Men in Prison Page 14

  The rhythm of life within this sequestered city follows a clockwork precision. At seven in the morning, three bells, separated by five-minute intervals, announce reveille. At the sound of the first, the six hundred prisoners lying on their cots in the dormitory cells get up. The second gives them a few minutes for folding bedclothes and cleaning up the cell.

  At the third, line-up in front of the open cells. Then the silent mass of men is set in motion in a long line through the stairways, across the yards, each man receiving his hunk of bread along the way.

  In the workshop, a few minutes are set aside for washing at the faucet. At 7:15 a bell gives the signal for work to begin. At 9 o’clock the bell again: stop work. The bell: line up. The bell: Indian file toward the mess hall. The bell: leave the mess hall; exercise, twenty-five minutes, from 9:30 to 9:55. The bell: back to the workshops. The bell: begin work again. The bell, the bell, the bell: second rest period, exercise, return, work, evening line-up, parade, dormitory, lights out, reveille, begin again: parade, dormitory, lights out, reveille, begin work again, the bell, the bell …

  The mechanical rhythm of each day, repeated ad infinitum, leads to an almost painlessly automatized existence. The bell sets off the same movements, at the same precise instant, in six hundred prisoners. Soon each man has internalized these movements. When a new man makes a slip finding his place in line, the event is absurd enough to attract attention.

  The day’s rhythm melts into that of the months and the seasons. The monotony of Sunday rest, broken by exercise, trips to church, to the Protestant chapel, to the writing room, does not change it—no more than the wilting heat of August, or the icy cold that makes the robots’ teeth chatter when they are lined up for parade.

  The rule is work and silence.

  Forced labor, usually piecework—that is to say, poured on to the limit of your strength—ten hours a day, from seven in the morning to seven in the evening, with two interruptions of an hour each for meals and exercise and two or three fifteen-minute breaks. Labor, industrial labor, at peon’s wages, under concession to different firms by the penitentiary administration.

  Absolute, perpetual silence, imposed on men working collectively, torn from life collectively, oppressed collectively. The absurdity of that rule is equaled only by its cruelty. If it were actually enforced and respected, it would be the simplest way to drive the prisoners quietly mad. It is softened by partial abrogation in practice: slackness in supervising and a toleration of words exchanged over the job. As a result, the days of rest are the hardest, and the unenforceable rule is nothing more, in reality, than a pretext for disciplinary harassments … The majority of punishments handed out are for infractions of the rule of silence.

  The various grades of these punishments, increasing up to those for “incorrigibles,” constitute a sliding scale of arbitrary persecutions against those who are put on the black list.

  The mill grinds slowly, imperceptibly, after your first resistance has been broken down. And since “you get used to anything,” you also get used to this slow-motion existence cadenced by the bell … Man thinks he consumes time, which in fact devours him. Reality is too concrete to be terrifying. You need imagination sometimes to realize how oppressing it is …

  For a long time my neighbor in the line-up was a big flabby fellow with pink skin and drooping cheeks. He used to greet me with a gentle glance and a barely visible smile on his thick lips. The very folds of his clothing seemed to shake effortlessly over his loose-hanging flesh. He radiated a great calmness. He was doing eight years and had a quiet little job in the paper storehouse: a bit of wall behind the latrines for a view.

  “Don’t let it get to you,” he told me between his teeth (and even his voice seemed flat, pale, flabby to me), “that’s the main thing. Me, I got used to it in the beginning. It doesn’t bother me anymore. You get hold of a quiet spot, and then you take it easy. And it’s amazing how time flies: It’s slow, slow, and then it’s over. I only have three years to go, just think …”

  He had his little daily pleasures. He ate his stew, bought at the canteen (beans, mutton, thirty centimes), with relish, looking forward to a peaceful afternoon and thinking that tonight there would be a “decent screw” on duty who wasn’t too proud to chew the fat for a while … Sunday, mail. Next week, a shower. And in a month, only thirty-five more months to serve, sixty-one already done. Time passes! I could read these reassuring little thoughts in his calm, bovine eyes.

  “Look at Vallard now,” he said to me one day, “how nervous he is! He has only six more months to do.”

  Vallard was a big, somewhat awkward fellow with a funny, wizened old man’s face at thirty-five, a big triangular nose, and steel-rimmed glasses—The peevish look of an old seminarist. He was finishing out a six-year term. We knew he had a wife and two lovely children. He kept silent.

  “Look how he carries his six months in his legs!”

  True, his step was lively. Once again the man went forward toward his destiny, drawn by a mirage. His spine stiffened; a kind of rejuvenation brightened his careworn face. Only six months more! But destiny found him. Vallard appeared one morning with a bandage on his head. He walked among us for two more days in the lines, with a nervous, tired step. Then we didn’t notice his absence. He died in three days, in the infirmary, of an erysipelatous inflammation that ate up his face.

  “He let it get to him,” said the flabby man. “Can’t let it get to you. Got to be stronger—Poor bastard!”

  SIXTEEN

  The Workshop

  THE PRINT SHOP IS A VAST BEEHIVE BUZZING WITH THE HUM OF MACHINES. Seventy men in dirty smocks and denim caps work there in unnatural silence … The movements of their lips are barely perceptible; their hushed whispering strives at the same time to be audible and inaudible; their glances, sharp under the false humility of their bent heads, follow closely the careless, self-important guard as he moves about among the presses and the rows of type cases. As soon as the yellow-braided képi disappears behind a machine, my neighbor bends quickly toward me. His hypocritical mask opens up and returns to life, breaking into a broad, fraternal smile:

  “Where you from?”

  By sundown tonight we will know all we need to know about each other. Poule is a commonplace little hoodlum totally devoid of intelligence. We have named him after a character in Les Misérables: “Ha’penny,” alias “Two Million.” “Squealed on by a fag,” he was arrested carrying a bag of burglar tools a block from a building in which there was a strongbox containing, the way he tells it, two million. At this point, a spark begins to glow in the depths of his dull eyes. “Think of it! I could be a millionaire today!”

  Does he really believe it? He stands distracted for hours, composing stick in hand, eyes clouded. His stupidity is so staggering that you think he must be putting it on. But fate is playing with him. During his hours of distracted immobility I think he dreams of his lost millions, of fast cars, of Deauville, of half-naked blondes strutting like burlesque queens, breasts firm under artificial flowers. And at night, in his barred cell, the flesh of this depraved, overgrown boy suffers and exhausts itself in dreary ejaculations …

  After the confinement of a cell, you are dazzled by the size, constant activity, and bustling noises of the workshop. It’s a world in itself. So many faces! Then you get used to them; you start noticing things again. Within a span of ten, twenty, or thirty yards, a thousand objects strike the eye. My body revels in its newfound freedom and wealth. Four times a day I am allowed to see the sky, trees, bushes, grass, for the prison yards contain such riches. I don’t want to acknowledge these miserable joys, but they are there, in my very limbs. They last for a few days, and then fade without a struggle. Having explored my vista of thirty yards, I know how terribly destitute it is. Nothing ever changes in this beehive, where time weighs down on you like an endless rain of ashes. Soon I strive, in vain, to recapture the first days’ wonderment. But every bell reminds me that I am a robot who knows in advance all the
movements he will ever make, and all the faces he will ever meet; reminds me that this will go on for 1,300 days (if only I survive).

  The presses are right at the entrance, where a guard stands before the locked door. Next come the rows of type cases, extending to the right and along the back; they are handy for hiding from the screw for a moment to exchange a few words or pass a note. There are some glassed-in cubicles along the inner wall: the office of the civilian manager, a gray-haired gentleman who wears an English cap and a printer’s smock; those of the proofreaders and accountants, objects of envy because they can talk among themselves. These privileged inmates do little favors. They form a world apart, envied and respected. The back wall opens onto the wire mesh enclosing the storerooms and the glassed-in lithographer’s shop. Across from the offices there are windows opening on the latrines, allowing the guards, without moving, to keep an eye on the squatting men. The latrines open onto narrow paved courtyards. The clean-up squad comes in there every day to empty the tanks in the hope of recovering forbidden objects. The perfection of jail! The administration even looks into your excrement!

  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.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Will to Live

  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.