‘Did I wake you up?’
‘No. You didn’t wake me up. You kept me up all night, that’s all!’
In a half-serious, half-funny Algerian accent you said, ‘Why? Everything’s OK, I hope.’
I said, ‘Because I was painting until really late.’
‘That’s not my fault.’
‘Your only fault is to be my inspiration, O muse!’
As usual when you lost your patience, you suddenly cried out in French, ‘Ah, non!’ Then you added, ‘I hope you weren’t painting me. What a nightmare you are!’
‘Where’s the nightmare in painting you?’
You continued in irritation, ‘Are you mad? You want to turn me into a picture to tour from city to city for everyone I know to see?’
I felt a morning desire to quarrel – perhaps because I was so happy, perhaps because I really was insane and didn’t know how to be happy like other people.
I said, ‘Didn’t you say that we draw inspiration from people we once stopped and stared at, chance encounters? That I paint you only means that I once bumped into you on the street.’
You shouted, ‘Are you an idiot? Do you want to convince my uncle and other people that you painted me after bumping into me on the street, waiting at a red light, for example. We only paint what excites us or what we love. Everyone knows that!’
Perhaps that was the confession you were luring me into making and circling around. Or you were foolish enough to believe my claim that I didn’t know that. That morning, on the line that separated and joined us at the same time, I had the chance to be honest.
I said, ‘Let’s suppose, in that case, that I love you.’
I waited for the words to take effect and anticipated a range of responses. After a moment’s silence you replied, ‘Let’s suppose, in that case, that I didn’t hear.’
I didn’t understand whether you found my admission more or less than you expected, or whether as usual you were playing delightfully with words while knowing that you were playing with my nerves. You jumped from one question to another.
‘Where shall we meet?’
That was the more important question, and we decided to take it seriously. We took time discussing where would be a safe place to drink coffee or have lunch. But Paris closed in on us. You only knew student places, and I only went to cafés in my neighbourhood. In the end, we decided to meet in a café near my house.
That was one of my biggest mistakes. I didn’t realise at the time that I’d given my memory an address right next to my house and, in consequence, the right to haunt me.
I no longer remember how our madness took up permanent residence in that café. Over the course of two months of stolen happiness, the café, responsive to our changeable moods, gradually came to resemble us. It always presented us with a new corner, and we would meet at various hours, according to your timetable and my work schedule.
You got used to calling me on your way to university every morning at nine o’clock. We would agree on the day’s programme, although in the end there was no programme but us.
With each day I was slipping further towards the precipice of your love. As if against stones and rocks, I smashed into the impossibility of it all. But as I loved you, I disregarded the scars on my feet and on my conscience that, prior to you, had been pristine. I kept descending at breakneck speed towards the ultimate insane love.
I felt no guilt about loving you. Well, at least while I was content with your love, once I had convinced myself that I wasn’t harming anyone. I dared not dream of more. I was content that overwhelming emotion was passing through me for the first time, from extremes of happiness to extremes of sadness. I was content with love.
When did my mania for you begin? I ask myself whether it was the day I saw you for the first time, or when I was alone with you for the first time, or when I read you for the first time. Or perhaps when I stopped after a lifetime of exile to paint Constantine, like the first time. Perhaps the day you laughed or the day you cried; when you spoke or when you remained silent; when you became my daughter, or when I imagined you were my mother.
Which of the women in you made me fall in love?
I was always surprised by yet another woman inside you. You were like those nested Russian dolls. After a few days you had acquired the features of all women. Whether you were there or not, I was surrounded by women taking turns with me, and I fell in love with them all.
Could I possibly have loved you just one way?
You weren’t a woman. You were a metropolis. A metropolis of contradictory women of various ages and features, wearing different perfumes and clothes, more or less modest or forward. Women from before my mother’s generation up to your own time. Women, all of whom were you. I learned that too late, after you had swallowed me as a forbidden city swallows its children.
I witnessed your gradual transformation into a city that had for ever lived within me. I witnessed you change unexpectedly day by day as you took on the features of Constantine. You put on her contours, dwelt in her caves, her memories and her secret grottos. You visited her saints and perfumed yourself with her incense. You dressed in a wine-red velvet kandoura – the same colour as Mother’s – and went back and forth on her bridges. I could almost hear the ring of the heavy gold anklets in the caverns of memory. I could almost see the traces of henna decorating the soles of your feet for a feast.
I reverted to my old accent with you. I pronounced ‘t’ as ‘ts’ in the Constantine fashion. Flirting, I would call you ‘yalla’ – something the men in Constantine no longer do. In tenderness, I would call you ‘Omayma’, a nickname that Constantine alone inherited from the tribe of Quraysh ages ago. When desire for you robbed me of my last weapon, I would admit defeat in the manner of Constantine lovers: ‘I want you. Damn your beauty!’ Words that have lost their original meaning over the years and just become words of affection.
Constantine was a hypocrite city that neither admitted to longing nor permitted desire. Like all ancient cities, she took everything by stealth to preserve her reputation. She might have been blessed with her holy saints, but she also had her adulterers and thieves.
I wasn’t a thief, a saint or an old man claiming to work miracles that Constantine might bless. I was just a lover who loved you with the obsession, passion and folly of an artist. I created you like the pre-Islamic Arabs created their gods as idols to worship and offer sacrifices to. Perhaps that was what you loved most about my love.
One day you said to me, ‘I used to dream that a painter would fall in love with me. I’ve read incredible stories about them. They’re the craziest creative type of all. Their insanity is extreme, sudden and scary – nothing like what they say about poets or musicians. I’ve read the biographies of Van Gogh, Delacroix, Gauguin, Dalí, Cézanne, Picasso and lots more who are less famous. I never get bored of reading the lives of artists.
‘It’s not so much their fame that interests me, as their volatility and extremeness. I’m interested in the line between creativity and insanity: the moment that out of the blue they declare that they have transcended and rejected logic. Only that moment deserves consideration, esteem even. They act out of defiance and leave us overawed with the canvas of their life.
‘Some artists are happy to distil their genius into their work, but others insist on signing their lives with genius. They leave us a life that cannot be replicated or forged.
‘I think that only painters are capable of such madness. A poet couldn’t match Van Gogh’s despair and contempt for the world that led him to cut off his ear as a gift to a prostitute. Or that little-known artist – I forget his name – who spent his days painting the woman he loved, then hung her portrait and hanged himself from the ceiling of his room. They were united, and he had signed his painting and his life in one swoop.’
‘What you find fascinating in the end,’ I said, ‘is painters’ superior ability to torture or mutilate themselves, no?’
You replied, ‘No. Painters a
re specially cursed. They’re subject to their own particular correlation: the greater their suffering, hunger and derangement, the higher the price of their paintings. Then they die, and their works go through the roof. It’s as if they have to disappear, and the paintings take their place.’
I didn’t discuss your view. I listened to you repeating familiar material, which was surprising, nevertheless, coming from you. I didn’t ask myself at the time whether you loved me for my potential madness or for some other reason. Or whether you intended, unconsciously, to turn me into a valuable painting whose price I would pay with my ruin.
Would suffering really increase the value of anything I painted – no matter its quality – when hungry or temporarily insane?
I was content to ask myself about the origins of art and of the sadistic tendency in others. For I believed that the correlation had nothing to do with creativity or art, but with human nature. We are inherently sadistic and take pleasure in hearing about the suffering of others. We believe, out of selfishness, that the artist is a new messiah to be crucified for us. His suffering both grieves us and makes us happy. His story might make us cry, but won’t stop us sleeping at night, or make us feed another artist who is dying of hunger or oppression before our eyes. For the same reason, in fact, we find it natural for others’ hurt to be turned into poetry or a treasured (or sellable) painting.
Was mania really the exclusive preserve of painters? Wasn’t it the shared fate of all creative people, all those haunted with an unhealthy desire to create? By the very logic of creativity, those who create could not be ordinary beings of ordinary character, subject to ordinary sadness and joy, with ordinary standards of gain and loss, of happiness and misery. They were turbulent and mercurial, not understood and with inexplicable behaviour.
That was the first time I talked to you about Ziyad.
‘I knew a Palestinian poet who was studying in Algeria,’ I said. ‘He was happy to be sad and lonely, and content with his modest income as a teacher of Arabic literature, his small dorm room and his two poetry collections. Then his fortunes improved and he moved into a flat. He was going to get married to a student of his with whom he was madly in love, and whose family had finally agreed to the match. Suddenly, he decided to give all of that up and go back to Beirut and join the freedom fighters.
‘I tried in vain to get him to stay. I didn’t understand his stupid insistence on leaving when finally about to fulfil his dreams. He responded sarcastically, “What dreams? I don’t want to kill the homeless Palestinian inside. If I do, all I have left will be valueless.”
‘Slowly blowing out smoke as if it were a screen to hide behind while he confessed a secret, he added, “Besides, I don’t want to belong to a woman. Or, if you like, I don’t want to settle down in her. I’m scared of happiness when it turns into house arrest. Some prisons weren’t built for poets.”
‘The girl who loved him came to see me in the hope that I’d convince him that he was crazy to head off to certain death. But it was useless; nothing could persuade him to stay. He was suddenly so far gone that my arguments only further encouraged him to leave.
‘I remember he once said to me with a touch of sarcasm, as if enlightening me, “There’s a certain greatness in leaving somewhere at the peak of our success. That’s the difference between ordinary people and exceptional men!”’
I asked you if you thought that a poet like that was any less demented than a painter who cut off his ear. He swapped ease for hardship and life for death without being forced to. He wanted to go proudly to death, not defeated or compelled. That was his way of overcoming its invincibility.
You asked me avidly, ‘Did he die?’
‘No. He hasn’t died. Or at least he was still alive on the date of his last card. That was about six months ago, at New Year.’
A moment’s silence fell between us, as though we were both thinking of him.
I said, ‘You know he was an indirect cause of my leaving Algeria? I learnt from him that we can’t reconcile all the personalities within us. We have to sacrifice some for others to live. Because we are instinctively drawn towards what matters to us, we only discover our true self when faced with such a choice.’
You interrupted, ‘Right, I forgot to ask you why you came to Paris.’
As if revealing feelings couched in disappointment, I sighed and answered, ‘My reasons might not convince you, but like that friend, I hate sitting on high awaiting a fall. In particular, I can’t bear my position turning me into someone who doesn’t resemble me.
‘After independence, I shunned the political posts that were offered to me and that everyone else was chasing after. I dreamed of something low-profile where I could make some difference without much fuss or getting tired. So when I was made responsible for publishing in Algeria, I felt I was the man for the job. I had spent the years in Tunisia perfecting my Arabic and had overcome my old complex as an Algerian fluent only in French. In a matter of years, I became bi-cultural. I didn’t go to sleep until I had read my fill in one of those languages.
‘My life revolved around books. At one point, I almost abandoned painting for writing, especially because in those days some considered painting deviant, a sign of artistic decadence unconnected to the liberation struggle.
‘When I came back to Algeria, I was overflowing with words. And because words aren’t neutral, I was also full of ideals and values. I wanted mindsets and values to change. This meant a revolution in the Algerian mind, still untouched despite the historical upheavals. But it wasn’t the right time for my great dream, which I don’t want to call the “cultural revolution”. Those two words, together or separately, no longer signify anything to us.
‘Major mistakes were being made in good faith. Change had begun in the factories, peasant villages, construction and infrastructure. People, however, were left till last. How could a wretched, empty person, drowning in the mundane problems of daily existence and with a mindset decades behind the rest of the world, build a nation or undertake an industrial, agricultural or any other revolution? All the world’s industrial revolutions began with the people themselves. That’s how Japan and Europe became what they are.
‘Only the Arabs erect buildings and call the walls a revolution. They take land from one person to give to another and call that a revolution. When we don’t have to import our own food, that’ll be a revolution. When citizens are as advanced as the machinery they operate, that’ll be a revolution.’
All of a sudden my voice had a new tone, full of the bitterness and disappointment that had accumulated over the years. You looked at me in some astonishment and perhaps silent admiration as I told you for the first time about my political sorrows.
You asked me, ‘Is that why you came to France, then?’
‘Not exactly,’ I said, ‘but probably because of the results of mistakes like those. One day I decided to leave behind mediocrity and the naive books that I had to read and publish in the name of literature and culture to be consumed by a people hungry for knowledge.
‘I felt I was selling something off, past its use-by date. I felt somehow responsible for dumbing down the population. I was spoon-feeding them lies and had turned from an intellectual into a contemptible policeman. It was my job to spy on the alphabet and excise the occasional word. What others wrote was my sole responsibility. I felt ashamed inviting a writer to my office to persuade them to remove an idea or opinion that I shared.
‘One day, Ziyad – the Palestinian poet I told you about – came to see me. That was the first time we met. I had called and asked him to cut or change some text in his poetry that seemed to me overly critical of certain regimes and Arab leaders. He made clear allusions to them and called them everything under the sun.
‘I’ll never forget the look he gave me that day. His eyes stopped at my amputated arm for a moment, then he gave me a withering look and said, “Sir, my poems do not undergo amputation. Give me back my book. I’ll publish it in Beirut.”
‘I felt my Algerian blood stir in my veins and was about to get up and slap him. But I calmed down and tried to ignore his provocative looks and words.
‘What intervened for him at that moment? Perhaps his Palestinian identity, or the courage that no other writer had shown before. Perhaps his poetic genius – his collection was far and away the best I read in that dismal period. Plus, I felt in my heart that poets, like prophets, were always right.
‘His words brought me back to reality with a shaming slap. This poet was right. How had I failed to realise that for years I had only turned the works before me into dismembered and defaced versions of themselves, just like me?
‘I cast an absent-minded glance at the cover of the manuscript and said defiantly, “I’ll publish it word for word.” There was some machismo in my stance, a bravado that no civil servant, whatever his rank, could flourish without putting his job on the line. After all, civil servants have traded their manhood for the job!
‘When his collection came out it caused me some headaches. Yet I felt there was something phoney I could no longer put up with. What stopped me allowing vile, bloody regimes to be discredited? We were still keeping silent over their crimes in the name of steadfastness and unity. Why was it OK to criticise some regimes and not others, all depending on the way the wind was blowing for the captain of our ship?
‘My despair slowly grew bitter. Should I change my job, swapping one set of problems for another, and become a player in a different game? What to do with all the dreams I had collected over my years of exile and struggle? What to do with forty years, one amputated arm and one good one? What to do with the proud, stubborn man inside me who refused to haggle over his freedom, and that other man who had survived by learning to go against his principles and adapt to every job?
‘I had to kill one of them for the other to survive. I made the choice.
‘Meeting Ziyad was a turning point in my life. I discovered subsequently that stories of close friendship – like violent love stories – often begin with confrontation, provocation and a trial of strength. Two highly intelligent and sensitive men with strong personalities, men who had taken up arms and grown used to the language of violence and confrontation, cannot meet without a clash. Out of mutual defiance, that first clash was inevitable. We needed it to understand we were made of the same stuff.
The Bridges of Constantine Page 10
