Episode
II – Major Saga in Guantanamo
Just as he is about to embark on an intrepid quest for the Olympic torch, Haflatoun lands in Guantanamo – rather than Athens – where Socratic irony and a Major Saga save his skin.
As retold to Khaled Diab
Date: 26 April
2005
Place: Somewhere in
Cuba
Time: Early
afternoon
The battered 1964 Cadillac slammed on its brakes
which, not sharing the same sense of urgency as the driver, only brought the
car to a gradual halt on the road, kicking up a cloud of dust. The young driver
cocked his head out of the window and started yelling obscene-sounding insults
at me in Spanish.
After all those weeks of solitude, I was not
sure whether I was actually walking through the streets of Havana, or whether
this was some vivid fantasy projected on to the walls of my darkened cell. The
lucidity of the whole experience – the way my heart raced in the seconds before
the expected impact with the large bumper, the intricate cracks on the wrinkled
bonnet, the smell of panic hurtling towards me from the driver’s armpits
–smacked of authenticity.
Having survived a close brush with a Cadillac
that was ten years my senior and an angry driver that was a decade my junior, I
resolved to settle whether I was standing in the middle of a real road or
whether I was exploring the back alleys of my imagination. On the other side of
the road, I noticed a large shop with Barbero del Gobierno painted on a
fading sign hanging above the entrance.
Inside was what looked like a state-run
department store. However, instead of lines of waist-high display cabinets –
behind which would stand a vendor in regulation summer suit in front of shelves
stacked with cloth and clothes rising to the ceiling – their stood file after
file of hairdressers, their scissors clanking to produce an impromptu rumba
tune.
Haflata: Talking
drivel Aflatoun: Plato Haflatoun: Drivelling Plato
Feeling the
rhythm carrying me off after the first beat, I took three steps forward,
swaying my hips as I went, and waited for the next pause. Miraculously, it
arrived. I took three more steps, thinking to myself, “This must be a dream.
It’s too absurd to be real.” But the beat didn’t start up again.
I opened my eyes to see that the 53-odd
hairdressers had stopped snipping and had turned their gazes on me. Their
customers were brushing the hair out of their eyes and also looking at me: 106
pairs of wondering eyes gazing admiringly, or perhaps bemusedly, at my deft
(daft?) footwork.
In a bid to connect with my surroundings, I
theatrically stroked the beard that I had been unable to trim in weeks. I
walked up to the counter and tried in my best beginner’s Spanish: “¿Quisiera
afeitarme, por favor?” I paid for the counter and sat next to some old men in
baggy suits waiting my turn for a shave, hoping it would scrape away the memory
of my ordeal.
My mind still
boggles as to how a simple 150-minute flight can mutate into a 120-day slog.
For a simple man in this new-fangled world, I sometimes find it hard to
understand why it is we sprout wings to fly, only to tie leaden weights to our
boots.
I must apologise for not filing my regular
reports over the past few months, but I was otherwise occupied – well,
actually, I was otherwise detained, incommunicado.
In theory, the task was a relatively simple
one: fly from Cairo to Athens. For more than 2½ millennia, Egyptians and Greeks
have been happily visiting each other – talking a lot of philosophy, science
and religion, and even going to war. After a few short days of sailing between
Alexandria and Athens, an Ancient Egyptian feminist scholar, say, could do the
Greek lecture circuit at all the best agorae and gymnasia to expound on her
controversial theory – through a male proxy, naturally – that “Socrates was a
woman and Plato was her love child”.
“All the empirical evidence supports it. She
disguised her gender to gain access to the man’s world of philosophy. Do you
think a man could have invented Socratic irony? Of course not, but it comes
naturally to women – it’s what we call humouring men,” she would claim to
derisive boos from her genteel audience.
“Do you really believe Socrates did not leave
behind any written works? Of course, she did,” our fearless feminist would
intone. “We would know nothing about her if it were not for her love child,
Plato, who, despite his shame, sought to preserve the memory of his maverick
mother.”
You digress too much, I hear you protest. But
the memory is so troubling that I cannot leap at it head on. I must skirt
around it, circling for a bit, and then pounce.
I have spent the last few months as Uncle Sam’s
guest on the beach holiday from hell. How, you may ask, does one start off on a
flight to Athens and end up in Guantanamo Bay? The question regularly haunted
my solitude under the star-studded Caribbean sky. Finally released from my
orange jump-suited confinement, I am free to tell my tale.
Date: (Flashback) 3 September 2004
Place: Cairo Airport
Time: Morning
It all began back in September. I had taken up
the Eye’s
challenge of bringing the Olympic flame to Egypt with the express intention
of sabotaging his devious plot to gain even more wealth and might than his lucrative
cult had already generated for him.
A person’s face is their calling card. In my
case, it is also my ID card and passport. Being Haflatoun, I have not usually
found it necessary to identify myself formally – people tend to recognise me. But
with security the way it is these days, I learnt to start carrying my papers.
However, some years ago, I took the momentous
decision to express my entire disregard for physical appearance by undertaking
one massive act of physical re-engineering. But, rather than indulge in the
vain folly of seeking beauty and perfection, I pioneered deconstructionist
surgery to remove my looks from the equation – I wanted people to appreciate me
for my philosophy, not my physiology.
My new face outdates my passport. And this, you
can imagine, presents me with something of a challenge at every border I cross.
“Sir, who’s passport is this?” the custom’s official at Cairo Airport asked me.
My attempts to explain and show him the ‘before and after’ shots came to no avail,
this time. He was the kind of public servant who held the rulebook in higher
esteem than the citizen.
“But I am Haflatoun and I must go to Athens on
a very important mission,” I protested in no uncertain terms.
“I don’t care if you’re the president himself,
if you don’t own the face on the passport, you can’t pass through here,” he
insisted unreasonably.
“But I was that face’s reckless former owner. I
had surgery to save it from myself.”
“Well, sir, you should have changed your
passport as well,” he pointed out too obviously.
“That would be too easy,” I argued. “That is
not how a philosopher prince behaves!”
All the commotion drew the attention of some
men in white suits and sunglasses who sported mysterious expressions on their
faces. Walking through a strangely bespectacled darkened haze, they collided
with some innocent bystanders on their way to their true target: me.
“Would you come with us, sir?” one of them told
the coral-reef fish swimming over my shoulder. “Why? What has that poor
creature done to you?” I asked, following his gaze to the poster advertising
Red Sea holidays.
“Just a routine seen (Q) and geem (A),”
one of them explained.
“Oh, I just love quizzes,” I told them as they
led me down a solitary corridor. “Will there be a lot of history questions?”
“Ohh, we’ll be grilling you about that all
right,” the one in the wire-rimmed shades said with a hint of irony and a touch
of menace. I felt a chill come from his direction and travel up the baggy
undercarriage of my toga, which I had worn especially to mark my imminent
return to one of my ancestral homes.
We were now somewhere deep in the less-visited
bowels of the airport – I could tell because there was a faint odour of poorly
digested food, not to mention the rancid smell of urine and sweat. Muffled
screams staggered through the thick doors.
We stopped outside one door which swung open to
reveal a Mastermind-like set up. But, instead of the comfortable illuminated
leather armchair, there was a cruder arrangement with a wooden stool upon which
was cast the severe light of a too-bright desk lamp. As I was rudely driven
into the room by a heavy hand, the quiz show’s famous theme music failed to
start up – however, a fairly accurate rendition was being performed in my
heart. Two sets of buffalo-thigh arms lifted me off the floor where I had
fallen and sat me on the Mastermind stool.
Rather than John Humphrys’s smiling
countenance, or even Magnus Magnusson’s televisual ghost, I was greeted by a leering
face that looked as if it had spent the worse part of its life in a torture
chamber scaring inmates. I almost fell off my stool and into someone else’s.
The stink was becoming overpowering.
“Thank you for joining us,” he boomed, “you
have ten minutes to answer my questions before my colleagues over there takes
you over for round two.”
Being informed of the rules of the game did not
help set my mind at ease.
“Your name, please?” he snapped.
Under his gaze and the sweat-inducing
spotlight, I was collapsing into a heap of blathering smithereens.
“P-p-p-ickle,” I spluttered, using my age-old quiz strategy of saying the same
word instead of ‘pass’.
“Stop wasting our time! No one in the world is
called Pickle.”
“H-h-h-h-aflatoun,” I stuttered, instead.
“If you don’t stop with this huflata (drivel),
there will be serious consequences,” he threatened. One of his goons kicked me
off my stool to demonstrate.
“Thank you, we’ll take it over from here,
Mohamed,” an American voice said from the darkness at the back of the interview
cell.
“My name is not Mohamed, I told you before,” my
interrogator said somewhat irritably.
“What do you know about I-raq?” my American
interrogator asked as he emerged into the light, his Robert Redford blonde hair
hanging just above his eyes.
“The history quiz. Excellent!” I remarked.
“It’s a bit of a broad question to answer in the allotted time. Perhaps if you
could narrow it to the Sumerian, the Babylonian, the Abbasid, or the modern
era…”
“I’m talking about insurgents, man,” he
interrupted me.
“I don’t know very much about the resistance,
I’m afraid. My specialty is philosophy.”
“Ahh, an ideologue, a Sadrist!” he said
triumphantly, as if I’d made some admission of guilt. “Are you a member of
al-Qaida?”
“No, but I am a member of Mensa,” I explained
proudly.
“Ahh, you must be a sleeper,” he asserted
bizarrely.
“Of course, I am. Eight hours a day. It’s the
only way to keep sane. Why? Aren’t you?” I asked, worried he might be an
insomniac. These professional types often don’t sleep enough.
“How dare you!” he roared as he slapped me in
the face.
From there, the rest of the interrogation went
downhill. The Americans had found my Greek guidebook to Greece and an ancient
Greek philosophical treatise I was reading. “What’s this Arabic? Is it some
kind of terrorist manual?”
“It’s not Arabic,” the not-Mohamed pointed out.
“It might be Russian.”
“A red Islamist. Man, how low can you go?” the
Redford hairdo shook in disbelief.
After some hours, I was secreted out of a
non-descript doorway onto an isolated floodlit runway where some big military
aeroplane was waiting. Our on-flight attendants were not very gentle – they
were rougher than the stewards I once came across on a Balkan Air flight.
One unusual aspect of this flight was that the
passengers were also expected to wear a uniform. A couple of hours into our
journey, heavy military boots shook us awake and made us all dress in these
bright orange jumpsuits.
“Where are we going?” I asked the owner of the
boot.
“Guantanamo Bay,” he answered simply.
“Where’s that?”
“In Cuba, dude,” he replied in shock at my
ignorance.
Images of socialist revolutionaries, ageing
Fidels who had lost their fidelity, Caribbean beaches, olive-skinned beauties
and Latino music flitted through my mind. What I got was an open-air cage in
the strangely named Camp X-Ray, armed guards, arm restraints, the occasional
blindfold, and neighbours with whom I couldn’t socialise. This routine was
broken up by regular interrogations during which I was asked the same questions
each time.
I also received regular lectures from the
base’s aspiring historian – who was no doubt trying to impress the chronicler
in me – on the USA’s “oldest overseas naval base” and the only one on “Communist
soil”. He even showed me the base’s website.
Even here my reputation preceded me, and Major
Saga – yes, I didn’t believe that was his real name either – had asked for me
in person. “I don’t believe they’re holding you,” he confessed. “Still, I’m not
complaining – it’s good to have a thinker among us who I can have a real
conversation with,” he reflected wistfully.
“Uh, uh, uh,” I replied as thoughtfully as I
could through my gag. Overpowered by my deft Socratic irony, he rushed over and
untied my mouth. “Thank you for the kind compliment but I have plenty of
reasons to complain,” I admitted, pointing to my tied wrists and ankles. “It’s
not exactly an intellectual retreat here.”
Back in my cage, I managed to snatch some
exchanges with my neighbour who turned out to be a Lebanese Catholic who sang
at a Beirut cabaret. “And they think you’re an Islamist?” I asked, incredulous.
Perhaps I was slowly losing my grip on reality
and that conversation never took place. Then again, we might just live in a
surreal world. The days started merging into one indistinct clutter of noises
and images; of sudden piercing physical pains and long stretches of numbness
and nothingesses; of nightmare and fanatasy; of Jekyll’s and Hydes; of mocking
and ridicule.
One night, Major Saga – Cliff-Hanna, I later
learnt, was his double-barrelled first name – came to my cage and told the
guard: “It’s time for his history lesson. We’ve got to get these bastards to
wake up to the American dream,” he said.
I got up drowsily and hobbled behind him. An
unmarked car with Cuban plates was waiting with its engine running in the car
park of the base. “I feel as barren as a stagnant swamp,” he told me in the
greenish light of his dashboard. “I’ve been contaminated by the rotting stink
of this place.”
All I could smell was his aftershave. It wasn’t
exactly my taste – a bit too overpowering – but I wouldn’t have condemned it in
quite those terms. “That’s why I’m breaking you out and, after 22 years of
dedicated service to the navy, I’m deserting.”
“They told me I would be at the frontline of a
new kind of war when they transferred me here. I would help make America safe,
I would help bring fugitives to justice,” he lamented. “But is this justice?
Are you a fugitive?”
“I s’pose I am now, as are you,” I observed
perceptively as the car sped along a dark country road.
“For the months since I arrived here, I’ve felt
like a lost ship at sea; I’ve been up a creek without a frigate. But you,
Haflatoun, have been my Faros lighthouse and you have guided me away from the
perilous rocks into which I was about to crash.”
Just before dawn, Cliff opened the door of the
car and dropped me off on a pavement in Havana. “It’s best we split up. We’ll
probably never meet again, but I hope you make it out of here.”
“They’ll be on the look out for a Cliff-Hanna
Saga,” I pointed out incisively. “A change of name is not a bad idea for both
of us.”
“No thanks, Haflatoun,” he declined. “If I
change my name, I’ll never be able to sell the rights to my biography.” If The
saga of my escape from Guantanamo by Major CH Saga ever makes it to the
bookstands, remember that you heard about it first here.
ã2005 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.