The Bridges of Constantine (13 page)

I felt a mix of happiness and shame listening to him tell me in his beloved Constantine accent, whose tones hadn’t faded at all, how much he loved that deadly city. My shame was compounded by all that Roger had done to help me over the years since I had come to settle in Paris. He had friends and connections that could (without my asking) make many of the problems faced by someone in my situation much easier.

Once I asked him, ‘Why haven’t you gone back to visit Constantine? I don’t understand what you’re afraid of. People still know your family in the neighbourhood and remember them fondly.’

I remember he then said, ‘It’s not that I’m afraid that people won’t know me, but that I won’t know the city, its alleys and a house that hasn’t been mine for decades.’ He continued, ‘Let me imagine that that tree is still there bearing figs every year. That that window still looks out on the people I loved. That the narrow alley still leads to places I knew. You know, the hardest thing is for memory to confront a reality that contradicts it.’ There was the glint of a tear in his eye that day. Somewhat playfully, he added, ‘If I should change my mind, I’ll go back with you. I’m afraid to confront my memory alone.’

His words came back to me that day, even though he never mentioned the subject to me again. Did he really manage to deceive his memory? What if he was right? We would have to preserve the original look and feel of our memories and avoid confronting them with reality, which would cause everything inside us to shatter like glass. What matters in such cases is to save memory.

I was convinced by the reasoning. Catherine’s phone call had indirectly saved me from making a stupid mistake. The painting would have no historical value if I added or removed something. It would become the rootless painting of a falsified memory. Would it matter then if it was more beautiful?

I looked at the palette of colours in my hand. I still felt I had to use them and the paintbrush that, like me, was nervously awaiting the decisive moment of creation. A simple and logical solution suddenly occurred to me. I replaced the painting on the easel with a new blank canvas. Without thinking, I started painting another bridge over another valley under another sky, adding houses and people.

This time, I paused over all the details of the picture, studying every aspect of them as though in close-up. I surprised myself by rushing to start with these details, as though the bridge no longer concerned me in the end as much as the stones and rocks it stood upon, the plants scattered beneath in the dampness, or dankness, of the depths and the secret paths worn by feet between its rock. Since the days of Maxentius, the old bridge had been oblivious to all this, in its towering nobility unable to see what was happening 700 metres below.

Isn’t circumventing bridges the first and timeless goal of mankind that is born between troughs and peaks? This random idea stunned me, and these details stunned me more. They were forcing themselves upon me that day, but hadn’t caught my attention a quarter of a century earlier, when I first painted that picture. Was that because in my initial effort I was controlled by the broad outlines of objects, like any beginner, and my ambition then was no greater than a desire to amaze the doctor, or amaze myself, and take on the challenge with one hand?

That day, after a lifetime, I was no longer worried about proving anything to anyone. I just wanted to live my secret dreams and spend the time I had left posing questions that would have been self-indulgent to answer in the past. They weren’t questions that could be grasped by a young man, nor by the wounded fighter I was.

Perhaps it hadn’t been a time for details. It had been a collective time that we lived as a whole and spent as a whole. It was a time for grand causes, grand slogans and grand sacrifices. Nobody wanted to discuss peripheral matters or think too much about small details. Perhaps it was the foolishness of youth, or of revolutions.

The painting took all of Sunday evening and a large part of the night to complete. But I was happy painting, as though hearing the voice of Dr Kapucki return after a lifetime to say, ‘Draw the thing you love most.’ Now I was obeying him and painting the same picture in the same confusion.

But what I painted this time wasn’t an exercise in painting; it was an exercise in love.

I felt I was painting nothing less than you. You, with all your contradictions. I painted another, more mature version of you. More sinuous. A copy of another painting that grew up with you. I painted that picture with an incredible urge to paint, perhaps even with hunger and a hidden desire. Had desire for you started to infiltrate my brush without my knowledge?

The next day, your voice surprised me at exactly nine o’clock in the morning. A cascade of joy as jasmine blossoms landed on my pillow. I lay in bed, tired out after the night’s work. I felt your voice on the phone come in through the window and give me a morning kiss.

‘Did I wake you up?’

‘No. You didn’t wake me up. You kept me up all night, that’s all!’

In a half-serious, half-funny Algerian accent you said, ‘Why? Everything’s OK, I hope.’

I said, ‘Because I was painting until really late.’

‘That’s not my fault.’

‘Your only fault is to be my inspiration, O muse!’

As usual when you lost your patience, you suddenly cried out in French, ‘
Ah, non!
’ Then you added, ‘I hope you weren’t painting me. What a nightmare you are!’

‘Where’s the nightmare in painting you?’

You continued in irritation, ‘Are you mad? You want to turn me into a picture to tour from city to city for everyone I know to see?’

I felt a morning desire to quarrel – perhaps because I was so happy, perhaps because I really was insane and didn’t know how to be happy like other people.

I said, ‘Didn’t you say that we draw inspiration from people we once stopped and stared at, chance encounters? That I paint you only means that I once bumped into you on the street.’

You shouted, ‘Are you an idiot? Do you want to convince my uncle and other people that you painted me after bumping into me on the street, waiting at a red light, for example. We only paint what excites us or what we love. Everyone knows that!’

Perhaps that was the confession you were luring me into making and circling around. Or you were foolish enough to believe my claim that I didn’t know that. That morning, on the line that separated and joined us at the same time, I had the chance to be honest.

I said, ‘Let’s suppose, in that case, that I love you.’

I waited for the words to take effect and anticipated a range of responses. After a moment’s silence you replied, ‘Let’s suppose, in that case, that I didn’t hear.’

I didn’t understand whether you found my admission more or less than you expected, or whether as usual you were playing delightfully with words while knowing that you were playing with my nerves. You jumped from one question to another.

‘Where shall we meet?’

That was the more important question, and we decided to take it seriously. We took time discussing where would be a safe place to drink coffee or have lunch. But Paris closed in on us. You only knew student places, and I only went to cafés in my neighbourhood. In the end, we decided to meet in a café near my house.

That was one of my biggest mistakes. I didn’t realise at the time that I’d given my memory an address right next to my house and, in consequence, the right to haunt me.

I no longer remember how our madness took up permanent residence in that café. Over the course of two months of stolen happiness, the café, responsive to our changeable moods, gradually came to resemble us. It always presented us with a new corner, and we would meet at various hours, according to your timetable and my work schedule.

You got used to calling me on your way to university every morning at nine o’clock. We would agree on the day’s programme, although in the end there was no programme but us.

With each day I was slipping further towards the precipice of your love. As if against stones and rocks, I smashed into the impossibility of it all. But as I loved you, I disregarded the scars on my feet and on my conscience that, prior to you, had been pristine. I kept descending at breakneck speed towards the ultimate insane love.

I felt no guilt about loving you. Well, at least while I was content with your love, once I had convinced myself that I wasn’t harming anyone. I dared not dream of more. I was content that overwhelming emotion was passing through me for the first time, from extremes of happiness to extremes of sadness. I was content with love.

When did my mania for you begin? I ask myself whether it was the day I saw you for the first time, or when I was alone with you for the first time, or when I read you for the first time. Or perhaps when I stopped after a lifetime of exile to paint Constantine, like the first time. Perhaps the day you laughed or the day you cried; when you spoke or when you remained silent; when you became my daughter, or when I imagined you were my mother.

Which of the women in you made me fall in love?

I was always surprised by yet another woman inside you. You were like those nested Russian dolls. After a few days you had acquired the features of all women. Whether you were there or not, I was surrounded by women taking turns with me, and I fell in love with them all.

Could I possibly have loved you just one way?

You weren’t a woman. You were a metropolis. A metropolis of contradictory women of various ages and features, wearing different perfumes and clothes, more or less modest or forward. Women from before my mother’s generation up to your own time. Women, all of whom were you. I learned that too late, after you had swallowed me as a forbidden city swallows its children.

I witnessed your gradual transformation into a city that had for ever lived within me. I witnessed you change unexpectedly day by day as you took on the features of Constantine. You put on her contours, dwelt in her caves, her memories and her secret grottos. You visited her saints and perfumed yourself with her incense. You dressed in a wine-red velvet
kandoura
– the same colour as Mother’s – and went back and forth on her bridges. I could almost hear the ring of the heavy gold anklets in the caverns of memory. I could almost see the traces of henna decorating the soles of your feet for a feast.

I reverted to my old accent with you. I pronounced ‘t’ as ‘ts’ in the Constantine fashion. Flirting, I would call you ‘
yalla
’ – something the men in Constantine no longer do. In tenderness, I would call you ‘Omayma’, a nickname that Constantine alone inherited from the tribe of Quraysh ages ago. When desire for you robbed me of my last weapon, I would admit defeat in the manner of Constantine lovers: ‘I want you. Damn your beauty!’ Words that have lost their original meaning over the years and just become words of affection.

Constantine was a hypocrite city that neither admitted to longing nor permitted desire. Like all ancient cities, she took everything by stealth to preserve her reputation. She might have been blessed with her holy saints, but she also had her adulterers and thieves.

I wasn’t a thief, a saint or an old man claiming to work miracles that Constantine might bless. I was just a lover who loved you with the obsession, passion and folly of an artist. I created you like the pre-Islamic Arabs created their gods as idols to worship and offer sacrifices to. Perhaps that was what you loved most about my love.

One day you said to me, ‘I used to dream that a painter would fall in love with me. I’ve read incredible stories about them. They’re the craziest creative type of all. Their insanity is extreme, sudden and scary – nothing like what they say about poets or musicians. I’ve read the biographies of Van Gogh, Delacroix, Gauguin, Dalí, Cézanne, Picasso and lots more who are less famous. I never get bored of reading the lives of artists.

‘It’s not so much their fame that interests me, as their volatility and extremeness. I’m interested in the line between creativity and insanity: the moment that out of the blue they declare that they have transcended and rejected logic. Only that moment deserves consideration, esteem even. They act out of defiance and leave us overawed with the canvas of their life.

‘Some artists are happy to distil their genius into their work, but others insist on signing their lives with genius. They leave us a life that cannot be replicated or forged.

‘I think that only painters are capable of such madness. A poet couldn’t match Van Gogh’s despair and contempt for the world that led him to cut off his ear as a gift to a prostitute. Or that little-known artist – I forget his name – who spent his days painting the woman he loved, then hung her portrait and hanged himself from the ceiling of his room. They were united, and he had signed his painting and his life in one swoop.’

‘What you find fascinating in the end,’ I said, ‘is painters’ superior ability to torture or mutilate themselves, no?’

You replied, ‘No. Painters are specially cursed. They’re subject to their own particular correlation: the greater their suffering, hunger and derangement, the higher the price of their paintings. Then they die, and their works go through the roof. It’s as if they have to disappear, and the paintings take their place.’

I didn’t discuss your view. I listened to you repeating familiar material, which was surprising, nevertheless, coming from you. I didn’t ask myself at the time whether you loved me for my potential madness or for some other reason. Or whether you intended, unconsciously, to turn me into a valuable painting whose price I would pay with my ruin.