The Bridges of Constantine (17 page)

I was filled with desire, lust, obsession. Finally, I was happy. Why ruin my happiness with regrets, with questions that would lead me to misery?

I don’t remember who said, ‘Regret is the second mistake we make.’ There was no room in my heart, not even a tiny space, for anything but love to well from.

Wasn’t the whole thing crazy?

How did I allow myself to be so happy when I knew I had had nothing of you in the end except a few minutes of stolen happiness, and that before me was a lifetime of torture?

Chapter Four

Your departure had the
same taste as my first tragedy. In a matter of days loneliness reduced me to the level of an orphaned painting on the wall. The opening line from a novel by Malek Haddad that I had once loved came to mind: ‘How great is God! As great as my loneliness. I see the Creator and he seems a painting.’

In my isolation and loneliness I was both the creator and the painting. I was hanging from the wall of a vast and cold universe, waiting for you.

After you left I entered a downward spiral of mental and emotional disappointment. I was living with the inexplicable anxiety that always came before and after an exhibition, when I would spontaneously run through my joys and disappointments.

So my exhibition was over. As usual, only the specialist French press and some émigré Arab magazines had shown any interest. Yet I could say it had received sufficient media coverage, and there was a consensus that Paris had witnessed an Arab artistic event.

Only the Algerian press ignored it, out of simple neglect, as usual. One newspaper and a weekly magazine mentioned it in passing, as if they lacked newsprint, not news. Abdel-Qadir, the journalist friend who had promised me he would be in Paris for personal reasons and interview me at length didn’t show up.

Although I didn’t love the limelight or sitting for hours with a journalist to talk about myself, I had hoped the interview would take place so that I could finally address at length the only person who really concerned me – the Algerian reader.

Abdel-Qadir called to tell me that he had to stay in Algeria to cover one of the festivals that were on the rise in those days, for reasons only God, and a few others, knew. I didn’t blame him. There was no comparison between an organised, official festival or gathering, paid for in hard currency, and an exhibition, no matter whose and no matter the years spent on the paintings.

In the end, I couldn’t even really blame the Algerian press. What enjoyment or entertainment could an exhibition of arty paintings offer to Algerian citizens about to explode, or commit suicide even, and with no time for contemplation or taste. They preferred a Rai music festival, where they could dance and shout and sing until dawn. On those suspect pop songs, they might spend the few dinars stuffed in their pockets and the sexual energy accumulated in their bodies. That was the only real ‘wealth’ our youth possessed. And just like our currency, they could only spend it on the black market in despair. Some had realised this before others.

In 1969, at the height of the desperate cultural vacuum being endured by the nation, someone, over a few days, came up with the idea for the biggest festival ever seen in Algeria or Africa. It was called the Pan-African Festival, and the whole African continent and its tribes were invited to spend a week singing and dancing (at times naked) in the streets of Algiers in honour of the Revolution.

How many millions were spent on this first and last festival of joy? Its most important achievement was to cover up the trial of a historic leader. During the festival, his men were interrogated and tortured in closed sessions in the name of that Revolution. The leader was also called Taher, and though we weren’t friends, I didn’t have any particular hostility towards him. He had once also been a fighter and a commander. I started to be aware of the game and greed of power and became wary of regimes that held many festivals and conferences. They were always hiding something!

Was it a coincidence that my problems began back then, and I started to have a bitter taste in my mouth?

I met that friend a few months later. He apologised sincerely and promised not to miss my next exhibition. I patted him on the shoulder and said, laughing, ‘Don’t worry. In a few days’ time the name of the festival will be forgotten, but history will definitely remember my name, even if after a hundred years!’

Joking, but with a hint of seriousness, he said, ‘Do you know you’re arrogant?’

‘I’m arrogant,’ I replied, ‘so as not to be despised. We have no choice, my friend. We belong to a people that doesn’t respect its creative artists. If we lost our arrogance and pride, we’d be trampled by the illiterate and ignorant!’

Later I asked myself if I really was arrogant. After a little thought, I understood that I was only arrogant when I stood, brush in hand, before a blank canvas. How arrogant did I have to be, then, to conquer its blankness and take its virginity as I circumvented my embarrassment with an outpouring of manhood and the virility of my brush?

But as soon as I had finished and wiped all the colours off my hand, I would fling myself on to the nearby sofa and look at the painting in amazement, to discover that I alone had sweated and bled in front of it. They were Arab females, greeting my revolution with fearsome, inherited indifference.

When I would collapse in disappointment, I would rip up a picture that annoyed me and throw it in the wastepaper basket. Some paintings were so naive and cold that they gave me a sexual as well as a creative block. Even so, no one would ever know, or perhaps even anticipate, my weakness and secret defeats. Others would only see my triumphs, hanging on the wall in elegant frames. The wastepaper basket would always be in a corner of my studio and my heart, out of sight.

To sit before an expanse ripe for creation meant being a god or else finding another vocation. Could I have been a god? Me, whom your love turned into a ruined Greek city of tall, weathered columns?

Was my arrogance of any use while every day your love was causing me to crumble from the inside? Two months and nothing but an impossible phone number and parting words that had dried up my brushes.

Silence had become my favourite colour.

I understood the opposition between painting and your form of writing. You emptied yourself of things when you wrote about them, as though killing them with words. When I painted I became fuller, as though investigating life through forgotten details. I would grow more attached to them and re-hang them on the walls of memory.

After I’d settled you in my heart, wouldn’t painting you mean installing you in the rooms of my house, too? That was a mistake I decided from the outset not to make. But night after night I discovered the futility of my decision.

Why was night my undoing? Because whenever I was alone with myself, I was alone with you? Or because art has secret rituals of longing, born mostly at timeless, lawless night?

Teetering on the edge of reason and madness, on the divide between the possible and the impossible that is blacked out by darkness, I committed the sin of you.

With my lips I drew the boundaries of your body.

With my manhood I drew the boundaries of your femininity.

With my fingers I drew where the brush could not reach.

With one arm I embraced you. I planted you and harvested. I stripped you naked and clothed you. I changed the contours of your body to meet my ideals.

Woman in the guise of nation, give me another chance at heroism. Let my one arm change your ideals of manhood, love and pleasure. How many arms have embraced you without warmth? How many hands have run over you, leaving scratches on your neck and a signature beneath your wounds? They loved you and they hurt you, but it was wrong.

Thieves, pirates and bandits loved you. But their hands were not cut off. Only those who loved you selflessly became handicapped. They had it all; I had only you.

That night, like every night, you were mine. Who would take your vision away from me, ban your body from my bed, steal your perfume from my senses, prevent me restoring you with my other hand? You were my secret pleasure, my secret obsession, my secret attempt to overthrow logic.

Every night your fortresses fell into my hand and your guards surrendered. You came in your nightdress and stretched out next to me. I ran my hand through your long black hair flowing over my pillow. You trembled like a bird drenched by the rain, and your sleeping body responded.

How did this happen? What led me to lose my mind? Perhaps it was your voice that I grew addicted to, that cascaded love and music and sprinkled droplets of pleasure over me.

Your love was a caller asking, ‘
Washik?
’ A phone that wrapped me at night in a blanket of kisses, that left its eyes as a lamp of passion next to me when the lights went out. It was afraid for me from the dark. It was afraid for me from my loneliness and old age. It took me back to my childhood without consulting me. It told me bedtime stories believed by children, and sang me lullabies. Was it lying? Would a mother lie? No child would ever believe that!

What brought me to the brink of derangement? Perhaps the impossible kiss I stole from you. But could kisses have caused all of that?

I remembered reading about kisses that changed lives, but I never believed it.

How could Nietzsche, the philosopher of power, who spent years investigating might and superiority, be bowled over by a single kiss? A kiss stolen by chance on an outing to a temple in the company of Lou, the woman he loved more than any other writer or poet of the time. These included Apollinaire, who long courted her and wept over her on this very Pont Mirabeau. Because her name sounded like
loup
– ‘wolf’ in French – this was, to him, decisive proof of his fate with her.

Nietzsche said, ‘When you visit a woman, do not forget to bring a stick.’ But before Lou he was a crushed, weak man, lacking will. His mother even said, ‘That woman only left my son three choices: marry her, kill himself or go mad!’

Such was Nietzsche’s fate when he loved. Should I have been ashamed of my weakness before you, when I wasn’t the philosopher of power or Samson, who lost his hair and his legendary strength because of a kiss?

Was I ashamed of your kiss? Did I regret it? Me, whose life began on your lips?

I don’t know how Nietzsche got over the woman he didn’t marry. Did he commit suicide or go mad? All I know was that I spent two months in mental turmoil, during which I almost touched the point of insanity – the kind of insanity that seduced you and that you often praised, as you believed it was the only proof of an artist’s genius.

So be it. After all these years, I will confess to you that I did reach the fearsome limits of irrationality.

Was it simply passion, or an unconscious wish to give you the plaything you had yet to acquire: the madman you dreamed of?

At that time I often went over my story with you, chapter by chapter. Each time I reached opposite conclusions. Sometimes your love seemed to be a myth too big for you and me. Something predestined perhaps centuries before, at a time when Constantine was called Cirta.

At times I would ask myself whether I was a man whose memory had struck you and whose madness had seduced you to start a story. Or whether I was just the victim of a literary crime you dreamed of committing in a future book. Then your childhood would suddenly outweigh the ‘criminal’ in you. I would remember that I was also a copy of your father, and that because of a foolish kiss I had for ever blown up the secret bridge between us.

I decided to apologise to you. I would wake up and go into my studio. I would sit for ages in front of your blank portrait and ask myself where I would start you.

I would contemplate your photograph for a long time – the one on the back of your novel, which you gave me without a dedication. Your face seemed to have no connection with the photo. How would I fix an age for your face, both old and new together? How to make a copy of you without betraying you?

In the midst of my confusion I remembered Leonardo da Vinci, who could draw equally skilfully with both his right and left hand. Which hand did he use to paint and immortalise the Mona Lisa? With which hand would I have to paint you?

What if you were a woman who could only be drawn with the left hand, my missing one?

It once occurred to me to paint you upside down and then sit and look at you in the hope of finally uncovering your secret. Perhaps that would be the only way to understand you. I even considered the possibility of exhibiting that painting upside down. It would be called
You
. Many people would stop in front of it. They might think it impressive without completely knowing you. Wasn’t that what you wanted, in the end?

More than a week, and several weather reports, passed before your voice came without introduction one morning.

‘How are you?’

My heart, not expecting such a morning gift, got a shock. Speech tangled. ‘Where are you?’

Your voice sounded close, or so I imagined. But you answered with a diversionary laugh. ‘Try and guess!’

Like one dreaming, I answered, ‘Have you come back to Paris?’

You laughed and said, ‘What do you mean, Paris! I’m in Constantine. I arrived a week ago for a relative’s wedding. I thought I must call you from here. Tell me what you’re doing with the summer. Haven’t you gone anywhere?’