You made no comment, as though my dreams no longer interested you to any great degree. You just asked him, ‘And you? What’s your dream?’
‘Maybe a city as well,’ he said.
‘Is it called Khalil?’
He said, smiling, ‘No. We don’t always carry the name of our dreams. Nor do we belong to them. My name is Khalil and my city is Gaza.’
‘When did you last visit?’
‘Before the 1967 war. More than fifteen years ago.’ He then added, ‘What’s happening to Khaled today makes me laugh. In the past, when we were in Algeria, he tried to convince me to get married and stay there for ever. He didn’t understand that Gaza haunted me so much it made me leave every city. Now he’s reached the same conclusion of his own accord, and is also haunted by a city.
‘What’s amazing is that he never talked about it to me. It’s as though he attached no importance to it before. We don’t pay attention to things like happiness until we’ve lost them!’
Perhaps that was what happened to me. I gradually became aware that I had been happy with you before that summer holiday, before Ziyad came and our love turned from a couple’s violent passion into a love triangle with equal sides. From a two-player game of chess, where love filled the black squares and the white squares and whose only rule was love’s ebb and flow, into a three-handed card game where we sat around a table, revealing our cards and our sadness. We shared a heartbeat and memory, laid traps for each other and created new rules for love. We forged our hands, all of which were identical. We cheated the logic of things, not for one of us to win the game, but to stop one of us losing and so make our ending less painful than the beginning.
It was clear that Ziyad sensed that I loved you in some fashion. But he was unaware of the roots or extent of that love. So he drifted into loving you without thought or guilt.
We all lacked the sense to realise that desire only has enough room for two. Once we were three, it swallowed us up like the Bermuda Triangle swallows ships.
How did we get there? What winds blew us to those alien shores? What fate scattered us, then reunited our disparate, contradictory fates, with our different ages and histories, with our separate battles and dreams, for us to end up there, unconsciously battling between ourselves?
Months later, I read in Ziyad’s papers an idea very close to those feelings. He wrote:
Our desire is another defeat in an age of losing battles. Which defeats hurt most, then?
All that happened was destined.
We were two people for one land.
Two prophets to one city.
Here we are two hearts for one woman.
Everything was ready for pain. (Was the world big enough for us?)
We share our pride like an Arab loaf, circular like our wound, a round-tipped bullet fired at a red square where fate is trained to shoot black circles that dizzily telescope until the centre of death
Where the bullet doesn’t miss
Where the bullet shows no mercy
Where one of our hearts shall be.
During those wintery evenings Ziyad sometimes stayed up late writing in his room. I took this as an unmistakeable sign. He had to be in love to return to writing with such passion when he hadn’t written anything for some years.
Sometimes I smiled as the sound of low music came from his room until late at night. It was as if Ziyad wanted to fill his lungs with life, or as if he didn’t trust life completely and feared it would steal something from him while he slept. He always listened to the same tapes; I don’t know where he got them from. Classical music: Vivaldi, Theodorakis. I wasn’t particularly fond of them.
I might spend the whole evening alone in front of the television and would say to myself, ‘He’s also living his obsession. There is summer fever and winter fever. Mine has ended and his begun!’
But how could I know the degree of his madness? Where to get a seismograph to find out what was happening deep inside him? How to do that when his bouts were secret jottings only revealed on paper? My madness was eleven paintings hanging on the walls, testifying against me and shaming me.
Was my obsession really over? No. It just became internalised and without relation to creativity. Sick feelings I squandered uselessly in jealousy and despair. When Ziyad changed his suit, I felt he was expecting you to come by. When he sat writing, he was writing to you. When he left the house it was on a date with you. In the crush of my jealousy, I even forgot the reasons why Ziyad had come to Paris, his meetings and other fixations.
Then came the trip that I have almost forgotten. Perhaps that was the most painful experience of all. I had to leave the two of you together in one city for ten whole days, and given the difficulty of your meeting elsewhere, probably in my house.
I left trying to convince myself that it was an opportunity for all of us to sort out our relationship. One of us had to be absent for the ambiguity between us to be resolved. Of course, deep down I wasn’t convinced by this logic, or at least by this perverse fate that made the lot fall upon me.
It was clear that fate was a partisan for you two. That hurt me a lot. But what was the most painful thing? Knowing that you were with another man, or that he was none other than Ziyad, or that the betrayal would take place in a room in my house where I had not enjoyed you?
How far would you go with him? How far would he go with you? Would our shared memories and values stop him?
I spoke to you a lot about Ziyad, but didn’t tell you what really mattered. Ziyad had been my secret cell, my secret ticket of belonging. He had been my defeats and triumphs, my proofs and convictions. He was the secret life of another lifetime. Would Ziyad betray me?
I started to blame, and perhaps to despise him in advance.
In my mad jealousy I forgot that I had done nothing different with you. I had disavowed Si Taher, a man who had once been my commander and my friend. A man who had entrusted me with you as a last wish and died a martyr.
Which one of us was the bigger traitor? He, the one who put his dreams and desires into effect, or me, the one who didn’t, because he failed to find an opportunity? Me, who had been sleeping and waking up with you for months, taking you in my sleep, or him, whom you would willingly give yourself to?
There are cities like women. Their names defeat you in advance. They seduce and bewilder you, fill you up and drain you. Their remembrance strips you of all your plans; your whole project becomes love.
There are cities that weren’t created to be visited and explored alone, for you to sleep and wake up in, and then have breakfast alone.
Cities as beautiful as memory, as close as a tear, as painful as loss. Cities so like you!
Could I have forgotten you in a city called Granada? Your love came with the low white houses and their red-tiled roofs, with the trellises of vines, with the flowering jasmine trees, with the streams that traversed the city. With the water, the sun and the reminiscence of the Arabs.
Your love came with the perfumes, the voices, the faces. The brown skin and deep black hair of the Andalucian women. With wedding dresses, with guitars as passionate as your body, with the poems of Lorca, whom you loved. With the sadness of Abu Firas al-Hamdani, whom I loved.
I felt you were a part of that city, too. Were all Arab cities you? And all Arab memory?
Time flowed on, and you remained like the waters of Granada, glistening with longing, and with a superior taste, unlike water from pipes and taps.
Time flowed on, and your voice echoed like the magical fountains in the ruined castles of Arab memory, when evening suddenly falls over Granada and Granada surprises herself as the lover of an Arab king who has just deserted her.
He was Abu Abdullah, the last Arab lover to kiss her!
Maybe I was that king who did not know how to keep his throne. Maybe I had lost you with the same foolishness, and would weep for you one day as he did.
When Granada fell, and he was oblivious, his mother told him, ‘Cry like a woman over a lost king
dom, for you have not protected it like a man.’
Did I really not protect you? Whom should I have declared war against, I ask you? Against whom, when you two were my memory and my dearest ones? Against whom, when you were my city and citadel?
Why should I be ashamed? Has there been one Arab king or ruler since Abu Abdullah who hasn’t wept for some city?
Fall then, Constantine, this was a time of easy conquest!
Did she really fall that day? That I would never know.
I only knew the date of your last fall, your final fall, which I witnessed thereafter.
What madness to increase the expanse of your love and let you assume the features of that city, too. Like a lunatic, I sat every night writing you letters born out of my wonder, longing and jealousy for you. I would tell you the details of my day and my impressions of a city incredibly like you.
One day I wrote to you:
I want to make love to you here. In a house like your body, painted in Andalucian style.
I want to escape with you from tin-can cities and give your love a home that has the same features as your Arab femininity. A house where my original memory is concealed behind its arches, carved inscriptions and meanderings. A house with a garden shaded by a large lemon tree like those planted by the Arabs in the gardens of their houses in Andalucia.
I want to sit by your side, like I’m sitting here by a pool filled with goldfish, and look upon you in awe.
I inhale your body, like I inhale the scent of the unripe green lemons.
Forbidden fruit, by every tree I pass, I hunger for you.
Many letters I wrote to you – could a writer resist words?
I wanted to garland you with words, to bring you back with them, to join you two in the circle of words closed in my face for being a mere painter. So for your sake I composed letters never before written to woman. Letters that exploded in my mind after fifty years of silence.
Without realising, maybe I started writing this book that day. My passion for you had shifted into the language of those letters, a language I was writing for the first time. I had written to women before you, those who passed through my life in my youth and adolescence. But I didn’t exert myself then looking for the right words. The French language, with its freedom, naturally induced me to speak openly and without complexes or shame. I discovered Arabic afresh with you. I learned to get around its gravity, to submit to its secret seduction, its contours, its allusions.
I was biased towards the letters that resembled you. The feminine ending, the ha from the throat and the he from the breath, the proud-standing alif, the dots strewn over their empty, brown bodies.
Was language also feminine? A woman we inclined towards above others and learned to cry, laugh and love the way she did? If she left us we would feel cold and orphaned without her.
I wonder whether you read those letters. Did you sense my fear of being an orphan and of ice-cold seasons? Did they startle you or did they come at an inopportune moment? I should have written them to you before Ziyad crept under your skin and became your language.
Would love letters have been of any use when they came too late for love?
Salvador Dalí and Paul Eluard loved the same woman, and in vain Eluard wrote the most beautiful letters and poetry to win her back from Dalí, who had snatched her from him. But she preferred the then-unknown Dalí’s madness to Eluard’s rhymes. She remained enamoured of Dalí’s brush until her death. He married her several times in several ceremonies, and painted no other woman all his life.
Actually, love does not always repeat itself. Painters do not always defeat poets, even when they try to take up the guise of words.
When I returned to Paris, I had a permanent lump in my throat. This had spoiled the success of my exhibition and the pleasant or useful meetings that went along with it. Something inside me was bleeding profusely – a new emotion of jealousy and vague spite that never left me and constantly reminded me that something was going on.
Ziyad greeted me warmly – was he really happy at my return? He handed me the post that had arrived and a list of the people who had called while I was away. I took it without looking. I knew I wouldn’t find your name. Then he asked me about the exhibition, about the journey and my news. He told me the latest political developments anxiously, which I put down to embarrassment on some account.
I listened to him while checking out the house with my senses like the fairytale giant who, whenever he returned to his lair, would sniff the air for the trace of any man who had crept in during his absence.
I had a strange feeling you had passed through the apartment, although I could find no proof to confirm my suspicions. Did proof matter? Could ten days have passed without you two meeting? And where could you have met, if not here? And when you had met, would talk have been enough?
You were a source of brimstone and Ziyad a Zoroastrian lover who worshipped fire! Could he have held out for long before you, a woman in whose fire men dreamed of being consumed, even if only in fantasy?
I searched Ziyad’s face for signs of happiness, for definite proof that you were his. But he revealed nothing but anxiety. He suddenly spoke about you. ‘I’ve asked her to come round tomorrow for our last meal.’
I cried out in some surprise, ‘Why the last?’
He said, ‘Because I’m leaving on Sunday.’
‘Why Sunday?’ I said this feeling a mix of sadness and joy.
Ziyad replied, ‘Because I have to go back. I was just waiting for you to come back before leaving. I was only supposed to stay for two weeks, but it’s been a whole month and I have to go.’ Jokingly he added, ‘Before I get used to Parisian life.’ Maybe you were the Parisian life he was afraid of getting used to. Maybe he was running away from love again, or his mission had finished and he had nothing left to do but leave.
Saturday was taken up with the business of my return and Ziyad’s preparations to leave. That evening, I tried to avoid sitting down with him. But Sunday lay in wait for us and finally set the three of us face to face at a fateful last meal.
You greeted me with unexpected warmth. For my part, I interpreted this as guilt – or gratitude, perhaps. Hadn’t I presented you with love on a platter of poetry laid on the table of my apartment? Then you thanked me for my letters, expressing admiration at my style, as though you were a teacher marking a pupil’s essay. Your openly expressed thanks annoyed me. I felt you had talked to Ziyad about them and perhaps had shown them to him, too.
I was about to say something when you resumed, ‘I wish I could have been there with you. Is Granada really so beautiful? Did you really go to Lorca’s house in Fuente Vaqueros – isn’t that the name of his village, like you said? Tell me about it.’
I found something quite incredible in your way of broaching the conversation with me from the margins, something thought-provoking, too. Was that all you could find to say after all the storms we’d been through? After ten days of hell that I had experienced alone?
A scene from a film about Lorca came to mind.
I said to you, ‘Do you know how Lorca died?’
‘He was executed,’ you said.
‘No. They took him to the open country and told him to walk. He started walking and they shot him in the back. He dropped down dead without really knowing what had happened. That’s the saddest part. Lorca did not fear death; he expected it and headed towards it as though going to meet a friend. He would have hated the bullets coming from behind!’
At the time, I felt that Ziyad took my words as a bullet to the chest. He lifted his eyes towards me and I felt he was about to say something, but he remained silent. We understood each other with few words. Later on, I regretted my deliberate attempt to hurt him. Hurting him cost me more than the pain you caused. Still, it was the least I could say to him after all the suffering I had gone through because of him. Perhaps it also was the most I could say.
Our dinner suddenly turned into embarrassing silence occasionally punctuated by fo
rced conversation, initiated by you in a woman’s way to lighten the atmosphere. Or perhaps evade it. But it was useless. Something pure as crystal had shattered. There was no hope of putting it together again.
‘Will you take Ziyad to the airport with me?’ I asked later.
‘No. I can’t go to the airport,’ you said. ‘I might meet my uncle there. He goes by the Air Algeria office sometimes. Besides, I hate airports and farewell ceremonies. We never really leave the ones we love, so we don’t say goodbye to them. Goodbyes were made for strangers.’
That was one of your marvellous outbursts, like when you had said before, ‘We only write dedications to strangers. Those we love do not belong on the blank first page, but in the pages of the book.’
Why goodbye?
Was there a need for another farewell?
Over lunch I watched your gaze consume him. You ate nothing else. Your eyes were saying goodbye to his body piece by piece. They lingered over every part of him, as though you were recording images for a future when images of him would be all you had.
He avoided your gaze, perhaps out of consideration for me or because my hurtful words had made him lose the desire to love – and the desire to eat – and made him turn his sad looks inwards and to the future after his journey.
I was no less sad than you two. But my sadness was unique and individual, like my disappointment. It had multiple, obscure reasons, including my belief in your wild affair. Perhaps your refusal to come with me to the airport made the lunch more tense. My great hope was that on the way back I would finally be alone with you. Then, with a few questions, I would know whether you could erase those days from your memory and return to me unharmed.
I knew that your heart favoured him. Perhaps your body, too. But I trusted in the logic of time and believed that in the end you would come back to me, because there would only be me. I was your first memory, your primal longing for a father figure.
The Bridges of Constantine Page 15