The Bridges of Constantine (15 page)

That day, as we were about to get up and leave, you suddenly kissed me on the cheek. You said in your Algerian accent, ‘Khaled, I love you.’ At that instant everything around me came to a standstill. My life came to a halt on your lips. I could have embraced you right then, or kissed you, or responded with a thousand I-love-yous and then a thousand more. I just sat down in amazement and ordered another coffee from the waiter. I said the first thing that came to mind. ‘Why today in particular?’

You answered in a lowered voice, ‘Because I respect you more today. It’s the first time in months that you’ve talked about yourself. I discovered incredible things today. I didn’t think you’d come to Paris for those reasons. Artists usually come here seeking fame or fortune. I didn’t expect you’d given up everything there to start from scratch here.’

I interrupted you to correct what you were saying. ‘I didn’t start from scratch. We never start from scratch when we start a new direction. We just start from ourselves. I started from my convictions.’

I felt that day that we were entering a new stage of our relationship, that you were suddenly malleable to my convictions, into the shape of my hopes and dreams to come.

I remembered something I had read in a book of art criticism: ‘In a painting, the artist does not present us with a personal portrait. He only gives us a rough sketch of himself, the outlines of his features to come.’ You were my sketch to come. You were my features to come, my city to come. I wanted you more beautiful, more wonderful. I wanted you to have another face, not mine exactly, and another heart, not mine, other fingerprints unconnected to the blue marks time had left on my body and soul.

That day, after some hesitation, I suggested you come and visit me one day in my studio so I could show you what I had been working on. I was happy that you accepted my offer without hesitation or fear. I was careful for you not to think badly of me, and had decided to dismiss the idea if you were uncomfortable. But you surprised me as you laughed, as happy as a child who has been invited to the circus. ‘Wow! I’d be really happy to come and see it!’

The next day you called me to say you had two hours free in the afternoon when you could come round. I put down the receiver and started daydreaming, leaping ahead of the intervening hours and of time. Would you really be in my house? Would you really ring the doorbell, sit down on this sofa, walk in front of me here? You, at last?

At last I would sit next to you, not opposite you. At last no waiter would bother us. The eyes of patrons and passing strangers would not bother us. At last we could talk and be sad and happy, our moods unobserved.

Out of joy I went and opened the door in advance, not realising I was opening my heart to a maelstrom. How crazy to bring you here. To open up my other secret world and turn you into part of this house. This house, which, as I waited, became my Eden and might become my hell after you. Was I aware of all this at the time? Or was I a happy fool of a lover, seeing no further than the next date? I asked myself subsequently whether it was really only my latest painting and my secret garden of obsession that I wanted to show you.

I remembered Catherine and her painting. It was my apology for having been unable to paint anything but her face that day in the College of Fine Arts. Others competed to depict the inspiration of her nudity. When I suggested that she come round and see the painting, I didn’t expect its innocence would give rise to a less-than-innocent relationship that had lasted for two years.

Did inviting you to my studio lack sense or contain a secret wish to set a train of events in motion? Perhaps I did it with Catherine’s words as she surrendered herself to me in mind. In that studio, amidst the chaos of blank canvases and unfinished paintings leaning against the walls, she said, with deliberate intent, ‘This place incites love.’

I answered her matter-of-factly, ‘I didn’t know that before now.’

Was it my studio that incited love? Or does every creative space induce madness? Still, I knew you weren’t Catherine, and never would be. There were barriers between us that no obsession could break down.

Today, six years since that visit, I go over that day as if reliving all its psychological shocks. You came in wearing a white dress (why white?), your perfume beating you to the tenth floor, my racing heart taking the lift before you. Halting words of welcome in French (why French?). I almost kissed your cheek, but shook your hand (why a handshake?). I asked if you found the house easily. The words came out in French (why French again?). Perhaps that language, essentially foreign to my traditions and psychological barriers, might have given me the freedom and courage to speak.

You sat down on the sofa. As you looked over the room, you said, ‘I didn’t imagine your house would be like this. It’s great, really tastefully done!’

I asked, ‘How did you imagine it?’

‘Messy and full of things.’

Laughing, I said, ‘I don’t need to live in a dusty garret strewn with junk to be an artist. That’s another misconception about painters. I might be a mess, but I don’t have to be messy. It’s the only way for me to create some order inside.

‘I chose this high-rise flat because it’s filled with light, which is all a painter needs. A painting isn’t a space filled with chaos, but with light and the play of shadow and colour.’

I opened the large window and invited you on to the balcony. I said, ‘See this window? It’s the bridge between me and this city. From my balcony I deal with Paris’s changeable sky. Every morning, Paris reveals its latest mood to me, and I sit on the balcony watching it change from one state to another. I often paint in front of this window or sit outside watching the Seine as it turns into a vessel for the tears of a city expert at weeping. I like to sit here at the edge of the rain, close to it but sheltered at the same time. Seeing the rain induces extreme feelings. As Malek Haddad wrote, “Man feels young again when it rains.’’’

You looked at the sky as if praying for it to rain and said in Arabic, ‘The rain makes me want to write. What about you?’

I almost answered, ‘Me, it makes me want to make love.’

I looked at the sky for a long time. It was the clear blue of June. The blue suddenly annoyed me. Perhaps I was used to it being grey. Perhaps because I secretly hoped it would rain right then, conspiring to throw you into my arms like a drenched sparrow. I said nothing of all that.

I shifted my gaze from the sky into your eyes. It was the first time I had seen them in the light of day. I felt I was becoming acquainted with them. I was confused, like the first time I had seen them. They were lighter than usual, more beautiful perhaps. They held a certain depth and calm, a certain innocence and a lover’s collusion. Maybe I stared for a long time. You asked me, as if you already knew the answer, ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Your voice in Arabic was a unique musical rendition.

I found my answer in the opening lines of a poem. ‘Your eyes are two palm-tree forests in early light/Or two balconies in receding moonlight.’

You asked me in disbelief, ‘Do you also know Al-Sayyab’s poetry? Wow!’

I gave an answer with a double meaning, ‘I know “The Hymn of the Rain”.’

I felt that perhaps you loved me more at that moment, as if I had become Al-Sayyab to you as well.

Like every time I surprised you with a line of poetry or an Arabic saying, you asked me, ‘When did you read that?’

This time I replied, ‘I’ve done nothing but read, my dear. Other people’s wealth may be reckoned in banknotes, mine is in the titles of books. I’m a rich man, as you can see. I read everything I could get my hands on, just as they stole everything they could get their hands on!’

Staring at the grey stone bridge over the Seine, ultramarine in summer, you said, ‘You’re lucky to have this view. It’s lovely to have a balcony overlooking the Seine. What’s the bridge called?’

‘It’s Pont Mirabeau. I recently discovered that Apollinaire immortalised it in some poems, which I came across in one of his collections. It seems he was infatuated with it. Poets, like painters, have an irresistible habit of immortalising any place they lived in or passed through and loved. They might give immortality to an unknown farm or a café they once wrote in or a city they passed through by chance but which they fell in love with for ever.’

You asked, ‘Have you painted this bridge?’

With a sigh, I answered, ‘No, because we don’t necessarily paint what we see, but what we once saw and fear we’ll never see again. That’s why Delacroix spent his life painting Moroccan cities that he only spent a few days in, and Atlan spent his life painting one city – Constantine.

‘I wasn’t aware of this until two months ago when I stood here opposite the window to paint my latest picture. I was feeling unusually anxious. My eyes were seeing the Pont Mirabeau and the Seine, but my hands were painting another bridge in another valley in another city. When I had finished, I had painted nothing less than the viaduct of Sidi Rachid and the Wadi Rummal. I realised that in the end we don’t paint where we live, but what lives in us.’

You asked avidly, ‘Can I see that painting?’

Leading you to my studio, I said, ‘Of course.’

You stopped in the spacious room filled with paintings. You looked at the walls and at the paintings stacked on the floor with the amazement of a child in an enchanted city. With the same sense of wonder, you said, ‘Wow, this is incredible. You know, I’ve never visited an artist’s studio before.’

I wanted to say, ‘No woman before you has visited it.’ But Catherine’s portrait leaning against the wall reminded me that another woman had passed through. My thoughts turned to her for a moment, and you suddenly said, ‘Where’s the painting you were talking about?’

I took you over to the other side of the room. The picture was still on the easel, as if from its superior position it were erasing all the other paintings scattered around.

There is an erotic relationship of sorts between a painter and his most recent picture. A silent emotional complicity only broken by the appearance of another, virgin, painting in the spotlight. The painter, like the writer, is unable to resist the painful siren call of the colour white. A white space always tempts him towards the mania of creativity. How then, after two months, could I still resist the challenge of the colour white and the seduction of all the canvases that flaunted their whiteness in my face?

Why had I refused to paint anything after that picture, prefering to leave it on the easel to attest that it was my mistress, and mistress of all the paintings around me? It was as if I had refused to move it into a corner or on to a wall like a passing lover. Was it possible for a painting to intoxicate me more than a woman? Perhaps, because I had never before made love to the homeland in paint!

Looking at the painting, you said, ‘It’s similar to your first painting,
Nostalgia
, but lots of the details are different. Especially the crude earth colours you’ve used. They give it maturity and more life.’

Turning my gaze from the picture to you, I said, ‘You filled it with life. It’s of you.’

‘Me?’

‘Do you remember the day I told you on the phone that I had stayed up very late the previous night painting you? You accused me of being crazy and were scared I’d expose your features. Don’t be scared. I’ll never paint you, and no one will know that you passed through my life. The brush has honour, too.

‘You are a city, not a woman. Whenever I paint Constantine, I paint you. Only you will know that.’

Suddenly, as your eyes flicked towards the portrait of Catherine, you said, ‘And her?’ In your question there was the defiant selfishness of a child, and the defiant jealousy of a woman.

Picking the painting off the floor I said, ‘Does this picture really annoy you?’

Plainly lying, you said, ‘No.’

I felt that I was capable of anything at that moment and continued, ‘If you want, I’ll destroy it in front of you.’

You shouted, ‘No! Are you insane?’

‘I’m not insane,’ I said calmly. ‘This painting means nothing to me. A passing woman in a passing city.’

Looking at me with an unsettling smile, you said, ‘She’s your other city, no?’

Where did that last shot at the painting come from?

My admission held a clear hint. ‘No. She isn’t my city. She’s my other pillow or, if you like, just my other bed!’

I sensed a slight reddening of your cheeks. Conflicting emotions and sensations had run through you, instantly changing your expression. You mumbled quietly as if talking to yourself, ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Taking you by the arm, I said, ‘Don’t be jealous of this picture. There’s only one woman in this house you should be jealous of. It’s her . . .’

You looked over at where I was pointing. There was a life-size statue of a woman standing on the floor.

‘Her?’ you asked, ‘Why her?’

‘Because, up to now, she’s the only woman I have felt comfortable with. She has shared most of my years of exile. I used to have a scale model of her. Then two years ago I decided to give myself a bigger version. That was a bout of insanity. But I don’t regret buying her. She’s a lot like me. I’ve got one arm and she lacks both. We lost our limbs at different times for different reasons, but we endure together. Our disability won’t deny us immortality.’