Men in Prison (10 page)

“Only seven months more and I’ll kill her.”

Below, a sort of little calendar. The inmate had drawn a line for each day, a cross at the end of the month. He had spent five months and two days in this cell …

The walls also speak with voices of the present. The guard has scarcely made his round when a faint noise, a mouselike scratching, makes your ears perk up. Three discrete little taps, a pause, three more taps. A man is calling me from the other side of the stone wall.
I answer: three, pause, three. Then, coming regularly now, the taps are spaced out evenly in long series. As many taps as are needed for each letter of the alphabet: 16, p; 9, i; 5, e; 18, r; again 18, r; 5, e. The tapper’s name is Pierre. It takes a great deal of concentration to avoid making a mistake counting up these hasty little taps to which you must listen with one ear tuned to the noises from the corridor so as to avoid getting caught. After long minutes, “Pierre of the Gang of the Four” managed to tell me: “Hello. Sent down for murder. And you?” Personally, I have nothing to say to Pierre of the Gang of the Four. This conversation made up of mouse noises and alphabetical additions wearies me. I tap:

“Goodby!”

And I fall back into my silence … To work.

You soon learn to tell time by the sounds of the prison. A long clattering of mess tins announces the next doling out of food. Soon it is four o’clock, end of the day. Doors are hastily opened and shut: the prison mailman making his rounds.

All at once the man pacing in his cell stops short, dumbstruck. From the guard’s desk at the bottom of the gallery a voice has just announced:

Number 13–21, released!

Upstairs, in their cement cubicles, both number 13–20 and number 13–22 are shaken by an icy shudder. They listen, anxious, their chests tight, cowering against the door. In the distance, heavy footsteps mount the stairs, move closer down the gallery. Here it comes. Here it comes. The door of cell 13–21 opens with loud clang. The following dialogue is heard:

An indifferent bass voice:

“Number 13–21, Michaud, Oscar-Leon, that’s you, right?” A palpitating, eager, choked voice:

“Yes, officer, yes, that’s me.”

The poor wretch has heard. He knows. But he doesn’t believe it yet. He is afraid. He would like to grovel before this mustachioed, ruddy-complexioned guard who holds his destiny written on a scrap of paper. And at the same time he would like to unchain his heart, which is ready to burst from his chest, to cry out:

“That’s me!
Me! Me!”

The bass voice continues calmly:

“Get your things together. Provisional release.”

The other voice, muddled, effusive, like a thankful schoolboy’s:

“Thank you, sir.”

They leave. The poor wretch can be heard telling his story loquaciously. Numbers 13–20 and 13–22 straighten up, taciturn, their stern brows doubtless wrinkled by the same frown. Number 13–20 has at least two more years to go. Number 13–22 has ten more years …

Another shout, at the end of the corridor:

“Number 13–23, released!”

Number 13–20 bites his lips, wrings his hands. Number 13–22 glances in bewilderment around his cell, which has grown darker from one moment to the next; his mounting rage vents itself in vague imprecations:

“Oh! the bastards! Of all the dirty, stinking …”

In one of his novels, Alexander Dumas describes a horrible execution in Venice. Three miserable wretches were to undergo an excruciatingly refined torture. They marched calmly to the scaffold, ready to die, already dead in the depth of their souls. Suddenly a messenger appeared, bringing a pardon for one of them. And the other two went into a frenzy of indignation. To see someone survive was worse than death for them. This fictional passage contains a terrible psychological truth. In here, every announcement of a release brings an uncontrollable nervous shock to those who hear it. The average prisoner, in spite of habit, feels it like a sudden blow. Those who feel that freedom has brushed by them, since they were the neighbors of the man released, feel the outrage of an injustice.

Calls to the visitors’ room cause the same reaction. A fearsome jealousy gnaws at the hearts of those who have been abandoned or betrayed when their brothers in misfortune are visited by their dear ones. I met two cellmates, one of whom hated the other with mortal passion. The one had been betrayed to the police by his mistress. The other received passionate letters every day from his …

When evening falls, other cries rip through the silence … The gloomy time of day passes slowly. Suddenly, from outside, a resonant voice calls out:

“Good evening, mates, good evening!”

A moment’s pause. The whole prison is listening. The impassioned voice soars and wheels with fury:

“Didi of La Chapelle wished you a good evening! Courage and blood!”

Sometimes it’s the farewell cry of a man about to leave; sometimes the revolt of an impatient man who must remain—and who will be punished that very night in the “hole.” An appeal, an exhortation, a promise.

The fierce exhortation strikes deep. This cry, reaching up from the lowest depths of Paris, bears true witness to a tradition of courage and blood.

Sometimes, especially in the evening, a noise from the street may reach the prisoner in his cell. An automobile sounds its horn. The bell of a trolley car rings out in the distance. Instantaneously, the image of the illuminated streets and of that trolley car appears in your mind’s eye. You see the conductor taking the steering bar into his wool-gloved hands. You see everything. You breathe in the smell of asphalt and gasoline. And then everything vanishes.

Two eyes under the visor of a
képi
appear and disappear in the rapidly opened spyhole of the door. You feel buried alive. Depending on whether you are an old inmate or a newcomer, the calm grayness of time sooner or later resumes its usual hue.

The city and life are nothing but unreality.

These walls: That is reality. And those one hundred and sixty little lines on the dark corner of the floor under a sentence etched in by an unknown hand:

“Only seven months more and I’ll kill her.”

AT SEVEN IN THE MORNING A BELL RINGS, GIVING THE SIGNAL FOR RISING
. A
quarter of an hour later, the cell door is opened by the guard on duty for a quick inspection. The cot is folded up into the wall, the bedclothes folded according to regulations. An inmate in overalls, accompanied by a guard who opens the Judas for him, throws in a
boule de son,
700 grams of black bread, which hunger alone enables you to eat. An hour later, morning soup. The mess tin, passed through the Judas by a grimy hand, generally contains nothing but a rather abundant portion of lukewarm yellowish water on which—sometimes, but not always—some odd scraps of cabbage are floating. It is lightly salted. When you are very hungry and, in winter, if the “soup” is hot enough to warm up the stomach, you dip your black bread in it. Most often, even those who are starving throw this insipid water—which is neither food nor drink, but more like dishwater—down the toilet. The administration, nonetheless, delivers fixed quantities of dried vegetables, fats, even fresh vegetables to the cooks. But, aside from the fact that the only check on the way the regulations are carried out is left to personnel with interests at variance from those prescribed by the rules, a large number of successive plunderings, coming one on top of the other, ends up by reducing the inmates’ usual fare to a bare minimum. The ill-paid guard on duty in the kitchen is not above a little pilfering. Before him, the quartermaster-sergeant took his share before delivering the quantities of provisions—weighed, for form’s sake, quickly and under the benevolent eye of his cohort or the accessory eye of the prisoner-chief-cook. Then the prisoner-cooks take care of their own interests. They naturally eat as well as they can, and put together special dishes or packets of provisions for some of their pals. They need money. By carrying on a sharp trade in fats and onions with inmates who have positions of trust and even with certain not-too-scrupulous guards, they are able to obtain
the desired funds: Then whatever nourishment is left in such a well-skimmed soup goes first to feed the boys on the maintenance squad and then to their “buddies.” If you give a modest reward to your regular soup server, you can get a fair amount of cabbage in your mess tin. The feckless and the penniless get nothing but yellowish water.

Around four o’clock, a second meal. The same soup, plus a dish of vegetables, alternately beans, mashed green peas, mashed potatoes, rice. These vegetables are boiled, salted, apparently without any fat added; this is a bare subsistence, a tasteless nutriment which you absorb out of necessity. The mashed purées are gelatinous, shiny like glue. Sometimes they serve you kidney beans which break your teeth and make a lovely metallic clank when you drop them into your mess tin from a height of a few inches. On Thursdays and Sundays the little bit of meat juice which they add to this administrative pittance is enough to make it delectable. On the latter day, “eighty grams of cooked beef” are added to the evening vegetables: a few thin scraps of cold meat strung out on a wooden stick or threaded onto a tough piece of tendon.

The diet of prisoners awaiting trial at the Santé Prison is considerably worse than that of convicts in the penitentiaries. The administration obviously takes the following reasons into account. Prisoners awaiting trial are divided, from a dietary point of view, into three categories: rich or middle class, aided, abandoned. To tell the truth, they are only interested in the first category, who are frequently visited by well-known lawyers, protected by deputies, capable of bringing the attention of the press to bear on the House; but these people throw away or disdainfully refuse the administrative pittance. They are allowed to have their meals brought in from restaurants; they receive bottles of wine and ample baskets of provisions. The less fortunate ones, who are nonetheless aided by their relatives, live on food sent in from the outside or bought from the canteen; the subsistence allotment is of secondary importance to them. Those who are abandoned, without money, without relatives, drink down the lukewarm, yellowish morning water in fury, have devoured their loaf of black bread by noon, and apply for an extra quarter loaf from the doctor. These common-law prisoners, whose sham defense is hurried inattentively along by a court-appointed lawyer, have no complaints to make: This is made quite clear to them. The slightest comment is enough to send them off to the hole for several days. Shrugging his shoulders, the guard in charge of punishments tells them:

“Go ahead and croak, if that’s what you want. I don’t give a shit!”

They’re stuck. They croak all right, but slowly, without saying a word, sometimes dreaming of the hard-labor colonies from which you can escape, where you can take revenge.

(“Ah, I swear to God, if the screw messes with me, I’ll shove my shiv into his gut …”)

The evening cries—courage and blood!—send long, invigorating shivers through the marrow of their spines.

There is always the expedient of signing up to visit the doctor. You get extra bread, a ration of cod-liver oil, and pills—God knows what kind of pills!

Moralists sometimes compare the practice of medicine to a priestly calling. The mission of the doctor, the priest, the lawyer; aid to the sick, the disabled, the innocent victim and the guilty. How little of these old hypocrisies remain once the walls of prison have been entered! Victim or guilty man—a subtle distinction!—the prisoner awaiting trial who cannot pay, has no lawyer in reality. When, in the fourth or fifth month of pretuberculosis, the starving man’s tonsils swell up painfully, when chronic ear infection sends neuralgic pains through his head, he signs up for a “visit with the doctor.”

Around eleven o’clock, a guard rounds up the sick. Ten or so prisoners come together with joyful surprise in their sullen eyes and line up in the ground-floor corridor. While they’re waiting for the last of those who have signed up, a man with a swollen cheek discreetly makes the acquaintance of a man with varicose veins who complains of not being able to walk anymore; a consumptive gives a slight cough as he contemplates the blood-specked sputum in his handkerchief, on whose display he is counting to get some medicine. A fishy-looking financier— delighted to escape for a few minutes from solitude so cruel for an ex-playboy—engages in a hasty conversation with tall, cunning-eyed Jadin (“You know Jadin, from the Bagnolet holdup …”), who has only signed up for the visit himself to pursue some subtle scheme …

“Forward march!”—in Indian file under the direction of a guard. In front of the ground-floor cell which is used as the doctor’s office, more meetings, exchanges of furtive signs, top-secret missives passing from hand to hand concealing more than one criminal secret—and also more than one message of friendship. The whole value, even purely medical, of the visit to the sawbones consists in these meetings and
correspondences. Psychosomatic afflictions subside in these moments of contact with
other men.

A white table. On it, a large register. Seated behind it, a gentleman in a white coat flanked by two inmate-orderlies. A kind of administrative tribunal. A guard calls the patients.

“Pirard, Marcel …”

Pirard, Marcel, emerges out of the gray corridor wall and appears before the table of the sawbones, who is still busy with the previous patient (Crispin, Gustave-Leon, twenty-two years old; bronchitis), for whom he is writing, under the
prescriptions
column in the big register: “tinct. iod.” Eight
tinct. iod.
for today: November! Without lifting his eyes from his register, where he reads the records devoted to Pirard, Marcel, the sawbones questions:

“What’s your trouble?”

Pirard, Marcel, a teamster by trade (in the register: “assault and battery”; he broke his whip handle over the back of a dishonest subcontractor), has been preparing his lesson for two days. Being in a cell is driving him mad. He can’t sleep anymore; he has cold sweat, nightmares, buzzings in his ears: He can’t go on! He would like them to “pair” him off—that is to say, give him a companion, a living man, to talk to, since these walls, these naked empty, silent, cold walls are driving him out of his mind! … But how to say everything in this fleeting minute!