My Torturess

by Bensalem Himmich

  For something like half an hour, the ball never left the feet of my team—more’s the surprise! We managed to score eleven goals, four of them by me. There were no serious attacks from their side and very little challenge or resistance. It reached the point that, every time our forwards were heading toward their goal, the goalkeeper would show his alarm by huddling up or run along the backline, yelling and screaming, while his colleagues simply laughed and guffawed.

  But after we had scored the seventh goal, I got the impression that some kind of conspiracy was being launched against my team. I pointed this out to my teammates every time we scored another goal. However, most of them were overjoyed at the team effort and the success we were having; they accused me of being a pessimist and weakling. For them, the name of our team, the Black Beasts, was fully justified. But, when their bodies started to tire and it became much harder to get to the other team’s goal, with shots going wide or missing altogether, they started to agree with me. From then on, it was a matter of dragging their legs around in their own half and never moving out of it; if anyone did move out, it was as though we were out for a stroll—like someone playing golf or walking in a public park.

  Just a few minutes later, everything changed completely, and went from bad to worse. Our opponents had already had their share of fun at our expense, and now they turned serious. It was time for attack and revenge. Showing us their muscles and powerfully fit bodies, they proceeded to turn the soccer field into a savage war zone with a series of nonstop powerful attacks. They forced us into our own half, moved toward our defensive line, and set about viciously attacking any of us who had the ball or were even standing anywhere close. Gradually, our team started to collapse with bruises, fractures, and severe wounds; players who lost consciousness were transferred to the clinic. The rest of our team was left spread-eagled on the sand, bleeding and groaning. One of them happened to be the man whom I had asked about the extraordinary difference between the two teams. I leaned over to offer him some comfort.

  “Now I think you understand,” he told me between pants. “The team that resorted to such violence and aggression to win the match consists of prisoners who are acting as agents and others in preventive detention who joined our team as substitutes for our wounded . . . If you yourself haven’t been hurt and evacuated beforehand, you’ll find that they’re all unhurt when the game is over.”

  And that is in fact exactly what I saw: those men, the majority of whom had paunches and never did so much as break into a run, walked and strutted about slowly, smoking and quaffing beer. If the ball happened to come near one of them or they happened to collide with it by mistake, they would either get rid of it or, as happened most of the time, pass it to one of the opposite team in a scandalously obvious way. Some of them even clustered near the other team’s goal. Even if the ball had been presented to them on a golden platter, they would have simply toyed with it for a while, then got rid of it somewhere far from the goal itself. Meanwhile, a newspaper correspondent kept yelling into a megaphone, something that had been mostly inaudible up till now; he was spouting a lot of stuff that made no sense, but—by God!—it had not the slightest connection with the game.

  With the sweat pouring off me from the heat and my own emotions, I rushed over to the referee—the bitch—who had moved over to the sideline and was lounging there smoking and showing off her stunning backside. She seemed to have forgotten what she was supposed to be doing and had either lost or swallowed her whistle. I told her about the way the other team had committed so many infractions and violent assaults on our players. She proceeded to twist the tie that I had forgotten to take off, slapped me on the head, and told me (as I understood from the French) that I was to get my stinking body out of her sight and take over from the goalkeeper who had fallen asleep in our goal. Failing that, she would issue a severe report against me, documenting my defiant attitude and contravention of the rules of the game.

  I now headed straight for the goal, where I did my best to staunch the bleeding from the at least thirty wounds and cuts that the man in the goal had received. Once I had made sure that he was still alive, I took up position between the two goal posts, ready to fend off attacks. I saved two goals, but managed to lose my rubber sandals, which by now were in shreds. However, the third shot, kicked from very close range and with all the force of a rocket, hit me square in the face. I collapsed to the ground, feeling dizzy. Some of their players now rushed over and started poking fun at me because the ball had gone in. They kept on patting their backsides and stomachs in clownish gestures.

  With a few deep breaths I managed to recover somewhat and once again stood in the goal, but without any shoes. I watched as those of my teammates who were still on their feet would receive a pass but be prevented from passing the ball on. Instead, they would be felled to the ground. This time, one of the other team got hold of the ball through sheer violence and moved in my direction. He stopped about a meter away from me.

  “With this shot,” he threatened, “I’m going to fuck you! Here’s a finger to your mother’s religion!”

  I looked at his face.

  “Ilyas,” I yelled. “By God, you’re Ilyas! How are you, my friend?”

  “No, I’m ‘Abbas ibn Firnas!” he replied.*

  He now proceeded to do some clownish stunts, his hope being that, by kicking the ball between my legs, he could make me look stupid. But, to save face, I flung myself at the ball and managed to stop it going into the net. I stood up with the ball in my hands. He now hit me so hard that I fell to the ground, then shoved both me and the ball into the net. He started kicking me hard enough that I eventually lost consciousness.

  10

  My Worst Night of Torture

  My sunny cell!

  Here I lie, after being subjected to that slugfest yesterday that masqueraded as a soccer game. I’m stretched out under the bedcover, doing my best to keep my bruises and wounds to myself, and occasionally taking a bite from the meager portion of food on the table. I keep turning over my current situation in my mind and thinking about what might happen next. That is the way I stayed until my eyes eventually surrendered to a deep but restless sleep.

  I was jolted awake by the sounds of loud footsteps and started to panic. The gigantic guard appeared, pointing the wavering beam of his flashlight in my direction. Forcing me to get up, he pushed me towards the door of my cell. I was eager to chat with him and so I asked where we were going, sharing with him my opinion that the weather was very nice. I had hardly opened my mouth before he showed me his semidetached tongue and pointed to his ears as a way of showing me that he was both deaf and dumb. When the air turned moist and foul-smelling, I assumed that we were now in some kind of cavern where foul and obscure purposes were being fulfilled. My intuition was confirmed when the guard made me sit in a corner alongside a row of other people. Now I was stunned to be confronted with a scene that beggars description. There was this female ghoul about whose barbaric cruelty I had heard so much, the woman I had seen close up at yesterday’s soccer game. This time, she was semi-naked, pouring with sweat and devoting herself to torturing a man strung up by his feet. She was beating him savagely and hurling all sorts of foul abuse at him as he hung there upside down—disgusting expressions peppered with phlegm-encrusted spit. She kept raking his skin with a sharp brass instrument that tore away at his body and made it bleed profusely.

  Behind her stood three armed guards who looked totally repulsed by the whole thing. She kept on repeating the same question over and over again.

  “What I want is the names of the people in your sleeper cell.”

  One of the guards came up to her and whispered in her ear. At that she threw a fit.

  “These cowards are all one and the same,” she yelled in French. “Once you get serious with them, they all faint. Take this wreck back to his cell. Tomorrow, by all that’s holy, he’s going to talk.”

  She indicated to the gigantic guard to take him away and sank into her chair, p
anting and exhausted.

  For a few leaden moments I found myself looking around in sheer panic, not least because I and the other man with me could hear the groans and screams emitted by prisoners in neighboring rooms, along with the barking of dogs. Once things had died down a bit and the woman had had a chance to recover, she yelled: “Next one!” (the French “au suivant” echoing the title of a Jacques Brel song in which a prostitute is calling in her customers who are waiting in the hallway). But in Mama Ghula’s case the same phrase implied the next person to be tortured. A guard pointed his finger at me and thrust a bowl in my face; it was filled with lentils and butter paste, all mixed in with bits of sausage and bits of meat of indeterminate kind. A genuinely satanic brew—may God never inflict it on anyone! The guard cautioned me that I had to kneel down and consume the entire contents of the bowl immediately. He explained to me that his boss would never deal with me unless and until my stomach was completely full. I had no option but to do as he said, although, once I had finished it, I plucked up enough courage to ask him what kind of meat I had just swallowed.

  “Pork,” he told me with a dry laugh, “pig-meat. That’s all pigs like you get to eat here, pig-meat mixed with salt sea-water. Next time you come, if you’ve been stubborn, it’ll be mixed with the piss of his excellency the director and his wonderful assistant in whose presence you happen to be at this moment . . .”

  “But my religion,” I interrupted, “forbids me to eat pork.”

  “Your religion, you say?!” he replied. “God curse your mother’s religion! If you belonged to a religion, we wouldn’t be seeing your dirty face here. But enough nonsense. Get up, the boss is waiting for you!”

  I thrust my fingers down my throat, hoping to make myself vomit, but I failed. With that I stood up and went over to the woman. I gave her a searing look, intending to save face.

  “What you’re doing here,” I told her, “is evil.”

  She pulled me towards her with a laugh. She started squeezing me in her tattooed arms and her ample bosom, just like a mother with her suckling child. I felt completely helpless and stunned as I found myself forced to rub up against her vile body, confronting her lewd and distracted expression, and smelling her sweat and her cheap and nasty perfume. I had to listen as she used a tone of apologetic complaint to whisper things in my ear in a mixture of languages, covering my face with tears blackened by the kohl she was wearing on her eyelids. The gist of her remarks was that the man I had seen hanging upside down was an evil person, an uncouth egomaniac who had made up his mind to keep his particular game a secret from her and stick to his own brand of truth. However, what she needed was to have him open his heart to her and share his secrets. If he refused to do that, he would make her unemployed and ruin her life. With a phony lust and coquetry she then proceeded to carry on her chatter in French, but this time I made it clear that I could not understand her. She then started talking in Arabic to the extent that she could, albeit it with a foreign accent that was partially fabricated but mostly natural.

  “Listen, Cheri,” she told me, “this breast isn’t just a piece of bandage. What do you think of it? Do you like it? Tell me the truth. It’s yours; you’re going to suckle from it and kiss it. But if you bite it, like that dog who came before you, then I’ll castrate you with no mercy. You can still ejaculate, I trust . . .”

  With one hand she thrust her breast into my mouth, and with the other she grabbed my penis as though it were a piece of dough. She started feeling and squeezing it as though to measure and weigh it. I started moaning, and that led to her to interpret things in her own debauched and perverted fashion.

  “Not bad,” she yelled, “not bad.”

  All of a sudden her tone became threatening and coarse. “But if you start playing fainting games on me,” she went on, “I’m going to feed you your own shit. So which cell do you belong to, whether active or sleeper?”

  “I don’t belong to any cell,” I replied in a panic.

  “Oh really!” she said. “Then how come you confessed to the lie detector that you joined an active cell?”

  “I never did. It’s lying!”

  “The lie detector’s lying! Damn you!”

  “Or maybe I told a lie because I was being threatened . . .”

  “OK, but here you are now in my warm embrace. So tell me the whole unadorned truth. Whisper it in my ear if you like. What’s your cell?”

  “Oh yes! Now I remember. In the past I used to belong to a small group that called itself the Yaqzin group or something like that . . .”

  “An awake cell!* Bravo, sweetheart! Tell me about its activities.”

  “A mystical ceremony, Madame . . .”

  “A mystical ceremony?”

  “A kind of ecstatic dance. Members of the group shake their bodies in an increasingly frenzied movement so as to achieve a state of exhaustion and oblivion aimed toward the transcendent.”

  “You’re talking in riddles. Tell me what the members discuss.”

  “Nothing, Madame. They only recite a single word, no other . . .”

  “What’s that word?”

  “God lives, God lives! It’s a phrase that emerges from the very depths of the devotee’s inner being and continues till he loses all consciousness and finds himself living in the realms of worshipped God . . .”

  “God lives?” she asked impatiently. “Is that some kind of code? A secret password?”

  “No, no, God forbid! It’s an expression of the unity and mention of the One Creator. It demands that indifference and forgetfulness be banished in order for true thought to be aroused in the presence of the Merciful One.”

  At this point her face turned red in anger and her voice cracked.

  “That’s all gibberish,” she yelled, “Who’s the leader of the group?”

  I came up with a name on the spur of the moment.

  “Musa ibn Zulayqa, Madame,” I told her, “if my memory serves me right. But he died a while ago.”

  She now started reciting a whole list of names to me, slowly and with obvious tension in her voice. When I responded with a whole series of “no’s,” sometimes softly, other times out loud, she rounded on me in fury.

  “And what about Ilyas, your former cellmate?” she screamed at me. “That nasty little catamite!”

  “Ilyas Bu Shama?” I asked her. “How is he? Where did he disappear to?”

  “I’m the one asking the questions, bastard!”

  “Oh no, I’m perfectly legitimate. You may not insult my mother!”

  “So how many times did you sleep with Ilyas; I mean, fuck him?”

  My entire body shuddered in horror.

  “Never, never!” I yelled as loudly as I could.

  “Never?” she replied with raised eyebrows. “Not even a caress or a kiss?”

  “Never. My faith totally forbids homosexuality.”

  “So is that your final word?”

  “Yes, my final word, Madame . . .”

  “It’s Miss, you ass!”

  I wanted to placate my interviewer and lessen the tension

  “Mademoiselle?” I said. “You mean, you’re still unmarried?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re still beautiful and desirable. I would imagine that someone must have raped you at some point or got you into bed . . .”

  “Listen! My personal life is sacred. Do you hear me, sacred?!”

  “Cigarette!” she yelled to the guard.

  The guard lit a cigarette and put it between her lips. Meanwhile, she kept clutching me without relaxing her grip at all. She started puffing away nervously at the cigarette and put the ash in my ear. As politely as I could, I suggested that my ear was not an ashtray, but that made her furious. She stubbed it out on my chest and threw it away, totally unconcerned about my cries of pain.

  I tried to control my nerves as much as possible. It occurred to me that I could take advantage of the somewhat lightened atmosphere and at the same time earn her sympathy if
I played the fool a bit. I would accept her invitation to solve our dispute by engaging in a boxing match with her, following the usual rules for the sport. I was surprised when she accepted the idea with a guffaw. When she told her assistants, they guffawed too, and, once the news spread to the other people who were waiting to be cross-examined and tortured, some of them let out a strangled sort of laugh as well.

  I was well aware, of course, that the balance of strength was not in my favor. Mama Ghula was much heavier; I was something like a flyweight. Even so, I decided, at least mentally, to put my faith in my own innocence. Every wronged person, I told myself, was obliged to defend himself. In any case, I had always felt an inborn proclivity for the honorable life and was always keen to endorse the loftiest examples of human advancement. As I was doing some warm-up exercises, I started rehearsing some of those principles, including expressions like “Even gnats can make the lion’s eye bleed,” “There are things in rivers that you won’t find in the sea,” and similar expressions.

  Mama Ghula yelled at me to stop talking nonsense. She selected a prisoner to act as referee and gave him a whistle. She then forced the small group of prisoners waiting there to testify that I was the one who had suggested this contest, no one else. The referee now brought the two of us together and reminded us both of rules forbidding either scratching, biting, or striking the head or the sexual organ. My hands were wrapped in strips of cotton (with the agreement of the boss-lady), then the whistle was blown to signal the start of the first round.

  I decided to defend myself and protect my honor by extending my tied hands and giving my opponent threatening looks. I imitated the tactics of the Muslim American boxer, Muhammad ‘Ali—May God cure his Parkinson’s disease and grant him a long life!—by taking on the role of a bee, painful opportunistic stings involving a lot of feinting and rapid dancing movements, but avoiding any clinches or bodily contact. I was able to land some painful blows to her face, chest, and stomach, all to the accompaniment of a veritable shower of cheers from the guards, followed by the prisoners as well. However, no sooner did the first round drawn to a close than—wonder of wonders!—my opponent looked scared and ran over towards her assistants who were competing to see who could emit the most piercing laughter. Wanting to continue my display of defiance, I took several steady and courageous steps in her direction. I taunted her and told her to come away from her corner and show herself.