Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

  According to Lenildo, a thief who never dealt on the outside but started in jail in order to support his two wives, three children and rheumatic mother, it wasn’t easy to deal in crack and come out alive: ‘You have to be tough, be careful what you say and weigh up the consequences of what can happen. One wrong move and I could end up on the tip of a knife, like that guy you examined last week. I counted more than thirty stab wounds. For Christ’s sake, Doctor, I felt like givin’ up crime!’

  I had indeed seen the body. He was a strong young man with a tattoo on his chest: Saint George on a horse rearing up in front of a fire-breathing dragon. The saint was thrusting his lance down the dragon’s throat with great flourish. There was a stab wound in the warrior’s waist, another in the dragon’s arrow-shaped tail, and another through the plume in the saint’s helmet, in addition to many others. There may well have been more than thirty.

  It had all been the consequence of a routine transaction. A regular user had gone to buy five reais-worth of crack on credit, saying he’d pay that Sunday. Suspicious that the user was insolvent, the guy with the tattoo had told him he didn’t have any goods. The peeved buyer mentioned it to his friends and they sent someone else to make the same kind of purchase. The guy with the tattoo didn’t suspect anything and sold on credit. He never should have given someone else the credit he had denied his old customer. It was a fatal mistake.

  I had seen so many similar cases that I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just do away with all credit. I once tried to call together some leaders among the prisoners to propose this measure. My hopes were dashed by a black man with dyed blond hair who had done time in the Casa on a number of occasions: ‘There’s no way it’ll work, Doctor. An addict who owes twenty reais will hand over his TV for that price. It’s very lucrative. It’s just like with the banks outside. You owe ‘em 20,000 and they take your house that’s worth 100. No one throws away that kind of business.’

  Lenildo, who prided himself on supporting his two wives and mother without them wanting for anything, explained that dealing in crack obliged dealers to take extreme measures, even though they might not want to: ‘I get sixty grams from my dealer and owe him four hundred. I package it up, sell it here and there, and some pay me and others ask me to wait ’til the weekend. Come Monday, my supplier wants his money. If I don’t pay, my goose is cooked.’

  Within this scenario, self-preservation spoke louder: ‘As a result, so I don’t get a knife in my ribs, ‘cause I’ve got a family to support, I have to stick it to the guy who owes me, with a knife, a club or boiling water, so he sees that I don’t let things slide. And that’s how it goes, each man lookin’ out for his own hide.’

  There were situations, however, in which it was more advantageous to cut one’s losses: ‘The buyer didn’t pay up? Let it go. Except that then, if somethin’ goes wrong and I find myself in a bit of a spot, he’s the one who’s gonna knife me, to clear his debt. Otherwise it’ll come back to bite him in the ass, unfortunately.’

  In spite of attempts to repress it, trafficking was firmly rooted in the prison. Each big dealer headed up a group of associates, who sold to the addicts desperate for drugs. It was an invisible, secret network: ‘like the mafia’, someone once told me.

  Idleness

  The inmates themselves used to say that an idle mind was the devil’s playground. Contrary to what one might imagine, most preferred to do their time working. They said time went faster that way, and at night: ‘When your body’s tired, you’re less likely to sit around reminiscing.’

  It also allowed them to learn a trade and gave them some kind of perspective in life when they finally went home. Releasing them poorer and more ignorant than they were when they came in wasn’t going to rehabilitate them.

  Sérvulo – a thief who ran the medical room in Eight and used to pack the waiting room with patients, and who I later discovered was charging two packets of cigarettes to get them a consultation – saw another advantage to working: ‘Prison would be less dangerous with those malignant minds occupied.’

  As an incentive, the law established that a person’s sentence could be reduced by one day for every three worked, though the mathematics weren’t always respected for those without a lawyer. Even so, many vied for the few jobs available. Others, however, were more orthodox: ‘Work? Not even on the outside, with my dad on my case. In here, never. It’s a matter of principle.’

  One Venezuelan naturalised as a Brazilian – who used to go into the Amazon jungle to receive drugs and then kill the delivery man because it was cheaper than paying him – was adamant: ‘The only way I’ll work for society is after I’m dead, if they cremate me and put my ashes in an hourglass.’

  To be fair, however, with the exception of security-related activities, the prison’s other tasks were all done by the prisoners – they cooked, distributed meals, cleaned everything, collected tons of rubbish, fixed things, made deliveries here and there, and organised football tournaments and the Winter Clothes Campaign.

  The inmates kept the Big House running and without them it would have been chaos.

  Some companies employed inmates to sew leather balls, flip-flops, insert spirals in notebooks, spokes in umbrellas, screws in hinges and similar jobs. Theoretically, the prisoners should have been paid for their services, which could have helped support families left without breadwinners or gone into savings for when they were released. In practice, however, there was so much bureaucracy involved in receiving the money that many of them accepted payment in packets of cigarettes, the prison’s traditional currency.

  Because there was only enough work for a privileged few, most spent their days lazing about, spinning yarns to their mates in the courtyard, lifting weights at the gym, practising capoeira in the old cinema, walking up and down the stairs, inventing anything at all to entertain themselves and, above all, getting into trouble.

  The Venezuelan concerned with the fate of his ashes warned me as I walked unawares among the groups of men that formed in the football pitch of Eight: ‘You hear so many stories of muggings, revolvers and gunfights, Doctor, you should walk through ‘em with your head down ‘cause of the stray bullets.’

  Running parallel to the organised work, which reduced sentences, was an informal economy of unregistered work. Some inmates offered clothes washing services, others sewed, cut hair, built sailboats decorated with football team emblems, cooked (there was a pastry shop in a cell on the third floor of Pavilion Eight and an ice cream parlour in Pavilion Two), distilled maria-louca and set up stalls in the gallery, where they sold general supplies, used trainers, clothes, battery-operated radios, TVs and photos of naked women.

  Goods were purchased by bartering or paid for with packets of cigarettes or, discreetly, with actual money. Internal trade was fundamental to the vitality of the economy; it was how goods were redistributed, merchandise circulated and debts were paid. In a place in which the men were only given food and beige trousers, all the rest was up to them: ‘There’s a cost of living inside.’

  Coming from the lowest echelons of Brazilian society, not all of them had outside help. On the contrary, most had wives, children and elderly parents to support, which is why men who never would have got involved with drugs when they were free became dealers in prison in order to continue supporting their families.

  In the cells of Yellow and Solitary Confinement, full of cigarette smoke, locked the entire time, the men would spend the day chatting and when they ran out of things to say, they would stare at the walls. In old Jeremias’s experience, idleness could drive a man crazy: ‘In the past, when I was in Solitary, I saw lots of men go in OK and leave there straight for the insane asylum.’

  He spent three months alone in one such cell, in total darkness. To occupy himself, he would throw a marble at the wall and feel about on the ground until he found it. He once repeated the operation 177 times on the same day: ‘But, thank God, I came out of there with my wits about me.’

  Capital Punis
hment

  Rapists were hated by all, as I’ve said. The inmates accepted everything: physical violence, swindling, theft, white slavery and heinous murders – except rape. Their loathing for this crime was shared by the warders themselves and society in general. In a poor district of São Paulo, a man sexually abused a boy and killed him. The newspapers published photographs of the murderer and the child. One Friday afternoon, as the result of an apparent bureaucratic slip-up, a group of prisoners was transferred to the Casa without administration realising that the murderer was in their midst. From the moment he got out of the police van in Divinéia to his death in Pavilion Five, exactly fifty minutes passed. He was stabbed so many times that his right arm was almost disarticulated.

  Marcolino, an illegal lottery operator and counterfeit money vendor, who was about to be released, told me that the rapist’s arrival in the pavilion was no surprise: ‘We were more than prepared. There were newspaper clippings with a photo of him on every floor. The men’d stab him then pass the knife onto the person behind them in the queue. He was stabbed more than sixty times and, believe it or not, he died without a sound. It was weird!’

  On another occasion, Gilson, a 30-year-old sales representative, gave a 15-year-old schoolgirl a lift in his vee-dub and did everything he could to convince her to go to a motel with him. When he realised she wasn’t going to go with him, he pulled out a revolver and crying or saying she was a virgin didn’t help her. With the girl at gunpoint, he drove to a deserted place and raped her. That night, as he was watching the nightly news with his little boy asleep on his lap, while his wife and mother-in-law washed up after dinner, the doorbell rang. It was the police.

  ‘Was the vee-dub parked outside stolen today?’

  He answered no. Then they asked if he had lent it to a friend. Gilson again said no and was handcuffed.

  Down at the police station, he told his cellmates that he had held up a market stall. The next day, an illiterate crack-head asked Gilson to write a letter of apology for him to his mother, who had promised to abandon him once and for all if he was arrested again. The sales rep, with great style, began the missive: ‘Beloved Mother, I am down on my knees, with a bleeding heart, to beg your forgiveness. I have erred, I cannot deny it, but I regret it with every part of my being . . .’

  When he finished, he read it out to the crack-head, who, moved by the beauty of the words, was unable to stop himself crying.

  As he was reading, the police officer on duty arrived holding a half-empty bottle of whisky:

  ‘Which one of you is Gilson? What’s your article? What are you in for?’

  ‘Article 157. Holding up a market stall.’

  ‘Market stall, my ass! You raped a 15-year-old girl while holding a gun to the poor thing’s head. If there was any half-decent con in this cell, he’d give you a good workin’ over and get half a bottle of Drurys for his trouble.’

  It was irrefutable. He had the police report with him.

  The crack-head went first. With tears still in his eyes, he stood up and kicked him in the face. Then came the other occupants of the cell – there were eighteen of them. He was beaten until he lost his senses.

  He woke up with a bucket of dirty water in his face. He was tied to the bars of the cell: ‘They made me hold a light bulb in my hand and touched the bars with a bare electrical wire. They had doused me with water to conduct the current better. Two hundred and twenty volts. They only turned it off when the light bulb came on in my hand. There was a horrible jolt in my body and my tongue rolled up, then the flash of the light bulb. I thought I was going to die. I just prayed to God that it would be fast.’

  When they tired of the game, Gilson fell to the ground half-conscious, covered in blood and with a deformed face. That was when they urinated on him.

  Then Belly – a thief who had been caught stuck in the skylight of a house in which he had hoped to find a fortune in smuggled jewels – pulled down Gilson’s trousers: ‘Now you’re gonna feel like the girl you raped!’

  Gilson claimed that Belly wasn’t able to penetrate him. Cilinho – a thief from Five who had killed his unfaithful mistress and back-stabbing partner who was planning to run away with her and the money from a robbery – had witnessed the scene at the police station and discreetly gave his version of events: ‘Yes he was. Even in the state he was in. Doctor, Belly is more of a man than you and I both!’

  The prison administration tried to protect rapists by keeping them in Pavilion Five, Yellow or even the Dungeon. Security was relative, however, as Not-a-Hope once told me: ‘One day we find out. It might be a Nosy Parker who takes a peek at his file, someone who knows his dirty secrets or a screw who doesn’t like ‘im. All sorts of ways. He hasn’t got a hope.’

  Often, rapists were given the opportunity to live peacefully among the other prisoners for long periods. But one day, in the anonymity of a rebellion, the angry mob would take out its pent-up hatred on them. On these occasions, they were thrown off the roof, stabbed to death or tortured with sophisticated cruelty, like a man I once treated in the infirmary, whose tongue had been burned with a scalding-hot knife and was infected with the microbes present in the excrement he had been forced to eat every thirty minutes.

  The unpredictability of this settling of scores meant that rapists had to be constantly on guard. Anything that wasn’t routine could be the harbinger of capital punishment.

  In a place where the murderer of a defenceless father deserved respect, this aversion to rapists may seem disproportional. Lupércio, who prided himself on never having stolen anything, although he had spent most of his life behind bars because of marijuana, and who, years earlier, in Eight, had seen a rapist impaled on a broomstick that was driven in with a sledgehammer, explained the philosophy: ‘You can’t have men like that around the place ‘cause our wives, mothers and sisters visit us here. A man who’s done somethin’ that vile might have a relapse and be disrespectful. I’m against the death penalty in this country, but I’m in favour of it in the case of rapists.’

  Fall Guys

  ‘Fall guys are the pathetic individuals who take the rap for other people’s cock-ups.’

  A fall guy was the one who would come forward to .take the blame when a warder found a hidden knife, a coil used to distil cachaça or a lifeless body. Many were recruited when they arrived in the distribution cells. For someone whose family brought supplies, there was no shortage of friends and a corner he could call his own; others were lucky enough to find friends from the outside in the pavilion. As for the recent arrivals who were poor and unknown: ‘For every ten cells they ask to live in, they get eleven no’s. There’s only one way out of distribution for a guy who’s in a bad way financially: to become a fall guy, ‘cause the men have him take the blame for everything that happens in the cell.’

  The majority of fall guys, however, were recruited from the ranks of the crack users. Many addicts would take the blame for crimes committed by others in exchange for drugs. Dealers didn’t need to do the dirty work.

  When someone lost his life on Rua Dez, the warders would lock all of the cells until the guilty man stepped forward. The technique was infallible; no prisoner dared allow an entire pavilion to be caged up because of him. In the end, the one who claimed responsibility was almost always a fall guy.

  Although the warders knew he wasn’t really the one who had committed the crime or offence, there was little they could do about the code of silence that governed life among the criminals.

  I once treated a man called Needle, thin as a rake, who used to work the traffic lights on Avenida Paulista. Every wallet, watch and chain he stole, he smoked in his crack pipe, until his arrest. A compulsive user, he smoked sixty reais more than he could afford in the pavilion. One day, his dealer called him to his cell:

  ‘Needle, you’ve been owin’ me for a few days now. When are you gonna pay up?’

  ‘At this exact moment, I haven’t actually got the cash, ‘cause my mother didn’t come to visit me, ‘
cause she’s in hospital with my sister, who got shot in the chest along with my brother-in-law, who was murdered . . .’

  The dealer interrupted him:

  ‘Needle, here’s the thing: later this afternoon, a stiff’s gonna show up on Rua Dez on the fourth floor. You head down to Incarceration and take the rap. Say he offended your mother who’s in the hospital lookin’ after her widowed daughter.’

  Needle took the blame for the crime, which had actually been committed by six inmates, and was sent straight to Solitary Confinement, on the ground floor of Five. Later, he described the thirty days he spent there, sharing the space with five others: ‘I wanted for nothin’, ‘cause my cellmates took me food, joints to smoke and even cachaça to work up the courage to face the food.’

  Because Solitary Confinement was on the ground floor and the window was covered with a perforated metal plate, his companions in the courtyard outside would pass a long straw through a hole in the plate and into the cell, where Needle would suck maria-louca, the locally produced firewater, straight from the straw, the far end of which was dipped in an innocent-looking coffee pot held by one of the true murderers as he absent-mindedly leaned against the wall.

  Needle signed the confession when he had served two years and three months of a forty-year sentence. He paid his debt to the dealer, but it cost him twelve years more of prison.

  Another time, I arrived in the consulting room and noticed a strange atmosphere. The nurses were pulling out the patients’ records in silence and exchanging enigmatic glances. I asked them what was going on and they said it was nothing. I waited five minutes and repeated the question. Their answer was identical to before. I started seeing the patients, and they remained as quiet as tombs. I decided to be more incisive:

  ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on or am I going to have to find out for myself?’