The Bridges of Constantine (28 page)

Only an iron railing prevented the fearful drop that no one stopped to consider. Perhaps because people naturally do not like to consider death too much. The immense drop halted nobody but me. Perhaps because I brought my preconceived ideas and inherited memories with me. Or because I walked that way to be alone with the city on a bridge.

Some stupid mistakes should not be made, like having a date with memory on a bridge. Especially when a story forgotten years before is suddenly remembered. The story of a great-grandfather who threw himself off a bridge, perhaps that one. He was special envoy and confidante to one of the beys. But the bey sought his life after hearing reports that he had treasonously plotted against the ruler with some of Constantine’s nobles.

My great-grandfather wasn’t strong enough on his own to stand up to this categorical order for his death. He was also too proud to allow himself to be led in humiliation before the bey. So by the time the bey sent for him, my great-grandfather was a corpse at the bottom of a deep gorge like this. He refused to give the bey the honour of putting him to death.

I heard the story once from my father’s lips, when I asked him for the meaning of our name. It seemed he didn’t like to tell the story. Suicide was a shameful thing and against the religion of pious Constantine. So our family left for the west of Algeria and adopted a name to disguise our origins. We didn’t return to Constantine for a generation or more, bearing the name of another city.

I looked down again. What had I come looking for on a bridge suspended 170 metres above solid ground and crossed by speeding flocks of crows? Perhaps I was looking for traces of an ancestor named Ahmed. Supposedly, he was handsome, rich and learned, and one day he threw everything away from here, leaving his sadness and his wound as an inheritance to our family.

That was Constantine, a city only concerned with how she appeared to others, fiercely protective of her reputation and fearful of the gossip she excelled in. She bought her honour with blood at times, with distance and migration at others. Had she changed? I remembered hearing as a boy about a family that suddenly left Constantine for another city, after the rumour spread that a song (still sung by Fergani today) had been written as a love song to one of its daughters.

The question remained, what had I come to do here on the bridge? Perhaps I had a date with memory, or perhaps that morning just with my painting. I stood in front of it that day without a brush or oils, without nerves or fear of the square of blank canvas. At that instant I wasn’t its maker, painter or creator. I was part of it, even capable of folding myself into its details.

I could have crossed the iron railing that separated me from it, as though crossing the frame and entering the picture to live in it for ever. I would roll down the deep rocky valley as a human speck, a drop of colour in an eternal landscape painting. One that I wanted to paint, but that painted me. Wouldn’t that be the most beautiful end for a painter: merging into the scene of his painting?

I stared into the deep gorge below with its rocky channel carved by the Rummal’s churning slowness. At that instant, I knew that the feminine chasm was drawing me down to the depths for a final erotic death. That might have been my last chance for physical union with Constantine and with the memory of an ancestor with whom I suddenly began to feel a puzzling complicity.

Perhaps the longing to fall and shatter gave me vertigo as I stood suspended on that bridge on my own. I suddenly felt ashamed of the city. I almost apologised for it. Only strangers felt dizzy here. When exactly did Constantine put me in that category?

Even so, I admit I wasn’t ready to die that day. Not that I was clinging on to life, but because I had linked the deep, sweeping sadness that had overwhelmed me since I stepped into the city with another mysterious and powerful emotion.

In my resentfulness and disappointment I had attained a vague sense of serenity and happiness. I had learned how to make fun of the things that annoyed me and confront memory with bitter irony. Didn’t I come here as the result of a crazy decision, possibly in search of madness in a city quite skilled in it? So I secretly began to enjoy the painful game and took care to experience the blows with deliberate masochism. Perhaps that day’s disappointment in the city would become the source of my future madness and genius.

Even so, I decided to escape the bridge that had once been the beginning of my mania. I had been infatuated with it for ages and turned it into the backdrop of my life after surrounding myself with multiple copies, and I suddenly fled.

Did that feeling overtake me when from my vantage point I caught sight of the rocky slopes whose green passes were once dotted with poppy anemones and narcissi? The people of Constantine would visit them every year to welcome spring, laden with pastries, sweets and coffee that the women prepared for the occasion. Now the slopes seemed sad, as if the flowers had left for some inscrutable reason.

Or was the feeling the result of seeing the tomb of Sidi Mohamed of the Crow? He suddenly came to mind and I recalled what I had recently read about him in a book on the history of Constantine. I shuddered. What if, without realising, I had been struck by the curse of Saleh Bey, the greatest of Constantine’s beys, because of the bridge? He had wanted to crown his magnificent architectural achievements and the various reforms he had made to the city by repairing the viaduct bridge – the only link between the city and the outside world and the only one of the five Roman bridges to survive.

According to folklore, the bridge was one of the reasons for Saleh Bey’s tragic death. For on the bridge, he had Sidi Mohamed, a very popular holy man, put to death. When the head of the saint hit the ground, his body was transformed into a crow that flew off towards Saleh Bey’s country house, which was on those slopes. The crow cursed him with a no less painful and unjust death than that of the saint he had killed. Saleh Bey could do nothing but leave his house and lands for ever, in flight from the crow, making do with his house in the city.

So the people called the place Sidi Mohamed of the Crow, and it remained a place of pilgrimage for two centuries. Muslims and Jews visited at the weekends or holidays, when they would spend a whole week wearing pink clothes and performing ceremonies passed down from generation to generation. They offered pigeons in sacrifice and bathed in the warm waters of the rocky pool where tortoises once swam. Pilgrims lived off arrack and submitted to bouts of primitive dancing in circles in the open air to the rhythm of the poor women’s drums.

Yet Constantine did not spurn her bey, who gave her so much status and luxury. Out of beneficence or madness she put the killer and the killed on an equal footing. The tomb of Sidi Mohamed of the Crow became the most famous of all Constantine’s sites of pilgrimage, and that in a city where every street bore the name of a saint. While the name of Saleh Bey alone, among the forty-one beys who had ruled, become immortal. Her most beautiful poetry was written about him, and her most beautiful lament was sung for his tragic death. Although she did not know it, she was still mourning for him today in the black shawls of the women.

Such was Constantine. There was no difference between her curse and her mercy, no divide between her love and her hate, no known measure for her logic. She granted immortality to those she wished and punished those she wished.

Who might make her pay for her madness? Who might make his position towards her clear? In love or hate, guilty or innocent, without confessing that in every situation she was a paradox?

Every day that I spent in the city I became more entangled in her memory. In my evenings with Hassan, during our long, rambling conversations, which often went on very late, I searched for another recipe to help me forget.

In that family atmosphere I had been missing for so long, I searched for a different self-assurance. My presence in the family house, which I knew and which knew me, had an effect on my spirits during those days. Perhaps it was my secret and unexpected prop.

I would return to it every night as if ascending to the far recesses of my childhood to once again become unborn. I hid myself in the body of an imaginary mother, whose place here remained unfilled after thirty years.

During those nights I would remember Ziyad – he had stayed with me in Algiers for a few months when his landlord had refused to renew his lease. At the time I got used to leaving him the bed. I would sleep on a mattress on the floor in another room. Ziyad protested and felt a little embarrassed, thinking I was doing it out of politeness.

I kept stressing that thanks to him I had discovered I preferred sleeping on the floor. The mattress reminded me of my childhood, when for several years I slept next to my mother on the same woollen pallet whose blue colour I still remembered. Every autumn Mother washed and re-stuffed the blue wool mattresses that furnished my bedroom.

I wished I could ask Atiqa to put a mattress on the floor for me in the guest room, like she did with her children. They slept in the other room on a shared mattress that exuded warmth and aroused a desire to slip under the beautiful wool blankets. I was envious, and longed for a time so distant I could no longer recall whether I had really lived it or only imagined it.

But could I reasonably put such a request to Atiqa? She had given me the most beautiful room in her house: the modern bedroom that was arranged more for the benefit of guests than for their married couple’s nights of love.

If I had asked, she would have found no explanation for my perversity, and I would probably have embarrassed her. Atiqa sometimes joined in our late nights and tried to appeal to me, as a civilised man from Paris, to persuade her brother to give up that old Arab house with its backward way of life. She practically apologised for all the things I found beautiful and unusual.

Because I was unable to convince her of my view, nor bold enough to disagree with hers, I just listened to her discussions with Hassan. These almost turned into arguments before she backed down and went to bed. Semi-apologetic, Hassan would say, ‘You can’t persuade a woman who watches
Dallas
on television to live in a house like this and be grateful. They have to stop that soap as long as they can’t give people decent homes and a better life.’

I envied Hassan’s sense of contentment and admired his philosophy of life.

He would say, ‘To be happy, you should look at those worse off. If you’ve got a piece of bread and look at someone who has nothing, you’ll be happy and thank God. But if you raise your head and look at those with cake, you’ll never be satisfied. You’ll be made miserable by your discovery and die crushed!’

In Hassan’s view, living in a house like that, with all its bad points (which at times were annoying) and its minor inconveniences surpassed by the modern age, was still better than what thousands had to endure. Tens of thousands, rather, who didn’t have a spacious house like that where they could live alone with their wife and children. No, they often had to share a cramped apartment with relatives for years.

That was Hassan. He looked at things head on. Everything he had learned he had acquired as a boy from the blackboard. He was happy with that way of looking at things, which was also down to his mentality as a badly paid teacher with meagre dreams.

What could he dream about, a teacher of Arabic who spent his days explaining literary texts and relating the lives of ancient writers and poets to his pupils whose grammatical and spelling mistakes he corrected? He didn’t have the time, or didn’t dare explain what was happening in front of him, to correct bigger mistakes made in front of his eyes in the name of words that had suddenly dropped out of the language and entered the lexicon of slogans and bids.

Deep down there was something bitter about Hassan, apparent in all the details of his life. He kept it to himself, however. He was clearly exhausted, floundering in the problems of his six children and his young wife, who dreamed of a life other than Constantine’s straitened existence. Hassan, though, didn’t dare to dream or, more exactly, in those days he was dreaming of finding someone with the connections to get him a new fridge, no more!

When I learned of his simple but hard-to-obtain dream, I was sad to realise that we weren’t just backward when compared to Europe and France – as I’d thought, and a manageable and understandable matter – but we were also backward when compared to the way we had been under colonialism fifty or more years earlier. Back then, our hopes were more beautiful, our dreams bigger. Today, it would be enough to study people’s faces and listen to them talking or look into shop windows to understand that. Back then we were a country that exported dreams at every news broadcast to all the world’s peoples.

Constantine alone exported more and better newspapers, magazines and books than the institutions of the nation as a whole did now. Back then we had intellectuals and scientists, poets, wits and writers who filled us with pride at our Arabism. No one would buy the papers and hoard them in the cupboard any more, as there was nothing left in the papers worth preserving. Nobody sat with a book any more to learn something. Cultural despair was a mass phenomenon, an infection that you might catch flicking through a book. Back then books were always right and we could speak as eloquently as those books. Now even books lied, just like the papers. So our honesty had diminished; our eloquence had died, since conversation revolved around scarce consumer goods.

When I said all that to Hassan, he looked at me in shock, as though he’d discovered something that had never occurred to him before. With some sadness he said, ‘True. They’ve set us small goals unrelated to the issues of the day, illusory individual triumphs like finding a small apartment after years of waiting, getting a fridge or being able to buy a car, or just a set of tyres! No one has the time and energy to go further or ask for more.