Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number translated from Jacobo Timerman's story in Spanish, Presa sin nombre, celda sin número Born in Ukraine in 1923, Jacobo Timerman moved with his family to Argentina in 1928. He was the editor and publisher of the newspaper La Opinión from 1971 to 1977, the year in which he was kidnapped by the Argentine Security Forces. Timerman was freed in 1979, and then moved to Israel where he currently lives. While in exile, he has published two books, Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number (1980), and The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon (1982). In order to understand the situation during the 70’s in Argentina, one must first look thirty years prior and observe the influence that the government of Juan Domingo Perón (1895-1974) and his wife Evita (1919-1952) exercised over the country. Both of them were the protagonists of a charismatic dictatorship based strongly on their strong personal attraction and on the enthusiastic support of the working class. Although Perón lost power in 1955 and had to go into exile, peronismo continued as a dominant force in the country's politics, appealing to very diverse groups, among them workers' unions and leftist middle-class youths. When Perón managed to return to Argentina in 1973, he was met with a society and a Peronist party that was so divided that not even he could run it, and he died without having created a viable political structure. His new wife, Isabel, served as President of the Republic for a short while after the death of her husband, but in 1976 she was arrested by the military junta whose members proclaimed themselves the only ones capable of restoring the unity and political direction of the country. The new regime became more and more repressive, until they carried out a so-called "anti-terrorist" campaign in which between 25,000 and 30,000 people suffered torture, disappeared, or lost their lives. In Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number, Timerman explains how an extremist faction of the Argentine Military came to his house at night, put him in the trunk of a car, and carried him off to a secret jail. Once there, the anti-Semitic guards regularly tortured him and questioned him about Zionism and the activities of the Jewish community. In the excerpt that follows, Timerman describes how he survived the abusive and sub-human conditions of his imprisonment. The cell is narrow. When I stand in the center, looking toward the steel door, I can't even stretch out my arms. But the cell is long. When I go to bed, I can stretch out my whole body. Lucky for me, because I came from a cell where I'd been for a while - how long? - doubled up, seated, falling asleep with my knees bent. The cell is very high. When I jump, I can't touch the ceiling. The walls, recently whitewashed, surely used to have names, messages, words of comfort, dates. Now there are neither testimonies, nor remnants. The floor of the cell is permanently wet. On one side, there is a drain. The mattress is also wet. And I have a blanket. They gave me a blanket, and I always keep it on my shoulders so it won't dampen. But if I fall asleep with the blanket on me, the part that touches the mattress becomes drenched. I find that it’s better to roll up the mattress, so that a part of it does not touch the floor. With time, the upper part dries. But I can no longer lie down, and I sleep sitting up. I live, during all this time - how long, again? - either standing or sitting. The cell has a steel door with a peephole. If I open it, one can see a portion of my face, or maybe even less than that. But the guard had orders to keep that aperture closed. The only light comes from outside, from a small crevice that also serves as a sort of vent. It is the only source of ventilation, the only source of light. A little lamp burns night and day, erasing any and all sense of time. It produces but half ray of light in an atmosphere of stale air, of half-air. I miss the cell from which they brought me - from where, again? - because it had a little hole in the floor where I could relieve myself. In my current cell, I have to call a guard so that I can go to the bathroom. It's a complicated ordeal, and they're not always in the mood to answer me, since they have to open a door that is surely the entrance to my cell block, close the door from the inside, tell me that they're going to open the door so that I can turn my back to them, blindfold me, guide me towards the pit where I can relieve myself, and take me back to my cell, repeating the whole ordeal. They think it's funny to tell me that I'm right in front of the cesspool when I'm not, or to lead me - they take my hand or shove me from behind - in such a manner that one of my legs slips into the sewage. But they get tired of that little game, and so they no longer respond to my calls. I had to piss myself. And that's why I miss the cell where I could piss on the floor. I pissed myself. And so I need special permission to wash my clothes, and must wait in my cell naked until they bring them to me dry. Sometimes days pass before that happens. They tell me that it's raining. I'm so lonely that I wish I could believe them. But I miss my cell with the indoor cesspool. The guards are not very well-disciplined. Many times, a guard gives me food without blindfolding me first. And so I see his face. He smiles. Sentry duty tires them, because they also have to act as torturers and inquisitors, and furthermore, must complete their deeds in secret. They can only work in these clandestine jails, and they have to complete all the work assigned to them. But on the other hand, they have a right to part of the valuables of every person who gets arrested. One of the guards has my watch. One time, when they questioned me, one of the other guards offered me a cigarette, which he lit with my wife's lighter. I found out later that they had orders from the army to not rob my house during my imprisonment, but they succumbed to temptation. Gold Rolexes and gold Dupont lighters were something of an obsession to the Argentine Security Force in 1977. This evening, a guard left the little window in my cell open - thus violating regulations. I wait for a bit to see what would happen, but it remains open. I rush to the window, looking outward. There is a narrow hallway, and to the front of my cell, I am able to make out at least two doors more. Yes, completely make out two doors. Such a feeling of freedom! An entire universe added to my time, that long time that lingered besides me in that cell, with me, hanging over me. Time, that treacherous enemy of man, is almost palpable in its existence, its persistence, its eternity. The hallway is very well-lit. I step back, a bit blinded by the light, but step forward again ravenously. I try to fill myself with the space I see. There’s so much that I have no sense of distance or proportion. I feel as if I'd been freed. In order to see anything I had to press my face up against the freezing steel door. And as the minutes passed I found the cold unbearable. I had my face pressed against the steel, and the cold made my head hurt. But it had been so long - how long, again? - since I had indulged myself like this with space. Now I press my ear to the door, but I don't hear a thing. So I look out. Someone was doing the same thing. I find that in the door in front of mine the peephole had been opened and there was an eye looking straight at me. I am startled. They'd set a trap for me. Looking out the peephole was forbidden, and they'd caught me doing it. I step back, and wait. I wait a bit, I wait longer, I wait some more. And I return to that little window. He was doing the same thing. And now I must talk to you, of this long night that we spent together, in which you were my brother, my father, my son, my friend. Or are you a woman? If so, we passed the night as sweethearts. All I saw was your eye, but you remember that night, isn't that so? Because they told me that you'd died, that you were faint of heart and you couldn't put up with their torture machine, but they didn’t tell me if you were a man or a woman. And furthermore, how could you have died, when that night was the night that we defeated death? You have to remember, you must remember, because if you don't, I must remember for the both of us, and it was so beautiful that I too must remember your story. You were blinking. I remember perfectly that you were blinking, and that deluge of movements showed, without any doubt, that I was not the last human being on in a world, a universe of torturer-guardians. Sometimes, in the cell, I move one of my arms or legs just to see one nonviolent motion, something different from the guards arresting or pushing me. And you were blinking. It was beautiful. You were - you are? - a person of the highest quality; you must possess a deep familiarity with life, because that night you invented all these games; in our stifling world, you created movement. At that moment you moved away, and then returned. At first, you startled me. But later I understood that you were recreating the grand human adventure of hide-and-seek. And so I played along with you. Sometimes we looked in that little peephole at the same time, and the feeling of victory was so pure that we seemed immortal. We were immortal. You went and startled me a second time, when you disappeared for a prolonged moment. Desperate, I pressed myself against the peephole. My face was freezing and on that cold night - it was night, right? - I'd taken off my shirt to hold up my face. When you came back, I was furious, and surely you saw the rage in my eye because you didn't disappear again. It must have taken great effort on your part, because a few days before, when they took me to a session of the torture machine I heard one guard comment to another that he'd used your crutches for firewood. But you know very well that they frequently try to trick us like that, to soften us up before we go to the torture machine, or as they called it, "a chat with Susana." And I didn't believe them. I swear to you that I didn't. No one could destroy the immortality within me that the two of us created during that night of love and fellowship. You were - you are? - very clever. It didn't occur to me to do more than stare, and stare, and stare some more. But right away you positioned your chin in front of the peephole. Or your mouth. Or part of your face. But I was very desperate. And very startled. I clung onto the peephole with the sole purpose of looking. I tried, I assure you, to put my cheek there for a bit, but then I looked again at the inside of my cell, and I got scared. The separation between life and solitude was so clear, that knowing you were there, I couldn’t look towards the cell. But you forgave me, because you continued to be mobile and full of life. I understood that you were comforting me, and I started to cry. Silently, of course. Don't worry; I knew not to even risk making a single noise. But you saw that I cried, right? Of course you did. I had a good cry in front of you, because you knew very well how sad it is in when a prisoner tells himself that it’s time to cry in his cell, and he cries without harmony, with regret, with fear. But with you, I could cry serenely and peacefully. Or, even better, it's even as if I'd had stopped crying, and in that way, it is more of a prayer than a lament. You can’t imagine how much I hated the belabored lament of the prisoner. You taught me, that night, that we could be friends in our mourning. back to translations home