The Dictator's Last Night

8

I have been striding up and down the room, kicking out at thin air, only stopping to aim a deadly finger at a shadow or to wring an imaginary neck.

I am spitting with rage. That wimp Mansour dared to lay a hand on me. I have had family members executed for less. My gaols are heaving with undiplomatic, suspicious, restless and reckless people, people whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I do not tolerate anyone discussing my orders, anyone questioning my judgements, anyone sulking in my presence. Everything I say is gospel, everything I think is a portent. He who does not listen to me is deaf, he who doubts me is damned. My anger is therapeutic for him who suffers it, my silence is self-discipline for him who reflects on it.

What did Mansour intend to achieve? Did he understand the extent of his folly? Blowing hot and cold like that, going off at tangents, jumping from allegiance to renunciation with disturbing ease.

He has badly unsettled me.

Libya would be a disaster without name or future if I were not here. This sacred land would be destined for misfortune and shame, our cemeteries would unleash their phantoms on our days and nights, and the living would turn into zombies, our stelae into gibbets!

I prowl around my cage, turning my shattered thoughts over and over in my mind, like a maniac driven by his obsessions. God alone is infallible! What was my Guard commander insinuating? That I am a troublemaker, or at fault? I have neither stirred up trouble nor fallen short, but have kept my promises in their entirety, won all my bets, risen to every challenge. The fury that now fills the streets with hate is a degeneration, an infamy, a sacrilege. An astounding ingratitude.

I am not a dictator.

I am the uncompromising sentinel, the she-wolf protecting her little ones, her fangs bigger than her jaws, the untamable jealous tiger that urinates on international conventions to mark his territory. I do not know how to bow and scrape or stare at the ground when a man looks down his nose at me. I walk with my head held high, with my full moon as my halo, and trample underfoot the masters of the world and their vassals.

People say I am a megalomaniac.

It is not true.

I am an exceptional being, providence incarnate, envied by the gods, able to make a faith of his cause.

Is it my fault that the valiant people of Libya, fallen so low, are compelled to ravage their homeland and make its blood run like filthy water, while the puppet masters rejoice at their martyrdom as they strip them of their last shred of dignity?

I lean my forehead against the wall, fingers linked behind my head, breathe in, breathe out. ‘Go on, Muammar, aerate your soul, purge it of what is holding it back. Breathe gently, as if you were inhaling the scent of a woman, then expel the miasmas inside you … There, go on, good. Breathe, breathe. Imagine you are deep inside the Hanging Gardens, fill your lungs with the perfumes of Babylon. Let your spirit glide higher than the birds of paradise. You are Muammar Gaddafi, have you forgotten? Do not allow the small fry to pull you down from your cloud …’

My voice penetrates my senses, soothes me, purifies my being. The muffled pounding at my temples gradually starts to fade, my pulse becomes more regular. I feel much better.

I go back to the couch, pick up my Koran and open it at random. I cannot concentrate. Mansour’s wailings return, pounding in my skull again like so many sledgehammers. I close my eyes to drive them out and cling to the summons of my soul.

It is the only Voice I know how to listen to: it calls me from the deepest depths of my being, makes my guts vibrate as a virtuoso does the strings of a lute. It is that Voice that incited me to overthrow a monarchy, to confront entire empires, to bring destiny to its knees. I have always known that I came into the world to mark it with my stamp, my way illuminated by that cosmic Voice that roars within me each time doubt appears, that proves to me every day that I am one of the blessed of heaven.

I have never listened to any other voice but my own.

My mother used to pull her hair out when she realised I was not listening to her, convinced that someone had put a spell on me. She took me to see all sorts of charlatans; their potions and charms did little to calm me down. I did just as I pleased, deaf to reproach, sealed off from everything that did not suit me. The chypsy has taken you, my mother sobbed, at the end of her tether. What have I done to you for you to make me ill from morning till night? Try to listen to reason, for once, just once … I did as she asked because I felt sorry for her, and a few hours later a neighbour came to the door of our house, shoving her snivelling kid in front of her as proof. You need to lock him up, your jinn, the neighbour would shout at my mother. Our kids can’t go anywhere near him without him setting on them.

The truth was that I did not listen to anyone, so as not to have to hear their lies. People have always lied to me. Whenever I asked about my father my mother would answer quickly, ‘He’s in paradise.’ I missed my father. Terribly. His not being there scarred me. I was jealous of the kids who scampered around their begetters. Even if they were not up to much, to me they looked as tall as gods. At the age of five I imagined what it would be like to take my own life. I wanted to die so that I could be with my father in heaven. Without him, existence had no flavour or attraction. So I chewed a poisonous herb, but all I got was a high fever and attacks of diarrhoea. When I was nine I went on and on at my uncle to make him tell me the truth about what had happened to my father. ‘He was killed in a duel. To avenge the clan’s honour.’ I begged him to show me his grave. ‘The brave do not really die. They are resurrected in their sons.’ I refused to accept this far-fetched explanation. I became uncontrollable. The more my cousins stoked my unhappiness with their deadly insinuations, the worse my tantrums got. ‘Your dad was expelled from the tribe. I heard he betrayed the tribe’s trust …’ A neighbour insisted that my father had simply been crushed by a tank during Rommel’s great offensive. ‘The poor man was out in a sandstorm with his goat. He didn’t see the tank coming.’ I was furious. ‘Somebody must have collected his body.’ — ‘What could they have collected after his body was flattened by the tank’s tracks? They couldn’t even tell there was a goat there in the pulp they found.’ I wept with disappointment, and when the neighbour started sniggering I pelted him furiously with rocks. I felt like burying the whole of humanity under heaps of stones.

My uncle no longer knew which saint to appeal to. He clapped his hands in impotence and apologised abjectly to the people who complained about my behaviour.

Until I was eleven years old, people treated me like a disturbed child. There was talk of confining me in the psychiatric clinic, but my parents were too poor. In the end, to restore some calm to the village, the clan all had to chip in to send me to school.

It was there, in front of a mirror in the school toilets, that the Voice started speaking to me. It assured me that my status as an orphan was nothing for me to be ashamed of, that the prophet Muhammad had not known his father, and nor had Isa Ibn Maryam.7 It was a marvellous voice: it soaked up my pain like blotting paper. I spent most of my time just listening to it. Sometimes I went out into the desert on my own just to hear that voice and no other. I could talk to it without fear of being mocked by gossips. That was when I understood I was destined to become a legend.

At school in Sabha, then in Misrata, my classmates drank in my words to the point of intoxication. It was not me who bewitched them with my speeches, but the Voice that sang out through my being. My teachers could not bear me. I defended the dunces, objected to the low marks they gave me, started strikes, cried foul, turned the poor kids against the well-off ones, openly criticised the king; none of the schools’ suspensions and expulsions made any difference.

When I entered the Military Academy my vocation as a troublemaker only intensified. In spite of the regulations and charges. I quickly started to infiltrate various secret protest groups and began to dream of a great revolution that would elevate me to the level of a Mao or a Gamal Abdel Nasser.

‘Brotherly Guide,’ a voice calls from the other side of the door. ‘The general requests you to join him. He is waiting for you downstairs.’

7 Jesus Christ in the Koran.