The Bridges of Constantine

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  I hovered over the contours of your love from a height that made it hard to see and hard to forget. I asked myself, even though it was too late, whether I was making the last stupid mistake of my life by running away from you into the arms of the homeland. I was trying to use it to get over you, having already failed with you to get over it.

  The painting I brought as a wedding present for you occupied your empty seat next to me. Finally we were travelling together, you and me. We took the same plane for the first time, but we weren’t on the same journey or going in the same direction.

  There was Constantine. Just two hours for the heart to go back a lifetime.

  A hostess opened the plane door, unaware that she was opening the shutters of the heart. Who now would stop the bleeding of memory? Who would be able to shut the windows of nostalgia? Who would stand in the face of the headwind to lift the veil from the face of this city, and look into her eyes without crying?

  There was Constantine.

  I was carrying a holdall in my one hand and a painting making its final journey after twenty-five years of life together. It was Nostalgia, that incomplete copy of Constantine about to meet the original by night. Like me, it very nearly fell down the steps in tiredness and confusion. Narrow, cold glances flung orders at us. All those tight faces, all those faded grey walls.

  Was this the homeland?

  Constantine . . . How are you, Omayma? . . . Washik? . . . Open your door and embrace me . . . Exile is painful . . . Return is painful.

  Your airport, which I no longer remembered, was cold. Your mountain night, which no longer remembered me, was cold.

  Wrap me up, lady of warmth and coldness.

  Hold back your chill a little. Hold back my disappointment a little. I am coming to you from frozen years of disappointment, from the cities of ice and loneliness. Don’t leave me standing at the mercy of the hurt.

  The signs in Arabic, some official pictures and all these similar brown faces assured me that I was finally standing face to face with the homeland. They made me feel a different kind of exile unique to Arab airports.

  Only the appearance of Hassan’s face filled me with sudden warmth and the ice melted between the airport and me.

  He embraced me and took the weight from my hand and said, in a playful Algerian accent while taking the painting from me, ‘What! You’re still lugging tableaux about?’ Then he added, ‘This is a great day. Whoever thought we’d see you here!’

  I felt that Constantine had suddenly assumed his features and had finally come to welcome me. Was Hassan anything other than the city herself, her stones, her tiles, her bridges and schools, her alleyways and her memory? He was born here, grew up and studied here. He became a teacher here. And only left rarely on brief trips to Tunis or Paris.

  He came to visit me yearly to make sure I was OK and take the chance to buy a few things for his ever-growing family. It seemed that Hassan, after despairing of ever marrying me off, had resolved to stop the extinction of the family name single-handedly. After several unsuccessful attempts to tempt me, he realised that, apart from my paintings, I would have no children to carry my name. He always talked with a teacher’s enthusiasm, certainty and repetition, as if addressing his students, not other adults. That day, I discovered that that very tall and clean-cut man was nothing less than my brother.

  Had I been ignorant of that? No! But on that day of exceptional pain, disappointment – and joy! – I felt my brother represented the only solid ground in my upheaval and, were it not for my pride, the only shoulder I could cry on.

  Over the course of nearly ten years, I had gone to wait for him at Orly airport. The roles were reversed then. He was the one arriving and I was waiting. Although I felt I was volunteering to perform a family duty, I was still particular about it. That was one of the few opportunities for me to play the role of older brother, with all its responsibilities and obligations. A role I did not always perform well, for in fact I was always quite distant with him. He had been orphaned at an early age, and his craving for tenderness and his attachment to me were obvious.

  Perhaps also on account of that, he married early and hastily. He had lots of children so as finally to surround himself with the family he had been denied as a child. That was something I could not make up for with my transient presence and my absence between exiles.

  Why did my meeting with Hassan that day overturn all the previous norms and make me feel, despite the difference in ages and his six children, that I was the younger brother, and at that moment he was seven years older than me, or more?

  Perhaps because he was the one carrying my bag, walking in front and asking about my journey, or because the airport, which was an offence to my masculine pride, stripped me of the gravity of my years. So I left Hassan to handle it instead of me, as though his experience with the city and familiarity with her changeable nature made him seem older that day.

  Perhaps at the first step on to the ground of Constantine, that mother of extreme emotions, love and hate, tenderness and abuse, I had turned into the confused, shy youth of thirty years before. I watched her from the car taking me home from the airport. I wondered whether she recognised me.

  That city homeland allowed informers, the well-connected and dirty-handed to enter through gates of honour, while I entered with queues of strangers, street traders and the desperate. Did the woman who checked my passport but forgot to look at me recognise me?

  A Bedouin woman was once asked, ‘Which is your favourite child?’ She answered, ‘One who’s absent, till he comes back; one who’s unwell, till he’s better; one who’s young, till he grows up.’

  I was her absent one who didn’t come back, her unwell one who didn’t get better, her little one who didn’t grow up. But Constantine had not heard the words of this Arab woman and I couldn’t reproach her. I just blamed what I’d read in books of Arab heritage.

  I didn’t sleep that night. Was the dinner – or feast – cooked by Hassan’s wife, Atiqa, to blame? With an appetite verging on the historic, I had surrendered to its multiple dishes, most of which I had not tasted for years. Or was my anxiety down to the emotional shock of a reunion with the house where I had been born and raised? Its walls, stairs, windows, rooms and passages held many memories, of weddings, of funerals and of the religious holidays, of other ordinary days. Memories that had accumulated deep within me and suddenly came to the surface that day. Extraordinary memories that obliterated everything else.

  When I was in that house, I was in my memory. How does one sleep on a pillow of memories?

  The ghosts of the departed were still moving around the rooms. I could almost see the hem of Mother’s deep red kandoura passing to and fro with its secret maternal presence. I could almost hear my father’s voice asking for water to perform his ablutions, or shouting from the bottom of the stairs, ‘Coming up, coming up,’ to warn the women of the house that he was with a male companion and that they should clear the way and secrete themselves in the back rooms.

  Beneath the new whitewash on the wall I could almost make out the traces of the nail where my father hung my primary school certificate forty years ago, and next to it, years after, another certificate.

  And then nothing. He lost interest in me and started to take an interest in other things, other plans that culminated in Mother’s death and a remarriage that had been waiting in the wings for some time.

  I could almost see Mother’s body leaving the narrow doorway again, followed by a crowd of Qur’an reciters and professional female mourners. I could almost see another procession making its way in a few weeks later, that time with a young bride and professional female ululators and singers.

  Then there was the night I kissed Hassan goodbye before I joined the FLN. He didn’t ask me where I was going; at fifteen he was far ahead of his years. Like me, becoming an orphan had made him grow up fast. Having been humiliated taught him to keep quiet and keep his questions to himself.

  He asked, ‘And me?’

/>   In the same panic, I answered him, ‘You’re still young, Hassan. Wait for me.’

  As if suddenly taking on Mother’s voice and her debilitating fear for me, he said, ‘Take care of yourself, Khaled,’ and burst into tears.

  Here was the homeland that I had once let take the place of my mother. I believed that it alone could cure me of my childhood complexes, my being an orphan and my humiliation.

  Today, a lifetime of shocks and hurt later, I know that a person can be the homeland’s orphan as well. There is the humiliation of homelands, their oppression and viciousness, their tyranny and selfishness.

  There are homelands without maternal feeling. Homelands like fathers.

  I didn’t sleep that night until nearly daybreak.

  My nocturnal reunion with the city had an aftertaste of bitterness. I had just fallen asleep when Hassan’s youngest child woke me up. He started wailing for his mother’s breast and breakfast. I envied his child’s innocence and boldness, his ability to say what he wanted without words.

  That morning, at my first encounter with the city, I lost my language.

  I felt that Constantine had defeated me even before we met, that she had brought me here to convince me of that alone. I had no desire to resist my fate.

  She defeated those who came before me, and as an example to others turned their obsession with her into tombs.

  I was the last of her deranged lovers, another cripple who loved her, another Hunchback of Notre Dame, another Fool of Constantine. What led me to such madness? What made me stop at the gates to her heart for a lifetime?

  She was like you. She had two names like you, and a number of birthdays. She emerged from history with two names, one familiar and one in memoriam. Once she was called Cirta. She was victorious like a feminine city.

  Men with the arrogance of soldiers, Syphax, Masinissa and Jugurtha all passed through, and others before them. They left their memory in her caves, carved inscriptions of their love, fear and gods. They left their statues, their tools and coins, triumphal arches and Roman bridges, and departed.

  Only one bridge and one name, given to her sixteen centuries ago by Constantine, have survived. I envied that arrogant Roman emperor who gave his name to a city that wasn’t his greatest love. He was coupled with her for purely historical reasons. I alone have given you a name other than my own.

  Perhaps because of this I flirted with the law of idiocy and called the city Cirta to restore its pristine legitimacy. Just as I had called you Hayat.

  Like all invaders, Emperor Constantine was wrong. Cities are like women. We do not possess them simply by giving them our names. Cirta was a city devoted to love and war that seduced history. She waylaid every conqueror that she had smiled at from her rocky heights. Like her women, she beguiled with an illusion of conquest. But no one took the lesson from her graveyards!

  There are the tombs of the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines, the Fatimids, the Hafsids, the Ottomans and the forty-one beys who succeeded each other until she fell to the French. Seven whole years the French army encamped at the gates of Constantine. France entered Algeria in 1830, but did not conquer the city on a rock until 1837, via a mountain path where it lost half its troops and Constantine lost her best men.

  From that day, bridges have sprung up around the city and the paths leading to it have multiplied. But the mountain was always greater than the bridges because it knew that under the bridges there was only an abyss.

  She was a city that accosted every conqueror, wrapping herself in her black shawl and hiding her secret from every visitor.

  Her deep gorges and hidden caves guarded her on every side. Her holy saints, with their tombs scattered on the green slopes beneath the bridges, guarded her.

  There was the viaduct, the closest bridge to my home and my memory. As though painting it, between puzzling vertigo and remembrance, I crossed spontaneously on foot, as though traversing my life from end to end.

  Everything on the bridge seemed to have been speeded up, the cars, the passers-by, even the birds, as though something awaited them on the other side. Perhaps at the time some of them did not know that what they were looking for might have been left behind. That in truth there was no difference between the two ends of a bridge. The only difference was between above and below.

  Only an iron railing prevented the fearful drop that no one stopped to consider. Perhaps because people naturally do not like to consider death too much. The immense drop halted nobody but me. Perhaps because I brought my preconceived ideas and inherited memories with me. Or because I walked that way to be alone with the city on a bridge.

  Some stupid mistakes should not be made, like having a date with memory on a bridge. Especially when a story forgotten years before is suddenly remembered. The story of a great-grandfather who threw himself off a bridge, perhaps that one. He was special envoy and confidante to one of the beys. But the bey sought his life after hearing reports that he had treasonously plotted against the ruler with some of Constantine’s nobles.

  My great-grandfather wasn’t strong enough on his own to stand up to this categorical order for his death. He was also too proud to allow himself to be led in humiliation before the bey. So by the time the bey sent for him, my great-grandfather was a corpse at the bottom of a deep gorge like this. He refused to give the bey the honour of putting him to death.

  I heard the story once from my father’s lips, when I asked him for the meaning of our name. It seemed he didn’t like to tell the story. Suicide was a shameful thing and against the religion of pious Constantine. So our family left for the west of Algeria and adopted a name to disguise our origins. We didn’t return to Constantine for a generation or more, bearing the name of another city.

  I looked down again. What had I come looking for on a bridge suspended 170 metres above solid ground and crossed by speeding flocks of crows? Perhaps I was looking for traces of an ancestor named Ahmed. Supposedly, he was handsome, rich and learned, and one day he threw everything away from here, leaving his sadness and his wound as an inheritance to our family.

  That was Constantine, a city only concerned with how she appeared to others, fiercely protective of her reputation and fearful of the gossip she excelled in. She bought her honour with blood at times, with distance and migration at others. Had she changed? I remembered hearing as a boy about a family that suddenly left Constantine for another city, after the rumour spread that a song (still sung by Fergani today) had been written as a love song to one of its daughters.

  The question remained, what had I come to do here on the bridge? Perhaps I had a date with memory, or perhaps that morning just with my painting. I stood in front of it that day without a brush or oils, without nerves or fear of the square of blank canvas. At that instant I wasn’t its maker, painter or creator. I was part of it, even capable of folding myself into its details.

  I could have crossed the iron railing that separated me from it, as though crossing the frame and entering the picture to live in it for ever. I would roll down the deep rocky valley as a human speck, a drop of colour in an eternal landscape painting. One that I wanted to paint, but that painted me. Wouldn’t that be the most beautiful end for a painter: merging into the scene of his painting?

  I stared into the deep gorge below with its rocky channel carved by the Rummal’s churning slowness. At that instant, I knew that the feminine chasm was drawing me down to the depths for a final erotic death. That might have been my last chance for physical union with Constantine and with the memory of an ancestor with whom I suddenly began to feel a puzzling complicity.

  Perhaps the longing to fall and shatter gave me vertigo as I stood suspended on that bridge on my own. I suddenly felt ashamed of the city. I almost apologised for it. Only strangers felt dizzy here. When exactly did Constantine put me in that category?

  Even so, I admit I wasn’t ready to die that day. Not that I was clinging on to life, but because I had linked the deep, sweeping sadness that had overwhelmed me since I
stepped into the city with another mysterious and powerful emotion.

  In my resentfulness and disappointment I had attained a vague sense of serenity and happiness. I had learned how to make fun of the things that annoyed me and confront memory with bitter irony. Didn’t I come here as the result of a crazy decision, possibly in search of madness in a city quite skilled in it? So I secretly began to enjoy the painful game and took care to experience the blows with deliberate masochism. Perhaps that day’s disappointment in the city would become the source of my future madness and genius.

  Even so, I decided to escape the bridge that had once been the beginning of my mania. I had been infatuated with it for ages and turned it into the backdrop of my life after surrounding myself with multiple copies, and I suddenly fled.

  Did that feeling overtake me when from my vantage point I caught sight of the rocky slopes whose green passes were once dotted with poppy anemones and narcissi? The people of Constantine would visit them every year to welcome spring, laden with pastries, sweets and coffee that the women prepared for the occasion. Now the slopes seemed sad, as if the flowers had left for some inscrutable reason.

  Or was the feeling the result of seeing the tomb of Sidi Mohamed of the Crow? He suddenly came to mind and I recalled what I had recently read about him in a book on the history of Constantine. I shuddered. What if, without realising, I had been struck by the curse of Saleh Bey, the greatest of Constantine’s beys, because of the bridge? He had wanted to crown his magnificent architectural achievements and the various reforms he had made to the city by repairing the viaduct bridge – the only link between the city and the outside world and the only one of the five Roman bridges to survive.

  According to folklore, the bridge was one of the reasons for Saleh Bey’s tragic death. For on the bridge, he had Sidi Mohamed, a very popular holy man, put to death. When the head of the saint hit the ground, his body was transformed into a crow that flew off towards Saleh Bey’s country house, which was on those slopes. The crow cursed him with a no less painful and unjust death than that of the saint he had killed. Saleh Bey could do nothing but leave his house and lands for ever, in flight from the crow, making do with his house in the city.