The Bridges of Constantine

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Yet he in particular interested and saddened me. He had been a comrade in arms for two whole years. Lots of minor incidents had linked us in the past, and memory, despite everything, couldn’t ignore them. Perhaps the most moving was when I was leaving the hospital in Tunis. A nurse gave me his clothes, the blood newly dried on them. In the pocket of his jacket I came across his identity card, which was barely readable through the bloodstains. I kept it to give back to him later. But he returned to the Front without knowing I had it, or perhaps without even asking after it. After all, where he was going there was no need for an identity card.

  In 1973 I came across that card by chance among my old papers. I was packing up my things at the time in preparation to leave Algeria for Paris. I wavered between keeping it and giving it back to him, for I knew that this identity was not really his any more. I wanted to confront him with memory, but without saying anything. Being on the verge of exile, perhaps I wanted to end my relationship with the ID card that since 1957 had accompanied me from country to country. By placing him and his things outside memory, it was as though I was ending my relationship with the homeland.

  Si Mustafa got a shock when, after sixteen years, I took the ID card out of my pocket and handed it to him. Was he more confused that moment or was I? As I was handing it over, I suddenly felt I was giving him something lodged in my chest: a part of me, my other arm perhaps, or anything that had been mine, that had been me. I found consolation in his delight. He embraced me with the same old fervour, a reward for memory and for the mistaken belief that his other personality might be restored.

  Here was Si Mustafa, years later, contemplating a painting of mine as I contemplated him. The other man inside him had died. How had I once put my faith in him? At that moment, the only thing he was interested in was owning one of my pictures. He might have been willing to pay any price. He was renowned for not counting the cost in such cases. He was like other politicians and nouveaux-riche Algerians who had been bitten by the art-collecting bug for reasons that mostly had nothing to do with art, but rather with their being acquisition-minded and obsessed with joining the elite.

  Perhaps he was more generous with me for the very reasons that made me reject him further. He had decided to exchange that tattered identity card for an aquarelle painting he could show off. Can blood be equated to watercolour, even after a quarter of a century?

  Later, I was happy to have gotten rid of him and Si Sharif without offending them and without abandoning a principle that has caused me to go hungry. I simply cannot stomach tainted bread. Some people are just born with a sensitivity to filth. Actually, I was in a hurry and wanted to be over and done with them, fearful that you might arrive while they were still there.

  Caught between the feelings evoked by Si Mustafa after so many years and the exhausting obsession with your visit, I was nervous and unsettled. But you didn’t come, neither then nor later.

  Where did all that subsequent depression come from? Downcast, my two legs led me heavily home after having carried me there on wings of overwhelming desire.

  What if I was never to see you again? If the exhibition closed and you didn’t come back? What if your talk about coming back had just been politeness, which I had taken seriously? How then would I chase your fleeting shooting star?

  Only the card that Si Sharif gave me when saying goodbye left room for hope. At last I knew the secret numbers to reach you. I fell asleep planning how to justify a telephone call that might join me with you. But when love comes, it does not seek justification or make a date. As soon as I entered the gallery the next day and sat down to read the newspaper, I saw you come in. You were coming towards me and time stood still in wonder. Love, which had often ignored me before that day, had finally decided to give me its maddest story.

  Chapter Three

  So we met.

  You said, ‘Hi. I’m sorry. I’m a day late for our date.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. You came a whole lifetime too late.’

  You said, ‘How much do I owe to be excused?’

  ‘The worth of that lifetime!’

  A jasmine sat down opposite me.

  Oh, jasmine flower that has quickly opened, less perfume, my beloved, less perfume. I didn’t know that memory also has a perfume. The perfume of the homeland.

  Confused and embarrassed, the homeland sat down and said, ‘Do you have any water, please?’

  Constantine welled up in me.

  Drink from my memory, my lady. All this nostalgia is for you. Leave me a seat here opposite you.

  I sipped you at leisure, the way Constantine’s coffee is sipped. A cup of coffee and a bottle of Coke in front of us, we sat. We might not have thirsted for the same thing, but we had the same desire to talk.

  In apology you said, ‘I didn’t come yesterday because I heard my uncle on the phone arranging to visit you with someone. I preferred to put off my visit till today so as not to see them.’

  Looking at you with the happiness of someone who finally sees his shooting star, I replied, ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come at all.’ Then I added, ‘But now I’m happy I waited another day for you. The things we want always come late!’ Perhaps I said more than I should have at the time.

  There was a brief, uneasy silence at this first confession. Then, as if to break the silence or arouse my curiosity, you said, ‘Guess what? I know lots about you.’

  Happy and surprised I said, ‘What do you know, for example?’

  Like a teacher trying to confuse a pupil, you answered, ‘Lots of things that you may have forgotten yourself.’

  I said, with a hint of sadness, ‘I don’t believe I’ve forgotten anything. Actually, my problem is I never forget!’

  You answered with an innocent admission.‘Well, my problem is I do forget. I forget everything. Imagine, yesterday, for example, I forgot my Métro ticket in my other handbag. And a week ago I left my keys at home and had to wait outside for two hours till someone came to let me in. What a disaster.’ At the time I wasn’t aware of what all this would mean for me.

  I said sarcastically, ‘Thanks for remembering this appointment.’

  With the same sarcasm you replied, ‘It wasn’t an appointment. Just a possible appointment. You should know I hate certainty. I hate to fix anything or stick to it. The most beautiful things are born as possibilities and maybe stay like that.’

  ‘Why did you come then?’ I asked.

  You looked at me and your eyes lingered over my face as if in search of the answer to an unexpected question. With eyes laden with promises and seduction you said, ‘Because you might possibly be my certainty!’

  I laughed at this way of putting it, loaded with shameless feminine contradiction – at the time I didn’t know this was your signature. Your eyes had charged me with masculine pride and arrogance, and I said, ‘Well, I hate possibilities, so I’m determined to be your certainty.’

  With a woman’s insistence on having the last word, you said, ‘It’s hypothetical, a certainty like that!’ We laughed.

  I was ecstatic, as if I hadn’t laughed for years. I had anticipated different beginnings for us and rehearsed many lines and ideas to try on you at this first meeting. But I confess I hadn’t expected it to be like this. Everything I had prepared vanished when you arrived. I became tongue-tied at your language and I was at a loss as to how you’d acquired it.

  There was something light-hearted and lyrical about you. A spontaneity and simplicity verging on the childish that didn’t dispel the constant presence of a woman. You possessed an extraordinary ability, after one meeting, to level our ages. It seemed I’d caught your youth and vitality.

  I was still under the influence of your previous statements when your words took me by surprise. ‘Really, I wanted to study your paintings that day, not share them with crowds of people. When I like something, I prefer to be alone with it!’ That was the most beautiful proof of appreciation for an artist, the most beautiful thing you could have said to me that day. B
efore I could get lost in my joy or say thank you, you added, ‘Apart from that, I’ve wanted to get to know you for ages. My grandmother sometimes talked about you when she reminisced about my father. It seems she loved you a lot.’

  I asked you eagerly, ‘How is Amma Zahra? I haven’t seen her for years.’

  With a hint of sadness you said, ‘She died four years ago. Afterwards my mother moved to live with my brother Nasser in the capital. I came to Paris to study. Her death changed our lives to some extent. She was the one who actually raised us.’

  I tried to forget that news. Her death was another thorn plunged into my heart that day. She had something of my own mother, her secret perfume, her way of tying her silk headscarf to the side, her concealing a silver locket in her full bosom. She had that reflexive warmth that our mothers exude, those words that in one sentence give you enough tenderness for a lifetime. But this was no time for sadness. You were with me at last. This was time for joy. I said to you, ‘God rest her soul. I loved her a lot too.’

  Perhaps at that moment you wanted to staunch the wave of sadness that had taken me by surprise, fearful that it would sweep us away towards memories we weren’t yet ready to leaf through. Or did you just want to keep to your plan when you suddenly stood up and said, ‘Can I take a look around the pictures?’

  I stood up to accompany you.

  I explained some of them and told you what occasions had made me paint them. Then you switched your gaze from the paintings to me and said, ‘You know, I really like your style of painting. I’m not saying this to be nice, but I think if I were an artist, I’d paint like you. I feel that we both share the same sensibility. I rarely feel that about Algerian work.’

  What confused me most at that moment? Your eyes, which had suddenly changed colour under the lights and were looking at my features as if contemplating another one of my paintings? Or what you had just said, which I felt was an emotional confession, not an aesthetic impression? At least that’s what I hoped or imagined. My attention paused at the words ‘we both’. In French they take on a singular emotional tone. It’s even the title of a soppy magazine for the remaining romantics in France: Nous Deux.

  I hid my confusion with a naive question. ‘Do you paint?’

  ‘No, I write.’

  ‘What do you write?’

  ‘I write stories and novels!’

  ‘Stories and novels!’ I repeated, as if I didn’t believe what I was hearing.

  As if you sensed an insult in the hint of disbelief or doubt in my voice, you said, ‘My first novel was published two years ago.’

  Moving from one shock to another, I asked you, ‘What language do you write in?’

  ‘Arabic.’

  ‘In Arabic?!’

  My scepticism annoyed you. Perhaps you had misunderstood when you said, ‘I could have written in French, but Arabic is the language of my heart. I can write in nothing else. We write in the language we feel with.’

  ‘But you only speak French.’

  ‘That’s habit.’ You resumed looking at the pictures before adding, ‘What matters is the language we speak to ourselves, not the one we use with others!’

  I looked at you in shock, trying to put my thoughts in order. Could all these coincidences meet together in one giant coincidence? Could all my fixed ideas and my first nationalist dreams come together in one woman? A woman who was you, the daughter of none other than Si Taher? A more astonishing meeting in my whole life was unimaginable. It was more than coincidence that our paths should cross after a quarter of a century. It was wonderful destiny.

  Your voice brought me back to reality: you were standing in front of a painting.

  ‘You don’t paint many portraits, do you?’

  Before giving an answer, I said, ‘Listen! We’re only going to speak Arabic. I’ll change your habits as of today.’

  In Arabic you asked me, ‘Will you be able to?’

  ‘I can,’ I replied, ‘because I’ll also change my habits with you.’

  You answered with the secret happiness of a woman who, I discovered later, loved orders. ‘I’ll obey you because I love that language, and I love your insistence. Just remind me if I should forget.’

  ‘I won’t remind you, because you won’t forget,’ I said.

  I had made a most beautiful blunder. I had turned the language that I was romantically involved with into another player in our complex story.

  I asked you in Arabic, ‘What were you just saying?’

  ‘I was surprised that there’s only this one portrait of a woman in your exhibition. Don’t you do portraits?’

  ‘There was a time when I painted portraits, then I moved on to other subjects. In painting, the older and more experienced you are, the more confining it is. You have to find other means of expression.

  ‘In fact, I don’t paint the faces I really love. I only paint something that strikes me about them, a look, the wave of the hair, the hem of a woman’s dress or a piece of jewellery. Details that stick in the mind after they’ve gone. Things you hint at without revealing entirely. A painter isn’t a photographer chasing reality. His camera is inside him, hidden in a place he doesn’t know himself. He doesn’t paint with the eye, but with memory, imagination . . . and other things.’

  You were staring at a woman whose blonde hair dominated her portrait. There was no room left for another colour except the red of her less-than-innocent lips. ‘This woman,’ you said, ‘why did you paint her so realistically?’

  I laughed. ‘This is a woman who can only be painted with realism.’

  ‘Why did you call her portrait Apology?’

  ‘Because I painted it as an apology to the subject.’

  You suddenly spoke in French, as if anger or hidden jealousy had revoked our earlier agreement. ‘I hope the apology convinced her. It’s a beautiful painting.’ With a hint of feminine curiosity you then added, ‘It all depends on the sin you committed against her!’

  I had no desire to tell you the story of that painting on our first date. I was afraid it would have a negative effect on our relationship or your view of me. So I tried to evade your remark, which might have tempted me to say more, and pretended to ignore you as you remained stubbornly standing in front of the painting. Can one resist the curiosity of a woman determined to find something out?

  I gave you an answer. ‘That painting has quite a funny story behind it. It reveals aspects of my psychological problems and traces of the old me. Perhaps that’s why it’s here.’

  For the first time, I told the story of that painting. I had friends who taught at the College of Fine Arts, and they would invite me and other painters to life classes to paint and meet the students and amateur painters. The subject one day was a female nude. All of the students were absorbed in painting this body from their different perspectives, while I was stunned at their ability to paint a woman’s body with a purely aesthetic gaze and without sex rearing its head. It was as if they were painting a landscape or a still life of a vase or statue.

  Evidently I was the only person in the class feeling uncomfortable. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked woman in daylight. She shifted her pose and revealed her body without inhibition or shame before dozens of pairs of eyes. Perhaps to hide my embarrassment, I started painting too. But my brush carried vestiges of the complexes of a man of my generation and baulked at painting that body – out of shame or pride, I don’t know. It started painting something else, which turned out to be the face of that young woman as it appeared from my angle. When the session finished, and the girl, who was just a student, had put her clothes on, she walked around to see how everyone had depicted her. She got a surprise when she saw my painting, since I had only painted her face. In a tone of mild reproof, as if she deemed this a slight on her feminine charms, she said, ‘Is that all the inspiration I gave you?’

  To be polite, I said, ‘No! You inspired a lot of wonder, but I’m from a society where the soul still lives in the Dark Ages. You’re the
first woman I’ve seen naked in daylight, even though I’m a professional artist. Please forgive me. My brushes are like me. They also hate to share a naked woman with others, even in life classes!’

  You were listening bewildered, as if by surprise you had discovered another man in me whom your grandmother hadn’t told you about. There was suddenly a strange new look in your eyes: wilful seduction. Perhaps it came from a woman’s jealousy at an unknown rival who had once caught the attention of a man who until that moment hadn’t meant anything to her.

  I took pleasure in the unintended situation. I was happy that jealousy should suddenly make you go silent, cause your cheeks to flush slightly and make your eyes widen in suppressed anger. I kept the rest of the story to myself and didn’t tell you that it went back two years and concerned none other than Catherine. And that afterwards I had to apologise again to her body. Winningly, too, it would seem, as she hadn’t left me since!

  Today I remember with some irony the sudden turn taken by our relationship after I told you about that painting. The world of women really is incredible. I expected you to fall in love with me when you discovered the secret link between you and my first painting, Nostalgia. A painting as old as you and with your identity. But you fell for me because of another painting of another woman that impinged on memory by accident!

  Our first date ended at noon. I had a feeling that I’d see you again. Perhaps the following day. I felt we were at the beginning of something, and that we were both in a hurry. There were a lot of things still to say – we hadn’t even really said anything. We seduced each other with potential speech. Out of innocence, or being clever, we were each playing the same game. So I wasn’t terribly surprised when you asked me as you said goodbye, ‘Will you be here tomorrow morning?’

  As happy as someone whose bet’s come in, I replied, ‘Of course.’

  You said, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow then, around the same time. We’ll have more time to talk. Today went by really fast without us noticing.’