The Bridges of Constantine (22 page)

Where will forgetting come from, I ask you?

I still remember that February day when
Si
Sharif’s voice came over the phone and invited me to dinner at his house. I was surprised by the invitation, and didn’t ask what the occasion was. I simply understood that he had invited other people to dinner, that I wouldn’t be on my own.

I admit I was delighted, and embarrassed by my delight. I was ashamed of myself because I had only called him once since our last meeting – at Eid – despite his insistence that I come and have coffee at his office, even if only once.

Suddenly I made a decision that might have been foolish. I decided to take him one of my paintings as a present. Wasn’t he making me unexpectedly happy? Wordlessly, I would prove to him that my paintings were only traded for the currency of the heart, not suspect banknotes. Later on, I realised the idea also had a bonus. I would become a fixture in the house you lived in, even if hanging on the wall.

The next day I took the painting and went to dinner. My heart was racing with me, getting ahead of me in the search for the building in that high-class district. I don’t remember whether my eyes or my heart led me to it. When I entered, your fragrance waylaid me at the entrance and in the lift. Your perfume was leading the way.

Si
Sharif greeted me at the door with a warm embrace. His warmth increased when he saw the bulky painting I was lugging. It seemed he didn’t quite believe it was a present for him. He hesitated before taking it, but I stopped him to say, ‘This is a painting of mine. It’s a present for you.’

All of a sudden I saw rare pleasure and delight on his face. He tore off the wrapping with the curiosity of someone who’s won the tombola. He saw the bridge hanging in a foggy sky and yelled, ‘That’s the suspension bridge!’

Before I said anything, he hugged me and patted my shoulder while saying, ‘Thank you! Live long, my friend!’

I couldn’t restrain myself from kissing him with the same passion. After all, he had given me a gift whose value to me he might not have been aware of.

Si
Sharif accompanied me to the living room, holding my arm in one hand and the painting in the other. He guided me over to introduce me to his guests. It seemed he wanted the group to witness his gratitude or, perhaps, our relationship and firm friendship which, in those vulgar times, I was reputed to share with only a few.

He uttered a number of names to go with a number of faces. I shook hands with them, mostly wondering who they were. I only knew one or two of them. As for the rest, they were what I called ‘parasitic growth’, like the weeds that spring up from nowhere in every flowerbed. They spread their roots and are suddenly full of branches and leaves, until they alone end up covering the ground.

I don’t know why I’ve always had a powerful sense for such creatures, wherever they were. Despite any differences in kind, appearance or status, they possessed shared features that gave them away. Those were pretence and extreme hypocrisy, the telltale signs of newly and rapidly acquired wealth and status, and a shared vocabulary that made a person believe they were more important than he thought.

A quick glance and a few words were enough to work out the nature of this ‘high-class’ party that comprised the elite of émigré society, who specialised in public slogans and secret deals. It was clear I was from another world.

Si
Sharif showed off the painting to his friends with a mixture of pride and affection. He turned to me and said, ‘You know what, Khaled? Today you’ve made one of my dearest dreams come true. I’ve always wanted something of yours as a memento in my house. Don’t forget you’re a childhood friend and a neighbour from Koshat al-Ziyyat. Do you remember that neighbourhood?’

I liked
Si
Sharif. He had some of Constantine’s dignity and presence, something of Algeria’s authenticity and memory, something of
Si
Taher in his voice and stature. There was something pure inside him, still untainted despite everything. But for how much longer? I felt he was surrounded by flies and the filth of the time. I was afraid that one day the rot would seep into his core. I was afraid for him and, perhaps, that the great name he had inherited from
Si
Taher would be tarnished. Were these feelings intuitive, or the logical conclusion to the painful reality of his environment?

Would
Si
Sharif escape infection? What would he choose? In which lake would he take a dip, which current would he go with and which against? Little isolated fish could not survive in murky, shark-infested waters. The answer was in front of me, but I didn’t pay attention that evening.
Si
Sharif had chosen his polluted waters and the matter was over.

The smartly dressed person next to me said from behind his Cuban cigar, ‘I’ve always been an admirer of your paintings. I requested that you be contacted to participate in some of our projects. But I don’t recollect seeing any of your work in our possession.’

At the time, I didn’t know who he was or anything about the projects he was talking about. That he referred to himself in the plural was enough for me to understand that he wasn’t an ordinary person.

As if
Si
Sharif had noticed that I didn’t know who it was I was talking to, he interjected by way of clarification, ‘
Si
— — loves art. He looks after big projects that will change the cultural face of Algeria.’ As if noting something, he added, ‘But you haven’t visited Algeria for a few years. So you won’t have seen these new cultural and commercial structures yet. You must get to know them.’

I didn’t respond. I watched him slide down the scale of values, whether out of stupidity or complicity I didn’t know. What I had heard about those ‘facilities’ and all the accompanying national monuments built brick by brick on a foundation of kickbacks and deals, I kept to myself. Greater and lesser thieves taking turns before the eyes of the martyrs whose misfortune meant their tombs had to stand alongside this betrayal.

So that was
Si
— —. He would have appeared a decent and quite simple man were it not for his very sharp suit and his incessant talk about current and future plans, all of which passed through Paris and involved suspect foreign names that seemed shameful on the lips of a former officer.

So that was him. Perhaps he was the manifestation of culture in the world of the junta, or the manifestation of the junta in the world of culture. Or was this unnatural marriage now natural since becoming official among Arab chiefs-of-staff?

Everyone fawned and flattered him. Perhaps they were licking at the honeyed river of hard currency flowing from his arms in an age of privation and drought.

The whole evening I asked myself what I was doing at this strange party. I had expected a family event, or at least a rare encounter with the homeland where I would recall distant memories with
Si
Sharif. But that evening the nation was absent. Its still-open wounds and newly disfigured face stood in. It was a
soirée
in France where we spoke in French about projects to be carried out, in the main, by foreign agencies with Algerian funding. Had we really gained our independence?

The evening ended around midnight.
Si
— — was tired and had commitments and meetings in the morning, and perhaps at night too. Ready money quickens our appetite for pleasure.

I might have been happy that evening. I had been the focus of interest for everyone, for reasons I didn’t want to go into. Perhaps I was the co-star along with
Si
— — in whose honour the party had been held, as I understood. I had been invited because he liked the company of artists at parties as proof of his passion for creativity and his non-military taste.

Actually, he was nice and polite. He gave me his views on various artistic fields and explained his love for particular Algerian painters. As a joke, he even said he envied
Si
Sharif for the painting, and if I always had a painting with me, he would invite me to his house in Algeria.

I laughed at the joke. But I was sufficiently sad afterwards to be on the verge of tears when I was alone in bed. I asked what idiocy had made me go to that house. A house that I had expected to be yours. But I had been and gone without even seeing the hem of your dress crossing the passage that divided me from your world.

The next morning, the phone rang. I expected it to be you, but it was Catherine. She said, ‘Morning kisses and most beautiful wishes for you.’ Before I could ask what the occasion was, she said, ‘It’s St Valentine’s Day. The patron saint of lovers. I thought I’d call rather than send a card. What would you like to wish for on the holiday for love?’ Met by my shock, or my hesitation, she added in the sarcastic tone I loved, ‘Ask, you idiot! All requests are met today!’

I laughed. I almost told her that I only wanted a little forgetfulness. But I said something along these lines: ‘I want to go into emotional retirement. Can you let your saint know my request?’

‘You madman,’ she said. ‘I hope he doesn’t hear you and deprive you of his blessings for ever. Was our last date so exhausting?’

I laughed that day with Catherine. Then I put down the receiver to cry with you.

I discovered the pain of that day I had not even heard about before.

You didn’t even call to thank me for the painting or the visit, that supposed date that I had gone on and that you had given a miss. It was Valentine’s Day, then.

You, my celebration and my misfortune, my love and my hate, my forgetting and my memory. May you be all of that with every return of the day.

So love has its day. Lovers and mistresses celebrate it. They exchange cards and longings. Where is the day for oblivion, madam? Every day of the year is a saint’s day, and among these 365 saints isn’t there one to mark forgetting? Separation is the flipside of love, just as disappointment is the flipside of desire. So why isn’t there a forgetting day when the postmen go on strike and the phone lines go dead? A day when they don’t broadcast romantic songs and we stop writing love poetry!

Nearly two centuries ago, Victor Hugo wrote to his mistress Juliette Drouet saying, ‘How sterile is love. It never stops repeating those three words, “I love you.” But ever fertile, too, since there are a thousand ways to say those very words.’

Let me amaze you on Valentine’s Day and try a thousand ways to say the same words of love. Let me tread the thousand divergent pathways to you and love you with a thousand contradictory emotions, forget you and remember you with the extremes of memory and oblivion. Let me be your enslaved subject and at liberty in the contradiction of desire and hatred. On love’s day let me hate you with love.

I wonder if I started to hate you that day. When exactly was that feeling born within me, growing astonishingly fast to rival love in its intensity? Following my repeated disappointments with you, after all our anniversaries passed unmarked, or because of the vague anxiety that possessed me, that permanent hunger for you that made me desire no other woman?

I wanted you and no other, and in vain tried to deceive my body by offering it to another woman. But you were its only hunger, its only desire.

Perhaps the most painful thing when making love was that I stroked Catherine’s hair and was brought up by her short, blonde tufts. I suddenly lost my desire as I remembered your long, dark, gypsy hair that could have covered my bed by itself.

Her skinniness reminded me of your full figure. The angular lines and flat planes of her body reminded me of the curves and recesses of yours.

In its absence, your perfume assailed my senses and masked her perfume. Like a child first exploring his senses, I was reminded that this perfume wasn’t the secret scent of my mother.

You crept into my body every morning and forced her from my bed. Your secret pain woke me up. The body’s accumulated desire for you was a time bomb, a delayed nocturnal longing day after day. Do men wake up with erections or does desire not sleep? Answer me, woman who sleeps deeply every night. Are only men insomniacs?

Why does the body become confused? I almost broke down on someone else’s chest and admitted to her that I was another woman’s lover. That I was impotent with her because my manhood was no longer mine but only took orders from you!

When did I start to hate you? Perhaps the day Catherine put her clothes back on, claiming out of politeness that she had an appointment, and left me on my own in a bed that no longer satisfied her. That day I discovered, when shedding a proud male tear, that manhood can also fly at half-mast and refuse to perform out of politeness or masculine pride. That in the end we are not the masters of our bodies as we believe.

That day, I asked myself in bitter irony whether Saint Valentine had answered my request so quickly and really turned me into a lover in retirement.

I remember I cursed you and resented you at the time. I felt the bitterness that goes with tears. I, who didn’t cry even when they amputated my arm, could have cried when you stole the last thing I possessed.

You stole my manhood.

One day I asked you, ‘Do you love me?’

You said, ‘I don’t know. Your love rises and falls like faith!’