The Dictator's Last Night

16

Running feet approach, pass close by my hiding place, fade away. My hands are trembling, my knees threatening to give way; the mad dash has exhausted me. I crouch in the half-darkness, overcome with dizziness and nausea; the thumping of my heart sounds so loud I am afraid it will be heard by my pursuers.

I feel ashamed at having turned into a target, a piece of game, I, Muammar Gaddafi, thorn in the side of the all-powerful; I am ashamed at having fled from a bunch of brats and run like a maniac across the fields; I am ashamed at having been reduced to hiding in a drainage pipe, I who jabbed my finger at the lectern at the UN to warn presidents and kings.

I feel like crying but the tears refuse to come; I feel like stepping into the open and shouting, ‘I am here,’ but I do not dare move a muscle. My one-time courage has deserted me, my suicidally reckless charisma is a thing of the ancient past.

I believed myself predestined to a sumptuous end. When I happened to think about death, I used to visualise myself lying in my patriarchal bed, surrounded by my family and most loyal subjects. I imagined my body laid out in the presidential palace, hung with wreaths and flags, with leaders and representatives come from the four corners of the planet to observe long minutes of silence before my garlanded remains, and my coffin on a tank draped with banners processing down Tripoli’s boulevards followed by millions of inconsolable Libyans. At the cemetery, full to overflowing, I heard the imams declaiming the most impossibly moving suras for my soul’s repose and, to the spadefuls of earth bearing me away from my people’s affection, the salute in reply of hundreds of cannon announcing to the whole world that the unforgettable Muammar was no more.

I was wrong.

If only I had listened to Hugo Chávez when he offered me his protection: at this moment I would be somewhere in Venezuela, arranging my declining years to perfection and in utter peace and tranquillity, instead of awaiting my executioners at the bottom of a drain. How could I have been so stupid?

Pride is invulnerable to reason. When you have ruled over peoples, you sit on your cloud and forget reality. But what exactly have you ruled over? To what purpose? In the final analysis, power is a misunderstanding: you think you know, then you realise you have made a thumping mistake. Instead of going back and redoing it properly, you dig your heels in and see things the way you would like them to be. You deal with the unthinkable as best you can and cling to your fancies, convinced that if you were to let go all hell would break loose.

And now, paradoxically, all hell has broken loose because I did not let go.

I stare at the light at the end of the tunnel, unable to breathe.

I refuse to think about my son, about what I myself will go through; I empty my head; I must not torment myself.

The minutes pass.

I hear bursts of gunfire that intensify, rockets replying to grenades, vehicles coming and going in a screech of tyres.

I am alone.

Alone in the world.

Left high and dry by my guardian angels and the marabouts who predicted a thousand victories for me in return for a few extra noughts on their cheques.

Where have my servants gone, my Amazons and my supporters who were so ardent they would whip themselves in public to show their devotion to the world? … Vanished into thin air! Puff! Melted into the background. Did they really exist? And my people, once loyal to my cause, standing behind me for better or worse, who took an oath to follow me wherever the Voice led me, what do they hope to raise over my bones?

My people have lied to me from the start, since that morning when on the radio from Benghazi I broke their chains and gave them back their dignity. My people have never loved me, they have just flattered me to receive my gifts, following the example of my courtesans, my kin and my whores.

I should have known: a sovereign can never have friends, he just has enemies who plot behind his back and opportunists he keeps close to his heart the way you nourish a viper in your bosom.

I should have listened to Bassem Tanout, a Libyan poet I knew a very long time ago, in London, during my training with the British Army Staff. He was a maverick, a lovely man as frank and open as a child’s laughter. He lived in exile: his country was his dog-eared library of books and a wad of paper that he covered with lines of rebellious verse. He came back to Libya the day after the coup and we continued to meet. In the early years of my rule he regularly came to my house. Then the intervals between his visits started to get longer. I did not see him any more. He declined my official invitations, did not respond to my letters. I decided that some harm must have come to him and I launched a search to find him. One night my agents brought him to me. As poets go, he did not look like much. He was as crumpled as his clothes; you could smell the alcohol on him a mile away and he was shivering like a junkie in withdrawal. When I asked him if he had problems, he retorted that I was his problem. ‘You disappoint me, Muammar,’ he announced from the heights of his inebriation. ‘You’re in the process of destroying with your left hand what you have built with your right. Don’t rely on the people’s clamour. The people are a siren song. Their fervour is a pernicious addiction. It is the vice of choice for exalted egos, their nirvana for a night and then their certain downfall.’ I was so wounded by his words that I banished him from my sight. For weeks afterwards his reproaches obsessed me. To ward them off I locked their author up in a dungeon. Three days after his arrest his gaolers found him hanged in his cell, a verse from Omar Khayyam carved on the wall as his legacy.

Thinking back to that time, as yesterday’s ovations turn into the baying of the arena, Bassem Tanout is the one and only friend I have ever had.

Other people come back to me. Each more crippled than the next. They drag themselves over the flagstones that pave the prison yards I consigned them to. All have the same look about them, the look that says one-way ticket, that says they will never be seen again. That one was a minister, he finished up at the end of a rope. This one is a dissident, he succumbed under torture. There were legions of them rotting in my dungeons, there for not having been worthy of my trust or my charity. They were my enemies. They only got what they deserved. But the people, my people, that mass I made with my own hands, that I gave birth to with forceps as I bit my lips, that I boosted in every one of my speeches and raised in the community of nations, what malignancy possessed it so that from one day to the next, without warning, it discarded what I had built for it and decided to crucify me on my own pedestal?

I have no regrets about clamping down.

It was legitimate and necessary.

A guide, though entrusted with a messianic mission, when he has official responsibility for a country, does not turn the other cheek. Quite the opposite: if he wants to fulfil his function properly, he must cut off the hand that was raised against him, even if the slap came from his father. From that perspective my conscience is clear, I am satisfied that I carried out my duty. I have killed, tortured, terrorised, hunted down, decimated families — because I had no alternative. But I did no wrong to the innocent. I only punished the guilty, the traitors and spies. I am ready to confront them on the day of reckoning and I shall make them bow their heads because they were at fault … Will the people have the audacity to look me in the face in God’s house? What will they have to say when they are asked, ‘What have you done with our elected one?’ … Words will fail them, just as the courage to look me in the eyes will fail them. The Devil take repentance when it produces damnation. He who burns his bridges burns every chance of forgiveness. Libya will never see the day light its way again; nowhere will it bask in sunshine, because darkness is its destiny.

Suddenly, a cracking noise … some pebbles clatter into the ditch, then a shadow falls across the circle of light at the end of the tunnel. I make out a weapon first, then a head leaning in … He’s here! I’ve found him! He’s here, sir … Running steps return. Rebels spring into the ditch, their weapons aimed at me. They do not dare come any nearer and remain some distance away, startled and indecisive.

An individual in paramilitary uniform jumps down.

‘Where is he?’

‘In there, sir. He’s crouched down at the end, on the left.’

The commander takes off his helmet and looks at me in silence.

‘I can’t believe my eyes,’ he exclaims. ‘Is it really you or is it your twin?’

He takes a step forward, then another, with all the caution of a mine clearance expert. He is afraid to come closer, and lowers his head as if he cannot believe his eyes. It takes him some time to be certain that he is not hallucinating.

‘No, it’s really him,’ he shouts. ‘It’s really Muammar Gaddafi. Only he could end up like this: making like a rat … like a sewer rat at the bottom of a drain.’

Behind him men pass the word back: It’s Gaddafi … it’s Gaddafi …

The commander opens his arms.

‘I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. What a picture! What a moral! The man who thought he could ride the clouds is trapped in an old drainpipe … You’ve gone back to your roots, Brotherly Guide. You were born out of camel dung and you’re going to die in your own shit … Amr,’ he yells at one of his companions, ‘get your mobile out and film this exceptional curtain call for me.’

Shadows start to mill around the mouth of the tunnel. Mobile phones are held up to immortalise the scene.

The commander allows several flashes to streak the tunnel before raising his hand to put an end to the ritual. He crooks his finger to order me to join him.

‘Get your carcass over here, Brotherly Guide. I can’t wait to squeeze you in my arms so tight I’ll have you pissing out of your arse.’

His crudity shocks me, more than my capture.

‘Come and get me,’ I challenge him.

‘Just watch me.’

‘He might be armed,’ a rebel warns, taking aim at me.

‘The Brotherly Guide doesn’t need to burden himself with weapons,’ the commander says. ‘The Force is with him.’

Sardonic laughter greets the leader’s sarcasm, followed by a whole squad of men lunging at me. I feel as if I am coming apart.

They push and drag me out of the pipe. Armed men encircle me in a cosmic silence. They are stock-still, transfixed with incredulity. For a good many of them it must be the first time they have seen me so close to. They think they are seeing things. If I happened to clear my throat, I am almost convinced they would run away without a backward glance. The majority of my captors are boys not much taller than their guns; they look utterly ridiculous in their would-be fighters’ uniforms. Some of them look away, unable to hold my gaze; others find it difficult to control their facial expressions.

Alerted to my capture, groups of rebels start running up and firing in the air to get the party started. Allāhu Akbar … death to the taghut … Oussoud Misrata, lions of Misrata … Within minutes more than a hundred of them are crowding around me, elbowing each other hard to get closer to the strange creature in their midst.

They jostle me across the fields, they spit on me, they promise me the most violent treatment. I lose a shoe, stumble on stones, keep going under the battering of rifle butts …

One hairy weirdo surges up in front of me, slapping my face as he does so.

I smile at him.

‘I forgive you.’

‘I don’t, fucking madman. No one here forgives you.’

‘What did he say?’ someone asks behind me.

‘He forgives us.’

‘He’s got a nerve. He still thinks he’s The Exceedingly Merciful.’

Tongues loosen, jeering and gibes pour out of them, and like a bush fire the uproar spreads and multiplies into shouting, demands for my death, turning into bedlam and booming pandemonium. A thousand howler monkeys swarm at me in a spate of saliva. All I can see are foaming mouths bellowing at me, bloodshot eyes, hands trying to tear me limb from limb. The men escorting me are overwhelmed. They punch out with flailing fists at their comrades to keep them away from me, but to no avail. The commander vainly orders his troops to keep back; he has no control over them. In the general frenzy, woe to anyone who stumbles. I try to walk upright, with my head high, as my rank and quality demand, but the brambles have set my shoeless foot on fire, forcing me to hop. That’s right, you son of a bitch, jump like you’re playing hopscotch … What’s the matter with him? Have his plush carpets made him forget the softness of our nourishing earth? … I want to tear his balls off and keep them in formalin … Why don’t we hang him? What are we waiting for? … He deserves to have his throat cut in a drain … We should douse him in petrol and set him on fire … Dog … fucker … filthy bastard … In the frenzy swarming around me, I see only hatred and curses. Faces blend into each other in a chaotic swell topped with the poisonous foam of the whites of their eyes. My turban is torn off and a thousand hands rain down on my skull; a leg of my trousers is torn off and a thousand hands pinch my backside and defile my private parts; my hair is torn out, I am bespattered with spit continuously, a thousand foul throats demand my death.

I refuse to acknowledge what is happening to me; it is a bad dream. Everything about it is absurd, exaggerated, incongruous; it seems the work of surrealists. Are these hideous faces yelling their filth at me really human? And how are these tentacle-like arms, which seem to be surging towards me out of the darkness, able to reach me in the tangled forest that binds me? … Show yourself, van Gogh. For the love of your art, show yourself, so I can wake up with a start, and go back to the cosy splendour of my palaces, my obsequious servants and my enchanted harems … Van Gogh is nowhere to be seen. I am not dreaming. My nightmare is as real as the blood on my forehead. I did not feel the rifle butt that split my skull. In fact I feel nothing any more. I have a confused sensation of what is taking place, a bizarre feeling of detaching myself from one reality and emerging into another where I have no point of reference. I feel as if the shot of heroin I was given last night is finally starting to have an effect. I am levitating, borne upwards by the savagery of a people I so cherished and who are getting ready to tear me apart with their bare hands.

The uproar of voices swirls around me. I feel woozy. A wreck tossed by angry waves. Let’s tie him to the pickup and drag him behind it till his flesh and the road become one. Blows and insults beat down on me relentlessly. I do not defend myself. Muffled inside my stupor, I let myself drift towards my fate, my head crowned with thorns, my face covered in blood like Isa Ibn Maryam, bowed under his cross on the path to Golgotha.

I am not afraid.

My feelings are dulled.

I have a vague sensation that I am gravitating to the edge of things, that all my senses have deserted me.

They throw me in the back of a pickup, which has trouble forcing its way through the tumult. Its horn reverberates inside me like the trumpets of the Revelation. I am no longer of flesh and blood, I am tragedy, I am the putting to death itself. I do not even pity this people any longer, running to their doom while they imagine they are catching up with the pickup transporting me to further furies.

The vehicle halts. Wild hordes block its path, overwhelm it. I am grabbed, torn apart and then served up to dogs and villains. Talons tear off my clothes and the skin with it. Someone thrusts a bayonet into my anus. The lynching begins; this time it is the real thing. They strip me, they skin me alive, they eat me raw. I do not resist, I let myself be cut to pieces without a groan or entreaty to anyone, stoical and dignified, just as the old lion accepts his fate as the hyenas tear him apart. The stampede reaches its peak. Flocks of vultures fight over my body. Take it, I give it to you willingly; tear it to pieces, dissect it; you have a right to my limbs, to my organs, to my sinews, but my spirit will outlive you. Your howls glorify me; my torment is my salvation. Only exceptional beings finish this way, merging with the crowd. The intensity of the blows redoubles; now that I am completely naked, hands rummage in my genitals, tear out the hair in handfuls, fiddle with my penis, pluck at my testicles, claw at my back, penetrate my rectum; I feel nothing, I am beyond the reach of the lynch mob and their cannibalistic desires. Purged of all toxins, I no longer feel anger or hate. I belong to the Spirit that doubts not, that nothing can surprise and that cannot feel anger, for anger is an admission of weakness, and which is the god that would falter before human foolishness? I have passed beyond the state of humankind, of those perishable beings shaped by pride and error. I bequeath them my mortal remains to act as a reminder of their own woes and, purged of all fears and restraints, I prepare to fly to that eternal heaven, my sins washed away with my blood, expiated with my final breath, for I die as a martyr to be reborn in legend. I am no longer a rais, I am a prophet; my downfall is my fertiliser, for in the future to come I shall grow higher than the mountains.

Suddenly, in the midst of the storm, looking up, I see the sky above the repulsive masks salivating over me. For a fraction of a second it seems to me that the full moon has taken the place of the sun. In a final momentary revival, I offer a prayer at random: Lord, forgive them their sins as I forgive them, for they do not know what they do … A gunshot goes off. Point blank. It is for me. My coup de grâce. The Lord has decided to cut short my agony. I knew He would not abandon me. God does not desert His elected; He makes of their end the beginning of a new faith, of their suffering a proof of transcendence … I fall in slow motion to the ground, freed of my ties, relieved of my wrongdoings, delivered from my remorse; I am born again from my wounds, new like a soul who has just emerged from his mother’s womb. Slowly the cries fade one after another, then the faces, then the daylight. I am dying, but my stamp will remain. For having left my imprint on their consciousness, my reward is to live on in the memory of peoples, to surf the ages that will race at top speed towards the infinite, to bombard them with remembrance of me until History becomes my pyramid. I shall be missed; I shall be sung in schools; my name shall be engraved on the marble of stelae and sanctified in the mosques; the epic of my life shall inspire poets and playwrights; painters shall devote frescoes to me wider than the horizon; I shall be venerated, wept over at the moment of repentance, and I shall have as many saints as accomplices, as is fitting for exceptional guides.

I make my bow; I am already on the other side of things and living beings, there where no sacrilege is to be found, where no mistake or misunderstanding can make me believe that the love of a people is an unfailing oath that cannot be broken …

My soul is leaving my body.

I float above the dust, see the ambulance forcing its way through the mob to take me to who knows what horror show, see the rebels revelling in their ignoble ritual, others brandishing pieces of my bloody clothing; I see tyre marks on the tarmac, the breeches of weapons glinting in the sun, the rebel banners flapping in the wind, but I do not hear the din of their jubilation or the noise of the volleys as they fire into the air in exultation.

I see everything: the sweat on faces as tense as if they have cramp, the eyes rolling upwards, the thick foam at the corners of their mouths, the crowd congratulating itself non-stop, the voyeurs immortalising with their mobiles the moment of their spiralling descent, but I cannot hear anything, not even the cosmic breath that is breathing me in.

It is now that my mother summons me, from across all these mirages. Her voice reaches me from the depths of a Fezzan eaten away by the desert. I see her again, her head in her hands, angry at my wild, boyish mischievousness: You only listen with one ear, the one you willingly lend to your devils, while the other is deaf to all reason … And it is at that precise moment, just before I dissolve among the swirls of nothingness, that I understand why that diabolical van Gogh, with his mutilated ear, broke in on my nights and on my madness.

But it is too late.