The Bridges of Constantine

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  Shutting the door behind me, as if slamming the doors of my heart, I answered her, ‘What of it? The country is theirs and the planes too. They can bring as much as they took!’

  Where to escape? There was nothing in front of me except me. Unthinking, I fell in with the crowds of pedestrians who aimlessly roamed the streets every day. Here you had the choice between walking, leaning against a wall or sitting in a café to watch those walking or leaning on the wall opposite. I walked.

  At some point I felt that we were all walking round this rocky city without quite knowing what we should do with our anger and misery, and whom to pelt with the pebbles that filled our empty pockets. Who was first in line for stoning in this country? Who? The one sitting atop everyone or those sitting on top of us?

  The title of a novel by Malek Haddad came to mind: Zeros Turning Around Themselves. I wished that I had read it. Perhaps I would have found an explanation for all these nothings that we had turned into.

  My thoughts took me to a scene I had witnessed in Tunisia of a blindfolded camel turning endlessly around an open space in Sidi Bou Said to bring water up from a well to the delight and surprise of tourists. What had given me pause that day was the camel’s eyes, which had been blinkered so that it would imagine it was walking forwards and die without discovering it had been going around in circles. A whole lifetime spent going around in circles. Perhaps we had become that camel, which no sooner finished one circle than it began another, going around small day-to-day worries in one way or another.

  Weren’t the newspapers, full of promises of a better tomorrow, just blinkers to hide the shock of reality, the catastrophic poverty and misery that for the first time assailed half this people?

  Perhaps I, too, no longer knew how to go forward in a straight line that didn’t automatically take me backwards to the nation’s memory. The nation’s special capacity to take a straight line and twist it into a circle, into noughts, where did it come from?

  Memory was an encircling fence that enclosed us from every side. It besieged me as soon as I set foot outside the house. Every direction I went in, distant memories walked alongside me.

  I walked towards the past with my eyes shut. I looked for the old cafés, those where every scholar or personality had his own place and the coffee was made on a stone stove and served in a small copper pot. The waiters would be embarrassed to hassle you when your presence was an honour. In those days Ben Badis used to stop at the Benjamina Café on his way to school. There was the Bou Arour Café where Belattar and Bashtarzi held their meetings and where I sometimes spotted my father as I walked by.

  Where was that café, so I might drink a cup of coffee in his memory that morning? How would I stumble upon a café that was only as famous as its patrons? How would I find it now that there were many large cafés to match the city’s misery, all of which had the same sad look as the people’s faces? Nothing distinguished them any more. Not even pride, characteristic of the people of Constantine, whose brilliant white sashes and hooded capes had become rare and faded.

  Perhaps the first thing to catch my attention that morning was the uniform dress of that city that woke up sadly, as she had slept. The dark tones shared by both sexes; the women wrapped in their black shawls that only left the eyes visible; the men in grey or brown suits the same colour as their skin or hair, which all seemed to have been acquired from the same tailor. Only rarely did a spot of light or the bright colour of a skirt or summer jacket appear within the crowds.

  Perhaps that morning I was taking in that city with the eyes of a painter attuned only to colours, almost unable to see anything else. Or was I just seeing her with the eyes of the past and the frustrations of the present?

  I threw myself into the crowds of men, lost like me in the city. For the first time I felt I had started to resemble them. Like them I did not know what to do with my time and my virility. I could do nothing but walk the streets for hours, as they did, burdened with my civilised despair and sexual frustrations.

  We were suddenly alike in everything. The colour of our hair and suits, the dragging of our feet and our directionless steps on the pavement. We were alike in all things. You were the only unique thing about me. But did that change anything?

  Loving you, which induced me to come as far as that city, also returned me to my backwardness without my realising. It threw me into the crowds of men walking slowly in no particular direction under the summer sun. They did not know what to do with the energy that their heated bodies would accumulate in the daytime and that despairing hands would spend secretly at night in solitary pleasures.

  My feet came to a sudden stop in front of the walls of a house unlike the others. It was the largest maison close visited by men. It had three entrances leading to different streets and markets. It was, in fact, a planned brothel, designed so that men could creep inside from any direction and exit from any other. Men headed to it from every direction, fleeing the neighbouring towns and villages where there were no pleasures and no women. Beautiful, miserable women also came from all the neighbouring cities to hide behind these yellowing walls. They only left as old ladies to spend their riches on charity, good deeds and the circumcision of orphans at the season of their final repentance.

  It was there that my father had spent his money and his manhood. I tried not to stop outside that exceptional house, which for a few years had been the cause of my mother’s secret sadness, and perhaps her death from despair.

  For a few years of my adolescence, it had also lain behind my secret indulgence and my suppressed dreams. I dreamed about it but didn’t dare go inside, perhaps afraid I would meet my father. Maybe, too, I was satisfied with my stolen transient liaisons on the roof or in the storeroom, which was rarely opened.

  My father was no longer around for his possible presence in that house to stop me going in. He died after leaving his distinguished history behind those walls, just like any rich and respectable man of Constantine at the time.

  To teach my mother patience and get her to accept betrayal with disdain, my grandmother used to say, ‘What men do is embroidered on their shoulders!’ But my father stitched his adventures on Mother’s body. A burning wound he was unaware of.

  I had not known what had become of that house. Some said it was closed down, one doorway perhaps remaining. It may have been part of a policy to curtail the pleasures available in the city or to show respect for the dozens of mosques that had sprung out of the mountainside and whose sound would combine several times a day to remind people of the advantages of faith and repentance.

  At such a moment, like most men of this city, I stood midway between carnal desire and spiritual chastity. The secret call of the darkened, lustful rooms, where sin was sweet, drew me downwards. While the minarets’ call to prayer and invocation of God’s greatness, which I had long missed, caused me to ascend. Its power entered my soul and shook me for the first time in years.

  In a matter of days I had developed the split personality of this city. I started to be aware that in this world full of opposites there were no innocent cities and no immoral ones. There were just hypocrite cities and those less hypocritical. There were no cities with just one face and one profession. Constantine was the city with the most faces and the most contradictions. It was a city that induced you to sin, then with the same force dissuaded you.

  Everything here was a veiled invitation to sex. Something about the city promised surreptitious love: the endless siestas, the warm lazy mornings, the sudden desolate night, the rock-hung pathways, the secret tunnels, dank and pestilent, the wild, mountainous landscape criss-crossed with diverging paths, the forests of laurel and oak, all the concealed caves. But you had to make do with observing the generations-old traditions of hypocrisy and avoid looking this city in the eyes so you didn’t embarrass her and throw her into confusion!

  Everyone here knew that behind the wide avenues clustered narrow tortuous alleyways, illicit love affairs and pleasures hurriedly stolen behind closed
doors. Beneath her staid black shawls the suppressed desire of centuries was dormant. The desire reflected in the singular strut of Constantine women and which gave their eyes behind the ajjar that rare flash.

  Over centuries women here had grown used to carrying their desires buried in the unconscious and waiting to explode. Desire would remain suppressed until a wedding, when the women would surrender to the beat of the drum and start to dance as if surrendering to love. Shy and coy to start with, they would move forbidden parts of the body to the left and to the right to the rhythm of the chants. Under the weight of their clothes and bracelets, their stifled femininity had been aroused. They had become more beautiful in their inherited seduction. Breasts shaking and hips swaying, the loveless body had suddenly heated up.

  The fever unquenched by a man had suddenly flared within. The drum, warmed up by the women beforehand, had become complicit with the hot body. The beats would quicken and intensify. The women’s plaits would come loose and locks of hair fly free as they danced like savage creatures writhing in pain and pleasure at a celebration of attraction and intimidation. They would lose all connection with their surroundings, as if they had left their bodies, memories and lives and nobody would be able to bring them back to their former calm.

  As at rites of pleasure and torture, everyone knew that the beat of the drum must not cease or its quickening rhythm be broken before the women reached the peak of their trance and pleasure and fell in a faint to the ground. Women supported them around the waist, and others sprinkled them with perfume prepared for such occasions until they gradually returned to consciousness.

  In this way women would make love in Constantine, in fantasy! Constantine seduced me with one night of fantasy love, and I accepted her secret bargain in exchange for a little amnesia.

  Where was forgetting, Constantine, when a wound lay in wait for me at every corner?

  Is nostalgia a medical condition?

  I was afflicted with you, Constantine.

  Constantine, our meeting was a prescription I tried as a cure, but that proved fatal. Did I exceed the recommended dose of desire in such cases? I hadn’t bought you at some pharmacy, so I couldn’t sue the seller of fates who had put you in my path. I had created you myself and assessed all your details by my own standards.

  You were a mixture of my contradictions, my sense and my madness, my worship and my apostasy. You were my purity and my sin, all my life’s complexes. There was no difference between you and other cities. Perhaps you were just the city that killed me more than once, for a contradictory reason each time.

  What divides the dose that cures from one that kills? At times of disappointment memory becomes a bitter draught to be swallowed in one go, while before it had been a shared dream to be sipped at leisure.

  Shared memory began here, with the streets inhabited only by history.

  Some I walked along with Si Taher, some with other people.

  Here was a street that bore his name. Here were streets that remembered his passing. I became one with his steps and continued the path we hadn’t completed together.

  Arabism walked with me from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. I was suddenly filled with a strange arrogance.

  A person couldn’t belong to the city if he didn’t share its Arabism, which here meant pride and bravado and centuries of bold defiance.

  The bearded face and words of Ben Badis still ruled the city, even after his death. He continued to gaze at us from that famous photograph of him in his bearded gravity, leaning on his hand, thinking about where we had ended up after him. His cry to history remained after half a century the only unofficial anthem we all knew by heart.

  The Algerian people is Muslim

  Part of the Arab nation

  Whoever says they’ve betrayed their origin

  Or says they’ve died, is a liar

  Whoever wishes to assimilate to it

  Wants an impossible desire.

  Your prophecy came true, Ben Badis. We didn’t die. Only our hunger for life died. What should we do then, your learned excellence? No one anticipated that we would die from despair. How could a people that multiplies every year die out?

  Youth, you are our hope

  The dawn is close thanks to you.

  The youth he wrote about no longer looked out for dawn, since those enthroned above us had sequestered the sun. They looked out for boats and planes and only thought of escape. Queues of our dead formed at every foreign embassy to obtain a visa for a life abroad.

  History had turned full circle and the roles had reversed. France now rejected us, and obtaining a visa, if only for a few days, was the ‘impossible desire’.

  We hadn’t died from abuse, but from subjugation. Only indignity could kill a people.

  We used to repeat that anthem in Constantine’s prison. It was enough for it to begin in one cell for other cells, whose occupants weren’t political prisoners, to pick it up. Its words had an extraordinary power to unite us. We discovered by chance that we had one voice. We were one people whose voice made the walls shake, before our bodies shook under torture.

  Had we lost our voice, or was there a voice louder than everyone’s, since this homeland became the property of only some of us?

  My mind had generated all those ideas as I crossed the street to confront, for the first time in thirty-seven years, the walls of a prison I had once seen from the inside.

  Did prison become something else simply because we were looking at it from the outside? Could vision have wiped away memory that day? Could one memory wipe away another?

  Kidya prison had been part of my original memory that time had not erased.

  Memory stood still before it, forcing my legs to stop. I entered it again as I had that day in 1945 along with 50,000 prisoners arrested after the demonstrations of the eighth of May of grievous memory. I had been lucky compared to those who hadn’t entered then. Forty-five thousand fell in demonstrations that shook eastern Algeria from Constantine to Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata. They were the first official batch of Algerian martyrs whose deaths came years before the war of liberation. Had I forgotten them?

  Had I forgotten those who went in and never came out? Those whose corpses were left in the torture chambers? Those who died more than one death as comrades of those who chose their own death?

  Take Ismail Shaalal, just a construction worker whose mission was to memorise the secret archive of the Algerian People’s Party. He was the first person to receive a visit from the General Intelligence Agency, who knocked on the door of his tiny attic room shouting, ‘Police! Open up!’ Rather than opening the door, Ismail Shaalal opened the only window and threw himself into Wadi Rummal, to die with his secrets in Constantine’s deep valleys. Was it possible even decades later, for me to remember Ismail Shaalal without crying? A man who had chosen death rather than give away our names under torture?

  Take the voice of Abdel-Karim Ben Wataf, whose screams under torture reached our cell like a dagger plunged into our bodies or like an electric shock. His voice cursed his torturers in French, calling them dogs, Nazis, murderers, words that interspersed his other cries. ‘Nazis, salauds, assassins, criminels.’ Our voices would respond with strident anthems and chants. Ben Wataf’s voice would fall silent.

  Take Bilal Hussein, Si Taher’s closest friend and one of the unknown makers and victims of history. Bilal was a carpenter, and though not well educated, a whole generation learned patriotism at his hands. His workshop under the Sidi Rachid bridge was a base for clandestine meetings.

  He would stop me in the street as I passed by his workshop on my way to secondary school. He would suggest I read al-Umma newspaper or a secret pamphlet. Over the course of two years he prepared me politically for joining the People’s Party. He set me more than one test in the field, which every prospective member had to go through before going before the membership committee and beginning his activities in one of the cells determined by Bilal.

  There was no trace left of the wor
kshop, but it was where the political leadership assembled. Messali Hadj gave his last instructions from there. The slogans raised at demonstrations were composed and written on banners there at night to surprise the French.

  The demonstrations would start on Sidi Rachid bridge, as planned by Bilal for tactical reasons, since assembly was made easier when protestors could scatter along the many roads leading there. The French forces were taken aback by the unexpected precision and order of the demonstrations. Bilal was the first to be arrested that day, and he was tortured as an example.

  Bilal Hussein did not die like others. He spent two years under torture in prison, leaving his skin on the implements of torture. He spent several days naked from the waist up, unable even to put a shirt on, as it would stick to his open wounds after the hospital doctor refused to be responsible for treating him.

  He was released after being sentenced to exile and put under observation. Bilal Hussein lived as a fighter in unknown battles, hunted and sought, until independence.

  He died only recently, aged eighty-one, on 27 May 1988, the same month as his first death. He died in misery, blind, without money or children. He confessed to his only friend a few months before his death that his torturers had deliberately made him impotent. In reality, he had died forty years before.

  The day he died, a handful of semi-officials accompanied the funeral procession, the very people who had never once asked him what he was living on and why he had no family. They walked a few steps behind him, then got back into their official cars without a trace of guilt.

  No one knew his secret, which he had guarded for forty years with the shame of a man of his generation and standing. Was it a secret that deserved to be so closely guarded? Bilal Hussein was the last man in an age of eunuchs. A visionary in an age when the sighted were blind.