The Bridges of Constantine (6 page)

My reflex answer would have been that I loved writing. It was certainly closest to me, seeing as I had done nothing all my life except read, which naturally leads to writing. I could have replied that my teachers had always predicted a glowing literary future for me – in French. Maybe that was why I answered without thinking or, as I discovered later, with the response that was already deep inside me, ‘I prefer painting.’

My terse answer did not convince him, and he asked me if I’d painted before. ‘No,’ I replied.

‘So, start by painting the thing that is closest to you. Paint the thing you love most.’

With the wryness of a doctor tactfully admitting they can do no more, his parting words were, ‘Paint, then perhaps you won’t need me again!’

I hurried back to my room, wanting to be alone between its white walls that were an extension of the whiteness of the Al-Habib Thamir hospital, which at the time was the place I knew best in Tunis. Unusually for me, I started staring at the walls and thought of all the paintings I could hang on them: portraits of those I loved, all the alleyways I loved, everything I had left behind.

My sleep was troubled that night. Perhaps I didn’t sleep at all. The doctor’s voice, in his broken French, kept waking me up as he said, ‘Paint!’ I saw him in his white coat, as he shook my hand in farewell and said, ‘Paint!’ A mysterious shudder passed through me and in my half-sleep I remembered the first revelation of the Qur’an, when the angel Gabriel, peace be upon him, came down to Muhammad for the first time and said, ‘Recite!’ The prophet, trembling in dread, asked, ‘What should I recite?’ Gabriel responded, ‘Recite in the name of your Lord the Creator,’ and went on to complete the first
sura
. When this was over, the prophet went to his wife, his body trembling in terror at what he had heard. As soon as he saw her he shouted, ‘Wrap me up, wrap me up!’

That night I shivered with feverish chills, due perhaps to nerves and my anxiety after the meeting with the doctor, which I knew would be the last. There was also the thin blanket – which was all I had to cover me in the depths of the freezing winter, and which my mean landlord would not supplement.

I could have screamed when I remembered my childhood bed and the woollen blanket I always had against the Constantine cold. I almost screamed in my night of exile, ‘Wrap me up, Constantine, wrap me up.’ But I said nothing. Not to Constantine, not to the mean-minded landlord. I kept my fever and chills to myself. It was hard for a man just back from the Front to admit, even to himself, that he was cold.

I waited till early morning to buy, with the little money I had left, the supplies needed to paint two or three pictures. Crazily, I stood and painted Constantine’s suspension bridge.

Was that bridge really the thing I loved most, for me to stand there and paint it of my own accord, as though about to cross it as usual? Perhaps it was just the easiest thing to paint. I don’t know. I do know that I painted it again and again afterwards, as if every time remained the first time and it was the thing I loved most.

Twenty-five years: that was the age of the painting I had called, without much thought,
Nostalgia
. A painting by a twenty-seven-year-old in all his loneliness, grief and desolation.

There I was, lonely again, with my other grief and desolation. Just an extra quarter of a century full of personal disappointments and defeats and the odd triumph. By then I was one of Algeria’s major artists, perhaps the biggest of all – so said the Western critics whose testimonials I included in large type on the invitation to the opening.

There I was, a minor prophet who was struck with inspiration one autumn in a mean room on Bab Sweiqa Street in Tunis. There I was, a typical prophet in exile. And why not, when a prophet is never honoured in his homeland? There I was, an artistic phenomenon. And why not, when the disabled can become a phenomenon, an artistic giant? As I was.

Where was that doctor who recommended that I paint and whose prophecy that I would no longer need him came true? He was the only person missing from the vast space where no Arab before me had ever held an exhibition. Where was Dr Kapucki to see what I’d done with my one hand? (I never asked him what he did with the other!)

There was
Nostalgia
, my first painting. Beside the inscription, ‘Tunis ’57’, at the bottom of the picture, was my first signature. Just as I signed beneath your name and date of birth when I registered you at the town hall in that autumn of 1957.

Between the painting and you, which one was my child? Which my beloved? Questions that didn’t occur to me that day when I saw you standing before the painting for the first time. A painting the same age as you. Officially, you were a few days older and it was actually a few months younger. A painting that marked my beginning twice: once, when I picked up a brush and first started to paint; the other, the day you stood before it and I began my adventure with fate.

In a diary full of insignificant dates and addresses, I circled that date in April 1981 as though I wished to single it out. There had been nothing throughout the previous years worthy of mention. My days, like the pages of my diary, were all rough drafts. Usually I would write something simply so as not to leave the page blank. White sheets of paper always frightened me.

Eight diaries for eight years, with nothing remarkable in them. Together they formed a single page of exile whose years, by a process of false accounting, I tried to condense into eight diaries. That was all. They were still stacked in my cupboard, one on top of the other. They hadn’t been kept according to any calendar, but counted off the years of my voluntary emigration.

I ringed that date as if locking you within, as if fixing you and your memory in my spotlight for ever. It was in anticipation that this date would be a turning point in memory, my rebirth at your hands. At the time I was well aware that being reborn through you, like reaching you, would be no easy matter. The fact that your phone number and address weren’t on that page was proof enough. Ultimately, only the date was recorded. Was it reasonable to ask for your phone number at our first meeting or, rather, our first chance encounter? What possible justification or pretext did I have for that? Any reason would have seemed contrived – a man asking a pretty girl for her phone number.

I felt a need to sit with you, to talk to you, to listen to you. There was a chance I would encounter that other version of my memory. But how to convince you of that? How to explain in a few minutes that I – a man you were meeting for the first time – knew a great deal about you? You were even talking to me in a formal French, as if to a stranger. I had no choice but to respond in the same formal way.

The words got caught on my tongue that day, as though I were speaking to you in an unfamiliar language, a language that didn’t know us. How could I, after more than twenty years, have shaken your hand and asked in neutral French, ‘
Mais comment allez-vous, mademoiselle
?’ You responded with the same coolness, ‘
Bien, je vous remercie
.’

My memory was on the verge of tears; this was the memory that knew you as a crawling baby girl. My one arm was almost shaking in an effort to resist the unruly desire to embrace you and ask in the Constantine accent that I so missed, ‘
Washik
? How are you?’

Ah, how are you, my little one who grew up out of sight? How are you, strange visitor who no longer knows me? Baby girl, wearing my memory and my mother’s bracelet on her wrist.

I gathered in you all those I loved. I contemplated you: your smile and the colour of your eyes brought back the features of
Si
Taher. How beautiful that the martyrs lived again in your face. How beautiful that my mother lived again in the bracelet around your wrist. Your appearance brought the homeland back to life. How beautiful that you should be
you
!

‘When people encounter something extremely beautiful, they want to cry,’ Malek Haddad wrote.

Encountering you was the most beautiful thing that had happened to me in a lifetime.

How could I explain all of this to you in one go as we stood there, surrounded by eyes and ears? How could I explain to you that I longed for you even without knowing? That I had been waiting for you without believing it? That it was inevitable we would meet?

To sum up that first meeting: fifteen minutes or thereabouts of talking, most of which I dominated, a stupid mistake that I regretted afterwards. I was actually trying to keep you there with words, neglecting to give you more of a chance to speak.

I was happy to discover your passion for art. You were ready to discuss each painting at length. With you, everything was up for debate. For my part, at that moment I only wanted to talk about you. Your presence alone made me want to talk.

Because there was no time then to tell you the chapters of my story that overlapped with your story, I made do with a word or two about my old relationship with your father and your early childhood, and about a painting you said you liked and which I told you was your twin.

I chose concise, clever phrases. I left pauses between them so you would feel the weight of the silences. I didn’t want to play my only card with you too hastily in a single day.

I wanted to arouse your curiosity to know more and to ensure you would come back. When you asked me, ‘Will you be here for the duration of the show?’ I realised I had passed the first test with you and that you were thinking of meeting me again. But I said in a normal voice, betraying no sign of the turmoil inside, ‘I’ll be here most afternoons.’ Then I added, thinking that my answer might not encourage you to visit in my absence, ‘But most likely, I’ll be here every day. I have plenty of meetings with journalists and friends.’

There was an element of truth to this. But I didn’t actually have to be at the exhibition all the time. I was just trying not to make you change your mind for some reason.

Suddenly you spoke to me as if we were old friends. ‘I’ll come and see the show again next Monday. I don’t have classes that day. I only came today out of curiosity and I’d be pleased to talk some more.’

Your cousin intervened, as if apologising, and perhaps disappointed not to be part of that meeting. ‘That’s a shame. It’s my busiest day. I won’t be able to come with you, but I’ll come back another day.’ Then she turned to me with a question. ‘When does the exhibition end?’

‘On the twenty-fifth of April, in ten days’ time,’ I replied.

‘Great,’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ll have a chance to come back.’

I sighed deeply. What mattered to me was seeing you on your own. After that, everything would be easier. I steeled myself with a last look at you as you shook my hand before leaving. There was an invitation to something in your eyes. They held a vague promise of a story and delicious submersion, and perhaps a look of apology in advance for all the catastrophes that would befall me as a result.

At that moment, when the whiteness had turned its back, gathered up its shawl of black hair and gradually moved away to mix with other colours, I was aware that whether or not I saw you again, I loved you. It was settled.

You left the space as you had arrived, the glittering passing of a dazzling radiance, pulling rainbows and unfulfilled dreams in its wake.

What had I found out about you? Afterwards I went over the two or three things a number of times. This was to convince myself that you weren’t just some shooting star on a summer’s night. One that flares and vanishes before the astronomers can turn their telescopes on it, and which the old astronomical dictionaries term ‘escaping stars’.

No, you weren’t going to escape me so easily and disappear into the boulevards and side streets of Paris. At least I knew you were studying for a degree at the Ecole Supérieure, and you were in your final year. You’d been in Paris for four years and had been living with your uncle since his posting to Paris two years before. Risible details, but still enough to find you again.

The time between Friday and Monday seemed interminable. The moment you left the space, I started a countdown.

I counted the number of days in between. At times I reckoned it was four, then I’d try again and exclude Friday, which was almost over, and Monday when I would see you, and the time would seem more bearable. Just two days, Saturday and Sunday.

Then I’d count the nights. I reckoned it was three whole nights – Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Anticipating how long they would be, I wondered how to spend them. A line of poetry came to mind that I had never found credible before: ‘I count the nights, night after night/having lived an age of nights uncounted.’

Does love always begin like this? We start to exchange our own standards for others mutually agreed upon. We enter a phase of life that has no relation to time.

That day I was happy to see Catherine come into the exhibition space. As I expected, she was late and elegantly turned out, fluttering like a butterfly inside a soft yellow dress. She kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘Sorry I’m late. It’s always busy at rush hour.’

Catherine lived in the southern suburbs, and at the end of the week the roads leading to the city centre would get busier as Parisians headed to the countryside for the weekend. But this wasn’t the only reason she was late. I knew she disliked public gatherings or, I inferred, disliked being seen with me in public. Perhaps she was embarrassed at the thought that someone she knew would see her with a one-armed Arab ten years her senior.