by Victor Serge
Every man who is thrown into a cell has an idée fixe as a companion. Every man who is thrown into a cell immediately begins to live in the shadow of madness.
… You bring nothing with you into a cell. Sometimes you find a book there. Never a sheet of paper. Nothing to work on. Prisoners awaiting trial have the right to ask for work, but several days go by before they get it, and it is invariably ridiculously underpaid work of stultifying monotony: sorting coffee beans, making paper bags, making paper fans, folding school notebooks. The same dull gesture to be repeated several thousand times a day. I admit that, however stupid it may be, this work is still a physical distraction, a diversion from obsessive thoughts. But this diversion is too weak; it merely serves to inspire the individual with a horror of work, pure and simple. Prisoners awaiting trial can also get permission from the examining magistrate to receive books for study from the outside; that is salvation. Unfortunately, this procedure takes several days. I got the permission without any trouble, but I recall they refused to give me two novels by Anatole France and Pierre Loti, these books doubtless having seemed unsuitable for study to the functionary in charge of censorship; and since prison, even preventive prison, still persists in the medieval notion of penitence, an inmate is not supposed to spend time reading things whose value is purely distractive. Fortunately, this rigor was tempered by bureaucratic imbecility: Having offered the argument of “literary research,” I was allowed to receive anthologies. The penitentiary administration, by the way, is very proud of having libraries in every prison. At the Santé Prison, they lend a book of one to three hundred pages a week to every inmate, but without any choice. The Judas opens, a voice calls “Books.” You hand over the book you have had for a week; the prisoner in charge of this distribution throws you another, taken at random from the little pile he has with him. The book I found in my first cell was an adventure novel by Mayne Reid: scalp hunters, trappers, virgin forest—all that is necessary, after all, to keep at half-cock the instincts of neighborhood “toughs.” About one fifth of the pages were missing; on the other hand, the margins were ornamented with various inscriptions and even with erotic drawings in a marvelous primitive style. The covers and the corners of the pages were so shiny with grease that I struggled for several hours against the emptiness of the hours before making up my mind to touch that book.
The bulk of the Santé Prison library seems to consist of bad adventure novels, old graduation-prize books, Mayne Reid, Jules Verne, unknown and mediocre amateur novelists, probably bought by the obliging administration precisely because they are unsalable to the public, and a heaven-sent collection of Balzac. Later on, I had the privilege of choosing my book from a list which included about twenty titles of this sort. I almost forgot to mention those ancient little treatises of somniferous morality. To judge from the relative cleanliness (of the pages), they are the ones least read; but the ferocity of certain commentaries written into the margins reveals that they are the best understood. Here at least bourgeois morality dupes no one …
I learned, alone with these books, that the most mediocre printed page can have its value. Everything is in knowing how to read and how to make the book a pretext for meditations. Even if only on human stupidity …
Have you ever seen caged wolves at the zoo? There are lean ones, with grizzled pelts, who circle, circle tirelessly in a rapid trot around their prison. A man in jail, before the end of the first hours, discovers that expedient: walking. He begins to walk. He paces around his cell, his steps mechanical or self-conscious, depending upon his feeling at the moment. He counts his steps. Eleven!, Bad! He gets his pace into rhythm and smiles at having eluded the trap set by an ill-omened number: He gets around the cell in twelve steps. There are many other things to do: you can figure out the necessary time in seconds, note the number of times around, then undertake a complicated calculation of miles traveled. You can make bets with yourself, improvising fascinating games of chance. How many steps, how many times around before the next check by the man on duty, revealed by the faint click of the spyhole? Thirty-eight trips … Lost, lost! No, won! Right, thirty-eight. The captive comes to a halt with a great silent laugh, one of those laughs of solitary men that the psychiatrist recognizes so well. Or, like a whirling dervish, you can walk until you’re dizzy, until your breath gives out, until you collapse in the heavy wooden chair, your ears buzzing, your pupils dilated, while the four walls of your cell seem to stretch out obliquely, twisting themselves into diamond shapes and spinning around a fantastical axis. More often you walk with a meditative step and your brain grows weak winding its skein of offensive-defensive tactics. When this has gone on for a certain number of months or years, the expression of your eyes and the lines of your face begin to change. A certain inmate will look at you in a distracted way, listen to you with detached politeness, and, by means of ingenious shifts and changes, constantly bring the conversation back to his system of defense. I met some who had been ruminating over theirs for eight to ten years.
A man marching in circles around his cell—twelve steps, never eleven!—has an invisible companion who is sometimes cruel, but who more often calms him, stultifies him, or releases him from the weight of his idle hours: insanity.
I immediately developed my own way of walking and of resisting the influence of my cell. Certainly not original. In his Memoirs, Peter Kropotkin tells the story of the years he spent in the Peter-and-Paul fortress at St. Petersburg. For a long time they gave him neither books nor paper. To prevent himself from going mad from idleness, he invented the idea of editing a newspaper every day, methodically, with the greatest seriousness; lead article, bulletins, features, scientific and artistic columns, society items … In this manner he mentally wrote thousands of articles. I did the same thing. For me it was an opportunity of undertaking a methodical classification and reexamination of my meager stock of knowledge, my memories, and my ideas … A huge internal labor which one never undertakes in the heat of action, but which makes you understand the value of “retreats” as they were practiced in past centuries in the Catholic world, and are sometimes still practiced today. Contemplation brings about a reexamination of all your values, an auditing of all your accounts with yourself, and with the universe. Introspection opens up the endless vistas of the inner life, shines a penetrating light into the most secret recesses of our being.
… But the invisible companion remains. Observing yourself, you become familiar with her. She is always there, watching and waiting for the moment when the will grows weak, when some spring in that complex cerebral mechanism which the metaphysicians call the soul begins to slip: Then an obsession invades your meditation and begins to bore its way slowly into your weary brain.
The French call this state of depression “le cafard”: the cockroach.
The image fits. The ugly black bug zigzags around under the vault of your skull.
The walls speak. To the careful eye, every surface reveals signs, most often scratched in with a pin or, in dark corners, in thin pencil lines. Four unchanging themes basically sum up the essence of the lives of the successive inhabitants of this cell. Man and woman. A heart pierced by an arrow. “Fred-of-the-Catalan-Bar to Tina-of-the-Alley—for life.” Or, abbreviated: “Big-John of the Bastille to Lena-the-Mouse f.l.” To give or take for life: This is the ritual dream inscribed on these walls by the hands of pimps. Does the idea of true self-abandonment really take hold of them? I think, rather, that they suffer, with a certain amount of self-complacency, from the feline violence of love: Violence is in the domain of the absolute. Other love motifs, brutal commentaries on the previous ones: The phallic symbol, the crude urchin’s sketch of pointed or fleshy breasts, the slit of the secret lips, and, less frequently, the ass or the whole outline of a woman. Of the face, only the characteristic hair-do remains. Primitive drawings which evoke the sex act, with the unimaginative lewdness of dirty postcards … How can we avoid the obvious conclusion, looking at these haunting symbols, that a kind of phallic cult
persists in the slums of our big cities? The eternity of love is expressed in writing; the permanence of animal lust and all the suffering it brings in these circumstances cries out in these drawings … M.A.V, or M.V, means mort aux vaches: death to the cops! This phrase or its abbreviation follows most of the signatures. For there are two fundamental duties: love woman, hate the enemy … Another duty: solidarity. The betrayed man, like the captain of a sinking ship who tosses a bottle into the sea, throws out his warning to any and all:
“Dédé of Montparnasse is a queer.” This is signed by B.H. followed by five periods and a date. Or again: “Riri, squealed on by the Alsatian, two years, burglary,” a concise history! Many names are followed by similarly terse statements of fact.
I found the following words carved deep into the floor in a corner of my first cell:
“Only seven months more and I’ll kill her.”
Below, a sort of little calendar. The inmate had drawn a line for each day, a cross at the end of the month. He had spent five months and two days in this cell …
The walls also speak with voices of the present. The guard has scarcely made his round when a faint noise, a mouselike scratching, makes your ears perk up. Three discrete little taps, a pause, three more taps. A man is calling me from the other side of the stone wall. I answer: three, pause, three. Then, coming regularly now, the taps are spaced out evenly in long series. As many taps as are needed for each letter of the alphabet: 16, p; 9, i; 5, e; 18, r; again 18, r; 5, e. The tapper’s name is Pierre. It takes a great deal of concentration to avoid making a mistake counting up these hasty little taps to which you must listen with one ear tuned to the noises from the corridor so as to avoid getting caught. After long minutes, “Pierre of the Gang of the Four” managed to tell me: “Hello. Sent down for murder. And you?” Personally, I have nothing to say to Pierre of the Gang of the Four. This conversation made up of mouse noises and alphabetical additions wearies me. I tap:
“Goodby!”
And I fall back into my silence … To work.
You soon learn to tell time by the sounds of the prison. A long clattering of mess tins announces the next doling out of food. Soon it is four o’clock, end of the day. Doors are hastily opened and shut: the prison mailman making his rounds.
All at once the man pacing in his cell stops short, dumbstruck. From the guard’s desk at the bottom of the gallery a voice has just announced:
Number 13–21, released!
Upstairs, in their cement cubicles, both number 13–20 and number 13–22 are shaken by an icy shudder. They listen, anxious, their chests tight, cowering against the door. In the distance, heavy footsteps mount the stairs, move closer down the gallery. Here it comes. Here it comes. The door of cell 13–21 opens with loud clang. The following dialogue is heard:
An indifferent bass voice:
“Number 13–21, Michaud, Oscar-Leon, that’s you, right?” A palpitating, eager, choked voice:
“Yes, officer, yes, that’s me.”
The poor wretch has heard. He knows. But he doesn’t believe it yet. He is afraid. He would like to grovel before this mustachioed, ruddy-complexioned guard who holds his destiny written on a scrap of paper. And at the same time he would like to unchain his heart, which is ready to burst from his chest, to cry out:
“That’s me! Me! Me!”
The bass voice continues calmly:
“Get your things together. Provisional release.”
The other voice, muddled, effusive, like a thankful schoolboy’s:
“Thank you, sir.”
They leave. The poor wretch can be heard telling his story loquaciously. Numbers 13–20 and 13–22 straighten up, taciturn, their stern brows doubtless wrinkled by the same frown. Number 13–20 has at least two more years to go. Number 13–22 has ten more years …
Another shout, at the end of the corridor:
“Number 13–23, released!”
Number 13–20 bites his lips, wrings his hands. Number 13–22 glances in bewilderment around his cell, which has grown darker from one moment to the next; his mounting rage vents itself in vague imprecations:
“Oh! the bastards! Of all the dirty, stinking …”
In one of his novels, Alexander Dumas describes a horrible execution in Venice. Three miserable wretches were to undergo an excruciatingly refined torture. They marched calmly to the scaffold, ready to die, already dead in the depth of their souls. Suddenly a messenger appeared, bringing a pardon for one of them. And the other two went into a frenzy of indignation. To see someone survive was worse than death for them. This fictional passage contains a terrible psychological truth. In here, every announcement of a release brings an uncontrollable nervous shock to those who hear it. The average prisoner, in spite of habit, feels it like a sudden blow. Those who feel that freedom has brushed by them, since they were the neighbors of the man released, feel the outrage of an injustice.
Calls to the visitors’ room cause the same reaction. A fearsome jealousy gnaws at the hearts of those who have been abandoned or betrayed when their brothers in misfortune are visited by their dear ones. I met two cellmates, one of whom hated the other with mortal passion. The one had been betrayed to the police by his mistress. The other received passionate letters every day from his …
When evening falls, other cries rip through the silence … The gloomy time of day passes slowly. Suddenly, from outside, a resonant voice calls out:
“Good evening, mates, good evening!”
A moment’s pause. The whole prison is listening. The impassioned voice soars and wheels with fury:
“Didi of La Chapelle wished you a good evening! Courage and blood!”
Sometimes it’s the farewell cry of a man about to leave; sometimes the revolt of an impatient man who must remain—and who will be punished that very night in the “hole.” An appeal, an exhortation, a promise.
The fierce exhortation strikes deep. This cry, reaching up from the lowest depths of Paris, bears true witness to a tradition of courage and blood.
Sometimes, especially in the evening, a noise from the street may reach the prisoner in his cell. An automobile sounds its horn. The bell of a trolley car rings out in the distance. Instantaneously, the image of the illuminated streets and of that trolley car appears in your mind’s eye. You see the conductor taking the steering bar into his wool-gloved hands. You see everything. You breathe in the smell of asphalt and gasoline. And then everything vanishes.
Two eyes under the visor of a képi appear and disappear in the rapidly opened spyhole of the door. You feel buried alive. Depending on whether you are an old inmate or a newcomer, the calm grayness of time sooner or later resumes its usual hue.
The city and life are nothing but unreality.
These walls: That is reality. And those one hundred and sixty little lines on the dark corner of the floor under a sentence etched in by an unknown hand:
“Only seven months more and I’ll kill her.”
SIX
The System
AT SEVEN IN THE MORNING A BELL RINGS, GIVING THE SIGNAL FOR RISING. A quarter of an hour later, the cell door is opened by the guard on duty for a quick inspection. The cot is folded up into the wall, the bedclothes folded according to regulations. An inmate in overalls, accompanied by a guard who opens the Judas for him, throws in a boule de son, 700 grams of black bread, which hunger alone enables you to eat. An hour later, morning soup. The mess tin, passed through the Judas by a grimy hand, generally contains nothing but a rather abundant portion of lukewarm yellowish water on which—sometimes, but not always—some odd scraps of cabbage are floating. It is lightly salted. When you are very hungry and, in winter, if the “soup” is hot enough to warm up the stomach, you dip your black bread in it. Most often, even those who are starving throw this insipid water—which is neither food nor drink, but more like dishwater—down the toilet. The administration, nonetheless, delivers fixed quantities of dried vegetables, fats, even fresh vegetables to the cooks. But, aside from the
fact that the only check on the way the regulations are carried out is left to personnel with interests at variance from those prescribed by the rules, a large number of successive plunderings, coming one on top of the other, ends up by reducing the inmates’ usual fare to a bare minimum. The ill-paid guard on duty in the kitchen is not above a little pilfering. Before him, the quartermaster-sergeant took his share before delivering the quantities of provisions—weighed, for form’s sake, quickly and under the benevolent eye of his cohort or the accessory eye of the prisoner-chief-cook. Then the prisoner-cooks take care of their own interests. They naturally eat as well as they can, and put together special dishes or packets of provisions for some of their pals. They need money. By carrying on a sharp trade in fats and onions with inmates who have positions of trust and even with certain not-too-scrupulous guards, they are able to obtain the desired funds: Then whatever nourishment is left in such a well-skimmed soup goes first to feed the boys on the maintenance squad and then to their “buddies.” If you give a modest reward to your regular soup server, you can get a fair amount of cabbage in your mess tin. The feckless and the penniless get nothing but yellowish water.
Around four o’clock, a second meal. The same soup, plus a dish of vegetables, alternately beans, mashed green peas, mashed potatoes, rice. These vegetables are boiled, salted, apparently without any fat added; this is a bare subsistence, a tasteless nutriment which you absorb out of necessity. The mashed purées are gelatinous, shiny like glue. Sometimes they serve you kidney beans which break your teeth and make a lovely metallic clank when you drop them into your mess tin from a height of a few inches. On Thursdays and Sundays the little bit of meat juice which they add to this administrative pittance is enough to make it delectable. On the latter day, “eighty grams of cooked beef” are added to the evening vegetables: a few thin scraps of cold meat strung out on a wooden stick or threaded onto a tough piece of tendon.
