Men in Prison (15 page)

An act is only as good as the end pursued and the result obtained. Masked or thinly veiled, from time immemorial, they have needed to use the death penalty against us—the working people. We, too, need it, to put an end to all this! Murder will close the circle of murder; for a war can only be ended by a victory; for only the victors can be liberators—having liberated themselves. In the class war, which is like the other kind but stripped of hypocrisy, the greatest humanity must be combined with the most decisive use of force. The class that wants to build a new world, forever cleansed of killing machines, must learn how to kill in battle so as not to be killed. But it must learn as well—along with all those who turn resolutely toward the future—to abolish a past which has put such arms into its hands, to abolish the refined, useless, senseless, gratuitous cruelty of death inflicted by an “act of justice” on guilty men who are sometimes brutes, usually unlucky wretches, sometimes rebels (that is to say, the most ardent of men), and always the inevitable products of the normal workings of society, always victims paying a ransom for others …

Nothing, in an opulent and solid society, justifies that abominable thing: the solemn execution, on a set day, at a fixed hour, after complicated formalities, of a miserable wretch who has been kept for sixty or a hundred days in an iron-gray cell in the Maximum Security section, alone with the guillotine blade, that cold line on the back of the neck. You can understand Danton calling for the September massacres.

You can understand the Russian Revolution, encircled like the French Revolution in the past, slaughtering several hundred or several thousand bourgeois on the day when Lenin fell bloody at its feet. You can understand the Third French Republic coldly shooting down thirty thousand defeated Communards; their magnificent blood has not been lost—all debts will be paid. That is the price at which we learn the laws of class war. They hold the secret of a different victory: But your death, Antoine-with-no-name of the Fifth Division, guillotined on an unknown date, seems to me to be something monstrously and ferociously useless.

Totally useless, surrounded by complicated ceremonies, the application of “capital” punishment to the worst victims on the losing side of the social struggle raises the whole system of penitentiary repression to the height of ancestral savagery. The guillotine (elsewhere, the ax, the noose, the garrote, the electric chair—different equipment) adds a symbol of steely clarity to prison. Jail is a machine for grinding up lives slowly. The blade’s lightning efficiency grinds better. Modern jails are perfect. Any scaffold, even the most primitive, is perfect. The very permanence of jails and scaffolds testifies to their necessity, and at the same time, to their eternal impotence. They will last as long as the class war in which only one victory can be definitive: that of the destroyers of jails and scaffolds. Your death at an unknown date, Antoine-with-no-name, only shows that you have been treated with all the rigor of the class war—you, who probably never devoted a moment’s thought to it.

Once, while returning from a visit with my lawyer, I happened to meet a comrade who was being kept in that deathly part of the prison. M*** was a tall, thin fellow with a long, drab face, a narrow, receding forehead, and flat temples. There was barely a spark of life left in his dull eyes, which were as lusterless as slack water; his face prefigured the guillotine grimace. He was too simpleminded to fool himself. His face barely responded to my greeting: His pupils widened, his eyelids arched; but he raised his long, pale, sharp right hand to the level of his neck and imitated the fall of the knife.

He lived with that anticipation. He greeted its image in a comrade’s face. When he walked, the shadow of two uprights crossed by a slanting blade fell before him. His anticipation was not deceived.

When I think of the men I have known well who were devoured by that expectation, the memory of meeting this one, the weakest among them and the most ravaged, rises up to greet me silently with that grave, almost ritual gesture. That gesture: the same one which, years before, during a dawn of execution which became a dawn of rioting, I saw traced by that skinny kid, surrounded by a circle of women in the misty halo of a street lamp …

They were five or six in the Maximum Security cells—men of savage strength whose hard, mocking expressions were familiar to me—alone with certain or probable death. They were living as one lives—but better, with more intelligence and will. One of them, with the face of a serious schoolboy and the nature of an impulsive child, divided his hours between calming studies, the orderly daydreams he mistook for thoughts, gymnastic exercises, ablutions—and the long, long walks of the caged man turning, taciturn, around his cage in the dizzying apprehension of losing his head at the end of the road. Nevertheless, the stubborn, unreasonable hope of living still grew within him with such youthful ardor that it was physically impossible for him to think of dying. At the moment when death appeared certain to him, he turned crimson and all the blood rushed to his brain, bathing it in the horrible intoxication of an ultimate act of will. From that first plunge of the guillotine blade right up to the real one, he maintained his self-control, repressing his terror. A fine-looking man, whom I had known less than a year earlier at the height of mature self-awareness, appeared before me on the way out of his death cell. He looked twenty years older, his face deeply lined, feverish, his velvet-brown eyes concealing wild panic under a façade of strained self-control. Innocent, his neck was to feel no other knife blow than that of a death sentence dragging on and on until the day of his “pardon.” Defendants in the same trial, we were given the surprise of a chance meeting during a transfer. And I saw how those who felt they were on the road to the guillotine already bore its distinctive mark in their eyes, on their brow, in the fold of their lips, in the jerky movements of their bony, whitened, nervous hands …

The iron-gray walls of the Maximum Security section are the most silent of all; but since the prison was built, so many tortured souls have
bruised their pitiful wings against the sterility and indifference, brightness and hardness of these walls that the mere thought of it makes you feel their torture going on and on, while one by one their names are lost, without meaning, in the crowd. The same suffering writhes endlessly within these same walls, perpetual from year to year, whatever the names and numbers of its momentary bearers. They relay each other, passing on from hand to hand—not the torch of antiquity—but their severed heads with blinking eyes.

“Tomorrow.”

All I saw through the Judas were two rounded eyes under arched eyebrows. The sharp voice whispered but one word:

“Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, what? The four iron-gray walls answer me with their heavy silence. The pages of the old Bible lying open on my table seem to fade, fade … What is it that suddenly changes the hue of the walls? As if the sun—but there is no sun—were setting … Where does this sudden cold come from—and this feeling of tension in the neck? I am not condemned to die … “Tomorrow.”

The three sharp whispered syllables will pass from cell to cell. Or the arc of raised eyebrows will pass on their meaning. Or a strange tapping will be heard in the wall. Or the guards will hurry as they make their rounds. Noises, signs, glances, a feeling. All these warnings will cease at the doorstep of one locked cell, but the man within will understand; and if he nonetheless falls asleep tonight, it’s because he has known too far in advance, for too many long hours. His troubled sleep, broken by starts, will become calm sixty minutes before dawn, only to be interrupted forty minutes later. The administration estimates twenty minutes as the time necessary to carry out the death ceremony.

Condemned men receive a kind of special treatment. To prevent them from sinking into madness or committing suicide in spite of every precaution, guards or Sûreté agents keep them company. They play cards together. They never speak of
that.
But it is all they think about. And the condemned man learns from his partner’s distraction, from a slight unusual pallor, from the tremor of a hand which accidentally touches his, that it’s
tomorrow.

A sharp whistle, coming from the outside, sometimes warns him.

One of them asked his guard one evening:

“It’s
tomorrow,
right?”

The guard, flabbergasted, tried to deny it.

“Don’t be afraid,” calmly replied the head destined to fall less than ten hours later. “I know. And they can all go to hell! Understand?”

Tomorrow.

Tonight the whole prison is listening anxiously. Hundreds of chests are holding in their breath. Brains grow feverish in a communion—perhaps only the contagion of a disease—of the fever of one crazed brain— soon to be a bit of gray stuff, bloodless, rotting slowly—living only in anticipation of death.

Long before the time comes, bare feet make their way toward the locked cell doors in the darkness or pale nocturnal light. Through the cracks in closed Judases the eyes of many brothers in suffering will try to glimpse the man leaving on his ultimate voyage.

Some will perceive—for the space of an instant—a confused image which will remain stamped on their memories forever:

Indistinct silhouettes: shadows,
képis.
Him: a gray profile, deep sockets. In shirtsleeves. Held by the elbow, dragged along, almost carried, fainting perhaps, bewildered. Him.

Then the bars of the window will turn dark against the pale sky and the numbness of chilling dejection.

I WAS INTERROGATED DURING FOUR OR FIVE HALF-HOUR SESSIONS, OVER A
period of twelve months, before being sent into criminal court under various indictments, adding up more or less to a ticket on a convict ship headed for Guiana. Prisoners with plenty of money go to their pretrial examinations in a taxi, accompanied by plainclothes policemen. Photographers from the big papers try to catch them on the courthouse steps. They wear ties and detachable collars. They are called “gentlemen.” Penniless prisoners are dragged suddenly out of their cells in ragged clothing and bustled into the filthy compartments of the Black Maria. These are known as “guys” or “mugs.”

After being locked up for months, the trip in the Black Maria and the duel of interrogation—where a man at bay confronts a crafty hunter lying in wait on the opposite side of a desk, ready to catch his victim off guard, aiming a sudden, unexpected question like a rifle shot—constitute real events …

The noise of the car rolling over cobblestones or asphalt. Street noises—the quiet streets around the Santé Prison, whose calm is disturbed only occasionally by an odd passing car, then the bustle of the main boulevard with its countless human and mechanical voices. The feeling of passing, stiff in a vertical coffin, through a street where you often walked with a free and lively step. Peering avidly through the air filter, yearning desperately at the fleeting sight of a female passerby—heart clenched, fists clenched. The moving screen of a trolley car.

On the way out of the Maria, a city trooper, or
‘Cipal,
snaps the cuffs on the new arrival and leads him to the Souricière
.

The name Souricière, or “mousetrap,” is a fitting one. Two stories of stench-infested wire cages, just big enough to hold a man and a latrine. Two paces wide, five paces long at the most. At one end, the wire-mesh
door; at the other, the filthy toilet seat of rusty iron, stopped up to prevent anyone from destroying anything in it. The stench of urine and defecation wafts up over the drawings on the walls. The accused is left to stew there for long hours, frequently five or six at a stretch. How to keep busy? Your defense is ready: Constantly thinking it over only weakens your mind and wears on your nerves. You observe the comings and goings. They bore you in the end: Their variety is a form of monotony. So then you look for the pencil stub which the previous occupants of the filthy stall have concealed in a crevice of the wall under the latrine; or you remove your own from the inside lining of your jacket and add your own page to the prodigious book of the wall.

This wall was once whitewashed. At first glance it appears a solid gray, made up of a tangled, confused, crosshatched network of inscriptions and drawings. Names, stories, rhymed couplets, appointments, confessions: an incredible swarm of writings and hieroglyphics weaves a mad arabesque around the four great human themes: struggle, sorrow, love, carnal lust. The primitive literature of the inhabitants of the social jungle, identical on the walls of every jail. One word of advice is found here again and again, sharp and clear, signed by countless hands:

Never confess!

Someone who didn’t sign has etched his experience in little block letters over the name
Adèle
written out in a fine round hand:

I was dumb, I confessed, I’m screwed, it’s all over for me.

There is also:

I confessed: 5 years.

Obscenity radiates from the ceiling down to the tiled floor, from the door over to the latrine, in drawings which sometimes attain the lewd perfection of Persian miniatures. In one of “my” cells in the Souricière, a life-size drawing of a naked woman took up the whole back wall: lower belly slit open, pointed breasts, mouth twisted, prostituted: The hallucinated artist had not been able to get the proportions right and had been careful and workmanlike only in finishing the sexual parts. The eyes, shoulders, arms might have been drawn by a clumsy ten-year-old child.

(It was only much later and in a very different place that I ever saw pornography comparable to this in imaginative frenzy and in the total absence of aesthetic pretensions. It was in the Winter Palace of Petrograd in the modest soldier’s apartment of Czar Nicholas I, one of the masters of post-Napoleonic Europe, one of the heads of the Holy Alliance. In an anteroom off his bedroom there was a cabinet concealing
a shower bath and a clothes closet on one side, at the back of which an insignificant painting was hanging. A hidden mechanism, well known to the august hands, allowed the first canvas to be pushed, aside revealing a second one, which was peopled with a swarming mass of purplish, rosy, turgid flesh intertwined in the most complicated positions …)