The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun Page A

always said that she’d been “out with the girls!” She spent time with a group of embittered, divorced women who’d embraced feminism late in life, who met at the house of a witch whose ugliness betrayed her dark soul. She was short, chubby, had a mane of hair that made her look like a lioness, sharp beady eyes, and a narrow forehead that, according to a physiognomist, was a bad omen. She called herself Lalla, claiming that her mother had been one of Hassan II’s concubines. All Moroccan princesses used the honorificof “Lalla” before their names. She talked a lot of nonsense, claimed that she’d once been a hippie who’d slept with celebrities, musicians, singers, and even a famous actor, whose photo she carried with her, saying it had been taken outside a villa in Los Angeles even though the décor clearly indicated it had been taken in the Casbah of Zagora. She said she’d spent some time in India under the tutelage of a guru who’d opened her eyes to the mysteries of the soul; thanks to him, she’d discovered the source of all energies, both positive and negative. She would claim that the waves of energy we send out are slow to reach their destination, adding that she’d only just received those emitted by her mother who’d been buried ten years earlier. In a nutshell, she played the part of a mystic with complicated words whose exact meaning eluded her, but which she voiced confidently enough to influence minds that were ready to follow her, people who would obey her deliriums and submit to her manipulations. She basically rehashed old feminist discourses from the 1960s and spliced them with her own unique brand of Eastern-mystical-mythological hocus-pocus, serving it up with a great deal of mass-market, Made in China incense fumes that she purchased in the drugstores of the El Maârif neighborhood in Casablanca. She would pretend that her Indian guru had sent her herbs that he’d picked from his own garden and that he’d laid to dry in his meditation room. She would feed them names of people she’d picked out from the pirated DVDs of Bollywood films that were sold close to the Joutia vegetable market on Derb Ghallef.
    Lalla had a sense of theatrics and a knack for showmanship. Everything about her was an illusion or a trick, but she still pulled it off, despite the obvious stupidity and absurdity of the things she said. The bigger the lie, the less her entourage of groupies suspected her of deceiving them. In her, those women had finally found a soul mate who understood them and who knew how to find the right words to speak to them and show them the way. Lalla had married a cousin of hers who’d inherited a great deal of money. Her cousin was gayand their marriage had been a means for him to keep up appearances, and he’d paid dearly for that. After a year of so-called married life, she’d separated from him after having extracted a few million dirhams from him, as well as the villa where they’d lived. Without any money worries, she’d had enough time and funds to surround herself with a retinue in order to make herself feel important. She claimed that she translated books for American publishing houses, but she’d never been able to show anyone so much as a single book that bore her name on the cover. Her father, who’d remarried after the death of his first wife, lived far away from her and hardly ever saw her. Lalla had tried to lure her stepmother into her circle, but the latter had quickly seen through her bluff and told her a few home truths. A few days later, Lalla had brought her father some compromising photos of his new wife that she’d digitally altered on her computer. She’d wanted to damage her stepmother’s standing, but the latter had proved stronger and smarter, and she’d disproved the hoax. After Lalla’s pathetic plot had failed, she’d been ostracized by her family and forbidden to set foot in her father’s house. Nevertheless, Lalla had told her “girls” that