Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

  I once treated an inmate by the name of Thousand and One – a reference to his four missing top incisors – who was doing thirty days in Solitary because he had been caught with two hundred grams of crack and eight television sets, supposedly taken from people who owed him money, in his cell. He was HIV-positive and had small sores on his legs and lower abdomen, which were leaking a clear liquid and had miniscule white larvae crawling out of them. He didn’t stop scratching for a second as he spoke to me. I treated the associated infection, but frustratingly I never did find out what was causing it, because Thousand and One was transferred to the State Penitentiary as a result of the television-set issue.

  Of all the problems, however, the worst was lying. In that prison, everything was complicated. Alongside patients with serious problems, others would fake illnesses, and distinguishing one from the other wasn’t always easy. An inmate would come in looking pale, with dishevelled hair, claiming weakness, diarrhoea, vomiting, dizziness and malaise. His appearance was that of a sick person, but how to be sure? He may have been pale because he had intentionally gone without eating, had been up all night, had been doing crack or was a good actor; how to prove subjective complaints? The objective of these inmates was to get transferred to the infirmary or to avoid being discharged from there. Despite the poor state of the facilities, that place was luxurious, as Juliano explained: ‘They show up here covered in lice, ‘cause this here is a three-star hotel compared to where they’ve come from.’

  Almost all of them asked to be prescribed vitamins, with a strange predilection for B12 injections. At first I thought it was because they felt weak and believed that the food served at the Casa de Detenção was of poor quality. I even went so far as to give them some of these useless prescriptions, thinking of the possible placebo effect that might give them psychological comfort. I soon realised that many of the inmates believed in the miraculous powers of vitamins and mineral salts, creating a busy parallel market for these products, in which the painful B12 injection, for example, was worth five crack rocks.

  I discovered this thanks to the honesty of Shorty – the little fellow with the lisp who had confessed to killing the four military police officers who he believed had murdered his parents, and who got a serious working over every time the military police riot squad searched the prison:

  ‘Doctor, I need some vitamins, but I’m not gonna lie to you. It isn’t me who’s gonna take ‘em. I’m gonna sell ‘em to buy soap and toilet paper. I’m on my own, I don’t have visitors and I get by with the help of the doctors.’

  He caught me off guard. I had given prescriptions to many liars. Was it right to say no to the only sincere one? On the other hand, abetting this small offence would make me an accomplice of Shorty’s and goodness knows how many others in the future. I refused his request, with a touch of remorse:

  ‘Shorty, until now I didn’t know this market even existed. From now on, I won’t prescribe vitamins for anyone.’

  ‘If that’s how it’s going to be, for no one, then you have my respect,’ he said.

  From that day on, I never again prescribed vitamins and I earned Shorty’s respect. I also learned that one of the secrets of that place was not to make any exceptions: if you do for one, it’s hard to say no to the others.

  Another time, I treated a man of Arabic descent, who had a large nose and was dripping with chains, which were tangled up in his chest hairs: ‘Doctor, I need a prescription for Biotônico Fontoura, which I’ve taken ever since I was little, so my family can bring it when they come to visit.’

  I didn’t even know the so-called revitalising tonic was still being produced and gave the prescription to the Turk, who, years later, escaped through a tunnel dug in Pavilion Seven. The tonic would be supplied by visitors, but needed a prescription to avoid being barred at the gate.

  After this request came others; always the same old story about the Biotônico Fontoura that their mothers used to give them. Even after finding out about the vitamin racket, I didn’t see anything wrong with prescribing the tonic, seeing as it was the families who bought it, and if the inmate later decided to sell it, it was his problem.

  One afternoon, as I was crossing Divinéia, I ran into the head of the medical service, my former teacher:

  ‘So you’re treating AIDS with Biotônico Fontoura now, are you?’

  ‘Er . . . Why the joke?’

  ‘Hasn’t anyone told you it’s prohibited? They drink it mixed with maria-louca, the hooch they make on the sly here. A few years ago, after hearing about this maria-louca with Biotônico for so long, I decided to try it. A prisoner brought me a full mug of it, telling the men in the gallery that Dr Mário’s strong coffee was coming.’

  ‘What does it taste like?’

  ‘Like sweet fire!’

  The next morning in the infirmary, I complained to my helpers: ‘Here I am prescribing Biotônico for inmates to put in their maria-louca and no one says anything!’

  They laughed sheepishly, except for Pedrinho, who answered seriously: ‘Doctor, you help us and we treat you nicely. You can trust us, but don’t expect us to grass on our guys.’

  Leptospirosis

  There are so many different situations that present themselves in a prison that a lifetime isn’t enough to know them all. The lesson in humility given by the more experienced prison staff helped me to relax and develop defensive techniques so as not to be duped all the time.

  To assess the veracity of subjective complaints such as nausea, anorexia, weakness and diarrhoea, I started weighing the patients at each consultation. It is rare for someone claiming lack of appetite and diarrhoea five times a day to gain weight, just as it is unusual not to hear something when listening to the lungs of someone complaining of coughing and bloody phlegm, for example.

  Pedrinho’s admonition that I couldn’t count on my helpers to expose the fakes made me pay closer attention to facial expressions. While the patients were speaking, I’d look them straight in the eye, without speaking, and would hold my gaze for a few seconds after the end of each sentence. When in doubt, I’d allow silence to fall, lower my head over their medical records as if about to write something and quickly glance at the nurses and whomever else was nearby to catch their disbelieving expressions.

  With the experience that repetition brings, I gained confidence as a doctor and spontaneity in my dealings with the inmates, who in turn stopped showing up with cock-and-bull stories like the one about the Biotônico Fontoura.

  Slowly, I learned that prison infantilises men and that dealing with prisoners requires paediatric wisdom. It often isn’t enough to let them complain or simply agree with the intensity of the suffering that they claim to feel. The angry manner with which many of them appeared for their consultation would disappear after I had palpated their bodies and listened to their hearts and lungs. By the end, it wasn’t uncommon to find a tender look in their eyes. The patience of listening and the contact of the physical examination disarmed them.

  Nevertheless, daily events made it clear that the complexity of that work required constant attention and discernment in order to work out what couldn’t be said.

  One rainy day, a thief from Pavilion Seven came in wrapped up in a blanket like a Bedouin in the desert, with only his eyes visible. His lips were split from fever, his conjunctivas were a reddish-yellow and he felt such intense muscular pain that he cried out when I squeezed his calf.

  It was leptospirosis, a disease transmitted through rat urine which was common at that time of year, when it rained every afternoon, the Tietê River overflowed onto the Marginal Tietê motorway and traffic in the Carandiru region became infernal. With so many rats and blocked drains, a few cases here and there weren’t anything out of the ordinary. That morning, however, was atypical: in two hours of consulting, he was the fourth man with the same symptoms. It was too big a coincidence.

  As the inmate was speaking, I took a peek at the records of the three previous patients and saw that they were all fr
om Seven, precisely the pavilion closest to the wall. When he finished relaying his symptoms, I jokingly asked him:

  ‘Are you working on the tunnel too?’

  What an inopportune joke! The guy grew even whiter and his yellow eyes bulged as he stared at me. As if he had become deaf, Edelso, the fake doctor, left the room. I realised that I had imprudently crossed a dangerous barrier. In prison, certain subjects burn the tongues of those who speak and the ears of those who listen.

  It seems that we sat there for hours, tense, in that silent stare, until I broke the silence:

  ‘I’m sorry, I was joking. I’ve never seen so much lepto spirosis as I have today. You’re the fourth person.’

  ‘Now, Doctor, you’ve put me in an awkward position.’

  Caught off-guard and uneasy, he didn’t deny or confirm his work on the tunnel. I tried to reassure him:

  ‘Look, I’m no copper. I’m here to look after the sick. You can trust me.’

  ‘For the Love of God, Doctor, this could bring trouble for me and the other men who came here today.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  Slowly, his face brightened. I suggested that he be admitted to the infirmary, but he refused; he preferred to take antibiotics in his cell. He said he could count on the help of his cellmates.

  Two or three weeks later, at home, as I was having breakfast, I opened the newspaper. The headline read: ‘Inmates Escape through Tunnel in Carandiru.’

  The hole, hidden behind a statue of Our Lady Aparecida, was opened in a room in labour, an area where the prisoners work, on the ground floor of Seven, passed under the wall and ended in the dining room of a house on the street next to the prison. There were those who claimed to have travelled in the opposite direction: from the dining room to labour, in Seven.

  Oblivious to the risk of cave-ins, the men had crawled more than one hundred metres through the flooded tunnel with drowned rats floating in it. One of the first through had knocked down a light bulb, which, in contact with the water, electrified the passage. In the darkness, squeezing their way through the tunnel’s narrow walls, receiving electric shocks, sixty-three men escaped to freedom.

  The only reason more hadn’t escaped was because an obese inmate had got stuck in the mouth of the tunnel. Cork, as he came to be known, was quickly transferred out of the Casa de Detenção so he wouldn’t be killed by the frustrated inmates who were behind him in the queue.

  Angels and Demons

  The cleaners were the backbone of the prison. Without understanding their organisation, it is impossible to comprehend day-to-day events, from the ordinary moments to the most exceptional ones.

  It was their job to distribute three daily meals, cell by cell, and do the general cleaning. The number of cleaners varied depending on the pavilion. In those with fewer people, as was the case with Four, Six and Seven, there were approximately twenty; the more populous ones, such as Five, Eight and Nine, pavilions with over a thousand prisoners each, had a requirement of 150 to 200, split into those who served food and those who took out the rubbish, swept and washed everything.

  The cleaners had a military-like hierarchy. Newer recruits took orders from older ones and on each floor there was a head cleaner who reported to the pavilion leader. Depending on the severity of a problem, there was occasional contact between the leaders, but the command was separate in each pavilion; there wasn’t an overall chief cleaner for the whole prison.

  It didn’t fall to prison administration to choose the cleaners; rather, the corporation itself recruited its members. In order to be accepted, a candidate couldn’t have informed on a fellow prisoner or have been responsible for anyone’s arrest. He couldn’t be in debt, have threatened to kill an enemy and not followed through with it, have been punched in the face, or taken the blame for somebody else’s actions. In short, he couldn’t have problems with other inmates. One of the cleaners in the infirmary once summed up the prerequisites in broader terms: ‘A cleaner is a human being just like any other inmate, but he has to have a clean record with the criminals. He can’t play dirty.’

  The corporation was especially selective when it came to the sexual conduct of its members. Rapists were never accepted and if a cleaner was found to be one, their lives were at risk. An inmate who had been sexually abused would only be admitted if he had killed his offender. If he was homosexual: ‘That’s where he’s even less likely to get in. It isn’t right for a person who does things with his ass to be handling people’s food.’

  When a member was recruited, the older cleaners would explain the rules: do not get into debt, respect other people’s visitors, assist those in need, help resolve disagreements and obey the group’s decisions. In the event that he received an order that he considered unfair, he had first to do what had been asked of him, then respectfully discuss it with his superiors. If the order was extreme, he had to take it up with his colleagues with a knife. The cleaners were a family: if you messed with one, you had bought yourself a fight with them all.

  The cleaners’ togetherness ensured their unquestionable authority. To take them on, one would have had to organise another, stronger group capable of sparking an internal power struggle, which was highly unlikely, though not impossible, as we will see later.

  The prison administration had a rather Darwinian view of the process, as a former director, famous for his boxing matches with the stronger prisoners, explained: ‘In competition, the more able prisoners dominate the weaker ones. It’s inevitable. We don’t impose a leader on them – it would be great if we could. What we do do is take advantage of the natural selection of the leader, getting him to command the others through their organisational structure. If everyone did as they pleased, who would control all of this?’

  Dialogue between administration and the cleaners was fundamental in maintaining order. One afternoon, the director of correctional services met with the pavilion leaders to put an end to the recent trend of inmates taking prison staff hostage at knifepoint as a means of forcing their transfer to another prison. The director of correctional services promised to speed up the bureaucracy of transfers and the cleaners agreed to calm desperate inmates. As if by magic, peace spread its mantle over the Casa de Detenção.

  A meeting between a director and a pavilion leader was like one between a company chairman and executive manager: in low voices, each would explain what he wanted and how far he was willing to go. A commitment made was a commitment fulfilled.

  The cleaners were absolutely fundamental in keeping internal violence in check. If an inmate didn’t honour a debt, his creditor couldn’t knife him without first consulting the pavilion leader, who would listen to both parties and set a deadline for the resolution of the situation. Before this time was up, woe was the creditor who dared attack a debtor. Without the acquiescence of the pavilion leader, nothing could be done. ‘He’s the one who keeps a handle on everything that happens in the pavilion. At that moment, they might be digging a tunnel, planning an escape, and a poorly timed stabbing throws a spanner in the works.’

  Once, Zico, a well-known criminal from the district of Vila Guarani, recognised a newcomer to Pavilion Nine and went to see the pavilion leader, a black man by the name of Moonface with a long career as a thief.

  ‘I’d like permission to teach that scumbag a lesson. He’s a rapist. He abused my sister’s friend, over in Vila Guarani!’

  Moonface listened in silence and when Zico had finished he said, ‘If this is for real, that he violated the girl’s honour and that her mother filed a complaint at the police station, there must be a police report. It’s easy. Write to your neighbour and have her bring over a copy of the report, and you’ll get your permission.’

  Zico followed his instructions to a T. The complaint had in fact been filed and the photocopy confirmed his story. He was authorised to kill the rapist.

  When he received the authorisation, however, Zico talked it over with his friends and decided that perhaps it wasn’
t the best thing to do. There was no fall guy on whom to pin the crime: he would probably get many more years behind bars, precisely now when he was about to be transferred to a semi-open prison.

  A few days later, Zico was summoned to Moonface’s cell in the presence of witnesses.

  ‘Zico, what’s goin’ on? What’re you waiting for to sort things out with that scumbag?’

  ‘I just got semi-open approval and I reckoned it was better to let it go for now and get him on the outside.’

  ‘Now you’ve disappointed me, Zico! You ask for permission to kill the guy, you bring proof of the rape and then you change your mind? Pack up your things and head on over to Five, ‘cause Nine just got too small for you. You’re no con, you’re a joke.’

  At Zico’s own request, the warders endorsed Moonface’s decision and had him transferred to Five. A patient in the infirmary at the time said: ‘The cleaners help as much as they hinder. They’re angels and demons.’

  Becoming a cleaner was a dangerous survival strategy: on the one hand, there was the protection of the group; on the other, a cleaner had to blindly obey orders from his superiors, no matter what was asked of him.

  Those who made it to the top of the hierarchy had to be well respected and to have been behind bars for a few years in order to know the ropes. Age was irrelevant and individual physical strength didn’t matter much among the inmates, contrary to what many people might think. I once met a frail 25-year-old who ran a pavilion of 1600 men. And the biggest thug in the prison was murdered in his sleep by an obstinate little man weighing only forty-four kilos.

  A dull-witted or cruel person was never appointed head cleaner. All of the pavilion leaders I ever met were men of few words and extreme common sense, who became leaders thanks to their ability to resolve conflicts and form coalitions.