The Dust of Promises

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  I was thinking: What is it that made this painting so important to Zayyan? The only answer I could find to the question was something he’d said once, namely, ‘We don’t make all our paintings with the same part of ourselves. A long time ago I stopped painting things with my hand or my heart. The geography of spiritual homelessness has taught me to paint with my steps. This exhibit is the map of my inward journey, and everything you see in these paintings is the tracks of my sandals. Picasso used to speak of going to his studio the way a Muslim goes to prayer, leaving his shoes at the door. As for me, I walk into a painting with the dirt on my shoes. I draw with the dust of homelessness that clings to my sandals.’

  This, then, was the painting Zayyan had done with his heart, and with all his heart he’d hoped to lie down on it like a bridge, and go to sleep.

  With it had begun, and with it had ended, the story of the old man and the bridge. He was a man who had lived his life under bridges’ spell. To him belonged the wind and all the unhinged doors that covered the walls in his absence. The wind blew through them in the evenings, but to everyone who stopped to look at them they would say, ‘Don’t go on knocking at these doors. The artist isn’t here any more!’

  His questions were voiced through bridges and doors. Whenever he stopped in front of one of his paintings, I would imagine him, with his whimsical seriousness, answering a question it had asked him: ‘Why did you stop painting?’

  ‘To forget. To paint is to remember.’

  ‘Why did you stop using watercolours?’

  ‘Because oils allow you to correct your mistakes. To paint is to recognise your right to be imperfect.’

  ‘O master of blackness, why are you wrapped in white?’

  ‘Because white is colours’ ruse. When they were leading Marie Antoinette to the guillotine, they asked her to change her black dress, so she took it off and put on the whitest dress she had.’

  ‘Why are you in a hurry?’

  ‘I walk through one country, while my sandals grope the soil of another.’

  ‘Why are you sad?’

  ‘I regret committing all those acts of heroism at my own expense.’

  Then his paintings asked him, ‘What can we do for you as we hang here, orphaned?’

  ‘I’m tired! You can prop me up against the pillars of illusion so that I can imagine myself dying standing up!’

  That evening I went back to the apartment carrying a fancy bottle of wine and a bottle of perfume wrapped in pretty ribbons to present to Françoise.

  The Christmas and New Year’s season was in the air. I’d been so engrossed in pain, I’d forgotten what it’s like to live in a culture of celebration, so I decided to spend what was left after buying the plane ticket on some recreational shopping.

  As she opened the door, I could see that Françoise was surprised at what I’d brought. She asked me if I’d gotten the tickets.

  ‘Yes,’ I assured her. Then I added, ‘This perfume is for you.’

  ‘Thank you!’ she said, giving me a kiss. ‘How could you have thought about a present in the middle of all this sadness?’

  ‘Today is the last day I have to thank you for all you’ve done.’

  Given the extreme sorrow called for by the situation, I’d decided, for one night, to take a vacation from tragedies. I’ve always had a hard-to-understand urge to experience either pure misery or utter happiness. In either case, I want to take the moment to its ultimate limit, to season my sorrow with generous amounts of madness and irony. I want to sit down to the table of losses with the spirit of celebration that befits it, to sip fancy wine, and to listen to beautiful music after having had no time to listen to anything but news broadcasts.

  Sarcasm and dry humour are the only things that can overcome the illusion of antagonism between death and life, gain and loss.

  Before sitting down to my glass, I called Nasser to inform him of Zayyan’s death. I’d put off calling him so that I wouldn’t have to talk to Murad, who was finished as far as I was concerned. This way also, Nasser wouldn’t taint the sacredness of my sorrow by relaying the news to Hayat, since I’d come to feel that Zayyan’s death was my concern alone.

  ‘To God do we belong, and to Him shall we return!’ he cried. ‘I can’t believe it, man. I was just with him this past Friday, and he seemed to be doing fine. This bitch of a world takes the good ones and leaves the bad ones. He was the best man I’ve ever known.’

  I told him that the body would be taken next day to Constantine and that we’d be at the airport at six in the evening if he wanted to recite the Fatiha over him.

  He said he’d come, of course. He seemed sorry that Murad wasn’t there, as he’d travelled to Germany two days earlier. As far as I was concerned, that was the best news he could have given me.

  He asked me if someone from the embassy would be there. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘So, then, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Françoise had ordered in pizza, so I went to the kitchen to make a salad and fry up a plateful of sausages I’d bought a couple of days before from a butcher that sells halal meat. Full of weird contradictions, an Algerian will insist on eating halal meat even when he’s drinking wine along with it!

  When she saw me setting the plate on the table, Françoise said, ‘My God, there’s a lot of rich stuff on that plate! Don’t you know that frying oil is your number one enemy?’

  I smiled. How was I to rank my enmities by order of degree, and where would my other enemies rank if rich foods were my number one foe? How can you compare the enmity of oil, the plotting of butter, the perfidy of cigarettes, the conniving of sugar, and the machinations of salt to the betrayals of friends, the envy of colleagues, the injustices of kinfolk, the hypocrisy of comrades, the intimidation of terrorists, and the humiliation of the homeland? Aren’t all these enmities too much for one person to bear?

  I remembered Zayyan asking me to close the door to his room one day so that he could light a cigarette.

  Amazed, I asked, ‘Isn’t it forbidden to smoke in the hospital?’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied with a smile. ‘In fact, it’s tantamount to a crime. But, as Amal Donqol said to his doctor from his deathbed, “Laws were made to be broken.” Besides, man, you can’t live and die obedient, or go on being such a wimp at the age of sixty-seven that you’re afraid of a cigarette!’

  I contemplated his ashtray, which lay hidden in his bedside table drawer. It was full of cigarette butts that were so long, it looked as though he’d only taken a single drag from each one – like fires that had been set, then hurriedly put out.

  He dissipated life the way he wasted cigarettes just for the fun of lighting them. There was no sign of a match in the ashtray. After all, a man with one hand can’t use a match box. So was that why he was so enamoured of lighting fires?

  He said scornfully, ‘Don’t believe anybody who tells you that things are bad for your health. The only “things” that are bad for your health are people. They do you a lot more harm than the stuff the Ministry of Health warns you against. So as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to replace people with things, to surround myself with music, books, paintings, and good wine. At least they don’t conspire against you or stab you in the back. They deal with you straight. And more importantly, they don’t play the hypocrite with you or put you down, and they don’t care whether you’re a rubbish collector or a five-star general.’

  Warming to his subject, he went on acerbically, ‘I read some time ago that a rubbish collector in France lost his arm when his glove got stuck in the teeth of the truck’s compressor. I thought about how this man who lost his arm in the “dirty” battle of life as he struggled to make a “clean” living would never enjoy the prestige of a military officer who’d lost his arm in a battle to take over someone’s homeland. Limbs are only worth as much as their owners. General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who ruled Mexico as a dictator several times, held a solemn official funeral for his left leg after losing it in
the so-called “Pastry War”. So, between the rubbish collector’s arm and the general’s leg there’s a difference of five stars. It’s only before objects that we’re truly equal. Unlike the people around him, that general’s wooden leg couldn’t care less about his stars!’

  More than his art, it was this man’s wisdom that impressed me, and his voice followed me wherever I went. On one occasion after another, it would come in the form of some dimly lit statement, and whatever happiness I now enjoyed came from listening to our recorded conversations in which, as I lay in bed hooked up to the elixir of memory, he would talk to me about the convictions he had settled into over time.

  He had died and left me his voice. That voice of his, between the clouds of language and the clear skies of silence, would dissipate my illusions, training me in the art of exposing life’s ruses and sweeping away its mines.

  I stood looking for a song that fit my mood, a song that, like ice cubes, was missing from my glass. I wanted it to be in Arabic, since grief in situations like these, like rapture, can only be in Arabic, and I asked Françoise’s permission to listen to it.

  She asked me about its lyrics. I didn’t feel like explaining the song to her, but out of politeness I said, ‘The singer is talking to a woman he’d been in love with, and who ditched him without a thought for his feelings.’

  How could I translate a song that conspires to make you break down and cry, a song in which the kamanja rips you to shreds as its bow is drawn back and forth over the strings? What other language, what other words, could possibly convey the agonised longing in the lyrics, ‘Ahhhh, how you’ve wronged me . . . for your sake I would have left my own children orphans!’

  It came as no surprise that the woman Fergani was bewailing resembled Hayat, as though every song in the world, whoever happened to sing it, was crying over her and her alone. She was the number one suspect in every love song, the traitor in every story, the villainess in every schmaltzy film, the woman on whom you could pin all the romantic crimes ever committed.

  ‘Are all Arabic songs this sad?’ Françoise wanted to know.

  ‘No,’ I said a bit defensively, ‘not all of them.’

  As if out of courtesy, she replied, ‘Maybe this sadness is the secret behind the Arabs’ romanticism and their emotional generosity.’ I retorted derisively, ‘We’re emotionally generous, my dear, not because we’re sad, but because we’re orphans. There’s no one more generous than an orphan. There may be a lot of us, but we’re an orphan nation. We’ve been this way ever since history abandoned us. As Zayyan says, an orphan never gets over his feeling of inferiority.’

  I paused briefly, then continued, ‘The perfume I gave you – Chanel No.5 – is evidence of this. Even after Coco Chanel had achieved success and fame, she went on suffering from her orphan complex. She named her first perfume with the number she’d been given in the orphanage she grew up in. Note the simplicity of its bottle, with its glaze-less, unadorned square shape. That’s what orphanhood is like: naked and transparent. It doesn’t even have a name. It has a number instead. The miracle of Coco Chanel isn’t that she was able to create such a wonderful-smelling perfume, but the fact that she made orphanhood into a perfume, and a number into a name.’

  ‘Amazing!’ exclaimed Françoise. ‘I never knew that!’

  ‘It’s something that isn’t known to many people, maybe not even Marilyn Monroe, who never used any other perfume. When she was asked once, “What do you wear to sleep?” her answer was, “A few drops of Chanel No.5.”’

  ‘My God, where do you get all this information?’

  ‘This, my dear,’ I bantered, ‘is the culture of orphanhood.’

  Then, in a more serious tone, I went on, ‘I’m talking to you about Marilyn Monroe because I thought of her today at the exhibit. It’s said that she was so sensitive to the fact of being an orphan that she could pick another orphan out of a whole roomful of people. The same sort of feeling came over me all of a sudden today as I walked into the gallery. I felt sure that any visitor, with or without a sixth sense, could have identified that particular painting as the orphan in the crowd.’

  ‘I would never have believed until now that a painting could be an orphan. In any case, there wasn’t anybody in the gallery to notice it.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Françoise said reassuringly, ‘people are just busy with their holiday celebrations, and a lot of them haven’t heard the news of Zayyan’s death yet.’

  Then she added, ‘By the way, did you know that the gallery sold that painting for 50,000 francs? It made a 20,000-franc profit without the painting even coming down off its hook. All Carole had to do was call one of our clients and tell him that the artist had died for the price nearly to double!’

  ‘That’s the cunning of art dealers for you,’ I said angrily. ‘They wait for an artist to die to make their fortune off a piece whose creator couldn’t even make a living off of it, or even guarantee himself a decent burial.’

  Out of curiosity I asked her, ‘Who bought it so fast, and for that price?’

  I expected to hear that the buyer had been one of those wealthy expatriate Algerians who, now that their bank accounts were bloated with looted money, had made it a practice to burnish their reputations by rushing to buy up every available piece by leading Algerian artists. They were the only ones I could imagine being able to come up with 50,000 francs to buy a painting offered for sale over the phone. Once in a gathering I’d heard one of them justify his sudden passion for art, saying, ‘Making money is a talent, and spending it is a sign of cultivation.’ So, now that he’d proven by what he’d pilfered that he was ‘talented’, all he had to do was prove by what he’d acquired that he was ‘cultivated’!

  But then Françoise countered all my expectations by saying, ‘He’s a wealthy French pied-noir who owns rare paintings, including a collection by Les orientalistes, and another by Mohammed Racim. He recently bought paintings by Jean-Michel Atlan that had been offered for sale. You must have heard of Atlan – a Jewish painter from Constantine who was considered one of the big names in abstract art and who died in the 1960s. He was famed for his passion for Constantine, and was imprisoned more than once for supporting liberation movements.’

  I was still in shock when she added, ‘Carole told me he’d wanted to buy more of Zayyan’s paintings, but the gallery wasn’t authorised to sell any of them – other than yours, of course, since it had been sold while Zayyan was still alive.’

  Seeing how downcast I looked, she came over and sat next to me to try to cheer me up. ‘Don’t be so sad,’ she said. ‘He’s a man who loves art, and who’s known for his obsession with everything related to Constantine. When Zayyan visited Constantine for the first time, he brought some little things back for him. I think he was a childhood friend, and that they studied together or something like that.’

  My voice all but gone, I asked her, ‘But do you think Zayyan would have sold him the painting?’

  ‘I don’t think so, actually,’ she confessed. ‘Zayyan had rejected the idea of selling it to anybody under any circumstances. If it hadn’t been for his confidence in you and his sense that he was going to die, he wouldn’t have sold it even to you. I think he would have liked to keep it for himself. At the same time, he wanted to leave it to somebody, and there was nobody to leave it to. One of his nephews was murdered in a horrible way a couple of years ago, and another nephew disappeared some time back, and it’s believed that he either died or joined the criminals. As for his only brother, he was assassinated ten years ago in the 1988 demonstrations.’

  There’s nothing harder for an artist at the end of his life than not to find anyone he feels he can entrust his works to.

  I said with rueful cynicism, ‘Did you know that the name pied-noir – “black foot” – was used to refer to the French colonists who were sent to settle in Algeria after the colonialist invasion in the mid-nineteenth century? They were so called because they used to wear thick black shoes as they oversaw work
in the plantations. I’m sure this wealthy man didn’t expect to carry on the tradition of wearing history on his feet. Nor would he have expected to see the day when this painting had no relatives left but him. But its family have been wiped out in senseless wars, and he had to wait until they’d finished each other off so that he could receive a full inheritance.’

  Possibly not having understood what I said, she commented, ‘In the art market, it’s just a matter of time. If you just wait, with a bit of patience and the necessary funds you’ll end up getting whatever painting you want. All you have to do is grab the opportunity when it comes along. Sometimes you have a stroke of luck and you end up benefiting from some momentary lapse of attention, as on this occasion, when people were preoccupied with their holiday celebrations, and the news of Zayyan’s death hadn’t yet gotten out.’

  Pouring a bit of wine, I said, ‘Of course. All of history is the outcome of momentary lapses of attention!’

  I wasn’t Boabdil, surrendering the keys to Granada. So why cry? They were losses that no one could gloat over, since I’d chosen them of my own free will.

  When Hayat used to visit me for an hour or two before rushing back home in a panic, I once said to her, ‘I’m not interested in owning you in instalments. I refuse to win you for a few hours after which you go to somebody else. Little wins like that don’t make me any richer. I’m not the neighbourhood grocer. I’m a lover who prefers to lose you in style. What I want with you is a win as devastating as a loss.’

  What I didn’t know was that serious wins generate successive losses, like that prize that, ever since I won it, I’d been spending on my losses.

  The situation took me back to Zayyan, who, like a maimed Greek hero and in this very place, had danced with his one arm amid the shambles of his life on the night when he turned most of his paintings over to Françoise and went to bury his brother.