The Bridges of Constantine Read online

  To my father

  A son of Constantine who would say, ‘There are cities where we live and others that live in us.’ He made me fall in love with the city that lived within me and that I had not visited before writing this book.

  The more than one million copies of this novel will for ever lack one reader: my father.

  What use is our writing when there are no bookshops beyond the grave?

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  A Note on the Translator

  Chapter One

  ‘What happened to us was love. Literature was all that did not happen.’ I still remember the time you said that.

  Now that everything is over, I can say: Congratulations to literature, then, on our tragedy. How vast the sweep of what did not happen, enough to fill several books. Congratulations to love, too.

  What happened, what didn’t happen, what will never happen – all so beautiful.

  Before today, I believed we could only write about our lives once we had been cured of them. When we could probe old wounds with the pen and not feel the pain again; when we could look back without nostalgia, without going mad and, also, without bitterness. Is that really possible? We are never cured of memory. That’s why we paint and why we write. And why some of us die.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’ Atiqa’s voice comes absently, as if asking someone else. Apologetic without apologising, like the sadness I haven’t been able to shake off for days. My voice suddenly fails me, and I respond with a nod of the head. She goes out, only to return a few seconds later with a large copper tray bearing a coffee pot, cups, a sugar bowl, a phial of rose water and a plate of small cakes.

  In other cities coffee comes pre-poured in the cup, with a spoon and sugar lumps on the saucer. But Constantine is a city that hates economy in anything. She always displays what she has, just as she wears all she owns and says all she knows. That’s why even sadness could hold a banquet in this city.

  I stack the scattered papers to make room for my cup of coffee, as though making room for you. The old drafts and blank sheets have spent days waiting for a few words – waiting for life to creep into them and turn them from paper into glory. Only words could take me from silence to speech, from memory to oblivion. Yet . . .

  I put the sugar aside and sip my coffee – bitter, the way your love has conditioned me. I think of the strange sweetness of bitter coffee. At that instant, I feel able to write about you. I light a nervous cigarette and blow out clouds of the words that have been burning me for years. Words whose fire I have never once extinguished on paper.

  Can paper extinguish memory when we leave the ash of nostalgia and the fag ends of disappointment on it? Which one of us snuffed out or fired up the other? I don’t know, but before you I hadn’t written anything worth mentioning. I will only start writing with you. Inevitably, I will finally find the words to write me. It is my right, today, to choose how I will be written, even though I didn’t choose this story – a story that might not have been mine, if fate hadn’t kept inserting you into every twist of the plot.

  Where has this confusion come from?

  How has the white rectangle of paper come to match the blank expanses of the canvases propped against the walls of my old studio? How have words abandoned me, just as colours did before them, turning the world into a black-and-white television showing a silent movie of memory? I have always envied artists who shift effortlessly between painting and writing, as if shifting from one internal room to another, as if moving untroubled between two mistresses. I should never have had only one mistress!

  That would be the pen: more revealing and more wounding, skilled neither in toning nor shading, unable to give touches of colour to the wound on display.

  These are the words I’ve been denied; naked, raw and painful, the way I want them. So why is my hand trembling fearfully, unable to write? Maybe it’s only just dawned on me that I have exchanged my brushes for a knife. Writing to you is as fatal as loving you.

  I sip your bitter coffee, this time with a dubious pleasure. I feel I am about to find the opening sentence for this book. A sentence with the spontaneity of a letter, as if I were to say, for example: ‘I’m writing from a city that still resembles you and that I have come to resemble. The birds still hurry across these bridges, while I’ve become another bridge. Don’t like bridges any more.’ Or something like: ‘Before a cup of coffee, I remembered you . . . Just this once you could have put a sugar lump in my coffee. Why such a large tray for bitter coffee?’ I could have said anything.

  In the end, novels are only letters and postcards we write not on special occasions, but to announce our inner news to those who care. That’s why the most beautiful novels start with a sentence unexpected by anyone familiar with our moods and rituals – someone who might have caused all our turbulence.

  A sudden flood of memory. I gulp down my coffee. I open my window to get away from you, to retreat into the autumn sky, the trees, the bridges and the passers-by. To a city that has become mine once again, after I made a date with her for a different reason.

  Constantine. Where everything is you.

  Here you are, coming in through the window – as you did years ago – along with the familiar call from the minarets, the cries of the vendors, the footsteps of the black-clad women, the same old songs from the tireless radio: ‘Apple, apple, tell me do/Why the people fancy you.’

  The naivety of the song breaks my reverie. It thrusts the nation into my face, unquestionably reminding me that I am in an Arab city. The years spent in Paris seem an epic dream. Is the singing of love songs to a fruit a peculiarly Arab thing? Or is it only the apple, with its taste of original sin, that is delicious enough to be serenaded in Arab lands? What if you had been an apple? But you weren’t. You were the woman who tempted me to eat the apple, that’s all. Instinctively you played Eve with me. But I couldn’t renounce the several men inside me and be, with you in particular, as big an idiot as Adam!

  ‘Hello Si Khaled. How are you today?’ A neighbour calls out his greetings. His gaze has climbed the floors of my sadness and he seems surprised at how lost I look as I stand there. I vacantly follow his steps, and those of others who come after him, towards the neighbouring mosque. Indolent or in a hurry, all heading to the same place. The whole country is off to pray, while the radio extols the eating of an apple. Beside the minarets, rooftop aerials pick up the foreign channels that every evening on television suggest more than one – contemporary – way to taste forbidden fruit.

  In fact, I don’t like fruit, and the matter of the apple has no particular interest for me.

  I loved you. Was it my fault that your love came in the form of a sin?

  ‘How are you?’ another neighbour asks on his way to pray. My lips give him a terse reply and proceed to ask about you.

  How am I? I’m what you did to me, madam. And how are you? A woman whom my nostalgia has smeared with madness, until she has gradually taken on the features of a city and the contours of a nation where I live, oblivious to time, as though within long-locked vaults of memory.

  How do you do? Like a mulberry tree decked in hereditary mourning for every season. You, Constantine woman in dress; you, Constantine woman in love, in joy, in sadness, in lovers. Tell me, where are you now? This is Constantine. With her cold limbs and feet, her hot lips, her bouts of insanity.

  This is she. If only you knew how like her you are. Let me close the window.

  It was Marcel Pagnol who said, �
��Get used to considering ordinary things, things that may actually happen.’ Isn’t death, in the end, something ordinary? Just like birth, love, marriage, illness, old age, exile and madness? Until they happen, we expect so many commonplace things to be extraordinary. Things that we think happen only to other people. We think that life for some reason or another will spare us many of them, until we find ourselves before them.

  When I examine my life today, I find that my having met you is the only truly extraordinary thing. The only thing I couldn’t have foreseen or whose consequences for me I couldn’t have anticipated. Because, at the time, I was ignorant of the fact that extraordinary things may also be accompanied by many ordinary ones.

  Even so, and even after these years have passed, I still wonder where to place your love. Under the heading of ordinary things that happen out of the blue – like a medical condition, a twisted ankle or an episode of madness? Or should I file it where it began – as something extraordinary, like the discovery of a planet or an earthquake undetected by sensors? Were you a twisted ankle or a twist of fate?

  I flip through a pile of recent newspapers searching for convincing explanations for an ‘ordinary’ event that changed the course of my life and landed me here. I browse our misery after all these years, the black ink of the homeland sticking to my fingers. You have to wash your hands after reading the newspapers here, although not always for the same reason. The ink of some of them stains, while the corruption of the glossier ones rubs off. Is it because newspapers resemble their owners that they seem to wake up daily like us, hitting the streets with haggard features and a sallow, hastily washed face? They don’t bother to comb their hair, put on a matching tie or give us a winning smile.

  Twenty-fifth of October 1988. Banner headlines. Masses of black ink. Masses of blood. Too little shame.

  Some newspapers print the same front-page photographs every day. Only the suits are different. Others promote the same lies, but with less intelligence each time, or sell nothing less than a ticket out of the country. Since that’s no longer possible, I’d better close the paper and go and wash my hands.

  The last time the Algerian press caught my eye was a few months ago. By chance, I was leafing through a magazine when I came across a half-page picture of you alongside an interview about your new book.

  My gaze was transfixed that day by that framed photo of you. I made a futile effort to decode your words. I read you in a state of confusion, stumbling over the words in my haste, as if it were me talking to you about myself, and not you addressing others about a story that might not have been ours.

  What an incredible date we had that day! How – after all these years – had I failed to expect that, tucked between the pages of a magazine I don’t usually read, you’d make a date with me.

  It had to be the law of idiocy that by chance I’d bought a magazine I usually did not, just to turn my life head over heels.

  Where’s the surprise? Weren’t you a paper woman, loving and hating on paper, leaving and returning on paper, killing and reviving with the stroke of a pen? Reading you had to be confusing. The electric thrill ran through my body again, firing my pulse, as though I were facing not your picture but you.

  I went back to that picture from time to time, and would wonder how you had managed to waylay me after I had avoided every avenue leading back to you. How did you come back after the wound had so nearly healed? My heart that once brimmed with your memory had little by little emptied of you, you who had packed love’s bags and taken off for another heart. You left my heart like a package tourist leaves a city. Everything pre-arranged, even the departure time; everything pre-booked, even the sights to visit, the play to see and the gift shop to buy souvenirs. Was your journey as tedious as that?

  Stunned and confused, I was looking at a representation of you as though you were really present. I was surprised by your new hairstyle; what had you done to your hair, now short, hair that had embraced me in the loneliness of my nights? I gazed at your eyes, searching for the memory of my first failure with you. That day, your eyes outshone themselves in beauty. They held so much misery and so much joy for me. Had your eyes changed too? Or had my perspective changed? I continued searching your face for signs of my earlier madness. I barely recognised your lips, your smile or your new lipstick.

  How had I once found an echo of my mother in you? I had imagined you in her burgundy dress, as you kneaded, hands with long, painted nails, the bread whose taste I had been missing for years. What insanity that was. What idiocy!

  Had married life really changed your appearance and your childlike laughter? Had it changed your memory too, the taste of your lips and your dusky, gypsy-like skin? Had it made you forget the ‘bankrupt prophet’ whose Ten Commandments were stolen on his way over to you, so he only brought you an eleventh?

  There you were before me in the guise of apostasy. You had chosen another path. You had put on another face that I no longer recognised. The face of an advertising model, made up in advance to sell something like toothpaste or anti-ageing cream. But perhaps you’d put on the mask just to promote a product in the shape of a book, which you’d entitled The Curve of Forgetting. A product that might be my story with you, the memory of my hurt, or the latest way you’d found to kill me all over again, without leaving your fingerprints on my neck.

  That day, I remembered an old conversation of ours when I had asked you why you opted for the novel in particular. I marvelled at your answer. You said with a smile whose truth or deceit I couldn’t gauge, ‘I had to tidy up internally, get rid of some old stuff. Just like a house, we need to spring clean inside ourselves. I can’t keep the windows shuttered on more than one corpse. We write novels for no other reason than to kill their heroes. To finish off the people whose existence has become a burden. Whenever we write about them, we get rid of them and let in the fresh air.’ After a brief silence you added, ‘Every novel that works is really a crime we commit against a certain memory or perhaps a certain person. We shoot them in public, with a silencer. They are the only ones who realise that the spray of words is aimed at them. Failed novels are just failed attempts at assassination. Authors’ pen permits should be revoked on the grounds that they can’t handle words. They might kill someone by mistake, and that includes themselves – after making their readers die of boredom!’

  Why hadn’t your sadistic tendencies raised doubts then? Why hadn’t I anticipated all those crimes to come, where you used your other weapons? I never expected that one day you might take aim at me. That’s why I laughed at what you said. Maybe my new fascination with you began then – in such cases we can’t resist a crazed admiration for our killer.

  Nevertheless, I expressed my perplexity. ‘I thought the novel was a way for an author to relive a story they loved and grant immortality to someone they loved.’

  My words seemed to surprise you, as though you saw in them something you hadn’t taken into account, and you said, ‘Maybe that’s true as well. Ultimately, we only kill those we love. In compensation, we grant them literary immortality. It’s a fair deal, isn’t it?’

  Fair? Who discusses justice with a tyrant? Did they argue with Nero the day he burned Rome out of pyromaniac love for her? Weren’t you just like him, as skilled in arson as in love?

  At that moment, had you foreseen my imminent end and were you trying to console me in advance? Or were you, as usual, just playing with words, noting their impact on me? Were you secretly relishing my constant amazement at you and your incredible capacity to forge a language that would match the scale of your contradictions?

  Anything was possible. Perhaps I was the victim of your novel, the victim you sentenced to immortality and decided, as usual, to embalm with words. Perhaps I was only an imaginary victim, created by you to resemble the truth. In the end, despite my stubborn desire for the truth, only you knew the answers to all these questions that haunted me.

  When did you write the book?

  Before or after you got married? B
efore Ziyad left us, or after? Did you write it about me, or about him? Did you write it to kill me or to bring him back to life? Or to finish us both off with one book, just as you left us both for another man?

  When I read the article a few months ago, I never expected you’d force your presence on me again and that your book would dominate my thoughts, a vicious circle in which I was caught alone.

  After all that had happened I couldn’t immediately go searching among the bookshops to buy a copy of my story. Nor could I ignore it and get on with my life as if I’d never heard of it and it had nothing to do with me. Wasn’t I burning to read the rest of the story? Your story, which ended without my knowing the final chapters. Having been the main witness, I was now absent. Yet according to the same law of idiocy, I had always been both witness and victim in a story that only had room for one hero.

  I have it now, your book. It would have been impossible to read today, so I’ve left it enigmatically closed on the table like a time bomb ready to ambush me. I turn to its silent presence for help in blasting open the quarry of words inside me and stirring up memory.

  Everything about it has annoyed me today: its title, chosen as a clear deceit; your smile that seems to ignore my sadness; your calm gaze that treats me like a reader who knows little about you. Even your name. Perhaps that annoys me most. Its particular letters still strike the memory before they strike the eye. Your name isn’t read so much as heard, like a melody played on a single instrument for an audience of one. How could I read it impartially when it was one chapter of an unbelievable story written by chance when our fates crossed?

  A comment on the back of your book describes it as a literary event. I put a pile of drafts written at moments of delirium on top of it and think, ‘It’s time for me to write or remain silent for ever. These are incredible times.’

  A sudden chill settles it. Constantine’s night creeps towards me through the closed window of solitude. I put the top back on the pen for the moment and slide under the covers of loneliness.