Men in Prison (14 page)

Whenever he hears the sudden clang of the doors being unlocked, the stoop-shouldered boy with the jaundiced face of a sick fox who occupies Cell Number 8–6 feels his heart beating anxiously. The chaplain has just read his card in the file: “nineteen years old, theft. Breaking and entering.” The name is unfamiliar. Sad. Let’s go in. The hunted man, in his cage, gives an embarrassed greeting. Then he asserts that he is innocent. Innocent. That he is hungry: dying of hunger, the soup is nothing but water. That his father and mother no longer recognize him as their son. That he is without news of his wife, who has had a miscarriage. He is gentle. “I can’t go on,” he says, smiling, “it’s too
much all at once.” It’s true, all too true. Between the two men hangs an invisible balance, and with each little phrase the weights of suffering fall on the guilty man’s side, keep on falling. The chaplain can do nothing. Theft with breaking and entering, he thinks: five years’ confinement; with extenuating circumstances, two years of prison. And the disciplinary battalions in Africa, in all probability.

“Would you like a Bible, my son?”

Oh! Yes! the nineteen-year-old-theft-with-breaking-and-entering wants a Bible, a book, a fat book.

“Read the
Book of Job.
He, too, thought he was abandoned even by God …”

The nineteen-year-old-theft-with-breaking-and-entering will read the
Book of Job.
But the chaplain, knows very well, deep down, that if the Almighty led Job out of captivity and blessed him until “he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses,” and “he had also seven sons and three daughters,”

“… and after this lived Job a hundred and forty years,”

“… and died, being old and full of days,” as is written in Chapter XLII, Verses 12, 13, 16, and 17 of the Holy Writ—this poor bastard here is poorer than Job, and no one will shorten his suffering by a day …

The next cell smells bad. The man who coughs in it never opens the window. Very clean, nonetheless, ageless, impassive, as if withdrawn from his own life. An undeniable murderer on his way to the scaffold. The matter is closed. His deepest concern is for his soul. Before this door had closed on him, he never even suspected he had a soul. He hardly ever thought. Gambling, the races, women, Mitzi (whose throat he neatly cut one night with a razor). Now he prays a great deal. His eyes have grown larger, round, shadowy, glassy.

“I go up in two weeks,” he says this time.

The chaplain understands the allusion to the next session of the criminal court. With his long experience, he is able to calculate fairly accurately the number of days this man has left to live: there are the three days allowed for filing an appeal, the examination of the appeal, the appeal for clemency to the President of the Republic, the time necessary to prepare the execution. It’s now April; all of that will bring us up to July … This calculation is rapidly traced in the chaplain’s brain. He rests his firm, ruddy hand on the shoulder of the man-who-will-be-guillotined:

“Would you like it if we prayed together for you, my friend?”

Eighty! The chaplain won’t be able to see more than thirty today. In two hours, subtracting the time needed to get around the prison, that leaves three minutes and thirty seconds for each visit. At five o’clock the chaplain goes away. At five o’clock, Pirard, Marcel, who is “going crazy” from being alone, suddenly feels crushed, overwhelmed by the idea that the chaplain will not come to see him today, that no one will come for another week. Why—yes, why—did they refuse this evening to give Pirard, Marcel, this last sacrament: three minutes and thirty seconds of human presence?

Twice a month, on Sunday morning, the minister conducts a service. The prison has a rudimentary church, Protestant chapel, and synagogue: everything that is necessary to render unto God what is God’s. The Protestant chapel is cellular in construction, and this invention simultaneously brings the science of prisons and the practice of religion to a remarkable degree of perfection.

There is a semicircle composed-of several successive rows of cells. A man is placed in each of these compartments, divided from one another by oak partitions. They make you think of vertical coffins. All you can see in front of you are the pastor’s pulpit and the two back windows. In one of these windows you can make out the corner of a window ledge. Birds come and perch there. Life! At the foot of the pulpit, looking bored, stands the guard on duty.

The pastor speaks of the Holy Writ and of terrestrial matters to his strange flock of pale men, each motionless in his cell. He sometimes quotes Saint Paul’s words, quite appropriate in front of these starving sometime criminals (“Sloth is the mother of all the vices”):
He who does not work shall not eat!
His bass voice is deep; and what he says about the divine legend strikes deeply into these minds unhinged by a hellish existence; what he says about bourgeois morality touches the minds of these unlucky, defeated men to the very quick. Others go to chapel in order to pass a “telegram” from hand to hand: “to Number Seven in the row, look out—, and don’t get nabbed!” The latter keep their faces silent in respectful hypocrisy. Their hands joined, they bow their heads during the prayer.

“Our Father who art in heaven! Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven …”

On the way out, someone murmurs:

“Go on, you windbag! You get plenty to eat!”

Back from the chapel.

My neighbor, the sad-faced clown, finds a blackish bucket in front of his door. A filthy rag, provided for washing the floor, is floating in it. This hygienic ritual is a dominical affair in our corner of the prison. The bucket gets slimier and slimier as it passes from cell to cell. You drag the nauseating rag across the floor with both hands, while it shreds apart and blackens any water. For long hours afterwards, the dampness seeps through your clothes, making shivers run up your spine.

Obedient ciphers, we wait in front of our doors for the “screw” to come along and lock us up. My, neighbor bends over the bucket, looks up at me and says, mocking:

“‘Our Father who art in heaven …’ He’s a nice guy, the Father! Bastard!”

DEATH’S MULTIPLE PRESENCE
. T
OTAL HELPLESSNESS BEFORE A FATE AS IMPLAC
able as the end. Sharpened perception of time’s flight; consciousness of death. The will to live weakens. Depression tortures the tired brain. The huge weight of a life sentence; the near-certain premonition of dying here. Finally, the ultimate torture of those condemned to die.

Whenever a man is guillotined the knife descends slowly, grazing thousands of bent, expectant necks. The prostrate multitude feel a shiver of terror tinged with defiance and perverse attraction.

I have seen a Paris crowd gather around an intoxicating and revolting execution. The hum of the night streets had grown more and more quiet, more and more uneasy in the dismal boulevards surrounding the prison, till, in the darkness, it collided, like a front consisting of thousands of livid faces, with the lines of troops. Bizarre revelers arrived by automobile. Under the street lamps, urchins with queer, mocking grins traced the gesture of decapitation in the air. Bewildered crowds of workers and young intellectuals were jostled, divided, dispersed, forced back in disorder by the black wedges of cavalry or police charges as they nursed their impotent anger in bitter idleness. Many couples exchanged vague caresses. You could see them getting out of limousines parked at the edge of deserted streets, where the expectation of the execution was no more than a rhythmic humming, rising and falling like the tide at the foot of a cliff. What cliff of implacable cold stone did the tide of this crowd beat against: death or prison? You could see them arriving in groups and bunches from the poor working-class suburbs and from the depths of the slums—la Bastille, la Chapelle, Charonne, Montmartre and Montparnasse—pimps and hookers, a world of victims liberated only by the knowledge that sometimes victims take revenge.

Dawn broke amid violent disorders, amid the cadenced cries of
Murderers! Murderers!
doubtless echoed—but with a profound feeling
of being the righteous ones at last—by murderers standing in the darkness of their cells behind the bars of the Santé Prison. Pointless scuffles sent the police charging furiously into the crowd. At long intervals pistol shots rang out, spreading general panic and private joy. People ran off, shouting: “A cop got hit …” Slender young women—perhaps nothing more than overgrown girls, with scarves around their necks—eyed the soldiers, their hands resting heavy on their rifles near the arms depots: “Would you shoot at us?” Some of them answered calmly: “Of course!”; others murmured: “Never”; still others turned their dark faces away and grumbled: “What the Hell!” Dawn came up. We saw nothing, except for a whitish tinge which appeared indistinctly at the end of the boulevard above the waves of heads in the jagged foliage of the treetops. We did not hear the rumble of the car from which the condemned man emerged, half-naked, shivering, furious, desperate, alive, horribly alive in every ganglia of his brain, in every fiber of his nervous system. He shouted out his innocence, a macabre joke which no one understood among the guilty men lined up around the scaffold who represented the social mechanism behind Dr. Guillotin’s philanthropic machine. He appeared like a phantom among the concerns of pathetic, respectable people—appeared and disappeared, in a rapid movement of the seesaw plank, ending in the double fall: the still-thinking head with wide-open eyes falling into the basket, and the thick stream of warm blood falling onto the pavement of the boulevard, where someone had sprinkled a little sand as a precaution. None of us—the crowd—saw it with our own eyes; but at the exact moment we all had, more or less clearly, the same inner vision. I remember the pallor which suddenly spread over everybody’s face, the lips turning blue, the clamor which suddenly spread its huge dark wings over us and over the city, the fury in our chests—the collective feeling of the blade’s fall.

In Paris, every traveler approaching that end spends the last stage of his journey in the light-colored cells (the one I was in was painted iron-gray) of the Maximum Security section.

A sign over the door:

“Twenty-four-hour surveillance.”

Every five minutes the round “eye” cut into the Judas blinks its metal eyelid; a human eye glows within it, rests impassively for a moment on the condemned man. In the cell, nothing. The rough pottery bowl in
which, in other cells, you can wash your face with cool water, is forbidden. The blunt iron penknife you used to be able to buy for three
sous
at the prison store is forbidden. Forbidden is the milk bottle which might be used to knock out a guard or, broken, provide a liberating piece of sharp glass to open your veins. The condemned man changes his clothes when he arrives there: the first stage in dressing the victim for the slaughter. I once caught a glimpse of a young comrade returning from court after being convicted. His hair had just been shaved off; his “civilian” clothes formed a dark pile on the tile floor. Fitted out in old denim worn through at the elbows and knees, his arms dangling, slow tears making perpendicular stripes down his lifeless face, he was staring stupidly at that patch of dark cloth at his feet …

Isolation is even more complete in Maximum Security. No more chance meetings during exercise period. The cell door is hardly ever open at the same moment as another. A guard unlocks it; the condemned man, wearing carpet slippers, finds a pair of wooden shoes (rarely his size) at his doorstep. Three paces away, the guard who is to accompany him is waiting. At the end of the corridor, the guard who watches the door leading to the exercise yards. Three pairs of eyes.

The electricity is always left on and burns dully in the middle of the ceiling and in the middle of the sleepless prisoner’s insomniac brain. His vague thoughts and nightmares flutter around the incandescent platinum wire until fatigue carries him off.

Almost no graffiti. A scratching, almost level with the floor, hidden, mysterious:
Antoine, guillotined on …
No date!

Death is perhaps the most
natural
of punishments; it is everywhere in nature. For the swimmer’s recklessness, the mountaineer’s false step, man’s duel against the tiger in the jungle, his longer duel against cold, hunger, the universe, she permits no other sanction than this—at once the first, and the ultimate one. The death penalty is perhaps the most
human
of punishments in two profound senses of the word. First, because men, for millennia—thus distinguishing themselves from the animals—have made daily use of it, clan against clan, tribe against tribe, city against city, state against state, society against society. The
Thou shalt not kill
of the Decalogue—in the laconic simplicity of its truncated text— is a vulgar lie. No one ever really thinks it. The moral law has always been:
Thou shalt not kill thy brother
in the tribe, the city, the nation or class, and it has always been completed by another imperative, no less
categorical:
Thou shalt kill
the man of the other tribe, the other city, the other nation, the other class! It is also the most
human
because it cuts short all suffering. On this last point, modern civilization has arrived at a rather paradoxical refinement in cruelty. Just as it counts on fully exploiting the capacity of poor devils, goaded by hunger, to work, so it counts on the will of prisoners to live. Often, then, society, with calculating, hypocritical sentimentality, prefers life sentences—which death alone ends, as a rule, after long years of torture—to the death penalty. Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland lock up their “worst” criminals for life. France and Germany grant a pardon to certain condemned men by commuting their sentence to life imprisonment—worse, in reality, than death. A great French lawyer who had earned a reputation for chivalry during the Dreyfus Affair, once proposed abolishing the death sentence and replacing it with “six years of absolute solitary confinement,” six years’ dreadful seclusion, six years of marching through the darkness toward inevitable madness and death! The mailed fist smashing into a skull is no more cruel, in itself, than any act of war—and many acts of peace. It is less so, to judge by the
quantity
of suffering and death inflicted, than that of the shrewd businessman who, through a lucky speculation in coal, brings about a rise in price of three
sous
a hundredweight that will cause the deaths of a few hundred paupers’ children in the metropolis before the end of winter.