by Victor Serge
I have felt death struggling in others, like a dark bird flapping its wings but unable to take flight. There was one youth whose beautiful wide eyes and deep purple lips must have excited many passions: We sometimes used to meet at the cutting bar, where typesetters shave down leads and space lines. From the beginning, he had the long, slender hands and weak wrists of someone who won’t last. And the pale ears too, and the girlish neck where a blue vein stood out … Those dark wings! Then one day our glances met; we exchanged a few insignificant words, without moving our lips; I could feel a hardness growing up in him; I noticed his hand, which had become more sinewy, one of those hands which grips and holds on to things.
“What’s up?” Guillaumet asked me when I returned to my place. “Does life look so rosy to you today?”
I was smiling at the thought that there would be one less dead man this year.
These were not the tricks of a disordered imagination, but the results of keen observations, too complex to be analyzed, as well as of an inner experience confirmed many times over. I was sometimes afraid of dying within these walls, when I thought of the slow-passing seasons, of the mysterious epidemics that would pass among us, of the inexorable statistics which revealed the same percentage of deaths year after year: It would have been easy to estimate your chances, but at bottom this would be an almost entirely false estimate. I was sometimes afraid, but I knew very well that I would live. And I have seen some astonishing cases of conscious resistance to disease.
The chief proofreader, Lemerre, was a swarthy little man. All of his movements, even all the folds in his clothes, were in sharp right angles. His low forehead was narrow, hard, and jutting. His face was made of three straight lines: the dark line of the eyebrows; the dark, thin line of the mouth; the perpendicular line of the nose. A meticulous, stiff, distant man, I judged him to be firm, very sure of himself, and perfidious. A pharmacist’s assistant at the age of twenty, Lemerre had poisoned his boss in the hope of marrying the widow. A mature, calculated crime, aimed at opening his way to a bourgeois existence. A number of stays of execution had kept him from the guillotine and resulted in twenty years at hard labor, which he was serving out in the penitentiary. I met him in his tenth year. He had been turning around this mill for ten years with the same firm, resolute step, never doubting his own strength. The weight of those twenty years didn’t break him. Bent over the same galleys in a tiny office choked with lead dust for the past eight years, his lungs were being eaten away by tuberculosis. Every year, in the spring, Lemerre coughed blood. Every year, those who didn’t know him well expected him to die. He was made to drink huge quantities of creosote. When the early warmth forced the first buds to open on the shrubs in the yard, and we began to march with a lighter step, raising our heads toward the fresh blue of a sky flecked with soft white tufts, turning in circles to the tramp of wooden shoes in those rounds known as exercise walks, in those days when so much pain was mingled with so much hope in us, Lemerre would have coughing fits and nightly fevers. The infirmary would greet him as an old friend, in a cell on that terrible fourth floor from which few have ever returned. He would spend six weeks there and then reappear, “patched up again,” having carried off one more victory against the disease—his narrow, hard, jutting forehead a little heavier, a little harder, his stubborn soul a little surer of itself …
One morning we were stupefied to learn that he had died during the night.
“Lemerre? You’re sure it’s Lemerre? It’s not possible,” repeated Guillaumet incredulously.
At noon a wad of paper thrown near our feet cleared things up. It was not Lemerre who had died, but Lamarre, the lithographer—an overimaginative businessman who had thought of a way to insure and sell nonexistent shipments—a man generally in good health who had been carried off in a few days by dysentery. Guillaumet said:
“Lamarre, I can understand. But Lemerre couldn’t die like that.”
Someone else remarked:
“Poor bastard! He was no sicker than anybody else! It’s no joke! But as for Lemerre, impossible.”
When I left Lemerre, in his fifteenth year of confinement, he said he was feeling “much better.”
EIGHTEEN
Some Men
GUILLAUMET LOVES HIS NICHE, OUR ROW OF BENCHES WHICH MUST BE KEPT in perfect order, his good pals he can spot at a distance, this workshop (“the best in the joint”), even this prison (“the best in France”). In a strange way, hatred and habit bind a man to his chain. I myself, months after jail had turned me loose, lying on a dazzling Mediterranean beach, suddenly felt haunted by the memory of my long passage through the “Mill” that grinds up men. I let my head fall into my hands, I closed my eyes. Once again I saw the workshop, the yards where our files of woe-stricken men turned in endless circles, the faces, so many faces; I saw it all again, my heart heavy with a feeling of loss, pity and regret. And isn’t it a kind of fascination mixed with pain that makes me write this book? Old chains which have tortured us dig so deeply into our flesh that their marks become a part of our being, and we love them because they are in us.
Guillaumet rationalizes his satisfaction at being here.
“The other pens, you see, are full of short-timers—two or three years. They’re stuffed with good-for-nothings, clumsy pickpockets; nervous burglars, run-of-the-mill murderers, petty crooks—you know, the kind of jerks who order a dinner in a restaurant and then try to cut out on the check. Chiselers! But believe it or not, there are hundreds of them who get pinched at it every year!” (The very idea makes him grin with delight.)
You can do anything with that bunch of spiritless, worthless louts: you’d be lucky to find ten real hoods, ten real big-city gangsters in a hundred of them: Moreover, there are twice as many “stool pigeons” there. The administration has set up a system whereby trusties, who are inmates chosen for their good behavior (willing stoolies, in reality), watch over the others. These trusties are thieves, informers, blackmailers, homosexuals; you buy their favor or their silence; you suffer their hatred. They are the ones who work you over when they send you to the hole; there are professional headcrackers among them. Their “exemplary” behavior often gets them released on parole after serving half their sentence … Here, in the print shop, we have the fine flower of the criminal courts. “All the crooked solicitors, all the priests who fool around with little girls, all the accountants who are too smart for themselves end up here. They all have connections, people watching out for them, right? So you see, chum, we’re guests in a model prison …”
His mouth slightly twisted, his eyes wide, Guillaumet continues in a whisper:
“How I’d love to blow it up, your model prison! When I think of all the dynamite that’s going to waste, it breaks my heart.”
We have a whole miniature society within the walls of the print shop alone. Several accountants, some bankers, brokers, officers, ecclesiastics, teachers, tradesmen, and farmers; thieves, pimps, and gangsters; anarchists. An authentic marquis perpetuates the tradition of colonial administrators. The prison still remembers two famous colonialists “who used to blow up niggers by shoving a stick of dynamite up their ass … Do you know what they did to the Negresses? …” One winter evening, when the green-shaded electric bulbs made the Workshop seem more intimate, an old-timer passed on to me the horrible legend of the sexual tortures invented by two madmen in the torrid brush of Senegal. Their madness still gnaws at our minds. The sex organs of young black girls, tortured to death fifteen years ago, bleed again today in the souls of prisoners.
Short-legged, pleasant, and stout, ex-Lieutenant-Colonel Desvaux, comptroller-general, former secretary to a prominent Finance Minister, corrects the galleys of colonial statistics along with Lemerre. Ex-Captain Meslier, accountant, takes our orders for the canteen. He has an intelligent, ageless face ravaged by fever, struggle, debauchery, and alcohol. The Indo-Chinese and Sahara campaigns. Alcohol. Left for dead, riddled with javelin wounds, one night of battle in the African jungle. Legion o
f honor. Alcohol. Wild nights in Paris. Alcohol. But where was the money to light up the town every night? What was left for a worn-out jungle fighter who had battled in the tropics, possessed slaves and houseboys, spilt his blood in the jungle where the panthers stalk; what was left for him after so much plundered flesh, so much squandered wealth, if not alcohol; consumed in bars, at night? Meslier had written to his mistress, a demi-mondaine infatuated by this mad hero: “Fifty francs, tonight, or I’ll kill you.” (Doubtless he used to tell the Bamako chiefs: “Fifty porters and ten maidens tonight or I’ll turn the machine guns on you.”) Ten years’ imprisonment (anyone else would have left his head in the good Doctor Guillotin’s machine) soon reduced to five for mercy. Paroled after half his sentence. The African hero paid only thirty months’ imprisonment for that slit throat. But he soon returned to the print shop; this time as a forger. Alcohol, alcohol! He had fine, delicate hands, shaky but agile, astonishingly bright gray eyes which seemed a little crazy whenever he stared at something, a friendly voice whose inflections were sometimes tender, the manners of a well-bred scoundrel. In the lines he used to bow to passing buddies, then let fly at them with horrible insults behind a friendly glance. In church on Sunday, he would sometimes sit down at the organ and play amazing pieces by Bach or Handel by heart. Then he would march around with us for twenty minutes, head raised, unseeing.
We have an abbot, a priest, an Ignorantine brother, a sexton: sex criminals, all four. We have respectable middle-class people like Durand, a fat sixty-year-old man who had counted on getting acquitted! In the appeals for pardon which he sends off every three months, he constantly brings up his “long life of hard work and fair dealing”; the fact that his credit had been good, for thirty years, that he was a good father and a good husband. His wife sends him tender letters which he reads over every Sunday morning with moist eyes. In any case, he always has moist eyes, like certain old dogs; and a mouth which hangs open in an expression of vague dismay. He killed his mistress, a twenty-year-old dressmaker, because she was cheating on him.
“I had set her up in a little shop, with furniture I paid for by the month. I thought she was happy, and then suddenly an anonymous letter arrives telling me she has a lover … So, while I was working to pay off her furniture, that little bitch could afford to take lovers on my money? I went crazy, Monsieur, believe me, it was too much … I loved her so much!”
“My wife has forgiven me, Monsieur; she’s an angel …”
The other woman, the young blonde with the voluptuous, thrice-perforated belly, must have been a devil.
I look in vain for signs of passion among those who commit “crimes of passion.” All I find are impulsive men even less capable of sustained suffering than they are of controlling their anger (which subsides as soon as they act). Anyway, they never act in good faith, since they always hope they will be acquitted. An anemic café waiter killed his mistress out of jealousy. He’s the most passive and resigned among us all. There is also T*** the butcher, a shrewd shopkeeper, too practical and too insensitive to really suffer. We used to inveigle him into telling the story of his little donkey, the nice little donkey which he “adored.”
“Well, where’s the little donkey now?”
“I slaughtered him; he ate too much.”
For a short while I had a little old man, crippled by rheumatism, for my neighbor in the leather-stitching shop. At the age of sixty, he began to suspect his wife (who was five years younger than he) of harboring special feelings toward a suspicious-looking neighbor (an old man like himself), and so he chopped him up with a hatchet. “He never had her!” he would blurt out at the end of his story. His simplicity bordered on imbecility. Since he had been a concierge for many years in the provinces, we had him ask the Warden for the job of concierge in the prison …
All the middle-class people brought here by crimes of passion consider themselves victims of huge injustices: They have nothing but scorn for the “common criminals.” They are pious, submissive, great scribblers, and prone to informing.
The arsonists—or “firebugs”—form another category, even more submissive. For the most part, they are quarrelsome peasants, happy to be able to look down on the “gentlemen” who are forced to wear the same denims and the same numbers as they, but whose office jobs make them envious; they are hostile to the “crooks” out of attachment to private property, hostile to the anarchists out of a love of order. Squealing is the only way they can gain favor with the administration. Their devious mentality helps them ferret out illegal books, love affairs, and “systems” for bringing in illicit tobacco.
NINETEEN
The “Men”
OPPOSITE THIS MOB STAND THE MEN, THE REAL MEN. THE OUTLAW HAS NO illusions about society’s values and knows neither faith nor law; but he has self-respect, the knowledge of his own strength, and the respect of other “men”—the strong. “I’m a man!”: All his pride is summed up in these words. A man never sells out. A man knows how to take it— and to dish it out—in a knife fight. He knows how to go down into the hole and “keep quiet.” The greatest praise you can give him is to say: “He’s a man.” Safecracker, second-story man, pimp, white-slaver: You can trust him. If he says “count me in,” it means for keeps. If he says no, it means no; and nobody will ever be the wiser.
Richardeau is a man. You can see it in his face—the face of a stocky strongman—with his black eyebrows, his firm, heavy jaw planted with splendid teeth, his calm smile.
His arms are hairy; he had little, sharply etched tattoo marks on the palms and wrists of his huge hands.
“Do you know what that is?” (an arrow, two dots, a heart).
“No? Well, go ask the boys on the Marseilles docks. They’ll still remember!”
All the men, except him, who bear that glorious mark on their wrists are on Devil’s Island. There is no more reliable comrade than Richardeau. Tobacco is his only weakness. His neighbor, the arsonist Beaugrand, nurses a patient hatred against him. This tall, flabby, dirty hayseed can detect a pinch of tobacco or a half-smoked butt no matter how well hidden. Richardeau always denies it calmly, even when it’s obvious.
“This is your tobacco, right?”
“No.”
“It was found in your place.”
“Could be.”
They gave him two weeks in solitary. Then a month. Then a month in the hole. He’s a man; he can take it. But one day somebody threw a hunk of molten lead in Beaugrand’s face. Two weeks in solitary, for a “man,” is not too high a price for the pleasure of messing up a face like that one.
Laurent is a man. A big blue butterfly spreads its wings across his nose and over his two cheeks. There are blue letters carefully printed across his forehead under his beret, which he wears pulled down like a cap. When someone stares at him, Vincent shoves his cap back over his head with the flat of his hand; and the sergeant can spell out the words: “There’s a c—sucker staring at me.” All his fingers are decorated with indelible rings. His chest is covered with hearts bearing women’s names. He has a President of the Republic on one buttock, and a general in full-dress uniform on the other.
Laurent incarnates strength and despair. Of his barely thirty years, he has spent ten in prison, the African battalions, the road gangs, and jail. When you’re at Biribi and you think you’ll never get out, you have your face tattooed as an ultimate challenge to society. Laurent only got out by accident, and he ended up here. Ten years and ten years’ ban (expulsion from the country, leading to life in prison if they catch you). Laurent has a pale, greenish complexion, a queasy mouth, a fishy eye, a disgusting voice, and a filthy vocabulary. He doesn’t bother to hide his half-cured syphilis. One day, during a visit to the penitentiary, an officer with a chestful of decorations stopped in front of this prisoner with his marked forehead.
“So you think you’re pretty,” said Laurent, “with all that hardware on your right tit?”
Laurent hates the army, officers, brass hats, and good soldiers— “all
c—suckers.” Laurent hates the rich because they’re rich, the poor because they’re cowardly, “females” because one of them gave him the clap, because another turned him in to the police, and because he can’t get along without them. Laurent hates yokels because “they’re scum.” Although he is careful, he will stop at nothing. “I’ll mess up a few more of ‘em before I croak,” he says vaguely.
We met once in a room in the infirmary. Something was hurting me inside, and I was going through a very bad time.
“Got the blues?” Laurent asked me.
“Yeah.”
He grabbed my hand and squeezed it tightly in a brief show of feeling. His sad eyes communicated a dark warmth to me.
“Stick it out, man! Stick it out. We’re men, aren’t we?”
The anarchists are men of another stamp. Julien Laherse is leaving in a few days. Despite his bowed shoulders and curved nose, he has the beauty of a young Christ. He stayed in this place for five years, composing stick in hand, patient, unchanging, exemplary, living on a diet of oil, studying German and English, greeting his comrades with a glance of solidarity. When I arrived, he was the first to help me along, out of his own canteen. The sweetness and strength of his character make a faultless, but slightly exasperating, mixture. His language is precise, his ideas have a self-negating clarity. Julien denies all feelings; reason alone should govern man. He practices solidarity through rational egotism. Love? An obsolete expression. A momentary conjunction of personalities and sex needs that’s all, nothing more. The rest is nothing but ignorance, outdated beliefs, prejudices, the effects of our reproductive instincts. In two months when he is released, Julien will desert. He will go to Spain, to a sunny land by the seashore, and live a rational life cleansed of the unhealthy needs of industrial civilization: tilling the soil, living on fruit, taking walks through the countryside, swimming with strong strokes against the warm waves, contemplating the world in the light of his lofty, clear intelligence.