Men in Prison (29 page)

That morning, after a terrible night—two hours of unconsciousness followed by dull sleep—Perchot half-opened his eyes without entirely emerging from his dream. His side was hurting him. The tops of the poplars swayed from side to side in the distance. White clouds floated across the sky. Catherine was walking across the barnyard in wooden shoes, her arms bare. Chickens were pecking at the ground near the manure pit. A stale smell of rotting straw floated in the warm air where flies were buzzing. Father was calling: “Zidore, Zidore!” The dying Perchot relived these dead things as he heard voices drifting around him. What were they talking about? Catherine went into the kitchen; Maraud, the old, one-eyed watchdog, stretched himself out in front of his kennel …

“The doctor said he wouldn’t live through the night. Morphine … Yesterday, Top Kick gave him a chocolate bar. Better wake him up; I haven’t the time. Get the syringe ready.”

“Perchot! Perchot! Boy, can he sleep! Perchot!”

Perchot came out of oblivion. The orderly, Ribotte, was pulling back his covers. A new man was attentively filling a hypodermic syringe. The sick man gazed at the steel needle with indifference. The injections no longer hurt him. But the man holding the syringe turned a thin face lit by gentle gray eyes toward him. He said nothing, he propped up the pillow, he folded the clothes thrown on the foot of the bed while the orderly gave the injection.

Perchot wanted to say something to those strangely solicitous eyes:

“Thanks, thanks,” he mumbled. “That feels good. It’s good medicine, that … I have the feeling it’s going to save me. Anyway, I’ve been better for the last three days. The pain has gone away …”

Realizing that he was lying too much, he added:

“Last night was only a weak spell. Isn’t that so, Ribotte?”

“Sure!”

Ribotte wrote something down in his notebook.

“Yes, you’re much better,” said the new man at last. “I’ll bring you a little coffee: Would you like that?”

Ribotte went out. They were alone. These two men had never spoken to each other before, yet there was an understanding between them. The visitor bent over close enough so that the sick man could speak into his ear without raising his voice.

“I’m going to tell you the truth … I heard you talking; I won’t live through the night; I can feel it myself. My feet are dead already … I can’t move my arms anymore … I’m finished; that stuff, it puts me to sleep … It’s horrible! I can’t take it anymore.”

Tell a lie? The other man didn’t have the strength.

“Be quiet. Don’t tire yourself out. Don’t be afraid.”

But both of them were afraid. They read disturbing thoughts in the other’s eyes. You are going to die. You are going to live. It can’t be helped. It was a moment of silent clarity, in spite of everything. And Perchot felt better. Those eyes meeting his did him good.

“Come back again, come back again,” he said, with supplication in his voice. He gazed longingly at that stranger, whose presence somehow reconciled him to the thought of death.

A soft light hovered in the corridor between the two rows of glassed-in doors. It was like being on an ocean liner.

“In Number 4, Old Horta. In Number 6, Father Nicot, the priest. In Number 8, Ollivier. The cells on the other side are empty … But the first one is where Miss Roberta died, you know.”

The cool air, full of the sound of chirping birds, swept gaily in through the open window. The
quais
and the prison wall seemed bathed in sunlight. The cell, freshly painted, was almost attractive. Ribotte— full of broad smiles, sly little laughs and winks talked about this strange dead man in his thick voice:

“His body was something to look at! Slender as a sixteen-year-old girl. With hips like a regular little woman. And eyes! You wouldn’t believe me, but when he was tucked in bed, just looking at his eyes, it made you think of a woman. He was gentle, a real liar, and bitchy when he had it in for somebody, just like a woman. I sometimes used to watch him through the glass in the door: When he was all alone he would curl his hair, pluck his eyebrows, look at himself in a little mirror … What faces he made! He would smile, sulk, put on airs, or pout; he used to blow himself kisses and make goo-goo eyes at himself … On his good days, he would stand by the window, all afternoon, humming:

… Amoureuse,

Langoureuse,

La berceuse des amants…

“In the end, just to please him, I got him a lipstick and some powder. He used to make himself up. His mouth looked like a bright red carnation … And not a bit afraid of dying, braver than any man, singing
‘Fouti-foutu, fouti-foutu’
after his attacks of fever; and, when I tried to cheer him up, he answered me: ‘Pull through three more years? Who are you kidding? Save your fairy tales … But if you want to be nice, tell Coco to come and see me …’”

Coco was a young banker, just arrived, in for five years. His wife bombarded half a dozen senators with requests to have him certified consumptive. They finally put him in Number 7, just to make her stop. A tall flabby fellow, who used to do his nails for an hour every morning with special brushes made for him in the workshop. Miss Roberta couldn’t get up anymore; she had abscesses in her knees, her thighs, her back; her bones were all rotten, bleeding, full of holes; some days it hurt her so much she would faint. But her arms, her chest and her head were still alive, and that was enough for their love. I saw her—all
made up, lips like cherries, white cheeks, languorous eyes—suddenly turn pale, her face distorted with pain. I gave her injections. Coco would come and sit on the edge of her bed; and they would kiss and caress all the time. She was like a little woman who is always sick in bed, and makes everyone look after her … He, I don’t know what attracted him.”

“He … I mean she, she died?”

“She died. Before she lost consciousness, she said to him again, half-delirious: ‘My darling, my little one, don’t forget me … don’t forget me … We really loved each other, eh?’ Then it was all over. She began to moan and didn’t recognize anybody … It was just about this time of day, a day like today. You know me, I’m not one of the Boys. They disgust me. They’re not real men, they’re perverts, dirty perverts. But at that moment I felt pity, I could have cried … And then, I’ll never stop feeling that deep down, that kid was a woman.”

Perchot died at dusk, after a rainshower. Streaks of silver flowed in the river.

Perchot was too weak to cry out. His head—freezing after the burning fever—rolled from side to side on the pillow. There was no life left except in his eyes, where a spark of consciousness still flickered, another tiny flame about to go out.

Ollivier was waiting in the next cell, which was empty. Quick muffled footsteps pattered down the corridor, hurrying past the dying man’s closed cell. Ollivier smiled. The door opened noiselessly. Ollivier turned around, his arms outstretched.

“Good evening, dear.”

Little George entered, out of breath, his cheeks flushed, his denim tunic floating around his thin shoulders, as fragile as a sapling that will snap in the first storm.

“I really ran. I was scared coming up the stairs. I thought the ‘screw’ was coming. What a fright!”

They met here every evening, the stooped man and the adolescent who had neither past nor future. They talked quietly together. They sat together in silence. One talked about life, about which he knew everything, as if he were telling a story. The other listened, not really understanding, to that penetrating voice, unlike any voice he had ever heard. Sometimes they held each other close, in the shadows, gazing at each other, at a loss for words. Ollivier waited for that moment when Little George’s eyes—slightly off-center, and dark as a pond full of
reflections—lost all trace of their normal expression; when his colorless lips became the only sign in that proffered face. The door swung open.

“Beat it, quick!” whispered Ribotte. “Perchot just kicked off.”

The guard came upstairs. He touched Perchot’s stone-cold forehead and said:

“O.K. Nothing to do until tomorrow. No need to call the doctor … The death certificate has been ready since yesterday.”

The profile of the guard (the one they call “Top Kick”) is sharply silhouetted for an instant against the gray background of the window: comical jutting jaw, bushy mustache,
képi
visor slanting down. He leaves. The dead man remains, his eyes open, empty, and transparent like funeral lights waiting to be lit …

I knew Perchot rather well. It was hard for me to recognize him in that emaciated mask. It had been a long time since anyone could have recognized in him the strapping farmboy who had entered a bordello one drunken Sunday. Afterwards he had never been able to understand what had gone on inside of him while he was lying on that passive, indifferent female, who suddenly awoke in fright to discover fixed upon her his wild, hard, inflamed eyes. Later, when they showed him the mangled breasts and belly and he saw his pocketknife red to the hilt with shreds of flesh clinging to the handle, he could hardly grasp what had happened. “What did you do that for?” they asked him. He answered: “I don’t know. I still can’t believe I did it.” Nothing now remained in that white, bony head of the young man’s fleshy lips. For years all trace had disappeared, in that inoffensive young lad, of the passionate brute who had murdered. Perchot was paying for an ancestor’s crime.

CELL NUMBER 4
.
HORTA.

This octogenarian, whose heavy flaccid jowls hung down over his wrinkled neck, had whiskers all over his face, which gave him a pale, bristly look. He used to cock his head to one side and stare out of the corner of one eye, keeping his weaker left eye closed. This gave him the air of having only one huge, metallic, cold-blue eye, through which he stared out at people in hatred. For eight years now the prison had held him in its grip; fiercely bent on survival, his endurance baffled doctors, guards, and attendants, in whom that obstinate eye had at last inspired a kind of terror. Remarried at the age of seventy after living the life of a corsair, tossed between palaces on the Riviera and cells in the Milan penitentiary; legend had turned him into something of a villainous old Borgia, pouring a phial of poison into his young bride’s tea. The crime, committed with the skill of an artist, remained in doubt. In the dock, Horta shook his white mane, hurled invective at his judges, railed bitterly at the prosecutor, raised toward the crowd the vigorous hand of a prophet, and cried out in a tragic voice:

“Woe unto you! May my blood bring retribution on you all! I am innocent! Innocent! Innocent!”

Nothing—neither the years in prison, crushing this old man under the weight of a life sentence, the dungeons, the hunger, nor even the illness that had chained him to this bed for the last forty months—nothing had silenced that voice of vengeance. His metallic eye cast the same dagger-glint; his wrathful voice, now hoarse, flung the same furious protest at all who approached him. (And yet in the depths of that cold eye a certain unease betrayed his guilt.) The whole infirmary called him “The Poisoner.”

“I’m out of paper,” he said to Ribotte. “Ask the Warden for some more immediately. I still have thirty pages to write.”

He pulled out a stack of manuscripts, covered with corrections, from under the sheets.

“O.K., O.K.,” said Ribotte. “Right away. Only don’t tire yourself out writing too much, eh?”

Horta caught a glimpse of me through the half-opened door. With the dignity of an old caged lion he raised his great, heavy body.

“Eight years! For eight years now I haven’t got tired! You, the new man! Ninety-six months, two thousand nine hundred and forty-five days …”

The words, the numbers, had lost all meaning.

“How long are you in for? Ten years? For me, it’s forever, do you understand, forever! … The grave. If I live for a century it will still be the same, do you understand?”

He rarely spoke this much, weary of seeing the same faces every day; of feeling his cries fading into the general indifference and—worse than death—feeling his own inability to move the souls of others. But, as he glared at the, his blue eye hardened, his voice rang out with conviction:

“Listen! I don’t know who you are. It doesn’t matter. Don’t ever forget what you have seen, you who are young … I am seventy-eight years old. They have been torturing me for eight years, and I’m alive, alive! And every day I shout at them: You have condemned an innocent man! … me, I’m innocent! Perhaps you have murdered or robbed, eh? Me, I’m innocent! Innocent! Innocent!”

“Be quiet,” said Ribotte. “They’ll hear you.”

He seemed to lose track of himself. With enormous effort, he sat straight up in his bed. This movement made him wince, for his disease had immobilized both his knees, swathed in bandages, for the past three years:

“Me? Be quiet? Let ‘em hear, let ‘em hear! Murderers!”

The silent
quai
under the tall, green poplars, the shimmering water where trees trembled in reflection among patches of sky, the path along the bank where a child was running: This peaceful vision of life, glimpsed suddenly through the window, calmed him.

“I’m finishing my brief,” he said. “Thirty pages more. This time I haven’t left anything out” (the blue eye glittered with pride once again). “My innocence is proven ten times over.”

The manuscripts piled up under his hand, close-written line upon line, quite legible, crisscrossed with references and ironical or emphatic exclamation points. Factual arguments—discussed, analyzed, reduced
to irrefutable syllogisms—analogies, artfully exploited inductions, brilliant dialectics, subtle, specious arguments which suddenly ensnared the unwary mind like a net, made this a strange and powerful book; and this man must, really have believed at times that his book—which no one would ever read—could and would destroy what he had doubtless never been able to extinguish entirely in himself: memory.

Perhaps even at the very moment when, terrible as an avenger, he thundered his innocence, an image still haunted his brain: his hands calmly uncorking a little octagonal phial and pouring a few colorless drops into the tea, steaming next to a little Japanese ashtray. The young bride came in, resembling one of the white birds gliding across her kimono, golden hair hanging over her temples. Absent-mindedly, she asked, in English: