Bensalem Himmich - My Torturess

“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.