The Bridges of Constantine (14 page)

Would suffering really increase the value of anything I painted – no matter its quality – when hungry or temporarily insane?

I was content to ask myself about the origins of art and of the sadistic tendency in others. For I believed that the correlation had nothing to do with creativity or art, but with human nature. We are inherently sadistic and take pleasure in hearing about the suffering of others. We believe, out of selfishness, that the artist is a new messiah to be crucified for us. His suffering both grieves us and makes us happy. His story might make us cry, but won’t stop us sleeping at night, or make us feed another artist who is dying of hunger or oppression before our eyes. For the same reason, in fact, we find it natural for others’ hurt to be turned into poetry or a treasured (or sellable) painting.

Was mania really the exclusive preserve of painters? Wasn’t it the shared fate of all creative people, all those haunted with an unhealthy desire to create? By the very logic of creativity, those who create could not be ordinary beings of ordinary character, subject to ordinary sadness and joy, with ordinary standards of gain and loss, of happiness and misery. They were turbulent and mercurial, not understood and with inexplicable behaviour.

That was the first time I talked to you about Ziyad.

‘I knew a Palestinian poet who was studying in Algeria,’ I said. ‘He was happy to be sad and lonely, and content with his modest income as a teacher of Arabic literature, his small dorm room and his two poetry collections. Then his fortunes improved and he moved into a flat. He was going to get married to a student of his with whom he was madly in love, and whose family had finally agreed to the match. Suddenly, he decided to give all of that up and go back to Beirut and join the freedom fighters.

‘I tried in vain to get him to stay. I didn’t understand his stupid insistence on leaving when finally about to fulfil his dreams. He responded sarcastically, “What dreams? I don’t want to kill the homeless Palestinian inside. If I do, all I have left will be valueless.”

‘Slowly blowing out smoke as if it were a screen to hide behind while he confessed a secret, he added, “Besides, I don’t want to belong to a woman. Or, if you like, I don’t want to settle down in her. I’m scared of happiness when it turns into house arrest. Some prisons weren’t built for poets.”

‘The girl who loved him came to see me in the hope that I’d convince him that he was crazy to head off to certain death. But it was useless; nothing could persuade him to stay. He was suddenly so far gone that my arguments only further encouraged him to leave.

‘I remember he once said to me with a touch of sarcasm, as if enlightening me, “There’s a certain greatness in leaving somewhere at the peak of our success. That’s the difference between ordinary people and exceptional men!”’

I asked you if you thought that a poet like that was any less demented than a painter who cut off his ear. He swapped ease for hardship and life for death without being forced to. He wanted to go proudly to death, not defeated or compelled. That was his way of overcoming its invincibility.

You asked me avidly, ‘Did he die?’

‘No. He hasn’t died. Or at least he was still alive on the date of his last card. That was about six months ago, at New Year.’

A moment’s silence fell between us, as though we were both thinking of him.

I said, ‘You know he was an indirect cause of my leaving Algeria? I learnt from him that we can’t reconcile all the personalities within us. We have to sacrifice some for others to live. Because we are instinctively drawn towards what matters to us, we only discover our true self when faced with such a choice.’

You interrupted, ‘Right, I forgot to ask you why you came to Paris.’

As if revealing feelings couched in disappointment, I sighed and answered, ‘My reasons might not convince you, but like that friend, I hate sitting on high awaiting a fall. In particular, I can’t bear my position turning me into someone who doesn’t resemble me.

‘After independence, I shunned the political posts that were offered to me and that everyone else was chasing after. I dreamed of something low-profile where I could make some difference without much fuss or getting tired. So when I was made responsible for publishing in Algeria, I felt I was the man for the job. I had spent the years in Tunisia perfecting my Arabic and had overcome my old complex as an Algerian fluent only in French. In a matter of years, I became bi-cultural. I didn’t go to sleep until I had read my fill in one of those languages.

‘My life revolved around books. At one point, I almost abandoned painting for writing, especially because in those days some considered painting deviant, a sign of artistic decadence unconnected to the liberation struggle.

‘When I came back to Algeria, I was overflowing with words. And because words aren’t neutral, I was also full of ideals and values. I wanted mindsets and values to change. This meant a revolution in the Algerian mind, still untouched despite the historical upheavals. But it wasn’t the right time for my great dream, which I don’t want to call the “cultural revolution”. Those two words, together or separately, no longer signify anything to us.

‘Major mistakes were being made in good faith. Change had begun in the factories, peasant villages, construction and infrastructure. People, however, were left till last. How could a wretched, empty person, drowning in the mundane problems of daily existence and with a mindset decades behind the rest of the world, build a nation or undertake an industrial, agricultural or any other revolution? All the world’s industrial revolutions began with the people themselves. That’s how Japan and Europe became what they are.

‘Only the Arabs erect buildings and call the walls a revolution. They take land from one person to give to another and call that a revolution. When we don’t have to import our own food, that’ll be a revolution. When citizens are as advanced as the machinery they operate, that’ll be a revolution.’

All of a sudden my voice had a new tone, full of the bitterness and disappointment that had accumulated over the years. You looked at me in some astonishment and perhaps silent admiration as I told you for the first time about my political sorrows.

You asked me, ‘Is that why you came to France, then?’

‘Not exactly,’ I said, ‘but probably because of the results of mistakes like those. One day I decided to leave behind mediocrity and the naive books that I had to read and publish in the name of literature and culture to be consumed by a people hungry for knowledge.

‘I felt I was selling something off, past its use-by date. I felt somehow responsible for dumbing down the population. I was spoon-feeding them lies and had turned from an intellectual into a contemptible policeman. It was my job to spy on the alphabet and excise the occasional word. What others wrote was my sole responsibility. I felt ashamed inviting a writer to my office to persuade them to remove an idea or opinion that I shared.

‘One day, Ziyad – the Palestinian poet I told you about – came to see me. That was the first time we met. I had called and asked him to cut or change some text in his poetry that seemed to me overly critical of certain regimes and Arab leaders. He made clear allusions to them and called them everything under the sun.

‘I’ll never forget the look he gave me that day. His eyes stopped at my amputated arm for a moment, then he gave me a withering look and said, “Sir, my poems do not undergo amputation. Give me back my book. I’ll publish it in Beirut.”

‘I felt my Algerian blood stir in my veins and was about to get up and slap him. But I calmed down and tried to ignore his provocative looks and words.

‘What intervened for him at that moment? Perhaps his Palestinian identity, or the courage that no other writer had shown before. Perhaps his poetic genius – his collection was far and away the best I read in that dismal period. Plus, I felt in my heart that poets, like prophets, were always right.

‘His words brought me back to reality with a shaming slap. This poet was right. How had I failed to realise that for years I had only turned the works before me into dismembered and defaced versions of themselves, just like me?

‘I cast an absent-minded glance at the cover of the manuscript and said defiantly, “I’ll publish it word for word.” There was some machismo in my stance, a bravado that no civil servant, whatever his rank, could flourish without putting his job on the line. After all, civil servants have traded their manhood for the job!

‘When his collection came out it caused me some headaches. Yet I felt there was something phoney I could no longer put up with. What stopped me allowing vile, bloody regimes to be discredited? We were still keeping silent over their crimes in the name of steadfastness and unity. Why was it OK to criticise some regimes and not others, all depending on the way the wind was blowing for the captain of our ship?

‘My despair slowly grew bitter. Should I change my job, swapping one set of problems for another, and become a player in a different game? What to do with all the dreams I had collected over my years of exile and struggle? What to do with forty years, one amputated arm and one good one? What to do with the proud, stubborn man inside me who refused to haggle over his freedom, and that other man who had survived by learning to go against his principles and adapt to every job?

‘I had to kill one of them for the other to survive. I made the choice.

‘Meeting Ziyad was a turning point in my life. I discovered subsequently that stories of close friendship – like violent love stories – often begin with confrontation, provocation and a trial of strength. Two highly intelligent and sensitive men with strong personalities, men who had taken up arms and grown used to the language of violence and confrontation, cannot meet without a clash. Out of mutual defiance, that first clash was inevitable. We needed it to understand we were made of the same stuff.

‘Afterwards, Ziyad slowly became the one friend I felt really at ease with. We would meet several times a week, stay up late drinking, talk at length about politics and art, curse everyone and part happy. It was 1973. He was thirty and two poetry collections old: some sixty poems, as many as his scattered dreams. My life consisted of a few paintings, little joy, much disappointment, two or three posts I’d moved between since independence, with vague prestige – a driver, a car, a vague bitter taste in my mouth.

‘Ziyad left two or three months after the October 1973 war. He went back to Beirut to join up with the PFLP, which he had been involved with since before coming to Algeria. He left me all his favourite books that had accompanied him from country to country. He also bequeathed me his philosophy of life, some memories and that girlfriend who came to see me every now and again to ask after him. He refused to write to her; she refused to forget him.’

Emerging from a long silence, you said, ‘Why didn’t he write to her?’

‘Perhaps because he didn’t like to disturb the past. He wanted her to forget him and get married quickly. He wished her a fate different from his.’

‘And did she get married?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her for a few years. Probably, yes. She was very beautiful. But I don’t believe she’s forgotten him. It would be hard for a woman to forget a man like Ziyad.’

At that moment I felt your thoughts drift away. Did you start dreaming about him? Did I begin a succession of stupid mistakes that day as I answered your many questions about him in a way that roused your curiosity both as a woman and a writer?

I told you a lot about his poems. In his last collection he wrote poems like someone firing in the air at a wedding or funeral, saying goodbye to a lover or relative. He was bidding farewell to his old friend poetry, swearing he would only write with his gun from then on. That man wasn’t really writing, he was just emptying a machine gun loaded with anger and revolution into the words. Once he no longer trusted anything, he fired bullets at everything. Ah, Ziyad was incredible!

I must admit again today that he really was incredible, and that I was a fool. I shouldn’t have talked to you about him under the illusion that mountains don’t meet. Why did I talk about him with such enthusiasm, with such lyricism? Did I want to use him to get closer to you and grow in your eyes by convincing you that I had old links with writers and poets? Or did I describe him in glowing terms because until that day I believed I was like him and was describing nothing less than myself to you?

Perhaps all of that was true, but I also wanted you to discover Arabism in men so exceptional it seemed they could not be of this nation. Men born in different Arab cities, belonging to different generations and political trends, but who all had a certain kinship with your father and his loyalty, nobility, pride and Arab identity. All of them had or would die for the sake of this nation.

I didn’t want you to shrink into the shell of the lesser nation and turn into an archaeologist of memories within one city. Every Arab city could be called Constantine. Every Arab who gave up everything and went to die for a cause could be called Taher. And you could be a relative of his.

I wanted you to fill your novels with other, more lifelike heroes. Heroes who would take you out of your political and emotional adolescence. Didn’t I, foolishly, say to you once, ‘If you knew a man like Ziyad, you would no longer love Zorba or need to create fictional heroes. This nation already has heroes beyond the imagination of writers.’

I didn’t, then, anticipate all that would happen. I would be the one to turn into an archaeologist, digging between your lines for traces of Ziyad and asking which one of us you loved more. For whom did you build your last tomb and your last novel? For him or for me?