Men in Prison (22 page)

Men from the kitchen squad go up and down along the benches with heavy wine pitchers, cool and dark inside. You are allowed to treat yourself—if you can pay—to a half pint of wine a day. Those who can’t are jealous of the others.

The mess halls used to be part of an old convent: white rooms, with barred windows and tight rows of school desks and benches on either side. We eat in rows, one behind the other: a mournful battalion lined up with our bodies caught at the waist in a kind of rough wooden trap. Each man has a sort of grimy drawer in front of him, under the plank he uses as a table, where he leaves his bread and his fork and spoon, which are never washed. You wipe them as well as you can on a hunk of bread. The utensils stink. Some have been filthy for years. Why be civilized? The need for nourishment is the most basic of our needs. We can eat the most disgusting slops under the filthiest conditions and live. To live is to think. Look at Ruelle’s hideous hands with their ornamentation of bluish scars. Guzzle your slops of bread and greasy water and dream of “the eternal axiom which is pronounced at the supreme summit of things.” Would you dream about it with the same fervor if there were pure hands here reminding you of the luminous splendor of existence? Eat like a pig, but think.

Whatever scraps are left in the kitchen cauldrons are given out on the spot. “Seconds, seconds?” call the men on the kitchen squad: bare arms, dirty hands, strong sweat. The whole table’s mess tins are thrown one into another and sometimes tossed all together into the liquid mash for faster service.

We take our exercise, after leaving the mess hall, in the courtyard, by workshops. Our broad, paved courtyard, divided by grassy plots and enriched by a few bushes, is one of the best. One end is blocked off by the dormitory cell block, with its four stories of narrow barred windows cut into gray stone. But at the other end, above the low buildings of the registry, we can see a row of old poplars. The wind bends their dark branches back and fills them with a sound like waves beating against a beach: Then they spring back swiftly. This simple landscape, set off from an ordinary pale-blue sky, across which scuttle heavy white clouds or milky mists, has for years symbolized all landscapes to me. I greet it every day. I have dreamed poems to these trees, wild and sullen in the cold November rains like helmeted heroes fighting against destiny: svelte and golden in the April sun like proud youths on the brink of some heroic enterprise. I love the variety embedded in their unity, which singles them out to the eye even as they blend together. I imagine them in summer, filled with the peeping of birds and the labor of insects; but distance confers on them that majestic, swaying immobility, that harmony of color and form which must mirror that of the universe.
There is a sea-breeze coolness in their murmuring when the heat beats down on us, turning round and round under the implacable sun (“a sun like a blackjack on your head”) to the sharp-hammered rhythm of wooden clogs against the pavement. In the evening they seem to sigh like waves, bringing a fresh wind of life from the open spaces toward which I yearn from my dark cell. I know they line the bank of a lazy river which I have never seen, yet could trace in my mind …

The line of men turns around the courtyard like a string of sausages to a military beat. We walk in silence, Indian file, a yard apart, describing symmetrical arabesques around the dreary grass plots. The resulting pattern approximates the shape of a cross. At each branch of the cross a guard is stationed to keep the men in line, silent, and in step. Seen from the infirmary windows, there is no stranger spectacle than that of men strung out like beads on a rosary, in never ending circles, without ever advancing, in a senseless ritual. The guards call out the cadences in turn, aloud: “One, two—one, two …” When “Duck Feet,” a nice plump old fellow with a waddling gait and an old woman’s voice, drops the count, then “Spike Chin,” his
képi
crushed down over one ear, his jaws huge and snarling, explodes into hoarse shouts at the other end of the court: “A-one, a-twooo, a-one, a-twooo.” He harasses our wretched line, snapping at our heels. “In step, Dubeux!” Dubeux, aghast, is decidedly out of step. “In step, I tell you, goddamn it!” The strings holding up this green-faced puppet seem to snap all at once; if he doesn’t fall down right there, like a limp rag, it is because he is carried on by the line, one hundred men in front, one hundred men (the same) behind, inseparable. “Two—hep!—hep!” The cadence is picked up, farther on, by the guttural voice of “The lap,” not a bad fellow, who always seems to be making fun of our grotesque round.

Everybody has his own way of marching: brisk, straggling, listless, or heavy. There is an infinite variety of shapes under the uniform dress. Heads erect, caps smart, or shoulders rounded, elbows flapping; the awkward gait of city urchins, the rhythmic tread of old tramps, the haughty stiffness of Meslier, who seems to wear invisible epaulettes on his threadbare denim. March, men! March. One, two. One, two. There is no end to the round. There is no end to time. There is no end to crime. There is no end to misery. There is no end to the reign of the swine.

I have made my way at least two thousand four hundred times through that eternal round which has continued, starting and stopping, for something like a half century. Slowly, one by one, the beads of that
endless human chain are replaced, through the process of life and death. Yet the infernal round is one of the things of this earth upon which time has the least effect. Perhaps Western man must give birth to an entirely new destiny before this absurd circle can be broken.

Gilles, who took liberties in jail, would sometimes wait for me as the line went around in order to whisper me the news. He appeared suddenly before me one morning at the corner of one of the branches of the moving cross formed by our steps: extremely tall, his face a gray mask, hard bitterness in his clenched teeth. He raised his arm, slowly, to his neck, and pressed the edge of his hand against it for a moment. The hammering of wooden clogs exploded suddenly in my ears. On the next turn around, Gilles had his one hand half-hidden in his tunic: Three fingers, sharply outlined, were sticking out. Three. Three fallen heads. I answered “yes” with a blink of the eyes—something heads have been observed to do in sinister experiments. On the third turn around, Gilles was able to say a word:

“Bravely.”

One year later; the same time of day; the round continued. Gilles reappeared at the same spot with the same ashy mask:

“Jaurès …”

The round carried me on. Those barred windows. A flash of sunlight crowned the poplars with faint gold. The Spider dragged himself, leaning on his two canes, toward the urinary. One hundred and twenty seconds. The path of the human rosary brought me back toward the man whose lips were still sealed over their terrible secret,

“… assassinated,” continued Gilles.

EVENING COMES, FOR EVEN THE LONGEST AND HEAVIEST HOURS EVENTUALLY
plunge into eternity. The sensation of falling softly, slowly, into the amorphous gray depths of the void. Even suffering loses its sharpness, becoming as insensible as decay eating through bone. The occasional cry of despair or madness fades away into the gloom. Our round turns within a void. We have been falling through the void for years, turning in circles. Vertigo. Here is the evening at last: nausea.

The strands of human beads twine rhythmically through the courtyards. If it is summer, the sky is still bright over our heads, vast and calm; if winter, the stars—or the shadows—ignore us. Two long parallel strands meet at the doors of the dormitory cell block, wind up the iron stairs, and line up, bead by bead, before the cell doors. A guard hurries through the galleries counting the motionless puppets standing at attention.

The bolts of the cell door have groaned. Here I am, alone, suddenly still. Or is it only an illusion? The round goes on. The hours fall; our lives fall in a spiraling gyre through the gray abyss: nausea. I am alone in a numbered sepulcher. Third floor, Number 171. Three yards deep by two yards wide. A tiny barred window, hardly more than a slit: but I can see the sky. Chalky whiteness. The cot is monastic. A thin mattress over iron, coarse sheets, gray wool blanket, bedding folded every morning in regulation manner. Being up after the bell is prohibited. About seven minutes for walking in this narrow sepulcher. The sky is fading slowly this evening. My poplars are humming. And now the pale, emerald-tinted azure turns beautifully limpid. If, after so many horrible days, there was only this instant of contemplation, standing before this rectangle of infinitude, hung on the border of day and night, wouldn’t life be worth living? I would like to answer: No. Be tough! You’re kidding yourself. This moment of vain exaltation redeems nothing. But
my whole being cries out the contrary. I can understand that the leper wants to live, his face eaten away, his hands rotting. I can understand that Lamblin, bald at thirty, with his poor, red, albino rabbit’s eyes, Lamblin, condemned for life, marching through the round for the past fifteen years without the slightest hope, wants to live,
even like this.
I can understand that Fla-Fla, the idiot, who shakes with hysterical laughter every thirty seconds (“She is there, there, there,” he says, with an obscene gesture, when you ask him about his laughter), that even Fla-Fla, if he suddenly understood what death is, that everything will be over, would cry out in terror, because he wants to live, to live, even he. I can understand that they are right: From the depths of their misery, they justify me, as much as the incredible delicacy of the June sky. I am not a coward. One must live. Be tough! Brace up under your burden …

Every day at the same moment, waiting in front of my cell door for the end of evening roll call, the same thought draws me slightly forward toward the railing of the third-floor gallery. One leap, a few rapid movements—one second—a fall of perhaps a tenth of a second: about forty feet, a thud, a sharp red pain—skull smashing on the tile floor— perhaps a dull black pain—bones cracking—and the round would cease, time would be vanquished. Giddy temptation.

You can read for a few moments in your cell. You can stare at your secret portrait, copied in pencil by Fuller, hidden under your shirt for fear of the evening search. You can, between two rounds of the guards, ears straining, smoke a cigarette, slowly, the better to savor it and to make sure the odor is dispersed. You can, stretched out on your cot, unfold the shred of the
Petit Parisien
picked up by a man on the maintenance squad in the guard’s lavatory:
“PEACE CONCLUDED BETWEEN TURKEY AND SERBIA.”
So there was another war in the Balkans? You can open and read over a
brifeton,
a message scribbled by a comrade or friend, confidences, secrets …

Night falls. A lantern at the foot of the courtyard wall throws a pale patch of light, striated by the shadows of the bars, on the ceiling of my cell. Closer, an electric bulb hanging somewhere in the galleries makes a stranger, sharper pattern, superimposed on the first. The cool freshness of solitude; a fresh bath of calm; slowly, I am cleansed of the day’s dust, ashes, and mud. How vast the night is! The purity of space comes through the window in great waves and bathes my brow. Faraway train whistles. Gleaming fails, signal lights, stations, a peaceful provincial square in the evening, the lights of a café, a couple embracing
on the doorstep of an old house. Man and woman … A cry ascending into the night, nearby: “Sentinel, how, goes the watch?” The sudden denseness of a heavy drop of silence. The echo, farther off: “Sentinel, how goes the watch?” A drop of silence, an echo.

I think of power. I extend my free hands into the aerial night. Am I not unbelievably free? Everything has been taken from me. I am chained to the Mill. All that remains to me is to end my life, if I want, by a leap over the railing. I can do it if I wish. It is within my power. No one could stop me.

The world I carry within me has a crystal sphere as its symbol: fullness, perfection. I am free because nothing more can be done to me. Chained to the wall by a circle of iron, I will know how to close my eyes, without a whimper. Let necessity run its course; I am all assent. I have divided the world into two parts: chains, things—and my very flesh, which is a thing—are in
your
power. The crystal sphere, my will, my lucidity, my freedom are irrevocably mine.

I think of the mystery of time’s passage. There are minutes and hours which have no end: the eternity of the instant. There are many empty hours: the vacuity of time. There are endless days; and weeks which pass without leaving the least memory behind them, as if they had never been. I cannot distinguish the years that are behind me. Time passes within us. Our actions fill it. It is a river: steep banks, a straight path, colorless waves. The void is its source, and it flows into the void. We, who build our cities on its banks, are the ones who raise dikes against it, who color its waves with the beacons upraised in our hands, or with our blood. Time could not exist outside of my thought. It is whatever I make it. The instant which I fill with light is priceless, like a ray of light from a star which shines for eternity through the space it illuminates. The empty hours and days which I yield to dead things have no more existence than shadows … My very dream is the surest reality.

Stretched out on my cot, like a dead man in his shroud (I even like to cross my hands over my chest, like a dead man), eyes open under the pale flickers of the ceiling, I rediscover, I invent, under the crushing weight of the gray stones of the jail, the beliefs which were the refuge and the greatness of enslaved peoples for thousands of years.

The night grows deeper: My thought begins to falter. Notice how the inner flame flickers. Here, on the edge of sleep, comes the poisoned moment. A familiar obsession begins to filter through your veins. You can feel it in all your limbs. Memory again becomes a torture. Is it the
city, with all its intersections brightly lit at this hour? Your home bathed in the golden circle of a lamp? the sharp scent of the earth after rain? an innocent, smiling child threatened by the unknown? a woman you desire uncontrollably? Those who have love driven into their hearts pay dearly for it, writhing on their mattresses as on a bed of thorns, ravaged by obsessive jealousy, devastated by the fear of death (for the lives of loved ones seem more fragile than a miracle in this place). Anguish. Lucidity. Madness. The flesh of six hundred males screams in the silence …