Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

  Their leader, a skinny thief who was merciless with his enemies and whose greatest disappointment was the fact that his younger brother had joined the police force, smiled wanly:

  ‘A knife we had stashed in the steriliser fell out. A small one, just for self-defence.’

  They had removed the back plate of the steriliser, hidden the knife and screwed the plate back on. It was unlikely that the warders would have discovered the hiding place without the help of an informer. When I asked them who had taken responsibility for the offence, they replied that it had been Fethry, a guy in the final stages of AIDS, committed to the infirmary, who could barely stand.

  ‘Judges don’t want to know about fall guys. They give ‘em heavy-handed sentences with no privileges,’ 82-year-old Lupércio told me. Once a fall guy went down to Incarceration and took the blame for a death, there was no turning back. If he denied in court what he had previously confessed, his life would be at risk when he returned to the prison. Even if he was transferred to another prison, it was dangerous. ‘He’ll die there too, ‘cause we all talk to each other. Every day people come and go from here, bringin’ news. It’s the Iron Mouth radio.’

  The Iron Mouth radio was so powerful that even after his release, a fall guy who had gone back on his word wouldn’t have any peace on the outside: That’s where he’s gonna die even more!’

  Although the number of fall guys in the prison increased significantly in the crack era, it was not an exclusively modern phenomenon, according to Philosopher, a career con artist whose glasses were patched with plasters: ‘There’s always been the sort who’ll take the responsibility for a death, and then, in the twists and turns of fate, he ends up getting killed himself, while another fall guy takes the blame for his death. Lots of mothers lose their beloved sons that way, leavin’ only tears rollin’ down the face of human sufferin’.’

  Good Guys

  ‘Everyone out of the cell with his hands on the gallery wall.’

  Bebeto was already fast asleep when three warders gave the order. He was worried; he had only been in the prison for three days and barely knew his cellmates. All seven of them came out in silence and the warders searched everything. They were about to give up, when one of them pulled up the bottom of a cupboard next to the wall and found two knives. Bebeto was surprised: ‘I had no idea two blades like that could even fit in that space.’ The warders wanted to know who they belonged to. ‘There they were, all pretendin’ it had nothin’ to do with them. Am I gonna say it’s not mine? First of all, the screws won’t buy it, and second, I’ll get a reputation as a grass, ‘cause if it ain’t mine, it’s theirs.’

  Solidarity cost him thirty days in Solitary. All things considered, he felt it had been worth it: ‘I came out with a reputation as a good guy. Life inside got easier for me.’

  It was better to pay for someone else’s crime than turn in a fellow con. The accused was allowed to claim innocence; but name the person responsible, never. In the event that someone else was unfairly punished, the real guilty man would pay a debt of gratitude, at the very least.

  Gypsy, a tattooed thief who worked in the infirmary for a while, received a letter from his wife. Troubled by possessive feelings, he went looking for some maria-louca in Pavilion Eight. Cidinho, his supplier, was sorry he couldn’t help him, but he was out of stock after a riot squad raid. Feeling sorry for his friend, however, Cidinho got him a bottle of Dreher for fifty reais. Gypsy paid twenty, assumed a debt of thirty and took the bottle: ‘To make up the difference, I sold a few shots, which is where I got unlucky. A guy got drunk and was disrespectful to a screw. They found out where the cognac had come from and said that if I gave them the supplier, they’d let me off.’

  Gypsy told them that the bottle had mysteriously appeared that morning at the door to his cell. He got thirty days in Solitary, but spared Cidinho – who had once thrust a dagger so hard into the hand of a business owner who had refused to open his safe that the blade went through his bones and buried itself in a table. The police had shown up immediately afterwards and when they saw the man with his hand stuck to the table, beat Cidinho and his two partners so badly that he lost the hearing in his left ear and all of his front teeth.

  Gypsy’s gesture did not go unnoticed by Cidinho: ‘He’s a good guy. If he’d turned me in, it would’ve complicated my legal situation, ‘cause I’ve already asked for a transfer to open and I can’t put a foot out of line, otherwise I’ll lose the benefit. But I didn’t let it go unthanked. I used my understandin’ with a screw to get a tin of goiabada2 to him in Solitary, ‘cause in there it’s a month eatin’ the food straight from the source, without doctorin’ it up.’

  This kind of respectful recognition didn’t apply to fall guys, who were looked down upon for taking the blame for someone else’s deeds – for what were considered the wrong reasons: cowardice, to settle a debt or some other form of immediate reward. The difference between a good guy and a fall guy was often very subtle, as it involved the reason behind the act, explained Chico – a former sailor who had killed his brother-in-law, been arrested and had never seen his children again, because, in retaliation, his wife had told them he had died in the penitentiary: ‘Fall guys take the blame in exchange for some kind of immediate benefit. A good guy helps his mate without knowing if he’ll ever be rewarded for it; he deserves our respect because he’s an altruist.’

  Transvestites

  In the beginning, with the transvestites, I had a problem with their identity. A man with breasts and delicate gestures whose medical record had him as Raimundo da Silva, but whom everyone called Loreta, would sit before my desk. As a doctor, how was I to address this person? Raimundo, take this medicine, or should it have been Loreta, dear?

  I quickly realised that Loreta was the right choice. Treating them as women didn’t offend them; much to the contrary.

  Transvestites live their lives on the margins of Brazilian society. They all come from the poorer classes, and when they go out at night, with their large breasts and tight skirts, they are automatically considered dangerous, regardless of what they have done. When they are arrested, they are taken to police stations, where the district chiefs try to place them in special cells, but when there isn’t room, what can they do? Squashed among men, in a situation in which many a brave man is at risk, curiously, transvestites find strength in their female fragility and command respect.

  In the Casa de Detenção, most lived on the fourth floor of Pavilion Five, but there were others scattered throughout the prison. Things were not all rosy among them; they would fight and bitch about one other, but their survival instinct brought them together in the face of danger.

  Old Jeremias said that the prison used to be different: ‘There were less trannies and more fags.’ He remembered a long-haired transvestite known as Índia who used to do the nails of the director general – the feared, iron-fisted colonel. ‘She was beautiful. When her sister came to visit, you couldn’t tell ‘em apart.’ When younger inmates asked, and only then, Jeremias, a survivor of many conflicts, would give them the following advice: ‘If you’re walkin’ along in the gallery and you see a faggot comin’, you’d best keep your head down. I’ve seen many a man die ‘cause someone said he was eyein’ up someone else’s faggot.’

  He was right, the husbands were jealous. Prison wives never circulated through the galleries and only went down to the courtyard accompanied. In order to marry, the husband had to be in a good financial position, because it was up to him to support the household, while she had to be submissive to the provider. Some disapproved of it in a veiled manner, but this kind of relationship was socially respected.

  The passive partner wasn’t considered a male. In the surveys we conducted, it wasn’t enough for us to ask if they had homosexual relations. We had to add: what about with a prison wife?

  Before intimate visits were instituted, homosexuality was prolific. I once told a toothless thief that he had tested positive for AIDS and asked him if he had
ever shot up drugs in the past. ‘Never,’ he answered. ‘I got this thing shagging prison ass. Lots of ass, Doctor!’

  Single transvestites could move about among the inmates without danger, as long as they knew their place. In the event of one of them disagreeing with another inmate they were allowed to defend themselves verbally, like women, but they could never get physically aggressive like the other men.

  Once, two dealers from Eight went to Five to collect a debt and had a misunderstanding with the debtors and their friends. They were stabbed. Among the attackers was a transvestite. The men in Eight didn’t let it go and wanted to invade Five. It was a conflict of serious proportions (both pavilions were crowded and the conflict could easily have escalated), which was only overcome thanks to the shrewdness and persistence of the pavilion director.

  The outrage in Eight wasn’t because of the physical aggression, which was commonplace in debt collection, but because a transvestite had participated. Zacarias, a chronic asthmatic and cleaner in Eight, complained to Valdir, a warder in Five: ‘Look what this prison has come to. Nowadays even fairies stick their knives in cons!’

  When they arrived in the Casa, the transvestites had already been estranged from their families for quite some time. Without any help in the prison, they either had to marry or continue working as prostitutes, as they had done on the outside. In the latter case it was for a pittance, in exchange for a tin of cooking oil, a good piece of chicken or a rock of crack.

  Patrícia Evelin, with her false eyelashes, had wound up behind bars because she had killed a client who didn’t want to pay her. What had upset her most was that he’d been rude and had kicked her out of his car like a dog. Once, Patrícia had asked the cleaner distributing lunch for an extra banana and received an indecent proposal: ‘Only if you give the bad guy here a bit of somethin’.’ She later laughed about it and said it was the least she’d ever charged. ‘What was I to do? I was dyin’ for a banana.’

  AIDS was devastating among the transvestites in the Casa. They would show up in the infirmary with advanced tuberculosis, perineum sores, shrunken breasts because they had stopped taking hormones and their wasting muscles infiltrated with industrial silicone. Enough suffering for any woman. In the end, bedridden, they would still smile with feminine sweetness. I lost count of how many died there.

  Innocence

  The prison was overflowing with innocence. An observer would be convinced by an initial conversation that no one was guilty. They were all victims of police set-ups, informers, sleazy lawyers, judges, ungrateful wives or bad luck.

  Paulão was a plump 40-year-old mulatto with a friendly smile and thick beard who was always moving back and forth through the infirmary. For months, our contact was limited to the coffee that he would bring me in the middle of the afternoon, in a glass with gold stripes and an Indian girl in a leopard skin on the side. The first time, I raised the coffee to my lips with ceremonious concern, which, to my surprise, was unnecessary: the coffee was strong and bitter, a pick-me-up in the interminable afternoon of consulting. One day, he brought the glass with the Indian girl on its side in an interval between patients.

  ‘Paulão, I want to thank you for your kindness. Freshly brewed coffee every time. I’m going to bring you a packet. It’s not fair that you’re using yours.’

  ‘Don’t, Doctor, it’ll make me feel sad. It’s my pleasure.’

  ‘How long are you in for, Paulão?’

  ‘I still haven’t been judged.’

  ‘Robbery?’

  ‘No way, Doctor! I’m awaiting judgment for a guy who died on my street.’

  ‘Was it you who killed him?’

  ‘My brother was murdered. A few days later, the murderer himself had an encounter with death. I became a suspect. Some say I did it, but they didn’t see nothing, and others say they saw it and it wasn’t me. And with all this business of some thinking it was me without seeing nothing and others seein’ that it wasn’t, here I am waitin’ to see what the judge decides.’

  A few months later, at his trial, the judge sentenced him to thirteen years and four months.

  Lover Boy

  It was a moonless night. A police van pulled up in Divinéia and eighteen handcuffed prisoners got out. The night guard grumbled: ‘And they say they’re going to deactivate the Casa.’ In protest against overcrowding, the newcomers had destroyed the cells at the local police lock-up where they were being held: ‘It’s always the same old story: they solve all the problems with the System by dumping more on us.’

  In the darkness of Divinéia, with one warder in front and two behind them, the procession turned left into Pavilion Two, in silence, stopped by Incarceration for the usual bureaucratic processing and was sent to distribution, on the ground floor. A warder stopped at the door and waited until they were all together. He opened it. The light was on.

  One of the prisoners, Zildenor, who, ironically, had been arrested in a toy shop while buying a train set for his children with the money from a robbery, couldn’t believe that the warders were going to lock them in there. ‘It was hot as hell,’ he said. ‘More than thirty cons lyin’ on the floor.’

  Some were sleeping on foam mattresses, others on tattered blankets. Strings stretched from one wall to another served as clothes lines for wet washing. There were plastic bags holding personal belongings hanging from nails on the wall. A privileged few, known as ‘bats’, had strung up hammocks and were hovering above the others.

  The occupants of the cell were outraged by the arrival of the newcomers. ‘When they saw there was eighteen of us, the ruckus started. There was lots of complainin’, people sayin’ it wasn’t right, there wasn’t room for anyone else, they’d have to kill one of us to prove their point. But the screws stuffed us in there ‘cause they don’t give a rat’s ass about cons sufferin’,’ said Zildenor.

  One warder justified it, saying, ‘It’s so no one can complain that there’s no human warmth here.’

  Inside the cell, the newcomers explained to their irate cellmates that they didn’t want to be there; they had destroyed the holding cells at the police station. ‘We were all victims of the same thing: overcrowdin’ in the country’s prison system,’ stressed Zildenor.

  It wasn’t easy to calm tempers, as the heat was relentless and the men were kept locked up all day long, being bitten by the body lice hiding in the folds of their clothes. Eventually things quietened down and the eighteen newcomers settled in around the toilet, according to the law of priority. It was actually a relief for them: ‘We were in all sorts of bother at the station. You had to take turns to sleep: some of us would lie down while the rest would stand there, trying not to touch the next guy, ‘cause it was wall-to-wall men.’

  The next night, a short, fair man with blue eyes arrived in distribution with his belongings wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper. He entered quietly and took up position next to the toilet.

  A short time later, a man lying near the window identified him as his wife’s lover.

  It was a serious matter: men who went out with inmates’ wives were the object of everyone’s hatred in the prison. I saw countless murders result from these love triangles: the husband would go to jail and the wife would take a lover, who later ended up in the same prison as his disconsolate rival. The former warder Aparecido Fidélis told me that wives were more likely than mistresses to abandon their men in jail.

  From his spot by the window, the spurned husband shouted: ‘That’s it! I know who you are: you’re the one who was fucking my girl. Now you’re gonna die!’

  He started over towards his usurper, but some peacemakers intervened:

  ‘Drop it, man, or you’ll get a bunch of years inside. Your sentence is too short. Get the bastard on the outside.’

  Their common sense appealed to the betrayed husband, who decided to get revenge in a less radical manner: ‘OK, I won’t kill the fucker, but lover boy here’s gonna have to pay tit for tat for what he did to my wife. I’m going to ride him from behin
d!’

  The lover humbly tried to dissuade him: ‘Not a good idea, man. I’m HIV-positive. I’m gonna die anyway, but do you want to get AIDS too?’

  At this point, a fat, toothless inmate, who had been in and out of the Casa several times, stood up and said: ‘Leave blondie-boy to me. It’s no problem, ‘cause I’m HIV-positive too!’

  According to Zildenor: ‘Blondie-boy was forced to go along with the fat guy in the corner.’

  The next day, realising that Zildenor was also new to the cell, the lover let off steam to him: ‘Jesus, man, that business about being HIV-positive wasn’t true. I just made it up.’

  Zildenor comforted him: ‘Don’t worry, Mr Big in the corner isn’t either.’

  This hatred of the figure of the lover was mercilessly incited by a military police officer who used to guard the wall behind Pavilion Eight. Whenever he was on duty, at ten o’clock at night on the dot, he would come out of the sentry box, find a dark point along the wall, near the windows of the pavilion, and rap on the wall three times with his helmet: clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

  ‘Hey con, here you are, all locked up, while the wife’s off having a fuck.’

  There would be a long silence, invariably broken by the same tenor: ‘Fuckin’ pig!’

  It was the cue for a fiery crescendo of swearing: ‘Fuckin’ cunt of a pig!’ ‘I’m gonna tell your sister when she visits on Sunday!’ ‘Hey motherfucker, I had your lady on all fours!’

  The shouting would reach an unintelligible peak and slowly subside until the last voices had silenced. Unperturbed, in the penumbra, the police officer would wait until silence had returned. Then he would beat the wall again with his helmet: clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

  ‘Hey con, here you are, all locked up, while the wife’s off having a fuck.’

  The Power Puzzle