My Torturess

by Bensalem Himmich

  “By God, you’re going to drink the wine of love from your bride’s own hand,” she said.

  When I refused point blank, she hit my bad leg. When she grew tired of my resistance, she grabbed my testicles and swore that she was not going to let go until I did what she wanted. The sheer pain left my mouth open, and within moments my torturess had thrust the bottle into my mouth and started pouring the liquid down my throat. I tried spitting it out but had to swallow to avoid choking myself. She used the same method to empty a second and third bottle down my throat, accompanying her actions with foul language and the grossest of insults:

  “God curse your mother’s religion! Here I agree to marry this despicable groom, folks, and yet we’re not getting drunk?! So, you little creep, you prefer heaven’s wine to mine? Whoever said you’re going to heaven, you little bastard?”

  All of a sudden this disgusting routine came to an end. Maybe she had had enough or felt tired. I watched as she smoked and drank with her usual frenzy, while the effects of all the wine I had drunk—something I had never even gone near before—gradually became apparent in me.

  “Now the night is ours, my man,” I heard her say as she swallowed some more wine, “and ours alone. Tell me some jokes . . . I kiss your mouth and hand . . . Really good jokes, no holds barred. They’re the only kind that make me laugh and feel like sleeping. If you do that for me, I’ll divorce you tomorrow morning, then I’ll be rid of you and you of me.”

  “God,” I said, “the Blessed and Almighty, may tarry but He never overlooks anything . . . His punishment for wrongdoers, male and female, is severe. He will decree a painful punishment for you, far more severe than what you have meted out to me and others as well . . .”

  “To the contrary, Hamuda, you’re the one who’s punishing me with your steadfast refusal to cooperate and your rejection of me. You deprive me of your knowledge and secrets; all you show me is your stubborn negativity. It’s you that God is going to punish. Now keep your eyes wide open, and I’m going to tell you something to develop your taste for jokes. There was a prisoner who died in my custody when he had a massive brain hemorrhage. He used to come to this bed of mine and tell me wonderful jokes in exchange for my dealing with him less severely. My aged midget servant used to attend those sessions as well, and he can remember all the jokes.

  She now whistled three times, and a person smaller than anyone I had ever seen in my life immediately appeared. His silver beard reached down to his knees, and he was wearing a suitably sized clown’s cap on his head.

  “I heard my mistress call,” he said, “and immediately interrupted the prayers I had to do in order to make up for the ones I had missed all week because I’ve been so busy with other things . . .”

  She now told the midget to start telling stories, and he did so with all due deference to her.

  “Your favorite joke-teller—may God have mercy on him—used to start a session by saying: ‘Once upon a time it so happened . . . ’ and you would tell him, Madam, to cut the cackle and tell the joke straight away with no beating about the bush . . . There was one joke that always made you laugh whenever I told it to you. The teller described it as being real because it actually happened to him in person. ‘My wife, God curse her,’ he said, ‘is very partial to all penises except mine . . . and at the mention of the word ‘penis,’ he told another story about an Egyptian from the south who took his wife to the gynecologist. When the doctor was alone with her and told her to take her undergarment off, she ran out to her husband in the waiting room screaming and complaining. He scolded her and told her to do as the doctor asked. When she went back inside and the doctor asked her again to remove her undergarment, she replied flirtatiously: ‘Take yours off first.’ On the way home, the husband told his wife that the doctor clearly had a big brain, as big as this . . . To which his wife responded: ‘Yes, and his penis is that big too!’ ‘Did you do it with him?’ he asked her. ‘You told me to,’ she said. ‘As of tomorrow, you’re divorced,’ he replied.”

  The debauched woman tapped my eyes to stop me falling asleep.

  “The same jokester,” the midget went on, “and may God fight him!—tells another story about a woman who found out only a month after her marriage that her husband was getting drunk in bars and having sex with prostitutes. Even worse news arrived soon afterwards, that he was buggering boys. She was furious, but offered a peaceful solution to the problem: she would let him enjoy himself by exercising his legitimate rights and functions inside the house. By way of experiment, the husband agreed. When the agreed-upon night came, she consorted with him as required and allowed him to have intercourse with her in the usual way. However, when he started to do the other thing with her, she started screaming out in pain. He rounded on her. ‘Listen, woman,’ he said, ‘now you’re supposed to be a man!’”

  The ghoul cackled and punched me to make me laugh too.

  “More!” she told the midget.

  “Let it be the farewell joke then, Madam,” he said. “Once upon a time . . . There was a young man who worked all day in a factory. Every day when he went home, he found his mother looking sad and depressed. When he asked her what was wrong, she said nothing. When he lost patience with the situation, he asked his only friend for advice. The latter gave him some counsel, the gist of which was that, when his mother was in this particular mood, he should sit with her and imitate her till he managed to discover what was causing it and work things out. So that’s what happened. No sooner did the young man sit opposite his mother looking utterly miserable than she turned to him.

  ‘My dear boy,’ she asked him, ‘why are you behaving like me. Haven’t you found anyone to fuck you?’”

  The ghoul cackled again and shook me to do the same. She then asked the midget to do what he normally did at the conclusion of each session—namely, to delight her with some details about himself.

  “God be praised and thanked!” he said. “I have been compensated for my short stature by having both a capacious memory and a huge penis, one to make even an elephant jealous—it being an animal proverbial for its memory and long penis.”

  The ghoul, who was still cackling raucously, now regaled the midget with words of praise and approval. At the same time, she reproached me for not telling her any lewd jokes, they being the salt of life in her view, and not joining her in appreciating the ones the midget had told. She threatened to punish me for that when morning came. With that she started eating and drinking again, then started spouting some drivel that I ignored. After that, she lay down, belched, farted, and started puffing a lot.

  One of the weirdest things I now witnessed, with a due amazement—was that the midget did not retrace his steps, but instead climbed on to the bed and started hugging the ghoul. I signaled to him to withdraw.

  “I can’t do that,” he whispered in reply, “until my mistress allows me to do so. Otherwise my head and beard will be consigned to the devil.”

  I gestured to him in other ways, but his response was to the effect that his mistress could see and hear everything, even if she were asleep; I needed to say nothing and go to sleep. With that, he fell into her arms, and they both let out a series of pants and groans . . .

  O Lord, what crimes and misdemeanors can I have committed against You or Your servants that I find myself being tortured and kept awake by two such utterly disgusting creatures? Now their foul deeds are followed by thunderous snoring, the female ghoul herself and her compliant, debauched midget. O Lord, are You testing me with enforced drunkenness, migraine headaches, and a veritable cascade of hallucinations and dark visions?

  I remained in this state, asking my Lord about myself and projecting my pains and agonies to Him, till the first light of dawn appeared. The whole place rang with the sound of the ghoul’s voice, objecting to the smell of urine in her bed and cursing the mother and father of the perpetrator. The midget leaped out of the bed, his mouth showing through his quaking beard as he swore a solemn oath that he was not the culprit. She or
dered him to send for the black guard and shoved me away after untying my bonds. She then removed the sheet, blanket, and counterpane from the bed and tore up the phony marriage contract, threatening me with a humiliating punishment at the hands of the giant black guard.

  When the guard arrived, she ordered him in a gruff tone to throw me back in my hole and do with me as he wished. She described me as a drunkard and said that I was now divorced. She specifically noted that her status as an unmarried mother had made the prospect of marriage to male excrement like me seem attractive.

  The guard took my crutch, picked me up, and carried me rapidly out of the room, as though he were eager to get away from his boss and her foul tongue. He stopped by the toilet and indicated to me to go in, hand him my cloak, and wash; he would come back after a while. And that is what happened. Once I had cleansed myself after such a night of debauchery, he returned, wrapped me in a warm blanket, and carried me back to my cell, where he put me down on my bed along with my crutch and two bags. He then went away, although I could see that his bloodshot eyes were welling with tears of sympathy.

  My fears and hallucinations, combined with the effects of dizziness and exhaustion, all came together to make me feel so drowsy that it felt like a swoon or even entry into some black hole or deep trench.

  22

  I Have No Choice but to Sleep and Wake Up to the Vestiges of a Fire

  When body and soul are both in the furthest possible stages of decline, the only stratagem available to the person so afflicted is to replicate the dead by remaining still and training mind and senses to be as self-denying and abstemious as possible. I listened as two guards standing close by my bed speculated as to whether I was actually dead or merely close to it. They were on the point of laying bets on it when a nurse arrived to feel my pulse. The two guards asked him to tell them which one of them was right, but he replied that neither of them would win the bet because I was half-alive and half-dead. He then gave me an injection which he told them might keep me alive rather than dead, if only for a while. They all left suddenly, and there was an all-pervasive silence in the block, as though either the cells had no one in them or else the same thing had happened to them as to me, although the modes and circumstances might be different.

  I have no idea how long I spent in this drink-induced compulsory slumber: a few hours, or a couple of days and more. The effects of the wine the ghoul had forced down my throat were still making me dizzy and giving me terrible headaches, but even so I began to feel myself getting gradually better and recovering both breath and clarity of thought. As far as I could make out, it was close to midday. While I had been asleep, the food on the platter had obviously long since disappeared inside the various members of the insect population, but the other platter still had the copy of the Qur’an, the thurible, and perfume bottle on it. There were also the two bags that the kind black guard had left for me. I checked on their contents and found one full of bread, olives, dates, boiled eggs, and bottles of water, while the second had clean underwear and a fresh blue suit. Dear God, be kind to this servant of Yours and liberate him from the clutches of the corrupt people of this earth and the battalions of rogue criminals.

  As a way of testing how awake I really was, I put my hand in the food bag and ate some of it with all due deliberation. After taking a few swallows of water, I got to my feet, still wrapped in my blanket, and tried walking on my leg without the crutch. To my delight, I noticed a distinct improvement in my bad leg and made myself walk up and down the cell a few times. I concentrated my mind on a variety of ideals and lofty values, using them as an antidote—or rather, a total block—to the specter of the female ghoul and the evil physical and psychological abuse to which she had subjected me. As I sweated and panted profusely, I was purging my body and faculties of the pollution caused by her barbaric actions, foul tongue, and disgusting odor . . .

  When I felt tired, I lay down again on the bed panting heavily. Just then a thought occurred to me: I remembered the hole in the floor by which I was connected to my neighbor. I removed the earth with my crutch and started sending some muted messages down the tube. Once I had repeated them several times, it became clear that there was no one there to listen. I looked down the tube in case I could see a shape of some kind—a foot moving or standing still, but there was nothing. My neighbor had either been killed or transferred somewhere else, and the same might be true of the other people in the block, whether close to me or further away—God alone knows!

  So was I now alone in this cellblock, with no one else living there?

  Previously, people had envied me for having my own private cell; some people regarded it as a boon, a kind of preferential treatment. However, the torturers themselves adopted it as a form of revenge that they used on people when they wanted to drive them crazy through a crushing total isolation. If I was now the only inhabitant in a cellblock that had previously housed some one hundred prisoners, then that was undoubtedly something much more sinister. But they could dump me down a well or in the desert, and yet—by the God who has created and trained me so well to mention His name and call on His familiar saints—I shall never allow myself to give in to hallucinations and delirium, nor will I plunge into a bottomless labyrinth.

  In a spontaneous gesture of defiance, I went over to the door and looked out through the iron-framed aperture. There was not a soul to be seen or heard, merely a profound silence steeped in humidity and a graveyard atmosphere. The whole situation seemed highly problematic and augured ill. I was utterly amazed when I pushed the door and it opened. Perhaps the kindly black guard forgot to lock it, I surmised, or he left it that way as an act of generosity and release for me. I wrapped myself up in my blanket, grabbed my crutch (for which I now had other uses), and leaned on it as I entrusted myself to God’s care. I made my way out into the dimly lit corridor and made a quick tour of inspection. I was shocked, or rather shocked and saddened, to see that all the walls were coal-black, as though they had been eaten away by a roaring fire. The cell furniture and people’s possessions had all been reduced to piles of ash, which gave off a few wafts of smoke from time to time.

  My assumptions were confirmed by an aged prisoner whom I spotted sitting cross-legged at the back of a cell. I looked down at him and offered my greetings, then asked him what had happened. He did not move, but merely gave me a tired look. He then muttered some phrases in a quaking voice, from which I gathered that a prisoner in one of the neighboring cells had set his cell and himself on fire. The fire had spread to all the neighboring cells, with the exception of the one on the end and another one opposite it. I asked him when precisely this had happened, and it emerged that it had been on the night I had spent in debauchery with the ghoul. When I asked about casualties, he told me all the prisoners had either died of asphyxiation or suffered terrible burns. I asked him about his own situation, and he responded that what the fire had not taken away from him was now being done by hunger and thirst.

  “Ever since it happened, my son,” he told me, “they’ve forgotten all about me, or maybe they think I’m among the dead.”

  I hurried back to my cell and brought back half of my provisions. Since he could not stand up, I threw them down for him. He took them and thanked me profusely. I asked him to wait till I returned, and then went to look for a doctor or nurse. I walked through corridors, halls and lobbies in the direction of the hospital, with people staring at me in amazement because I was clad in my blanket, as though I was from the land of the Eskimos or else afflicted with some kind of heat deficiency.

  In one courtyard that I had to cross, some prisoners decided to provoke me. They made fun of my clothing and the fact that I was so flustered. Some of them stretched out their hands to remove the blanket and expose me naked. I took refuge with a guard.

  “Sir,” I asked him, “would you escort me to the hospital, please?”

  He asked me for my number.

  When I told him, he rubbed his neck.

  “112, you say! Ho
w did you escape from the fire?”

  “A miracle, Sir, a genuine miracle!”

  “So you’ve lost all your belongings? Why do you need the doctor?”

  “There’s still a prisoner in the block. He’s still just alive but is close to death.”

  “Go back to your cell at once. I’ll look into the problem. Now go!”

  I could not disobey the command of a man whose black uniform and medals made clear that he was an officer of some kind. I retraced my tracks, avoiding the glances of the other prisoners. When I reached my cellblock, I looked in on the old man and found him stretched out fast asleep. Rather than disturbing him by waking him up, I went back to my own cell and hid my bag of new clothes under the bedcover. Then I too collapsed on the bed, waiting to see what would happen next.

  23

  From the Penitents’ Wing to a Debauched Nightclub

  One cool and cloudy morning, I woke up to the banging of hammers and pickaxes. The intensity of the activity and the orders being issued by the guard made it clear that the cells were being repaired and rebuilt using prisoners with professional skills. Putting on my new outfit, I walked over to the door of my cell and happened to spot the officer guard whom I had met the day before. After greeting him, I asked first about the sick old man whose sorry state I had brought to his attention. He issued two orders, but managed to tell me that the old man had been buried. While I was feeling personally sorry for the old man’s demise, he continued to chew his gum. He asked me which trade I myself knew best. I raised my eyebrows hesitantly, but, before he left, he instructed me to get ready to help the plasterers. The next day I spent close to an hour helping prepare buckets of gypsum, but the professional workers soon excused me, not only because I had no training but also because of my general weakness and crippled condition. Their boss advised me to go back to my cell and abide myself in patience till the work was finished and things in the block returned to normal.