Men in Prison (9 page)

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

HERE I AM BACK IN A CELL
. A
LONE
. M
INUTES, 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 habitable, 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.

Every man who is thrown into a cell has an
idée fixe
as a companion. Every man who is thrown into a cell immediately begins to live in the shadow of madness.

… You bring nothing with you into a cell. Sometimes you find a book there. Never a sheet of paper. Nothing to work on. Prisoners awaiting trial have the right to ask for work, but several days go by before they get it, and it is invariably ridiculously underpaid work of stultifying monotony: sorting coffee beans, making paper bags, making paper fans, folding school notebooks. The same dull gesture to be repeated several thousand times a day. I admit that, however stupid it may be, this work is still a physical distraction, a diversion from obsessive thoughts. But this diversion is too weak; it merely serves to inspire the individual with a horror of work, pure and simple. Prisoners awaiting trial can also get permission from the examining magistrate to receive books for study from the outside; that is salvation. Unfortunately, this procedure takes several days. I got the permission without any trouble, but I recall they refused to give me two novels by Anatole France and Pierre Loti, these books doubtless having seemed unsuitable for study to the functionary in charge of censorship; and since prison, even preventive prison, still persists in the medieval notion of
penitence,
an inmate is not supposed to spend time reading things whose value is purely distractive. Fortunately, this rigor was tempered by bureaucratic imbecility: Having offered the argument of “literary research,” I was allowed to receive anthologies. The penitentiary administration, by the way, is very proud of having libraries in every prison. At the Santé Prison, they lend a book of one to three hundred pages a week to every inmate, but without any choice. The Judas opens, a voice calls “Books.” You hand over the book you have had for a week; the prisoner in charge of this distribution throws you another, taken at random from the little pile he has with him. The book I found in my first cell was an adventure novel by Mayne Reid: scalp hunters, trappers, virgin forest—all that is necessary, after all, to keep at half-cock the instincts of neighborhood “toughs.” About one fifth of the pages were missing; on the other hand, the margins were ornamented with various inscriptions and even with erotic drawings in a marvelous primitive style. The covers and the
corners of the pages were so shiny with grease that I struggled for several hours against the emptiness of the hours before making up my mind to touch that book.

The bulk of the Santé Prison library seems to consist of bad adventure novels, old graduation-prize books, Mayne Reid, Jules Verne, unknown and mediocre amateur novelists, probably bought by the obliging administration precisely because they are unsalable to the public, and a heaven-sent collection of Balzac. Later on, I had the privilege of choosing my book from a list which included about twenty titles of this sort. I almost forgot to mention those ancient little treatises of somniferous morality. To judge from the relative cleanliness (of the pages), they are the ones least read; but the ferocity of certain commentaries written into the margins reveals that they are the best understood. Here at least bourgeois morality dupes no one …

I learned, alone with these books, that the most mediocre printed page can have its value. Everything is in knowing how to read and how to make the book a pretext for meditations. Even if only on human stupidity …

Have you ever seen caged wolves at the zoo? There are lean ones, with grizzled pelts, who circle, circle tirelessly in a rapid trot around their prison. A man in jail, before the end of the first hours, discovers that expedient: walking. He begins to walk. He paces around his cell, his steps mechanical or self-conscious, depending upon his feeling at the moment. He counts his steps. Eleven!, Bad! He gets his pace into rhythm and smiles at having eluded the trap set by an ill-omened number: He gets around the cell in twelve steps. There are many other things to do: you can figure out the necessary time in seconds, note the number of times around, then undertake a complicated calculation of miles traveled. You can make bets with yourself, improvising fascinating games of chance. How many steps, how many times around before the next check by the man on duty, revealed by the faint click of the spyhole? Thirty-eight trips … Lost, lost! No, won! Right, thirty-eight. The captive comes to a halt with a great silent laugh, one of those laughs of solitary men that the psychiatrist recognizes so well. Or, like a whirling dervish, you can walk until you’re dizzy, until your breath gives out, until you collapse in the heavy wooden chair, your ears buzzing, your pupils dilated, while the four walls of your cell seem to stretch out obliquely, twisting themselves into diamond shapes and spinning around a fantastical axis. More often you walk
with a meditative step and your brain grows weak winding its skein of offensive-defensive tactics. When this has gone on for a certain number of months or years, the expression of your eyes and the lines of your face begin to change. A certain inmate will look at you in a distracted way, listen to you with detached politeness, and, by means of ingenious shifts and changes, constantly bring the conversation back to his system of defense. I met some who had been ruminating over theirs for eight to ten years.

A man marching in circles around his cell—twelve steps, never eleven!—has an invisible companion who is sometimes cruel, but who more often calms him, stultifies him, or releases him from the weight of his idle hours: insanity.

I immediately developed my own way of walking and of resisting the influence of my cell. Certainly not original. In his
Memoirs,
Peter Kropotkin tells the story of the years he spent in the Peter-and-Paul fortress at St. Petersburg. For a long time they gave him neither books nor paper. To prevent himself from going mad from idleness, he invented the idea of editing a newspaper every day, methodically, with the greatest seriousness; lead article, bulletins, features, scientific and artistic columns, society items … In this manner he mentally wrote thousands of articles. I did the same thing. For me it was an opportunity of undertaking a methodical classification and reexamination of my meager stock of knowledge, my memories, and my ideas … A huge internal labor which one never undertakes in the heat of action, but which makes you understand the value of “retreats” as they were practiced in past centuries in the Catholic world, and are sometimes still practiced today. Contemplation brings about a reexamination of all your values, an auditing of all your accounts with yourself, and with the universe. Introspection opens up the endless vistas of the inner life, shines a penetrating light into the most secret recesses of our being.

… But the invisible companion remains. Observing yourself, you become familiar with her. She is always there, watching and waiting for the moment when the will grows weak, when some spring in that complex cerebral mechanism which the metaphysicians call the soul begins to slip: Then an obsession invades your meditation and begins to bore its way slowly into your weary brain.

The French call this state of depression “le
cafard”:
the cockroach.

The image fits. The ugly black bug zigzags around under the vault of your skull.

The walls speak. To the careful eye, every surface reveals signs, most often scratched in with a pin or, in dark corners, in thin pencil lines. Four unchanging themes basically sum up the essence of the lives of the successive inhabitants of this cell. Man and woman. A heart pierced by an arrow.
“Fred-of-the-Catalan-Bar to Tina-of-the-Alley—for life.”
Or, abbreviated:
“Big-John of the Bastille to Lena-the-Mouse f.l.”
To give or take for life: This is the ritual dream inscribed on these walls by the hands of pimps. Does the idea of true self-abandonment really take hold of them? I think, rather, that they suffer, with a certain amount of self-complacency, from the feline violence of love: Violence is in the domain of the absolute. Other love motifs, brutal commentaries on the previous ones: The phallic symbol, the crude urchin’s sketch of pointed or fleshy breasts, the slit of the secret lips, and, less frequently, the ass or the whole outline of a woman. Of the face, only the characteristic hair-do remains. Primitive drawings which evoke the sex act, with the unimaginative lewdness of dirty postcards … How can we avoid the obvious conclusion, looking at these haunting symbols, that a kind of phallic cult persists in the slums of our big cities? The eternity of love is expressed in writing; the permanence of animal lust and all the suffering it brings in these circumstances cries out in these drawings … M.A.V, or M.V, means
mort aux vaches:
death to the cops! This phrase or its abbreviation follows most of the signatures. For there are two fundamental duties: love woman, hate the enemy … Another duty: solidarity. The betrayed man, like the captain of a sinking ship who tosses a bottle into the sea, throws out his warning to any and all:

“Dédé of Montparnasse is a queer.”
This is signed by B.H. followed by five periods and a date. Or again:
“Riri, squealed on by the Alsatian, two years, burglary,”
a concise history! Many names are followed by similarly terse statements of fact.

I found the following words carved deep into the floor in a corner of my first cell: