The Bridges of Constantine by Ahlem Mosteghanemi Read Free Book Online

closer and scanned the list for its name. At that instant a dark shiver ran through me, the curiosity of the mad artist piqued.
    Who were you, standing in front of my favourite painting? Confused, I watched you studying it as you talked to your friend out of earshot. What made you stop before it? It wasn’t the most beautiful painting in the show. It was just my first painting, my first effort. Yet, despite its simplicity, I had insisted this time that it be included in the exhibition – my most important to date – because I considered it my little miracle. I had painted it twenty-five years ago, less than a month after my left arm had been amputated.
    It wasn’t an attempt at creativity or designed to go down in history. I was just trying to live, to escape despair. I had painted it like an art student taking an exam in which the assignment is to paint the scene closest to who you are. That was what the Yugoslavian doctor had told me to do. He had come to Tunis with other doctors from the socialist states to treat wounded Algerians and had taken charge of amputating my arm. Afterwards, he had kept an eye on how I was doing, physically and mentally.
    He had noted my continuing depression and, each time I saw him, he had asked if I had any new interests. I wasn’t ill enough to stay in hospital, but neither was I whole enough to begin my new life. I was living in Tunis, a local and a foreigner at the same time, both at liberty and confined, happy and miserable. A man rejected equally by death and by life. A tangled skein of wool. How could the doctor find the end of the yarn and unravel all my complexes?
    On one occasion he asked me, as he was inquiring about my education, whether I liked writing or painting. I seized hold of his question as if grabbing at a straw that might save me from drowning. I realised immediately the prescription he had in mind for me.
    He said, ‘I’ve carried out the operation that you’ve had dozens of times on those who’ve lost limbs in war. The operation is the same each time, but its psychological impact differs from person to person, depending on their age, job, social status and, especially, on their level of culture. Only an intellectual reconsiders himself every day. He reconsiders his relationship with things and with the world whenever anything in his life changes.
    ‘I’ve come to realise this over the course of my experience. Yours isn’t the first case I’ve come across, and I think that losing your arm has upset your relationship with what’s around you. You have to build a new relationship with the world through writing or painting.
    ‘You must choose which you prefer and then sit and write down everything that’s on your mind, without inhibition. The kind of writing isn’t important, nor its literary quality. What matters is simply writing as a means to get it all out and rebuild yourself internally.
    ‘If you prefer painting, then paint. Painting can also reconcile you to things and to a world you see differently. You’ve changed now that you see and feel it with only one hand.’
    My reflex answer would have been that I loved writing. It was certainly closest to me, seeing as I had done nothing all my life except read, which naturally leads to writing. I could have replied that my teachers had always predicted a glowing literary future for me – in French. Maybe that was why I answered without thinking or, as I discovered later, with the response that was already deep inside me, ‘I prefer painting.’
    My terse answer did not convince him, and he asked me if I’d painted before. ‘No,’ I replied.
    ‘So, start by painting the thing that is closest to you. Paint the thing you love most.’
    With the wryness of a doctor tactfully admitting they can do no more, his parting words were, ‘Paint, then perhaps you won’t need me again!’
    I hurried back to my room, wanting to be alone between its white walls that were an extension of the whiteness of the