The Bridges of Constantine (21 page)

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 forced 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.

I backed logic and waited.

Ziyad had left.

I gradually got my apartment, and my old habits, back.

I was happy, but with a vague bitterness. I had grown used to him being around, and suddenly felt lonely when he abandoned me to face winter on my own with its grey days and long startling nights.

Ziyad had left. The apartment was all at once as empty of him as it had been full. Only a suitcase remained behind to attest that he had been there. He left it at the bottom of the wardrobe after packing away his papers and other things. I saw in it the prospect of his return, perhaps on your account.

Still, I have to admit I was more happy than sad. I felt that getting the apartment back without him meant getting you back. I felt that, in one way or another, the house would finally be filled with you. That when I was alone, I would be alone with you.

I would gradually bring you back. Hadn’t you readily admitted that you loved the apartment, how it was arranged, its light, the view of the Seine below? Or perhaps you had only loved Ziyad’s presence that saturated everything and made things better!

To begin with, I anticipated your call. I held on for it to rescue me. But your voice gradually receded. You called every week, then every fortnight, then calls came sparingly, like drops of medicine. At times I felt you only bothered out of politeness, or boredom, or from an unspoken desire for news of Ziyad. Then the calls stopped completely.

I wondered whether he wrote to you at home so you had no need to ask after him. Or, as usual for him, he had told you in advance that he wouldn’t write and that like him you had to learn to forget. But you went and imposed that punishment on me, too.

Ziyad hated half-solutions. Like any man who has carried a gun, he was an extremist. So he also hated what he used to call ‘half-pleasures’ or ‘half-measures’. He was a man of fateful choices: either he loved and renounced everything else for that love, or he left for something more important. In either case, there was no reason to make himself suffer with longings or memory.

For a long time afterwards I wondered what he had chosen. Perhaps he had done the same as he had years before in Algeria with that girl he nearly married. Or had he changed this time? By virtue of age, or just because of you? After all, what happened between you two was no ordinary story of ordinary people.

Sometimes I tried to coax you to talk about him. I might end up understanding the new rules of the game and accommodating them. As usual, you were evasive. It was obvious that you loved it when I talked about him. But you gave nothing away. You contradicted yourself all the time. You mixed the funny and the serious, truth and lies in an effort to evade something.

Your words were white lies that I coloured with a paintbrush to match what I knew about you. I became used to applying anxious mauves, blues or greys to what you were saying. I turned its gist into an illustrated scenario, a series of drawings. I could add touches belonging to another conversation we had not had.

It was then that I might have started to fathom the mysterious link forming in my memory between you and the colour white. It wasn’t just that your words were a white lie. You were a woman with a special ability to evoke that colour in all its antonymic forms. Or it was then that I may have started, without realising it and by blind intuition, to remove that colour from my paintings entirely. I tried to do without it in a deranged effort to obliterate you.

It was a colour in league with you. The day I saw you as a baby crawling towards your white clothes drying on slats over the stove, fate gave a forewarning that, rather than drying clothes, it was cooking me and you together over a low flame. Like you, white was an ingredient of all tones and objects. I would have to destroy so many things before I could be rid of it. I would have to blank so many paintings if I stopped using it.

In every way (and colour) I was trying to finish with you. But in truth I just became more caught up in loving you. In a moment of despair, I admitted over the phone, ‘You know that your love is a desert of shifting sands and I no longer know where I stand.’

With hurtful irony you replied, ‘Stand still. What matters is not to move. Any attempt to extract yourself will make the sand drag you down further. That’s the advice desert people give. How could you not know that?’

I should have been sad that day. But I laughed. Perhaps because I loved your clever irony even when it hurt. It is rare to meet a woman who makes us suffer with her intelligence. Perhaps you were offering me the possibility of a death that I saw was as beautiful as it was final.

I recalled a wonderful proverb that I had not paid attention to before: ‘The free bird has no ruler, but if caught it will not flap its wings!’ At the time, I felt that I was that proud bird descended from eagles and falcons that cannot easily be hunted but, once caught, whose nobility lies in a superior surrender without the resistance or struggle of a small bird trapped in a net. I answered you that day with that proverb, and you marvelled, ‘How wonderful. I’ve never heard it before!’

With a sigh I replied, ‘That’s because you don’t know men. These aren’t the times of eagles and falcons. It’s the time of tame birds waiting in the park.’

Six years have passed since that conversation. I’m remembering it now by chance and recall your final advice: ‘Stand still. What matters is not to move.’

How did I believe that tempests and shifting sands made you afraid for me? You who stopped me here for a few years at the mercy of my wound, stirred up storms around me, shifted the sands under my feet, and incited fate against me.

I have not moved. I have remained stupidly standing at the threshold of your heart for years. I didn’t know that you were swallowing me up in silence, removing the ground from under my feet as I slid down to the depths. I didn’t know that your tempests would keep coming, even years later, to kill me.

Today amidst the recent storms, along comes your book to provoke a whirlwind of extreme and contradictory feelings inside me.
The Curve of Forgetting
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