“So . . . you finally got here.”
“You know who I am?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” she said. “You’re the other wife.”
SEVENTEEN
“I PRESUME YOU drink a bit,” Faiza said.
“A bit, yes,” I said.
“I drink a lot.”
She motioned for me to seat myself on a brown corduroy sofa. I was in a one-bedroom apartment of around eight hundred square feet. Concrete walls painted white. A bentwood rocking chair. Splatter-paint abstract canvases. An elderly rug. A few framed photographs of Samira at varying stages of life. An air conditioner that, though effective, emitted a low wheeze. A couple of old lamps that, like the rest of the decor, seemed around twenty years out of date. A balcony that overlooked the encroaching desert.
Seeing me take everything in, noting many empty wineglasses and brimming ashtrays and the aura of dustiness, she let out a serious smoker’s cough and said, “I didn’t invite you here, so I’m not going to apologize for this place. Except to say that I had a change of personal circumstances in April and had to find a new apartment in a hurry. Life, sometimes, is an ongoing series of letdowns. Especially when it comes to men, wouldn’t you agree?”
She began to cough wildly.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Of course not,” she said.
She was as thin as a stalk of celery, dressed in black linen pants and a black linen shirt, with around nine gold and copper bangles on her spindly wrists. Her hair—long, very straight—was still jet-black. But her skin was leathery, and her teeth were tobacco-stained.
She disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, returning with a chilled bottle of rosé and a second glass.
“It’s Moroccan, but good,” she said.
“Like most of the wines I’ve had here.”
“So Little Boy Paul married himself a much younger woman,” she said, lighting up another cigarette.
“I’m not that young.”
“But you are at least twenty years younger than me . . . which, in my book, makes you a kid. More to the point, you are his wife.”
“So are you.”
“Actually, the marriage only lasted about ten minutes . . . and then was annulled.”
“Annulled? Really?”
“You seem surprised.”
“I’d been told that you were still his wife.”
“Whoever told you that—and I have my suspicions—simply wanted to play head games with you. I am—definitely—Paul’s ex-wife.”
She splashed some wine in a glass and handed it to me. When I raised it she just nodded curtly.
“No need to get friendly,” she said. “Anyway, I have a class to teach—Conversational English—in around forty minutes. Though speaking conversational English with you might have its professional benefits, it honestly doesn’t please me being here with you.”
I apologized for showing up on her doorstep, unannounced, uninvited. “But I am genuinely worried about Paul.”
“Poor you for being so involved with the fool. Because that is what he is: a fool. And one who has to shoot himself in the foot with a Kalashnikov, pausing twice to reload.”
Faiza was suddenly hit with another horrendous coughing fit. When she brought it under control she used some wine to clear her throat, then said, “Well, they always told me smoking was a stupid habit. But one without which life might be even more intolerable. Not that you’ve probably ever smoked a cigarette in your life. I bet you’re one of those Americans who work out six days a week.”
“I know Paul came here to see you,” I said, refusing to take the bait.
“Correction: Paul came here to plead with me. To ask that I intervene with our daughter and get her to have contact with him. Of course I refused to do any such thing.”
I took another sip of wine, choosing my next words with care. “I can understand why you turned him away,” I said. “Please understand: until yesterday I didn’t know that you and Samira existed. Nevertheless, Paul has had a major breakdown and he has gone missing.”
“And perhaps this time the disappearance will be a permanent one. I can handle self-destruction. It’s a personal choice. Like my smoking forty cigarettes a day. The difference is that mine is self-directed. Paul is someone whose self-destructiveness ends up destroying everyone else in his immediate path. When I kicked him out last night I told him to do the world a favor and kill himself.”
“Your capacity for hate is impressive.”
“And who are you, Mother Teresa?”
“I am probably going to divorce Paul as soon as I get him back to the States. But first I am going to get him home. And away from Ben Hassan.”
“That fat fuck: he can be your best friend and your ultimate nightmare.”
“Are you still in contact with him?”
“You mean, considering that he might have killed my father and two brothers . . . not that I totally blame him for having done that.”
“They’re all dead?”
“Well, they are all planted in the earth now. So that should answer your question. Was Ben Hassan behind all this? That’s the great ongoing question.”
She splashed some more wine into our two glasses and continued.
“Not that I would blame Ben Hassan for having killed them. After he helped Paul escape his shotgun marriage to me—that’s the term you use in the States, isn’t it?—they destroyed his hands, his future as a painter. The police and the judiciary let my father and brothers off with a small cash payment. But Ben Hassan was never able to hold a paintbrush again.”
“Didn’t you feel guilty about that? According to the story Ben Hassan told me last night, you were pounding on Paul’s door, telling him you’d be killed if he didn’t marry you.”
She stabbed her cigarette into the ashtray.
“Do you have any idea whatsoever what it means to be a woman in this culture? Even though the situation has somewhat improved over the past thirty-five years, there was no possibility of negotiating with my family once they knew I was going to have a child. Did I deliberately fall pregnant by Paul? Put it this way: we were careless. And no, I wasn’t on the pill. And yes, it was my hope that Paul would marry me and get me out of Morocco and to the States. So yes, I was being completely mercenary. But Paul and I loved each other back then . . . for a while, anyway. I even told him: ‘Marry me, get me my green card, and once we’re in the States I’ll make my own way.’ But when he balked I made a fatal error. I told my father that I was pregnant. From that moment on we were, on a certain level, doomed. Because Papa could never do anything subtly or cleverly. He had to always bring out the heavy artillery. He had to get his way, and punish anyone who blocked him—which was poor Ben Hassan’s fate.”
“Did he eventually kill your father and brothers?”
“As I said before, that is the ongoing question. My father died in a car accident, driving alone between Casablanca and Marrakesh. According to the police report, the brakes of his Mercedes failed. They couldn’t establish if they had been tampered with or not, but it seems that someone had so significantly stripped back the brake pads that when a motorcycle swerved in front of him and my father tried to hit the brakes, the result was catastrophic. He lost control of the car. It flipped over three times and then ignited. The chassis was so badly burned that they couldn’t really establish if maliciousness had been behind it. Of course the driver of the motorcycle was nowhere to be found. The fact that it happened late at night on an otherwise empty road . . . it all seemed to me and many others to have been carefully planned. So carefully planned that the police could not hold anyone accountable, or even justify an investigation.
“Then around seven years later, my brother Abdullah was found hanged at his condo on the Costa del Sol. Abdullah had done very well in the wall-to-wall carpet and linoleum business. He’d married a very beautiful, very stupid woman quite late in life—he was over forty—and had two little girls whom he doted over whenever
he was at home, which wasn’t very often. He’d expanded his business into Spain, bought a petit bourgeois seaside condo, and was showing no signs of depression or any other signs of psychological instability. It was his mistress—a local bar girl—who found him. She was considered the prime suspect for a while. The thing was, Abdullah had grown almost as large as Ben Hassan, and ended up weighing at least three hundred pounds. So it was very unlikely that she could have strung him up herself. The fact that he seemed to have taken three too many sleeping pills that evening raised all sorts of suspicions. She was held along with her actual boyfriend, for many months under suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. But I was always convinced that the hand of Ben Hassan was behind it all.”
“Why didn’t you alert the authorities?”
“To what? To the fact that, fifteen years previously, my father had ordered his two sons to carry out an appalling act of violence on a man who, in the intervening years, had become, in his own ingratiatingly corrupt way, a sort of Mr. Fixit in Casa and Rabat . . . and who had so many connections in so many echelons of the establishment here? Not that anyone high up in government administration or the world of finance would ever admit to calling a sleaze like Ben Hassan a friend. He knew this too. It didn’t bother him. He had ‘connections.’ Tainted, blemished connections. But it kept him and whatever younger man he was sodomizing that month in a level of modest comfort . . . and yes, I am getting nasty. Talking too much. But after kicking our husband out of here last night, I found myself unable to sleep. As I had two classes to teach this morning, I popped a Dexedrine to keep myself up. I took another Dexedrine just fifteen minutes before you came, and the wine works wonders with its speedy properties. A sort of yin-yang effect.”
I put down my glass of wine, suddenly too buzzed from the alcohol and the desert afternoon, which the wheezing, consumptive air conditioner was almost keeping at bay.
“You didn’t tell me about your other brother,” I finally said.
“Driss? Even a bigger fool than Abdullah. Never married. Never succeeded at much. Worked for his brother running inventory in Casa. After Abdullah was ‘suicided’—because I know that is what happened—the man who bought up the company let Driss go. As there wasn’t much in the way of family money—what little Driss had inherited from our father he spent at the roulette table and on prostitutes—he ended up as a limousine driver for a company ferrying somewhat important people from the airport to one of Casablanca’s five-star hotels. Every summer he had a week off down in dreadful Agadir: the Moroccan package holiday resort. He went out swimming one evening, maybe fifty meters from the shoreline. A speedboat ran over him. Split his skull in two. Being a speedboat, it sped away. Not a trace of who was commandeering it, or even a glimpse of its registration. The thing is, Driss loved swimming at night—and it was his fifth night in Agadir, so I am pretty damn certain that someone had been watching him, figuring out his habits.”
A shrug. Another slug of wine. Another cigarette.
“I don’t think I like your silence,” she finally said. “It feels very fucking judgmental.”
“Your English is impressive,” I said.
“So is your sense of irony.”
“I am hardly being ironic. I am just trying to figure out your story.”
“What’s to figure out? I have never asked Ben Hassan directly if he was behind all that befell my family. Because he has been, on a certain level, a very good friend to me and my daughter. When Samira pushed me away over a decade ago—after I moved down here, but also as a result of a lot of built-up anguish—he acted as a surrogate parent for her in Casa, and also gradually brought her around to establishing some sort of détente with her mother, for which I will always be grateful. You know she got pregnant by a French businessman. But Ben Hassan negotiated with him on Samira’s behalf. He may have headed back to his wife and children, but he does give her three hundred euros a month . . .”
“Ben Hassan told me it was five hundred.”
“Maybe he pays Ben Hassan five and he gives her three. Who cares?”
“But that means Ben Hassan is pocketing twenty-four hundred euros a year.”
“Yes, Little Boy Paul did tell me you were an accountant. What was a highly rational, competent woman like yourself thinking when you hooked up with such a disaster zone?”
I met her gaze straight on.
“I was thinking about the sex—which was pretty spectacular. I was thinking about the sexiness of being with an actual artist—and one with real talent. I was thinking how wonderful it would be for our child to have an artist for a father.”
As I spoke these words I felt myself slipping into a haze, my boldness succumbing to fatigue. Perhaps it was the wine, or the absolute despair of the bitter, strange woman sitting opposite me, or my naive wish to connect with someone who once wanted everything with Paul and, like me, was betrayed by him. I took a deep steadying breath before continuing.
“With Paul I believed I could think about adventure and culture and freedom. Freedom from all the trappings of modern American life. But Paul wanted all those trappings—the nice home, the gym membership, the summers in Maine, good food, fine wine—even as he bemoaned our materialist culture. And he knew I would deliver all that to him, because I had what he lacked—which was a sense of responsibility. And a real belief in us. Our life, our future together. Of course, I also made that pathetic mistake of thinking I could change him. So, yes, you’re right. I hooked up with a disaster zone. Guilty on all charges. Despite all that, despite everything he’s done, I still don’t want to see Paul come to harm.”
She reached for what must have been her fifth cigarette.
“Do you want me to congratulate you on your directness, your openness?”
“I just want to know two things.”
“Go on.”
“Did you know about Ben Hassan talking Paul into taking out this loan for your daughter’s apartment?”
“What loan?”
“Ben Hassan told me that Philippe gave Samira one million dirhams for an apartment in Casablanca.”
“Oh, please. The Frenchie has been reasonable about giving her a degree of child support. But . . . one million dirhams? That is beyond absurd. Samira lives in a fifty-square-meter apartment that she rents for two thousand dirhams a month—which is quite a bargain for the Gauthier neighborhood of Casa. You know she is a professor at the university there. Literature. Her specialty is Romantic melancholy. How apt. She did get her doctorate in France. At Aix-en-Provence. Her thesis was even published. So yes, I am very proud of her. And I so love being a grandmother to her wonderful son. But the fanciful idea that her Frenchman gave her a million dirhams for an apartment . . .”
I felt myself getting hyperstressed, because I was beginning to figure out the actual game that Ben Hassan was playing. I said, “But Ben Hassan also told me that when Paul contacted him, begging that he put him back in touch with Samira, he informed Paul that a quick way back into her life was by giving her the matching one million dirhams for the apartment she was buying.”
“And Paul naturally bought into this?”
“I’m afraid so. Ben Hassan showed me the loan agreement he signed. He’s repaying one-point-six million on a one-million-dirham loan.”
“The first I’ve heard of it. If he had given that money to Samira—or went and bought an apartment for her . . . well, Samira and I are reasonably close now, so she would have told me. I mean, one million dirhams would buy her close to one hundred square meters in the Gauthier district. She’d be over the moon. So . . . it is clear that your husband allowed himself to be scammed.”
I picked up the glass of wine I had put aside. I took a long sip, trying to absorb what I just heard.
“So Paul going missing . . . ,” I said.
“That is largely due to you. I heard all about the secret vasectomy.”
“Paul told you that?”
“Hardly. It was Ben Hassan.”
“That bastard. An
d let me guess—he also called you last night or this morning, telling you I was on my way to Ouarzazate.”
“Indeed he did. I am sure he promised you that he wouldn’t phone me. Just as I am certain you regret now letting him in on that little betrayal that Paul perpetrated on you. Again I am dazzled by how a bright woman like you—”
“Yes, I was naive. Naive because I was also so hopeful. Never a good combination, apparently. Just as I now know that Ben Hassan has deceived Paul. Lending him money on the basis of giving it to your daughter, and then not passing it on to her. Isn’t that known as embezzlement?”
“That’s a matter of conjecture. Did you read the loan agreement? Did Paul? I tend to doubt it. Do you know what I now think—having heard about Ben Hassan’s newest vengeance game? Even though this is all speculation, I’d bet that after Samira gave birth to my grandson, Ben Hassan got in touch with Paul, informing him that he was a grandfather and that Samira desperately needed his help. He probably played up the fact that, having never answered any of her letters or emails over the years, Samira had written him off as a terrible man; a nonexistent father. But Ben Hassan told Paul that, if he would find her the money needed for her apartment, he would be able to reestablish his relationship with her and play a role in his grandson’s life—and that he would also right the wrong that he perpetrated on Ben Hassan all those years ago. Of course, Ben Hassan being Ben Hassan, he probably sent that email as a way of seeing if he could play on Paul’s guilt after all these years. Knowing my ‘friend’ as I do, I am certain he felt that the account would not be closed until he found a way of ensnaring Paul. What he couldn’t have known—until you told him last night—was that his email arrived right after Paul promised you a baby and had himself fixed in secret; an act that Paul knew, when revealed, would destroy everything between you. Ben Hassan’s email allowed Paul to think: here was his chance at making good on past wrongs; here was a chance to reconnect with the only child he would now ever have.
“So maybe that’s why Paul showed up on Samira’s doorstep two days ago, thoroughly expecting her to greet him as the man who finally redeemed himself in her eyes. Instead she rebuffed him. Which had him running back to Ben Hassan—who comforted him and put it into his head that maybe if he headed south to Ouarzazate, I would be able to help him find a way back to Samira.”
The Blue Hour Page 20