Men in Prison Read online

Ballade Solness, “Anarchy! Oh torchbearer!” Here I am, suddenly transfixed with awful clarity, before a name and a date on the sordid wall of a detention cell. The name of a wayward comrade, a murderer and thief, a man overboard—my poor friend!

  I am not alone. My chance companion is a tall devil of a workman with a tanned, forty-five-year-old face and a long, drooping mustache. Black—a dull black, eyes black, hair black (graying nonetheless), features black, it would seem, because of their blank fixity and the rough, lusterless skin, cracked like old leather. Squatting on the foul mattress, we talked as the hopeless night drew slowly over us. My cellmate told me his story in a gloomy voice, in short, rudimentary, incomplete sentences. Workman, widowed, a fifteen-year-old daughter. The whole paycheck drunk up. (Why? There is no “why.” Or rather, why live? If life is always hard work which hardly keeps you from starving, with nothing afterwards.) Staggering home to a filthy hovel, falling heavily onto the mattress where his little girl is sleeping. After that, he can’t remember very well how it happened in the double darkness of night and alcohol: He had never even thought of it before—no, never!—rape. Man is not too far removed from the brute: A beast of burden, even after forty-five years of misery and work, has these bestial revolts of the flesh. The usual punishment in such cases is at least ten years at hard labor.

  Six years later, I was to enter one of these detention cells again, perhaps the same one. Nothing had changed: not even the greenish slime at the bottom of the earthenware jug. This time I was alone. On the second day, having procured pen and paper from the prison store— prizes of inestimable value for which you have to wait at least twenty-four hours in total idleness—I began to write a story. In prison it is a fundamental rule of mental hygiene to work at all costs, to occupy the mind. So I was writing; the Judas of the barred door was half-open; there was that peculiar silence of jails, peopled by a hundred lifeless sounds: bolts being drawn somewhere among the galleries, a patrol of guards making the rounds, mess tins being washed, a chow wagon rolling down the corridor … Suddenly the silence was broken by a soggy thud like the sound of a bundle of wash falling onto the tiles—and a strange cry, not very loud, but sharp:

  “Ou-i-iiiiii …”

  Like a bird whose neck is being wrung.

  The sound of hasty steps resounded, not too loudly—the sound of guards wearing boots and the muffled, padding tread of trustees on the cleanup squad. The half-open Judas closed with a bang. I listened for a long time with that premonition of evil which comes so accurately to old prisoners that they no longer question it. I heard the footsteps multiply; whisperings; an unprecedented number of footsteps, now moving away; water splashing on the tile floor; rag mops swishing; an unusually lengthy washing-down. Soup was brought in. The silence continued. The Judas opened again; I glimpsed two civilians discussing something in low voices in the gallery: they were sizing up the height of the stories with movements of their hands …

  The next day a trustee from the cleanup squad told me: “You know, one of ‘em took a dive from the third gallery almost in front of your door. Hardly made a sound.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know; an Italian, they say. A deportee. Maybe that ain’t so. But there sure in hell was a lot of blood, believe me: a whole bucketful, he made!”

  The old trustees on the cleanup squad had done a good job sopping up the blood with their dirty rag mops: the tiles were as shiny as usual.

  Once inside prison walls, the use of the familiar tu is practically a rule among inmates. At the house of detention, where crowds of transients are always coming and going—in that sudden physical indignity of arrest which is so much harder on new prisoners than on underworld “regulars”—the guards call almost everyone tu. Elsewhere, after a rapid process of classification by social categories, they reserve this vulgarly familiar address for inmates who command no respect or consideration. One of my first observations—the accuracy of which was confirmed many times later on—was that this use of the familiar form by guards to inmates, or by policemen to criminals, is an instinctive recognition of a common existence and a common mentality. Guards and inmates live the same life on both sides of the same bolted door. Policemen and crooks keep the same company, sit on the same barstools, sleep with the same whores in the same furnished rooms. They mold each other like two armies fighting with complementary methods of attack and defense on a common terrain. I have learned from long experience that, if there are any differences of mentality and morality between criminals and guards or policemen, they are generally, and for profound reasons, all to the advantage of the criminals. Even when it comes to everyday honesty, the comparison leads to that conclusion. Most of the guards and policemen I have run into were themselves thieves or crooks, sometimes pimps. An hour after my arrest, while I was reading the newspapers in the office of a sergeant of the Sûreté, I saw one of those professional finks, known as “plainclothesmen,” come in. (They are called plainclothesmen precisely because their civilian disguise—derby hats, canes as thick as billy clubs, heavy shoes—makes it impossible for anyone to mistake them for ordinary plain people in the street.) This one reported a difficult “tailing” job to his superior; then, embarrassed, lowering his voice, he explained his misadventure of the day. His wife had just been arrested, red-handed, for shoplifting in a department store. The sergeant reassured him without appearing at all surprised. It would be taken care of.

  The next day, while being taken to the anthropometric service by a man from the Sûreté or from headquarters—I wasn’t sure which, because we never opened our mouths—I heard my guard become vehemently indignant to an acquaintance:

  “Really, what a lousy joint! What bastards! You know what? I leave my overcoat on the coathanger, see? Well, somebody came along and stole my handcuffs! I had to borrow a pair to bring over this customer.”

  I wasn’t in a happy mood, but I had to stifle a wild desire to break up laughing. Steal a pair of handcuffs! This low point in thievery could only have been reached by a cop. A genuine thief would have seen it as a low point in perversion.

  2 Through the starry air

  Climbs into the very sty, erect like a héro,

  The bright tower which rules over the waves.

  THREE

  Transitions

  THE TRANSITION—THE TRANSFER—FROM THE HOUSE OF DETENTION TO THE Santé Prison takes an hour in the darkness of a Black Maria, or police van. Thirty men as unlike each other as thirty kinds of misfortunes, are dragged one by one out of the gray void of their cells, bustled for the twentieth time down corridors lined with Judases, dazzled for an instant by the bright daylight of the courtyard, and swallowed up by the blackness of the waiting vans. A city trooper hustles them up the step. The van is divided down the middle by an iron-plate corridor half a yard wide. Inside, another trooper armed with a key opens one of the narrow lateral doors. The man drops in there like a billiard ball into a pocket. The inside is so narrow you can’t turn around, so low you can’t stand up: hunched up, automatically seated. The darkness seems to melt little by little. Your dilated pupils capture the faint light that sifts in through a dusty ventilator. On the wall I read:

  Mon coeur à ma mere,

  Ma tête à Deibler,

  Mon corps à la terre.

  H. bon pour la tronche.3

  An “I love Louey-the- …” in small block letters partly covers over this allusion to the guillotine. The wall is covered with inscriptions. Another one reads: “Petty theft, May 2. Shit on the Republic and long live Rochette!” The van is now rolling along through the soft smile of the Paris lights. The Seine has been crossed; here we are on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. I can hear the sounds of the living Boulevard: even the sudden bursts of conversation from strolling passers-by. Pulling myself up to the grill of the air filter, I attempt to look out; I see the corner of a building: Pâtisserie in big gold letters, a horse’s head, two students hurrying along … Nothing about this astonishes me yet; I sit down again. What is asto
nishing is to be going up Boulevard Saint-Michel like this, exactly like a dead man in his coffin.

  My coffin is perpendicular.

  From one coffin to another, a conversation begins:

  “Hey, Martingale! You there?”

  Martingale gives vigorous evidence of his presence:

  “Ay!”

  In covert language, half-slang, half-Javanese—Javanese being a language, unknown to philologists, formed by interposing made-up syllables between the syllables of each word—Martingale and his buddy tell each other a strange story—punctuated by scatological exclamations (in French) and laughter.

  Glimpsed in transit:

  The outer wall, towering, gray; the paved inner court; the gate, yawning open like a grave.

  On the inside, cleanliness, light filtering down from an open transom twelve yards above, wide hallways forming little streets. The impression of entering a subterranean vault—impossible that this pale light should come from the free sky over the city! A buried city, peopled with shades. The House of the Dead, someone called it.

  The same seedy sempiternal scribblers are working in a sort of glassed-in cage at the crossroads where all these inner avenues come together. Vague silhouettes in front of a grilled window. To the right, splashing sounds from the showers, naked forms, clouds of steam, the tired voice of a turnkey:

  “Will you get the fuck under there … Get the fuck out in the hall.”

  A guy emerges, still dripping, wearing his shirt, arms full of clothes: gray tweed suit, soft felt hat, detachable collar, duds of comic elegance.

  “Are you deaf? Move on there!”

  In front of me the blue-black nape of a neck bobs up over rounded shoulders, and I hear:

  “Carder, Pierre-Paul-Marie … What’s the matter, one name isn’t good enough for you? … thirty … Under a warrant from Examining Magistrate Billot … Charged with intentional homicide …”

  The clerk recording these details looks like a Gavarni caricature of an old Foreign Legionnaire. Beard specked with tobacco flakes, képi over one ear.

  “Intentional Homicide.” The administrative term makes the murderer standing there smile. The clerk-registrar writes a beautiful round hand: the “H” is surrounded by a winged flourish. I wonder: Is it stone or sponge under that greasy képi?

  “Cartier, Pierre, Twelfth Gallery, Division Twenty, Cell Number One.”

  A broad winding staircase, on which barred windows cast a strange green glow, for the leaves of old linden trees rustle against this corner of the prison.

  3 My heart to my mother,

  My head to Deibler,

  My body into clay.

  H. ready for the blade.

  FOUR

  Architecture

  I KNOW OF ONLY ONE PERFECT AND IRREPROACHABLE WORK OF ARCHITECture in the modern city: prison.

  Its perfection lies in the total subordination of its design to its function. A modern prison is as different from an old crenelated castle— whose every loophole and battlement betrayed the need for defense against the surrounding countryside or town—as today’s all-powerful capitalist society is unlike the absolute monarchies of olden times, so limited in their real power. Set up in the center of town, or in the suburbs, a modern prison feels totally secure. Behind its thin walls, its frail buildings spread out in a star-shaped pattern. Only the barest minimum of thick walls, barred windows, metal doors and purely decorative battlements has been retained from the convent or fortress of yesteryear. Its perfection is revealed at first glance: It is impossible to mistake it for any other kind of edifice. It is proudly, insularly, itself. The design is almost invariable. There is only one opening in the outer wall, around which the guardroom, the registry, and the administrative offices are gathered. Inside the wall, the cell blocks, arranged in a star, converge on a central hub. Within each cell block, the narrow galleries running along in front of the cells rise tier upon tier over a wide corridor. Each stretch of wall is like a beehive honeycombed with rectangular cells. From any point along any gallery, as from the corridor, nearly the whole beehive enclosed in one of the branches of the star is visible. From the center of the hub, a single man can keep his eye on the whole prison without difficulty, and his glance can ferret into the most remote corners. Maximum ease of surveillance is ensured with a minimum of personnel. The lines are simple, the plan faultless. Uniform daylight comes down through the glassed roof, getting grayer and grayer as you get closer to the ground floor: This solves the problem of daily lighting with a maximum of thrift. The empty spaces between the branches of the star are used as exercise yards for the inmates.

  A modern city has no forum. It contains no circuses for the diversion and amusement of its throngs of people. It provides no day nurseries. Nor does it nurture, with all its lodgings and gathering places, the labor, the meditation or the relaxation of all men. In America, its skyscrapers, those mechanical creations of the business mentality, bring together apartments, banks, movie theaters, hospitals, schools, and churches in carefully ordered confusion, all behind the same totally anonymous and undistinguishable façade. Its architects have added practically nothing to the legacy of the past except, for its victims, this scientifically imperfectible hive of crimes, vices, and iniquities.

  A modern prison—the Spanish more openly call it Carcel Model, or model prison—successfully resolves the problem of economy in space, labor, and surveillance. Housing a crowd, it effects the total isolation of each individual in that crowd. Busier than a beehive, it is able to accomplish, silently and systematically, as many different tasks as there are lives tossed into its grinding cogs. The chance of escape is reduced to infinitesimal proportions. They used to escape from the Bastille. They used to escape from Noumea, in spite of the ocean fraught with squalls. They still escape from Guiana, across the virgin forest. No one escapes from the model jail.

  Modern prisons are imperfectible, since they are perfect. There is nothing left but to destroy them.

  FIVE

  In a Cell

  HERE I AM BACK IN A CELL. ALONE. MINUTES, HOURS, DAYS SLIP AWAY WITH terrifying insubstantiality. Months will pass away like this, and years. Life! The problem of time is everything. Nothing distinguishes one hour from the next: The minutes and hours fall slowly, torturously. Once past, they vanish into near nothingness. The present minute is infinite. But time does not exist. A madman’s logic? Perhaps. I know how much profound truth there is in it. I also know that a captive is, from the very first hour, a mentally unbalanced person.

  My cell is one of those whose perfect order and irreproachable maintenance are probably noted in official reports. On the second story of galleries a shiny door, bolted, exactly like the others: Fourteenth Division, Number thirty-nine. I am Number “14–39.” Three or four yards in length, the same in width. A little oak table, bolted to the wall; a heavy chair, attached to the wall by a chain to prevent it becoming a weapon in the hands of the unknown man whose despair and fury have been anticipated. A camp bed of satisfactory cleanliness folds up against the wall during the day and hardly takes up any room. The inmate makes his bed in the evening at a signal given by a bell, after which it is forbidden to be seen standing up. It is folded in the morning at a signal. Even in case of illness, it is absolutely forbidden to lie down during the day without the doctor’s permission. There is also, in a corner, a board which is used as a shelf: For the moment, only the tin “quarter” and the wooden porringer which serves as a spoon can be seen on it. Two windows at the top of the back wall, long and low, with bars and frosted glass. In one corner, a porcelain toilet and a water faucet. In the door, the Judas, a shelf for the food that is pushed through. Inside the Judas, the spyhole, an eye whose metallic blinking is heard every hour when the guards make their rounds. The walls are painted a dark brown up to the level of one yard; above that a yellowish, light ocher. The light which falls on you is always dirty.

  It is not like a room; it is more like an oversized bathroom or a monk’s cell. It’s habit
able, nonetheless. I came to understand this with time. For man needs but few things to live! Hardly more than the six feet of earth necessary for his rest when he has finished living. As in the monk’s cell, the proximity of death can be felt here. It is also a tomb. Prison is the House of the Dead. Within these walls we are a few thousand living dead …

  I have nonetheless done a great deal of living there, and very intensely. I have changed cells several times. It has never been without feeling a certain sadness at having to leave walls which could speak, whose every secret I knew, between which I had spent such hours of plenitude. My memory of an iron-gray death cell—despite an infinite fifteen-day nightmare—contains an element of authentic clarity.

  The first days are the worst. And in the first days, the first hours.

  Here is man, between these four walls. Alone: nothing around him. No event. No possibility of an event. Total inactivity. His hands are idle. His eyes soon tire of that uniform yellowish light. His feverish brain spins in a void.

  There is a furious agitation in the city’s life and in the lives of those who live there. Yesterday you had a thousand worries, a bustling schedule of activity; the hours rushed by, you were barreling along in the subway, pushing your way through the living sea of the avenue; you were surrounded during the day by thousands of faces; you had newspapers, the motley lure of the billboards, the persuasive voice of books. Yesterday, in the very center of life, there were your woman, your child, your friends, your comrades. People and objects surging forth in ceaseless motion, like you, with you. And all at once: nothing. Silence. Isolation. Inactivity. The dullness of empty time.

  A runner, suddenly immobilized, experiences shock. So does a captive. In the total disorientation of his inner life, everything is thrown out of proportion; things in the foreground become exaggerated. The slightest worry aggravates itself, becomes an obsession. The imagination immediately fleshes out thousands of hypotheses that the normal mind disdainfully discards. From a large number of observations I have drawn the conclusion that the immense majority of captives, during the first hours of isolation, live a shortened version of their whole future life in jail with a peculiar intensity. They immediately run off the rails, the rapid transition from active life to dead claustration being an entirely sufficient cause for mental disorder. Two or three obsessions dominate them from the very first, which are usually: preoccupation with their “case,” family worries, sexual obsession.