The Bridges of Constantine

by Ahlem Mosteghanemi

I masked my face with happiness and tried to keep it up for the whole evening.

  The house was filled with trilling cries of joy. My lungs were filled with the smoke of the cigarettes that I lit and that lit me. My heart was full of grief. I learned automatically to put a false smile on my lips and laughed with the others. I sat down with people I knew and those I didn’t. I talked about things I knew and others I didn’t. That way I wasn’t alone with you for a second. That way I wasn’t suddenly surprised by you inside me and didn’t collapse.

  I said hello to the groom, who kissed me with the affection of a long-lost friend.

  ‘So you’ve made it to Algeria, sir! If it wasn’t for this wedding we wouldn’t have seen you!’

  I tried to forget that I was talking to your husband, a man talking to me out of courtesy, hurriedly, perhaps thinking about the moment he would be alone with you at the end of the night.

  I looked at his cigar, extra long for the occasion, the blue silk suit he was wearing – or that was wearing him – with the elegance of one accustomed to silk. I tried not to stop and think about his body. I tried not to remember. I distracted myself with the faces of the guests . . . and you appeared.

  You entered in a procession of women, professionals at joy and nuptials as much as I was a professional in painting and sadness.

  I was seeing you for the first time after all those months of absence, passing close and distant, like a shooting star. With a heavy dress and heavy steps you walked among the trills of joy and the drumbeats. A song scratched my memory and took me back to being a child running around the old houses of Constantine with other processions of women behind other brides about whom I knew nothing at the time.

  I loved those wedding songs so much. Songs to accompany the bride, which I enjoyed without understanding. Now they were making me cry.

  ‘Open the door, mother of the bride.’ It was said that brides always cried when they heard this song.

  Had you cried that day, I wondered?

  Your eyes were distant. The mist of my tears and the throng kept me from them. So I dropped the question.

  I made do with contemplating you in your final role.

  You approached like a fairytale princess, seductive and desirable, surrounded by admiring glances, bewildered and bewildering, humble and arrogant.

  There you were, as usual, every man’s secret desire and the envy of every woman.

  There I was, as usual, still stunned before you.

  There was Fergani, as usual, serenading those with stars on their shoulders in the front row. His voice sweetened and his violin grew louder when he played for the notables, the decision-makers, the generals. The musical instruments reached a crescendo and the singers united in one voice to welcome the groom:

  How sweet the wedding with its ouds

  May God never part them

  Or have them fear the evil eye.

  The ululations went up and the banknotes fluttered down.

  What strength there was in hired throats. How generous were the hands that contributed as quickly as they had amassed!

  There they were then. All of them, as usual. Men with distended stomachs, Habana cigars, and multi-faceted suits. The masters of every era and every time. Diplomats and suspect wheeler-dealers, masters of happiness and misery, those with unknown pasts.

  There they were. Former ministers and ministers-in-waiting. Former thieves and thieves-in-waiting. Opportunist administrators and opportunists waiting to become administrators. Former informants and military men disguised in ministerial dress.

  There they were. Those with revolutionary theories out for a quick buck. Those with vacant minds and towering villas who talked of themselves in the plural.

  There they were. They always gathered like sharks, always swarming around dubious feasts.

  I knew them and ignored most of them. ‘Don’t say “I” until the neighbourhood big shots die!’ I knew them and pitied them. How pitiable they were with their wealth and their poverty, with their knowledge and their ignorance, in their rapid ascent and their calamitous fall. How pitiable on the day when no one would offer them a hand to shake.

  Until that day came, the wedding belonged to them. Let them eat, let them enjoy, let them scatter banknotes. Let them listen to Fergani singing, like at every wedding in Constantine, the song ‘Saleh Bey’.

  The same song had been sung for two hundred years to remind people of the tragedy of Saleh Bey and of the deceit of power and glory, which did not last for anyone. It was being sung that day out of habit; no one paid attention to the words.

  Ministers and sultans

  All dead and mourned.

  Great wealth they had,

  But the Arabs said:

  ‘What use wealth and glory,

  Saleh with his money.’

  Listening to those words, I remembered the words of a pop song I had heard on the radio: ‘Saleh, Saleh, I love your eyes.’

  Yes, Constantine, every age had its Saleh, but not every Saleh was a bey, and not every ruler was saleh, fit to rule.

  Finally the other homeland was in front of me. Was that really the homeland? At every table was a face that I knew too much about. I sat down and looked at them. I listened to them grumbling and complaining. Not one of them was happy, it seemed. It was unbelievable that they were the ones who always had something to complain about. They criticised the situation and cursed the homeland.

  A very strange thing! It was as though they hadn’t all run scrambling after their positions. It was as though they weren’t part of the filth of the homeland, as though they weren’t the cause of the disasters.

  I said hello to Si Mustafa. He had become a minister since the day he visited me to buy a painting, and I refused to sell it to him.

  Si Sharif’s predictions had come true, then, and he had backed a winning horse.

  I asked him politely, ‘How are you Si Mustafa?’

  He launched straight into a complaint. ‘We’re drowning in problems, you know.’

  Quite by chance a phrase of De Gaulle’s popped into my head: ‘A minister has no right to complain – nobody forced him to become a minister!’

  I kept the thought to myself and just said to him, ‘Yes, I know.’

  Yes, I knew about those vast amounts of money he had received in Canada as commission for refitting one of the large state facilities. But I was ashamed to say that to him, because I knew that those who had preceded him in the job had done no better. I contented myself with listening to him complaining in a way that would have evoked the pity of any wretched citizen.

  Hassan was busy talking to an old friend, an Arabic teacher who had, all of a sudden, become ambassador to one of the Arab states. How had that happened? It was rumoured to be a payback. An inheritance and an old friendship linked him with the father of someone important. That wasn’t the only diplomatic case!

  There was the case of Si Hussein, whom I knew well. He had been director of a cultural institution when I was director of publications. Overnight he had been appointed as a foreign ambassador, after his smell turned sour at home. So they kept him under wraps for a few months and then dispatched him abroad with full diplomatic credentials under the Algerian flag.

  He was back that day, in his natural environment. After some fraud and deception with state funds abroad, he had been summoned home to take up a party post without any fuss being made. Just in a back seat this time. In such cases there was always a respectable dumping ground!

  At another table, someone was still theorising and going on as if he was the philosopher of the Revolution and all future revolutions. One of his personal revolutions involved reaching the top ranks in dubious circumstances, after having supplied female students to an elderly official with a thing for young girls.

  Such was the homeland. Such was your wedding to which you invited me. It was a circus whose only acts were clowns and contortionists who jumped the queue, broke necks and trampled on values. A circus where a handful made fun of the m
asses and a whole people was trained to be stupid.

  How right Nasser was not to turn up to that grotesque show. I knew intuitively that he wouldn’t appear, but where was he? He might still have been praying in the mosque so as to avoid meeting anyone from the wedding party. But had his prayer, or my getting drunk, changed anything? Ah, Nasser, stop praying, my lad. They also pray and put on a guise of piety. Stop praying. Let’s think while the flies land on everything and the locusts devour the feast.

  As the night went on, my sadness grew, as did their enjoyment. Banknotes rained down on the important women surrendering to the intoxication of dancing to the most famous popular song:

  When the night falls, where will I sleep?

  On a bed and pillows of silk.

  Some hope!

  Yes, Fergani, sing!

  The song had nothing to do with the housing crisis, as it might seem at first. It was a paean to the lurid nights and silk sheets that weren’t within reach of the masses.

  Those who’ve died, don’t cry for them,

  those who’ve died.

  Some hope!

  I wouldn’t cry. It wasn’t the night for Si Taher or Ziyad. It wasn’t for martyrs or for lovers. It was a night for deals, openly celebrated with music and trills of joy.

  She leaves the bath-house perfumed.

  Is it for me or for another?

  Some hope!

  I wouldn’t ask myself that question. I knew you were another’s and not mine. The songs confirmed this, and the procession taking you away with trilling cries to your licit night of love.

  When you went past me in the bridal march, I felt that you were walking over my body, not perfumed as the song says, but with your hennaed feet and your gold anklets clinking inside me like bells awaking memory.

  Stop.

  Easy now, you, dressed in the fashion of Constantine! Poems do not pass by so fast!

  Your dress, embroidered in gold and studded with gold coins, was a long poem on red velvet composed by Constantine over the generations. A gold belt, tightly encircling your waist to make your femininity and seduction overflow, was the epicentre of my amazement. The greatest lines of Arabic poetry ever written.

  So go easy.

  Let me dream that time has stopped, that you are mine. Me, who might die without marrying, without the ululations rising for me.

  How much I wished I could steal the song from all those women’s throats to bless my taking possession of you. If I were the bride snatcher of legend who runs off with beautiful women on their wedding night, I would have come riding the winds on a white horse and snatched you from them.

  If you had been mine, the city would have blessed us, and from every street we passed, a saint would have come forth to light incense on our way. But how sad the night, Constantine. How dejected her holy saints. They alone sat at my table for no good reason and reserved a front seat for my other memory.

  So I spent my evening greeting them, one by one.

  Peace, Sidi Rachid. Peace, Sidi Mabrouk, Sidi Mohamed of the Crow, Sidi Suleiman, Sidi Bouanaba, Sidi Abdelmumin, Sidi Maseed, Sidi Bumezza, Sidi Shalice.

  Peace to you who rule the streets of this city, her alleyways and her memory.

  Stay with me, holy saints of God. I am tired tonight. Do not leave me. Wasn’t my father one of you?

  My father, member of the Aissawiyya Order, like his father and grandfather before him. In the closed circles, at the incredible ceremonies of the Order, he would plunge a red-hot skewer into his flesh, right through his body and then pull it out without a drop of blood on it.

  He, who swallowed red-hot iron, putting it out with his saliva and not getting burnt, may he teach me tonight how to be tortured and not bleed. Teach me how to say her name and not burn my tongue. Teach me to be cured of her, he who frequented the Aissawi group in sessions of ecstasy and terror, dancing possessed by the flame, ‘I am Sidi Aissawi who wounds and heals.’

  Who will heal me, father, who? When I love her.

  At that late hour of pain, I confessed I still loved her. That she was mine.

  I defied those with distended stomachs, the one with the beard, the bald one, the bearers of innumerable stars and all those to whom she gave so much but who raped her today in my presence.

  I challenged them with my lack. With the arm that was no longer my arm. With the memory they had stolen from me. With all they had taken away from me.

  I challenged them to love her like me, because I alone loved her without return.

  I knew that right then someone was lifting that dress off her in haste. He would take her gold bracelets off with little care and rush towards her body with the eagerness of a fifty-year-old man taking a girl.

  My sadness was for that dress.

  How many hands had embroidered it? How many women had taken turns for a single man to enjoy lifting it off? A man who would throw it randomly over a chair, as though it were not our memory, our homeland.

  Was it the fate of nations to be built by entire generations for one man to enjoy?

  I wondered why it was only me who considered all these details. Why only now had I discovered the meaning of all those things that had no meaning before?

  Was it perhaps love for the homeland, or distance from it, that had given ordinary things a sacredness that only those deprived of them feel?

  Now ordinary life had killed the dream and the sacredness of things. One of the Prophet’s companions advised the Muslims to leave Mecca as soon as they had finished the rites of the pilgrimage, so that that city would retain its awe and sanctity in their hearts, and not be transformed into an ordinary city where anyone might steal, fornicate and oppress without dread.

  That is what had happened to me since stepping into Constantine. Only I treated her as an extraordinary city. I treated her every stone with love. I greeted each one of her bridges individually. I asked for news of her families, saints and men, individually.

  I contemplated her walking, praying, fornicating and putting her madness to work. No one could understand my mad attachment to a city that all dreamed of escaping.

  Did I blame them?

  Did the inhabitants of Athens feel they were going to and fro over history, over the soil trodden by the gods and many mythic heroes? Did the wretched poor of Giza know they were living by the oldest wonder of the world? That the pharaohs were still among them ruling Egypt with their chambers and tombs? Only foreigners who have read Greek and Egyptian history in books treated these stones with sanctity and came from all over the world just to touch them.

  Perhaps I had spent too long in the city and committed the stupid mistake of coming within burning closeness to dreams. Now, day after day and failure after failure, I would be cured of the power of her name over me and lose my beautiful illusions. But not without pain. At that moment, I only wanted the city to provide a bullet of mercy.

  So I accepted the cries of joy that arose at that early hour of dawn to bless your petticoat sullied with your innocence, the last shot fired in my face by the city. Without a silencer or a muffled conscience, I received it frozen, with the astonished look of a corpse, while I watched them competing around me to touch your shift on display.

  There they were offering you to me as a painting splattered with blood, in proof of my ultimate impotence, in proof of their other crime.

  I didn’t move or protest. A spectator at a bullfight cannot change the logic of things and side with the bull. If that were so, he should have stayed at home and not gone to the corrida, which existed to praise the matador.

  Something about the atmosphere evoked the bullfight. The ululations and the elegance, the music to mark the ‘consummation’ and the cries directed at a slip smeared with blood reminded me of its rites. A beautiful death would be arranged for the bull who entered the arena to dance music and died to it under deadly, decorated swords, entranced by the colour red and the elegance of his killer.

  Which of us was the bull? Was it you or me who was colour blind and
saw only the red colour of your blood? Which of us was the bull circling the ring of your love with the pride of a creature only conquered by deceit, who knew his death was preordained?

  In truth, your blood embarrassed me and made me ashamed. I felt torn.

  Hadn’t I always been desperate to know the end of your story with him, the one who took you from me? Perhaps he had taken everything from you.

  The question had occupied and haunted me to the point of madness since the day I put Ziyad in front of you and put you before your other destiny.

  Did you open up the gates of your fortress to him, lower your high towers and surrender to his masculine seduction?

  Perhaps you left your childhood to me and your womanhood to him?

  The answer had come to me after a year of torture. There it was at last, a sticky, fresh red rose, a moment old. There it was, the answer I didn’t expect, intruding, shaming. So why the sadness?

  What hurt me most that night? Was it knowing that I had wronged Ziyad with my doubts, and that he, the most worthy of you that night, had died without enjoying you? Or was it knowing that you were just a city taken by military force, like every Arab city?

  What annoyed me most that night? That I finally knew your riddle, or that I knew I would know nothing more about you after that day, even if I were to spend a lifetime talking to you and read you a thousand times?

  Were you still a virgin, your sins merely ink on paper?

  Why had you made me believe all those things? Why did you give me your book as though giving me a dagger for jealousy?

  Why did you teach me to love you line by line, lie by lie, and to violate you on paper?

  Let it be.

  My consolation now was that among all my failures, you were the most beautiful.

  ‘Why are you sad this morning?’ asked Hassan.

  I tried not to ask him why he was happy.

  I knew that Nasser’s absence and boycott of the wedding the day before had spoiled his mood. But it didn’t prevent him from getting into Fergani’s songs, laughing or talking at length to people he had not met before. I was observing him and quite happy at his naive happiness.