The Bridges of Constantine by Ahlem Mosteghanemi Read Free Book Online Page A

Al-Habib Thamir hospital, which at the time was the place I knew best in Tunis. Unusually for me, I started staring at the walls and thought of all the paintings I could hang on them: portraits of those I loved, all the alleyways I loved, everything I had left behind.
    My sleep was troubled that night. Perhaps I didn’t sleep at all. The doctor’s voice, in his broken French, kept waking me up as he said, ‘Paint!’ I saw him in his white coat, as he shook my hand in farewell and said, ‘Paint!’ A mysterious shudder passed through me and in my half-sleep I remembered the first revelation of the Qur’an, when the angel Gabriel, peace be upon him, came down to Muhammad for the first time and said, ‘Recite!’ The prophet, trembling in dread, asked, ‘What should I recite?’ Gabriel responded, ‘Recite in the name of your Lord the Creator,’ and went on to complete the first sura . When this was over, the prophet went to his wife, his body trembling in terror at what he had heard. As soon as he saw her he shouted, ‘Wrap me up, wrap me up!’
    That night I shivered with feverish chills, due perhaps to nerves and my anxiety after the meeting with the doctor, which I knew would be the last. There was also the thin blanket – which was all I had to cover me in the depths of the freezing winter, and which my mean landlord would not supplement.
    I could have screamed when I remembered my childhood bed and the woollen blanket I always had against the Constantine cold. I almost screamed in my night of exile, ‘Wrap me up, Constantine, wrap me up.’ But I said nothing. Not to Constantine, not to the mean-minded landlord. I kept my fever and chills to myself. It was hard for a man just back from the Front to admit, even to himself, that he was cold.
    I waited till early morning to buy, with the little money I had left, the supplies needed to paint two or three pictures. Crazily, I stood and painted Constantine’s suspension bridge.
    Was that bridge really the thing I loved most, for me to stand there and paint it of my own accord, as though about to cross it as usual? Perhaps it was just the easiest thing to paint. I don’t know. I do know that I painted it again and again afterwards, as if every time remained the first time and it was the thing I loved most.
    Twenty-five years: that was the age of the painting I had called, without much thought, Nostalgia . A painting by a twenty-seven-year-old in all his loneliness, grief and desolation.
    There I was, lonely again, with my other grief and desolation. Just an extra quarter of a century full of personal disappointments and defeats and the odd triumph. By then I was one of Algeria’s major artists, perhaps the biggest of all – so said the Western critics whose testimonials I included in large type on the invitation to the opening.
    There I was, a minor prophet who was struck with inspiration one autumn in a mean room on Bab Sweiqa Street in Tunis. There I was, a typical prophet in exile. And why not, when a prophet is never honoured in his homeland? There I was, an artistic phenomenon. And why not, when the disabled can become a phenomenon, an artistic giant? As I was.
    Where was that doctor who recommended that I paint and whose prophecy that I would no longer need him came true? He was the only person missing from the vast space where no Arab before me had ever held an exhibition. Where was Dr Kapucki to see what I’d done with my one hand? (I never asked him what he did with the other!)
    There was Nostalgia , my first painting. Beside the inscription, ‘Tunis ’57’, at the bottom of the picture, was my first signature. Just as I signed beneath your name and date of birth when I registered you at the town hall in that autumn of 1957.
    Between the painting and you, which one was my child? Which my beloved? Questions that didn’t occur to me that day when I saw you standing before the painting for the first time. A painting the same age as you. Officially, you