The Bridges of Constantine (35 page)

Perhaps I had spent too long in the city and committed the stupid mistake of coming within burning closeness to dreams. Now, day after day and failure after failure, I would be cured of the power of her name over me and lose my beautiful illusions. But not without pain. At that moment, I only wanted the city to provide a bullet of mercy.

So I accepted the cries of joy that arose at that early hour of dawn to bless your petticoat sullied with your innocence, the last shot fired in my face by the city. Without a silencer or a muffled conscience, I received it frozen, with the astonished look of a corpse, while I watched them competing around me to touch your shift on display.

There they were offering you to me as a painting splattered with blood, in proof of my ultimate impotence, in proof of their other crime.

I didn’t move or protest. A spectator at a bullfight cannot change the logic of things and side with the bull. If that were so, he should have stayed at home and not gone to the
corrida
, which existed to praise the matador.

Something about the atmosphere evoked the bullfight. The ululations and the elegance, the music to mark the ‘consummation’ and the cries directed at a slip smeared with blood reminded me of its rites. A beautiful death would be arranged for the bull who entered the arena to dance music and died to it under deadly, decorated swords, entranced by the colour red and the elegance of his killer.

Which of us was the bull? Was it you or me who was colour blind and saw only the red colour of your blood? Which of us was the bull circling the ring of your love with the pride of a creature only conquered by deceit, who knew his death was preordained?

In truth, your blood embarrassed me and made me ashamed. I felt torn.

Hadn’t I always been desperate to know the end of your story with him, the one who took you from me? Perhaps he had taken everything from you.

The question had occupied and haunted me to the point of madness since the day I put Ziyad in front of you and put you before your other destiny.

Did you open up the gates of your fortress to him, lower your high towers and surrender to his masculine seduction?

Perhaps you left your childhood to me and your womanhood to him?

The answer had come to me after a year of torture. There it was at last, a sticky, fresh red rose, a moment old. There it was, the answer I didn’t expect, intruding, shaming. So why the sadness?

What hurt me most that night? Was it knowing that I had wronged Ziyad with my doubts, and that he, the most worthy of you that night, had died without enjoying you? Or was it knowing that you were just a city taken by military force, like every Arab city?

What annoyed me most that night? That I finally knew your riddle, or that I knew I would know nothing more about you after that day, even if I were to spend a lifetime talking to you and read you a thousand times?

Were you still a virgin, your sins merely ink on paper?

Why had you made me believe all those things? Why did you give me your book as though giving me a dagger for jealousy?

Why did you teach me to love you line by line, lie by lie, and to violate you on paper?

Let it be.

My consolation now was that among all my failures, you were the most beautiful.

‘Why are you sad this morning?’ asked Hassan.

I tried not to ask him why he was happy.

I knew that Nasser’s absence and boycott of the wedding the day before had spoiled his mood. But it didn’t prevent him from getting into Fergani’s songs, laughing or talking at length to people he had not met before. I was observing him and quite happy at his naive happiness.

Hassan was happy that doors so rarely open to the common people were finally opening for him, that he had been invited to the wedding, which he would now be able to talk about for weeks with his friends, describing the guests, the food and what the bride was wearing to those who asked.

His wife could also forget that she had borrowed the clothes and jewels she had worn to the wedding from neighbours and relatives. She in turn could start boasting to everyone about the opulence she had seen, as if she had suddenly become part of it just because she had been invited to gawp at the wealth of others.

Suddenly he said, ‘
Si
Sharif has invited us for lunch tomorrow. Don’t forget to be home around noon so we can go together.’

In an absent voice I said to him, ‘I’m going back to Paris tomorrow.’

He cried, ‘How can you go back tomorrow? You must stay at least another week with us. What’s waiting for you there?’

I tried to make him believe I had a number of commitments and had begun to tire of my stay in Constantine.

But he pressed, ‘That’s wrong, brother. At least stay for lunch with
Si
Sharif tomorrow and then leave.’

I replied in a firm tone that he didn’t understand, ‘It’s finished. I’m going tomorrow.’

I liked to talk to him in the accent of Constantine. With every word, I felt that a long time would pass until I might say it again.

As though convincing me of the need not to refuse the invitation, Hassan said, ‘I swear,
Si
Sharif is a good guy. Despite his position, he’s still true to our old friendship. You know that some people here say he might become a minister. Perhaps God will grant us some relief through him that day.’

Hassan said the last sentence in a barely audible voice, as though to himself.

Poor Hassan! My poor brother to whom God gave no relief after that. Was it just naivety that made him ignorant of the fact that the wedding was nothing more than a deal, that
Si
Sharif would have to get something in return? We wouldn’t marry our daughters to high-ranking officers without prior intentions.

Any benefit Hassan might derive from
Si
Sharif’s prospective post was simply an illusion. The believer starts with himself, and years might pass before he got around to giving a few crumbs to Hassan.

I asked him in fun, ‘Have you also started dreaming about becoming an ambassador?’

As though the question had somehow hurt him, he said, ‘What misery, man! Too late for that. All I want is to get out of teaching and land a decent job in any cultural or media organisation. A job to support me and my family in a half-normal way. How do you expect the eight of us to survive on my salary? I can’t even afford to buy a car. Where would I get the millions to buy one? When I think about the luxury cars lined up at the wedding yesterday, I feel sick and lose the desire to teach. I’m tired of that profession; there are no material or moral rewards. The times of “the teacher almost being a prophet” have changed. Today, as one of my colleagues puts it, “the teacher’s no more than a rag”.

‘We’ve become everyone’s rag. The teacher goes on the bus just like his pupils. He has to insert his ticket and stamp it just like them. People curse him in front of them. Then he goes home, like that colleague, to prepare his classes and correct homework in a two-room flat that eight or more people live in.

‘At the same time there are people who own two or three flats thanks to their job or connections. He can meet his mistresses in them or lend the keys to someone who’ll open other doors for him.

‘Good for you, Khaled, that you live far from these worries in your high-class neighbourhood in Paris. You don’t have to worry about what’s happening in the world!’

Ah, Hassan, when I remember our conversation that day, the bitterness congeals in my throat. It becomes a raw wound, tears of regret and grief.

I could have helped you more, Hassan, that’s true.

He would say, ‘Ask for something, Khaled, while you’re here. Weren’t you a fighter? Didn’t you lose your arm in the war? Ask for a shop, a piece of land or a van. They won’t turn you down. It’s your right. Give it to me, if you want, to support myself and the kids. You’re known and respected. No one knows me. It’s crazy for you not to take what’s rightfully yours from this nation. It’s not charity they’re giving you. Plenty of people can prove they were fighters, but they did nothing during the Revolution. Your body is your proof.’

Yes, Hassan. You didn’t understand that that was the only difference between them and me. You didn’t understand that it was no longer possible, after all these years and all the suffering, for me to bow my head to anyone, even if in exchange for a patriotic gift. I might have done that right after independence, but today it was impossible.

There’s not long left now, my brother. Not long left now for me to bow my head before I die.

I want to remain like that before them, plunged like a dagger in their consciences. I want them to be ashamed when they meet me. For them to lower their heads and ask how I am, in the knowledge that I know all about them and am a witness to their baseness.

Ah, if only you knew, Hassan! If only you knew the pleasure of walking the streets with your head held high, to be able to meet anyone, an ordinary person or a VIP, without feeling shame.

Today there are people who can’t walk the streets, when before, all the streets were reserved for them and their convoys of official cars.

I said nothing to Hassan. I just promised, as a preliminary step, that I’d buy him a car. I said, ‘Come with me and choose a car that suits you. Take it with you from France. I don’t want you to live feeling like this any more.’

Hassan was as happy as a child that day. I felt that was his great dream, one that he had been unable to fulfil and unable to request from me. But how could I have known that, as I hadn’t visited him for years?

When I remember Hassan today, only that gesture brings a little joy to my heart, because I made him briefly happy and gave him respite for a few years. A few years I never imagined would be the last ones.

Hassan returned to the subject. ‘Do you really insist on going tomorrow?’

I said, ‘Yes. It’s wiser that I go tomorrow.’

‘Then you must call
Si
Sharif today and apologise to him. He might misinterpret your leaving and get upset.’

I thought a little and found he was right. I said to Hassan, ‘Call
Si
Sharif for me and I’ll apologise to him.’

I expected that would be that, but
Si
Sharif was welcoming and embarrassed me with his kindness. He insisted I come and visit him, even if right then.

He said, ‘Come and have lunch with us today, then. What matters is seeing you before you go. Plus you can give your present to the newly-weds yourself this evening before you leave.’

There was no way out of it. Once again I had to face my fate with you. And I had decided to hasten my departure so as to escape an atmosphere which, in one way or another, centred around you.

There I was, once again putting on my black suit and carrying a painting that you stood before one day and that became the reason for all that happened to me afterwards. I went to the lunch with Hassan.

My legs carried me, once again, towards you. I knew I would meet you that time. I had an intuition that we wouldn’t miss that date.

What did
Si
Sharif say that day? What did I say, and whom did I meet? What was put in front of us to eat? I no longer remember.

I was living the last moments of loving you. Nothing interested me right then but seeing you and ending it with you at the same time. But I feared your love. I feared it would reignite from the ashes once more. Grand passion remains frightening and risky even in its death throes.

You arrived.

The most painful, the most crazy, the most ironic moments were those when I stood to say hello and give you two innocent pecks on the cheek. I congratulated you on your marriage using all the right words for such an incredible situation.

How much strength I needed, how much patience and dissimulation, to make the others imagine that I had not met you before, other than one passing encounter, and that you weren’t the woman who had turned my life upside down. The woman who had shared my empty bed for several months, and who had – until the previous day – been mine!

How good an actor I had to be to give you that painting without any further comment, without any explanation, as if it wasn’t the painting that marked the start of my affair with you, twenty-five years ago.

You gave an admirable performance too as you unwrapped it and looked at it in wonder, as if seeing it for the first time. I could only ask in the secret complicity that had once joined us, ‘Do you like bridges?’

A brief silence enveloped us, which seemed as long to me as the wait for a death sentence or a pardon. Then you lifted your eyes towards me to pronounce judgement. ‘Yes. I love them!’

How much happiness you gave me at that moment with your words. I felt you were sending me the last sign of love. I felt you were giving me ideas for future paintings and nights of fantasy and that, despite everything, you would remain faithful to our shared memory and to a city that was complicit with us and extended all these bridges to bring us together.

But were you really my beloved? At that moment another man was next to you, devouring you with two eyes not sated from a whole night of making love. At that moment when all the talk was about the cities you would visit on your honeymoon, I said my farewells in silence for your final departure from my heart.