The Bridges of Constantine (5 page)

Read this book to the end. Afterwards, you might stop writing fake novels. Review our story afresh. One shock after another, one wound after another. Our meagre literature has known no greater story, nor witnessed a more beautiful ruin.

Chapter Two

The day we met
was extraordinary.

Fate was no extra. Right from the beginning it played the lead. Didn’t it bring us together from different cities, from another time and another memory, for the opening of an art exhibition in Paris?

I was the artist that day; you were a visitor, curious in more ways than one. You weren’t exactly a young art lover, nor was I a man who felt threatened by younger women. What brought you there that day? What made me stare at your face? Admittedly, I was drawn to faces, because only our faces reveal us and give us away. I could love or hate because of a face.

Even so, I am not fool enough to say I fell in love with you at first sight. Let’s say I was in love with you before first sight. There was something familiar about you, something that attracted me to your features. I was already disposed to love them, as if I had once loved a woman who looked like you, or had always been ready to love a woman just like you.

Out of all the other faces, yours haunted me. As your white dress moved from picture to picture, my incredulity and curiosity also turned white. The gallery, filled with visitors and colours, became completely white.

Could love be born from a colour we have not necessarily loved?

White suddenly drew near and started talking in French with another young woman I hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps when white has long black hair, it obscures other shades.

Looking at one of the paintings, White said, ‘I prefer abstract art.’

The colourless one replied, ‘Personally, I prefer to understand what I’m looking at.’

In preferring to understand all she saw, the stupidity of the colourless one didn’t surprise me. Only White surprised me – how uncharacteristic to prefer the obscure!

Before that day, I had never been partial towards the colour white. It had never been my favourite colour. I disliked categorical colours. But at that moment, I inclined towards you without thinking and found myself saying to that young woman, as though continuing a sentence you had begun, ‘Art is not necessarily what we understand. It is what stirs us.’

The two of you looked at me in surprise. Snatching a glance before you said anything, you spotted the empty sleeve of my jacket, the cuff tucked into the pocket in shame. It was my card, my identity papers.

You stretched out a hand in greeting and said with a warmth that took me aback, ‘I’d like to congratulate you on the exhibition.’

Before your words could register, my gaze was caught by the bracelet adorning your bare wrist. With its plaited yellow gold and distinctive engraving, it had to be a piece of Constantine jewellery. One of those heavy bands that in the past were always part of a bride’s trousseau and were for ever found on the wrists of women in eastern Algeria. Without completely taking my eyes off the bracelet I took your hand. My memory instantly travelled a whole lifetime back to my mother’s wrist, which was never without such a bracelet.

I was seized by an ambiguous feeling. How long had it been since I’d seen a bracelet like that? I could not remember. Maybe more than thirty years. With considerable adroitness you withdrew the hand I had been gripping, perhaps unconsciously, as though I were holding on to something you had suddenly brought back.

I lifted my gaze for the first time, but our eyes only half met. You smiled at me. You were looking at my missing arm, while I contemplated the bracelet on your arm. Both of us carried their memory on the surface.

That might have been the end of our acquaintance. But you were an enigma made even more mysterious by such details. I took a gamble on discovering you. Fascinated and confused, I examined you. It was as though I already knew you whilst also just making your acquaintance.

Your beauty wasn’t of the dazzling, frightening or disconcerting kind. You were an ordinary girl with an extraordinary aura and a secret hidden about her face. Perhaps it was your high forehead, the natural arch of your thick eyebrows, the mysterious smile on your lips that were painted a pale red, like a covert invitation to a kiss. Or perhaps it was your wide eyes and their changeable honey colour. I already knew these details. I knew them, but how?

You spoke in French, interrupting my thoughts. ‘It makes me happy to see such a creative Algerian artist.’ You went on, a touch embarrassed, ‘Actually, I don’t really understand much about painting, and I only go to art exhibitions once in a while. But I can give an opinion about beautiful things, and your paintings are superb. We need something new like this, with a taste of modern Algeria. That’s what I was saying to my cousin when you came up to us.’

With that, the young woman came forward to shake my hand and introduce herself. Perhaps she thought she would join in the conversation from which she felt excluded – I had, without realising, ignored her from the beginning. Introducing herself, she said, ‘Miss Abdelmoula. Pleased to meet you.’

The name shook me.

I looked in amazement at this girl who was shaking my hand with a warmth not lacking in arrogance. I gazed at her as if only just noticing her presence, then went back to considering you. Perhaps I was seeking an explanation for my amazement in the features of both your faces. Abdelmoula. Abdelmoula. My memory went searching for an answer to this coincidence.

I knew the Abdelmoula family well. There were only two brothers:
Si
Taher, who had been martyred more than twenty years before, leaving behind a boy and a girl, and
Si
Sharif, who had married before independence and might have had several sons and daughters by now.

Which one of you was
Si
Taher’s daughter? She whose name I was commanded to carry from the front, back to Tunis, and whose father I represented when registering her birth at the town hall? Which one of you was the baby I had kissed, cuddled and spoiled as her father’s stand-in? Which one of you was
you
?

Despite some features in common between you, I felt that
you
were you, not her. Or so I hoped, dreaming prematurely of a certain bond between us. I was astounded by this coincidence and suddenly found the reason why I was already attracted to your face. You were the image of
Si
Taher, but more alluring. You were a woman.

Could you possibly be that little girl I had last seen in Tunis in 1962, right after independence, when
Si
Sharif had called me from Constantine and asked me to sell
Si
Taher’s house, which was no longer needed? He had bought it a few years previously as a refuge for his small family after the French had exiled him from Algeria in the 1950s, once he had spent a few months in prison for political incitement. So I had gone as usual to check you were all fine and to keep an eye on the arrangements for your return to Algeria. How old were you then? Could you possibly have changed this much, grown up this much in twenty years?

I gazed at you again, unwilling to admit your age – maybe my own, too, and the man I had become since those bygone days.

What brought you to this city and this gallery on this day in particular? A day I had awaited, for a reason unrelated to you. A day for which I had made a thousand calculations that had not included you. In which I had expected all surprises except you.

I was stunned, afraid to meet those eyes of yours that were following my confusion with some astonishment. I decided to turn the question around and continue my conversation with the girl who had just introduced herself. I knew that if I found out who she was, the puzzle would be solved, and I would automatically know who you were. One of you had a name that I had known for twenty-five years. I just needed to learn which one. I asked her, ‘Are you related to
Si
Sharif Abdelmoula?’

As if realising I was interested in her, she answered gaily, ‘He’s my father. He couldn’t come today because a delegation just arrived from Algeria yesterday. He’s told us so much about you. We were so curious to meet you that we decided to come to the opening in his place.’

Despite the spontaneity of what she said, it provided two answers. First, she wasn’t you. Second, it explained why
Si
Sharif hadn’t come. I had noted his absence and wondered whether it was for personal or political reasons. Or whether he was avoiding being seen with me.

I knew our paths had diverged years ago when he had entered the corridors of politics. His only goal was to reach the leading ranks. Even so, I couldn’t ignore our being in the same city. He had been part of my childhood and youth, part of my memory. Because of this, and for purely sentimental reasons, he was the only Algerian personality I had invited.

I hadn’t seen him for a few years, but news of him had always reached me since his appointment, two years previously, as an attaché at the Algerian embassy. Like all postings abroad, this required serious connections and a power base.
Si
Sharif could forge a path to such posts – and more important ones – by means of his past alone and by his name, which
Si
Taher had immortalised with his own martyrdom. Yet it seemed that the past alone was not enough to guarantee the present. To make progress, he had to adjust constantly to the way the wind was blowing.

All of this occurred to me as I tried to absorb the emotional shocks that had rocked me in the last few moments. It had started with my wanting to say hello to a pretty girl who was visiting my exhibition, nothing more. Then, suddenly, I was saying hello to my memory.

I returned to my initial surprise at you: to all the details that caught my eye and the particular picture that you were standing in front of for so long. It was more than coincidence, more than fate, more than destiny.

Was it really you? In a gallery looking at my paintings. Studying some and pausing before others, turning to the catalogue in your hand to find out the names of the pictures that most caught your attention.

Might it be you lighting up each painting that you passed? The spotlights directed at the paintings seemed to point at you, as though you were the genuine work of art.

Yes, you. You paused before a small painting that no one else had stopped at. You scrutinised it, moved closer and scanned the list for its name. At that instant a dark shiver ran through me, the curiosity of the mad artist piqued.

Who were you, standing in front of my favourite painting? Confused, I watched you studying it as you talked to your friend out of earshot. What made you stop before it? It wasn’t the most beautiful painting in the show. It was just my first painting, my first effort. Yet, despite its simplicity, I had insisted this time that it be included in the exhibition – my most important to date – because I considered it my little miracle. I had painted it twenty-five years ago, less than a month after my left arm had been amputated.

It wasn’t an attempt at creativity or designed to go down in history. I was just trying to live, to escape despair. I had painted it like an art student taking an exam in which the assignment is to paint the scene closest to who you are. That was what the Yugoslavian doctor had told me to do. He had come to Tunis with other doctors from the socialist states to treat wounded Algerians and had taken charge of amputating my arm. Afterwards, he had kept an eye on how I was doing, physically and mentally.

He had noted my continuing depression and, each time I saw him, he had asked if I had any new interests. I wasn’t ill enough to stay in hospital, but neither was I whole enough to begin my new life. I was living in Tunis, a local and a foreigner at the same time, both at liberty and confined, happy and miserable. A man rejected equally by death and by life. A tangled skein of wool. How could the doctor find the end of the yarn and unravel all my complexes?

On one occasion he asked me, as he was inquiring about my education, whether I liked writing or painting. I seized hold of his question as if grabbing at a straw that might save me from drowning. I realised immediately the prescription he had in mind for me.

He said, ‘I’ve carried out the operation that you’ve had dozens of times on those who’ve lost limbs in war. The operation is the same each time, but its psychological impact differs from person to person, depending on their age, job, social status and, especially, on their level of culture. Only an intellectual reconsiders himself every day. He reconsiders his relationship with things and with the world whenever anything in his life changes.

‘I’ve come to realise this over the course of my experience. Yours isn’t the first case I’ve come across, and I think that losing your arm has upset your relationship with what’s around you. You have to build a new relationship with the world through writing or painting.

‘You must choose which you prefer and then sit and write down everything that’s on your mind, without inhibition. The kind of writing isn’t important, nor its literary quality. What matters is simply writing as a means to get it all out and rebuild yourself internally.

‘If you prefer painting, then paint. Painting can also reconcile you to things and to a world you see differently. You’ve changed now that you see and feel it with only one hand.’