Bensalem Himmich - My Torturess

“Fatima was a widow with little money;” I replied immediately. “She was left alone and had had no children. Her life was utterly miserable. I gave her shelter and offered her as much help as I could in return for cleaning the bookstore and occasionally acting on my behalf. .”

“The boss is asking if you had sex with her,” the muscle-bound man demanded.

“Good heavens, no!” I replied. “She and I were both nursed by the same woman. That’s totally forbidden.”

That made Mama Ghula cackle.

“Your nursing sister, you fornicator?” she yelled, using a genuine or phony foreign accent. “My ass! Where is she now?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “She disappeared two months before I did.”

“No, no, you son of a bitch! Tell it right. She joined the maquis* in the mountains, along with her other suckling brother, your cousin, al-Husayn al-Masmudi.”

The gorilla now received some more whispered questions from his boss.

“In previous interrogation sessions, you’ve never mentioned Fatima al-Lozi. Why not?”

“Because there was nothing to be gained from talking about her.”

“Oh yes, there is! The boss is asking about your own sexual orientation.”

“My sexual orientation? I don’t understand. .”

“In sexual matters,” he interrupted, “do you favor women or men?”

“Women, of course,” I replied, “because I’m a man. But not just any woman. If I could marry the lovely woman standing in front of me here in accordance with the practice of God and His Prophet, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment. But, if we’re talking about this torturess, for example, death would be a preferable option. The gentler sex is totally innocent of her as a model.”

With that, the female ghoul stood up and spat the entire contents of her mouth in my face, then sat down again and suppressed her fury with another bottle of beer.

“Your relationship with Fatima al-Lozi is of great help to the inquiry,” the gorilla went on. “The fornication charge can be based on firm evidence and the dictates of the law. But that’s not all you’ve kept hidden. There’s also something far more serious: trading in gasoline smuggled across the Algerian-Moroccan border using different kinds of containers. At first, you were doing it on a motorbike, but later you used a car. It was butane gas which is highly flammable and could well have killed innocent people. Why have you kept that hidden?”

I did my best to conceal my alarm and responded slowly and deliberately.

“Had I been questioned about this information,” I said, “I would have told you the following: It’s true, I smuggled gasoline in small amounts from Algerian villages to Oujda and its environs. But I soon stopped, both because the dangers involved far outweighed the profits to be made and because there was an ever increasing number of ‘withouts,’ that being the term used to describe unemployed people who could only find work smuggling cans of gasoline. The only reason I used gas for my car was that it was fairly cheap and thus suited my meager budget. That’s all.”

Mama Ghula now signaled to Na‘ima to turn the light up full. My eyes were so dazzled and disturbed that I kept seeing shadows and visions behind it. I looked away to give them a chance to recover and noticed that the guard was no longer behind me. She told me to look straight ahead.

“It’s the boss’s opinion,” the gorilla’s voice intoned, “that what you’ve told us is a pile of rubbish. So, for one last time, she’s asking you the whereabouts of your cousin nicknamed Abu al-Basha’ir or even some of his men. If you cooperate, the charges of fornication, smuggling, and using a booby-trapped car will be dropped. You can add to all that the murder of your mother’s husband as well. What do you have to say?”

I begged my Lord to give me the fortitude to withstand the violence and torture that were certainly to follow in view of my one and only response to her questions and threats. She gave another signal, and Na‘ima came over to me, looked straight at my brightly illuminated face and repeated the question in a gruff voice totally unlike the one I had heard before.

“I’m delighted to see you here, lovely visitor,” I said once again. “Weren’t you scared of the guards on the way? By the true word of Him who created you in such a perfect form, I know nothing about my cousin’s whereabouts, where he is, or who his companions are.”

Na‘ima gave me a slap on the face, and I enjoyed it. I turned my other cheek to her, asking her to do it again. She slapped that cheek too, not without a certain gentleness of touch. I really wanted her to keep on slapping me so I would forget this room and the people in it. I could imagine that the person slapping me fitted the old proverb that says: “One who loves a lot punishes a lot.” However, my wishes were soon curtailed when the muscle man grabbed hold of me, dragged me to a dark circle, laid me down on my back close to a water bowl, and proceeded to stuff my mouth full of bits of wool and toilet paper. He then waxed it with a binding paste.

“Now, my stubborn fellow,” he whispered in my ear, “warm suffocation is going to make you spit out the truth!”

Warm suffocation! What on earth was that?

The female ghoul now came over and sat cross-legged on my face. I could feel her press one of her orifices over my nose which prevented me from breathing and forced me to smell her foul gases and disgusting body odors. She only relaxed her revolting grip a little in order to ask if I was ready to cooperate yet. Once she realized that I was still maintaining my stance, she simply resumed her position. Her portable phone rang.

“Yes, Sir,” I heard her say, “the dog’s in our hands now. He’s bound to talk. Yes, Sir.”

When she felt my breathing slow down and my legs stop moving, she got up and went back to her place to continue eating and drinking. I stayed on the floor, groaning and spluttering.

Na‘ima now came over, either prompted by a signal from the ghoul or on her own initiative. She took the stuff out of my mouth and untied my legs. I started coughing as never before and vomited up the entire contents of my stomach. I apologized to my rescuer, who moistened a towel from the water bowl and leaned over to clean my face and neck. Thanks to the attention of this sympathetic woman and her pure breaths so close to me, I gradually calmed down.

A few moments later the female ghoul came back, felt my neck vein and pulse, then signaled to the gorilla, who dragged me and sat me cross-legged in front of the water bowl.

“Now it’s time for waterboarding!” he yelled. “The time has come. Either you confess, or else it’s curtains for you.”

So now it was time for the infamous waterboarding. People say that, as the person being tortured is deprived of oxygen, he can look upon his own death time after time until he confesses and cooperates or else dies without doing either. That is precisely what the boss now did with me, and in the most barbaric fashion. If she felt hungry or thirsty, or if the phone rang, she would hand things over to Na‘ima, who started lessening the amount of time I was under water and pretend she was not good at it. The muscle man noticed the way she was behaving and told the female ghoul who was busy eating or answering the phone. As soon as she had finished what she was doing, she gave Na‘ima a resounding slap that completely knocked her out. She kept complaining about the incompetence of these young female assistants and their lack of experience and knowledge. She gave instructions that her now-unconscious assistant be taken to the health clinic and then reprimanded for her conduct. That done, she set about subjecting me to more water torture and only raised my head out of the water in order either to heap all kinds of foul abuse on my father and my religion or else to threaten me with death by drowning if I did not open my heart to her and reveal all my secrets. As I struggled underwater, I had Na‘ima‘s lovely face in my mind; as I strived to hold my breath, I kept asking for God’s aid and hers. Then I started to feel a certain weakness creep into the female ghoul’s curses and threats, also in the way she was holding my head under the water. I told myself that she was getting drunk. God willing, that would be my means of escape from this torment. My hunch proved to be correct, in that the guard came rushing in, looking very worried and helped his boss stand up and head for her bench. All the while she kept muttering snatches of incomprehensible nonsense. He returned to where I was and took me out of the room. He had to carry me to the health clinic on his shoulders, not only out of sheer sympathy but also because he did not want me to die in his custody. He could easily see how bad my condition was and that I could not walk on my own. In the waiting room he sat me on a seat fixed to the floor, tied my hand to it, then left to perform some function or other.