Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

  Blackie was respected by all, even the warders. Occasionally, when his wound was being dressed, I would be called over to inspect it. Apart from that, our relations for the most part didn’t go beyond ‘good afternoon’ and ‘goodnight’. I never saw him relaxed, laughing or joking with someone. His scowling face made him look as if he was always on the defensive.

  One afternoon, I crossed paths with him in the gallery; there were just the two of us and his creaking wheelchair.

  ‘Hey, how’s the sore?’

  ‘It’s getting better. It’s dry and not as deep.’

  ‘It’ll heal.’

  ‘Thanks. God protect you.’

  I think I saw the faintest of smiles and watched the anger drain from his expression. Not that he was the picture of peace, far from it; but for a fleeting moment he looked disarmed, with a twinkle in his coal-black eyes.

  Mango

  All letters were opened before they were delivered to the prisoners. Three people carried out the task. At a table, one inmate would cut the side of the envelope with a pair of scissors, a prison employee would empty out the contents and look for strange objects and another inmate would staple everything together. No one was curious to read them; besides, there wouldn’t have been time, as there were thousands. Then the correspondence was separated by pavilion, to be distributed to the individual cells by the postmen.

  One of the lessons I learned from Waldemar Gonçalves was to listen to the prisoners who delivered the post. ‘To know how a prison’s doing, it’s imperative that you talk to them, Doctor.’

  Mango, a postman in Pavilion Seven, liked to chat with me – and I with him. He was a tall, well-spoken man with a booming voice, who had fled his hometown in Northeastern Brazil because the brothers of a girl who claimed to have lost her virginity to him wanted to avenge their sister. Over time, Mango came to trust me so much that he would give me detailed descriptions of the movement of drugs in the prison, which helped me in my strategies for the AIDS-prevention campaigns. For example, he was the first to say: ‘Doctor, you don’t need to insist the guys stop slamming, because it’s over now. You can search the whole prison and you won’t find a single syringe to tell the tale. The thing now is crack. It’s come to kick the cons up the ass.’

  Mango swore he had ended up in the Casa de Detenção due to a legal error. Years earlier, when he was released from prison in Sorocaba without a penny to his name, a friend had lent him half a kilo of marijuana. He had sold it in the streets of Liberdade, the Asian district of São Paulo, including in Rua do Estudante, where he lived. It paid the bills and there was a little left over: ‘To buy clothes for the baby that was about to be born, order a pizza on Sunday, and look after the wife, give her the pampering that every woman needs.’

  Then along came Sonha, a neighbour with whom Mango did business.

  ‘Sonha was caught with twelve bricks of weed stashed in her pressure cooker and, to get off the hook, she gave them my name. That was when the DEIC grabbed me.’

  The police raided his house and found a kilo of marijuana. ‘I had to hand everything over and part with a decent sum of money for them to let me off. They told me to lie low for a few days.’ He went home from the police station depressed, once again without any money. ‘My son had just been born and I was so hard-up I was lookin’ up to beggars.’

  At this delicate time, Genival, one of his customers, rang the doorbell.

  ‘Hey, Mango, sell me a brick and I’ll pay you tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not selling you nothing, ‘cause I have to stop for a few days. Take this one here to smoke with the loonies over by the church and leave me out of it. I’m staying low-key at the request of the cops.’

  Genival thanked him and left. After a few hours Mango went for a walk to think about life. As he turned a corner, he saw Murky Waters coming towards him.

  ‘I was just goin’ to your place to get a brick.’

  ‘Too late, I gave the last one to Genival.’

  Murky Waters didn’t like the answer.

  ‘The guy arrived from Alagoas just the other day, he barely knows his way around and he already thinks he’s a dealer.’

  Mango didn’t know anything about Genival’s past.

  ‘You refuse me but you sell to that bastard who’s got some serious shit to his name, a rape conviction and everything, and now he wants to come smoke with our gang!’

  Murky Waters pulled a length of pipe out of his waistband and clouted Mango across the head. He hit him with so much force that the metal rang in the air. Mango quickly ducked, but the pipe clipped his eyebrow. Blinded by rage and blood, he pulled out his knife and before his adversary had time to attack him again, he drove it into his chest. Murky Waters lost his balance and staggered backwards, but didn’t drop the pipe. Mango reasoned: ‘If I don’t finish this madman off now, I’ll never be able to walk the streets in peace again.’

  It took another three good stabs, two in the stomach and one in the back as Murky Waters fell into the gutter, face down.

  He abandoned him in a pool of blood, with frightened passers-by looking on, and ran home. He got his wife and newborn son, locked everything up and fled to his mother-in-law’s house in the district of Vila Madalena.

  ‘Things were going from bad to worse: the agreement with the police had cleaned me out, then I had to liquidate Waters, plus the baby had all kinds of needs and, to top it all, we were staying with the mother-in-law, who was always on her daughter’s case about the life I was leading.’

  So as not to depend on the mother-in-law, he decided to steal a tape deck with a guy whose nickname was Big Mouth. The tape deck was in a florist’s van, next to the Cardeal Arcoverde Cemetery. They had barely opened the door, which was his friend’s speciality, when the alarm went off. Big Mouth ran, while Mango tried to pull out the tape deck, but he didn’t have any experience in this kind of theft.

  ‘The alarm was honking non-stop and I was fumbling with the tape deck that wouldn’t come out. Then people started shouting “Catch the thief!” and I was surrounded. I had to jump into the cemetery. Do you know where I fell?’

  He really was having a run of bad luck.

  ‘Right into an open grave. The cemetery was huge, and I had to go and jump right into a grave! It was a deep hole, Doctor. When the cops pulled me out I couldn’t put any weight on my leg.’

  Down at the police station, in pain, Mango gave a false name. Two days later, he was identified and transferred to the Presídio do Hipódromo, where he found a vindictive enemy. He was still down on his luck.

  ‘Murky Waters’ brother, who went by the name Cross Eyes, was doing time there. I discovered that Waters hadn’t died, although he had been left with a huge scar in the middle of his belly. Cross Eyes and I had words, but there they’ve got guards to put an end to misunderstandings and all we did was shout, “I’m gonna get you on the outside.” “It’s gonna be you or me!” “You can bet on that!”’

  Mango got out first, got back into the marijuana trade, returned to Rua do Estudante with his wife and son and bought a revolver. One night, he ran into his enemy in the district of Baixada do Glicério.

  ‘Cross Eyes and me, face to face, about ten metres away, like from here to that wall there at the back of the gallery. I jumped behind a parked car and fired at him six times. And he fired six times too.’

  Their twelve stray bullets broke the windows of the vehicles parked nearby. When they realised they were both out of ammunition, the confrontation became hands-on. The fight started at the top of a block and rolled downhill. It ended amid a crowd of onlookers, with the two of them exhausted and covered in blood. They were arrested by a passing police officer.

  They were taken to the local police station, each charged with the unlawful possession of a weapon and released on bail.

  ‘After a month, a friend of mine, Butterball, who did hold-ups with me, did one with Cross Eyes. When they were divvying up the takings, Cross Eyes made off with a bigger cut. When Butte
rball realised he’d been scammed, he went and put three bullets in him; two in the head, just to be sure. I never saw Murky Waters again.’

  Because of the circumstances of his last arrest, Mango was accused of Cross Eyes’ murder. Without a lawyer or a convincing alibi, he was sentenced to nine years in jail. He couldn’t believe his bad luck.

  ‘After all the marijuana I’ve sold, the hold-ups, burgling shops, and I get locked up precisely for a crime I didn’t commit. Justice is blind, Doctor.’

  Mango was one of the prisoners who escaped through the tunnel in Pavilion Seven. Two years later he wound up back in the Casa de Detenção. Late one afternoon he came to me about a private matter. We talked in the doctors’ room; the sun was shining through the window and projected a barred shadow on his face. He handed me an envelope with flowery writing on it. In the letter, his wife said she was tired of suffering because of him and had decided to take her mother’s advice. She had moved to the state of Minas Gerais with their two children, the youngest of which had been born after his escape, and was never coming back.

  He sobbed as I read out the letter. When I finished, I sat there quietly waiting for him to calm down. The tears finally stopped rolling and he dried his eyes, stood, thanked me and left before I could say a single comforting word.

  Old Jeremias

  Jeremias had a misunderstanding with a warder and was given thirty days in Solitary Confinement. I went to visit him with Waldemar Gonçalves. Through the window of the dark cell, I could barely make out the old black man’s features and kinky white hair. When he was released from Solitary, he came to thank me for the visit. He was thin and his eyes were sad. He transmitted, however, a strength of character that reminded me of my father.

  ‘For someone who just spent a month in seclusion, you don’t look bad,’ I said.

  ‘After so many years inside, Doctor, the mind learns to control the body.’

  That was how our friendship began. He taught me a lot about life in prison as well as on the outside.

  Jeremias had fled the drought in the state of Bahia in the 1940s and had climbed off the coach at Estação da Luz as a newlywed; his bride with a handkerchief on her head, freezing cold, and Jeremias carrying the couple’s belongings in a cardboard suitcase.

  They had eighteen children, who had given them thirty-two grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Jeremias was determined and had managed to provide a decent life for his family; his daughters had all had church weddings, the boys had never set foot in a police station and his very Catholic wife visited him every weekend, although she never condoned his errant ways. ‘At home, if she discovered a single grain of birdseed that I hadn’t earned with the sweat off my back, she’d go off and report it to the police. It took a lot to stop her and the children had to intervene. That’s why, Doctor, you can’t tell your wife everythin’, no matter how much you love her. Marriage ain’t a confessional.’

  Jeremias was one of those men who had buried his past. I never had the courage to ask him about his life in crime; nor did he ever give me such an opportunity. Only once he told me he had been arrested in the city of Santos as he was getting ten marijuana cigarettes from the basement of his grocery shop to give to two dock workers. He mentioned it in passing and then changed the subject.

  He had a faint Northeastern accent and his speech was punctuated by suspenseful moments of silence and colourful expressions. It was a pleasure to listen to him. If he hadn’t been illiterate, Jeremias could have written a prison-survival manual. ‘Seen from the past, the Casa is a child’s playground now. When two or three men die, everyone gets scared. I tell ‘em: you should have seen it twenty years ago.’

  In those days, forty or fifty men would die in disputes in Eight and Nine alone. Then they would cross over to the other pavilions and kill even more. ‘When the dealers got busted ‘cause someone had grassed, a convoy of twenty or thirty guys’d go out into the gallery with knives, stabbin’ everythin’ in sight; whether it was them or whether it wasn’t. Even fags got killed. We had a barrel of gunpowder on our hands there!’

  The bodies would be taken to the room where cleaning supplies were stored on the ground floor of Five; the emergency morgue. ‘Death reunited everyone there. Piled up on top of one another, until the man with the black book’d come and hang a card around the dead man’s neck with his info on it. Things’ve happened in here that we don’t like to remember!’

  Experienced and respected, he was never fazed by skirmishes in the galleries, arguments in cells, or even the fights on Rua Dez. For him, it was the peaceful moments that were dangerous. ‘When you see the prison in silence, hardly a soul in the galleries, too much obedience, somethin’s about to happen. Someone’s diggin’ a tunnel, two or three are gonna die; it’s all about to explode. Everyone knows, but no one can say anythin’. You have to have eyes in the back of your head in this place!’

  Jeremias said that he had learned from the older prisoners not to stand about chatting or hang around with other inmates so as not to get involved in other people’s problems. For him, solitude was a survival strategy. ‘I might die of a disease, but not murdered in the cooler. When I’ve finished talkin’ to you, I go straight to my cell and shut the door. I don’t trust anyone and I don’t have a single friend. I don’t want jailbirds for friends! Lots of guys know me, I’ve been here so many years. I just say, “Hi, hi,” and keep walkin’. Inside, you have to keep to yourself, and God. It’s like walkin’ on eggshells!’

  In spite of all the rapes in the days before intimate visits were allowed, he says there was a lot of respect. The prison administration still owned the cells in those days. ‘They didn’t care if it was already full. They’d keep shovin’ in another three or four, here and there. You had to ask permission to enter, take your shoes off, ‘cause they used to spread blankets on the floor, and ask who’d been there the longest. The oldest’d tell you to read the rules on a piece of paper stuck to the door, and you had to obey them. These days it’s all very mysterious!’

  The codes were more rigid. Once, an inmate from Pavilion Eight became romantically involved with a homosexual. One Sunday, his wife paid him a surprise visit, found him with his lover and made a scandal. ‘She scratched the fag’s face up, and he got pissed off and shouted, “Get the hell out of here. You don’t need to come back, ‘cause it’s me who bankrolls him now!”’

  The other inmates were perplexed.

  ‘What? It’s all back to front: now fags are bankrollin’ cons?’

  It didn’t take long for everything to come to a head.

  ‘The next day, when they went to see exactly what was going on, they discovered it was the fag who was doin’ the con. Everyone’d thought that he was the fag’s husband, and there he was gettin’ it up the ass. It was fatal: they killed him and the fag too. There’s no pity or mercy in this place!’

  I once asked him if anything good had ever happened to him in jail. He answered that the feeling of walking out into the street, free again, with his wife waiting at the door was indescribable. ‘It’s a happiness that can’t be contained in your chest. You want to laugh, but that’s not it; you feel like cryin’, but you’re ashamed.’

  As for the bad things, he told me, ‘There’s two things inside which are the most awful: a guy steals, kills and runs amuck on the outside, and when he gets here he has to be a fag. The other one is endin’ your days in a puddle of blood in the gallery.’

  At the start of one year, Jeremias was transferred and I never saw him again. Time went by. One morning, I arrived at the Sírio-Libanês Hospital to find a young man waiting for me. It was his son. His father had been released and was going to turn seventy that Sunday. Because he had spoken of our friendship to the family, they wanted to give him a surprise and take me to see him on his birthday.

  That Sunday, I got off the metro at the last station on the line, Itaquera, where I met his son and we caught a bus that took another forty minutes to reach its final stop. From there, it was
almost half an hour on foot along dirt roads until we reached a little house with a porch overflowing with children and grandchildren. Jeremias was in the garden with two boys, who were holding up a trellis covered with chayote so he could fix the fence, next to a flowerbed of dahlias. When he saw me, his eyes filled with emotion. I wanted to give him a hug, but was too shy.

  Veronique, the Japanese

  The first time I treated the inmates of Yellow, as I mentioned earlier, an Assembly of God pastor asked me to examine a transvestite with a painful rear end.

  She insisted I call her Veronique. Despite her protests, the inmates all called her ‘the Japanese’, because of the slanted eyes she had inherited from her native Indian ancestors. Ever since she was little she had played with dolls and dressed up in her mother’s clothes. As a child, her first sexual arousal had been because of a man, as often happens with boys who later discover they are gay.

  She began taking female hormones at the age of eleven and, at thirteen, debuted in a motel with an older man who only hired minors. A year later, tired of being slapped around by her brother, she and a friend ran away from their hometown of Corumbá, in the state of Mato Grosso, to Porto Velho, in Rondônia. From there, they made their way to São Paulo, where they rented a room and started working as streetwalkers on a busy avenue.

  Veronique found herself a black market silicone injector, who gave her some passion fruit juice to calm her nerves and injected a litre of industrial silicone into her buttocks. With time, this silicone, purchased at a hardware store, infiltrated her muscular fibres and provoked chronic inflammation, which caused her to suffer in Yellow. The backs of her thighs were swollen, red and so painful that she could barely walk. I had her admitted to the infirmary.