• Have medical experts declare him of unsound mind and thus have him placed under my tutelage.
• 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
Voilà, I’ve gotten it all out of my system, and unlike him, I kept it brief and to the point. Regardless, I know that you’ll believe his version of events rather than mine, because his work will outlive our miserable love story. After all, I’m just the country girl who entered his life and wrecked everything. He never made me happy and yet I still made many efforts to ensure his life was pleasant. I regret having turned a blind eye to many things. Seeing him now in his wheelchair with half his body paralyzed fills my heart with pity. Pity isn’t a wonderful sentiment; however, I have no wish to see him regain his health so he can start betraying me again. From now on I’ll take care of him, be his nurse, his mother, his wife, perhaps even his friend. I’ve put a stop to the divorce proceedings. I’m going to change my behavior and alter my tactics, which will surprise him and he’ll realize he cannot do without me. I’m going to love him like I did in our early days, I’m going to love him and keep him close. I’m going to rid myself of my nastier urges; I’ll give up on exacting my revenge, I’ll be good to him and put myself at his disposal. I’ll stop asking myself whether I love him or not because I know he’s utterly incapable of love, or of giving and receiving. I’m not a monster, even though he’s depicted me as a harbinger of death and disease.
My first gesture will be to bring him some broth, and then I’ll give him a nice long massage just like his beautiful Imane used to do. She’s now living just a few miles away from here. One day around the beginning of August I went to see her and brought her a present, a pretty dress that I haven’t worn in a long time, and invited myself over to the tiny apartment in a poor neighborhood that she shares with her mother and brother. I was blunt with her and said: “I’m going to look after my husband myself, he needs me. I want him to get better so that he’ll get back to his paintings thanks to me, because I’m his wife. He’s a great artist, and so I’m asking you not to look after him anymore, I can see that this bothers him and it’s affected his blood pressure, which is dangerous. I know I’m asking you for a favor, so I’m going to offer you something in exchange: I’ll get your brother a visa so he can go to Spain and I’ll keep paying you until you leave for Belgium. It can all be easily arranged, you can teach me how to give him his injections and to help him with his physical therapy. You’ll also need to appease him and tell him that you can’t come anymore because you’re going to get married and your fiancé is on his way to take care of all the arrangements. I’ll handle all the paperwork and I don’t think it’ll be complicated because your situation falls under the “right to family reunification” category. As for your brother, I’m sure it’ll be easy, I know the Spanish consul well and Javier never says no to me. He’s a good friend of my husband’s too.”
Imane was initially shocked by my visit and my proposal, but she had a good heart and thought it was normal for a wife to want to look after her sick husband. She told me she thought of Foulane as an uncle or father, that she’d just been doing her job, and that she loved her fiancé. I pretended to agree with her and stuck to practical questions. She showed me how to give him his injections, taught me how to massage him and revitalize his muscles. It was a very informative afternoon. She gave me her brother Aziz’s passport and handed over her visa application to live in Belgium, which had been turned down. We hugged and I left, feeling proud of myself.