The Bridges of Constantine (9 page)

‘Because I painted it as an apology to the subject.’

You suddenly spoke in French, as if anger or hidden jealousy had revoked our earlier agreement. ‘I hope the apology convinced her. It’s a beautiful painting.’ With a hint of feminine curiosity you then added, ‘It all depends on the sin you committed against her!’

I had no desire to tell you the story of that painting on our first date. I was afraid it would have a negative effect on our relationship or your view of me. So I tried to evade your remark, which might have tempted me to say more, and pretended to ignore you as you remained stubbornly standing in front of the painting. Can one resist the curiosity of a woman determined to find something out?

I gave you an answer. ‘That painting has quite a funny story behind it. It reveals aspects of my psychological problems and traces of the old me. Perhaps that’s why it’s here.’

For the first time, I told the story of that painting. I had friends who taught at the College of Fine Arts, and they would invite me and other painters to life classes to paint and meet the students and amateur painters. The subject one day was a female nude. All of the students were absorbed in painting this body from their different perspectives, while I was stunned at their ability to paint a woman’s body with a purely aesthetic gaze and without sex rearing its head. It was as if they were painting a landscape or a still life of a vase or statue.

Evidently I was the only person in the class feeling uncomfortable. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked woman in daylight. She shifted her pose and revealed her body without inhibition or shame before dozens of pairs of eyes. Perhaps to hide my embarrassment, I started painting too. But my brush carried vestiges of the complexes of a man of my generation and baulked at painting that body – out of shame or pride, I don’t know. It started painting something else, which turned out to be the face of that young woman as it appeared from my angle. When the session finished, and the girl, who was just a student, had put her clothes on, she walked around to see how everyone had depicted her. She got a surprise when she saw my painting, since I had only painted her face. In a tone of mild reproof, as if she deemed this a slight on her feminine charms, she said, ‘Is that all the inspiration I gave you?’

To be polite, I said, ‘No! You inspired a lot of wonder, but I’m from a society where the soul still lives in the Dark Ages. You’re the first woman I’ve seen naked in daylight, even though I’m a professional artist. Please forgive me. My brushes are like me. They also hate to share a naked woman with others, even in life classes!’

You were listening bewildered, as if by surprise you had discovered another man in me whom your grandmother hadn’t told you about. There was suddenly a strange new look in your eyes: wilful seduction. Perhaps it came from a woman’s jealousy at an unknown rival who had once caught the attention of a man who until that moment hadn’t meant anything to her.

I took pleasure in the unintended situation. I was happy that jealousy should suddenly make you go silent, cause your cheeks to flush slightly and make your eyes widen in suppressed anger. I kept the rest of the story to myself and didn’t tell you that it went back two years and concerned none other than Catherine. And that afterwards I had to apologise again to her body. Winningly, too, it would seem, as she hadn’t left me since!

Today I remember with some irony the sudden turn taken by our relationship after I told you about that painting. The world of women really is incredible. I expected you to fall in love with me when you discovered the secret link between you and my first painting,
Nostalgia
. A painting as old as you and with your identity. But you fell for me because of another painting of another woman that impinged on memory by accident!

Our first date ended at noon. I had a feeling that I’d see you again. Perhaps the following day. I felt we were at the beginning of something, and that we were both in a hurry. There were a lot of things still to say – we hadn’t even really said anything. We seduced each other with potential speech. Out of innocence, or being clever, we were each playing the same game. So I wasn’t terribly surprised when you asked me as you said goodbye, ‘Will you be here tomorrow morning?’

As happy as someone whose bet’s come in, I replied, ‘Of course.’

You said, ‘I’ll come back tomorrow then, around the same time. We’ll have more time to talk. Today went by really fast without us noticing.’

I made no comment. I knew that time had no measure except our two hearts. That’s why it only races with us when the heart races too, from one joy to another, from one shock to another. Your words held an admission of a shared, secret joy that I hoped would be repeated.

I remember saying to you as you left that day, ‘Don’t forget your book tomorrow. I’d like to read you.’

Surprised, you said, ‘Is your Arabic perfect?’

I said, ‘Of course. You’ll see for yourself.’

‘I’ll bring it, then.’ With adorable feminine wiles, you smiled and added, ‘If you still insist on getting to know me, I won’t deny you the pleasure!’

The door shut behind your smile, without me understanding exactly what you meant.

You left shrouded in mystery just like you had arrived. I stood at the glass door, watching you melt into the crowd and disappear again like a shooting star. Quite stunned, I wondered, ‘Did we really meet?’

So we had met.

Those who say that mountains never meet are wrong. Those who build bridges between them, so they might greet each other without stooping or diminishing their pride, know nothing of the laws of nature. Mountains only meet in massive earthquakes. Even then they don’t shake hands, but turn into dust.

So we had met.

The unforeseen tremor happened; one of us was a volcano and I was the victim.

Inferno of a woman, volcano that swept away everything in your path and incinerated my last strongholds, where did you get all those blasting waves of fire? Why wasn’t I wary of the ash that burned like the lips of a gypsy lover? Why wasn’t I wary of your simplicity and false modesty? Why didn’t I remember that old geography lesson: ‘Volcanoes do not have peaks; they are mountains with the modesty of a plateau.’ Could a plateau have done all that?

Popular proverbs warn us about the tranquil river that tricks us with its calmness and which, when we cross, swallows us, and about the twig we don’t pay attention to that blinds us. More than one proverb tells us in more than one dialect to beware of what seems safe. But all her warning signs didn’t stop us making yet more idiotic mistakes. The logic of desire is crazy, ridiculous. The more we loved, the more ridiculous we were. Wasn’t it Bernard Shaw who said you know you’re in love when you start acting against your own interest?

My prime folly was to act with you like a tourist visiting Sicily for the first time: he runs up Mount Etna, praying that the dormant volcano will lift one sleepy eyelid and engulf the island in fire in full view of the stunned, camera-wielding visitors. The corpses of the tourists are turned to soot to attest that there is nothing more beautiful than a yawning volcano spewing fire and rock and swallowing up vast regions in seconds. A spectator is always mesmerised by the hunger of flames and he is drawn towards those rivers of fire. He stands stupefied and in shock as he tries to recall all he has read about Judgement Day. In his lover’s swoon, he forgets that this is his own day of judgement!

The destruction that surrounds me today bears witness that I loved you to death, that I desired you until the final pyre. I believe Jacques Brel when he said, ‘Scorched fields can give more corn than the best of Aprils.’ I bet on a spring for this parched life, an April for these blighted years.

Volcano! You swept everything around me away. Wasn’t it insane to go further than deranged tourists and lovers, than all those who loved you before me? I moved my house into your shadow, set my memory at the foot of your volcano and then sat in the midst of the flames to paint you.

Wasn’t it insane to refuse to listen to the weather forecast and disaster warnings? I convinced myself that I knew you better. But I forgot that logic stops where love begins. What I know about you has no relationship with logic or knowledge.

So the mountains met, and we met.

A quarter-century of blank white pages unfilled with you.

A quarter-century of monotonous days spent waiting for you.

A quarter-century since the first meeting between a man who was me and a small baby playing on my knees who was you.

A quarter of a century since I had kissed you on your child’s cheek, standing in for a father who hadn’t yet seen you.

I was the crippled man who had left his arm on forgotten battlefields, and his heart in forbidden cities. I never expected you to be the battlefield where I would leave my corpse, the city where I would exhaust my memory, the blank canvas where my brushes would quit to remain virginal and mighty like you, holding all contradictions in their colours.

How did all of this happen? I don’t know any more.

Time raced with us from one date to another. Love transported us from one gasp to another. I submitted to your love without argument. Your love was my destiny. Perhaps it was my end. Could any power withstand destiny?

We met almost every day in the same gallery, but at various times. Chance wished my show to coincide with the Easter holiday. You had enough time to visit me every day as there was no university. All you had to do was deceive others a little, your cousin perhaps a bit more so she didn’t come along for one reason or another.

Every time, as I said goodbye to you and repeated reflexively, ‘See you tomorrow,’ I wondered whether it wasn’t utterly absurd that we were growing more attached to each other with every passing day. Perhaps because I was older than you, I felt that I alone was responsible for the abnormal emotional situation and our rapid and terrible slide towards love. In vain I tried to withstand the torrent rushing me towards you with the crazy force of love in my fifties and the hunger of a man who had not known love before. With its youth and vigour, your love swept me to reason’s nadir, the point where desire almost touches madness and death.

As I slid down with you into the labyrinths inside me – secret recesses of love and hunger, cavernous spaces never before entered by woman – I felt that I was also gradually sliding down the scale of moral values. Unconsciously, I was denying the passionate ideals that I had spent my whole life refusing to compromise. For me, moral values were indivisible. In my dictionary there was no difference between political morality and any other kind. But I was aware that with you I had begun to deny one to convince you of another.

I often asked myself at that time whether I was betraying the past by sitting alone with you at half-innocent meetings in a space furnished with paintings and memory.

Perhaps I was betraying the dearest man I knew, the most valiant and steely, the bravest and most faithful. Perhaps I would betray
Si
Taher, my leader, comrade and lifelong friend, sully his memory and steal from him the sole rose of his life. His last testament.

Could I do all of that in the name of the past, while speaking to you about the past?

But was I really stealing anything from you at those meetings when I talked at length about him? No, it didn’t happen. The glory of his name was always present in my mind. It joined me to you and kept me from you at the same time. It was a bridge and a barrier.

My only pleasure then was to hand over the keys to my memory, to open the yellowed notebooks of the past and read them to you page by page. As I listened to myself narrating this for the first time, it was as if I were discovering it with you.

In silence we found that we complemented each other frighteningly. I was the past of which you were ignorant; you were the present, which had no memory and where I tried to deposit some of the burden of the years.

You were as light as a sponge. I was as deep and weighty as an ocean. Every day you filled yourself more with me. I didn’t know then that whenever I grew empty, I replenished myself with you. Whenever I gave you some piece of the past, I turned you into a replica of me. So we carried a shared memory, shared streets and alleyways, shared sorrows and joys.

Both of us were war-wounded. Fate ground us down without mercy, and each emerged with their wound. Mine was visible, yours was hidden in the depths. They amputated my arm; they severed your childhood. They ripped a limb from my body and took a father from your arms. We were war’s human remains. Two smashed statues in elegant clothes, nothing more.

I remember the day you asked me for the first time to tell you about your father. You confessed, with some embarrassment, that you had come to see me in the first place with just that design. Your voice had a touch of uncompromising sadness, a touch of bitterness that I had not seen in you before.

You said, ‘What’s the point in naming a main street after my father, of me carrying the burden of his name, which pedestrians and strangers repeat in front of me all day long? What’s the point of that if I know no more about him than they do? And if not one of them can really tell me about him?’

I said in surprise, ‘Doesn’t your uncle talk about him, for example?’

‘My uncle doesn’t have time,’ you said. ‘If he should mention him when I’m there, it sounds more like a eulogy addressed to strangers to boast of his brother’s glorious deeds. He doesn’t make it relevant to me and talk about the man who, before anything else, was my father.