The Dictator's Last Night

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.

5 Foot whipping.