I’m reborn. I come back to life. Arriving in this military hospital looking out on the Atlantic Ocean is a liberation. My pain is gone. Even my migraine has given up. I’m an interesting case. This business with the testicle intrigues a doctor, who examines me, palpates my balls, asks me if I was ever violently kicked in the scrotum. I say yes. I don’t exactly remember. He keeps me under observation. I have X-rays, lab tests, they treat my ear infections, they hover over me: I’ve become a research project. I spend two weeks being spoiled and ask for paper and a pencil. I write my first compositions on the hospital’s prescription forms. There are six of us in the room. My neighbor to the left is dying. He’s so pale, so weak. I notice tufts of his gray hair on the pillow. He sleeps with his mouth open. Now and then, a moan. An orderly arrives and looks around at us: “He won’t last long; let me know when his soul comes out.” The expression surprises me. I begin to watch him and keep my eyes open to catch the soul coming out. I stare fixedly at him. Nothing comes out. I get tired and close my eyes. Suddenly, I hear a cry, swiftly stifled. That’s it: the soul came out but I missed it.
At the end of these two weeks a sergeant comes to get me. We travel in a jeep. Once out of Rabat, he begins to ask me questions. I figure I’ve got one of those soldiers from Military Intelligence. Perhaps. He wants to know everything: the reasons for the punishment, what I think of the army, if I would be interested in enlisting the way he did, was I going to get married, what weapon I prefer, do I like ironing gray shirts, what was the illness that landed me in the hospital, do I have a passport, what countries would I like to visit . . .
I reply with indifference. I don’t feel like talking with him. At the end, he says, “Ah, you’re suspicious of me, you think I’m a secret agent who’s pumping you for information? In our department, when we want something, we don’t beat about the bush: wire up the balls, and everyone talks.”
“I know.”
“What do you mean, you know?”
“Some friends were tortured by the police in Casa.”
“Why?”
“They never had the slightest idea; the torture was applied randomly and the flics love to let you know that.”
“You’re involved in politics?”
“No.”
“Then why does your serial number begin with 10 300? That’s a code for us. We hate politicals and professors.”
We stop on arrival at Meknès, and the sergeant suggests having a beer. I tell him I don’t drink. He gives me to understand that I’m supposed to buy him one and while I’m at it a pack of American cigarettes as well. I spend the little bit of money I have with me. I order a lemonade and we get back on the road. He tells me something I’d already suspected.
“You know, so that you all don’t get hard-ons anymore, they put something in the coffee, I think it’s called brou, bro—anyway, it’s something like that . . .”
“Bromide?”
“Yes, that’s it, it prevents fucking. But Lieutenant Zéroual, he takes advantage to screw the youngsters, the ones who’ve just joined the army. He’s a really strong guy, you’d best not answer him when he says anything. Keep this between us, don’t start people thinking there’s army guys sharing their butts. Here we look down on ‘bottoms’ . . .”
With or without bromide, my libido is nowhere. Nothing. Not the slightest twinge. Everything here is anti-erotic unless you’re inclined to boys, like Lieutenant Zéroual, who’s probably not the only one in the camp humping the new recruits, but that’s hush-hush. In the barracks, there’s a big dope who looks like a Volkswagen Beetle (an astonishing resemblance, you see him immediately as that low-slung car with the flattened nose), and we know he masturbates noisily but has trouble coming. He gets pissed off and, as if he were alone in a bathroom, starts raging at the army, accusing it of castrating him.
When I think of my ex-fiancée, when I envision myself caressing her breasts, thighs, kissing her, it no longer has any effect. I can’t get it up. I don’t even feel like masturbating. We never talk about this among ourselves.
The sergeant enjoys the blond tobacco cigarettes, exclaiming with every puff what a pleasure they are. The smoke gives me a headache. When we arrive in camp, I see Akka, his baton under his arm, waiting in front of the gate. While I am getting out of the jeep, he runs the tip of the baton over my scalp and says:
“Going to have to shave all that hair. And right away, too. Then you come see me, on the dub.”
I ask a neighbor to help me shave. The showers are closed at night. I wash up as best I can. I go see Chief Warrant Officer Akka.
“Tell me, what’s your illness?”
“I’ve got a malformed testicle.”
“Because a ball’s fucked up, you take off for a vacation in Rabat!”
He shouts, stands up then sits down, rages, and perspires.
“Right, if I told you to come see me, it’s because the commandant would like to ask you some questions. You’re a philosophy student, right? Oh, I bet that’s hard, that is! I don’t know what’s got into the commandant, but I’m supposed to bring him any of you punished guys who’ve had some education. You’re lucky, I don’t know why, but he must like you, otherwise I’d have made you pay for that two-week vacation ’cause here we don’t like shirkers—you know, cheaters . . .”
When I get back to the barracks, everyone wants to hear about Rabat—if the nurses are pretty, if the food is high quality . . . One fellow we’d nicknamed the Weasel because of his long slouchy physique asks me how much to pay the doc to get sent to the hospital. “Nothing,” I tell him. “You just have to be actually sick. The doctor does his job, he’s a French guy doing his alter native military service here, and in theory he’s not aware of our status or the treatment targeting us, and in any case you mustn’t talk to him about it, he’s in a tough spot, he’s still an outsider . . .”
A few days after my return, we’re awakened by unusual noises. It’s a wedding, or something like that. Maybe Commandant Ababou is celebrating his promotion. We don’t know a thing, but he’s rumored to now be a lieutenant colonel. That calls for a party. Which would explain the Berber music for the Chikhate dancers, and even off in our barracks the noise reaches us so clearly that we can’t fall back asleep. We also hear laughter, shouting, and ululations. Someone says, “The commandant is celebrating his thirty-third birthday.” And it must be a party with plenty to drink. Toward the end of the day, black limousines were seen delivering well-dressed men, but no one saw the Chikhates arrive. Akka must have brought them in through a hidden door. The aroma of the méchoui mutton floats in the air.3 Ababou and his friends, all superior officers, are having a great time and don’t even know that not too far away ninety-four young students are starving and mired in depression. The next day, crates of empty whiskey bottles are piled at the camp gate. Perhaps they put them there to taunt us.
AN EVENING CHEZ ABABOU
One evening after dinner, I’m summoned with two other companions by Commandant Ababou. He lives in a pleasant house with a garden that has a couple of trees. We enter; one of the soldiers on guard duty installs us in the living room on some fake leather sofas and brings us tea. I have never tasted such sweet, strong, delicious mint tea. Everything takes on unfamiliar dimensions. The sofa seems so soft to me, so comfortable, that my skin feels flattered. We look at one another without a word. On the wall: a portrait of Hassan II as the leader of the Royal Armed Forces, next to a black-and-white photograph of Mohammed V.1
Ababou arrives. We stand up, at attention. He gestures for us to sit down, removes his gloves, places a dossier on the table, gets comfortable, and starts right in:
“Which of you can tell me something about Lenin?”
We’re scared stiff. Talking about Lenin in the house of our tormentor, the one who abuses and humiliates us. A trap? A provocation?
It’s so bizarre to go from our barracks, truly a stable for animals, to a comfortable house in order to talk about Lenin! I turn toward Abbas, the militant
Communist.
Abbas, a disciplined man, begins to situate the life and actions of Lenin within the context of the Russian Revolution, and talks about Karl Marx, mentioning his German background. He evokes the class struggle, the end of man’s exploitation of man, etc.
Ababou listens attentively, then interrupts:
“What does he say about religion?”
“It’s Marx who says it’s ‘the opium of the people.’”
“He could have thrown in soccer, too!” exclaims Ababou, laughing.
Then he asks me a question that sounds like an indictment.
“You, you led a student movement, you organized strikes at the university, and you pushed kids to demonstrate, didn’t you? Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking. So, you’re an agitator, you’re familiar with civilian guerrilla tactics, you know what the Vietnamese did, what the Cubans did . . .”
I remain silent.
“Are you going to answer?” he yells.
Startled, I stammer some meaningless words, then pull myself together and decide to take him seriously. I think, Too bad, here goes.
“Yes, commandant: the minister of national education, Youssef Belabbès, issued an administrative memorandum that prevented students more than seventeen years old from advancing to the second level in our lycées, thus shunting them into vocational training. The demonstrations against this memorandum were quite peaceful in the beginning, even though strikers and workers from the Moroccan Workers’ Union had joined the students. The repression, on the other hand, was very violent. There were at least fifty dead and three hundred wounded. But if the police had not fired on the crowd, I don’t think we would have had the riots that followed.”
My two companions look at me as if in encouragement; as for Ababou, he rises, paces back and forth, downs a glass of tea in one go, and returns to me.
“So, you’re a revolutionary?”
“No, commandant, I am a poet, a dreamer. On the day of the demonstration I felt sad because I’d had an argument with my fiancée . . . so I melted into the crowd—and got beaten.”
“You cried because a girl was angry at you?”
“No, commandant, I did not cry, but I was sad. That’s normal, she was my first love . . .”
“What sort of a story is that? A man, a real one, never falls in love, or else he’s done for . . . You think General de Gaulle was in love?”
“Yes, commandant: in love with France!”
He laughs, then asks the two others a few general questions. As we’re leaving, he tells us that we’ll be going to a different camp. Without revealing our destination, he simply says that it will be more comfortable than this one.
A few days later we are visited by General Driss Ben Omar, who beat back the Algerians in October 1963 in what has been called the Sand War: Algeria did not want to give Morocco back the mining city of Tindouf, annexed by France in 1934, because iron mines had been discovered there, and there were some additional problems regarding border disputes. On the day of the visit we’re served a decent dinner; each of us even received an apple instead of a Laughing Cow.
This visit worries us all. Is war perhaps imminent with our Algerian neighbor? Why did the general talk about frontiers, the territorial integrity of the nation, the sacrifices we’ll have to accept to defend the country?
Rumors of mobilization on the eastern borders circulate through the camp. It occurs to me that this would be the best way to get rid of hotheads and eggheads. There were ninety-four of us punished, minus the one who vanished. If they send us to the front line to fight the Algerians, we’ll surely be killed right away. Good riddance! This must be another idea of that pervert Oufkir, who fired on the students in Rabat and Casablanca. The one who had us arrested and delivered into the hands of an Akka.
THE CONVOY
Early in the morning of January 1, 1967, some months after my arrival, I hear the rumble of truck engines. The noise is intense. I’m sure they’re coming to get us. We’ll be changing camps, we’ll be lined up along the frontier with Algeria. I’m petrified, stomach aching, impossible to concentrate. I harbor no hatred for the Algerian people, I don’t see why I would attack them. If I disobey I’ll be shot. You can’t be a conscientious objector here; here, you obey or you die. Case in point: the soldier punished this summer, buried out in the sun, died insane.
Perhaps war will be declared in the coming hours. We are not allowed radios or newspapers. When one of us is occasionally assigned to clean the toilets in the officers’ club, he seizes the opportunity to collect a few old papers on which we all pounce hungrily. Otherwise, we have only rumors, conjecture. No: if we were at war with Algeria, we would have been on maximum alert. So they’re preparing us to be sent there. A little war of a few days, enough time to send the troublemakers off to the shooting gallery. A diabolical plan! We’d be legally assassinated. The nation in danger had to be defended and saved, those young people volunteered to stop the Algerian aggressor: the brother whom we’d helped, nourished, protected—and who has forgotten all that.
I know, I have too much imagination. The images slip past and repass at high speed. Almost twenty-four per second, the rhythm of a film.
I collect my kit, I hide the papers on which I’ve written poems, I shave my head and beard. I put on campaign dress. I’m ready. I think of my parents. I mustn’t break down. Abdenebi comes to announce that we might go to a military school for training before being sent to the front. After roll call, we climb into the trucks. I notice that neither Akka nor Ababou is there. I see a new arrival, a captain who wears sunglasses even when it’s dark. Which it is at five in the morning. The trucks set out. The canvas covers are taut. We see nothing of the landscape, know nothing of where we’re going. It’s like being a condemned man who loses all notion of time and space. Fear and hunger, shuffled through the jerky cadence of the truck, are sending me to sleep. Actually, I’m just getting drowsy, because I still hear everything. I’m dreaming, filling time with pretty pictures, postcards, clichés of happiness, the little things in life one hopes one day to find. I see sunny prairies with girls rolling hoops, I see a butterfly land on the breast of a girl sunning herself, I see a stream on which glide waterlilies, guided by a frail hand, I see colors, light, joy . . . everything that does not exist in this ordeal savaging our nerves. Now I see nothing: the truck has suddenly stopped. A checkpoint. A sergeant is barking unintelligibly.
“Dere’s missink, a bassard, a sumbeechwhat fukinwi me, but it’s me, Sergeant Hassan, who’ll screw his whore mother . . .”
His anger frightens us. We all pile out. Regroup in sections.
“Lineupstrate!” screeches the sergeant.
It’s daybreak, we are on top of a mountain. In the distance I can see smoke coming from the roof of a cottage. I imagine that it belongs to a young shepherd and his cousin, now his wife. They live modestly and happily.
“Balkoum!”
The sergeant reviews and counts us.
“Dere’s missink, sumbeech,” he yells again. “Find him, or you’ll all pay.”
He talks with a superior on a walkie-talkie, sometimes mixing Arabic and Berber with a few mangled French words.
The missing man is Marcel, the only Jew among the ninety-four punished. A decent fellow who’d been arrested while distributing leaflets about Palestine. His father is a militant Communist rather well known in Morocco. The son isn’t the kind to disobey, but probably did not wake up this morning, or else he was sick and in the infirmary. That’s what the other officer must have told the sergeant, because we caught part of a sentence: “coming along with the support crew.” After this unpleasant interlude, we drive on.
The trucks roll slowly, laboring up the steep slopes; the roads are winding, with many sharp turns. Nausea. Feel like throwing up. I hold on. The fellow we call the Weasel has raised the canvas and vomited; it stinks, I hold my nose, and this promiscuity is a problem for me, I’m not made to live with other people. Some men drool in their sleep, others pla
y cards they’ve made with bits of cardboard, all of them fart, the atmosphere reeks, and I am suffering, yes, I am a weakling, just as Akka told me at the outset: fragile, civilized, hating being a sardine in a can and there’s nothing I can do. I calm down and remember the first lines of “Vowels”:
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
One day I will tell where your latent birthplace lies;
A, velvety black corset of glittering flies
Whirling and thrumming ’round odors rank and cruel.
It’s precisely those “cruel odors” I’m enduring that bring Rimbaud to mind. Those verses allow me to go on a voyage, break out of this miserable truck. Poetry is my only weapon against these barbarians. The words, the images, the dazzling effects are beyond their control. Rarely has poetry been as necessary to me as during those days. As soon as I can, I jot down lines without thinking about what they mean. I’m obsessed by the myth of Orpheus, and by Spartacus, too. Poetry becomes my ally, my refuge, my bed and my nights. Sometimes I compose in my head until I can find a bit of paper to write my verses down. Before, I used the paper tablecloths in the canteen; now they have plastic ones. Once I asked the doctor who wrote me a prescription for a few pages from his pad. Otherwise, Bloom and Dedalus keep me company. Their rambles through a Dublin I’ve never seen help me to escape, and I wish I could talk to them, leaping through time and space to greet them. I hold the big book close and think, One day I’ll be free, and I’ll go to Dublin.
My memory has always been a faithful friend, because it allows me to run away and visit extraordinary places. It is also my solitude. Not that I think myself better than the others, but I am certain that Rimbaud allows me to rise above these moments of loneliness among a humanity with which I share nothing beyond our collective punishment by the king. All this weighs on me more and more and exposes me to danger.
The Punishment Page 5