The Bridges of Constantine (19 page)

Before thinking to introduce you, you had introduced yourself to Ziyad. He in turn was about to introduce himself to you, when you interrupted him. ‘Let me guess. Aren’t you Ziyad al-Khalil?’

Ziyad stood amazed, then asked you, ‘How did you know?’

At that point you turned to me, as if noticing my presence, kissed me on both cheeks and said, directing the words at him, ‘You’ve got quite an advocate in this guy.’

Checking my expression, you asked me, ‘You’ve changed a bit. What happened to you over the holidays?’

Ziyad intervened to say sarcastically, ‘He painted eleven pictures in six weeks. He hasn’t done anything else. He even forgot to eat and sleep. I think that if I hadn’t come to Paris, the man in front of you would have died of hunger and exhaustion among his paintings. That’s not the way artists die any more!’

Rather than asking me, you asked Ziyad, in a touch of panic, as if you were afraid I might have painted eleven portraits of you, ‘What did he paint?’

With a smile aimed at me, Ziyad replied, ‘He painted Constantine. Nothing but Constantine. And lots of bridges.’

Pulling out a chair to sit down, you exclaimed, ‘Please no! I beg you, don’t talk any more about Constantine. I’ve just come back from there. An unbearable city, the perfect recipe for suicide or insanity!’

Then you spoke to me. ‘When are you going to be cured of that city?’

If we had been alone, I could have said to you, ‘When I am cured of you!’

But Ziyad answered, perhaps for me. ‘We are never cured of our memory,
mademoiselle
. That’s why we paint and why we write. That’s why some of us die.’

Ziyad was incredible, poetic in everything. He spouted poetry without effort, loved and hated without effort, seduced without trying. I watched him as he asked you, ‘You’re Algerian, then?’ I didn’t hear what you said to him. It seemed that the conversation was just between the two of you and that I hadn’t uttered a word since your arrival. I was just a third party at this strange meeting with fate.

I looked at you, seeking an explanation of what was happening to me in your smallest details. I asked you one day, ‘What’s the most beautiful thing about you?’ You gave a vaguely beckoning smile and didn’t reply. You weren’t the most beautiful. You were the most delectable. Was there an explanation for desire? Perhaps Ziyad was like you, too.

I discovered that gradually as I watched you talking to each other in front of me. There was something ambiguously charming about him, something attractive that had nothing to do with beauty. The idea that you were alike or made for each other annoyed me. Perhaps it annoyed me from the very first, when you drew my attention to my poor health and pallor as I watched both of you in front of me glowing with enviable health.

Did jealousy start worming its way in from the instant I realised I was just a ghost between you, a face stuck by mistake into your double portrait?

You didn’t notice that day that I had reached such a state because of you. So you didn’t apologise to me; even worse, you didn’t talk much with me, but lots with him. You said to him, ‘I loved your last collection,
Plans for a Love to Come
. It helped me bear this miserable holiday. There are sections I’ve learned by heart, I’ve read them so often.’ To Ziyad’s astonishment, you started reciting:

Sadness has ambushed me. Don’t abandon me to evening sadness

Lady, I will leave

I will knock on your door today before crying

See, these places of exile beguile me to stay

These airports are a waiting whore

Enticing me to the final journey.

That was the first time I heard you recite poetry. Your voice was a musical instrument as yet uncreated. I came to know it for the first time in the sadness of your tone, originally created for joy. Here it was playing in another key.

Ziyad listened, quite amazed, as if all of a sudden he was sitting outside time and memory. As if he had finally decided to sit on something other than his suitcases and listen to you. When you fell silent, he recited the rest of the poem as if reciting his fortune:

I have no nation but you

No memento of the soil, a bullet of desire the colour of shroud

I have nothing but you

Plans for love, in a short life!

At that moment, I felt an electric bolt of sadness, and perhaps love too, had surged through the three of us.

I loved Ziyad. I was in awe of him. I felt he was stealing my words of sadness and the nation, and of love too.

Ziyad was my voice. I was his hand, as he liked to say.

At that moment I felt that you had become the heart of us all.

I should have expected everything that happened.

Could I have stopped you two being swept away? I was like the scientist who creates a monster and then loses control of it. I discovered that I had foolishly authored your story with my own hand. A model of stupidity, I had written it chapter by chapter and allowed my characters to slip out of my control.

How could I sit before you, and then try and compare myself with a man twelve years younger, more striking and more attractive than me?

How could I undo the complicit link of words between you to prevent a writer from loving a poet whose verse she had learned by heart?

How could I have convinced him – who might still not have got over his previous Algerian love – not to love you who came and roused memory and opened forgotten windows?

How did this happen? How did I bring you together with your destiny, which was also my destiny?

That evening, he said to me, ‘That girl is great. I don’t remember if I’ve read anything by her. She started writing after I’d left Algeria, it seems. But I know that name. I’ve read it before somewhere. It sounds familiar.’

At the time I said, ‘You haven’t read the name. You’ve just heard it. There’s a street in Algiers named after her father, Taher Abdelmoula, who died in the Revolution.’

Ziyad put his newspaper aside and looked at me in silence. I felt he was lost in thought. Perhaps he had also begun to discover the exciting hidden dimension to your meeting, all the incredible details he would be unable to treat with coolness.

I felt a desire to talk more about you.

I was on the verge of telling him about
Si
Taher. I almost told him you were the daughter of my commander and friend. I even almost told him my incredible story with you. You, who could once have been my daughter, suddenly becoming my beloved a quarter of a century later.

I almost told him the story of my first painting,
Nostalgia
, and how it coincided with your birth. And the story of my most recent paintings: their connection with you, and the reason for my declining health and recent obsession.

I almost explained the secret of Constantine.

Did I keep silent to keep your secret to myself, like a big secret we take pleasure in bearing alone? Did your love carry the hint of clandestine operations and their deadly pleasure?

Without knowing all your feelings towards me, perhaps I was ashamed to confess to him, even though I’d never felt ashamed by him and had shared everything with him.

Did I decide from the outset that you would be only one of ours, because your love was not created for sharing?

Was it out of friendship, or idiocy, that I wanted to give him, perhaps as a last chance at love, the chance to love you? A few days of happiness stolen from the likelihood of death, which stalked him at all times and in every city?

What had Ziyad come to do in Paris? Clearly, it wasn’t sightseeing. Maybe to make clandestine contacts, meet certain parties, give or receive orders. I didn’t know which. But he was rather nervous, avoided making appointments over the phone and rarely went out alone.

I didn’t ask him his reason for visiting Paris. The residue of the period of struggle in my life made me respect others’ secrets when they were connected to a cause. I respected his secret. He respected my silence. So our secret and our silence took us to our shared story with you.

With his superlative intuition did he anticipate something between you and me? Faced with my show of indifference, perhaps he didn’t expect such a burning passion inside me. How could he have figured it out when I was gradually withdrawing on tiptoe to leave him more space? Instead of doing it myself, I let him answer the phone, talk to you and invite you over.

You would come round, and I would try not to ask myself for whom, and for whom you had made yourself beautiful.

Perhaps the most painful day was when you came round for the first time. Ziyad had to point out my paintings for you to take note of them. You moved from room to room as though going through the rooms in your own house. The corridor didn’t make you pause. The memory of a kiss that turned my life upside down.

Was that the most hurtful moment, or when I opened (by mistake?) a door and told you in explanation, ‘This is Ziyad’s room.’ You stood in front of the half-open door for what seemed to me longer than all the time that you’d spent in front of my paintings.

On the way back to the living room you said, ‘I don’t understand why you painted so many bridges. It’s mad. One or two would have been enough.’ You sat down on the same sofa.

Did Ziyad volunteer to answer for me out of conviction or politeness when he noticed the impact of your words on me? I was so crushed I had lost my voice.

‘You haven’t studied those pictures, but judged them at first glance. In painting, pictures are not the same, even if they look alike. There’s a key that cracks the code and solves the riddle of every painting. You have to find it in order to grasp the message the painter wishes to convey.

‘If you walked by
The Card Players
in the same rush, you’d only take note of two card players sitting at a table. You wouldn’t spot that the cards they are holding and shielding from each other are blank. That what Cézanne wished to convey wasn’t a card game, but a scene of fraud, agreed upon or perhaps inherited, since one of the players is older than the other.’

Before Ziyad could continue, you interrupted, ‘How do you know all that? Are you an art expert as well? Or have you caught Khaled’s illness?’

Ziyad laughed and moved slightly closer to you. ‘It’s not my area of expertise at all,’ he said. ‘That would be a luxury not available to a man like me. My ignorance of art would surprise you. I only know a few artists, and I came across their works by chance, mostly in books. But I love some modernist schools that pose questions in their work.

‘I’m not convinced by art for art’s sake. And the esteemed
Mona Lisa
doesn’t move me. I like art that challenges me existentially. That’s why I thought Khaled’s last paintings were great. It’s the first time he’s really impressed me.

‘Painting after painting, he’s become one with this bridge – in joy, then sadness grading into darkness, as if he had lived a day or a lifetime to its time.

‘In the last painting only a distant shadow of the bridge remains visible under a pencil of light. Everything around it has disappeared in the mist, and the bridge shines like a question mark suspended in the sky. There are no supports extending below, nothing demarcates it to the left or the right, as though it has lost its original purpose as a bridge!

‘Do you think it’s early morning or dusk? Is it a moment of demise, or birth with the thread of dawn? This question remains hanging like a bridge in picture after picture, each haunted by the continuous play of light and shadow, of death and rebirth, because anything suspended between heaven and earth contains the seeds of its own death.’

I listened to Ziyad in amazement. Perhaps I had discovered something that hadn’t occurred to me when I was painting the pictures.

Was it true what he was saying? Ziyad was certainly talking about my pictures better than I could. He was like any critic who gives an astonishing interpretation of works of art that the artist produced naively, without any philosophical reflection. The critic makes the artist laugh if he is genuine and straightforward, uninterested in symbols or convoluted theories of art. Alternatively, the critic may fill the artist with arrogance and rage if he’s like many who take themselves seriously and start to theorise and evangelise for a new artistic school.

Ziyad’s critique contained an important truth that I hadn’t perceived before and that stunned me. When painting the bridges, I believed I was painting you. In fact I was only painting myself. The bridge was an expression of my suspended situation, now and always. Without realising, I used it to project my anxiety, my fears and my vertigo.

Perhaps that’s why the first thing I painted when I lost my arm was a bridge. Do all these bridges mean that no part of my life has changed since then? That might have been accurate, but not the whole story. Ziyad could have philosophised about the symbolism of the bridge in other ways. But it was certain that he wouldn’t go beyond familiar symbols – the symbolic dimension is created by our lives, and in the end, Ziyad didn’t know all the folds of my memory. He hadn’t visited the only city that knows the secret of bridges!