The Bridges of Constantine (33 page)

That morning, I turned to drink to forget my failure with you.

In that room furnished with an empty bed, a window overlooking minarets and bridges and a table with no painting supplies, the only means of deliverance I could find were a few sheets of paper, some pens and one of the bottles of whiskey that I had brought for Hassan, unaware of his return to the faith. They were still waiting in my bag. I pulled one out and drank a toast to Ziyad and
Si
Taher, and to Constantine.

I recalled a play I had enjoyed once and wrote at the top of the page without much thought, ‘Cheers to you, Constantine.’ I laughed at the part I was playing in this city where alcohol was forbidden but there was every reason to drink.

At the time, I didn’t know that I was condensing my failure into a few words that might do as the title for this book, the idea of which was perhaps born that day.

I felt like defying you and that city and that lying homeland.

I raised my glass, brimful of you. Cheers to your memory, as good at making one forget as this drink. Cheers to your eyes, created to lie. Cheers to a wedding night ready for crying. Cheers to my tearless crying.

You reconciled me with God, and once made me worship Him again. But you would betray me on the eve of Friday, rule shedding my blood lawful
and shoot me with a traitor’s bullet.

Why shouldn’t I get drunk? Which one of us would be more irreligious?

In fact, I wasn’t a big drinker. Alcohol was the drink for extremes of happiness and sadness. That’s why it was connected with you and your crazy mood swings. Every time I drank, I was recording an event in our never-ending affair.

I opened a final bottle in your honour and committed my final act of madness. I didn’t think I would get drunk again after that day, because I was going to wash my hands of you from then on and bid you farewell in my own way.

Only the business with Nasser was of any interest now. Your brother was praying in one of the mosques of the city in order, like me, to forget that everyone would come, one after another, to the reception that night and that there would be someone who would enjoy you out of view.

Really, I was getting drunk as a toast to him, no one else. Yes, Nasser. Me, you and Constantine. A city complicit with us in extremism and madness. A sadistic city whose pleasure was to torture her children. She who would become pregnant without trying and give birth to us like a sea turtle that lays its young on the shore and heads off in indifference, leaving them to the mercy of the waves and the seabirds.

‘Think, because God won’t do it for you.’ So said the sea turtle when abandoning its young. Here we were without thoughts, seeking our fate between the bar and the mosque.

We were turtles sleeping on our backs. We were turned over to prevent us running away, turned over in an effort to overthrow logic.

Birth in ancient cities was very like death. There we would be born and die in the crosswinds.

There were so many orphan turtles in that city.

When Hassan arrived later and caught me sitting writing at the table with a half-empty bottle of whiskey in front of me, he almost gasped in shock. He stared at me in astonishment, as if by opening the bottle I had released a demon or genie into the house.

I tried to tease him and said sarcastically, ‘Why are you looking at me like that? Haven’t you seen a bottle before?’

But he was in no mood for fun and took the bottle to the kitchen, cursing and talking to himself with words that didn’t reach me.

When he came back, he said in a tone tinged with despair and traces of worry for Nasser, ‘What is it with you two? The place has gone mad. One of you prays; one of you gets drunk. What are we supposed to do?’

I was drawn to an expression I had not heard for several years, ‘the place has gone mad’, by which he meant the city was in uproar or witnessing something exceptional. The meaning was, in fact, highly sexual. I smiled as I realised once again the power of the city to insert sexual imagery into everything. And with startling innocence.

I raised an eye towards him and said, ‘This is Algeria, Hassan. Some pray, some get drunk and all the while the rest “go mad”.’

Hassan seemed unwilling to continue the discussion with me. Perhaps he had spent too long trying to convince Nasser and couldn’t face arguing any more. So he interrupted and said, ‘I’ll go and make you a coffee to clear your head and sober you up. Then we can talk. People are expecting us. Some of them haven’t seen you for years. You can’t turn up like this!’

When he came back with the coffee a few minutes later, I asked him, ‘What did you do about Nasser?’

He said, ‘He promised me he’d go by at dinner time, just to please me, but wouldn’t stay long. I still doubt he’ll actually turn up. I don’t understand why he’s being so stubborn. After all, he only has one sister, and it just won’t do for him not to appear with her at her wedding.’

Madness!

I sipped the coffee to sober up, as Hassan put it. Yet at the same time I felt I was getting drunker, or madder, as I listened to him. I asked him why Nasser was boycotting the wedding and the conversation that ensued touched on a number of matters.

He said, ‘He disagrees with his uncle. He thinks he’s derived a lot of benefit from
Si
Taher’s name but didn’t give much thought to what happened to his brother’s wife and children. The wedding is self-serving and only about political ambitions. Nasser is against his uncle’s choice of a man who has a bad reputation, politically and morally. Everyone’s talking about the commission he receives from his various deals, about his bank accounts abroad, about his Algerian and foreign mistresses. Plus, this is his second marriage and his children are nearly the same age as his new bride.’

‘Did you think it was a normal marriage?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know on what basis you want to judge it. According to how we think here, it’s normal, and won’t be the first of its kind, or the last. Most important men here have more than one mistress, and all of them, in one way or another, have got rid of wives and children to marry a younger woman more beautiful and cultured than the first. You can’t stop a man whose star is on the rise from adding a woman to his household, or a guy who’s landed a position he never dreamed of from seeking the girl of his dreams.

‘I just tried to convince Nasser that his uncle didn’t necessarily intend to put an end to his sister’s future with this marriage. That anybody else would grab it with open arms. It’s the only way for him to solve his and the girl’s problems in one go. It’ll save him a lot of headaches.’

I asked him, ‘If you had a daughter, and that man asked for her hand in marriage, would you agree?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Why not? It’s a permissible marriage. What should be forbidden is some people’s modern way of doing things. They despatch their daughter, wife or sister to get hold of an official document for them or to put in a request for an apartment or trading licence. Yet they know that no one here gives you anything for nothing. The ordinary people have created their own currency to meet their needs. Pay with a woman and take what you will!’

‘Is that true?’ I mumbled.

‘It’s happening now in plenty of cities,’ he replied, ‘especially the capital. There, any young girl can go to some party office and obtain an apartment or some other government service. Of course, everyone knows where to go and whom to see. That person provides apartments and services for women and slogans for the people in equal measure. It’s enough to see the look of the girls going in to understand the whole thing.’

I asked him, ‘Who told you about this?’

Grumpily, he said, ‘Who? I heard and saw it for myself a few months ago when I went to the capital to meet a friend who’s a party official. I thought he might help me leave teaching. Imagine, not even the doorman could be bothered to talk to me. I wasted my breath explaining to him that I had come from Constantine especially. Only women were worthy of attention there. When I started to complain to the office messenger, he snapped at me that most of the female visitors were officials in the party unions or activists. When one of them went by I nearly asked him which “member” they were active with exactly. But I kept quiet.

‘Come on, man. Now everything goes via women during late nights and special sessions. So, if I had the choice, I’d marry my daughter to someone who could get her anything with one phone call, rather than to someone like me who’d live with her in misery like I do, or join in the corruption and send her knocking at a hundred doors.’

Maybe Hassan noticed the signs of shock and confusion on my face. He added, as if to qualify and ease my disappointment, ‘In any case, it wouldn’t happen. Even if I offered my daughter to
Si
— —, he would be sure to refuse her. They only get married to each other. So-and-so only wants the daughter of so-and-so, so that “our oil only mixes with our flour!” and they ensure their moves from one position of power to another. In such an atmosphere, how do you expect an ordinary young man to build his future? All the girls are on the lookout for officials and managers, men who’ve already made it. The men themselves know this and set more and more conditions, while the number of unmarried women gets bigger every day. It’s the law of supply and demand.

‘If you understood that things were like this, you’d definitely forgive
Si
Sharif. What matters is that he protects his niece and ensures her and himself as happy a future as possible.

‘As for the groom being a thief who robs the state, what do you want to do? All of them are crooks and cheats. Some are found out, others just know how to keep up the appearance of propriety!’

I was shocked by what I was hearing.

I almost said that in the end he was right, and maybe
Si
Sharif was too. I didn’t know.

But there was something about the wedding I just couldn’t accept.

Chapter Six

For your wedding
I wore my black suit.

Black is an incredible colour. It can be worn at both weddings and funerals.

Why had I chosen black? Perhaps because when I fell in love with you I became a sufi, and you became my spiritual order and path. Perhaps, too, because it was the colour of my silence.

Every colour has its language. I once read that black was an affront to patience. I also read it was a colour that contained its own opposite. I also heard a famous fashion designer say that he always wore black because it set a barrier between him and others. Today I could tell you a great deal about that colour. But the words of the fashion designer are enough. I wanted to put a barrier between all those I would meet, all the flies who would come and land at your wedding table, and me.

Perhaps I also wanted to put a barrier between you and me.

I wore my black outfit to silently counter your white dress. Studded with pearls and flowers, it had been specially made for you at a Parisian couturier, or so the rumour said.

Would it be possible for a painter to choose his colour impartially?

I looked elegant – sadness has an elegance too. The mirror confirmed this, and Hassan’s looks. He suddenly had faith in me again and said in the Algerian accent I adored, ‘That’s how we like you Khaled. Knock ’em dead!’

I looked at him and nearly said something.

At the gate, open for cars and the arriving crowds,
Si
Sharif greeted me with an embrace. ‘Hello,
Si
Khaled, hello. You bring blessings. Thank you for coming. You are our happiness today.’

Once again, I summarised that absurd situation in a few words and said, ‘All things are blessed.’

I masked my face with happiness and tried to keep it up for the whole evening.

The house was filled with trilling cries of joy. My lungs were filled with the smoke of the cigarettes that I lit and that lit me. My heart was full of grief. I learned automatically to put a false smile on my lips and laughed with the others. I sat down with people I knew and those I didn’t. I talked about things I knew and others I didn’t. That way I wasn’t alone with you for a second. That way I wasn’t suddenly surprised by you inside me and didn’t collapse.

I said hello to the groom, who kissed me with the affection of a long-lost friend.

‘So you’ve made it to Algeria, sir! If it wasn’t for this wedding we wouldn’t have seen you!’

I tried to forget that I was talking to your husband, a man talking to me out of courtesy, hurriedly, perhaps thinking about the moment he would be alone with you at the end of the night.

I looked at his cigar, extra long for the occasion, the blue silk suit he was wearing – or that was wearing him – with the elegance of one accustomed to silk. I tried not to stop and think about his body. I tried not to remember. I distracted myself with the faces of the guests . . . and you appeared.

You entered in a procession of women, professionals at joy and nuptials as much as I was a professional in painting and sadness.

I was seeing you for the first time after all those months of absence, passing close and distant, like a shooting star. With a heavy dress and heavy steps you walked among the trills of joy and the drumbeats. A song scratched my memory and took me back to being a child running around the old houses of Constantine with other processions of women behind other brides about whom I knew nothing at the time.