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The news was the main topic in my home as far back as my memory takes me. News in all its forms and stages. As a child, I listened to grown-ups talking about the pogroms of the Russian Civil War. At home, newspapers bringing the first news about Hitler were devoured, and, later on, with others of my generation, I followed the long path leading from the Spanish Civil War to the present day. Newspapers, novels, films, poetry, war diaries, political works, the memoirs of those who had escaped the prison camps of Franco, Petain, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin; books about repression in Cuba, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Vietnam, China; interrogations in jails all over Africa—countless battles, countless tortures, countless blows, countless killers. One might logically assume that I thought I knew it all, knew what a political prisoner was, how he suffered in jail, the things a tortured man felt. But I knew nothing. And it’s impossible to convey what I know now.
In the long months of confinement, I often thought of how to transmit the pain that a tortured person undergoes. And always I concluded that it was impossible.
It is a pain without points of reference, revelatory symbols, or clues to serve as indicators.
A man is shunted so quickly from one world to another that he’s unable to tap a reserve of energy so as to confront this unbridled violence. That is the first phase of torture: to take a man by surprise, without allowing him any reflex defense, even psychological. A man’s hands are shackled behind him, his eyes blindfolded. No one says a word. Blows are showered upon a man. He’s placed on the ground and someone counts to ten, but he’s not killed. A man is then led to what may be a canvas bed, or a table, stripped, doused with water, tied to the ends of the bed or table, hands and legs outstretched. And the application of electric shocks begins. The amount of electricity transmitted by the electrodes—or whatever they’re called—is regulated so that it merely hurts, or burns, or destroys. It’s impossible to shout—you howl. At the onset of this long human howl, someone with soft hands supervises your heart, someone sticks his hand into your mouth and pulls your tongue out of it in order to prevent this man from choking. Someone places a piece of rubber in the man’s mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue or destroying his lips. A brief pause. And then it starts all over again. With insults this time. A brief pause. And then questions. A brief pause. And then words of hope. A brief pause. And then insults. A brief pause. And then questions.
What does a man feel? The only thing that comes to mind is: They’re ripping apart my flesh. But they didn’t rip apart my flesh. Yes, I know that now. They didn’t even leave marks. But I felt as if they were tearing my flesh. And what else? Nothing that I can think of. No other sensation? Not at that moment. But did they beat you? Yes, but it didn’t hurt.
When electric shocks are applied, all that a man feels is that they’re ripping apart his flesh. And he howls. Afterwards, he doesn’t feel the blows. Nor does he feel them the next day, when there’s no electricity but only blows. The man spends days confined in a cell without windows, without light, either seated or lying down. He also spends days tied to the foot of a ladder so that he’s unable to stand up and can only kneel, sit, or stretch out. The man spends a month not being allowed to wash himself, transported on the floor of an automobile to various places for interrogation, fed badly, smelling bad. The man is left enclosed in a small cell for forty-eight hours, his eyes blindfolded, his hands tied behind him, hearing no voice, seeing no sign of life, having to perform his bodily functions upon himself.
And there is not much more. Objectively, nothing more.
Or perhaps there is much more. And I’m trying to forget it. Every day, since my release, I've been waiting for some vital shock to take place, some deep, extended nightmare to explode suddenly in the middle of the night, allowing me to relive it all—something that will take me back to the original scene, purify me, and then restore me to this place where I am now writing. But nothing has happened, and I find this calm terrifying.
A journalist asked me how freedom feels. I still do not feel it. I’m repressing the sensation of freedom because I fear that, otherwise, I may find myself relinquishing the profound marks imprinted on me, imprints that must be relieved in order to be relinquished.
Although I cannot transmit the magnitude of that pain, I can perhaps offer some advice to those who will suffer torture in the future. The human being will continue to be tortured in different countries, under different regimes. In the year and a half I spent under house arrest I devoted much thought to my attitude during torture sessions and during the period of solitary confinement. I realized that, instinctively, I’d developed an attitude of absolute passivity. Some fought against being carried to the torture tables; others begged not to be tortured; others insulted their torturers. I represented sheer passivity. Because my eyes were blindfolded, I was led by the hand. And I went. The silence was part of the terror. Yet I did not utter a word. I was told to undress. And I did so, passively. I was told, when I sat on a bed, to lie down. And, passively, I did so. This passivity, I believe, preserved a great deal of energy and left me with all my strength to withstand the torture. I felt I was becoming a vegetable, casting aside all logical emotions and sensations—fear, hatred, vengeance —for any emotion or sensation meant wasting useless energy.
In my opinion, this is sound advice. Once it’s been determined that a human being is to be tortured, nothing can prevent that torture from taking place. And it’s best to allow yourself to be led meekly toward pain and through pain, rather than to struggle resolutely as if you were a normal human being. The vegetable attitude can save a life.
I had a similar experience during those long days of solitary confinement. More than once I was brusquely awakened by someone shouting: “Think. Don’t sleep, think.” But I refused to think. I behaved as if my mind were occupied with infinite diverse tasks. Concrete, specific tasks, chores. To think meant becoming conscious of what was happening to me, imagining what might be happening to my wife and children; to think meant trying to work out how to relieve this situation, how to wedge an opening in my relationship with the jailers. In that solitary universe of the tortured, any attempt to relate to reality was an immense painful effort leading to nothing.
When my eyes were not blindfolded, I’d spend a few minutes—I believe it was minutes—moving a hand or a leg and observing the movement, fixedly, in order to experience some sense of mobility. Once a fly entered the cell, and it was a real holiday watching it flit around for hours, till it disappeared through the small crack by which the jailers communicated with me.
Then, after those “important” episodes in my life were over, my mental labor began. I decided to write a book about my wife’s eyes. It would be entitled Risha’s Eyes in the Cell Without a Number. Curiously, I wasn’t thinking about my wife as such, for that would have been acutely painful, but was organizing myself, like a poet at his work table, before undertaking some inspired professional endeavor. I held a long discussion with myself about what style to employ. Modeling it after Pablo Neruda would be reiterative, an inadequate romanticism perhaps; whereupon I recalled Federico Garcia Lorca’s style in “Poet in New York,” and came up with a few lines, but then began wondering if perhaps Stefan George’s symbolism might not be more appropriate, for in a certain way it was linked with Franz Kafka’s world. But if my quest were to end here, that meant that my mental writing had to begin. And the important thing was for that task to last as long as possible. I recalled the work of Chaim Nachman Bialik, particularly one of his poems about a pogrom, but his work struck me as being too peculiar to eastern European experience; as for Vladimir Mayakovsky, he seemed overly Russian in his love poems to Lila Brick and too verbose in his poetry about the Russian Revolution. I likewise dismissed Paul Eluard; Claudel was unadaptable, and Aragon didn’t especially impress me. There remained, of course, the poets of my youth: Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and the Spaniards Miguel Hernandez and Luis Cernuda. Finally, I settled on Stephen Spender, and began to write, i
n my mind.
One might think that the selection of style would bring back memories of the times when I first read those writers. Memory is the chief enemy of the solitary tortured man— nothing is more dangerous at such moments. But I managed to develop certain passivity-inducing devices for withstanding torture and anti-memory devices for those long hours in the solitary cell. I refused to remember anything that bore on life experience—I was a professional stoic dedicated to his task. The book I was working on absorbed me for days, though now I can’t remember a single line. For a time I recalled paragraphs, but now they are profoundly buried. And the thought that they may resurface is as frightening as the notion of reliving those solitary hours. Some day I suppose I’ll be forced to re-encounter myself by way of all that. Perhaps I’m experiencing the same problem as Argentina, an unwillingness to be aware of one’s own drama.
Another activity of mine was to organize a bookstore. I thought about how one day I’d be free, figuring that several long years might elapse before that moment, maybe ten or fifteen. Thinking in terms of a prolonged span of time is extremely useful when there is no fixed sentence, for it annihilates hope, and hope is synonymous with anxiety and anguish. I imagined my eventual arrival in Israel and the need to organize some work. I decided that a bookstore would be the most suitable way for two voracious readers like myself and my wife to earn a living. I speculated on all the details: the size of the main room, the name, the typography of the letters printed on the windows, the type of books we’d sell, whether it would be a good idea to install a literary salon on an upper floor or perhaps an experimental film society. A detailed task of this sort could easily keep me occupied for days. Following the same method, I organized a newspaper in Madrid, another in New York, my life on a kibbutz, and a film by Ingmar Bergman on the solitude of a tortured man.
Long afterwards, I realized that I had developed a withdrawal technique. I tried through every available means, while inside my solitary cell, during interrogations, long torture sessions, and after sessions, when only time remained, all of time, time on all sides and in every cranny of the cell, time suspended on the walls, on the ground, in my hands, only time, I tried to maintain some professional activity, disconnected from the events around me or that I imagined to be going on around me. Deliberately, I evaded conjecture on my own destiny, that of my family and the nation. I devoted myself simply to being consciously a solitary man entrusted with a specific task.
At times, something in the mechanism would fail, and I had to devote several hours to reconstructing it: some lingering physical pain following an interrogation, hunger, the need for a human voice, for contact, for a memory. Yet I always managed to reconstruct the mechanism of withdrawal, and thus was able to avoid lapsing into that other mechanism of tortured solitary prisoners which leads them to establish a bond with their jailer or torturer. Both parties seem to feel some need of the other: for the torturer, it is a sense of omnipotence, without which he’d find it hard perhaps to exercise his profession—the torturer needs to be needed by the tortured; whereas the man who’s tortured finds in his torturer a human voice, a dialogue for his situation, some partial exercise of his human condition—he asks for pity, to go to the bathroom, for another plate of soup, he asks for the result of a football game.
I was able to avoid all of that.
Following my transfer to a legal cell and permission for family visits, the guards would have allowed packages of food to be brought to me in exchange for a gift. I didn’t take advantage of this system, and my wife was told by a policeman that I was punishing myself, playing the martyr. I don’t know why I opted for such proud asceticism. Now, I am unable to judge how sensible an idea this was, though at that point it helped to instill an idea of my own reserves, and I rejoiced. The other recourse would have provided consolation, but not joy.
After the War Council’s ruling that no charges existed against me and that a trial would not be held, I remained imprisoned for another two years, although my situation in legal imprisonment improved. There were other prisoners, we were allowed to talk, the cells were open and each was provided with a latrine (a hole in the ground). We could bathe every day, we began cooking our own food, played long card games, read newspapers, and were allowed to receive certain books, clean clothing, blankets and sheets, a radio. We’d all been tortured, to a greater or lesser degree. From our dialogues, we discovered that a torture session to soften a man up always followed immediately upon his arrest, though in some cases many days elapsed between torture session and interrogation. Other prisoners were never even interrogated.
Inevitably, since my release, the first question I’m asked concerns the torture I underwent. Yet, for the man who’s been tortured and has survived, this is perhaps the least important topic. In conversations with other prisoners, I discovered the following curious fact: our preoccupations revolved around how long we’d be in jail, our family’s situation and economic needs; and if by chance the topic of torture came up, it was only via a random remark that didn’t seem of consummate interest to anyone. “I had five days on the machine.” “They put me on the machine with my clothes on.” “The machine hurt my head.” Sometimes, on hearing the howls that rose from the basement, a prisoner might say, as if in passing, ‘They’re giving someone the machine.”
The victim, following his torture and during the waiting period—whether he’s been sentenced or is ignorant of his fate—devotes himself to the daily needs of life. Torture forms part of an ordinary routine, something already undergone and now the turn of others—some of whom will survive, others not. It occupies a very limited place in the life of the tortured person, and when he’s newly freed and able to speak openly and be openly questioned, he’s astonished at the importance mankind attaches to the subject.
The soldiers who tortured me were so proud of finally having laid hands on me that they strove to spread the details of that great event, and even embellished it, I believe, with nonexistent details. They spoke of the mirrored rooms where the electric shocks were applied and of the numerous observers who witnessed the episode from the other side. I think the tortures were performed in old buildings, disguised as commissaries, in small villages near Buenos Aires, generally some rebuilt kitchen or a large cell where an electric cable could be installed. Torture centers existed, of course, in military barracks, but always in basements or abandoned kitchens.
The torturers, nevertheless, try to create a more sophisticated image of the torture sites, as if thereby endowing their activity with a more elevated status. Their military leaders encourage this fantasy; and the notion of important sites, exclusive methods, original techniques, novel equipment, allows them to present a touch of distinction and legitimacy to the world.
This conversion of dirty, dark, gloomy places into a universe of spontaneous innovation and institutional “beauty” is one of the most arousing pleasures for torturers. It is as if they felt themselves to be masters of the force required to alter reality. And it places them again in the world of omnipotence. This omnipotence in turn they feel assures them of impunity—a sense of immunity to pain, guilt, emotional imbalance.
I’m seated on a chair in the yard. Hands tied behind my back. Eyes blindfolded. It’s drizzling, and I’m soaked. I keep moving my head and legs in an effort to keep warm. I’ve peed, the pee has turned icy, and the skin on my legs, where the urine ran down, hurts. I hear some steps, and a voice asks me if I’m cold. I’m untied from the chair and led into a warm room. I was brought to this clandestine prison today. Taken from central federal police headquarters in the city of Buenos Aires. I later learned that a prisoner who saw me leave asked the head of our ward for permission to inform my family that he’d seen me, arms tied behind my back, go peacefully without offering resistance. He was told that it wasn’t advisable to get involved, inasmuch as I’d been removed without a written order or record of transfer, which meant that I was going to be executed.
It is hot. They seat me on a chair
and take the blindfold off my eyes. It’s handed to me. We’re in a spacious kitchen. Before me are some smiling men, big and fat, dressed in civilian clothing.
Weapons are everywhere. The men are drinking coffee, and one of them offers me some in a tin cup. He keeps smiling. Tells me to sip it slowly, asks if I want a blanket, invites me to come close to the stove, to eat something.
Everything about him transmits generosity, a desire to protect me. He asks if I’d like to lie down a while on the bed. I tell him no. He tells me there are some female prisoners on the grounds, if I’d care to go to bed with one of them. I tell him no. This gets him angry because he wants to help me and, by not allowing him to, I upset his plan, his aim.
In some way he needs to demonstrate to me and to himself his capacity to grant things, to alter my world, my situation. To demonstrate to me that I need things that are inaccessible to me and which only he can provide.
I’ve noticed this mechanism repeated countless times.
One feels tempted to combat this tendency on the part of the torturers, to confront it as almost a unique possibility for feeling oneself to be alive; yet such futile battles lead to nought. It’s best to acknowledge and accept the torturers’ omnipotence in such unimportant matters. Many times you reject them more out of your own omnipotence than out of a competitive spirit toward the torturer or a lucid decision to put up a fight, though it’s definitively a gratuitous act of pride.
Out of weariness, perhaps, or resignation, or that sensation which so often assails the tortured—a presentiment of imminent death—I do not answer. He insults me but doesn’t strike me. Again he puts the blindfold on my eyes. Takes my hand and leads me out of the kitchen. Seats me on the chair and ties my hands behind me.
Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number Page 4