“Equality, equality!”
“Damn equality, my ass!”
“Equality, equality!”
“My ass to equality!”
All the while her assistants kept clapping as she made her way around the room.
“She’s for real!” they kept chanting, and then they ordered me and all the other prisoners to repeat the chant, “She’s for real. .” None of us was in any position to refuse.
Was I in a prison or a lunatic asylum? What was clear enough was that in this case the difference between the two was as thin as a spider’s web; above all, there were no signs or dividing lines to tell you when you were leaving one for the other. As an indication of that fact, no sooner had this woman finished dancing around and yelling with her backside exposed and then stood still again, sweating profusely, than she singled me out with a wine-soaked gesture. The guard rushed over, grabbed me from my corner and once again put me in her clutches. I decided to wear them out by running backwards and doing various feints and other stunts, but this time the female ghoul, duly aided now by the gigantic black man who was presumably performing another one of his functions, managed along with the other guards to grab hold of me and tie my hands behind my back. They placed a bottle between my legs and withdrew.
“Sit on it,” she said in a lewd tone of voice.
The wine bottle test, I told myself.
“Sit on it?” I said, pretending that I didn’t understand. “Sit on what?”
“That’s right,” she yelled after emptying the bottle of wine. “Sit on it so the mouth goes up your ass! God damn your mother’s religion!”
“Don’t insult my mother, I beg you. Seek refuge with God and his Prophet from foul talk and debauched conduct!”
She repeated her instructions, but this time as a final warning.
“I’ll sit down, yes,” I replied, trying to control my nerves, “but on a chair. That’s only right and proper, Mademoiselle!”
The guards started laughing again, and the gigantic black man joined in as well. I laughed along with them, not because I was that naïve, but to try to keep the atmosphere as conducive as possible. However, I soon changed tack and became serious again. I tried as best I could to address her in such a way as to arouse her sympathy.
“Why are you insulting me like this?” I asked.
With chewing gum in her mouth, she chuckled and winked at one of the guards.
“Oh, no reason at all,” he replied mechanically. “To kill the time, or maybe because the boss doesn’t like your filthy face! Sit on the bottle!”
“Never,” I protested, “my religion totally forbids such things!”
Mama Ghula responded to my protest with an outburst of abuse against my mother’s religion, the like of which I have never heard in my entire life. Her assistants rushed over, still laughing, and attached one of my legs to a rope hanging down from the ceiling. The position I was now in promised nothing good; I looked like a slaughtered sheep about to be flayed. The ghoul now came up to me, with a cigarette between her lips, her features a tissue of hatred and disgust. She now started stubbing her lighted cigarette on the soles of my feet, my backside, my back, and my armpit. Even though I mustered the proverbial patience of Job to counter this onslaught, I still emitted some suppressed groans. However, she then spread my thighs apart and thrust the bottle hard into my anus; this time I could not help filling the entire room with screams of extreme pain. My torturess now seized the opportunity to tighten the noose by asking me over and over again about my cousin called Abu al-Basha’ir and his cell and my own involvement in what she kept calling a sleeper cell. When she did not get the information she was after, she leaned close to my ear and pleaded with me — for the last time, I reckoned — to tell her the truth and offer her my help. She told me that she was a widow with a family to take care of; she pleaded with me to take pity on her crippled daughter and other children. I could help by responding to their needs and guaranteeing their future lives. When she still did not get what she wanted, she showed me her dagger and started sticking various parts of my body, in simultaneous admiration and disgust.
“There’s nothing to cut,” she yelled in her foul French. “This sheep’s got no flesh on him. He’s all skin and bones.”
How I congratulated myself on being so incredibly thin; I was so grateful! The torturess made do with scratching my backside and thighs with her dagger, then proceeded to pound me with a cane on the soles of my feet, which had been dampened with cold water. When she was exhausted and I was totally destroyed, it was time for the swing and seesaw routine, something that is infamous, even for prisoners who have the strongest possible constitution. Trussed up like a sheep for sacrifice, I was spun around horizontally in two directions while she launched insane attacks on my backside, stomach, and genitals.
If it had been a matter of swinging gently as in childhood days of old, it would not have been so bad, but in this case they were doing it to cause maximal pain and damage, flaying my body and making it bleed every time I crashed into a wall studded with sharp, pointed protrusions. No human intellect, no legal system, could possible justify such bestial activities.
One of the consequences of my gruesome and painful ordeal was that the bottle came shooting out of my anus, leading to the most incredibly intense stomach pains and severe internal convulsions and distress. My head, meanwhile, was finding it hard to tolerate the vertigo and the continual collisions with the walls, so that gradually I began to waver between a marginal consciousness and a sense of detachment from my surroundings. Even so, this fiendish woman kept up her crazy assault, kicking me savagely as she accused me of being hard-hearted toward her. In a bizarre twist, she was still insisting that I needed to stop torturing her and provide her with the information that would help her keep her job and look after her children.
All of a sudden she stopped and stood me up. She begged me to sign a piece of paper, accompanying the gesture with mechanical kisses that were rough and cruel — almost crushing my lips and chattering teeth.
Even though I was feeling dizzy, I managed to respond, “I’ve no objection to any woman kissing me on the mouth,” I raved, “but not a barbaric ghoul-woman with foul breath and crooked artificial teeth!”
My torturess now completely gave up hope of using her normal methods on me, and put me back on the seesaw machine. This time it was even more vicious and insane than before. I now made good use of the disgusting meal that they had fed me before it all started and that was now causing me all sorts of intestinal pain. Taking advantage of the situation to have my revenge on this ugly fiend of a woman, I raised my head every time I passed by her shoes and used every ounce of energy I had left to plaster her face with a shower of thick, viscous vomit. By doing so, I hoped she would deliver a final crushing blow to put me out of my misery. In fact, the female ghoul whom I had insulted soon decided to prod my back with an electric stun gun and followed it with a savage blow to my head. I heard the other prisoners who were waiting for their turn utter cries of panic and fear, while the single girl among them started wailing and fainted away. In my semiconscious state, I heard the ghoul order her assistants to bring over some onion and throw some cold water on me, and she told me to remain conscious. However, the space around me started to become a blur, and everything turned head over heels. All my eyes could make out were vague shapes, all fuzzy, and a few other moving figures. Soon afterward it all disappeared down a dark and bottomless pit.