Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number

by Jacobo Timerman

  ... I masturbate. ... I must respect the corporal on guard. . . . The police love me. . . .

  The prisoner who is incommunicado is envious of all this. He longs to see a face. His need engenders a series of skills. From his isolation, he begins to comprehend the architecture of the outside world, a faceless architecture that he pieces together like a puzzle. Although he is a blind man, a dextrous blind man who comes to the end of his task without a happy conclusion providing him any relief, he remains, in the end, blind, never able to see the vital part. There are long silences that must be linked with whispers. (A soft voice asks, “Who’s there?” and, softly, I reply, “Timerman,” and the voice lets out a burst of laughter. Then another voice slowly asks, “Who’s there?” and this time I don’t answer; but another time I say, “Timerman,” and he murmurs, “Be strong.”) Then, too, one must find a place in the puzzle for the shouts, insults, and hard beatings meted out to prisoners, the jokes toward homosexuals; all must be incorporated in order to have an idea of what’s going on. The police need to shout— shouting helps them. They have orders from their superiors to shout all the time in order to intimidate and confuse prisoners. Therefore, whenever they talk, they shout, which adds to the puzzle, to the effort of constructing the outside world, the only world apart from the cell.

  And then there are other pieces: The policeman who negotiates with a homosexual to rent a cell in the isolation ward so that the latter can receive alternating prisoners from another ward, the one for petty criminals and thieves who are in for sixty or ninety days, entitled to use their money for food, and glad to pay for this hour of male prostitution inside a cell located in the heart of Buenos Aires, a hallucinatory brothel administered by the Federal Police, which Juan Domingo Peron pronounced the best police force in the world.

  Adding further to the puzzle are the big cleaning days when a commissioner will be coming for inspection and the cells are disinfected. But since those who are held incommunicado cannot be let out, a man in white opens the door and fumigates the cell with puffs of white powder. The chemical smell engulfs me for days, though I no longer fear choking, like the first time. Then there are the typical Sunday sounds, when the names of prisoners with visiting rights are called out, and you hear radio broadcasts of soccer matches and smell the odor of different foods, that of the guards no doubt; there are days, too, when you hear the droning sound of a religious service.

  And that is why I am startled now. The sound that just dropped into my cell has destroyed the puzzle and doesn’t fit into the despair of the cell, nor into my effort to compensate for that despair by my slow, laborious, ardent reconstruction of the exterior architecture, the blind man’s stubborn obsession with his puzzle.

  I pick up a letter and two candies. The letter, a few brief lines, is from my wife. Dated May 20, 1977. We’ve been married today for twenty-seven years. I leave everything on the bed and go back to my task as blind architect: She’s undoubtedly contacted one of our army friends, one of those who came to our house so often, or one of the retired officers who worked on my newspaper, perhaps someone who spent vacations at our beach house. . . . And yet, this doesn’t fit into the heightened sensibility of a blind man whose sightless eyes are gazing at an unknown world. No military man nowadays would dare to speak to my wife. More likely one of the policemen, a ward guard, went to visit her and offered, for a sum of money, to bring something to me. At this point the blind architect starts reconstructing the scene. My house, the entrance, the doorbell, my wife’s face. . . . But no, the image of my wife’s face is unbearable in this place.

  How I cursed my wife that day! How many times I told myself I wouldn’t read her letter, I wouldn’t eat the candies. After so many efforts to forget, to refrain from loving and desiring, to refrain from thinking, the entire painstaking edifice constructed by the blind architect collapses over his head. Already I’d begun to belong to the world around me, the one I actually belonged to, the imprisoned world where my heart and blood were installed: this world I've already accepted and that is real, that corresponds to the inscriptions on the wall, the odor of the latrine matching that emitted by my skin and clothes, and those drab colors, the sounds of metal and violence, the harsh, shrill, hysterical voices. And now this world, so heavily armored, so solid and irreplaceable, without cracks, has been penetrated by a letter and two candies. Risha, why have you done this to me?

  She tells me that if she could she’d give me heaven with all its stars and clouds, all the air in the world, all her love, all her tenderness. She says that she’d kiss me a thousand times if she could. But that is what she fails to understand: she cannot. In a rage, I throw the letter into the latrine, and with equal rage stick the two candies into my mouth. But already I’m lost, for the flavor is overpowering, as is my wife’s face, her scent almost; and my realization that I’ve been married today for twenty-seven years and have been sequestered for forty days.

  How can a blind architect fit into his unknown edifice— that structure he can neither see nor touch—the face of his wife, the taste of two candies, his wedding anniversary? Anywhere I place them, the structure collapses. Then, once again, I sit down on the stone bed, and when the guard opens the peephole to ask me my name, once again I arouse myself from the submerging debris, grasping for a life jacket to reconstruct my reality. I don’t reply, and the guard kicks the steel door with his heavy boots. “Name, son of a whore!”

  The blind architect goes to work trying to fit the meaning of this insult into his world. He no longer needs to remember. At this juncture I feel as if I’ve passed the first serious test, worse than torture, and that I’ll survive. For it is here that you must survive, not in the outside world. And the chief enemy is not the electric shocks, but penetration from the outside world, with all its memories.

  I get into a big black car, the back seat. It’s raining in New York. I’ve been free barely a month. Liv Ullmann also gets in. I’m occupying the wide back seat, and she seats herself in one of the small fold-up seats that provide extra places. We’ve just attended a lecture by Elie Wiesel, and are on our way to a gathering of friends at someone’s home.

  She gazes at me with sympathy, indifference, or perhaps aloof interest. And I look at her with hatred. But my voice is calm, dispassionate in tone, maybe even indifferent. Yet it would be impossible not to tell her that it was she, Liv Ullmann, who did me the most harm while I was in prison. I tell her almost everything, perhaps a bit less, or perhaps now I am telling her less than before or find more to say than before. We called her “Howlmann” because her name coincided with the word “howl,” which was what we mostly did in our cells—we howled inside, inverting biology and sounds. And all this happened after her book arrived in the prison.

  She destroyed the blind architect, revealing his full misery, terror, and horror to him; she brought the crows that would devour every part of his accumulated vital blood; she incited him to hatred, death, madness. She didn’t spare him one iota of despair. She revealed the bruises on his legs; she dispelled the haze he’d been slumbering in; she awakened every fragment of his paralyzed brain, of his dormant memory; she unfolded before his single seeing eye the colors of the fever of love, of lips to be kissed, of slender fingers, little fingers, the soft, tiny fingers of her daughter Linne.

  She brought to that place where tenderness is the enemy, where goodness is madness and memory the implacable, encroaching leper, she brought that gentle face of hers, enhanced by photography and Renaissance type, with those real eyes and lips, and that word “Changing,” an absurd word for a prisoner, plus that relationship with her daughter. She brought it directly to me—me with three sons, and I tremulously defended myself against their memory, those three sons who’d been told by a policeman that their father was a brave man because of the manner in which he withstood torture.

  I tell her these things in that automobile crossing Manhattan in the rain, in the autumn of 1979, or perhaps other things, or not even those, refraining possibl
y from mentioning the men who remained behind, who likewise hate her. Liv Ullmann starts to tremble, and a woman psychiatrist at my side begins to cry, then tells me if I need help to call her. And many times in the hotel, with her white card on my table, I’ve thought of telling Erika Padan Freeman how much I hated that Norwegian of Swedish fame, that woman so proud of her tenderness—much more than I conveyed to her as we were squeezed into an American millionaire’s car.

  In fact, I don’t think I even tell Liv Ullmann that I hate her, only that her book did me harm. It was brought by someone to my cell after I was no longer incommunicado, and was allowed to see my family every day for five minutes. We were permitted to receive books and newspapers but no food, though my children used their ingenuity in hiding small bits of chocolate, cake, or candy inside their trousers, socks, jackets, and sleeves. On that particular day, the only thing I tell Liv Ullmann about that desolate place where everything is somehow surmountable through psychological subterfuge, where one’s relationship with his torturer at times even has the aspect of an encounter between two human beings, where marriages exist between men in which pity infuses their encounter ... the only thing I tell her is that tenderness there is nonexistent. There is a total absence of tenderness, and it’s impossible to create it via any subterfuge. No one gives tenderness, and no one receives it. It's impossible to go beyond pity, and it is with pity that a prisoner adds to his armature of feelings and sensations.

  When two prisoners shake hands it’s an act of pity, as is the apple once given me and which I subsequently threw, while walking in the corridor during recreation break, into someone’s isolation cell whose peephole was open. A cake of borrowed soap, a gift of underpants—that is pity. Listening for hours to the babble of someone who has been tortured to force him to reveal the hiding place of his son, who he later discovers has “disappeared”—that is pity. To show interest in the plans of an architect who may soon be released and who still retains intact his ideals on urbanization, housing developments, creativity in support of neighborhood groups—that is pity.

  But that is all. There is no tenderness. The five-minute family visit is filled with caresses, whispered words, kisses given in full view of everyone. Yet there is no surrender to tenderness, no brimming, unstinting tenderness, no unbridled, fearless tenderness; only a suggestion of it conveyed in moderation to remind you that it’s there. But the biology of survival is also there, and the intoxication of tenderness is tantamount to death, madness, suicide.

  Liv Ullmann’s book appeared in this place like a mockery, with its impudence, the omnipotence of someone able to give and receive tenderness; with its insolence, of someone able to enjoy and suffer tenderness; with its pleasure and pain devoid of pathos. Unencumbered by the risk of life, as ours were risked whenever tenderness appeared.

  What need did she have to address us prisoners with that lighthearted cunning, that girlish mischievousness by which she describes herself and her relationship with her daughter? Lingering tenderly on landscapes, bodies, souls, meals— wielding tenderness like a screwdriver to open and penetrate, hurling it in our faces, while we prisoners were merely trying, with the aid of pity, to structure our own survival.

  The thought of suicide occurred to me often. But I discovered then that it was a temptation rather than a premeditated decision. The idea of suicide, its temptation, would appear like a delicious fruit in situations where only death could arouse some sensation of desire. But the opportunity for suicide did not arise during those early weeks of interrogation and torture.

  With hands bound behind me and eyes blindfolded, suicide was the only thing that could share the long endless stretch of time, made up of time and more time, of interrogation and time, of cold and time, of hunger and time, of tears and time. How to fill those orifices of time if not with the preserved fruit of suicide? How to modify the rigid endless structure of time if not with the unforeseen originality of suicide?

  With hands bound behind me and eyes blindfolded, there was no possibility of suicide. I was transferred from my clandestine prison to the interrogators at police headquarters in the city of La Plata, blindfolded, bound, thrown to the floor in back of a car, covered with a blanket.

  It was early in the morning by the time one of the longer sessions, lasting I think about eighteen hours, was over. Accompanied by two guards, I was leaving La Plata and heading back in the direction of the clandestine prison. They were exhausted but happy: I'd signed a declaration admitting that I was a leftist Zionist. They sat me in back, alone, did not blindfold me or tie me up, and gave me an apple. They said that before reaching the prison, they’d cover me with a blanket so that I wouldn’t see the location, which was known in their coded language as the Puesto Vasco. They speeded along the deserted route while I, in absorption, gazed through the window at the road. One of the guards wanted to know what crazy thoughts were passing through my mind as we heard a radio newscast announcing that my wife had presented a new writ of habeas corpus to ascertain my whereabouts. Smiling, I told him I was thinking of opening the door and throwing myself from the car. But he warned me not to attempt this because there obviously wouldn’t be enough time—he’d grab me with his hands, and I wouldn’t have the strength to move. Again he smiled, and said: “There were seventeen in this car, Jacobo.’’ It’s for those seventeen faces that I had also to seek haven in the night.

  Aside from suicide, there’s one other temptation—madness. These are the only two temptations, or rather the only two strong emotions I experienced during my thirty months of imprisonment and beatings. Strong emotions because their repressed violence enables them to overpower time. And time is not an easy enemy.

  To reflect on suicide does not mean that you’re going to commit suicide, or decide that suicide ought to be committed. It means introducing into your daily life something that is on a par with the violence around you. Managing to introduce into that daily life an element on the same level as the violence of that other element. It’s like living on an equal footing with one’s jailers, those who beat and martyr you. Sharing with oneself a non-inferior capacity, one equal in magnitude to that of one’s oppressor. This self-imposed state of equality functions as a compensatory mechanism. It’s with you, has the force to be with you, is created and structured in that place, that prison, and will afterwards be missed or remembered.

  More than a decision or a hope, it’s an occupation—its dimension so profound, so biological and awesome, that it’s a palpable presence. Impossible to confuse with any other sensation, it introduces the possibility of achieving a level of destruction akin to the destruction unremittingly being inflicted upon you.

  The word “suicide” is not linked, in the mind of the beaten and tortured prisoner, with any other connotation. Nor to the consequences, possibilities, remorse, or pain that it will produce, or the defeats that the act presumes. It is simply what it is, with its own taste, smell, form, and weight. And it fills the Time of the prisoner’s time, and the Space of the prisoner’s cell.

  He can measure the wall-to-wall distance inside his cell and wonder whether his head will break if he hurls himself against that wall with all his might; or he can imagine the feasibility of puncturing a vein with his nails. All this inherent violence transmits a sensation of physical capacity and inevitability to the prisoner who’s undergone torture. It contains an element of romantic audacity, the sense of a completed story.

  There’s pride in the idea of potential suicide. It’s the primary temptation ’in response to the continual humiliation from one’s torturers.

  But at some point you must reach a decision to abandon the idea, for it can become too obvious a subterfuge. In fact, it already has become a subterfuge, for you realize that you’re not going to commit suicide and once again comes the feeling of defeat. You’re humiliated, and the humiliation is justified. Your world is utterly reduced, and the fact that you’ve told the torturers nothing, and that you’ve survived, doesn’t occur to you. These are not usab
le values in this world of cockroaches, vomit dried on your clothes, bits of half-raw meat strewn on the ground. A world in which the sphincters must endure their gross intestinal content until you’re authorized by a guard to go to the toilet.

  Suicide is a usable value because of its definitive, hopeless nature. And can anyone within that obscurity of torture and darkness conceive that the place where he is, the space where he is, is anything other than definitive and irremediable?

  Hence, when the possibility of suicide no longer exists, with its splendid image of a raging bull ready to confront the bullfighter’s truth—that suicide which in the darkness of one’s cell has the somber, austere, incorruptible flavor of vengeance—when that possibility of suicide no longer exists, there remains the temptation of madness.

  Yes, the temptation of madness remains, though it’s impossible to deal with madness as one does with suicide. You must await madness, and think that perhaps it will come. You must try to yield to it, and possibly it will engulf you. Await it and yield to it—that is the grim part. For if it fails to arrive, your impotence is conclusive, your humiliation greater than a kick on the behind from some voiceless, faceless stranger who leads you blindfolded, from your cell, stands you flat against the wall, gives you a kick in the ass, always in silence, then has you return to your cell with one of those delicate gestures suggested by the bejeweled hands of an El Greco painting.

  Yes, punishment in silence leads to the temptation of madness. Yet madness is unavailable, and you can await it in vain. I waited for it one whole night—I believe that it was night —after a long torture session. I’d been transferred from Puesto Vasco to another location, and then taken to police headquarters in La Plata, and back again to Puesto Vasco, so that I would be confused and unaware that I was at Puesto Vasco and in the kitchen, where the torture was inflicted.