The Dictator's Last Night Read online

  I contracted the sublime illness called love at school in Sabha, in Fezzan. I was fifteen and had spots and a few unruly hairs trying to be a moustache. Faten was the headmaster’s daughter. She sometimes came to watch us boys roughhousing in the playground. With her eyes that were bigger than the horizon, her black hair hanging down to her backside and her translucent skin, she seemed like a creature from a midsummer dream. I loved her from the moment I set eyes on her. My sleepless nights were full of the smell of her. I closed my eyes only to be with her in a thousand fantasies.

  I wrote her letters inflamed with my passion, without managing to pass a single one to her. She lived inside the school complex in a house with a heavy door and curtained windows. The bars that separated Faten and me were as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China.

  After that I had to go to another school at Misrata and I lost sight of her.

  But a few years later I came across her again, in Tripoli, where her family had moved to. It was as though chance had restored to me what my failures as a wild schoolboy had taken away: Faten was destined to be mine!

  Dashingly dressed in my uniform of a young communications officer, I went to her house to ask for her hand, with an assortment of cakes under my arm that I had bought at the best cake shop in the city.

  I remember every detail of that day. It was a Wednesday, and I had been given special leave after my return from England, where I had very successfully completed nine months’ training with the British Army Staff. I was so happy that I could hardly walk straight along the road where she lived. It was lined with smart villas, and mimosa tumbled over the garden walls, laden with heady scents. Cars as big as boats sparkled in the sunshine. It was three o’clock. I was not walking, I was gliding, swept along by the beating of my heart.

  I rang the bell at number 6 and waited for an eternity. Every minute seemed as long as a season. I was sweating under my braid, and as formal as I knew how to look, at attention, boots together, as handsome and proud as a centurion posing for posterity … An enormous black servant opened the gate and led me through a garden where the flowers were tended with great care. The path, paved with white stones, looked like a trail of cloud. It was the first time in my life I had found myself in a house belonging to a member of the Libyan bourgeoisie. The sumptuousness that greeted me plunged me back to thoughts of my humble beginnings, but I paid no attention. My career spoke for itself. I had started out at the bottom of the ladder and was overcoming the barriers of prejudice one by one. My family had spent everything it possessed in order for me to be the first child of my clan to go to school, and I was aware that such a sacrifice compelled me to succeed against storms and tides, to prove to the world I had nothing to envy anyone.

  My old school headmaster had completely changed. I did not recognise him. He did not look anything like the sickly character with muddy trouser bottoms who had once vegetated at Sabha.

  He stood waiting for me at his door, wearing a dressing gown with a fleur-de-lis design over a pair of dusky-red pyjamas. His slippers contrasted strongly with the bright red colour of his feet. The prayer beads he was counting between plump fingers told of the discreet wealth that accompanied a comfortable relationship with God.

  He did not invite me into the living room that was visible at the end of the corridor, decorated with brocade and grand furniture. My officer’s tunic did not exempt me from certain customs. The master of the house invited me to be seated on a bench in the hall where he would usually receive routine visitors whom he judged unworthy to walk on his rugs. He did not offer me coffee or tea and paid no attention to my box of cakes or my feverish young suitor’s air. Something told me that I had rung the wrong doorbell, but my love for Faten refused to admit it.

  Her father remained courteous: coldly, distantly, monotonously courteous. He asked me which tribe I was from. The Ghous clan meant little to him. From what he said, he appeared not to care for Bedouins very much. His time in Fezzan had reinforced his feeling of being a city dweller banished to some wretched hole that smelt of bread ovens and goat droppings. Now that he had a brother who was a diplomat, and a cousin who was an adviser to the crown prince Hassan Reda, the desert and its peasants were a distant memory.

  ‘I must admit I am somewhat surprised by your manner of proceeding,’ he addressed me formally.

  ‘I realise it is a departure from protocol, sir. My parents are aware of my approach but they live very far from here.’

  ‘Be that as it may, marriage is a serious matter. We have our customs. It is not for the suitor to turn up unannounced, alone, without witnesses.’

  ‘That is true, sir. I have come back from England and have only just been posted to my new unit. I had to beg my commanding officer for forty-eight hours’ leave. As I am passing through the city, I felt I had to grasp my opportunity.’

  He stroked the bridge of his nose, half amused and half embarrassed.

  ‘How did you meet my daughter, Lieutenant?’

  ‘I was a pupil at your school, sir. I used to see her crossing the playground to go back home.’

  ‘Have you actually met?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Have you written to each other?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Is she aware of the feelings you have for her?’

  ‘I do not think so, sir.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, looking at his watch.

  A disconcerting silence followed that was almost suffocating. Having reflected, he decided to adopt a flattering tone.

  ‘You’re young, healthy in mind and body. You have a fine career ahead of you.’

  ‘Your daughter will want for nothing,’ I promised him.

  He smiled. ‘She has never wanted for anything, Lieutenant.’

  I do not know why I was surprised to find myself taking an instant dislike to him, with his owlish face, his pince-nez from another era and his sepulchral delivery. I screwed up my courage and said to him in a voice that stuck in my throat for a long time afterwards, like a tumour, ‘I would be honoured if you would give me your daughter’s hand.’

  His smile faded. His brow furrowed and the look he gave me almost wiped me off the face of the earth.

  He said to me, ‘You are Libyan, Lieutenant. You know perfectly well the rules that govern our communities.’

  ‘I do not follow you, sir.’

  ‘I think you understand very well. In our society, just as in the army, there is a hierarchy.’

  He got to his feet and held out his hand.

  ‘I am certain you will find a girl of your rank who will make you happy.’

  I did not have the strength to lift my arm. His hand remained extended for a long time.

  It was the saddest day of my life.

  I went to the beach to see the sea hurling itself against the rocks. I felt like shouting until my shouts silenced the crashing of the waves, until the hate in my eyes made the waters recede.

  ‘You will find a girl of your rank who will make you happy …’ He had once been a minor official who could not make ends meet, who was more worried about the flies buzzing around his miserable dinner than about the kids having a crafty cigarette in the school toilets. He had swiftly forgotten the cheap sandals he wore, day in day out, the figure he cut drooling over a cake some grateful mother had baked him, the pathetic moudir3 whose life was so meaningless that the garish bleakness of Fezzan gave him not a whisper of consolation. He had only had to marry his sister to an ageing vizier to discover, from one day to the next, that he had status, significance, a caste and rouge on his cheeks. You will find a girl of your rank, he had said, the upstart. A genuine disaster would not have destroyed me the way his nasal voice did, going round and round in my head, casting me to the absolute bottom of the pit.

  I did not forgive the offence.

  In 1972, three years after my enthronement as head of state, I looked for Faten. She was married to a businessman and the mother of two children. My guards brought her to me one morning. In tea
rs. I kept her for three weeks, having her whenever and however I felt like it. Her husband was arrested for an alleged illicit transfer of capital. As for her father, he went out for a walk one evening and never came home again.

  From that moment on, all women have belonged to me.

  3 Headmaster.

  6

  Under the harsh Fezzan sun the clouds struggle to take shape, while an ochre wind blows over the burning stones. I am standing on a rock, a boy in his rags, and I am watching, in the distance, a black dot that appears then vanishes in the desert’s reverberating heat.

  Is it a crow, or a jackal?

  I put my hand up to shield my eyes.

  The black spot starts to get bigger as it gets closer, sucked in by my gaze. It is my uncle’s kheïma.4 There is no one inside it. Apart from a double-headed Saluki busy sniffing its backside, and a peacock trapped in its plumage like a gnat in a spider’s web, there is not a living soul.

  Next to an elderly saddle worked with silver, on a low copper table, there is a samovar overrun with iridescent beetles. Stacked one on top of the other, tea glasses rear up like the trunk of a date palm with feminine fingers for leaves, lengthened by endless twisting nails. Away in a corner an aromatic incense stick is smouldering, its smoke scoring the gloom with curling swirls.

  In the buzzing silence of the desert’s crucible, the only sound is the creaking of a pulley.

  Attached to the tent’s central pole, a lavish picture frame twists slowly on its axis. It is not a pulley creaking, but the cord from which the frame is hanging. The frame is empty.

  I am afraid.

  My skin is covered in goose bumps.

  Urged on by a mysterious instinct, I place a leg into the frame and bring the other in behind it, as if I was going through a mirror. I am surprised to find myself sitting in the middle of a crowd of children in rags, stumbling through their verses and wagging their heads above their tablets. I recognise the Koranic school I went to when I was seven, with its mud walls and ceiling of worm-eaten beams. Muffled in a green coat, his face framed by wild hair, the sheikh is dozing on his cushion, lulled by his pupils’ discordant chorus. Whenever the clamour subsides a fraction, he lands his rod on the shoulder of the nearest unfortunate to revive the general enthusiasm and dozes off again.

  The sheikh loathed the agitators who droned out their verses and sniggered in secret. When he got one of them in his clutches, he would stop the class, order us to form a circle around the miscreant and make us witness a terrible session of falaqa.5 The punishment would traumatise me for a long time.

  Suddenly the sheikh wakes up and his look fastens itself to me like a bird of prey. Why aren’t you reciting like your fellow pupils? What have you done with your tablet? Have you renounced your religion, you little dog? he shouts, raising himself in a surge of indignation. Like Moses, he throws his rod to the ground where it is transformed into a dreadful black snake, every one of its scales quivering, its forked tongue like a flame flickering up from hell.

  My heart almost stops when I see that the sheikh is really Vincent van Gogh in disguise.

  I wake with a start, my chest tight, my throat parched. I am in the bedroom upstairs, on the couch I use for a bed.

  Amira has gone.

  I sit up and put my head in my hands, overwhelmed by my nightmare … Usually my fix sends me into a magnificent, restorative sleep. But for several weeks now it has been the same dream over and over again, turning my rare moments of respite upside down.

  My Vincent van Gogh thing goes back to when I was at the lycée. One day, leafing through an illustrated book I had borrowed from a classmate, I stumbled on a self-portrait by the painter. Even now I cannot explain what took hold of me that day. I had never heard of van Gogh.

  I remember: I was literally hypnotised by him. His forehead was half hidden by a wild, dreadful haircut, his mutilated ear was covered with a bandage, and his expression was evasive: he looked as though he regretted having come into this world. On the wall behind him was a Japanese print. The painter had turned his back on it. He was standing, bundled up in his nasty green coat, indecisive, in the middle of his cold, seedy studio.

  That image has never left me. It is embedded deep in my subconscious and, like a sleeper agent, every time some great event is imminent it returns to haunt my dreams. I have never known why. I even consulted an imam from Arabia who was celebrated for his interpretations of dreams, without success.

  I have little in common with van Gogh, except perhaps for the wretchedness that I suffered as a child and that finished him off, among his canvases that never paid him enough for a square meal and that sell for obscene sums of money today. I cannot see the slightest connection that could justify this doomed painter’s repeated intrusion into my life, yet I am convinced that there is an explanation somewhere.

  Apart from oriental music, I have very little interest in the arts. I would even admit to harbouring a certain disdain for contemporary painters: they seem subversive in the same way politically minded poets are, not always inspired and without real magic. They are more the result of fashion, a way (like any other way) of persuading people that decadence is a kind of revolutionary transcendence, that some vulgar red line on a canvas can single-handedly raise ordinary people to the ranks of the initiated, because in that space where all appreciation is conventional, arbitrary and without specific proven parameters, it is the signature that authenticates the talent and not the other way round. Of course, to look as if I was enjoying myself on official visits to the West, I occasionally feigned a general bliss looking at a fresco or listening to Mozart – whose much praised genius has never once managed to pull at my heartstrings; for me nothing comes close to the splendour of a Bedouin tent pitched out in the middle of the desert, and no symphony is equal to the whispering of the wind on a dune it has created. Yet by some mysterious quirk of fate Vincent van Gogh, who does not belong to my culture or to my world, goes on exercising on me an unfathomable fascination, part fear, part curiosity.

  The night before the coup d’état – 31 August 1969 – while my officers were putting the finishing touches to the assault operation timed for King Idris’s absence abroad for medical treatment, I was in my room, totally stressed out. Van Gogh was there, in his gilded frame; he did not let me out of his sight. I tossed and turned in bed, put a pillow over my head, all in vain; the ghost refused to fade away. When the telephone rang on my bedside table, the painter leapt out of his canvas and threw himself at me, his green overcoat teeming with bats. I woke up screaming, soaked in sweat. Mission accomplished! the voice at the other end said. The crown prince has abdicated without resistance. The king is already aware that it is not in his interests to return to the country. At dawn with my troops I took over the radio station in Benghazi to announce to the people that the villainous monarchy that had sucked the nation’s lifeblood was dead and that the Libyan Arab Republic had just been born.

  A few months later, galvanised by my people’s demands, I began to reflect on another coup that would give me greater visibility on the international stage. I wavered between expelling all British troops from the country or taking back Wheelus Air Base from the Americans … One night van Gogh came back to terrify me in my sleep, and in the morning, despite my advisers’ well-argued reservations, my mind was made up: no more Crusaders in the sacred lands of Omar Mukhtar.

  In August 1975 it was again van Gogh who alerted me, in a dream of unusual violence, to the conspiracy being hatched against me by two of my best friends and confidants, Beshir al-Saghir Hawady and Omar al-Meheishy. I foiled the would-be coup with some style, purging the Revolutionary Command Council the way you lance a boil.

  Each time the doomed painter made an appearance in my dreams or thoughts, History added another stone to the Gaddafi edifice.

  I have often wondered whether my Green Book and the colour I chose for the new Libyan national flag were inspired by the green of van Gogh’s overcoat.

  4 Bedouin tent.
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br />   5 Foot whipping.

  7

  Someone is knocking at the door.

  It is Mansour Dhao, come to redeem himself … What is he worth now, at wartime prices? A bullet? Less than that. A pair of pliers, a blunt knife, a hemp rope would be more than generous. The commander of my People’s Guard, the terrible Mansour Dhao, impeccably turned out, attentive to the smallest detail of his martial appearance, and here he is letting himself go completely, unshaven, looking like a tramp, in a shirt with a filthy collar and with his shoelaces undone. A shadow of himself, of which appears to be nothing but a distant memory. His gaze, which once saw further than the horizon, can barely travel past his eyelashes now.

  I am sad for him, and for myself: my right hand of steel is limp and useless.

  There was a time when nothing escaped his vigilance. He knew everything that went on, down to the moans of the virgins I deflowered between two shots of heroin. Back then Mansour was my sword of Damocles. He kept watch on the fruit and the orchard, and could tell a bad apple before it appeared. He left nothing to chance. His agents were hand-picked. At the slightest suspicion they struck; suspects vanished into thin air faster than a puff of smoke, and I could enjoy my nights in complete peace.

  ‘Don’t be angry with me, Rais. I haven’t taken my medication for weeks.’

  He has hidden from me the fact that he is on medication. And there I was, thinking him unassailable. He looked as if he had never known illness or fatigue. I had even had my best men tail him – his charisma and authority as head of the People’s Guard made him a potential rival. Power is hallucinogenic, so you are never safe from others’ murderous daydreams. It is one short step from the barracks to the presidential palace, and overarching ambition dwarfs the risks … But I had grossly misjudged Mansour: he would have cut his mother’s throat without hesitation if she had ever bothered me.