Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

  One winter, many years ago, things got tense in Pavilion Five. The director of correctional services received complaints that the cleaners were charging protection money for rapists and drug debts directly from visitors. ‘Here’s the thing, ma’am: if you don’t bring the money next weekend, your son’s gonna die!’

  In the face of this inadmissible breach of the inmates’ internal code, according to which a prisoner, no matter how close he was to a fellow con, could only approach his family members if he was invited to do so, Luís, the director of correctional services, called Jocimar, the head cleaner in that pavilion:

  ‘I’ve been getting complaints that the cleaners are extorting money from prisoners’ families, and I won’t allow it. To avoid unpleasant consequences for your personnel, you’d better get order in the pavilion.’

  Luís wasn’t at all pleased with Jocimar’s reply:

  ‘I think your story’s wrong. Besides which, I can’t control everything that goes on here.’

  The following Monday night, the silence was interrupted by shouting in the cell of an asthmatic on the second floor. The warder doing the rounds looked through the window in the cell door, saw that the man was blue in the face and having difficulty breathing and opened the cell. The six occupants came out holding knives, took the warder hostage, then went down to Incarceration and overpowered the five warders on the night shift. They said they had received death threats from their enemies and wanted to be transferred to another prison.

  In these situations, despite the tension, a gentleman’s agreement would be established: the warders wouldn’t react and the inmates wouldn’t be overly violent, to avoid future consequences. On that occasion, however, everything was different; the mutineers were rough with one of the hostages and stole money from the others. There were two cleaners among them.

  The negotiations stretched into the small hours. When the day staff arrived, things got worse. Indignant at the humiliation to which their colleagues were being subjected, the warders pressed administration to let them resolve the situation with force. It wasn’t easy to contain them.

  Finally the negotiators reached an agreement with the rebels. At the prison gate, the warders flanked the police van that was to take them to another prison, as they had demanded.

  At this moment, with the acumen that the passing years bring certain people, Luís, a large, bespectacled man, planted himself in front of the door to the police car and told his colleagues, who were blind with rage:

  ‘Look, boys: what they did is unacceptable. We’re going to give ‘em a workin’ over, but I’m takin’ the first swing. I’m the director of correctional services and no one touches ‘em before me.’

  As well as having the undeniable moral authority of one who had started out as a warder when he was barely a boy and made it to director, Luís was holding a convincing length of metal pipe.

  In the courtyard, the prisoners came out using their hostages as shields. The agitated warders formed a circle around them, while military police officers guarded the prison entrance with machine guns. When the prisoners arrived at the door of the police van, Luís, still holding his length of pipe, quickly shoved them inside with a brusque movement and locked the door, without giving the indignant warders time to react. At that same instant, he turned to face them:

  ‘We’re professionals. It’s over, folks. Everyone inside. It’s over. We’re professionals.’

  Rumour has it, though no one knows for sure, that during their transfer to a prison in the interior of the state the prisoners got the beating that the frustrated professionals had wanted to give them, from the heavy hands of the military police who were transporting them.

  When this episode was over, the director of correctional services found himself facing the following dilemma: to speak with the pavilion leader again would be interpreted as a display of weakness on the part of administration; on the other hand, deposing him and putting someone else in his place wasn’t within his power. It was the inmates who chose the leader of the cleaners, not him.

  Luís, grandfather of two and son of a woman with a head of white hair who had spent her life worrying about his safety, realised that it was imperative he did something. His humiliated subordinates wanted revenge; the inmates were silently waiting to see what the next move would be.

  To buy time, which wasn’t a bad thing in a situation like that, Luís made a bold play: he transferred the pavilion leader to the State Penitentiary and declared his post open. With this measure he showed firmness in his command, appeased the warders and gave the cons a scare.

  Two or three days went past without a leader and the inevitable impasse arose: who was the substitute going to be? In Luís’s opinion, the cleaners would probably choose someone who would uphold the status quo of extortion, coercing visitors and disrespecting warders. In the following nights of lost sleep, looking after his wife who had just had an operation, Luís considered a radical measure: transferring the entire group of cleaners, scattering them throughout the system.

  He shelved the idea because a dangerous vacuum of power would appear; in the dispute to occupy it, many could lose their lives. Additionally, it couldn’t be forgotten that the cleaners carried out important duties in the prison routine. The very next day, who would distribute breakfast and lunch? And what if, out of fear, solidarity or some other reason, no one agreed to take on the tasks of those who had been transferred?

  According to old Lupércio, a pothead from the days in which one could calmly smoke a joint in downtown São Paulo because passers-by thought it was a rollie: ‘A jail without food is dynamite with a lit fuse, Doctor.’

  Luís’s many years as director of correctional services had given him time to organise an intricate network of informers which extended throughout the entire prison (if he hadn’t had the competence to put it together, he wouldn’t have held onto his position).

  Through the grasses, he was able to better assess the atmosphere in the pavilion. There were prisoners who were angry at the cleaners’ conduct, people who had had money extorted, who had been humiliated or who simply disapproved of what they did for moral reasons. He discovered that within the cleaners themselves there was even a group who didn’t agree with the methods used by their colleagues.

  Machiavellically, Luís remembered String Bean, a grass who had made a career of informing at a downtown police station, providing information in exchange for part of the goods seized from the thieves he turned in. His dirty past had led him to seek protection from the director as soon as he got to the prison. Luís had been willing to talk to him, promised discretion and gave him his word that the other inmates wouldn’t get access to his criminal record. At that moment, he didn’t ask him for anything in exchange, but one day, who knew? The future belongs to God, was Luís’ philosophy in running the prison.

  String Bean, tall, thin and with a wandering eye, ran the warders’ kitchen in the pavilion with a group of other inmates. Weeks earlier one of them, in prison for rape, had been stabbed to death by six cleaners as he was leaving the kitchen.

  Luís invited him into his office and offered him a coffee.

  ‘String Bean,’ he said, ‘ever since you set foot in here I’ve protected you. I’ve been good to you, I saved your life. If anyone heard from my lips about your past as a police informer, God help you; you’d be a dead man. Well, the hour has come for you to show your gratitude: I want you to head up the group that is going to take over the cleaners.’

  String Bean was intelligent. Luís didn’t need to explain everything. He merely helped him regiment those who were discontented and those over whom the directors had power. Proceeding with caution, in a matter of days he had managed to unite 300 dissidents around the new leader, and did his sums: ‘There are approximately two hundred cleaners. The numbers are in my favour.’

  In spite of his numerical advantage, the director knew that the overthrow would be traumatic. By this time, he could have transferred the entire group of cleaners and
put String Bean and his followers in charge, but it would have been evident to the inmates that administration was behind things, and the group put together with such great shrewdness would be considered by all to be a bunch of traitors. Many would pay with their lives for such a miscalculation.

  The old director concluded, then, that the only solution was for the new group to take over the cleaners’ cells, expel the losers and make the pavilion respect them, the best way they knew how: ‘Against force there is no resistance.’

  Luís was walking on eggshells. You can’t be careful enough, he thought: ‘Violence is a difficult remedy to measure.’

  The day of the final battle went like every other. At five everyone went upstairs. On the floors, as happened from time to time, the rumour on everybody’s lips, no one knew where from, was that there was going to be a general search for knives, alcohol and drugs. Those who had any ran to hide them.

  At the usual hour, the warder rapped on the bars with the padlock. Men hurried back to their cells, and there were sounds of metal, TV and a singer playing a ukulele. All entirely routine, except for one detail: the head count, sacred in the prison, wasn’t conducted.

  Baianinho – a thief with over one hundred robberies and two deaths on his record, who lived for free in one of the six cells with a TV owned by Jocimar, the leader who had recently been transferred to the State Penitentiary, with the condition that he hide eight knives in the cell and take responsibility for them if they were found – thought it was very odd that there hadn’t been a head count: ‘But because they were sayin’ there was gonna be a bust, I thought that was why. It was OK. The screws weren’t gonna find anything in our cell; we’d hidden all the knives in the shower.’

  The slightest disruption in the routine of a prison makes the men apprehensive. That night, the rumour about the bust and the fact that there had been no head count created an atmosphere of expectation in the cells. A deep silence fell. Bad sign.

  At eight-fifteen, movement was heard in the poorly lit gallery. Roberto Carlos – a thin thief with Our Lady Aparecida tattooed on his chest and a blind right eye, who had been discharged from the infirmary two weeks earlier – looked nervously through the window in his cell door: ‘I didn’t like what I saw: cons wandering the gallery at that hour, ten or twelve of ‘em. If there was gonna be a search, why was it that they were out there and there were no warders around?’

  Behind the ten or twelve came another two hundred. Their faces covered with ninja-style hoods, they formed a double corridor along the entire gallery where the cleaners’ cells were, on the second floor. They came holding knives, pieces of wood and metal piping, and the keys. They opened the first cell; precisely the one Roberto Carlos was in: ‘They told us to come out in just our underwear, ‘cause we all thought we were big shit, we took money from visitors and we were gonna die. Of the eight of us, no one wanted to be the first one out. We were sure our days had ended. We tried to sit tight, but we didn’t have any means with our knives all stashed in the shower.’

  If they had known that the plan was to overthrow the cleaners, they wouldn’t have hidden the knives and, above all, they would have disobeyed the order to return to their cells at lock-up.

  More experienced than his cellmates, Roberto Carlos took the lead: ‘Seeing as we were gonna meet our death, let it be free, runnin’ through the gallery and not like a chicken cowerin’ in its coop. I stripped down to my underpants and came out, ‘cause when the ship’s goin’ down, the man without initiative drowns first.’

  In his thirteen years in the system, Roberto Carlos had never seen as many knives as he did when he left that cell. He confessed that he was scared: ‘Those rows of men must have been hit men, rapists, all worthless shits, and the odd thief who had somethin’ against us. There was no way to even try to fight back, or explain that we didn’t know what was goin’ on. I took three steps and got a thump in the head that filled my eyes with stars. Even so, I tried to get out of there with my friends behind me.’

  By the time he got to the stairs, Roberto Carlos had been hit seven or eight times with pieces of wood and pipe. When he got there, a new surprise was waiting for him: ‘Every two steps down there was an enemy waitin’, lookin’ like a ninja. One of them, ironically, was holding one of the knives that Roberto Carlos had personally hidden in the shower and thrust it at his chest: ‘How’s that for bad luck? I hide the knife, someone finds it and sticks it to me of all people, aimin’ for my heart, except it got my shoulder. I don’t know if he missed ‘cause he was all worked up or if it was the work of the saint tattooed on my chest.’

  He was kicked and beaten as he ran down the stairs until he reached the pavilion door, where he took a relieved breath because he was still alive. But because an imate’s happiness never lasts, on the pathway between pavilions Five and Six there was another row of beige trousers and ninja hoods. Some say that among them were warders holding lengths of pipe, because it was the shift of the same team that had been taken hostage and abused fifteen days earlier. The fifty metres of pathway separating the two pavilions seemed interminable to Roberto Carlos: ‘It felt further away than Rio de Janeiro.’

  One by one, the cleaners’ cells were opened and their occupants kicked out at stick-, pipe- and knife-point. The intention was to evict and frighten the cleaners, with no fatal accidents. Black and blue, but alive, the cleaners and company were taken into the entry cage of the neighbouring Pavilion Six. From there, they were transferred to the safety of the Dungeon, in Four.

  The events of that night were avidly watched from the windows of Pavilion Eight, with a partial view of the expropriated cleaners’ floor.

  The next morning, String Bean, as leader of the victor ious group, and two direct subordinates crossed over to Eight on a diplomatic mission: to debate the conditions for recognition of the new order with that pavilion’s cleaners. With the support of the men in Eight, they thought, the pavilion of the older inmates, most of whom were repeat offenders, they would win the respect of the entire prison.

  They met in a cell on Rua Dez, out of sight of the warders. The dialogue was somewhat tense:

  ‘Now the three of you are going to die. First you, String Bean, for startin’ this circus. We don’t like you, ‘cause you defend rapists, like that friend of yours that they had the good sense to kill. Besides, if you wanted to take over the cleaners, fine, it’s your right, but it should’ve been by the light of day. By night, with the men locked up, that’s just gutless.’

  They grabbed the men, brought a rubbish bin and put String Bean in it with his hands tied behind his back:

  ‘You’re gonna burn to death and then we’re going to quarter you as they did with Tiradentes3.’

  Under such extreme circumstances, String Bean demonstrated his ability as a negotiator, without which he would never have made it to where he was:

  ‘Do you know why you’re not gonna do that? ’Cause if the three of us don’t make it back to Five safe and sound in fifteen minutes, your seven mates over in Solitary are going to die the worst of deaths.’

  After moments of indecision, String Bean and the other two were released with the threat that they would meet their death in any prison within the system to which they were transferred.

  Santão

  During the time when I was giving talks in the cinema, I met a thief and receiver of stolen goods by the name of Santão, who had had a falling-out with a childhood friend and killed him because he had called him Dumbo. Santão, who had been born missing the outer part of one ear, had been angry about it: ‘Dumbo has two ears, but they stick out. My case is different.’

  Santão was the eighth child of a grocery carrier at the Central Market and a laundry woman. By the time he was seven, he was already making his own way in the world: he worked in downtown São Paulo shining shoes, cleaning car windscreens and selling roses, to help out at home. He looked older than his age and decided to change paths at the age of thirteen: ‘Curiosity got the better of me: I started
stealin’ wallets and pickin’ pockets.’

  Whenever he was arrested, the police never believed that a muscular mulatto like himself, unmanageable and missing one ear, was a minor and they would send him to the DEIC4, like an adult: ‘I’d be held with the hardcore villains, gettin’ worked over by the cops, who wanted to know what my crimes were, but all I’d done was pick pockets, pinch things from shops and snatch wallets as people were payin’ for things.’

  His strong body was a disadvantage. The police saw him as a dangerous criminal; his older companions as a small-time thief in a big body. At the age of sixteen, hanging head-down in five sessions of pau-de-arara,5 he decided to change his life. ‘That’s when I said: I need to do somethin’ more serious so I’ve got somethin’ to give ‘em the next time they string me up.’

  He left the downtown area and started robbing houses and holding up supermarkets and delivery trucks. He ended up in Pavilion Nine of the Casa, sentenced to eighteen years. In jail, he eventually came to accept his lot: ‘If I’d kept goin’ the way I was, I’d be dead or paralysed by now. When you’re in crime, you’re high on success.’

  That was his background. When the story I am about to tell took place, we had just finished the study showing that 78 per cent of the transvestites in the Casa were HIV-positive. Staggered by the number, I arranged with Waldemar Gonçalves to have a talk with the transvestites. It was scheduled for a Friday at eight a.m., in the cinema.

  On the day in question, I arrived in the cinema half an hour early. I was lucky I got there when I did, because the sky grew dark and a loud thunderstorm caused a power outage in the prison. No one was there yet. I entered alone, in the half-light, and went to the window opposite the door to watch the rain. My gaze became lost in the water falling on the wall and the front of Pavilion Five.

  At a particular moment, I noticed a tall mulatto in a white T-shirt at the door of the cinema, some twenty metres from me. He stood there a while in silence, staring at me. Then he turned and left. Still standing by the window, I pretended not to have noticed him.