Men in Prison (13 page)

“Listen! This is good!”

We were in two different exercise yards on either side of a dividing wall. Whenever the guard, making his rounds on the circular gallery above our heads, was down at the other end of the vast courtyard, we had a good thirty seconds to talk. “This is good!”

I could hear my neighbor laughing quietly on the other side of the wall.

“You’re listening? Yes? Well, your buddy B*** just killed the Chief of the Sûreté …
Oremus!”
⁵

I had heard nothing of “my buddy B***” for several months. All I knew was that they were hunting him down from hide-out to hide-out and that he would sell his skin dearly. The joyful voice put off my questions:

“That’s all I know, pal. One of the boys on the clean-up squad told me. They’re all laughing. They’re as happy as little women since they heard about it. Do you hear them every night, the girls?”

I heard them … The nights were beautiful, heavy, starry—those summer nights when you feel surrounded by all the warmth and primitive fervor of life. Only ten yards from our windows, under the heavy
branches of the chestnut trees, couples used to lurk in the darkness of the deserted street. And we often heard the piercing laughter of young women—that prolonged laughter which is a nervous reaction to the struggles, caresses, and uneasy games of desire.

“You hear them, right? … They sure in hell treat themselves to a good time, the bitches! …”

Then, as if to seal a mutual understanding based on a common joy linked to a common suffering, my neighbor concluded without any transition:

“… Anyway, it sure feels good to hear he got what was coming to him, the bastard.”

The ice had been broken. Our relations became friendly. A true
Apache,
our sad-faced clown was serving out his fourth sentence for theft: eighteen months, I think. The prosecution was preparing various other accusations against him. One two-year sentence was hanging over him, on appeal. At the end of all of this, nothing—except death, or a miracle. He believed—quietly, without fervor—in a miracle: escape. And he was prolonging “the pleasure” of being here, in the Santé Prison, dressed in threadbare denim, spending his days making paper fans, smoking on the sly now and then, getting letters from his “wife.”

“When they add all that up, you understand, I’ll get at least five years in Guiana. Once I get there, I’ll see if I can’t escape …”

“How much have you done already?”

“Eight months, pal, with nothing to eat …”

He earned a few centimes a day, which he spent on illegal tobacco. But three times a week I heard the mailman noisily unlocking his door and then I understood his silent joy, dissolving into a long, stifled laugh; his sad clown’s joy; the joy kindled by a little square of pink paper …

This joy brightened his dead-end existence so much that he finally confided in me. But not without first making sure he wouldn’t be opening any old wounds, causing any hurts (“you’ve got a wife too, right? … I hear the mailman every day when he comes to you … I says to myself: Only his woman would write him so often …”). He threw me a few of his precious letters over the wall in the exercise yard. They were written in a big, childish hand, and full of “my dear little man” and “your woman for life.”

The woman who wrote them wandered up and down Boulevard Sebastopol every day from five o’clock on, provocative and on the lookout. She knew her lover was a lost man. And she knew the score.

I made the acquaintance of two other neighbors, more conveniently, and less intimately. The guards sometimes give in to the pleadings of a man in isolation who is too weary of solitude, and allow him a yard companion during exercise period. It happened to me two or three times a year. In this way I met a neighbor from across the hall who intrigued me, a little old man, all white, spic and span, a little shabby, who looked a lot like the portraits of President Combes … When he learned I was an anarchist, he shook my hand effusively. In the “bear cage” he minutely observed the rules of a childlike and untainted courtesy. His tiny eyes, blue as motionless pools, fixed me with a watery stare while he rubbed his hands together and repeated, as if he were in a
salon:

“Delighted, Monsieur, truly delighted …”

This man, a dead ringer for “little papa Combes,” had been a lawyer and had known Prince Kropotkin and Pierre Martin at the time of the Lyons trial; their memory filled him with a respect which was, perhaps, under the circumstances, only politeness. Then, having gone into business, and after long years of financial speculations, he had brought down on himself a large number of suits for fraud, violations of corporation law, etc. The pretrial examination of his numerous cases had been going on for two years. He explained to me that, since he knew more about the legal Code, procedure, jurisprudence, the brief, petitions of appeal, and delaying tactics than anyone, he would be able to prolong it for at least a year longer.

“You understand, Monsieur, at my age you don’t like change. Here, at least, I’m left alone, I am respected. The Chief Warden is very nice. I get my food from a restaurant …”

He expected to be sentenced to five years—he only spoke of this guardedly—and he hoped to do at least half, of his time in the preventive-prison system and then to be let out on parole.

Years later, in another prison, I heard him mentioned as one of the cleverest men in France. I asked what had happened to him. They told me that he had died in prison before the end of his trial, but after having crowned his career with a last dazzling exploit. It seems this swindler was able to inspire such confidence in the Chief Warden that the latter, led on by the prospect of a “nice little investment,” entrusted him with his savings … The Chief Warden’s savings had naturally gone into buying white wine for the old charmer.

The other neighbor, whom I met the same way, was a rather tall gentleman with the bearing of an ex-officer. His chest was embellished by a broad, fan-shaped beard. But his face, pockmarked to the forehead, was dark, with sharp little black eyes. He was an ex-colonial official— he said—charged with embezzling and wearing unauthorized decorations, and he bore a historical name—a name admirably suited, in this century, to seduce the plebeian wealth of Yankee lard-and-leather heiresses. The occupant of Cell Number 24 (I believe), Tenth Division, was the last direct descendant of a crusader who had been King of Jerusalem and then Emperor of Constantinople; and of a Cardinal who had been Finance Minister under Louis XVI.

People generally don’t realize the place held by the old nobility in this world. On various lists of old offenders I have seen the name of the descendant of a Superintendent of Finance under Philip the Handsome.

Ah, the old families!

The pathological self-centeredness of men in confinement sometimes comes out in an almost unthinking manner. I remember one chance neighbor who called out to me in the exercise yard. That day I had entered my eighth month of confinement. “How long you been here?” his voice asked me.

“Eight months.”

The question, as it often happens, was asked only for propriety’s sake. You have to pretend to be interested in others before you can talk about yourself. But the essential thing is to talk about yourself. Me, me, me, do you understand,
I’ve
been here for …

On the other side of the wall the man gave out a sigh. A short pause; the guard was going by. Then feverish, with an inexpressible accent of suffering, the voice answered me:

“And me for eight days. Eight days already! It’s hard! … Eight days! Eight days! …”

“There are those,” I said, “who are doing eight years and who keep their mouths shut.”

Prisoners awaiting trial are not allowed to receive newspapers. Their correspondence is censored by the examining magistrate. It is forbidden to discuss anything but family matters. My communications with the outside world were extremely rare. But around me, even in jail, I could
sometimes feel the active, although invisible and silent, presence of a sort of freemasonry. When an event which might interest me took place on the outside, I learned of it first, thanks to this clandestine comradeship.

Two men I had known had just been killed: two magnificent rebels gone to waste. As morning soup was being distributed, a somber stare fell on me. Twenty minutes later, as I was passing my mess tin back through the Judas, a newspaper rolled up into a ball fell at my feet.

I felt I was reading news from another planet. There was fighting in Albania. The Montenegrins at Scutari. Monsieur Poincaré. Lord Grey. Wars, epidemics, catastrophes, governmental crises went on without causing the slightest perturbation in the smooth running of that perfect machine: prison.

There are silent encounters. One morning I found myself in an exercise yard whose wire-meshed side was turned toward the high window of a cell. I could see a man’s silhouette rather clearly in it; he was tall, bearded, well on in years, and he walked around his cage with rapid steps. Every half-minute he passed in front of the window again, without seeing me. His head was then visible in direct sunlight, in profile: a high forehead, somewhat receding; an arched nose; thick lips; a powerful face, but with something incomplete in the expression, like an involuntary confession of some weakness. He walked, but looked at nothing. Head lowered, he went on.

“Don’t you recognize him?” asked the guard who came to get me to take me back to my cell. “That’s T***, you know, the murderer …”

The murderer? (Since then, I have met many men with bloodied hands, and have learned they are no different from the others.) An ordinary murderer. The kind who slowly tightens his sinewy hands around the neck of an old woman so he can snatch the wad of bills from under a pile of worn, rough linen. I scrutinized that face, by chance a little more ravaged than the ordinary face, with a somewhat higher forehead, its tense muscles and deep lines betraying more concentrated power. The bearded face of an old tycoon with irons in every fire, the kind you meet in banks and in factories, surrounded by the din of work. To complete the resemblance, T*** stopped in front of his window, put on his pince-nez, and read over a letter. Our glances crossed, doubtless without his seeing me. His brown eyes were bewildered and absent, rather gentle: the sickly air of a man suffering migraine headaches.

⁵
See translator’s introduction.

ONLY ONE VISITOR CROSSES THE THRESHOLD OF THE CELL: THE ALMONER,
priest, minister, or rabbi. He brings the alms of his presence, the alms of his words and gestures. His faith matters no more than the belief or disbelief of the man in the cell. Guards and officials blend into the walls themselves, the Judases, bars and bolts. You feel in the marrow of your bones that they are no more than cogs in the prison machine. And this is reciprocal: Human beings no longer exist for them. Only such and such a number occupying such and such a cell. The cell counts, not the crowd of inmates, not man. This chaplain is a man. And not an enemy. He is interested only in man. His profession is oddly anachronistic. He is concerned with that undefinable
je ne sais quoi,
the soul.

“The soul?”—laughed an eighteen-year-old inmate, “Catholic” and totally agnostic—“I think it’s a dumping ground for the old blues.”

Those who declare themselves Catholics, Protestants, or Jews on arrival are visited by the chaplain of their faith. The cell door closes even more tomblike over the “freethinkers”: They see no one.

My agnosticism neither shocked nor surprised the Protestant chaplain, an old man of solid bearing and the appearance of a wealthy Huguenot. This pastor, a man of great kindness, open and broadminded, had been carrying on his disconcerting mission as prisoners’ chaplain and a prison official for perhaps a quarter of a century.

I remember his low voice, the heavy shaking of his head, his deep sigh when he said to me one gray afternoon:

“Many are those I have accompanied to the scaffold to hide it from them a few more seconds before the end, so that the last voice they would hear would be mine, crying: ‘May God help you!’ Many …”

The whole ambiguous duplicity of the chaplain’s calling was apparent to me here, as was the whole revolting sham of his function. Even more revolting because the man was sincere and kind, resigned to his
sacerdotal calling with that inner toughness that a social conscience gives to the intelligent bourgeois. The guillotine, doubtless, is not Christian. But the guillotine is necessary to the Christians. The death of Pierre Durand, at a predetermined hour, “by verdict of law,” on that seesaw plank, is a horrible thing. But the justice that commands that death is sacred. The pastor’s duty is to sympathize with Pierre Durand’s final anguish. His “social” duty is to make sure the guillotine functions properly. Christian compassion plays its part, as does the oiling of the blade.

Once a week, the chaplain comes over to the prison. His stomach lined with a good lunch, his hands in the pockets of a well-tailored overcoat, appropriate to the season, his mind occupied by the ordinary things of life, our chaplain crosses the city. On the way over, he is perhaps distracted by the display in a bookstore window, an elegant silhouette, the morning’s headlines, the stock-market quotations. In his mind he maps out his day:

Three to five o’clock, prison. Be at the editorial office of
Church Life
at 5:30 … 6:30 promised to call on such and such a lady …

He thinks, as he approaches the prison, that eighty men are waiting for him in their cells. Including: one condemned man who will not be pardoned; two or three who will probably be condemned; a dozen “lifers”; that little D*** who is so ill; B*** who is always lying and begging for favors; H*** who prays and scoffs; Z*** who is becoming more and more unhinged. The thought of all these sufferings which he sees and cannot relieve saddens the chaplain. Eighty! And the prison is so big. Five minutes to get from the Fifth Division to the Fourteenth. The chaplain is out of breath.

At the gatehouse, the chaplain shakes some jailers’ hands …