by Victor Serge
The human larvae living in these rectangular grottoes hear the guard’s soft step approaching from a distance. The man in irons, whose cramped arms are chained behind his back tingling with pins and needles, straightens up with the hope of a few swallows of water. The half-crazed man, turning around and around in the darkness, then lying prostrate on his mat, his brain oppressed by the image of his daughter’s death (he sees her blue lips drawn into a last smile, her closed eyelids strangely transparent, her adorable silk-blond hair; he sees it all, again, and again; and, although he keeps telling himself he’s crazy, he believes desperately in what he sees), huddles in the corner of his dungeon to hide his tortured face and still not miss the ray of light that is about to enter. That light, and Latruffe’s silhouette, attest to the reality of a universe where, perhaps—certainly!—Jeanne is not dead, not dead. Meanwhile the ray of light is prying into the neighboring dungeons, and the dead girl’s face rises up again into his tired brain like a drowned body rising from the bottom of a lake …
Latruffe moves noiselessly past the dungeon doors. A lamp hanging at the end of the gallery seems to guide him through the silence, the narrowness of the cement corridor, where in a sort of haze the yellow light fights against the gray. This is his kingdom: an insect of prey inspecting the captive larvae on which it feeds. He moves along, neck stretched out, muscles flexed, ears straining: and it’s a struggle between him and the larvae. These have even sharper ears: he rarely catches them off guard. But, a patient hunter, he never ceases prying.
Number 6. Latruffe abruptly opens the wicket gate. The lantern dazzles an ageless, emaciated boy sprawled on his mat with both arms outstretched. Latruffe mutters:
“Get up.”
The boy gets up slowly. The wicket gate closes again. Latruffe pretends to leave. Actually he is watching at the door. He knows the boy has lain down again. The wicket clicks open again. Again the dazzling light whips the figure stretched out on the cement floor. This time Latruffe opens the door and walks toward the boy, who is standing motionless on his feet now, glued to the back wall.
“What did I tell you?” asks Latruffe in a whisper.
For a moment he savors the terror in those frightened eyes, tortured by his lantern.
“Eh?”
Latruffe sways slowly on his legs. He raises his lantern to the boy’s face. Slowly he passes the ring of keys from his right hand to his left: The boy, lips trembling, sees the keys swinging back and forth under the flame. Latruffe raises his right hand slowly, noiselessly, deliberately, and gives that helpless face glued to the wall a sharp slap. The boy’s teeth rattle: ti-ti-ti. Tears well up in his eyes. Latruffe raises his hand again, hesitates for a second, and says:
“Enough for today, eh? Tomorrow, try to obey.”
Latruffe is laying for Number 8. He’s a stocky Spaniard with a hairy face (unshaved for three weeks now) and a shaggy chest. He turns round and round in the darkness, or squats, or lies down; but the same images are always with him. Sometimes it’s a woman, his bronze-skinned narrow-hipped Tonine, his Niña, his niña, “niña querida …” Her earlobe is a rose petal, a petal he is constantly nibbling at. And now, for days and nights now, he senses that his Niña has been penetrated, possessed by another man, senses it so vividly that he actually feels the heat of their bellies and the strain of their backs, feels the woman’s flesh open to the male’s thrust, their lips coming together, the man on top of her like a leech. “A-haa-a …” The choked-back cry in his throat is no more than a rattle. Latruffe shoves open the wicket; the light slaps at this castaway’s haggard face:
“Silence!” growls Latruffe. “What makes you ‘sing’ like that?”
Sometimes the man’s hallucinations turn his dungeon into a fantastic seraglio. The brunette with the hard, pointed breasts is called Lolita: She offers herself shamelessly, standing, her back arched like a Sevillian dancer’s. The blonde is sometimes called Manse, sometimes Lise—after a girl he once knew—and she strips submissively with shy, tentative gestures: The white underclothes fall onto the white bearskin rug at her feet and she shrinks back, desirous yet fearful, before the arms stretched out toward her. Others follow, in pairs and in groups, enfolding, clenching, embracing each other, and in the darkness the man falls into frenzies like a lubricious monkey. Latruffe catches him at last, panting, his organ bared, his hands wet. Latruffe enters quietly with a soft, menacing laugh in his throat:
“What if I put this in my report, Martínez? Aren’t you ashamed?”
Martínez buttons up his clothing like a sleepwalker: In the returning darkness he finds himself trembling under the horrid indignity of that cackling laugh. Then he turns over, black in the blackness, his clenched fists heavy as stones.
“Te mataré, cobarde!”
These words spoken aloud (“I’ll kill you, coward!”) echo against the cement walls which no strong voice ever strikes.
The words soothe like a knife thrust. Meanwhile Latruffe turns back along the gallery, laughing to himself, satisfied, a warm feeling in the lower part of his belly. He makes himself comfortable in front of his radiator and drowses off, twiddling his thumbs slowly over his belly. Inside the low, narrow vault of his skull—another cell containing other larva— obscene gestures caught in the dungeons linger on, multiplying endlessly.
Latruffe gradually acquired his mountain of pale flab from his years in prison. For the past ten years he has been in charge of the stockade cell block. Eight thousand men have suffered within these walls under his hands. It is he who makes prisoners from the chain shop drink purgatives before they are released, to prevent them from making off with tubes of powdered gold hidden inside their anus. Latruffe spreads their buttocks and peers inside. Latruffe probes their excrement with a special forked stick of his own invention. Latruffe accompanies them, at dawn, as far as the registry office, already dressed in their civilian clothes, overcome by that extraordinary anxiety, mixed with boundless joy, of the final minutes in jail. At these moments a broad smile—the smile of a murderous Punch—spreads over his piglike face.
“Try and behave yourself on the outside,” he tells them. “Don’t forget all we did to put you back on the right path.”
That morning, a departing prisoner suddenly turned around on the threshold. Latruffe felt his stomach sink and a streamlet of cold water run down his back. The man lunged his head at him like a serpent, and hissed:
“Shut your stupid hole, you dirty butcher. Try not to forget what I’m going to tell you. If I ever run into you in a dark alley, you’ll get six inches of cold steel in the belly just as sure as I’m calling you a piece of shit right now. Understand?”
The departing prisoner had stopped short, turning his back on freedom. Latruffe could feel his short legs beginning to wobble.
“Move on,” he said.
But the serpent’s head drew closer to him, terrible, with inflamed pupils, phosphorescent in the shadows, like a cat’s eyes.
“Do you understand? Answer me, you dumb prick, or do you want me to beat the crap out of you?”
“I understand,” he said, defeated, his head lowered.
The satisfaction for the other man was instantaneous; he laughed out loud.
“Yeah, you bet you understood. You’re not such a crap-head after all, eh? You dirty pig!”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The Sick
THE INFIRMARY WINDOWS, ALTHOUGH COVERED WITH WIRE MESH, LOOK LIKE the windows of houses “outside.” We raise our heads toward that reminder.
Behind those windows you live in unaccustomed calm and whiteness; you are out of the round for a moment, you have come to catch your breath, in a real bed, or else to escape at last, for good, from hope and torment. At times you forget death’s sure presence; your existence shrinks to the dimension of this refuge, provided for the weakness of the sick. You are glad not to be walking, marching in step, glad to get a little coffee, naively grasping at the slightest hope of life …
My lamp has more flame than oil. M
y spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak. (I understood why it is that slaves invented the religion of the divine, of the immortal soul imprisoned in contemptible, perishable flesh; I also know very well that the soul would be nothing if it were not flesh. Yet how can I avoid making the distinction between my strength and my weakness?) Every ten months or so, hunger, fatigue, and our peculiar form of overwork mixed with lethargy, break me down: A great coldness penetrates me, my teeth chatter; my heart beats in my chest like an enormous bell. Dizziness, dizziness. The saying goes that you must be at death’s door, or close to it, to get into the infirmary. Evidently I am close, for here I am.
Lie down. There is a voluptuousness in the long shivers that precede the inner heat of fever. Relax your limbs and relax your mind. You no longer need your strength, for a while. Listen to the secret invitation to the voyage of fever. Embark.
When you return from the mysterious voyage, when your eyes open again, it will seem to you that a white, airy, almost warm light has filled the room with gaiety. The white beds are lined up in two rows along the light-colored walls. Old Madré is there, his crooked shoulders shaking with silent laughter.
“Well, there you are! I’m very glad to see you here. This is the place where you get patched up …”
“Or where you croak,” answered a quiet voice from another bed.
Madré seems to turn yellow all at once, his mouth pinched. He shouts toward the back of the room:
“Bullshit. Croak if you want to; but leave the rest of us in peace.”
Full of sympathy, this gray-haired fifty-year-old, with one deformed shoulder, greedy lips, a satyr’s long, yellow, hooked nose, greenish eyes sparkling with mischief, and smelly breath, helps a sick young man get undressed with one of his affectionate wisecracks: Then tucking him in:
“I’ll look after you, Little George. The orderly is a jug-head … (he laughs). And a wine jug to boot, by God … Lie down.”
Through the chatter of teeth a smile answers him from the pillow.
“Come on, go to sleep now: Don’t worry about it.”
I see these beds, this crooked satyr, the strange sick boy he has just tucked in; I hear these voices in a half-dream bathed in whiteness. Footsteps hammer the pavement, the bell rings in the distance, in the realm of the unreal. Fever.
Another voice—somewhat heavy, like the voice of a fat, gossipy market woman—worms its way into my brain.
“… More than that, of course! I’ve seen at least thirty of ‘em pass on in three years … In every one of these beds … There isn’t a single place here where somebody hasn’t passed on … In Number 12, Pirron, a murderer who was doing twenty years (and he had already done sixteen, the poor bastard!) … Over there José, Rivol, Andrieux … In Number 17, Garon … say! He looked just like Van Hoever … Yeah, yeah! and he looked at me just like that two days before popping off … He died in his sleep, without suffering … In Number 19, young Girod; say, Madré, you remember, the young fellow who got married to What’s-his-name upstairs … In the new man’s bed …”
(My bed, evidently.)
“… Poulain, a strapping fellow, carried off in three days by God-knows-what.”
Noises. Someone enters. They’re bringing in someone new, a big old man, being carried on the back of an attendant. He is breathing noisily. Sharp-eyed, red-faced. His beret is all askew, pulled down comically over his bushy eyebrows. He is greeted by excited shouts:
“Pop Vincent!”
He answers in a loud, hoarse voice:
“It’s me. I’ve been around long enough. Pop Vincent’s here to die … Jesus Christ!”
This grinning crowd of dead or dying men is too much for me. I relapse into my fever, into my dream. Half-asleep I hear Thiébaut, the orderly, calmly holding forth. His voice reaches me from across a wide white space …
“Dupuis the Controller? Of course I knew him … A short fellow, broad-shouldered, with a pinched chest and a white, dried-up face. He always looked as if he had a stomachache. A nasty sonofabitch, he killed a fellow on me … A little Rumanian who used to be a counterfeiter … I remember, he was right over there. Dupuis caught him hiding the checkerboard and sent him to the ‘hole’ for sixty days, when he came out of the infirmary, because of some wisecrack … He came back from the ‘hole’ to that same bed, Number 12, and died there … He died telling me: ‘Please, Thiébaut, don’t forget to have them bring me my photographs tomorrow morning.’ They had just refused him permission to see his photographs. And they knew very well that he wouldn’t last much longer. But Dupuis had said: ‘Let him wait for his day!’ and his day was Sunday, the next day … Every three months, when his day came up, he would ask to see them again, and he used to sit for two or three hours, as long as they would let him keep them, looking at his old Mama, a gray-haired lady, and then his big sister, a nice little thing, and a whole gang of little brothers and little sisters back in Braila … I still think he was just waiting to see them before he died. When he came back from the ‘hole’ he was all white, with gray lips, and he could hardly see. That same day he coughed blood for an hour. On Tuesday the doctor examined him and told me: ‘It’s the end; two or three days. Give him some shots of morphine. Ask him if he wants some chocolate.’ You know, in this place, when you see the chocolate coming you can be sure it’s the end. He was a little delirious, he kept saying, ‘Sunday, Sunday,’ I guess on account of the pictures … He died Saturday night … His eyes suddenly opened up, real wide, as if he were looking at something awful, and he tried to tell me something, but nothing came …”
I listen without eagerness, bathed in a vague feeling of warmth and security.
“The Scorpion really killed that fellow,” continues Thiébaut, “no doubt about it … Would you believe that one time Dupuis went over to an old paralytic in Room 2 to refuse him something or other, and the old fellow started shouting at him: ‘Scorpion! Scorpion! Scorpion!’ You should have seen him running away with his little hat in his hand, his overcoat flapping behind him, livid with rage. Think of it! After all, they couldn’t throw the paralytic into the ‘hole’ … And he wouldn’t shut up, he kept shrieking in this horrible voice: ‘Scorpion, Scorpion!’ They left him for three days without food.”
“And he died?” asked someone.
“He died … But that’s another story. We used to have an Italian banker here, a swindler, an amazing guy! He embezzled four or five million on the Tunisian railways …
Naturally, they pardoned him; he’s looking after his liver at Cannes or Menton right now … Well, he was a sly one, a mean sonofabitch, old too, completely bald, with a tottering old monkey’s head. He used to have the guard bring him tobacco. The old paralytic ratted on him once, and he never forgave him … So he poisoned him, slowly, a little bit each day. He was an educated man …”
The room was filled with a soft, half-light. His heavy voice was the only one to be heard, but it was enough to fill the room with dark, unsavory memories, with the poisoned breath of the tomb. The night light cast a pale yellow stain on the ceiling, around which our glances fluttered.
TWENTY-NINE
Dying
A CHART HANGING BEHIND THE BED READS: “#5529, VINCENT, AUGUSTIN, welder, 66 years old,” and, lower down, in an ugly scrawl: “bronchial pneumonia. 104° of fever, this morning.” Three little black dots connected by a line. That means you’re on the way out, old boy. Little George went and got a blanket, for your feet, in spite of the heat in here. You couldn’t even say thank you, your mumbled words lost in a choking gasp. The boy was terrified by the greenish tint of your face.
“Jesus Christ! My pipes were always good and solid … At sixty-six, I’m still as much of a man as I was at twenty.”
Last night he was rambling on like that, sitting up in his bed in spite of his worn-out lungs. His eyes bright with fever, he took advantage of the orderly’s absence to give joyful reign to his voice as in the good old days. For nearly three years now he hadn’t tasted the rare joy of talking o
ut loud.
He went at it to his heart’s content, without suspecting that he would die of it in a few hours. Little George’s raucous laughter egged him on. He was saying:
“I fought at Beaugency, on the Loire, with Chanzy … in the snow, nothing to eat, with holes in our shoes and frozen breechloaders that burned in our hands … I lived through that. We were men, all right!”
He was still full of burning energy. The sweat glittered on his forehead. They got him to tell his story, the story of a tired old worker who could no longer keep up at the factory. “The foreman had it in for me, you see. He didn’t want any old men in his shop. I get called into the office, they tell me politely: ‘Here’s a hundred francs, my friend, try to find a nice light job more in line with your strength.’ A clerk was pushing me gently toward the door: ‘Think about it, M. Vincent. You’ll certainly find something else. Our work isn’t made for men of your age, I’m sure you understand. You’re such a sensible fellow.’ I didn’t understand anything. Out in the street—I can still see that street corner, the tobacco shop, the mailbox, as if I were standing there now—I suddenly understood that they were showing me the door, after sweating for twenty-seven years. Right away I thought of killing that bastard of a foreman. I went to buy a revolver.”
Life was still in him then. Now Vincent’s hairy chest is filled with mucous phlegm he can’t even spit up. He struggles, coughs spasmodically, vomits into his spittoon. He’s had it; he’s turning green. His dark, flaring nostrils can no longer get enough air. Was it really worth it to fight at Beaugency, to accept hunger, cold, love, hard work, valiantly, all these long years, only to come to this sorry hour? Madré, mulling over such thoughts, shakes his head as he stands by the window, cooking for himself an appetizing stew: potatoes in onion gravy. Old Vincent is no longer thinking. His face ashen, his mouth drawn, his swollen brows dripping with cold sweat, his eyes closed, he gasps painfully for his last breaths of air. His chest gives out a continuous rattle, and you can hear the phlegm that’s choking him rumbling in his throat. The white room is full of that rasping noise and his spasmodic breathing …
