Men in Prison (28 page)

“Thief! Thief! old vulture! Ah, I’ve caught you now, you old bastard, robbing the dead, stealing a dead man’s milk, you old vulture! …”

Madré seemed to be shaking all over with rage. The two old men stared at each other, consumed by the same anger. They could not see their resemblance, although they were almost identical in their hideous scrawniness, enveloped by the same shadow. Insults rose to their sputtering lips, repressed by one out of fear, shouted by the other so as to rouse the whole room.

“Ha! I hope you choke on that milk!”

The whole room awoke from its lethargy to watch the old Fleming’s terror-stricken retreat. He backed away, eyes dazed, moving from bed to bed without answering. He climbed back into his bed, rolled himself up in his covers, paralyzed with fear, hardly daring to stammer out: “Bastard, bastard,” and his favorite peasant’s insult: “Bum.”

Madré ran up and stood over him, his arm pointing toward the dead man:

“Just wait a little, you old thief! You saw how he went off. He was a better man than you. Well, you’re going to go too, you can take my word for it. Right here, in your smelly sheets, behind the screen, yeah, and soon, too! You’ll be just like him, only uglier, with your hen’s ass of a mouth …”

The superstitious Van Hoever trembled under that curse. A strange coldness crept into his bones. The memory of sorcerers who make animals die without anyone knowing how, who set fire to haystacks invisibly, and bring evil down on farms where the master has sinned, increased his terror. Madré went on and on; his seething anger against men and the world, repressed for so long, now overflowed in a torrent of furious language:

“Die! Die, you thief!”

The whole room, peopled by thieves and murderers, seemed to turn on the old rascal. Madré himself, carried away by his split personality, that of a once “honest” landlord, who had doubtless forgotten his own trespasses on other people’s property.

“Die! And good riddance! Wait till he’s three feet underground; then the old carrion won’t plague us anymore …” The sinister words circled among the beds, where pale sick men listened with abject smiles. The cold wind of death blew on them all. Van Hoever, in the lengthening shadows, raised his shriveled right hand and crossed himself slowly. Now he was stammering: “Holy Mary, Mother of God …,” unable to recall the rest of the prayer in his addled brain. His face was like dirty old ivory.

Madré took away the milk. And it was he who got to drink it.

Old Vincent had regained such a simple serenity that nothing of the weariness of his sixty years remained on his wrinkled face. His slack mouth, half-open over his yellow teeth, seemed to be laughing feebly. His eyes were almost closed (although no one had taken the trouble to lower their lids) as if he disdained to see. Even his paleness had become a neutral color, serenely indifferent.

They came for Old Vincent’s remains in the evening, after supper. The body, brusquely uncovered, appeared pale, gray, hairy, pressing strangely into the mattress as if it had become very heavy. The big feet stood out; the toes were spread apart and stiffened, probably by a last convulsion. The penis, a fat worm of limp flesh stretched out in its dark bush, inspired pity … The belly stuck out too far; the enlarged chest seemed swollen. The limp neck was creased by thousands of wrinkles; the head, hung heavily to one side, mouth gaping, eyes not quite closed, yellow, cold, heavy as stone.

“Is that it?” asked fat Ribotte.

He was breathing noisily. He bent his fat, pale face—the face of a potato-stuffed peasant—over the dead man’s head for a second.

“That’s it.”

Then they lifted up the body by the feet and shoulders and laid it out in an old, piss-stained bedsheet spread right on the floor. The dead man’s head and elbows hit the wood hard.

“Doesn’t matter,” declared Madré. “He don’t feel it anymore. Come on.”

They folded the arms of the man who didn’t feel it anymore and closed the sheet over his face. There was nothing left but a long, bumpy shape stretched out in the whiteness of the shroud. But at that moment a cry rang out, a kind of wild moan. Zetti, his face covered by his hands, bolted toward the other end of the room. Like an epidemic, his terror
passed from one man to the next. The two orderlies and Madré, who were bending over, their hands ready to take up the body and carry it away, stood up trembling. And all they saw in the room were two heads drawn together by the same sense of horror, two bloodless, already cadaverous old men’s heads with eyes staring out in terror … It was only for a second. The dead man was carried off. Voices were heard. Someone even laughed. The terror stayed only with a few; but these it filled with an enormous shadow of despair.

“You scared?” Little George asked Zetti.

Gently, he pulled Zetti’s hands away from his eyes, so he could see that fear whose cold breath reached out to touch him.

“You’re crazy! What are you scared of the dead for? It’s all over for them; and as for him, he lived out his time, didn’t he? It was his turn, not ours, right? Old folks, they just gotta die.”

“Si,
si!”
the Italian was at last able to say, calmed by that soft young voice.

But across the way, in beds 15 and 17, the two old men shriveled up when they heard those same words: “Old folks, they just gotta die.” Van Hoever’s eyes searched desperately for something. Now he remembered the little wooden crucifixes country people hang over their beds and toward which the prayers of the dying ascend. “Lord Jesus!” he said. And Gobin the notary, who hadn’t prayed for twenty years, repeated involuntarily, his decrepit limbs growing heavy with cold and stillness: “Lord Jesus! …” Then, their voices in unison, one clear, the other low, almost inaudible:

“Have pity on us …”

NUMBER 4627 WAS A LONG BODY, COVERED UP TO HIS EYES, LYING PROSTRATE
in almost perpetual slumber. No one could remember the name of this patient, who never spoke and hardly moved. He appeared once every night, like a phantom in his damp bedclothes, dragging himself very slowly from bed to bed toward the toilet. Then he went back to bed. He was dying, by inches, after six or seven years in prison. They used to imitate his nightly babblings, which ended in a comical murmur: “Ben-ben-ta-ti … ff.”

The prison postman came through the room one evening, oblivious to the greedy looks which clung in the stack of opened letters in hand:

“Alexis … Madré … Van Hoever … Poissonnier …”

They had to search for Poissonnier, unknown to his neighbors. They found him in bed 19, under Number 4627, the man who was always sleeping, the man who slept endlessly because that was his way of dying. Madré ran limping over to him.

“Hey! Sleepy! Wake up, I tell you! There’s a letter for you!”

At last Number 4627 began to stir, showing a puffy face, spotted with tufts of beard, and bewildered eyes. “Poissonnier, yes, yes, that’s me … here!”

“O.K., you shoulda said so!” said the guard, without any malice, handing-him a yellow envelope.

The postman wiped his tobacco-flecked mustache with the back of his hand. He stood there for another half-minute, set strangely apart. We saw his ruddy, wrinkled little face, his lopsided shoulders, the metal buttons on his yellow-braided tunic; then he became invisible. Only the letters still existed, as if the ignorant and insignificant hands that had handled them, carried them, delivered them, had completely disappeared.

Number 4627 fell back into his perpetual slumber. Madré had to use force to keep him up.

“Come on, do you want me to read you your letter, yes or no?”

Immensely discouraged, he answered “yes,” just to be left in peace again.

“All right. Now listen. Don’t fall asleep, eh?”

Number 4627 stared stupidly at the letter. His mouth continued to hang open in a sort of drawn-out, unfinished gasp.

“Listen. It’s from your wife. Poissonnier spouse, Therese,
née
Michon.”

Something of these words must have reached the patient through the veil of lethargy and sleep. His swollen face twisted in an effort of attention: “My … my … my … wife,” he mumbled, and he seemed a little bit more awake. Could he understand that “his little Marcel, who had just turned nine, sent him a big kiss?” That his eldest, Marie, was becoming an apprentice and that they both were thinking about their father, who had been away on a trip for so long (in the colonies) and that they were always asking when he would return?

“Sunday night Marcel asked me: ‘Tell me, Mama, what will Father bring me when he comes home?’ My poor man, I was completely undone …” These words could be heard throughout the room. We thought we had heard the child’s own voice. Did he understand, Number 4627, with his vague, sleepy stare, that he would never return from that long voyage?

“Did you understand?” said Madré when he had put the letter back in the envelope.

The man shook his head.

“Yes, yes, leave me in peace, let me sleep. Who are these children calling me, and this woman? We are no longer part of the same universe.”

He made a face and slid under his bedclothes.

The letters were tiny wings beating in the hands of the men. Each one had its soul, its character, its voice. This one, on fine paper with a sober Chamber of Deputies letterhead, contained only a trite word of acknowledgment (typewritten) which probably cost its recipient five hundred francs. And Van Hoever reckoned up the enormity of the sum which made this bit of paper, with its flamboyant signature, precious: “If he would only do something for me! If he only would!”—this personage who had to be paid so much. A wild hope swelled within the old peasant’s heart.

This other, which Madré was reading, came from an extremely old grandmother, spry at ninety-three, whose trembling hand revealed her
fear of no longer being around when her “little one”—already nearly an old man—came home. He could visualize her in her black lace cap, raising her eyes, still lively, to him and saying “M’boy” in her peasant accent. He was touched. His grin faded. And as he lost his sly smile he seemed to grow older, to become apelike, a faun without his crown of laughter.

Thiébaut moved his lips as he pored over his letter. A sharp-featured patient had taken refuge near the window and stood staring out across the lilac-colored paper. At the bottom of the page, which was covered with large, uneven writing, there was:

“My darling, I love you. —Simone.”

And at that moment, that prisoner felt invulnerable, like someone wearing a talisman.

That large handwriting, offering him a cup of fortifying wine across the distance of years, laid bare a woman’s love on the page, initialed by the prison postmaster with a blue-penciled V.

“You can stand anything when you love somebody the way I love you. I know that nothing, nothing can untie that knot that has been tied between us! Suffering is nothing. Dream of me. I am yours and I love you. I tell you so every night, at the times when I know you are thinking of me. There is nothing but you, there is nothing but me,
us.
Love me, wait for me. Come to me … A day will come …”

He answered:

“Yes, Simone.”

This rapture lifted him above his misery. The window offered him a fairly wide view. He stood there for hours, motionless, contemplating a corner of the world. A
quai-side
corner. The river’s lusterless surface, with its faint reflections; the towpath with a few tufts of green, a length of wall, a shuttered window. The house was silent. The deserted
quai
seemed silent: But people passed by from time to time. They were unaware that someone followed their steps, and that long after they had passed he still saw them. A little blond girl in a black coat. A workman carrying a toolbox slung over his shoulder. A man on a bicycle, a team of mules. Barges towed by sluggish, black tugboats, of which only the smokestacks were visible. The landscapes unfolded under the sailors’ eyes.

The man who gazed out, having been so close to death, was joyful at his own survival. He felt generous, oblivious, selfish, naïve, heroic, poetic.

“Little girl, little girl,” he murmured.

The little girl had gone away. A washer woman came and kneeled at the edge of the water. Her bare arms moved rhythmically, and it was good to imagine her regular breathing. From a distance, that female form, at moments, became very beautiful.

From the nearest windows of the stockade cell block rose a cry of lamentation, muted at first, then suddenly frenzied with despair. The dreamer, his head pressed against the bars, imagined he caught a glimpse of a man inside a dark, cavernlike cell, a man in a ragged tunic, head, shaved, shoulders hunched, hands held in the vice of irons, a man crying out his anguish in pain and humiliation, like a beast at the slaughter. Latruffe, pointed snout and drooling mouth, was doubtless working him over placidly with his keys, insulting him in his little eunuch’s voice, stuttering like a clown. A sharper, louder cry brusquely broke the silence.

Ribotte, the fourth-floor orderly, came running in. The sandals on his bare feet went “flap-flap” across the floor. The whole room heard him calling Thiébaut:

“Come quick. Perchot’s dying. And What’s-his-name is coughing up blood.”

“Who’s that?” growled Thiébaut.

From bed to bed, these few words passed through the room:

“Perchot’s dying.”

But we were all right, nonetheless.

PERCHOT DID NOT DIE THAT EVENING, BUT ON ANOTHER EVENING A FEW DAYS
later.

On the fourth floor of the infirmary there were two rows of light-green cells set aside for patients who had to be isolated, with contagious or chronic diseases, or had been placed under special surveillance.

Cell Number 2, closed off by a glass-paneled door, had an outside view. All of the space was taken up by a large, low bed, piled high with covers and clothing. The patient’s body was practically invisible, sunk into the hollow place where he had been lying for months. The bed seemed to swallow up the man. Only the head emerged, propped up by bolsters, facing tenaciously toward the window. The sharp angles of bone under the emaciated skin already suggested a death mask: the smooth, high brow of a twenty-year-old, cheeks sunken under a faint growth of beard, but lips that were strikingly red and revealed white teeth frozen in a wide grin. Whatever strength the sick man had left was concentrated in his glowing, watchful eyes.