The Bridges of Constantine

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

  I made no comment. I knew that time had no measure except our two hearts. That’s why it only races with us when the heart races too, from one joy to another, from one shock to another. Your words held an admission of a shared, secret joy that I hoped would be repeated.

  I remember saying to you as you left that day, ‘Don’t forget your book tomorrow. I’d like to read you.’

  Surprised, you said, ‘Is your Arabic perfect?’

  I said, ‘Of course. You’ll see for yourself.’

  ‘I’ll bring it, then.’ With adorable feminine wiles, you smiled and added, ‘If you still insist on getting to know me, I won’t deny you the pleasure!’

  The door shut behind your smile, without me understanding exactly what you meant.

  You left shrouded in mystery just like you had arrived. I stood at the glass door, watching you melt into the crowd and disappear again like a shooting star. Quite stunned, I wondered, ‘Did we really meet?’

  So we had met.

  Those who say that mountains never meet are wrong. Those who build bridges between them, so they might greet each other without stooping or diminishing their pride, know nothing of the laws of nature. Mountains only meet in massive earthquakes. Even then they don’t shake hands, but turn into dust.

  So we had met.

  The unforeseen tremor happened; one of us was a volcano and I was the victim.

  Inferno of a woman, volcano that swept away everything in your path and incinerated my last strongholds, where did you get all those blasting waves of fire? Why wasn’t I wary of the ash that burned like the lips of a gypsy lover? Why wasn’t I wary of your simplicity and false modesty? Why didn’t I remember that old geography lesson: ‘Volcanoes do not have peaks; they are mountains with the modesty of a plateau.’ Could a plateau have done all that?

  Popular proverbs warn us about the tranquil river that tricks us with its calmness and which, when we cross, swallows us, and about the twig we don’t pay attention to that blinds us. More than one proverb tells us in more than one dialect to beware of what seems safe. But all her warning signs didn’t stop us making yet more idiotic mistakes. The logic of desire is crazy, ridiculous. The more we loved, the more ridiculous we were. Wasn’t it Bernard Shaw who said you know you’re in love when you start acting against your own interest?

  My prime folly was to act with you like a tourist visiting Sicily for the first time: he runs up Mount Etna, praying that the dormant volcano will lift one sleepy eyelid and engulf the island in fire in full view of the stunned, camera-wielding visitors. The corpses of the tourists are turned to soot to attest that there is nothing more beautiful than a yawning volcano spewing fire and rock and swallowing up vast regions in seconds. A spectator is always mesmerised by the hunger of flames and he is drawn towards those rivers of fire. He stands stupefied and in shock as he tries to recall all he has read about Judgement Day. In his lover’s swoon, he forgets that this is his own day of judgement!

  The destruction that surrounds me today bears witness that I loved you to death, that I desired you until the final pyre. I believe Jacques Brel when he said, ‘Scorched fields can give more corn than the best of Aprils.’ I bet on a spring for this parched life, an April for these blighted years.

  Volcano! You swept everything around me away. Wasn’t it insane to go further than deranged tourists and lovers, than all those who loved you before me? I moved my house into your shadow, set my memory at the foot of your volcano and then sat in the midst of the flames to paint you.

  Wasn’t it insane to refuse to listen to the weather forecast and disaster warnings? I convinced myself that I knew you better. But I forgot that logic stops where love begins. What I know about you has no relationship with logic or knowledge.

  So the mountains met, and we met.

  A quarter-century of blank white pages unfilled with you.

  A quarter-century of monotonous days spent waiting for you.

  A quarter-century since the first meeting between a man who was me and a small baby playing on my knees who was you.

  A quarter of a century since I had kissed you on your child’s cheek, standing in for a father who hadn’t yet seen you.

  I was the crippled man who had left his arm on forgotten battlefields, and his heart in forbidden cities. I never expected you to be the battlefield where I would leave my corpse, the city where I would exhaust my memory, the blank canvas where my brushes would quit to remain virginal and mighty like you, holding all contradictions in their colours.

  How did all of this happen? I don’t know any more.

  Time raced with us from one date to another. Love transported us from one gasp to another. I submitted to your love without argument. Your love was my destiny. Perhaps it was my end. Could any power withstand destiny?

  We met almost every day in the same gallery, but at various times. Chance wished my show to coincide with the Easter holiday. You had enough time to visit me every day as there was no university. All you had to do was deceive others a little, your cousin perhaps a bit more so she didn’t come along for one reason or another.

  Every time, as I said goodbye to you and repeated reflexively, ‘See you tomorrow,’ I wondered whether it wasn’t utterly absurd that we were growing more attached to each other with every passing day. Perhaps because I was older than you, I felt that I alone was responsible for the abnormal emotional situation and our rapid and terrible slide towards love. In vain I tried to withstand the torrent rushing me towards you with the crazy force of love in my fifties and the hunger of a man who had not known love before. With its youth and vigour, your love swept me to reason’s nadir, the point where desire almost touches madness and death.

  As I slid down with you into the labyrinths inside me – secret recesses of love and hunger, cavernous spaces never before entered by woman – I felt that I was also gradually sliding down the scale of moral values. Unconsciously, I was denying the passionate ideals that I had spent my whole life refusing to compromise. For me, moral values were indivisible. In my dictionary there was no difference between political morality and any other kind. But I was aware that with you I had begun to deny one to convince you of another.

  I often asked myself at that time whether I was betraying the past by sitting alone with you at half-innocent meetings in a space furnished with paintings and memory.

  Perhaps I was betraying the dearest man I knew, the most valiant and steely, the bravest and most faithful. Perhaps I would betray Si Taher, my leader, comrade and lifelong friend, sully his memory and steal from him the sole rose of his life. His last testament.

  Could I do all of that in the name of the past, while speaking to you about the past?

  But was I really stealing anything from you at those meetings when I talked at length about him? No, it didn’t happen. The glory of his name was always present in my mind. It joined me to you and kept me from you at the same time. It was a bridge and a barrier.

  My only pleasure then was to hand over the keys to my memory, to open the yellowed notebooks of the past and read them to you page by page. As I listened to myself narrating this for the first time, it was as if I were discovering it with you.

  In silence we found that we complemented each other frighteningly. I was the past of which you were ignorant; you were the present, which had no memory and where I tried to deposit some of the burden of the years.

  You were as light as a sponge. I was as deep and weighty as an ocean. Every day you filled yourself more with me. I didn’t know then that whenever I grew empty, I replenished myself with you. Whenever I gave you some piece of the past, I turned you into a replica of me. So we carried a shared memory, shared streets and alleyways, shared sorrows and joys.

  Both of us were war-wounded. Fate ground us down without mercy, and each emerged with their wound. Mine was visible, yours was hidden in the depths. They amputated my arm; they severed your childhood. They ripped a limb from my body and took a father from your arms. We were war’s human rema
ins. Two smashed statues in elegant clothes, nothing more.

  I remember the day you asked me for the first time to tell you about your father. You confessed, with some embarrassment, that you had come to see me in the first place with just that design. Your voice had a touch of uncompromising sadness, a touch of bitterness that I had not seen in you before.

  You said, ‘What’s the point in naming a main street after my father, of me carrying the burden of his name, which pedestrians and strangers repeat in front of me all day long? What’s the point of that if I know no more about him than they do? And if not one of them can really tell me about him?’

  I said in surprise, ‘Doesn’t your uncle talk about him, for example?’

  ‘My uncle doesn’t have time,’ you said. ‘If he should mention him when I’m there, it sounds more like a eulogy addressed to strangers to boast of his brother’s glorious deeds. He doesn’t make it relevant to me and talk about the man who, before anything else, was my father.

  ‘What I want to know about my father isn’t the ready-made words in praise of heroes and martyrs. That’s what’s said on every occasion about all of them. It’s as though death suddenly made all shahids identical, copies of one template.

  ‘I’m interested to know what he thought, the minor details of his life, his good and bad points, his secret ambitions and failings. I don’t want to be the daughter of a myth. Myths are a Greek invention. I just want to be the daughter of an ordinary man with his strengths and weaknesses, his victories and defeats. Every man’s life contains disappointments and setbacks that might have spurred him on to success.’

  A brief silence fell. I was contemplating you and probing the depths of my soul. I was seeking the boundary between my defeats and my victories. At that moment I was no prophet, and you were no Greek goddess. We were just two ancient statues with smashed limbs trying to restore their parts with words. I listened to you as you repaired the ruin in your depths.

  You said, ‘At times, I feel that I’m the daughter of a statistic, one among a million-and-a-half others. Perhaps some of them were bigger or smaller, perhaps the names of some are written in bigger or smaller letters than others, but they all remain statistics in a tragedy.

  ‘That my father left me a big name means nothing. He left me a tragedy as weighty as his name, and left my brother with a constant fear of failure, obsessed with not living up to expectations. He’s the only son of Taher Abdelmoula. He has no right to fail at school or in life. Symbols don’t have the right to fall apart. As a result, he gave up university when he realised it was futile to pile up qualifications when others were piling up millions. Perhaps he was right. Qualifications are the last thing to get you a decent job these days.

  ‘He saw his friends who graduated before him going straight into unemployment or into jobs with limited pay and limited dreams. So he decided to go into business and, even though I share his view, I’m sad that my brother in the prime of his youth has turned into a small businessman running a small shop with a van given by Algeria as a privilege to the son of a martyr. I don’t think my father expected his future would be like that!’

  I interrupted you in an effort to alleviate your litany of complaint. ‘He didn’t expect a future like this for you, either. You’ve surpassed his dreams and inherited all his ambitions and principles. Science and knowledge were sacred to him. He loved the Arabic language, and dreamed of an Algeria that had nothing to do with the superstitions and worn-out traditions that had exhausted his generation and finished them off. You don’t know how lucky you are today to live in a country that gives you the chance to be a cultured young woman who can study and work, and even write.’

  You responded somewhat sarcastically. ‘I might be indebted to Algeria for being cultured or educated, but writing is something else. Nobody gave me that. We write to bring back what we have lost and what has been stolen from us by stealth. I would have preferred to have an ordinary childhood and life, a father and family like others – not shelves of books and a pile of diaries. But my father is public property in Algeria. Only writing is mine alone and no one is going to take it away!’

  Your words stunned me. I felt a conflicting mix of emotions. Sadness yes, but not pity. An intelligent woman does not provoke pity. Even in her sadness, she always arouses admiration. I was impressed by you, by the defiance in your hurt, by your provocative way of challenging the homeland. You were like me, who painted with one hand to restore the other. I would have preferred to remain an ordinary man with two arms doing everyday things and not have been turned into a one-armed genius with nothing but drawings and paintings.

  I didn’t dream of being a genius, a prophet or an artist – rejecting and rejected. I didn’t struggle for that. My dream was to have a wife and children, but fate chose another life for me. So I became father to other people’s children and the partner of exile and the paintbrush. My dreams were amputated too.

  I said to you, ‘Nobody will take writing away from you. What is deep inside us is ours and nobody can touch it.’

  You said, ‘But there’s nothing deep inside me except a void filled with newspaper stories, news broadcasts and artless books that have nothing to do with me.’

  Then you added, as if entrusting me with a secret, ‘Do you know why I loved my grandmother more than anyone else? More than my mother, even? She was the only person who found time to talk to me about it all. She would go back to the past unbidden, as if she refused to leave it. She wore the past, ate the past and only enjoyed hearing songs from the past.

  ‘She dreamed of the past when others dreamed of the future. So she often told me about my father without me having to ask. He was the most beautiful thing about her fading past as a woman. She never tired of speaking about him, as though she brought him back and made him present with words. She did it with the grief of a mother who refuses to forget she’s lost her firstborn to eternity. But she didn’t tell me more about him than a mother would say about her son. Taher was the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the good boy who never said a single word to hurt her.

  ‘On Independence Day my grandmother wept like she’d never wept before. I asked her, “Amma, why are you crying when Algeria’s just gained its independence?” She replied, “In the past, I was waiting for independence for Taher’s return. Today I’ve realised that I’m not waiting for anything any more.”

  ‘The day my father died, my grandmother didn’t ululate with joy like in the made-up stories of the Revolution I read later. She stood in the middle of the house, racked with sobbing, trembling with her head uncovered, and repeating in primal grief, “Ah, black day of sorrow! Taher, my love, why have you gone and not me?”

  ‘My mother was crying silently and trying to calm her down. I was watching them both and crying, not fully understanding that I was crying for a man I had only seen a few times. A man who was my father.’

  Why did your memories of Amma Zahra always stir unaccountable emotions in me? Before that day, they had been warm and beautiful, but they suddenly became painful to the point of tears.

  I still remember the features of that dear old lady who loved me as much as I loved her. I spent my childhood and adolescence between her house and ours. That woman had only one way to love. I discovered later that this was common to all our mothers. They loved you with food. They cooked your favourite dish, came after you with delicacies, and plied you with freshly made sweets, bread and pastries.

  She belonged to a generation of women who devoted their lives to the kitchen. For them, holidays and weddings were banquets of love. There they made all their overflowing femininity and tenderness into gifts, along with the secret hunger that found no expression outside of food.

  Every day they fed more than one tableful, more than one sitting on the terrace. Then every night they went to sleep without anybody noticing their age-old, inherited hunger. I only discovered that fact recently, when I found myself – perhaps out of loyalty to them – unable to love a woman who lived on fast
food and whose only banquet was her body.

  As I fled those painful memories of my distant childhood, I asked you, ‘And your mother? You’ve never told me about her. How did she manage after Si Taher’s death?’

  ‘She didn’t talk about him much,’ you said. ‘Perhaps inside she blamed the people who had arranged the marriage. They married her to a martyr, not a man.

  ‘She already knew about his political activity. She realised that he would join the FLN after they got married and begin a clandestine life, sneaking home from time to time, and might return a corpse. Why marry, then? But the marriage was inevitable – there was the sniff of a deal in the air. Her family were proud to become linked in marriage with Taher Abdelmoula, a man with a name and money. It was fine for my mother to be his second wife, or his next widow. Perhaps my grandmother understood that he had been born to be a martyr, and so she visited the tombs of the holy and the good to beg in tears for her son to have children. It was just the same when she was pregnant with him, pleading that her newborn be a boy.’

  I asked you, ‘Where did you hear all these stories?’

  ‘From her. From my mother, too. Imagine, as soon as my grandmother fell pregnant with my father, she didn’t stop visiting the tomb of Sidi Mohamed of the Crow in Constantine. She almost gave birth to him there. So she called him Mohamed Taher in his honour. Then she called my uncle Mohamed Sharif, also in honour of him. Later, I found out that half the men of the city have such names. Its people ascribe a lot of importance to names, and most of them bear those of prophets or holy men. She almost called me Sayida in honour of Sayida Menoubia, whom she’d visited in Tunis, always with a candle, a prayer mat and invocations. She’d move between Sayida Menoubia’s tomb and that of Sidi Omar el-Fayash. Perhaps you’ve heard of him – the saint who lived divested of everything. He made the Tunisian authorities chain his legs to stop him leaving his house naked. So he lived in chains, walking screaming around an empty room. Empty except for the women who scrambled to visit him. Some to honour him, others merely to see his manhood on display, or out of the curiosity of women wrapped in sefsaris pretending to be shy!’