The Bridges of Constantine (2 page)

Stunned and confused, I was looking at a representation of you as though you were really present. I was surprised by your new hairstyle; what had you done to your hair, now short, hair that had embraced me in the loneliness of my nights? I gazed at your eyes, searching for the memory of my first failure with you. That day, your eyes outshone themselves in beauty. They held so much misery and so much joy for me. Had your eyes changed too? Or had my perspective changed? I continued searching your face for signs of my earlier madness. I barely recognised your lips, your smile or your new lipstick.

How had I once found an echo of my mother in you? I had imagined you in her burgundy dress, as you kneaded, hands with long, painted nails, the bread whose taste I had been missing for years. What insanity that was. What idiocy!

Had married life really changed your appearance and your childlike laughter? Had it changed your memory too, the taste of your lips and your dusky, gypsy-like skin? Had it made you forget the ‘bankrupt prophet’ whose Ten Commandments were stolen on his way over to you, so he only brought you an eleventh?

There you were before me in the guise of apostasy. You had chosen another path. You had put on another face that I no longer recognised. The face of an advertising model, made up in advance to sell something like toothpaste or anti-ageing cream. But perhaps you’d put on the mask just to promote a product in the shape of a book, which you’d entitled
The Curve of Forgetting
. A product that might be my story with you, the memory of my hurt, or the latest way you’d found to kill me all over again, without leaving your fingerprints on my neck.

That day, I remembered an old conversation of ours when I had asked you why you opted for the novel in particular. I marvelled at your answer. You said with a smile whose truth or deceit I couldn’t gauge, ‘I had to tidy up internally, get rid of some old stuff. Just like a house, we need to spring clean inside ourselves. I can’t keep the windows shuttered on more than one corpse. We write novels for no other reason than to kill their heroes. To finish off the people whose existence has become a burden. Whenever we write about them, we get rid of them and let in the fresh air.’ After a brief silence you added, ‘Every novel that works is really a crime we commit against a certain memory or perhaps a certain person. We shoot them in public, with a silencer. They are the only ones who realise that the spray of words is aimed at them. Failed novels are just failed attempts at assassination. Authors’ pen permits should be revoked on the grounds that they can’t handle words. They might kill someone by mistake, and that includes themselves – after making their readers die of boredom!’

Why hadn’t your sadistic tendencies raised doubts then? Why hadn’t I anticipated all those crimes to come, where you used your other weapons? I never expected that one day you might take aim at me. That’s why I laughed at what you said. Maybe my new fascination with you began then – in such cases we can’t resist a crazed admiration for our killer.

Nevertheless, I expressed my perplexity. ‘I thought the novel was a way for an author to relive a story they loved and grant immortality to someone they loved.’

My words seemed to surprise you, as though you saw in them something you hadn’t taken into account, and you said, ‘Maybe that’s true as well. Ultimately, we only kill those we love. In compensation, we grant them literary immortality. It’s a fair deal, isn’t it?’

Fair? Who discusses justice with a tyrant? Did they argue with Nero the day he burned Rome out of pyromaniac love for her? Weren’t you just like him, as skilled in arson as in love?

At that moment, had you foreseen my imminent end and were you trying to console me in advance? Or were you, as usual, just playing with words, noting their impact on me? Were you secretly relishing my constant amazement at you and your incredible capacity to forge a language that would match the scale of your contradictions?

Anything was possible. Perhaps
I
was the victim of your novel, the victim you sentenced to immortality and decided, as usual, to embalm with words. Perhaps I was only an imaginary victim, created by you to resemble the truth. In the end, despite my stubborn desire for the truth, only you knew the answers to all these questions that haunted me.

When did you write the book?

Before or after you got married? Before Ziyad left us, or after? Did you write it about
me
, or about him? Did you write it to kill me or to bring
him
back to life? Or to finish us both off with one book, just as you left us both for another man?

When I read the article a few months ago, I never expected you’d force your presence on me again and that your book would dominate my thoughts, a vicious circle in which I was caught alone.

After all that had happened I couldn’t immediately go searching among the bookshops to buy a copy of my story. Nor could I ignore it and get on with my life as if I’d never heard of it and it had nothing to do with me. Wasn’t I burning to read the rest of the story? Your story, which ended without my knowing the final chapters. Having been the main witness, I was now absent. Yet according to the same law of idiocy, I had always been both witness and victim in a story that only had room for one hero.

I have it now, your book. It would have been impossible to read today, so I’ve left it enigmatically closed on the table like a time bomb ready to ambush me. I turn to its silent presence for help in blasting open the quarry of words inside me and stirring up memory.

Everything about it has annoyed me today: its title, chosen as a clear deceit; your smile that seems to ignore my sadness; your calm gaze that treats me like a reader who knows little about you. Even your name. Perhaps that annoys me most. Its particular letters still strike the memory before they strike the eye. Your name isn’t read so much as heard, like a melody played on a single instrument for an audience of one. How could I read it impartially when it was one chapter of an unbelievable story written by chance when our fates crossed?

A comment on the back of your book describes it as a literary event. I put a pile of drafts written at moments of delirium on top of it and think, ‘It’s time for me to write or remain silent for ever. These are incredible times.’

A sudden chill settles it. Constantine’s night creeps towards me through the closed window of solitude. I put the top back on the pen for the moment and slide under the covers of loneliness.

Since realising that every city has the night it deserves, which resembles it and which alone exposes what is hidden by day, I have decided to avoid looking out of this window at night.

All cities unconsciously undress at night and reveal their secrets to strangers, even when they say nothing. Even when they bar their doors. Because cities are like women, some of whom make us wish morning would come soon. But . . .

‘
Soirs. Soirs, que des soirs pour un seul matin.
’ ‘Evenings, evenings, how many evenings for a single morning.’ Why do I remember this line by the poet Henri Michaux and find myself repeating it in two languages? Why do I remember it, and when did I memorise it? Perhaps for years I’ve been expecting such despondent evenings that will only ever have one morning. I search my memory for anything about the poem and remember it is called ‘Old Age’.

My discovery frightens me, as if I had suddenly discovered I had new features. Does old age really creep up on us over the course of one long night, with an inner darkness that makes us slower in everything, ambling along in no particular direction? Are boredom, disorientation and monotony characteristics of old age or of this city?

Am I going senile, or is the whole nation having a collective mid-life crisis? Doesn’t this country have a marked capacity to make us old and decrepit in a matter of months, a matter of weeks, even?

Before I didn’t feel the weight of the years. Your love kept me young and my studio was an abundant source of renewable energy. Paris is an elegant city where one would be embarrassed to neglect one’s appearance. But now the flame of my madness has gone out, and I have ended up here. Now we’re – all of us – standing over the nation’s volcanic eruption, and all we can do is fuse with the lava showers and forget our inconsequential fires. Nothing now warrants all that elegance and decorum. Our nation itself now struts shamelessly before us!

At an age when others have said everything they have to say, there is nothing more difficult than starting to write. Picking up the pen for the first time after the age of fifty is as crazy and lustful as reliving the passion of adolescence. It is exciting and foolish, an affair between an ageing gentleman and a virgin quill. While he is confused and in a hurry, she is chaste, unsated by the ink of the world.

I shall consider what I have written up to now as just preparatory, an overflow of desire for these sheets of paper that for years I have dreamed of filling. Maybe tomorrow I will begin writing in earnest. I’ve always liked to link the important things in my life with a particular date, in a nod to another memory. This idea seduced me again when I was listening to the evening news and discovered – having lost my relationship with time – that tomorrow will be 1 November. How could I not choose that as the date to start my book?

Tomorrow will mark the passing of thirty-four years since the firing of the first shot in the war of liberation. I’ll have been here for three weeks, three weeks also since riots claimed the last martyred
shahids
, one of whom I came here to mourn and bury myself.

Between the first and the last bullets, hearts have changed and aims have changed. The country has changed. That’s why tomorrow will be a down payment of grief. There will be no military parade, receptions or formal exchanges of congratulations. They will make do with an exchange of accusations, while we will make do with visiting the graves.

I won’t visit that grave tomorrow. I don’t want to share my grief with the nation. I prefer complicity with paper and its silent pride. Everything annoys me tonight. I feel I might finally write something great, not tear it up as usual. For, after all these years, an agonising coincidence has brought me back to this very place on the anniversary of the original memory to find the body of someone I loved waiting for me.

Tonight the past awakens bewilderingly inside me. It lures me into the labyrinth of memory. I try to resist, but can I resist my memory? I close the door of my room and open the window again. I try to see something other than myself, but the window looks back at me.

Forests of bay and oak stretch before me. Constantine creeps towards me, wrapped in her old cloak, with all the familiar woods, cliffs and secret passes that once surrounded her like a security cordon. Her branching pathways and dense forests lead to the secret bases of the fighters, as if explaining to us tree after tree, cave after cave.

All the paths in this ancient Arab city lead to steadfastness. All the forests and rocks here joined the ranks of the Revolution before we did.

There are cities that don’t choose their fates. History and geography have condemned them not to surrender. So their sons do not always have a choice. Is it strange, then, that I resemble this city so much?

More than thirty years ago, I walked these paths. I chose these mountains as my home and clandestine school where I studied the only subject whose teaching was banned. I knew that there were no re-sits, and that my fate was confined to the space between freedom and death.

We chose a more enticing name for this death, so we could head towards it without fear and, perhaps, with secret desire, as though moving towards something other than our end. Why did we forget at the time to give freedom more than one name? Why from the outset did we limit our freedom to its original meaning?

Death in those days walked, slept and ate hasty meals with us, just as yearning, patience, faith and a vague happiness never left us. Death breathed in sync with us. The days grew ever harder, only different from those before in the toll of
shahids
whose deaths were mostly never expected. For some reason, their end – theirs especially – was never envisioned as so close, so devastating. That was the logic of death that I hadn’t yet taken in.

I still remember them, those who we later got used to talking of en masse. They were not
shahids,
plural: each one of them was a
shahid
in his own right. As though the plural in this case in particular didn’t abbreviate our memory of them, but rather diminished their claims on us.

One died in the first battle as though he’d come just for martyrdom. One fell a day before a stolen visit to his family, having spent weeks working out the details and making preparations. One went to get married, then came back and died a married man. One dreamed of going back to marry, but never went back.

In war it isn’t so much those who die who are miserable. The most miserable are those they leave behind bereft, orphaned, with wrecked dreams.

I discovered that fact early on,
shahid
by
shahid
, story by story.

At the same time, I also discovered that perhaps I was the only one to leave nothing behind except the fresh grave of a mother who died ill and in despair, an only brother years younger than me, and a father preoccupied by the demands of his new young wife.

The popular proverb has it right: ‘The death of a father doesn’t an orphan make. Only the death of a mother.’