Booty drops into the lining. If this professional overcoat passes unnoticed, my companion of the moment will get off with a few months in prison. If not:
“I’m in for it. Up for recommitment.”
You are up for recommitment after three convictions for theft; the amount of the theft itself doesn’t matter in the least. Three times ahundred
sous
—these things happen—can mean an “additional” life sentence for a twenty-year-old, three-time loser …
The cell door has finally closed on me. The bolts have been drawn, the Judas shut. I’m on the ground floor. My cell has two large, semicircular barred windows with panes of frosted glass. It is large and dirty. A low column divides it into two unequal parts. Three gray straw mattresses on crude cots—gray with filth, spattered with all sorts of stains, stinking of dust, old straw, sleeping animality—make up the furniture. Bolted to the wall, there is a little oak table; the wood is an oily brown and covered with inscriptions. On the table, an earthenware jug and a “quarter”—a tin drinking cup—that holds a quarter of a liter. The mattresses and the drinking cup are apparently never cleaned. After the first hour, I wanted a drink. I was clumsy enough to shake the jug, and a greenish slime rose to the surface where wisps of straw, odd leaves, hair, bits of thread, and a broken match were floating. Before quenching your thirst, simple prudence advises allowing this “brew”—which is changed every day—to settle to the bottom. I am already used to the graffiti. They will interest me only later on, during the months of isolation, when every sign in the cell will become a life-giving word for my brain in its struggle against stupor and madness. The only thing I find here, at first glance, is the name of a wayward comrade, a murderer and thief—a man overboard. When mountain climbers scale the highest peaks, they tie themselves together with a stout rope; thus, if one should happen to fall, he may drag his companions down with him into the abyss. Among us—rebels and revolutionaries, so different from one another, ill-assorted idealists, bohemians, adventurers, cranks, proletarians, bandits—blind solidarity, knowing only comrades, plays the role of that life-saving or ill-fated rope. We too, are conscious of striving obstinately to climb upward. But for us the peak, more dreamed of than glimpsed, is inaccessible, and a fall is always fatal.
Par les airs sidéraux
Monte en plein ciel, droite comme un héros,
La claire tour qui sur les flots domine… 2
Ballade Solness,
“Anarchy! Oh torchbearer!” Here I am, suddenly transfixed with awful clarity, before a name and a date on the sordidwall of a detention cell. The name of a wayward comrade, a murderer and thief, a man overboard—my poor friend!
I am not alone. My chance companion is a tall devil of a workman with a tanned, forty-five-year-old face and a long, drooping mustache. Black—a dull black, eyes black, hair black (graying nonetheless), features black, it would seem, because of their blank fixity and the rough, lusterless skin, cracked like old leather. Squatting on the foul mattress, we talked as the hopeless night drew slowly over us. My cellmate told me his story in a gloomy voice, in short, rudimentary, incomplete sentences. Workman, widowed, a fifteen-year-old daughter. The whole paycheck drunk up. (Why? There is no “why.” Or rather, why live? If life is always hard work which hardly keeps you from starving, with nothing afterwards.) Staggering home to a filthy hovel, falling heavily onto the mattress where his little girl is sleeping. After that, he can’t remember very well how it happened in the double darkness of night and alcohol: He had never even thought of it before—no, never!—rape. Man is not too far removed from the brute: A beast of burden, even after forty-five years of misery and work, has these bestial revolts of the flesh. The usual punishment in such cases is at
“I’m in for it. Up for recommitment.”
You are up for recommitment after three convictions for theft; the amount of the theft itself doesn’t matter in the least. Three times ahundred
sous
—these things happen—can mean an “additional” life sentence for a twenty-year-old, three-time loser …
The cell door has finally closed on me. The bolts have been drawn, the Judas shut. I’m on the ground floor. My cell has two large, semicircular barred windows with panes of frosted glass. It is large and dirty. A low column divides it into two unequal parts. Three gray straw mattresses on crude cots—gray with filth, spattered with all sorts of stains, stinking of dust, old straw, sleeping animality—make up the furniture. Bolted to the wall, there is a little oak table; the wood is an oily brown and covered with inscriptions. On the table, an earthenware jug and a “quarter”—a tin drinking cup—that holds a quarter of a liter. The mattresses and the drinking cup are apparently never cleaned. After the first hour, I wanted a drink. I was clumsy enough to shake the jug, and a greenish slime rose to the surface where wisps of straw, odd leaves, hair, bits of thread, and a broken match were floating. Before quenching your thirst, simple prudence advises allowing this “brew”—which is changed every day—to settle to the bottom. I am already used to the graffiti. They will interest me only later on, during the months of isolation, when every sign in the cell will become a life-giving word for my brain in its struggle against stupor and madness. The only thing I find here, at first glance, is the name of a wayward comrade, a murderer and thief—a man overboard. When mountain climbers scale the highest peaks, they tie themselves together with a stout rope; thus, if one should happen to fall, he may drag his companions down with him into the abyss. Among us—rebels and revolutionaries, so different from one another, ill-assorted idealists, bohemians, adventurers, cranks, proletarians, bandits—blind solidarity, knowing only comrades, plays the role of that life-saving or ill-fated rope. We too, are conscious of striving obstinately to climb upward. But for us the peak, more dreamed of than glimpsed, is inaccessible, and a fall is always fatal.
Par les airs sidéraux
Monte en plein ciel, droite comme un héros,
La claire tour qui sur les flots domine… 2
Ballade Solness,
“Anarchy! Oh torchbearer!” Here I am, suddenly transfixed with awful clarity, before a name and a date on the sordidwall of a detention cell. The name of a wayward comrade, a murderer and thief, a man overboard—my poor friend!
I am not alone. My chance companion is a tall devil of a workman with a tanned, forty-five-year-old face and a long, drooping mustache. Black—a dull black, eyes black, hair black (graying nonetheless), features black, it would seem, because of their blank fixity and the rough, lusterless skin, cracked like old leather. Squatting on the foul mattress, we talked as the hopeless night drew slowly over us. My cellmate told me his story in a gloomy voice, in short, rudimentary, incomplete sentences. Workman, widowed, a fifteen-year-old daughter. The whole paycheck drunk up. (Why? There is no “why.” Or rather, why live? If life is always hard work which hardly keeps you from starving, with nothing afterwards.) Staggering home to a filthy hovel, falling heavily onto the mattress where his little girl is sleeping. After that, he can’t remember very well how it happened in the double darkness of night and alcohol: He had never even thought of it before—no, never!—rape. Man is not too far removed from the brute: A beast of burden, even after forty-five years of misery and work, has these bestial revolts of the flesh. The usual punishment in such cases is at
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