Men in Prison (31 page)

“You can blame it on bad luck.”

The miner answered:

“Bad luck is only another name for poverty. And rich people make poverty.”

I could hear Van Hoever grumbling: “… Pinko! Vermin! …”

“It’s hopeless,” spit out Laurent, with a thin stream of saliva that engulfed a few ants.

“There’s nothing we can do,” said Madré. “Prisons are the oldest things in the world.”

Thiébaut, the orderly, ran across the foot of the garden. Before disappearing, he shouted to us:

“What’s-his-name, upstairs, you know! He kicked off.”

“It’s hopeless,” repeated Laurent sharply.

The miner seemed to be smiling, but he wasn’t. There was a sharp edge in his voice:

“Let the dead bury their dead!”

Abbé
Nicot turned his head quickly toward the man who had spoken the words of the Gospel.

“Hey, you’re really funny,” said Madré, mocking.

“Man used to live in caves. It’s not so long ago since they burned heretics at the stake. Everything ends sometime. Prison will end someday. But men remain, men move on. The old structure is cracking. Perhaps only one good blow is needed before everything changes: It’s worth living for, and maybe even dying for. When there is enough bread for everybody, no one will steal anymore. When women no longer sell
themselves, when reason prevails, there will be fewer vices and fewer murders. Prison will be destroyed. People will come and stare at the stones that are left, and they won’t be able to imagine what we are living through. They won’t be able to conceive of our misery any more than we can conceive of their grandeur. Life will become large and free. It will …”

Pensively, his sad face turned toward the setting sun, the blind man answered:

“That is far off. Perhaps it’s farther off than we know. But it’s good to think about it. It’s like being in the sun.”

“It could begin tomorrow with a general strike.”

Chemin-des-Dames, the idiot soldier with the hole in his head, was dancing around our group, staring at the miner in sullen anger. And he, who never spoke, began to shout:

“That’s a lie! That’s not true! That’s not true! I know your phony speeches! You’re a defeatist. There’s a war on. Guys like you, we send ‘em to the firing squad! To the firing squad, I tell you!”

IT’S OVER
. T
HREE OF US ARE LEAVING TOMORROW
. M
Y THREE MONTHS’
growth of hair already gives me more individuality than Number 6731 ought to have. Just now Latruffe opened the doors of the stockade cell block for my last day and night of isolation. A last chance encounter, in the corridor in front of the dark cells: Bernard (The Slicer) and Rouillon (Mud Bath) both eligible for release a day after me.

“Are you glad?” I asked Bernard.

“Yes.” (A pause) “I don’t know.”

We’ve known each other for years. He is an anarchist. His unimpressive appearance—low forehead, narrow eyes, badly shaped features— conceals an obsessive kind of will power at the service of a strangely lucid, but unsteady mind. The sharpness of his logic used to make me think of fine lacework stamped out by machine on low-grade paper. In jail, Bernard was surrounded by feelings of respect, astonishment, and secret scorn. In front of him, no one would have dared to pronounce certain of the most ordinary words. In confinement, Bernard’s flesh had suffered, not more than anyone else’s, but just as much. He, too, had felt himself sliding into madness. The years were too slow, the flesh too strong, the spirit too poorly armed. Bernard stole a pair of scissors from the tailor shop. During the nights in his dormitory cell, he laboriously sharpened the two blades. This difficult work, which had to be done noiselessly, under the covers, grinding the steel against some pebbles, diverted him from his carnal hallucinations. When the scissors were ready, Bernard made himself—still in the workshop—some gauze packing and some bandages sterilized in sublimate.

Then one morning he was seen coming out of the lavatory, extremely pale, both red hands pressing a bandage against his groin, from which blood was streaming. “I gave myself an operation,” he told the guard, “take me to the infirmary, quick.” He tried to walk, but had
to be supported under the arms. At the door of the infirmary, Bernard had not yet lost consciousness: Noticing a cat, he went
psss, psss,
and tossed two shreds of grainy flesh onto the pavement. Cauliflower, the guard, picked this food up in his handkerchief. Bernard had nothing left under his penis but a horrible double gash, which had to be sewn up. The relics of his virility were placed in alcohol; and Ribotte put his new glass jar in the infirmary museum, next to another glass jar, fifteen years old, where a thick worm of gray flesh was hanging.

“Now we have the whole works!” said the infirmary guard known as “Top Kick.” There was a whole male organ, in effect, in the two jars: a member and two glands. An inmate, a barber, had cut off his erect penis fifteen years before, with one fatal razor stroke.

We were waiting to be led to our cells for the final hours. Bernard said:

“I think we were wrong.”

We understand each other. He is thinking of the years, his six, my five, in the jail, of the mark that remains stamped on us. He concludes:

“Life isn’t worth that. The most reasonable thing is to get yourself killed.”

Mud Bath is jubilant. Merriment is written all over the hairy puss of this troglodyte-of-the-slums. I can hear him purring like a cat, then wagging his head back and forth and singing:

… une moukère de Mers-el-Kébir,

… à Mas-ca-ra…

We had a minute alone together. Mud Bath poured his hot breath into my ear, whispering his boundless joy, ready to burst forth in thundering laughter, in yells, jumps, gesticulations.

“My time is up! I’ve done my six years. They can all go to hell now! And it’s long live life! you hear!”

… une moukère de Mers-el-Kébir,

… à Mas-ca-ra…

I was unaware that excessive joy could reduce the human beast to a sort of animal-like idiocy. Mud Bath can’t find the words to express the gaiety running through his veins: There is only this refrain he picked up in some Algerian dive to the snapping of castanets, this refrain doubtless associated in his eyes with the vision of a woman’s belly rhythmically heaving and twisting with the dance as if possessed by invisible demons.

One second, a flash: Mud Bath spreads his arms, throws out his chest, takes a tremendous breath, tensing all his muscles. I could hear his bones crackling. I could even feel the tension of his leg muscles. He emanates the magnetism of powerful, electrified flesh. When Latruffe turns around at the other end of the gallery, Mud Bath is standing stock-still, laughing silently. Once more he whispers:

“It’s long live life, eh?”

Now that the guard standing a few feet away from us has his back turned, Mud Bath starts cracking his gorilla fingers—(take, squeeze, break; take, squeeze, break. It’s good to be alive!)

We named him Mud Bath because his soul is sordid. Coming out of a conversation with him is like corning out of a mudhole. He never talked about anything but his “case,” harping on the same filthy details for years; and his case was a disgusting one: At the end of a drunken spree, his “moll” invited a girlfriend to sleep in their bed. By dawn their frenzies had ended in vomiting, hair-pulling, jealous rage. “My moll must have stuck her at least twenty times with these scissors. She didn’t know what she was doing. Me, I didn’t do a thing. I was drunk, you see. All I said was: Leave her alone, you bitch, you can see she’s blotto. Then I grabbed the other one by her mop and tossed her down the stairs. I swear I had no idea she was dead. You can see I’m innocent, can’t you? And they sent me up for six years, the bastards!” The surviving girl is doing twenty years. But at last it’s over. A cry of triumph surges up from the very bowels of this brute:

“Long live life!”

Bernard The Slicer and Mud Bath are returning to life with two hundred francs and five years’ restricted residence each: enough to live on for six weeks and get sent back to jail for life.

I
AM SPENDING THIS LAST NIGHT IN A CELL, LYING ON A STRAW MATTRESS
stretched out on the floor, my eyes open, staring into total darkness. I don’t know if I have slept or not. I am stunned not to feel, at this dark threshold to life, the enormous joy one expects to feel. A sort of anxiety oppresses me. I am aware of my joy (like a fleeting light at the bottom of a well), only through negative logic: If it were not true, if I were to learn this instant that I would have to take up my place in the round again tomorrow, I would probably kill myself; in any case, the thing that I can most easily imagine after that “if” is the allurement of the third-floor dormitory railing and the flagstones swirling on the ground below; I am lulled by the dizzying prospect. Nothing is more disappointing than the long-awaited fulfillment of a wish: for the reality itself is too concrete and brings with it a certain calm. The exaltation on which one was living disappears, leaving in its place a great void in which things appear only as they are, nothing more.

I hover between this disappointing reality—which is still nothing more than this familiar darkness—and my strange inability to imagine anything else. I will be free in a few hours.
Free.
The enormous word is written in flaming letters before me. But is that all? I can’t see beyond it. I don’t know what will happen. I can’t believe it’s really true. Do I still believe in the world? The outside is unreal. I am about to enter the unreal. Like the sleeper who dreams “I’m going to wake up” and doesn’t believe himself: I think about the last hours of men condemned to die: They can’t imagine what death is. I can no longer imagine what life is.

I begin to love this darkness where nothing obstructs my eyes, where nothing allows me to measure these hours which are perhaps the most endless of my life. I am in a world between, floating down the river of time. Behind me I leave the Mill, where every stone is familiar to me. I am tearing myself away from a world that has become a deep,
unforgettable part of me. The old round passes before me enticingly. My heart aches as a corner of the workshop and certain faces reappear before me. I am leaving, they are staying. The Mill is eternal. Three men, three kernels of half-ground grain, will drop out of it tonight, through a clack valve: Nothing changes, nothing will ever change …

That must be it; I feel the mark of jail too deeply within me. They no longer brand your shoulder with a hot iron; it is an inner wound that will start to ache tomorrow. For years I was nothing but a thinking automaton whose thoughts and actions were totally separate and unrelated. Now I will have to make decisions every minute, the thousand little everyday decisions which I have unlearned. I feel the same panic as a swimmer who hasn’t swum for ten years and must dive in. He has forgotten the taste of the bitter, salty water that washes away our dirt, heals our wounds, and replenishes our being.

I will overcome this. I do not want to carry away with me any defeat. The Mill has not worn me down. I am leaving it with my mind intact, stronger for having survived, tempered by thought. I have not lost the years it has taken from me. We have committed great errors, comrades. We wanted to be revolutionaries; we were only rebels. We must become termites, boring obstinately, patiently, all our lives: In the end, the dike will crumble.

The guard entered with a candle and a suitcase: my belongings.

“Get dressed.”

I didn’t ask for a light. Why should I speak to this man who only appears to be a man? He is like a part of the wall: He is nothing but a little cog in the machine. I learned long ago that some men are indistinguishable from things.

The cell is filled with a feeble gray light. Dawn. The hour of executions. My blue tweed suit feels strangely light. With unexpected ease I rediscover pockets and the stance of a free man, hands in pockets. I smile at this gesture and the solemn satisfaction it gives me. Here I am dressed again; here is my old felt hat, bought in Belleville. These brown castoffs at my feet belong to Number 6731. Their rounded folds still hold the warmth and the shape of my movements. I see, in this prisoner’s denim, my cast-off self.

Dawn is breaking. I stand in this cell, a man whose chains have fallen away. My helplessness now lies in these brown rags that I kick aside. The bolts are still locked, but already I feel free, sure of myself;
somewhere, within me, there is a calm hatred, like a still ocean. I will turn it into strength.

The simplicity of certain gestures. Signatures in the registry office. And then the clack valve of the Mill: a little gate in the great door. The keys turn (I barely notice the automaton-men who turn these keys), I step over a railing and the coolness of the river blows against my face. It is still almost night under the pale sky. The poplars are murmuring on the other bank; the river is there, black, gliding by with a vague, hissing sound; the grass on the banks seems ash colored. I walk quickly under the wall punctuated at intervals by towers sheltering a man and a rifle. I have never seen, will never again see, this landscape of the world between, this landscape immersed in deep shadows and the pale glimmers of the night.

Daylight appears in white reflections on the black water under the arch of an old bridge. You have to cross this bridge, to the right, to go toward the town. A gray form stands out there against the now bluish darkness ahead of me.

This first human figure suddenly transforms into reality the unreal landscape I have been moving through. He emerges in front of me, very tall and very strange, like a barbarian in his shadow-colored overcoat, leather-belted, crisscrossed by the straps of the heavy musette bags hanging at his hips. The soldier’s bony face, his piercing eyes glowing in their dark sockets, surges up before me for an instant under the dented helmet which bears, gray against gray, an incendiary grenade. Our ringing footsteps fall in together. This first man I meet at the threshold of the world is a man of the trenches.