The Bridges of Constantine (32 page)

After a little thought, I found that bed was the only place I could escape you, or at least meet you in pleasure rather than pain. Even so, would I really be bold enough to make you present today, at the very time I knew you were making yourself beautiful for another man? Would I be bold enough to make you present that morning? Would my body truly forgive you, on a whim, for all past and future disappointments? That was madness upon madness!

But in the end wasn’t that what you wanted when you said, ‘I’ll be yours that night’?

I felt like having you that morning. As though I wanted to steal everything from you before I lost you for good. After that day you would never be mine. The stupid painful game, which was never a hobby prior to you, would come to an end.

My encounter with you that morning was painful. Full of ferocity and dark bitterness. Full of resentment and crazed longing.

If only you had been mine. Ah, if only you had been mine that morning. In that large bed, empty and cold without you. In that spacious house haunted by memories of a severed childhood and the suppressed longings of a youth that had quickly passed.

If you were mine, I would have you like I’d never had a woman here. In a moment of madness, I would squeeze you with my one hand. I would turn you into pieces, into raw materials, into the remnants of a woman, a paste fit to mould into a woman, into anything other than you, anything less arrogant and wilful, less tyrannical and oppressive.

I, who had never raised my hand to a woman’s face, might have hit you that day till it hurt and then made love to you till it hurt. Then I would have sat next to your body begging its forgiveness. I would kiss every part of you, effacing with my lips the redness of your hennaed limbs and tattooing you with savage kisses. Perhaps when you awoke you would find me tattooed on your body, in that blue colour only ever found on the skin!

Where did all that madness come from? Did I want to be alone with you and have you before him? Or did I know, by intuition or prior decision, that in spending the last shudders of my desire with you, I would cast you out of this bed for ever?

My problem with you wasn’t simply desire. If it had been, I would have resolved it that day one way or another. There were plenty of women that a man could easily have. There were plenty of half-open doors waiting for a man to push. There were female neighbours who crossed my path in those shared Arab houses, and whose secret desire for love I well knew. Over time I had learned how to read the looks of coy women, with their excessive decorum and polite words. But I would ignore the looks and their wordless invitation to stray.

Today, I no longer know whether I behaved like that on principle or out of stupidity and a sense of nausea. In truth, I felt pity for them. I despised their husbands who had no justification for strutting like peacocks. Except that they had a plump hen at home, whom probably no one would touch in disgust. Or another, tastier one, domesticated according to tradition, whose master wouldn’t expect that her short wings still flapped instinctively.

The idiocy of cocks! If all the women were chaste and all the men guarded their honour, who were they all fooling around with, then? Didn’t all the men boast of their conquests when they got together? Didn’t each of them make a fool of the others while not realising they were making a fool out of themselves? I really hated the atmosphere of hypocrisy and inherited corruption.

If my gaze should catch a woman’s, I would recall something you once said. It was when I expressed my astonishment at the contents of your first novel and started interrogating you for a suspicious memory. You said, ‘Don’t look too hard. There’s nothing between the lines. A woman writer is beyond suspicion because she is open by nature. Writing cleanses all that has stuck to us since birth. Look for dirt somewhere other than literature!’

Inherited corruption was everywhere around me, in the eyes of most of the women, who craved a man – any man. It was in the nerves of men who were taut with accumulated desire and ready to snap in the face of the first woman.

But I had to resist my animal desire that day, and not let that city draw me to the depths. There were principles I couldn’t renounce, like having an affair with a married woman. Perhaps that explained my recent sadness. For I knew that that day another reason had been added to all the others that made our relationship impossible. You would never be mine after that day.

My right hand didn’t shame me that day. I felt a sense of relief as I discovered that, despite all that had happened, I still respected my body. What mattered in these situations was not to lose respect for the body and give it up to the first tramp. What could we inhabit afterwards if we were to humiliate it and it refused to forget?

I suddenly threw off the covers and went over to the window. I opened it as if to let your ghost out for ever and let light enter the room.

In a city haunted by magicians and
jinn
, perhaps you were a
jinn
who would creep in to bed with me in the dark and tell me tall tales, promising me a host of magical solutions to my tragedies. Then you would disappear with the first rays of the sun, leaving me to my obsessions and doubts.

Did your ghost really leave my bed, my room and my memory that day? Did it escape out of the window? I don’t know.

All I know is that Constantine came in through the same window that I rarely opened. The call to prayer from many minarets all at once startled me. I was rooted to the spot as people rushed in every direction. The Sidi Rachid bridge also seemed absorbed in its constant motion, like a woman getting ready for some event, caught up in its daily worries and weekend enthusiasm.

That morning in particular, the bridge seemed too busy for my sadness, which I felt amounted to betrayal and ingratitude. In my turn, I decided not to flatter it and closed the window in its face.

All of a sudden, I was struck by an overwhelming desire to paint, a raging hunger for colour that almost matched the violence and intensity of my earlier sexual desire.

I no longer needed a woman. My body had been healed and the ache had moved to my fingertips. Ultimately, the bed wasn’t my pleasure ground or the arena for the rituals of my madness. Only the white space stretched between wooden runners would allow me to empty myself out. I wanted to pour my curse on to it, spit out the bitterness of a lifetime of disappointments.

I emptied out a memory that had developed a penchant for black since I aligned myself with a city that had foolishly been wrapping herself in blackness for centuries and that, in contradiction, had been hiding her face under a white triangular scarf of seduction.

Greetings, impossible triangle. Greetings, city confined between the unholy trinity of religion, sex and politics. You swallowed up so many men under your black robe. Not one of them expected you to match the Bermuda Triangle’s desire for victims.

Ashen thoughts multiplied in my mind that morning. My rage mounted as time progressed towards Hassan and Nasser’s arrival to take me to that house for your wedding. Rage and frustration paralysed my arm and even prevented me from shaving and getting ready for the wedding-funeral.

I was pacing up and down the room, as strung out as an addict lacking his shot of heroin.

How had I failed to anticipate my sick need to hold a brush that day, the overwhelming desire to paint? That irresistible desire that became a pain in the fingertips, a bodily tension that passed from one limb to another?

I wanted to paint and paint until I became completely empty and fell down dead or unconscious in exhaustion and ecstasy.

Most likely I wouldn’t paint bridges or viaducts. I might paint women in black shawls with white kerchiefs over their faces, and lying eyes promising a certain joy. Black, just like white, was mostly a colour that lied. I might not paint anything and just die standing, impotent before a blank canvas.

Was there anything more brilliant than signing a blank canvas with blankness and withdrawing on tiptoe, as long as we didn’t sign anything in the end?

Only fate signs our life and does what it will with us.

So why try to deceive things, then? Why evade them?

Were you not my painting? What would be the use of my having painted you a thousand times if someone else left his signature and fingerprints on you that day, his name on your ID papers? What was the use of the dozens of canvases I covered with you compared with the bed containing your body and immortalising your eternal femininity?

What was the point of what I painted, if as usual someone else’s signature appeared in my place?

At that pinnacle of despair, the telephone suddenly rang and brought me out of my solitary obsessions for a moment. I hurried to a distant room to answer it.

It was Hassan. Without introduction he asked, ‘What are you doing?’

I answered, somewhat truthfully, ‘I was dozing.’

‘That’s OK then,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be ready and have been waiting for me for a while. I wanted to let you know I might be a bit late. There’s a small problem I have to sort out.’

Startled, I asked him, ‘What problem?’

‘Guess what Nasser’s come up with today? He doesn’t want to attend his sister’s wedding.’

My curiosity growing, I said, ‘Why?’

‘He’s against the wedding. He doesn’t want to meet the guests, the groom or even his uncle!’

I almost interrupted with, ‘He’s got a point,’ but just asked, ‘Where is he now?’

‘I left him at the mosque. He said that he’d rather spend the day there than with those pim—’

For the first time I laughed from the heart and couldn’t stop myself commenting aloud, ‘Nasser is great! I swear he’s one of us.’

Hassan cut me short, however, in a tone of reproach and bewilderment. ‘What! Have you gone mad too? It’s not done. Have you ever heard of someone not going to his sister’s wedding? What would people say?’

‘People? People? Let them say what they want. Look man, for the love of your parents, let’s—’

Before I could say anything more, he said, ‘Stay in the house, then, and I’ll come by as soon as I’ve finished. We’ll talk about it later. I’m calling from a café and there are lots of people around. Understand?’ He went on, ‘There’s some food in the kitchen that Atiqa cooked for you.’

I hung up and went back to my room.

I didn’t want to eat. I just had a morning thirst and felt that after the phone call my bitterness had a hint of happiness.

Nasser’s stance made me feel elated. There was someone else who, without knowing, shared my sadness and, in his own way, stood with me against your wedding. Nasser was a thoroughbred, worthy of being
Si
Taher’s son. I hadn’t met him as an adult, but expected him to be stubborn and direct like his father. And if he was truly like his father, Hassan would never succeed in making him change his mind.

I still remembered
Si
Taher’s stubbornness, and the absolutely unshakeable decisions he took. Back then, I found something dictatorial about such an attitude and the arrogance of the commander. But I came to realise that the early days of the Revolution needed men like
Si
Taher, stubborn and totally self-confident, able to impose their will on others. This was not out of love for glory or control, but to unify the Revolution and prevent disagreements and personal considerations from holding sway, so that its sparks were not scattered and taken by the winds.

The memory of
Si
Taher returned suddenly at a moment I had not prepared for him. His form came back, painful as the bullets they emptied into his body one day and that claimed him a few months before he could witness Algeria’s independence. Where was he on this exceptional day, another one he would miss? Was it his fate to miss two momentous occasions?

He left as he had come, before his time, as if he knew he hadn’t been created for the time to come.

A bitter realisation struck me: not one of those who loved you would attend your wedding. Many of those you had delighted would be absent –
Si
Taher, Ziyad and Nasser too. Why had the lot fallen on me alone, why had fate led me to you? Why had it lured me here, in the name of memory and nostalgia and that mad, impossible love? I said the words that filled the pockets of dreams: ‘I will be yours as long as we are in Constantine.’

How had I believed you and come? I knew you were lying, giving me white clouds for a long summer. But who could resist the beautiful rain of lies? There were lies we tried to believe so as to confound predictions. But when the rains poured inside us, who would dry the tears of the sky?

The truth is you were a sadist and I knew it. One day I said to you, ‘If Hitler had had a daughter, by rights she would have been you!’ You laughed at the time, the laugh of a mighty ruler confident of his power. With the naivety of a victim I commented, ‘I don’t know what led me to love you when I’m a fugitive from the rule of tyrants. After all this life, could I have fallen in love with a tyrannical woman?’

You gave a sudden smile and after a brief silence you said, ‘You’re amazing when you talk. You make subjects to write about spark inside me. One day I’ll write that idea.’

So write it then some day; it’s certainly good material for a novel!