by Victor Serge
The diet of prisoners awaiting trial at the Santé Prison is considerably worse than that of convicts in the penitentiaries. The administration obviously takes the following reasons into account. Prisoners awaiting trial are divided, from a dietary point of view, into three categories: rich or middle class, aided, abandoned. To tell the truth, they are only interested in the first category, who are frequently visited by well-known lawyers, protected by deputies, capable of bringing the attention of the press to bear on the House; but these people throw away or disdainfully refuse the administrative pittance. They are allowed to have their meals brought in from restaurants; they receive bottles of wine and ample baskets of provisions. The less fortunate ones, who are nonetheless aided by their relatives, live on food sent in from the outside or bought from the canteen; the subsistence allotment is of secondary importance to them. Those who are abandoned, without money, without relatives, drink down the lukewarm, yellowish morning water in fury, have devoured their loaf of black bread by noon, and apply for an extra quarter loaf from the doctor. These common-law prisoners, whose sham defense is hurried inattentively along by a court-appointed lawyer, have no complaints to make: This is made quite clear to them. The slightest comment is enough to send them off to the hole for several days. Shrugging his shoulders, the guard in charge of punishments tells them:
“Go ahead and croak, if that’s what you want. I don’t give a shit!”
They’re stuck. They croak all right, but slowly, without saying a word, sometimes dreaming of the hard-labor colonies from which you can escape, where you can take revenge.
(“Ah, I swear to God, if the screw messes with me, I’ll shove my shiv into his gut …”)
The evening cries—courage and blood!—send long, invigorating shivers through the marrow of their spines.
There is always the expedient of signing up to visit the doctor. You get extra bread, a ration of cod-liver oil, and pills—God knows what kind of pills!
Moralists sometimes compare the practice of medicine to a priestly calling. The mission of the doctor, the priest, the lawyer; aid to the sick, the disabled, the innocent victim and the guilty. How little of these old hypocrisies remain once the walls of prison have been entered! Victim or guilty man—a subtle distinction!—the prisoner awaiting trial who cannot pay, has no lawyer in reality. When, in the fourth or fifth month of pretuberculosis, the starving man’s tonsils swell up painfully, when chronic ear infection sends neuralgic pains through his head, he signs up for a “visit with the doctor.”
Around eleven o’clock, a guard rounds up the sick. Ten or so prisoners come together with joyful surprise in their sullen eyes and line up in the ground-floor corridor. While they’re waiting for the last of those who have signed up, a man with a swollen cheek discreetly makes the acquaintance of a man with varicose veins who complains of not being able to walk anymore; a consumptive gives a slight cough as he contemplates the blood-specked sputum in his handkerchief, on whose display he is counting to get some medicine. A fishy-looking financier— delighted to escape for a few minutes from solitude so cruel for an ex-playboy—engages in a hasty conversation with tall, cunning-eyed Jadin (“You know Jadin, from the Bagnolet holdup …”), who has only signed up for the visit himself to pursue some subtle scheme …
“Forward march!”—in Indian file under the direction of a guard. In front of the ground-floor cell which is used as the doctor’s office, more meetings, exchanges of furtive signs, top-secret missives passing from hand to hand concealing more than one criminal secret—and also more than one message of friendship. The whole value, even purely medical, of the visit to the sawbones consists in these meetings and correspondences. Psychosomatic afflictions subside in these moments of contact with other men.
A white table. On it, a large register. Seated behind it, a gentleman in a white coat flanked by two inmate-orderlies. A kind of administrative tribunal. A guard calls the patients.
“Pirard, Marcel …”
Pirard, Marcel, emerges out of the gray corridor wall and appears before the table of the sawbones, who is still busy with the previous patient (Crispin, Gustave-Leon, twenty-two years old; bronchitis), for whom he is writing, under the prescriptions column in the big register: “tinct. iod.” Eight tinct. iod. for today: November! Without lifting his eyes from his register, where he reads the records devoted to Pirard, Marcel, the sawbones questions:
“What’s your trouble?”
Pirard, Marcel, a teamster by trade (in the register: “assault and battery”; he broke his whip handle over the back of a dishonest subcontractor), has been preparing his lesson for two days. Being in a cell is driving him mad. He can’t sleep anymore; he has cold sweat, nightmares, buzzings in his ears: He can’t go on! He would like them to “pair” him off—that is to say, give him a companion, a living man, to talk to, since these walls, these naked empty, silent, cold walls are driving him out of his mind! … But how to say everything in this fleeting minute!
“Doctor, I don’t know what’s the matter; I’m going crazy …”
The two orderlies—two augurs—standing behind the doctor smile indignantly. Another faker! (“He’s going crazy! What’s that to us, buddy?”) The doctor at first raises his head, but immediately remembers that he has forty-seven men signed up for consultation this morning, and that this is only the twenty-third. Without even having seen Pirard, Marcel, the doctor himself clarifies:
“Headaches?”
“Yes, that’s it, Doctor!” murmurs Pirard, Marcel, in ecstasy.
He is already being gently pushed outside. The doctor writes “Bromide” in the prescriptions column. Maekers, Henri, is called in. Each visit lasts from forty to sixty seconds, the time necessary to fill out the prescriptions column with a rapid scrawl. Pirard, Marcel, returns to his cell weak and dejected. He continues “going crazy” noiselessly until the day—if his pretrial examination drags out—when we hear him dashing himself furiously against the door, beating his head against the wall, howling like a wild beast. Then they knock him senseless for a while, give him a shower, throw him into the hole; afterwards they “pair” him without medical assistance.
I have never seen the sawbones touch a patient with his stethoscope.
But it sometimes happens that an inmate is found dead in his cell— of natural causes.
The regulations prescribe a twenty-minute exercise walk each day; you have the right to refuse. I have refused it times out of dread of the wads of phlegm in the exercise yard.
The yards are twelve to fifteen feet wide by twenty-five to thirty feet long. The buildings of the Santé Prison, taken as a whole, form a vast quadrangle whose middle is occupied by the exercise yards. A vast courtyard is divided into more or less equal compartments, all of them closed. Some are enclosed by walls on three sides only; on the fourth, a grillwork looks, from a height of seven feet, onto the windows of the inside ground-floor cells. A covered catwalk forms a circle over these courtyards, which are very like middle-sized bear cages. Above, the guard. Twenty men can take the air under his eyes without ever emerging from their total isolation. Some parts of the courtyard are covered.
You go through the corridors in a racket of slamming doors; you see your cell-block neighbor passing out ahead of you; suddenly you find yourself in the bear cage. A landscape of mud-colored walls; above, the rectangular buildings, also mud-colored, with their infinity of little barred windows. You notice those that are open or closed.
Between seven and ten o’clock, nine men have passed through this hole; the tenth finds the cement literally covered with cigarette butts and greenish mucus. I have often resisted the temptation of those twenty minutes of fresh air, so great was the nervous repulsion I felt for that slimy mucus. For twenty minutes you walk in circles in the cages among the spittle. Sometimes a note rolled into a ball jumps over the wall or a voice calls from the grill side. Returning, you are nauseated by the stale odor of your cell.
Twice a week the inmates’ relatives gather
, a little early, in front of the prison gates, forming one of those odd groups that can also be seen, on visiting days, in front of hospitals. Women, especially older women, are the majority in these groups where people whisper, commune with each other’s sorrows, or remain apart in oppressed silence. All of them look like widows. The old men, who have come from poor neighborhoods with their baskets of provisions, have mourning faces. Their gestures are constrained by embarrassment, their glances veiled with shame. Some of them draw together in sympathy. The mother of a thief glances, with a look full of inexpressible commiseration, at the murderer’s mother. No one dares speak aloud; idle hands fuss over packets of foodstuffs and linen. Respectable people are afraid of being recognized there by a passing neighbor.
The visitors’ room is made up of two opposing rows of wire-meshed compartments separated by a space about a yard wide … The mother sits down in a compartment on the administration side. The son sits down in a compartment on the prison side. They are unable to touch each other. They can hardly see each other, barely communicate. Each has his face glued to the dusty grillwork. On both sides their eyes become inflamed trying to make out the familiar features in the semi-darkness. The other person is there: corporeal, yet ghostly; present, yet inaccessible. These partitioned compartments stretch out in long parallel rows. They are filled with a confused tumult of voices, sobs, sighs, cries, exclamations, admonitions, and advice which must be overcome in order to project a word from one cage to another. You leave this howling hall with your ears buzzing, full of clamors. But how many pardons, how many promises, how many sorrows, how many dashed hopes soar by each other there in painful flight—and fall there, heavily, with broken wings, in the mud …
A man, a woman. He: magnificent athletic shoulders, short neck, forehead low with compressed power, a kind of black fire in the deep sockets under the ridge of the brow. He: terror … a murderer. She: supple and feline from buttocks to breasts to golden hair. She: love, sold by night, given by day, a bogus “sister” come today to look at her man and to cry out to him:
“I’m yours, you see! Down to the depths of me! You’re my man!”
She is glued right against the wire mesh, straining toward him. Because it was for her that he bloodied his knife! Teeth clenched, he stares with dull eyes at that mouth which is proffered, given, but unreal; murmurs with the affectation of disdain for love proper to a male:
“Send me some tobacco.”
On the right, a mother and her son.
Twenty minutes. The mother, somewhat paler, leaves her cage with a hesitant step. She looks drunk. Her hat has slipped down over one ear. Her damp eyes are burning, her lower lip trembles … She is probably ashamed of crying “in front of people.” She is in a hurry to leave: “The street will do me good,” she thinks—and the walls of the jail turn about her, angular, shattered, crooked, falling in. “So it’s true, it’s all true, everything the papers said. My God! My poor little Marcel! My poor little Marcel! …”
… On his side, he moves off, staggering a bit himself, his eyes still clinging to the image of an old mama’s pained, ruined face. His shouted confession keeps vibrating in his throat. But it’s over, over. What a relief! She knows everything now, everything: that he did it in order to become a pilot …
In his cell he finds the gift of maternal hands: a jar of jam, some white bread, a can of sardines which has just been opened. A clean shirt. The shirt is spotted with grease.
In the neighboring cells, the jealousy of abandoned prisoners stirs with the clanging of the bolted door.
From time to time, inspectors come through. A gentleman in a silver-braided képi stands haughty in the doorway. Behind him, the guard on duty, the chief guard—bedecked with braid from cuff to shoulder—or some fat sergeant.
“Do you have any complaints to make?”
I have none. No one has any. Nobody wants to get on the wrong side of the omnipotent authorities. The pale, skinny kid whose guard calls him a “stinking little bastard” from dawn to dusk (lucky when his guard’s heavy key doesn’t whack him between the shoulder blades “on the sly”), gazes, full of deference, at the three rows of silver braid on the képi, squints at his torturer’s lantern jaw, stares out with the hate-filled eyes of a beast at bay—and keeps quiet.
Whistling, humming, talking to yourself out loud, making any noise, is forbidden. It might seem easy to maintain discipline in a cell. But punishments of dry bread, loss of canteen privileges, even of being sent to the hole, are dealt out each day to a steady number of celled prisoners, Most of whom are guilty of attempting to communicate with each other, either by tapping, by writing, or by other means. The use of the “telephone,” for example, is severely punished. The toilet bowls are connected to wastepipes which pass perpendicularly from story to story, so that when you speak into the opening you can be heard on the floors above and below you. By means of this bizarre “telephone,” it is possible to have actual conversations, albeit conversations interrupted by untimely waterfalls and requiring a great deal of skill: The whole thing is to talk loud enough to be heard on the next floor without being heard from the guards’ catwalk.
The regulations could be summed up in three peremptory words:
Living is forbidden!
But is it possible to forbid living men to live? With all the weight of its mighty edifices of stone, cement, and iron, the hulking prison affirms that it is possible.
The large number of inmates makes it impossible for the prison authorities to respect the principle of isolation. Thanks to an insufficient number of cells, a handful of culprits escape this special torture. Three men are put together. There is only one bed: Two spread their mattresses on the floor. I spent only two days under that system. Certainly, whatever its disadvantages may be, it usually presents one great advantage: Madness, the inevitable result of idle solitude, is somewhat delayed. But for the man who is able to master himself and discipline his mind, solitude is better. Being put in with two others can become intolerable to him.
Three men are brought together in a cell by chance. Whatever their differences, they must tolerate each other; relentless intimacy twenty-four hours a day … Rare is the day when at least one of them is not depressed. Irritable or gloomy, at odds with himself, he exudes a sort of invisible poison. You pity him. You suffer with him. You hate him. You catch his disease … If, among the three, one has the advantage of being well cared for by his relatives, then a jealous hatred hovers over all of his movements as he drinks the wine of inequity or reads the letter which the others didn’t get … If there is one abandoned starveling, then hunger and hatred may move in with him alongside the two other inmates. The presence of a slob fills the cell with snoring, spitting, belching—nauseating smells and filthy gestures.
The cube of air, hardly sufficient for one, is so insufficient for three that the air never really changes. You wake to a rank stench—a compound of putrid exhalations. The bitter smell, at first pleasant, then asphyxiating, of tobacco smoke, is mixed in with it. A bluish fog fills these four yards of space where three men wander around, gesticulating, like phantoms. Human beings give off an animal odor, and it takes a great deal of hygiene to keep it from getting rancid. The cell fills with a warm stench.
Each does his business in front of the other two. But perhaps the worst intimacy is not that of bodies. It is not being able to be alone with yourself. Not being able to remove your face from the prying glance of others. Betraying, with every tic, at every moment, the secret of an obtusely disturbed inner life. Not being able to work.
SEVEN
Burial and Victory
HOW IS THE PULSE OF LIFE EXTINGUISHED? IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY: WITH TIME. The same feelings, repeated indefinitely, grow dull. You lose count of the hours and the days. What moved or terrified you during the first days no longer moves you. Suffocation? Drowning? A torpor sneaks into your veins, between your temples: All of life takes on the faded-ocher hue of the cell. You can no more escape this torpor than you
can escape from these four walls. The rhythm of your inner life slows down. I will speak of the exaltations later on. Their rhythm is slow too; they come and go against this unchanging background without shattering the deeper torpor.
Men become childish again. The joys of the seventh year of childhood return. Gregory Gerchuny, an intrepid revolutionary of the time of the first Russian Revolution (1905), has described what a joy it was for him to receive a bar of soap in his death cell. Even less will do! I have witnessed—and other men have told me of the same experience—the profound drama of the appearance and disappearance of a ray of sunlight … On the ceiling, in a corner, around ten in the morning, a rectangle of sunlight appears: a few square inches. The cell and its inmate are instantly transformed. The rectangle draws itself out, becomes a ray. The presence of this warm light, which neither lights nor warms, creates an inexpressible emotion. Your step quickens, your back straightens, the day takes on a brighter aspect. But the ray of sunlight draws itself out, becomes narrower. This tiny bit of life-bringing gold becomes a thin thread ready to snap. Dull anxiety. The thread has snapped. The man-child grows cold.
Dreaming is another thing you soon learn about. Opium. This path, too, leads to insanity. Like all the cell’s paths.
The unreality of time is palpable. Each second falls slowly. What a measureless gap from one hour to the next. When you tell yourself in advance that six months—or six years—are to pass like this, you feel the terror of facing an abyss. At the bottom, mists in the darkness.