Men in Prison (19 page)

The work is paid by the day. Some of the typesetters are forced to produce a set number of jobs calculated to squeeze twelve straight hours of hard work out of them. Fortunately, most typesetting jobs can’t be parceled out that way. The print shop produces official forms for the Ministries of Colonial Affairs, Interior, Justice, and Health. It also produces scientific and statistical works in which future compilers, coming across the wildest imaginable errors, will stand in amused amazement at what the stupidity of colonial officials, combined with the malice of French convicts, can produce in the way of bizarre statistics. (“Reunion
Island. Marriages: women; 6; men, 6; total marriages, 12.” “Imports in Senegal: pianos, by the ton … ; ostrich feathers, in cubic yards …”)

“You see,” Gillet, the fat proofreader, explains to a neophyte, “a proofreader is not required to understand what he reads. He follows the copy. The copy is sacred …”

His ruddy, sprightly monk’s face opens into a smile:

“… especially when it’s pissed out by those idiots.”
(He hums to himself.)
“And we don’t give a damn, fa-la-la-la … Get it?”

We also set up the “wanted” circulars for the police, which keeps us more or less up-to-date on unpunished crimes and their probable penalties. Convicts’ hands carefully align the routine abbreviated description and anthropometric photo of next year’s convict who is still, at this very hour, hanging around the bars of Ménilmontant, fear in his belly. The women’s faces—those strange, sometimes empty, sometimes drawn, sullen or desperate faces of prostitutes and shoplifters, distorted by the police photographer—have secret charms for men in prison. They often steal the proof sheets off the presses to cut out a photo, the portrait of an unknown wanted woman (merely a name linked to the description of a crime:
Marie Chevrillon, 22 years old, thefts),
whose name matters little but who has lovely eyes, widened by fear and confusion, and the lips of a child. Back in his dormitory cell, a man, prey to the most human of all obsessions, will gaze endlessly, night after night, at this mysterious portrait which he carries carefully hidden in his clothes, in spite of the searches. And I doubt that Gainsborough’s most charming portraits, or the mystery of Mona Lisa, have ever stirred such inexpressible passions in the depths of the human heart or flesh than these harsh portraits have aroused in the minds of these often perverted convicts.

We also set up the green lists of deserters and draft evaders, the yellow lists of persons expelled from the country, the white lists of three-time losers. The number of crimes, miseries, and sordid struggles which flow inexorably through our captive hands is like the number of the stars …

You earn from 50 centimes to 2.75 francs a day working in the print shop.
⁷
The administration holds back six tenths of this salary (more, in the case of prisoners with a record). Of the remaining four tenths, two are earmarked for canteen expenses, which allow the prisoner to supplement his diet, and two for the savings he will receive when he leaves.

A few francs are set aside in the very beginning: the sum required, in case of death, to pay for a coffin. The first duty of the damned is to pay for his own coffin …

It’s not always easy. Somewhere there is a rope-weaving shop, where they earn a few centimes a day at the very most. This work is reserved for old men. I sometimes see the rope-weaving crew march by: a dozen old, broken marionettes dragging their wooden shoes, dirty, stiff, bent, gnarled, with mummified faces, hairy nostrils, moist eyes, hands like dried roots. There is one who marches along erect, greasy cap over one ear, his gaunt body bearing a little crimson head with beak-nose on which a drop is hanging: and still, glassy, eyes. (“A hayseed. He set fire to his neighbor’s barns. Eight years.”) They are sixty to seventy years old and have five, ten, and fifteen years to do. The last in their line is a monster: the Spider. Back twisted, body bowed, legs turned, bent wide apart, his two bizarrely outstretched arms leaning on two canes, this old man, like a lightning-struck tree, made entirely of broken and badly mended bones, crawls along vigorously at the end of the human caterpillar. They say he will never leave this place alive (as if the others were about to leave!). His crime is unknown. Some peasants smashed his limbs with pitchforks and shovels …

A dialogue in the first-aid room:

“When you croak, you dirty old beast,” says the orderly who dresses the dead, “there’ll be some job! We’ll have to break up your arms and legs again to get you into the coffin!”

The Spider’s blackish mouth, lined with horrible stumps, spits out a whole litany of insults like drool, ending with a snicker:

“… and don’t worry, you’ll croak ahead of me.” (He didn’t know the truth of his words: I saw that orderly die.)

The old men wait for the end as they slowly plait the heavy ropes with their swollen fingers. A stench of filth and organic decomposition surrounds them. Sometimes a young prisoner coming out of the hole is put in with them.

⁷
Wartime figures.

EVERYONE MAKES HIS OWN NICHE IN THE WORKSHOP, FURNISHES IT AND FIXES
it up. The typesetters have the use of a shelf under the type fonts. They add a stool, a cardboard box for type characters, and a little shelf for soap. Dillot, the seminarist, who killed his brother after endless quarreling over a two-thousand-franc inheritance, has made himself a sort of altar out of holy images from breviaries. During the fifteen-minute noon break, he bows his sharp profile over a tiny Sacred Heart of Jesus, turns his eyes away from the world, and prays. My neighbor and good pal, Guillaumet—a jolly hooligan whose Mediterranean good humor almost never leaves him (“When my six years are up”—a broad wink here—“I’ll still have fifteen good years left! and I know how to live, you know!”)—told me with the air of a connoisseur:

“He gets nuttier and nuttier. Wait and see what happens next.”

Another neighbor lives in a strange squalor. He is right in front of me. Whenever I raise my eyes above the type font, I see his naked cranium dotted with dirty-gray hairs around the neck, his greenish skull, livid at the temples. Sometimes I see Dubeux in profile: white-lipped and cadaverous. His movements are slow, mortally slow. He never sits down or rests. He has never tried to communicate with anyone. When you brush by him, he turns on you slowly with a totally inexpressive greenish gaze. At noon, he cuts his black bread into identical little rectangles, lines them up in front of him, and eats them one after the other, motionless, without reading, staring straight ahead or at the ground. His mechanical gestures remind you of a robot. Once a rascal filled his shoes with glue: He’s been trailing the same nauseating odor after him for months now. People who pass close by him sometimes give him an elbow in the ribs or whisper obscene insults into his ear, just to see the stupid look in his dirty-green eyes and the slow muttering of his pale lips. They say that he had a small income, that he murdered a woman in
a bawdyhouse and that there is a pair of pink silk panties in his bundle at the registry which he would never let out of his sight … These are perhaps only legends, but I can very well imagine this blanched little man entering a close-shuttered house with his robot’s step, breathing his murderous breath into a terrified woman’s face, killing her with those inevitable, automatic gestures that emanate from the depths of his mechanical soul.

“You’re too thin,” Guillaumet told me. “Get a grip on yourself. Don’t mess around! You have three months to react. If you’re O.K. at the end of the third, and I see you have guts, you’ll pull through. Now, to start off, you better stuff yourself and relax. Here’s a bootleg book. Don’t get pinched with it; it’ll cost you two weeks in the hole and it’ll be bad for the club. And here’s a cheese someone sent you.”

Much, much later, he reminded me of that conversation: “You were so skinny, you see, you looked so beat that some of the boys were saying you wouldn’t live the six months for the gravedigger’s pint of wine …”

Every time someone is buried, the gravedigger, a lucky member of the clean-up squad, marches over to the cemetery and gets a pint of wine for his pains.

“Me, I bet on you. I won. We’ll beat ‘em!”

I, too, learned how to probe the faces and hearts of newcomers.
I know
if they are going to live. I know when they will supply that extra pint of wine for the lucky gravedigger. I never make a mistake: Their death is revealed to me long before they themselves see it coming. I can’t explain this intuition. I pick it up in their glances, from the way their hands rest on the marble where the frames are tightened before being placed on the presses, from the bent of their heads, the curve of their shoulders, their way of walking. I read death in them with an awful clarity I would like to deny, to reject by force of will, but which is there, too strong to be brushed aside. Guérin, for example. He was a rather cultivated, polite man, a small rural landlord convicted of arson. Six years. He claimed to be innocent, but his preoccupied stare and the hard line of his mouth gave him away. His complexion was healthy; he seemed only sad. You had to be sharp to pick up the signs of his weariness, his resignation, his dejection over time passing by. His spring had snapped. He died in six months, simply, as he was destined to die.

I have felt death struggling in others, like a dark bird flapping its wings but unable to take flight. There was one youth whose beautiful
wide eyes and deep purple lips must have excited many passions: We sometimes used to meet at the cutting bar, where typesetters shave down leads and space lines. From the beginning, he had the long, slender hands and weak wrists of someone who won’t last. And the pale ears too, and the girlish neck where a blue vein stood out … Those dark wings! Then one day our glances met; we exchanged a few insignificant words, without moving our lips; I could feel a hardness growing up in him; I noticed his hand, which had become more sinewy, one of those hands which grips and holds on to things.

“What’s up?” Guillaumet asked me when I returned to my place. “Does life look so rosy to you today?”

I was smiling at the thought that there would be one less dead man this year.

These were not the tricks of a disordered imagination, but the results of keen observations, too complex to be analyzed, as well as of an inner experience confirmed many times over. I was sometimes afraid of dying within these walls, when I thought of the slow-passing seasons, of the mysterious epidemics that would pass among us, of the inexorable statistics which revealed the same percentage of deaths year after year: It would have been easy to estimate your chances, but at bottom this would be an almost entirely false estimate. I was sometimes afraid, but I knew very well that I would live. And I have seen some astonishing cases of conscious resistance to disease.

The chief proofreader, Lemerre, was a swarthy little man. All of his movements, even all the folds in his clothes, were in sharp right angles. His low forehead was narrow, hard, and jutting. His face was made of three straight lines: the dark line of the eyebrows; the dark, thin line of the mouth; the perpendicular line of the nose. A meticulous, stiff, distant man, I judged him to be firm, very sure of himself, and perfidious. A pharmacist’s assistant at the age of twenty, Lemerre had poisoned his boss in the hope of marrying the widow. A mature, calculated crime, aimed at opening his way to a bourgeois existence. A number of stays of execution had kept him from the guillotine and resulted in twenty years at hard labor, which he was serving out in the penitentiary. I met him in his tenth year. He had been turning around this mill for ten years with the same firm, resolute step, never doubting his own strength. The weight of those twenty years didn’t break him. Bent over the same galleys in a tiny office choked with lead dust for the past eight years, his
lungs were being eaten away by tuberculosis. Every year, in the spring, Lemerre coughed blood. Every year, those who didn’t know him well expected him to die. He was made to drink huge quantities of creosote. When the early warmth forced the first buds to open on the shrubs in the yard, and we began to march with a lighter step, raising our heads toward the fresh blue of a sky flecked with soft white tufts, turning in circles to the tramp of wooden shoes in those rounds known as exercise walks, in those days when so much pain was mingled with so much hope in us, Lemerre would have coughing fits and nightly fevers. The infirmary would greet him as an old friend, in a cell on that terrible fourth floor from which few have ever returned. He would spend six weeks there and then reappear, “patched up again,” having carried off one more victory against the disease—his narrow, hard, jutting forehead a little heavier, a little harder, his stubborn soul a little surer of itself …

One morning we were stupefied to learn that he had died during the night.

“Lemerre? You’re sure it’s Lemerre? It’s not possible,” repeated Guillaumet incredulously.

At noon a wad of paper thrown near our feet cleared things up. It was not Lemerre who had died, but Lamarre, the lithographer—an overimaginative businessman who had thought of a way to insure and sell nonexistent shipments—a man generally in good health who had been carried off in a few days by dysentery. Guillaumet said:

“Lamarre, I can understand. But Lemerre couldn’t die like that.”

Someone else remarked:

“Poor bastard! He was no sicker than anybody else! It’s no joke! But as for Lemerre, impossible.”

When I left Lemerre, in his fifteenth year of confinement, he said he was feeling “much better.”

GUILLAUMET LOVES HIS NICHE, OUR ROW OF BENCHES WHICH MUST BE KEPT
in perfect order, his good pals he can spot at a distance, this workshop (“the best in the joint”), even this prison (“the best in France”). In a strange way, hatred and habit bind a man to his chain. I myself, months after jail had turned me loose, lying on a dazzling Mediterranean beach, suddenly felt haunted by the memory of my long passage through the “Mill” that grinds up men. I let my head fall into my hands, I closed my eyes. Once again I saw the workshop, the yards where our files of woe-stricken men turned in endless circles, the faces, so many faces; I saw it all again, my heart heavy with a feeling of loss, pity and regret. And isn’t it a kind of fascination mixed with pain that makes me write this book? Old chains which have tortured us dig so deeply into our flesh that their marks become a part of our being, and we love them because they are in us.