The Bridges of Constantine (20 page)

I remembered a contemporary Japanese artist who, I had read, spent a number of years painting nothing but grass. When he was asked why, he said, ‘One day I painted grass and understood the field. When I understood the field I grasped the secret of the world.’ He was right. Everyone has a key that opens the riddle of the world – his world.

Hemingway understood the world when he understood the sea. Alberto Moravia when he understood desire, Hallaj when he understood God, Henry Miller when he understood sex, Baudelaire when he understood sin and damnation.

Perhaps Van Gogh understood the baseness and sadism of the world when he sat febrile at his window with his head bandaged. He saw only vast fields of sunflowers and, exhausted, could only paint the same scene over and over. His febrile hand was only capable of painting those naive, simple flowers. But he kept painting. This wasn’t to make money from his pictures, but to get revenge for them, even if a century later. Didn’t he predict to his brother that a day would come when his paintings would be more valuable than his life?
Sunflowers
once broke all records for the price of a painting.

That idea prompted me to wonder whether painters were also prophets. Then I linked that idea with Ziyad’s comment that ‘anything suspended between heaven and earth contains the seeds of its own death’. I asked myself what prophecy was contained in each of the pictures I had painted in an advanced stage of madness and unconsciousness. Was it the death or rebirth of that city? Was it the endurance of her bridges that had hung for centuries in the face of crosswinds and so many changes of weather? Or their total and sudden collapse at that moment when only a pale thread of indifference divides night and day – the indifference of history?

I was under the influence of that shocking vision when your voice shook me out of my nightmare. ‘You know, Khaled, you’ve been lucky not to visit Constantine for a few years, otherwise she wouldn’t have inspired you to paint such beautiful things. When you wish to get over her, just visit and the dream will be over!’

At the time of course, I didn’t know that one day you would personally take on the task of killing that dream and would force me to the threshold of Constantine.

Ziyad intervened, once again to say things before their time, like prophecy. In polite reproach he said, ‘Why are you so determined to kill this man’s dream? There are dreams that kill us. Allow him to be happy, even with a fantasy.’

You made no comment, as though my dreams no longer interested you to any great degree. You just asked him, ‘And you? What’s your dream?’

‘Maybe a city as well,’ he said.

‘Is it called Khalil?’

He said, smiling, ‘No. We don’t always carry the name of our dreams. Nor do we belong to them. My name is Khalil and my city is Gaza.’

‘When did you last visit?’

‘Before the 1967 war. More than fifteen years ago.’ He then added, ‘What’s happening to Khaled today makes me laugh. In the past, when we were in Algeria, he tried to convince me to get married and stay there for ever. He didn’t understand that Gaza haunted me so much it made me leave every city. Now he’s reached the same conclusion of his own accord, and is also haunted by a city.

‘What’s amazing is that he never talked about it to me. It’s as though he attached no importance to it before. We don’t pay attention to things like happiness until we’ve lost them!’

Perhaps that was what happened to me. I gradually became aware that I had been happy with you before that summer holiday, before Ziyad came and our love turned from a couple’s violent passion into a love triangle with equal sides. From a two-player game of chess, where love filled the black squares and the white squares and whose only rule was love’s ebb and flow, into a three-handed card game where we sat around a table, revealing our cards and our sadness. We shared a heartbeat and memory, laid traps for each other and created new rules for love. We forged our hands, all of which were identical. We cheated the logic of things, not for one of us to win the game, but to stop one of us losing and so make our ending less painful than the beginning.

It was clear that Ziyad sensed that I loved you in some fashion. But he was unaware of the roots or extent of that love. So he drifted into loving you without thought or guilt.

We all lacked the sense to realise that desire only has enough room for two. Once we were three, it swallowed us up like the Bermuda Triangle swallows ships.

How did we get there? What winds blew us to those alien shores? What fate scattered us, then reunited our disparate, contradictory fates, with our different ages and histories, with our separate battles and dreams, for us to end up there, unconsciously battling between ourselves?

Months later, I read in Ziyad’s papers an idea very close to those feelings. He wrote:

Our desire is another defeat in an age of losing battles. Which defeats hurt most, then?

All that happened was destined.

We were two people for one land.

Two prophets to one city.

Here we are two hearts for one woman.

Everything was ready for pain. (Was the world big enough for us?)

We share our pride like an Arab loaf, circular like our wound, a round-tipped bullet fired at a red square where fate is trained to shoot black circles that dizzily telescope until the centre of death

Where the bullet doesn’t miss

Where the bullet shows no mercy

Where one of our hearts shall be.

During those wintery evenings Ziyad sometimes stayed up late writing in his room. I took this as an unmistakeable sign. He had to be in love to return to writing with such passion when he hadn’t written anything for some years.

Sometimes I smiled as the sound of low music came from his room until late at night. It was as if Ziyad wanted to fill his lungs with life, or as if he didn’t trust life completely and feared it would steal something from him while he slept. He always listened to the same tapes; I don’t know where he got them from. Classical music: Vivaldi, Theodorakis. I wasn’t particularly fond of them.

I might spend the whole evening alone in front of the television and would say to myself, ‘He’s also living his obsession. There is summer fever and winter fever. Mine has ended and his begun!’

But how could I know the degree of his madness? Where to get a seismograph to find out what was happening deep inside him? How to do that when his bouts were secret jottings only revealed on paper? My madness was eleven paintings hanging on the walls, testifying against me and shaming me.

Was my obsession really over? No. It just became internalised and without relation to creativity. Sick feelings I squandered uselessly in jealousy and despair. When Ziyad changed his suit, I felt he was expecting you to come by. When he sat writing, he was writing to you. When he left the house it was on a date with you. In the crush of my jealousy, I even forgot the reasons why Ziyad had come to Paris, his meetings and other fixations.

Then came the trip that I have almost forgotten. Perhaps that was the most painful experience of all. I had to leave the two of you together in one city for ten whole days, and given the difficulty of your meeting elsewhere, probably in my house.

I left trying to convince myself that it was an opportunity for all of us to sort out our relationship. One of us had to be absent for the ambiguity between us to be resolved. Of course, deep down I wasn’t convinced by this logic, or at least by this perverse fate that made the lot fall upon me.

It was clear that fate was a partisan for you two. That hurt me a lot. But what was the most painful thing? Knowing that you were with another man, or that he was none other than Ziyad, or that the betrayal would take place in a room in my house where I had not enjoyed you?

How far would you go with him? How far would he go with you? Would our shared memories and values stop him?

I spoke to you a lot about Ziyad, but didn’t tell you what really mattered. Ziyad had been my secret cell, my secret ticket of belonging. He had been my defeats and triumphs, my proofs and convictions. He was the secret life of another lifetime. Would Ziyad betray me?

I started to blame, and perhaps to despise him in advance.

In my mad jealousy I forgot that I had done nothing different with you. I had disavowed
Si
Taher, a man who had once been my commander and my friend. A man who had entrusted me with you as a last wish and died a martyr.

Which one of us was the bigger traitor? He, the one who put his dreams and desires into effect, or me, the one who didn’t, because he failed to find an opportunity? Me, who had been sleeping and waking up with you for months, taking you in my sleep, or him, whom you would willingly give yourself to?

There are cities like women. Their names defeat you in advance. They seduce and bewilder you, fill you up and drain you. Their remembrance strips you of all your plans; your whole project becomes love.

There are cities that weren’t created to be visited and explored alone, for you to sleep and wake up in, and then have breakfast alone.

Cities as beautiful as memory, as close as a tear, as painful as loss. Cities so like you!

Could I have forgotten you in a city called Granada? Your love came with the low white houses and their red-tiled roofs, with the trellises of vines, with the flowering jasmine trees, with the streams that traversed the city. With the water, the sun and the reminiscence of the Arabs.

Your love came with the perfumes, the voices, the faces. The brown skin and deep black hair of the Andalucian women. With wedding dresses, with guitars as passionate as your body, with the poems of Lorca, whom you loved. With the sadness of Abu Firas al-Hamdani, whom I loved.

I felt you were a part of that city, too. Were all Arab cities you? And all Arab memory?

Time flowed on, and you remained like the waters of Granada, glistening with longing, and with a superior taste, unlike water from pipes and taps.

Time flowed on, and your voice echoed like the magical fountains in the ruined castles of Arab memory, when evening suddenly falls over Granada and Granada surprises herself as the lover of an Arab king who has just deserted her.

He was Abu Abdullah, the last Arab lover to kiss her!

Maybe I was that king who did not know how to keep his throne. Maybe I had lost you with the same foolishness, and would weep for you one day as he did.

When Granada fell, and he was oblivious, his mother told him, ‘Cry like a woman over a lost kingdom, for you have not protected it like a man.’

Did I really not protect you? Whom should I have declared war against, I ask you? Against whom, when you two were my memory and my dearest ones? Against whom, when you were my city and citadel?

Why should I be ashamed? Has there been one Arab king or ruler since Abu Abdullah who hasn’t wept for some city?

Fall then, Constantine, this was a time of easy conquest!

Did she really fall that day? That I would never know.

I only knew the date of your last fall, your final fall, which I witnessed thereafter.

What madness to increase the expanse of your love and let you assume the features of that city, too. Like a lunatic, I sat every night writing you letters born out of my wonder, longing and jealousy for you. I would tell you the details of my day and my impressions of a city incredibly like you.

One day I wrote to you:

I want to make love to you here. In a house like your body, painted in Andalucian style.

I want to escape with you from tin-can cities and give your love a home that has the same features as your Arab femininity. A house where my original memory is concealed behind its arches, carved inscriptions and meanderings. A house with a garden shaded by a large lemon tree like those planted by the Arabs in the gardens of their houses in Andalucia.

I want to sit by your side, like I’m sitting here by a pool filled with goldfish, and look upon you in awe.

I inhale your body, like I inhale the scent of the unripe green lemons.

Forbidden fruit, by every tree I pass, I hunger for you.

Many letters I wrote to you – could a writer resist words?

I wanted to garland you with words, to bring you back with them, to join you two in the circle of words closed in my face for being a mere painter. So for your sake I composed letters never before written to woman. Letters that exploded in my mind after fifty years of silence.

Without realising, maybe I started writing this book that day. My passion for you had shifted into the language of those letters, a language I was writing for the first time. I had written to women before you, those who passed through my life in my youth and adolescence. But I didn’t exert myself then looking for the right words. The French language, with its freedom, naturally induced me to speak openly and without complexes or shame. I discovered Arabic afresh with you. I learned to get around its gravity, to submit to its secret seduction, its contours, its allusions.

I was biased towards the letters that resembled you. The feminine ending, the
ha
from the throat and the
he
from the breath, the proud-standing
alif
, the dots strewn over their empty, brown bodies.