by Victor Serge
Twice a week we get a hundred grams of boiled meat. Julien, who is a vegetarian, used to give his to Miguel.
“Tomorrow,” he told him one day, “I’m not going to give it to you.”
“But why?”
“Meat is poisonous to the system. If, out of ignorance, you want to poison yourself, I shouldn’t help you.”
This irrefutable logic was alarming to the comrade, for he was starving to death.
“Julien, that’s not the point. You will agree that a thing belongs to the person who needs it and not to the person who owns it without need. You have no right to dispose of food for which you have no use. It belongs to me.”
“You’re right,” said Julien, convinced.
Julien later committed suicide over a woman, in Portugal.
There are a dozen of us comrades in this city of the damned. From a distance I can spot the hard face and square shoulders of the miner, Nicklaus, who wears his prisoner’s beret like the leather cap of some hero out of Constantin Meunier. His rude hands, used to handling blocks of coal with their glint of black diamonds, smashed the heads of class traitors during a mining strike. From mine to prison, he merely changed one burden for another, digging even deeper into his hatred. In court, before the judges, Nicklaus had a very clear plan.
“I can do up to six years,” he told himself. “I’ll be free when I’m thirty-five: I’ll still have life in front of me. Eight years, ten years? No. My life isn’t worth that. My muscles will be gone and my mind stultified by the time I get out. If they give me ten years, I’ll grab the first rotten ‘screw’ in the gallery and make the jump from the fourth floor with him. One life for another. Mine is worth a thousand times more than his, but the choice isn’t mine. Don’t tell me that they’re not responsible. I’m a determinist. No one is responsible, but they kill us all the same, eh?”
“Once I made that decision,” he added, “I wasn’t afraid anymore. Only one thing bothered me: Suppose they play a dirty trick on me and sentence me to seven years. I didn’t want to have to bargain my life against my will.”
Vicenzi is a sort of blond giant, so silent that his mouth has that grave, sealed line you see in certain Italian Renaissance portraits. And pale, water-blue eyes lighting the heavy features of this day laborer who, in olden times, would have made a magnificent reiter. On account of his awful calmness in fights, his presence of mind, his surprising agility, he had been put in charge of guarding some precious printing equipment, which he had defended with well-aimed shots from his Browning. We never spoke to each other within these walls, although we had known each other for years. Two or three times a month, we would exchange greetings with our eyes. He would pass by in his impenetrable silence, continuing his march back to life calmly, forcefully, confidently. When he was out on bail, before turning himself over for trial, he told us pessimistically:
“It will be tough. But I’m tough, too.” I knew his exemplary integrity and his candor, the candor of a grownup child who believes in truth.
Miguel, Nouzy, and Rollot, all three counterfeiters, are more or less neighbors of mine. Miguel is a libertarian—that is to say, an anarchist-communist; the difficulty of finding a living in the streets of Paris at nineteen with a head so full of ideas and a passion for life so strong that ten hours a day in a factory seemed like ten hours of slavery, had led him down the dark path of “illegalism” (the accepted expression) a demoralizing individualist doctrine to which he was opposed. Nouzy and Rollot—one a forty-year-old stevedore from Rouen; the other, a handsome, fair-haired, twenty-eight-year-old Parisian mechanic—are both individualists, like Laherse, belonging to a so-called “scientific” faction. Because, in modern society, one must be either an exploiter, a wage slave, or an outlaw—three ways of living equally opposed to their ideal—they decided to take up the counterfeiter’s trade. They argue with each other about the meaning of life, death, heredity, monogamy, love, war, the transformation of man, the revolution. We manage to get together while working on some job, to discuss great issues …
TWENTY
The Mind Resists
SWELTERING AUGUST HEAT. THE PRISON DOZES, BENT OVER ITS TASK. A FEW yards away, the guard yawns on his bench. It’s either Réséda, the kindly drunkard, or La Tulle, the nasty drunkard, whose voice and bloodshot eyes have gone soft along with his flabby body. Three men in coveralls are working the hand press in feigned silence. The first— beads of sweat standing out on his forehead—turns the heavy press, straining his arms and body; the second spreads the proof sheets over the text and then strips them off; the third moistens the paper, carries the type frames to the press and removes them. With each turn of the press, the three silent heads come together; in that instant, an astute observer might be able to detect a fugitive movement of the lips, a fleeting expression. The pressman straightens up, the three faces reappear wearing their impassive masks. At that instant, these three men feel like brothers. They will savor the plenitude of their comradeship for long days afterward. Their whispered dialogue grazes the silence of this hell without breaking it—a low-flying bird seems thus to graze the water—searching into the meaning of life … And perhaps in that instant they are the only men in this jail, in this city, in this part of the universe, in whom the inexplicable flame of pure thought flickers.
The rhythmic clatter of the machines becomes a sort of constant buzzing in our abused ears. The air is heavy.
“The cicadas are singing,” whispers Guillaumet as if in a dream.
The cicadas? I blink my eyes like a man suddenly dragged out of darkness, dazzled by the light. There are cicadas in the fields, there are fields, there is a deep azure over the green and russet fields, there is …
The thinly painted glass in the windows of the shop has become transparent again in spots. I know where these spots are; I search for a shred of azure in them. A skylight is open. Azure.
Why have you dragged me out of my lethargy, that merciful lethargy of the prisoner that makes us forget the fields, the cicadas, the summer, the world, everything there is, since there is nothing real but our sordid world and time, the time we think we are wasting but which is slowly, inexorably, wasting us? An absurd anger unwinds its dark, serpentine coils in my brain.
“Guillaumet! Hey! Guillaumet!”
“What?”
“She died,” I say.
I’m ashamed of having said these two words, but I’ve said them. Cynically, I return the hurt. These two words come from a stupid popular song—“She died on the bo-o-at …”—but they hurt my neighbor, who turns pale, his eyes narrowing. Somewhere—in that unreal world where the cicadas are singing—there is a woman, a woman to whom he clings with his flesh and soul. I long ago discovered the secret superstition which sometimes reduces this self-possessed man to a childish sense of his own weakness. I suffer from the same affliction, and these two ridiculous words unhinge me, too; that’s how I guessed his secret. And I hurt myself even more than him, for I’m ashamed. The heat has unhinged me.
I look around me, to escape from myself. Dubeux, with his cadaverous complexion, is swaying slowly to and fro on his feet, composing stick in hand, prey to his usual obsession. Dillot, the seminarist, has his back to me, motionless; he’s crazy, too. I can see an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus under his shelf; and this flame-ringed heart cries out like a piece of living flesh, flesh torn away from the body by sharp teeth (I unconsciously clamp my jaws) and spit out …
The guard is half-asleep, the lout. I see two bowed heads through the glass partition of the lithography shop. A crazy old man with a drooping lower lip: I know that during these breaks he draws, painstakingly, for himself alone, on little squares of stolen cardboard, with the scrupulousness of a Persian miniaturist, incredible scenes of intertwined couples caught in insatiable lust. That carnal hallucination is his life. A yard from him, a pleasant German named Füller, his bandaged head tortured by cold sores, hastily copies the tiny portrait of a woman from a photograph; inmates who are sent photogr
aphs can keep them for only twenty-four hours.
Returning from the hand press, Rollot the counterfeiter (whose wife is living with another man) bends over the galleys, his brow wrinkled, reading a tray of six-point type. He pretends to be proofreading. His lips move slowly as if murmuring a prayer. I know that beautiful prose, beautiful like a metaphysical incantation, which he wants to keep constantly before his eyes:
The Idea of Nature
At the crowning apex of all things, at the highest point in the luminous, inaccessible ether, the eternal axiom is pronounced, and the immensity of the universe, is but the long echo, the inexhaustible undulation, of that creative principle…
… All life is simply one of its moments, every living being one of its forms; and the successive orders of things, proceeding from it with inalterable necessity, are bound by the divine links of its golden chain.8
At noon the bell gives us a quarter hour for rest. We grab a snack on tables made from old overturned crates. Everyone has his book open in front of him. Dinot, Volume XV of the General History of the Church; Laherse, his German Grammar; Guillaumet a precious Volume of “came,” (the abbreviation for “camelote,” contraband books whose appearance has been carefully disguised in the binding shop so as not to differ in the least detail from the works in the prison library), Volume III of Casanova’s Mémoires. Rollot is reading Balzac. I, too, open a “came” book: H. Taine, On Intelligence, Book III, The Knowledge of Mind… Gilles has already covered the pages with marginal notes in a tiny, round hand. The unknown laws of nature (I was about to say “chance,” but here in the Mill we like to join our sordidly human chains to the “divine golden links of inalterable necessity”) provided rich spiritual nourishment for us when, twenty years ago, they crushed two fine young lives in the flower of their strength.
In those days a little-known tragedy ravaged an old upper-class family, long corroded from within by the seven deadly sins. The children took the part of their injured mother against the father, an old two-faced judge who hid his selfishness and depravity under a hypocritical façade of respectability. One of the sons, an artist just coming into his own, pronounced a death sentence within himself after a pitiless inner debate. Without trembling, with the tempered soul of an avenger, he pressed the trigger of a hunting rifle. He was about to reach the crowning point of his life. The purity and passion of love, art, Paris, the future were just opening before him when, to break a vicious circle of crimes that the written law does not punish, he became a parricide. At the trial, they wanted, above all else, to save the honor of the family; as a result, the parricide shouldered all the blame. The whole family kept silent over the dead man’s infamy. The parricide kept silent as well. Influence in high places saved him from the guillotine and the penal colony of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in Guiana. He was granted the signal honor of undergoing his twenty years at hard labor in this penitentiary. He only asked for one thing: that his mind be allowed to live. That he be allowed to think. Since he had connections in very high places, he was granted a privilege infinitely more rare than the commutation of a death sentence: that of receiving twenty works by scientists and philosophers in the prison. For the Mill hates nothing so much as thought.
These books, passing clandestinely between safe hands, sent a ray of light through the darkness of the jail. And that light traveled on for twenty years, transfiguring the faces on which it shined. My comrade Gilles owed a new life to it. Before entering prison, this square-jawed, square-headed boxer had known only the life of his muscles and his instincts—which had turned him from a prizefighter into a criminal. At first, imprisonment was worse than death for him. Then the ray of light fell on him. The parricide told him: Read. The athlete, his muscles useless, learned that the widest vistas—infinity itself—are embodied in printed symbols. He once wrote me a confession containing these words: “I have no regrets. I’m no longer just a brute.”
We defended this treasure with the cunning of savages guarding their totem. Prison tries to stultify: to mechanize all movements, efface all character, desiccate the brain. That is its method of cutting down the defeated rabble of the social struggle which, in the last analysis, is what we are. Those who think, in the Mill, always feel that their mind is constantly threatened. The example of idiots and madmen shows them what can happen. Obsessions, idées fixes, dreams, sexual hallucinations, swarm within their brows. “The only mental hygiene,” said Laherse with reason, “is to study something, anything: the Bible, German, Siamese.” The administration tolerates the study of foreign language on the condition that it remains purely mental: Owning a pencil is forbidden. In my fifth year of imprisonment, I applied for permission to acquire Pascal’s Pensées and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Refused …
Pascal and Marcus Aurelius nonetheless entered our jail: Jean Fleuriot from Rue Aubry-le-Boucher (known as “One Eye,” having left the other on the point of a knife in a Constantine gin mill—burglary, six years) was released, and made a trip to Paris, risking the loss of his parole, just to get them for us. And the lamplighter, accompanied by an affable guard who had been paid fifty francs, picked up a package wrapped in rags behind the prison wall—the “came”—containing (a treasure for which any man would have done thirty days in the hole without hesitation) three packets of tobacco, two copies of Le Matin, three chocolate bars, a postcard representing a nude from the Salon d’Automne (at the express demand of Guillaumet), Pascal, and Marcus Aurelius.
From noon to four o’clock (the bell for mess) the day drags on slowly. The hours are leaden.
8 H. Taine: Les philosophes classiques du XIXe siècle en France, Paris, 1857.
TWENTY-ONE
The Round
WHEN THE NINE O’CLOCK BELL RINGS ANNOUNCING THE FIRST MEAL OF THE day, we line up against the shop walls according to the numbers sewn on our jackets. My neighbors in the mess hall are those whom chance has brought to the prison slightly before me, and slightly after. The different kinds of work create, in the long run, divisions based on educational levels, and sometimes even affinities. But on the narrow benches of the mess hall, where we are jammed together behind filthy planks a foot wide, the simple order of our registration numbers provides me with more heterogeneous neighbors. On my right I have Ruelle the accountant, a stiff manikin, disease-ridden, with a bilious complexion, a perpetually open mouth, horrible hands crisscrossed with pink scars, and grimy fingernails. On my left I have a fat, red-faced fellow, an Italian ditchdigger named Zetti, with a fine Roman nose in a shapeless face. He buys a half pint of wine every day at the canteen, pours it into his soup, adds bread and sugar, and then noisily laps up the red, greasy mixture. “Whatever you eat gets mixed up in your belly anyhow,” he explained to me politely. The only neighbor I like is a little bright-eyed, twenty-year-old teamster from Luxembourg, who is never separated from his dictionary, a Petit Larousse illustré. He reads it, systematically, word by word, page by page. “I’m getting educated,” he says with a smile, at once embarrassed and self-satisfied. “Some words amuse me: like buirette, feminine noun, A haystack. Sounds like a woman’s name. It makes me think of a woman resting in the hay.” Martin, you are at the source of all poetry. And the Petit Larousse holds more dreams for you than all the tales of Scheherazade.
Men from the kitchen squad go up and down along the benches with heavy wine pitchers, cool and dark inside. You are allowed to treat yourself—if you can pay—to a half pint of wine a day. Those who can’t are jealous of the others.
The mess halls used to be part of an old convent: white rooms, with barred windows and tight rows of school desks and benches on either side. We eat in rows, one behind the other: a mournful battalion lined up with our bodies caught at the waist in a kind of rough wooden trap. Each man has a sort of grimy drawer in front of him, under the plank he uses as a table, where he leaves his bread and his fork and spoon, which are never washed. You wipe them as well as you can on a hunk of bread. The utensils stink. Some have been filthy for years. Why be civilized
? The need for nourishment is the most basic of our needs. We can eat the most disgusting slops under the filthiest conditions and live. To live is to think. Look at Ruelle’s hideous hands with their ornamentation of bluish scars. Guzzle your slops of bread and greasy water and dream of “the eternal axiom which is pronounced at the supreme summit of things.” Would you dream about it with the same fervor if there were pure hands here reminding you of the luminous splendor of existence? Eat like a pig, but think.
Whatever scraps are left in the kitchen cauldrons are given out on the spot. “Seconds, seconds?” call the men on the kitchen squad: bare arms, dirty hands, strong sweat. The whole table’s mess tins are thrown one into another and sometimes tossed all together into the liquid mash for faster service.
We take our exercise, after leaving the mess hall, in the courtyard, by workshops. Our broad, paved courtyard, divided by grassy plots and enriched by a few bushes, is one of the best. One end is blocked off by the dormitory cell block, with its four stories of narrow barred windows cut into gray stone. But at the other end, above the low buildings of the registry, we can see a row of old poplars. The wind bends their dark branches back and fills them with a sound like waves beating against a beach: Then they spring back swiftly. This simple landscape, set off from an ordinary pale-blue sky, across which scuttle heavy white clouds or milky mists, has for years symbolized all landscapes to me. I greet it every day. I have dreamed poems to these trees, wild and sullen in the cold November rains like helmeted heroes fighting against destiny: svelte and golden in the April sun like proud youths on the brink of some heroic enterprise. I love the variety embedded in their unity, which singles them out to the eye even as they blend together. I imagine them in summer, filled with the peeping of birds and the labor of insects; but distance confers on them that majestic, swaying immobility, that harmony of color and form which must mirror that of the universe. There is a sea-breeze coolness in their murmuring when the heat beats down on us, turning round and round under the implacable sun (“a sun like a blackjack on your head”) to the sharp-hammered rhythm of wooden clogs against the pavement. In the evening they seem to sigh like waves, bringing a fresh wind of life from the open spaces toward which I yearn from my dark cell. I know they line the bank of a lazy river which I have never seen, yet could trace in my mind …