The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris

by Leila Marouane

  "And you haven't even purified your apartment. That apartment where you live must be full of filth and dust …"

  "Yes, my mother."

  "You should have sacrificed a chicken at least, and coated the corners of the rooms with henna, and we should have gotten together around a couscous and left the candles burning until morning. None of that was done. I should have taken care of it. But I don't even know where you live. And you moved out, leaving me with the fait accompli. Is that true or not?"

  "It's true, my mother."

  "And how are you breaking the fast? With soups from the supermarket? I even wonder if you're fasting, my son …"

  "What an idea, my mother …"

  "It was just an idea, my son. I'll go now but try to get here before the others …" Ihung up, repressing a burp with an acid taste. Why had I forgotten about Ramadan? My sister had called me on my cell phone, she was so distressed by my mother's crying and her health, so she should have reminded me, she's the pious one, the blessed among her sisters, the one whose opinion I had asked for regarding the fugitive. In any event, if I had been forewarned, I would have stopped drinking alcohol and I would have performed my ablutions in time. At least one week before the start of the fast. What is the point of purifying your body and your mind? whispered the voice into my left ear. Because, henceforth and forever, you will no longer need to fast. Not even out of solidarity. Or respect for anyone at all. A free man, I thought jubilantly as I left the bed and went into the living room. I swallowed a shot of whisky, to help me get back to sleep that much easier, and I went back into the bedroom. After I'd unplugged the land line and switched off the cell phone, I burrowed under the comforter.

  When I woke up, it was nearly eight o'clock in the evening. My mother, my brother, his fiancée and the family of his fiancée, my sister and her husband, the entire tribe, must have been in the midst of their Ramadanesque prayers, there in the 11th arrondissement.

  And your mother must be weeping and cursing you, hissed the voice in my right ear. Too bad, I said. I took a shower and drank a coffee. I got dressed and called the girl from the night before, Samia, Safia, Nadia, whom I cordially invited to dinner. She couldn't, her husband had just returned from his business trip, she explained apologetically. I switched on my computer and printed out my notes. Enough to throw together a chapter, I thought, as I reread them. After which I filed them under "Novel," along with the little bits of paper that contained dates, names collected here and there, plenty of material with which to structure and build my tale, I thought gladly as I stared at the rustling foliage. Then I switched off the machine and walked around in circles, not knowing how to rid myself of the anxiety that was slowly and ineluctably constricting my thorax. Go find them at the mosque, hissed the voice into my right ear. Enough! Enough! I wailed. I swallowed a big glassful of whisky and got back into bed, determined to see my psychiatrist no later than the very next day and talk to him about all this hissing and whispering which, to this day, when I am not careful, still irritates my ears.

  The sun had risen, he said, when I closed the door of my apartment. I collapsed in the armchair and my gaze immediately landed on the sticky notes where I had written Break Fast At Mother's. Set Alarm. Unplug Telephone.

  Then I thought about the girl I had just left. Tall, a bit androgynous, as russet as an autumn leaf, she had admired my cock, she had weighed it and touched it, stroked it and caressed it. On the sofa bed in the guest room at the painter's—the one who collects boxer shorts, and who was celebrating her birthday in splendor, and who'd hardly said hello, Ciao, Mo-a-med, so glad you could come, and she had scarcely glanced at my bottle of champagne and bouquet of roses, which she had thrust into the arms of a guest who was passing by.

  In short, she greeted me as if nothing had ever happened two weeks earlier, in these very premises where she had aspired to Sufism and where, this evening, she only had eyes for this handsome Mexican who was hot on her heels all evening, and who looked like neither prophet nor poet, I noted bitterly.

  If walls could speak, I thought fretfully; then Driss, turning for a few moments from a tall, flamboyant mulatto, said he wanted to introduce me to "an old acquaintance," as he called her.

  Fatima Kosra, but her friends call her Fatie, a peerless lawyer … My cousin Mohamed Ben Mokhtar, but his friends call him Momo, one of the most sought-after financiers in all the realm … Very happy. Delighted. Thus, my expensive Ralph Lauren boxer shorts ended up in other hands, those of a real redhead, born in the Kasbah in Algiers; she owed her freckles and her pale skin to her Ottoman ancestors, she told me as she caressed me, refusing however to go any further, explaining that she did not want to disturb the baby. You understand? Because she was pregnant, she said while I ejaculated into her hand. Two months. If it was a boy, she would call him Yacine, like Kateb, and if it was a girl, Nedjma, like the famous novel by Kateb, and she would not waste her time afflicting her child with a white name, unlike Loubna Minbar, who may have had her reasons, among others to thumb her nose at that guy who, before a whole crowd of people, had shouted that she was not even Algerian, and had called her Madame Alas, then branded her an alcoholic, a bitch, in other words, a renegade, a traitoress … "It's an obsession," I said. "Would you like it if someone called you Monsieur Alas? Or Lush? Or Loon?"

  "No," I shuddered. "The Barbarians are cutting our throats, raping us, disemboweling us. Civilized people—my apologies to those who don't deserve it—are humiliating us, denigrating us, driving us up the wall. Like the men in my country. And beyond my country. Do you remember that guy, a so-called civilized man, who'd been raised on the principles of the Republic, and who said, referring to Ségolène Royal, This is about politics, not a beauty contest. Proof that stupidity is universal," she added. Poor Olympe de Gouges and her Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Then, when we heard that the last of the painter's guests were leaving, she told me one of the stories making the rounds of the patios in the Kasbah. It was the story of a woman whose husband was absent for two whole years. This was in the days when people rode to Mecca on camels. When he came back, the husband saw that his wife was with child. What is the meaning of this, woman? asked the husband. The wife replied that the child was truly his, may Allah be her witness, conceived two years earlier, but that it had fallen asleep to await the father's return. The man went off to see the imam. The imam confirmed what the wife had said, and all's well that ends well. This story had always fascinated her, she told me. As a lawyer in Algiers she used to refer to it to plead the case of women who were accused of adultery. Since the birth of Islam, I then said to her, to the present day, we have invented stories like this to avoid the worst. Was she familiar with the book entitled The Ruses of Women, by a certain Abd al-Rahîm alHawrâni? No, she replied, somewhat surprised. Well, I continued, give or take a few details, you can read the same story in that book, and many others that have saved lives and marriages. "So have you read The Sultan of Saint-Germain?" she asked. "No," I replied. "But I keep hearing about it wherever I go."

  "The main character is forever quoting the author you just mentioned. What's his name again? Abd al-Rahîm? As well as a certain al-Souyoûti. And other Arab theologians and poets …"

  "And your husband?" I said anxiously, fearing that a colossus might suddenly appear out of nowhere to smash my face in over almost nothing. "I'm not married," she said. "Bastard," I said, without thinking. "What do you care!" she said with a laugh. "All the same," I said. "I'm the one who refused to get married."

  "Oh, really?" I said, looking at my sleeping cock, which was enormous, it's true, but absolutely immaculate, unburdened of its hair. "You know, at my age, you don't go getting yourself weighed down with a husband. And you know, when I was in Algiers, my worst fear was that I'd get pregnant. It wasn't easy to get the pill, you had to know a doctor or a pharmacist. Or borrow a marriage certificate discreet as could be to get the pill from the mother-and-childcare dispensary, and they'd only hand out one box per woman per month. I
n short, it was a major hassle to fuck in peace," she added. "So you see, a pregnancy in the heart of the Kasbah—my mother would have buried me alive!" And then one day, so it happened, she was pregnant. She had just passed her bar exam. Her mother, who thus far had been so proud of her daughter's untarnished career, trusted her and gave her permission to go away on vacation when she asked, to a friend's place in Oran. In actual fact, the friend in question was waiting at the other end of town. "She'd organized the whole thing—the doctor, a real fake marriage certificate, and she'd managed to extort money from the guy who'd gotten me pregnant and who, naturally, had done a bunk. But the day of the operation we found out that the doctor was in prison for practicing illegal abortions. I thought I'd never get out of this nightmare in one piece," she sighed. "Time was passing and my tummy was getting rounder before my very eyes, when we finally managed to get the address of a backstreet abortionist. I'll spare you the horror of it—hemorrhaging, the consequences …"

  Four years later, in the midst of all the upheaval, at a time when you had to run for your life, she left Algiers. On the plane she ran into a childhood friend. He lived in some sort of hotel in the 18th arrondissement, where he was the manager. At his request—what better could she ask for?—she moved in with him, and their relation ended up in marriage, to the delight of her mother and brothers. And to her own. Religious ceremony, humongous couscous, civil ceremony beneath the tricolor flag, it was your regular LibertyEquality-Fraternity. Honeymoon by the sea in Vendée. A fairy tale, she added. "But Rachid always found some pretext to get out of the appointments at the prefecture, where he was obliged to be present for me to get my paperwork in order. The actual fact of the matter was that he was waiting to make sure I was really pregnant. All my eggs were blighted, and I'd expel them as soon they were conceived. Five years later, despite all my efforts, no children." Then, when she was going through yet another miscarriage, her husband began to change. The modern man she'd met on the plane, who liked his muscadet and his seafood, who took her to the Basque country where she could lie on the beach topless, who made love to her beneath a tree in the forest of Fontainebleau, was now letting his beard grow, was welcoming pilgrims at the hotel, had transformed the bar into a mosque, replaced the furniture with carpets, painted the walls green, the same green you see in all the mosques, and he had hung suras and other images from the Kaâba and Medina here and there on the wall. "I was in really bad shape and he wanted to put me on a plane and send me back to Algeria. Eventually I ran away.

  We got divorced and I never saw him again. Anyway, it's a long story." And then, she continued, she moved in with a girlfriend, the very woman who had called her daughter Pauline, whom she had met seven years earlier in the Barbès hammam. "It was Sunday. I had just had my umpteenth miscarriage and I decided to purify myself and drown the nostalgia for my work and my friends and the family I'd left behind that was eating away at me. In the vapors of the steam room I met Loubna Minbar. She wasn't very talkative, though I have to admit I didn't let her get a word in edgewise; she listened to me and nodded and from time to time she stared at my right foot, the crippled one. You see, I'm missing a toe," she told me, removing her shoe. "In short, I had a lot on my plate—my husband, my life in Paris, living as a semi-clandestine, and all the reasons I left Algiers." Fear, the arbitrary nature of things, blood, she had said. Unemphatically, without pathos. "After that, we stayed in touch. I often went to visit her in her apartment on the rue des Martyrs, near Abbesses. Sometimes she'd organize a dinner where her old girlfriends from Algiers would come by, and male friends too, and that's how I met Jamo, Hadda, and even Samira, the little amnesiac." And when she separated from Rachid, her novelist friend offered to help her out. At her place she met a Norwegian, a widower in his sixties who was childless and had no intention of having any children. He was the correspondent for a weekly paperin Oslo, and he lived in a dream apartment, sixteen hundred square feet, rue Pigalle. His neighbors were a famous actor and his wife, who were in the middle of a divorce, and their conjugal strife spilled over onto the landing, as they squabbled over a worn sofa, or a clock that wasn't worth a penny. Such was the atmosphere in which the Norwegian asked her to marry him. They hadn't even known each other a month. "I can't say I was dying of love for him," she said. "He was onthe ugly side, he smelled like an old goat, but my papers still hadn't come through, I was fed up with coming and going to the prefecture, fed up with Bureau 8 where they treated us like lice. So I accepted his proposal." They were married at the Norwegian embassy and, very quickly, she was granted the nationality. And in no time at all she had a French residence permit valid for ten years. It wasn't issued by Bureau 8 but by another office for high-end immigrants—smiles and bowing and scraping were the order of the day. Whatever. A last she could move around however she liked, pound the Parisian pavements, get her fill of the cafés and stores, go out at night, and take the metro without fear of being taken away and sent home on a free ticket without so much as a farewell or a suitcase or a present, like some piece of scum.

  Of course her mother and brothers knew nothing about her new marriage, something they would have condemned out of hand. "As time went by," she said, "I began to appreciate my husband, almost love him. I have to admit he treated me like a gazelle. We went to restaurants, to the theatre, we entertained politicians and journalists and humanitarians—they came to taste the ‘cuscus prepared by his vife who vas russet as an autumn leaf, but a real Algerian,' bragged the Norwegian." In actual fact, she smiled, as her mother had never taught her so much as how to boil an egg, the couscous in question had been delivered by "Allô-Couscous." Everything was hunky-dory, and her kind-hearted new husband, without grumbling, agreed to support her for the time it would take to validate her degrees. But no sooner had he seemed perfectly contented with the dormancy of her libido—temporary, she assured him, a dormancy she attributed to a nervous breakdown but, to be honest, she said again, she found him repugnant—than he suddenly got it in his head that he wanted children. "Just one, he begged. When I told him that it could wait, he countered that he was getting old, that I wasn't all that young myself, and that he could not bear the idea of dying without having fulfilled his desire to be a father. He was the son and grandson of an only child, and after him there would be no more Søren Fosnes Hansens. Finished. No more. Dustbin of history. So I told him the truth. That all my ova were blighted, that it was one of the reasons for my divorce …

  Two weeks later he took off with a young thing who gave birth to his son before our divorce was even finalized." The alimony was ridiculous, hardly enough to keep her in cigarettes; the apartment the Norwegian had left behind was exorbitant, so she moved back into the two-room apartment with Louba Minbar, who in those days was writing The Time of Punishment. "As she was an insomniac, she gave me her bedroom. For over three months all I did was eat and sleep, and I only went out to buy cigarettes or potato chips. I watched television ad nauseum, and waited for God knows what. A miracle. Or death. Then my savings ran out, and I shook off my lethargy and began to look for a job. I did all the little odd jobs you can think of—nanny, cleaning lady, checkout clerk, market vendor." Until the lawyer, she continued, who'd dealt with her two divorces,wrote to her one fine day. He needed an assistant. He worked with Saudi companies and he was interested in her background. She couldn't believe her eyes; she read the letter ten times. Then she took over the novelist's apartment—her friend had moved away without leaving a forwarding address. Because, she added, when it's all over, she moves on. "When it's all over?" Sidestepping my question, she said, "Once I'd been hired and the trial period was over, the lawyer screwed me, of course, justonce, the guy was okay, and he's still pleased with my work and I'm pleased with the job." In the meantime, bolstered by her financial independence, crying now and again whenever she saw a commercial for Evian, avoiding parks with sandboxes, struggling against the nostalgia for something—maternity—she would never know, she took on more lovers, with the goal, however unlikel
y, of finding Mr. Right.

  Because, two thousand kilometers from there, her mother had not stopped harassing her by phone, incriminating her, telling her to get married and put an end to her life as a "divorcee," that all her cousins were mothers and some of them were already mothers-in-law, almost grandmothers. "‘You need to remarry,' she would weep. ‘Never mind if he's not Algerian, so long as he's a Muslim. And if he isn't a Muslim, it's no big deal, you'll convert him. And if he doesn't want to convert, never mind, my girl, but just be sure to name the children properly, you'll bring them up on the right path, you'll celebrate your sons' circumcisions in the proper way, you'll watch over your daughters' honor. Allah will look after His own.' Then, last year, at the end of the summer, my mother died. I went to her funeral with a terrible feeling not of grief, but something else. It was more than a feeling, it was a sensation of lightness that I had never known, that I had never thought I could attain, as if I were sprouting wings, as if by burying my mother I was being unburdened of some sort of secular cope, and at last I could escape, a woman without chains, without master, the woman I have become …" Just after she came back from Algiers, a lawyer recently hired by her boss, younger than herself, fell in love with her. And it was mutual. Ten months later, no more period. It was menopause, she thought. But her doctor ordered a pregnancy test. Po-si-tive. It took hours for the truth to sink in, days before she actually realized what was happening. "And there we are," she exulted, caressing her stomach. "And Iam doing everything I can to make sure my baby doesn't let go. That's why I don't want to be penetrated. You understand? Even though—and this you can believe, with the rush of hormones and all the rest, any pregnant woman will tell you as much—it's not that I don't feel like it."

  "And the father?"

  "Dismissed," she said, with a glow of pride. "Well, he's the one who broke it off; he was shocked that I refused to live with him. No matter how I explained that I loved the idea of being single and pregnant, that I was living out a sort of fantasy, that we could wait until after the birth to get married, nothing doing. He called me a crazy old woman and broke it off. Having said that," she continued, "all the dreams I have now are about pregnancy and they're all mixed up with my past. I'm on the rue Didouche-Mourad, the longest one in Algiers, the one that goes from the Grand-Poste to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Do you know Algiers at all? Anyway, there are a lot of people in the street, and I am wandering around with nowhere special to go and suddenly I see how incredibly huge my belly is. For a moment I think I haven't digested the last five meals I've eaten, and then I have to face the truth: I'm pregnant, and it's visible. I'm pregnant and my mother will bury me alive. Then without leaving the dream I realize I'm in Paris, and I have an official status known as ‘lone parent,' and no one at work is the least bit bothered, except the genitor himself, who has just resigned. And maybe you …"