Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

In particularly well cared for cells, the little curtains, embroidered rugs, patchwork quilts and saints gave them the feel of a house in the country.

  The cell was a sacred place. It took a lot of pluck to enter another man’s uninvited. Even so, according to old Jeremias – the one with eighteen children by the same wife, doing seven years this time: ‘Without the owner there, you don’t go in. No matter how well you know the guy. It’s really oversteppin’ the mark! I’ve seen a man die ‘cause of a bread roll. He was good friends with the other guy, smoked some weed, got the munchies and went into his cell while he was in court. There were two bread rolls; he ate one. The other guy came back and said he’d been saving the roll so he wouldn’t have to eat his cold dinner. That night, he killed him in his sleep.’

  When caught stealing, ‘cell rats’, as they were known, were attacked with pieces of wood and knives. They would show up in the infirmary invariably claiming that they had fallen down the stairs, covered in blood, with head wounds, their bodies marked with welts and superficial stab-wounds, especially around the buttocks, the punishment dealt out when an inmate wanted to disgrace the offender. The thieves made it explicit that their penal code was unrelenting when they were the victims. ‘There’s that old saying: “A thief who steals from another thief has a hundred years of pardon,” except that when we catch ‘em they’re in trouble.’

  Day and Night

  The day started at five for the inmates who served breakfast. They all lived together, generally on the second floors of their pavilions, and were part of the brotherhood of cleaners which was the spinal cord of the prison, as I have said before.

  They pushed bread rolls and large urns of coffee around on iron trolleys. As the group passed, mugs and dented coffee pots would appear through the windows in the doors of the locked cells. Late risers would leave their mugs on the window ledge and hang a plastic bag on it so they could still get their buttered roll and avoid the torture of getting out of bed.

  When it was still dark, the cell lights were turned on in silence, out of respect for anyone who was asleep, explained Not-a-Hope, a skinny mulatto who had earned his nickname for the way he ended sentences: ‘You’ve got to be quiet. If you wake up early, when everyone’s asleep, and go relieve yourself and flush the toilet or make any other noise you’ll have to change cells. Wake up criminals? Not a hope!”

  At around five o’clock in the morning, the warders on the night shift would take a head count. They’d have the inmates get out of bed and stand before the cell window, to be sure that everyone was present and alive before turning over their shift. According to one warder who had been doing it for years, ‘At that hour, all you see is scowls.’

  At eight, the unlocking of the cells began. From the entry cage on each floor, one pair of warders would head down the gallery to the right, while another would head left. Holding a set of keys, the one in front would open the padlocks, while the man behind him would remove them and slide back the bar. Metallic sounds would echo down the halls. The men would come out of their cells in silence, like ants.

  In the work pavilions, they would quickly take up their posts. Others, such as the football sewers, for example, did their work in their own cells. I watched them on many an occasion, admiring the elegance with which they sewed. They would work sitting down, the sections of the ball between their knees, and, with the palms of their hands protected with strips of leather, they would pass the needle back and forth in precise, rhythmic movements until they reached the spot where they’d tie it off. It was a manual ballet.

  Although the really lazy inmates were still in bed, the traffic in the gallery and on the worn stairs was infernal. The prisoners invariably walked fast, climbed the steps two at a time; and no sooner had they gone downstairs to the field, then they’d nip back to their cells and come back down again. They looked like businessmen who had places to be.

  The hustle and bustle would die down at around nine, the strange hour at which lunch was served. Because the pavilions didn’t have general mess halls, the cleaners were back at work again. With the doors open, the ritual was somewhat different to breakfast: each man had to be in his cell, leaving the gallery free for the food trolleys laden with piles of takeaway containers or, when the general kitchen was still in operation, with big pans of rice, beans and a mixture of meat with potatoes and carrots. A man’s presence in the gallery at this delicate moment was interpreted as disrespect for food hygiene and punished severely.

  I once tended a large man with a squint and a crew cut who was covered in abrasions. He claimed to have fallen out of bed, which I could see from the characteristics of his wounds was obviously a lie. I heard the real story a short time later from Shorty, a 1.5-metre-tall fellow with a lisp who had killed four military police officers whom he claimed had murdered his parents: while the cleaners were serving lunch, the big fellow had absent-mindedly strolled out into the gallery with his shirt unbuttoned and a towel around his neck. One of the cleaners immediately turned to him and said, ‘You’ve got some cheek, sonny boy.’ That was the cue for the other cleaners to push him down to Rua Dez, beat him up and return to work as if nothing had happened.

  Old Lupércio, a dyed-in-the-wool pothead, said that back in the days when people were more respectful, a blanket was spread out on the floor of the cell and the plates were placed on it. The man who had been in jail the longest would choose his; the newest was the last to serve himself. The rules of conduct at mealtimes were rigid: ‘You couldn’t use the can, hawk up or cough, much less clean your teeth with your tongue, or you’d cop it on the spot.’

  Most of the sporting and leisure activities took place in the morning: football, boxing, capoeira, weight-lifting, music and adult education classes. The most popular by far was football. In games, if a patrolling military police officer happened to pass a stray ball that had ended up on top of the wall, he would rarely return it to the field. The explanation for this disregard – given by an officer who was transferred to this duty after the death of a colleague, and the retaliatory gunning-down of four members of the gang who had killed him – was vocational: ‘I didn’t join the force to be a ball boy for criminals.’

  Tournaments were organised with regulations that were committed to paper, after endless discussion, by the members of FIFA (the Internal Federation of Amateur Football, in Portuguese), a close-knit group of experienced, well-respected inmates, chosen by direct election among the football squads of each pavilion, led by the head of the sports department, Waldemar Gonçalves, who was in the habit of chewing on cloves which he kept in a little pastille tin.

  With so many players it was possible to put together a general squad with a good technical level, which nonetheless didn’t stop them from obtaining disastrous results against the excellent district teams that were invited to play them. Although they disappointed the inmates, these occasional defeats never provoked disrespectful retaliations against the visiting team.

  Reinaldo Drumond, one of the warders who worked at the prison door, black and strong as an ox, once proposed bringing a district team in to take on the prison’s squad. ‘I know they’re gonna lose, ‘cause the boys are good,’ he told Waldemar. ‘But my intention is to get the local guys who’re going astray, who are thinking about getting involved in crime, to see where that life’ll take you.’

  Years ago, in a tournament for seniors (players over the age of thirty), I was invited to give the kick-off. Honoured by the invitation, which came directly from the older members of the prison, not only did I give the kick-off but I also sought to watch all of the games. In the deciding match the squad from Pavilion Eight beat the one from Two, 3–1.

  At the end, the athletes gathered around the FIFA representative’s table at the side of the field for the awards. There was a special award for the most outstanding players in the squads who had won first and second places. Waldemar handed me a medal hanging from a blue and white ribbon and announced the name of the best player on the squad from Pavilion Two, t
he vice-captain.

  It was Gaúcho, a fullback with the typical features of an Amazonian, who had arrived in São Paulo twenty years earlier, as a tiler. He had been doing well at work until he became friends with a thief who lived in the district and got involved in a fight in which two contenders lost their lives. As a result, he fled his home, lost his job and everything he had, and ended up partnering with his thief friend, who stood by him in his time of need. After hanging the medal around his neck, I held out my hand to shake his. He was shaking with excitement, averting his moist eyes, which were glistening like those of a primary-schooler who had just won a prize, so as not to betray his emotions.

  At around two or three in the afternoon, dinner was served, with the same ritual of cleaners, trolleys, empty galleries and the obsessive respect for hygiene. From this hour on, anyone who was hungry had to make do on their own.

  The odd mealtime was again justified by the head count, which had to take place at five o’clock in the afternoon, and made re-cooking meals and the need for ‘jumbos’ important: ‘Jumbos are the bags our families bring us when they visit, or leave with the doormen on weekdays. They help a lot, though there are some idiots that sell their jumbos to pay off drug debts.’

  At five o’clock, everyone would return to their floors and the cages were locked, except those of the men whose activities justified their being out of them, such as cleaners and nurses, for example.

  Lock-up time was another of the prison’s rituals: the gallery would be busy, full of light, beans on the boil, the doors open with the naked women visible, voices, music from radios, people coming and going with pans and clothes. Suddenly, a warder would appear in the cage and beat a padlock against the bars or a pipe on the ground: clang, clang, clang, rhythmically, without stopping. The inmates would hurry to their cells, because lock-up was no time for messing around. The warders would lock up in pairs: the first one would put the padlock through the loop, while the one behind him would slide the bar into place and snap the padlock shut. It all happened very quickly and no man could be left outside of his cell. Offenders’ names were taken down the first time; if it happened again, they got thirty unforgettable days in Solitary Confinement. ‘If we’re not strict, mayhem breaks out, Doctor,’ the warders told me. ‘Everyone here’s a criminal, most with nothing to do but sit around looking for something to take advantage of. If you slack off one night, the next night you won’t lock anyone up.’

  Once the cells were closed, the sound of plates, talking, laughter and nightly news programmes could be heard in the galleries. Later, gradually, lights would go out and a heavy silence would fall. Even the night-owls who watched TV until the last film had ended took care with the volume, because a jailbird’s sleep was sacred.

  Without the bustle of the day, with men heading up and down the stairs, coming and going from the different floors, the prison lost its human face and became a deserted building with dark galleries and little altars of Our Lady Aparecida surrounded by flickering candles and plastic flowers.

  Late at night, walking through these haunted corridors, with the silence broken by an anonymous cough, a cat’s meow, or a door banging in the distance, I understood why men commit suicide in the morning, after nights of depression or claustrophobic panic, elbow-to-elbow with other men, unable to cry: ‘Men who cry in jail don’t deserve respect.’

  Lupércio – who had grown up in an orphanage and, as a young man, had been a masseur with the famous São Paulo Futebol Clube before becoming a wholesale marijuana dealer – told me he’d lost count of how many had hung themselves from the bars on the windows, and thought that nights became calmer after intimate visits were allowed. ‘It used to be worse. In the middle of the night you’d hear shoutin’ that echoed through the whole prison. Then the men’d start beatin’ their mugs on the bars. You could bet on it: someone had been raped.’

  Weekends

  By noon on Friday, there would be water in the cells, flooding the galleries and tumbling down the stairs. A strong smell of soap would fill the air and pagode and sertanejo music would mix in the corridor with the knocking of mops and brooms. The inmates would hang their clothes in the window, drag furniture about and hide the naked women.

  Cleaners in rubber boots, under the watchful eye of that floor’s head cleaner, would push the water down the stairs, while those following up the rear would dry the gallery. The cleaner in charge would move about among them, quickly and courteously, to ensure that not a single wet patch was left. On the stairs, the bubbling cascade would fall to the ground floor cage and flow into the black waters that another column of cleaners would push with mops along the path connecting the pavilions. In the words of the head cleaner of Pavilion Seven: ‘It’s all so visitors’ll find us in a more appropriate environment in terms of hygiene and civilisation.’

  Family members would start gathering at the prison doors in the small hours, the vast majority of them women. They were girlfriends, wives, sisters, aunts and the mothers who were inseparable from their sons, rarely abandoning them behind bars no matter how low they had sunk. Over the course of ten years, I saw so many demonstrations of motherly love that, I confess, I found wisdom in the saying ‘the only true love is a mother’s’.

  An old lady with a bun in her hair and legs covered in varicose veins travelled 600 kilometres from the state of Paraná by bus every fifteen days, religiously, to visit her son, who had been sentenced to 120 years. Four years earlier, the fellow, at the invitation of a dealer friend of his, had gone into a house whose residents he didn’t even know and murdered six people who had supposedly asked the police to shut down the drug den owned by his friend, across the street from their home. One Sunday, his mother begged a prison guard to look after her boy: ‘I know my son did something wrong because of the company he kept, but when I look at him, I can’t believe he took the lives of those people as they say he did. In my mind’s eye I can still see him as a little boy in my arms, laughing.’

  One Saturday, on the football pitch of Pavilion Eight, I saw Pirate’s mother, a short, stout woman, on tiptoes waggling her index finger in his face. The chief of a gang that had raided ships at the entrance to the port of Santos, where they would attach a rope with a hook to the railing and use it to climb onto the ship carrying machine guns, Pirate listened to her scolding with his head down and hands clasped behind his back, as humble as a fullback before a yellow card.

  Visitors to the prison came carrying plastic bags stuffed to the brim; plastic containers full of deep-fried pastries, potato salad, pasta, fried sausages and roast chicken. There wasn’t the slightest concern with cholesterol: they only brought what the prisoners liked.

  Visitors included many babies who were wrapped up warm, most conceived in the prison itself, in addition to older children bored by the waiting around with nothing to do.

  It was an incredibly diverse population of poor people, who spent hours queuing: long-suffering elderly women, born-again Christians with braided hair, mothers, brunettes in tight jeans and platinum blondes who talked and strutted like the criminals themselves. Some arrived looking sad, with their children in tow. Others brought folding chairs and greeted the entire queue.

  Because women will always find something in common to talk about, as the hours passed the queue would thicken into circles of women while the platoon of little devils would scamper among them, trip over, spill ice cream down their clothes and get reprimanding pinches from their mothers.

  The sacrifice these people made was no small thing. Once, Mavi, the chief warder of Pavilion Nine, asked a group of prisoners who were complaining about the food: ‘What are you complaining about? You don’t have to work to eat; you get free medical treatment and medicine, which whether good or bad is a right that people who work don’t have; when you mess up and a fellow prisoner decides to kill you, we transfer you to the security wing. The ones who do time are your families, who leave home before dawn with plastic bags, catch three different buses and, to top it off, scra
pe together the money they’ve earned with the sweat off their own backs for you lot to spend on crack.’

  When the sun was high in the sky, a horde of itinerant street vendors would swoop in and portable barbecues would fill the air with smoke. They sold canned goods, biscuits, coconut sweets, snow cones, hot dogs and two-litre bottles of soft drinks. Stalls displayed T-shirts and used trainers, and would rent blazers to men (a requirement that was no longer enforced) or respectable dresses for the more scantily clothed women, because the atmosphere was one of decency.

  Everywhere you looked there was someone selling packets of cigarettes, the official currency behind bars. The basic unit was a ten-pack of Commander, sold for seven reais. On the inside, each packet was worth fifty centavos; Hollywood and Marlboro cost double that. The value of a packet obeyed the law of supply and demand: when there were a lot of cigarettes in circulation, the price would fall; when they were scarce, it would go up. Because supply fluctuated according to the financial situation of families, who, in turn, reflected the country’s economic situation, in periods of national crisis, visitors would bring in fewer cigarettes and the price would rise.

  During the Collor Plan, when Brazilians’ bank accounts were temporarily frozen, Xanto – an inmate who, when visiting his aunt, had shot not only his drunken uncle who’d had the unfortunate idea to beat her up in his presence, but also his two cousins who had gone to their father’s aid; he had shot them all in the chest because, he recognised, not knowing how to shoot a man in the legs was one of his flaws – provided the following analysis: ‘That’d never have happened among us. Just think, a young lady shows up and announces that our money, earned with the sweat off our backs, is frozen? She’d be a goner, Doctor, not even the thoughts in her mind’d be left when we were done with her.’

  Pavilions Two, Five and Eight, on the left for those entering from the street, received visits on Sundays; the others, on Saturdays. On the last weekend of each month visits were allowed on both days.