoking and thinking, watching the film of my future life flash past my eyes. I had a certain knack for predicting how my future would turn out. Even though I was in love, I wasn’t under any illusions. I knew that his family wouldn’t miss an opportunity to remind me of my humble origins and how inadequate an addition I was to their family portrait. I knew that he wouldn’t stick up for me and that he shared their ideas. I could clearly see that I was about to make a mistake, but I stupidly told myself that I was fated to marry him. I had read many French novels and identified with petty bourgeois characters from the provinces, and like them, I convinced myself that I had an intense inner life.