The Bridges of Constantine (18 page)

I abbreviated my suffering with a few words. ‘I’m tired,’ I said, ‘really tired. Why didn’t you call before?’

As if you were a doctor writing a prescription, or a sheikh who’s been asked to write an amulet or magic spell, you said, ‘I’ll write to you. I swear I’ll write soon. You have to forgive me. You don’t know how annoying and difficult life is here. You never have a moment to yourself in this city. Even talking on the phone is a detective story.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing. I go from one house to another, from one invitation to another. I don’t even wander round the city on foot. I’ve just seen it from a car.’ As if you’d remembered something important you added, ‘You know what? You’re right. The most beautiful thing in Constantine is its bridges. I remembered you as I went over them.’

At that moment I wanted to ask you if you loved me, but stupidly I asked, ‘Do you love them?’

After a brief silence, as if I’d put a question that merited some thought, you answered, ‘Perhaps I’ve started to love them.’

‘Thank you.’

You laughed, and to end the conversation you said, ‘You idiot! You’ll never change.’

‘You open your window to look outside. You open your eyes to look inwards. Looking is only the scaling of the wall separating you from freedom,’ wrote Malek Haddad.

That morning I lit an early cigarette, which wasn’t my habit. I sat on the balcony with a cup of coffee contemplating the Seine flowing slowly beneath Pont Mirabeau. Its beautiful summer blue annoyed me that morning, for no reason. It suddenly reminded me of blue eyes, which I didn’t like. Perhaps its not being a river in Constantine made me hostile. I stood up without finishing my cigarette. I was suddenly in a hurry.

So be it. Forgive me, river of civilisation. Forgive me, bridge of history. Forgive me, Apollinaire, my friend. I’m going to paint a different bridge this time, too.

I was bursting with you and your voice coming from over there to rouse that city within me. I hadn’t picked up a brush for three months. All the conflicting emotions and sensations I had experienced before and after you left had built up into an internal time bomb, in one way or another about to explode.

I had to paint to relax at last.

I painted with my whole hand, with all my fingers, with the hand that was there and with the one that was missing. I painted with all my turmoil and contradiction, with my reason, my memory and my oblivion, so as not to die – that summer in a city empty except for tourists and pigeons – a despairing death.

That morning I began to paint a new bridge, the viaduct of Sidi Rachid.

When I started, I didn’t anticipate that I was embarking on my strangest ever experience of painting. It would be the beginning of ten other paintings, done in six weeks without a break except for a few snatched hours of sleep. Even then, I would mostly wake up seized with a crazed desire to paint.

The colours suddenly acquired the tones of my memory, and became an unstoppable flow. No sooner had I finished one painting than another was conceived. No sooner had I finished with one neighbourhood than another awoke. I had barely finished one bridge when another would rise inside.

I wanted to satisfy Constantine, stone by stone, bridge by bridge, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, as a lover satisfies the body of a woman no longer his. I went over her, backwards and forwards, with my brush, as if with my lips. I kissed her soil, her stones, her trees and her valleys. I spread my desire over her in coloured kisses. I splashed her with longing and love till the sweat flowed.

I was happy when my shirt stuck to me after hours being fused to her. Sweat is the body’s tears. When we make love, like when we paint, we don’t make our bodies cry for any old woman, or for any old painting. The body chooses for whom to sweat.

I was happy that Constantine should be the painting for which my body wept.

In that last month of summer, I was still waiting for a letter from you. It would restore part of the strength and enthusiasm I had lost in the two months you had been away. A letter from Ziyad took me by surprise.

His letters from Beirut always amazed me, even before I opened them. Each time I asked myself how it had managed to arrive. Under which collapsed roof in which camp or at which front had he written it? Which postbox had he mailed it from, and how many postmen had handled it before it reached my mailbox here in the sixteenth
arrondissement
?

I always treated them with particular love. They reminded me of the war of liberation, when letters to our families would be smuggled under clothes. Many letters didn’t arrive, but died with their writers. Many letters arrived too late. Stories good enough for novels.

Ziyad would write for no particular reason. Long letters at times, short at others, which he called ‘life notices’. I laughed at the name. He just meant he was telling me he was still alive. Then I became frightened at his long silences and his letters’ stopping. To me this meant the chance of another kind of notice.

In Ziyad’s latest letter he wanted to let me know he would be in Paris at the beginning of September. He was expecting a quick reply from me to make sure I would be there. His letter surprised, delighted and threw me.

My thoughts turned to you and I said, ‘This man has a charmed life. I just mentioned him to you and here he is.’ Then I wondered whether you had read his poems, and whether you had liked them. What would your reaction be if I told you he was coming to Paris? After all, you had feared he was dead and expressed interest in his story.

Summer was gradually receding, and I was gradually restoring my equilibrium.

The paintings had saved me from a breakdown. I had to paint them to get away from the jolts of madness you had caused.

I had lost a lot of weight. But that didn’t matter to me, or perhaps at the time I hadn’t noticed. I only looked at the paintings and forgot to look at myself in the mirror. I believed that the weight I lost I would gain in eternal glory. For this reason I found it gratifying to contemplate the haemorrhaging of my madness hanging before me – eleven paintings, too many for the walls of my flat.

Perhaps I was also attached to them because I knew as I added the final brushstroke that a few months might pass before I once again had a desire to paint. In one go I had emptied my memory. I relaxed.

September was approaching and I was happy, or in a state anticipating happiness. You would return at last. I awaited autumn as I never had before. Winter clothes in shop windows and school supplies filling stationers’ shelves announced your return. The wind, the orange sky, the changeable weather all carried your suitcases. You were coming back. With autumnal gales, reddening leaves and pencil cases. You were coming back. With children returning to school, with traffic, strikes and Paris’s return to its bustle. With vague sadness, with rain. With the onset of winter, with the ending of insanity. You would come back to me, my winter coat, my confidence for a tired life, my firewood for frozen nights.

Was I dreaming? How could I forget that wonderful remark of André Gide: ‘Don’t prepare your joys!’ How could I forget such advice?

In reality, you were a tempest of a woman who came and went in storm and destruction. You were another’s overcoat and my cold. You were the firewood that burned me instead of keeping me warm. You were you.

I waited for September then, for your return so we could finally say the absolute truth. What exactly did you want from me? Who would I be for you? What would we call our story?

I was wrong again. It wasn’t time for questions and answers. It was time for a different lunacy. I was waiting for security, and you came. One tempest colliding with another called Ziyad.

And then there were hurricanes.

Ziyad hadn’t changed since the last time I’d seen him, in Paris five years before. Perhaps he had filled out a little, become a little more masculine compared with the tall, slim young man with fewer worries who had first visited my office in Algeria in 1972.

His hair was still a polite mess. His shirt, tieless and unbuttoned at the collar, was still that of a rebel. His distinctive voice still had the same warmth and sadness. It made one imagine he was reciting poetry even when saying mundane things. He seemed like a poet who had lost his way and had found himself where he was by mistake.

In every city that I met him, I felt he had yet to reach his final destination. He was always on the point of departure. Even when sitting on a chair, he seemed to be sitting on a suitcase. He was never relaxed where he was, as though the cities he lived in were stations where he was waiting for a train whose time of arrival was unknown.

He was as I had left him, surrounded by his few things and laden with memories, wearing the same pair of jeans, as though they were his other identity.

Ziyad resembled the cities he passed through. There was something of Gaza, Amman, Beirut and Moscow about him, of Algiers and Athens. He resembled all those he had loved, and had something of Pushkin, Al-Sayyab, Hallaj, Mishima, Ghassan Kanafani, Lorca and Theodorakis.

Because I often shared Ziyad’s memories, it meant that I loved everything and everyone he loved without realising.

I needed him those days. When I welcomed him, I realised that I had missed him all those years without knowing it, that I had never met someone else to call a friend.

Time and geography had taken him far away. But our old convictions kept us close. That’s why he had not faded from my heart or lost my respect over all those years. Wasn’t that a rare thing?

Ziyad arrived, and the apartment that for two months had been shut to others – even Catherine – came to life. He filled it with his presence, his stuff and his mess, and his raucous laugh sometimes. His vaguely furtive presence was a constant. I almost thanked him simply for opening the windows and taking one of the rooms, perhaps the whole house, even.

We spontaneously reverted to the routine of his first visit to me in Paris five years before. We went to virtually the same restaurants. We sat and talked about virtually the same subjects, for nothing had changed. Not one Arab regime that Ziyad was counting on falling since I met him had fallen. No political earthquake here or there had changed the nation’s map.

Only Lebanon had become a homeland for earthquakes and shifting sands. But who would be swallowed up in the end? That outcome we tried variously to predict. The discussion would always flow into the question of Palestine: factional splits, battles between partisans in Lebanon, assassinations and their toll of Palestinian figures abroad.

Ziyad usually ended up cursing the regimes that acquired glory with Palestinian blood under euphemisms like rejectionism, steadfastness or confrontation. In his fury he would describe them using the full gamut of crude oriental epithets. I would laugh when I heard one of them for the first time.

I also discovered that all revolutionaries have their own special vocabulary, refined by their revolution and life. Nostalgically, I would recollect other words from another time and revolution.

Perhaps that week was the most beautiful time I spent with Ziyad. For several years afterwards I tried to remember no other so as not to feel sad about all I experienced after, rightly or wrongly. All the pain I went through, the jealousy and shocks after putting the pair of them together face to face without any introductions or special explanations.

I just said to him, ‘We’re going to have lunch tomorrow with a writer friend of mine. I really should introduce her to you.’

He didn’t seem especially interested in what I was saying. He started reading the newspaper again but added, in his particular style, ‘I hate women when they try to have literature instead of having something else. I do hope your friend isn’t a spinster, or menopausal. I have no patience for such types!’

I didn’t answer. I delved deep in his thoughts and smiled.

On the phone, I told you, ‘Come and have lunch tomorrow in the usual place. I’ll bring you a surprise you won’t believe.’

You said, ‘It’s a painting, isn’t it?’

After some hesitation I replied, ‘No, it’s a poet!’

So you two met.

I could say on this occasion, too, that those who say mountains never meet are wrong. Those who build bridges between them, so they might greet each other without stooping or diminishing their pride, know nothing of the laws of nature. Mountains meet in massive earthquakes. And even then they don’t shake hands, but turn into dust.

So you two met. You were both volcanoes. It’s hardly surprising that I was the victim this time, too.

I still remember that day. You arrived a little late. Ziyad and I had ordered a drink while waiting. You came in. Ziyad was talking about something when he suddenly went quiet. His eyes lit on you as you came through the door. I turned and saw you coming over in a green dress; elegant, seductive, as you’d never been before. Ziyad stood up to greet you as you approached. In my bewilderment I remained seated. It was obvious he hadn’t expected you to be like that. There you were at last.

I felt that something was pinning me to my seat, as though the exhaustion of the past weeks, the agony since you had left, suddenly hit me and stopped my legs working.

There you were at last. Was it really you?