Men in Prison (11 page)

“Doctor, I don’t know what’s the matter; I’m going crazy …”

The two orderlies—two augurs—standing behind the doctor smile indignantly. Another faker! (“He’s going crazy! What’s that to us, buddy?”) The doctor at first raises his head, but immediately remembers that he has forty-seven men signed up for consultation this morning, and that this is only the twenty-third. Without even having seen Pirard, Marcel, the doctor himself clarifies:

“Headaches?”

“Yes, that’s it, Doctor!” murmurs Pirard, Marcel, in ecstasy.

He is already being gently pushed outside. The doctor writes “Bromide” in the
prescriptions
column. Maekers, Henri, is called in. Each visit lasts from forty to sixty seconds, the time necessary to fill out the
prescriptions
column with a rapid scrawl. Pirard, Marcel, returns to his cell weak and dejected. He continues “going crazy” noiselessly until the day—if his pretrial examination drags out—when we hear him dashing himself furiously against the door, beating his head against the wall, howling like a wild beast. Then they knock him senseless for a while,
give him a shower, throw him into the hole; afterwards they “pair” him without medical assistance.

I have never seen the sawbones touch a patient with his stethoscope.

But it sometimes happens that an inmate is found dead in his cell— of natural causes.

The regulations prescribe a twenty-minute exercise walk each day; you have the right to refuse. I have refused it times out of dread of the wads of phlegm in the exercise yard.

The yards are twelve to fifteen feet wide by twenty-five to thirty feet long. The buildings of the Santé Prison, taken as a whole, form a vast quadrangle whose middle is occupied by the exercise yards. A vast courtyard is divided into more or less equal compartments, all of them closed. Some are enclosed by walls on three sides only; on the fourth, a grillwork looks, from a height of seven feet, onto the windows of the inside ground-floor cells. A covered catwalk forms a circle over these courtyards, which are very like middle-sized bear cages. Above, the guard. Twenty men can take the air under his eyes without ever emerging from their total isolation. Some parts of the courtyard are covered.

You go through the corridors in a racket of slamming doors; you see your cell-block neighbor passing out ahead of you; suddenly you find yourself in the bear cage. A landscape of mud-colored walls; above, the rectangular buildings, also mud-colored, with their infinity of little barred windows. You notice those that are open or closed.

Between seven and ten o’clock, nine men have passed through this hole; the tenth finds the cement literally covered with cigarette butts and greenish mucus. I have often resisted the temptation of those twenty minutes of fresh air, so great was the nervous repulsion I felt for that slimy mucus. For twenty minutes you walk in circles in the cages among the spittle. Sometimes a note rolled into a ball jumps over the wall or a voice calls from the grill side. Returning, you are nauseated by the stale odor of your cell.

Twice a week the inmates’ relatives gather, a little early, in front of the prison gates, forming one of those odd groups that can also be seen, on visiting days, in front of hospitals. Women, especially older women, are the majority in these groups where people whisper, commune with each other’s sorrows, or remain apart in oppressed silence. All of them look like widows. The old men, who have come from poor neighborhoods with their baskets of provisions, have mourning faces.
Their gestures are constrained by embarrassment, their glances veiled with shame. Some of them draw together in sympathy. The mother of a thief glances, with a look full of inexpressible commiseration, at the murderer’s mother. No one dares speak aloud; idle hands fuss over packets of foodstuffs and linen. Respectable people are afraid of being recognized there by a passing neighbor.

The visitors’ room is made up of two opposing rows of wire-meshed compartments separated by a space about a yard wide … The mother sits down in a compartment on the administration side. The son sits down in a compartment on the prison side. They are unable to touch each other. They can hardly see each other, barely communicate. Each has his face glued to the dusty grillwork. On both sides their eyes become inflamed trying to make out the familiar features in the semi-darkness.
The other person is there:
corporeal, yet ghostly; present, yet inaccessible. These partitioned compartments stretch out in long parallel rows. They are filled with a confused tumult of voices, sobs, sighs, cries, exclamations, admonitions, and advice which must be overcome in order to project a word from one cage to another. You leave this howling hall with your ears buzzing, full of clamors. But how many pardons, how many promises, how many sorrows, how many dashed hopes soar by each other there in painful flight—and fall there, heavily, with broken wings, in the mud …

A man, a woman. He: magnificent athletic shoulders, short neck, forehead low with compressed power, a kind of black fire in the deep sockets under the ridge of the brow. He: terror … a murderer. She: supple and feline from buttocks to breasts to golden hair. She: love, sold by night, given by day, a bogus “sister” come today to look at her man and to cry out to him:

“I’m yours, you see! Down to the depths of me! You’re my man!”

She is glued right against the wire mesh, straining toward him. Because it was for her that he bloodied his knife! Teeth clenched, he stares with dull eyes at that mouth which is proffered, given, but unreal; murmurs with the affectation of disdain for love proper to a male:

“Send me some tobacco.”

On the right, a mother and her son.

Twenty minutes. The mother, somewhat paler, leaves her cage with a hesitant step. She looks drunk. Her hat has slipped down over one ear. Her damp eyes are burning, her lower lip trembles … She is probably ashamed of crying “in front of people.” She is in a hurry to leave:
“The street will do me good,” she thinks—and the walls of the jail turn about her, angular, shattered, crooked, falling in. “So it’s true, it’s all true, everything the papers said. My God! My poor little Marcel! My poor little Marcel! …”

… On his side, he moves off, staggering a bit himself, his eyes still clinging to the image of an old mama’s pained, ruined face. His shouted confession keeps vibrating in his throat. But it’s over, over. What a relief! She knows everything now, everything: that he did it in order to become a pilot …

In his cell he finds the gift of maternal hands: a jar of jam, some white bread, a can of sardines which has just been opened. A clean shirt. The shirt is spotted with grease.

In the neighboring cells, the jealousy of abandoned prisoners stirs with the clanging of the bolted door.

From time to time, inspectors come through. A gentleman in a silver-braided
képi
stands haughty in the doorway. Behind him, the guard on duty, the chief guard—bedecked with braid from cuff to shoulder—or some fat sergeant.

“Do you have any complaints to make?”

I have none. No one has any. Nobody wants to get on the wrong side of the omnipotent authorities. The pale, skinny kid whose guard calls him a “stinking little bastard” from dawn to dusk (lucky when his guard’s heavy key doesn’t whack him between the shoulder blades “on the sly”), gazes, full of deference, at the three rows of silver braid on the
képi,
squints at his torturer’s lantern jaw, stares out with the hate-filled eyes of a beast at bay—and keeps quiet.

Whistling, humming, talking to yourself out loud, making any noise, is forbidden. It might seem easy to maintain discipline in a cell. But punishments of dry bread, loss of canteen privileges, even of being sent to the hole, are dealt out each day to a steady number of celled prisoners, Most of whom are guilty of attempting to communicate with each other, either by tapping, by writing, or by other means. The use of the “telephone,” for example, is severely punished. The toilet bowls are connected to wastepipes which pass perpendicularly from story to story, so that when you speak into the opening you can be heard on the floors above and below you. By means of this bizarre “telephone,” it is possible to have actual conversations, albeit conversations interrupted
by untimely waterfalls and requiring a great deal of skill: The whole thing is to talk loud enough to be heard on the next floor without being heard from the guards’ catwalk.

The regulations could be summed up in three peremptory words:

Living is forbidden!

But is it possible to forbid living men to live? With all the weight of its mighty edifices of stone, cement, and iron, the hulking prison affirms that it is possible.

The large number of inmates makes it impossible for the prison authorities to respect the principle of isolation. Thanks to an insufficient number of cells, a handful of culprits escape this special torture. Three men are put together. There is only one bed: Two spread their mattresses on the floor. I spent only two days under that system. Certainly, whatever its disadvantages may be, it usually presents one great advantage: Madness, the inevitable result of idle solitude, is somewhat delayed. But for the man who is able to master himself and discipline his mind, solitude is better. Being put in with two others can become intolerable to him.

Three men are brought together in a cell by chance. Whatever their differences, they must tolerate each other; relentless intimacy twenty-four hours a day … Rare is the day when at least one of them is not depressed. Irritable or gloomy, at odds with himself, he exudes a sort of invisible poison. You pity him. You suffer with him. You hate him. You catch his disease … If, among the three, one has the advantage of being well cared for by his relatives, then a jealous hatred hovers over all of his movements as he drinks the wine of inequity or reads the letter which the others didn’t get … If there is one abandoned starveling, then hunger and hatred may move in with him alongside the two other inmates. The presence of a slob fills the cell with snoring, spitting, belching—nauseating smells and filthy gestures.

The cube of air, hardly sufficient for one, is so insufficient for three that the air never really changes. You wake to a rank stench—a compound of putrid exhalations. The bitter smell, at first pleasant, then asphyxiating, of tobacco smoke, is mixed in with it. A bluish fog fills these four yards of space where three men wander around, gesticulating, like phantoms. Human beings give off an animal odor, and it takes a great deal of hygiene to keep it from getting rancid. The cell fills with a warm stench.

Each does his business in front of the other two. But perhaps the worst intimacy is not that of bodies. It is not being able to be alone with yourself. Not being able to remove your face from the prying glance of others. Betraying, with every tic, at every moment, the secret of an obtusely disturbed inner life. Not being able to work.

HOW IS THE PULSE OF LIFE EXTINGUISHED? IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY: WITH TIME.
The same feelings, repeated indefinitely, grow dull. You lose count of the hours and the days. What moved or terrified you during the first days no longer moves you. Suffocation? Drowning? A torpor sneaks into your veins, between your temples: All of life takes on the faded-ocher hue of the cell. You can no more escape this torpor than you can escape from these four walls. The rhythm of your inner life slows down. I will speak of the exaltations later on. Their rhythm is slow too; they come and go against this unchanging background without shattering the deeper torpor.

Men become childish again. The joys of the seventh year of childhood return. Gregory Gerchuny, an intrepid revolutionary of the time of the first Russian Revolution (1905), has described what a joy it was for him to receive a bar of soap in his death cell. Even less will do! I have witnessed—and other men have told me of the same experience—the profound drama of the appearance and disappearance of a ray of sunlight … On the ceiling, in a corner, around ten in the morning, a rectangle of sunlight appears: a few square inches. The cell and its inmate are instantly transformed. The rectangle draws itself out, becomes a ray. The presence of this warm light, which neither lights nor warms, creates an inexpressible emotion. Your step quickens, your back straightens, the day takes on a brighter aspect. But the ray of sunlight draws itself out, becomes narrower. This tiny bit of life-bringing gold becomes a thin thread ready to snap. Dull anxiety. The thread has snapped. The man-child grows cold.

Dreaming is another thing you soon learn about. Opium. This path, too, leads to insanity. Like all the cell’s paths.

The unreality of time is palpable. Each second falls slowly. What a measureless gap from one hour to the next. When you tell yourself in
advance that six months—or six years—are to pass like this, you feel the terror of facing an abyss. At the bottom, mists in the darkness.

So as not to lose track of the date, you have to count the days attentively, mark each one with a cross. One morning you discover that there are forty-seven days—or one hundred and twenty, or three hundred and forty-seven!—and that it is a straight path leading backwards without the slightest break: colorless, insipid, senseless. Not a single landmark is visible. Months have passed like so many days; entire days pass by like minutes. Future time is terrifying. The present is heavy with torpor. Each minute may be marvelously—or horribly—profound. That depends to a certain extent on yourself. There are swift hours and very long seconds. Past time is void. There is no chronology of events to mark it; external duration no longer exists.

You know that the days are piling up. You can feel the creeping numbness, the memory of life growing weak. Burial. Each hour is like a shovelful of earth falling noiselessly, softly, on this grave.

The first day in a cell contains, in miniature, the months, years, decades which will follow till death, which may wait for you at the end, and whose terrors you live through more than once. The effects of living in a cell develop according to a constant curve: I tend to think that only their rhythm may vary among individuals.