patient with his stethoscope.
But it sometimes happens that an inmate is found dead in his cell— of natural causes.
The regulations prescribe a twenty-minute exercise walk each day; you have the right to refuse. I have refused it times out of dread of the wads of phlegm in the exercise yard.
The yards are twelve to fifteen feet wide by twenty-five to thirty feet long. The buildings of the Santé Prison, taken as a whole, form a vast quadrangle whose middle is occupied by the exercise yards. A vast courtyard is divided into more or less equal compartments, all of them closed. Some are enclosed by walls on three sides only; on the fourth, a grillwork looks, from a height of seven feet, onto the windows of the inside ground-floor cells. A covered catwalk forms a circle over these courtyards, which are very like middle-sized bear cages. Above, the guard. Twenty men can take the air under his eyes without ever emerging from their total isolation. Some parts of the courtyard are covered.
You go through the corridors in a racket of slamming doors; you see your cell-block neighbor passing out ahead of you; suddenly you find yourself in the bear cage. A landscape of mud-colored walls; above, the rectangular buildings, also mud-colored, with their infinity of little barred windows. You notice those that are open or closed.
Between seven and ten o’clock, nine men have passed through this hole; the tenth finds the cement literally covered with cigarette butts and greenish mucus. I have often resisted the temptation of those twenty minutes of fresh air, so great was the nervous repulsion I felt for that slimy mucus. For twenty minutes you walk in circles in the cages among the spittle. Sometimes a note rolled into a ball jumps over the wall or a voice calls from the grill side. Returning, you are nauseated by the stale odor of your cell.
Twice a week the inmates’ relatives gather, a little early, in front of the prison gates, forming one of those odd groups that can also be seen, on visiting days, in front of hospitals. Women, especially older women, are the majority in these groups where people whisper, commune with each other’s sorrows, or remain apart in oppressed silence. All of them look like widows. The old men, who have come from poor neighborhoods with their baskets of provisions, have mourning faces.Their gestures are constrained by embarrassment, their glances veiled with shame. Some of them draw together in sympathy. The mother of a thief glances, with a look full of inexpressible commiseration, at the murderer’s mother. No one dares speak aloud; idle hands fuss over packets of foodstuffs and linen. Respectable people are afraid of being recognized there by a passing neighbor.
The visitors’ room is made up of two opposing rows of wire-meshed compartments separated by a space about a yard wide … The mother sits down in a compartment on the administration side. The son sits down in a compartment on the prison side. They are unable to touch each other. They can hardly see each other, barely communicate. Each has his face glued to the dusty grillwork. On both sides their eyes become inflamed trying to make out the familiar features in the semi-darkness.
The other person is there:
corporeal, yet ghostly; present, yet inaccessible. These partitioned compartments stretch out in long parallel rows. They are filled with a confused tumult of voices, sobs, sighs, cries, exclamations, admonitions, and advice which must be overcome in order to project a word from one cage to another. You leave this howling hall with your ears buzzing, full of clamors. But how many pardons, how many promises, how many sorrows, how many dashed hopes soar by each other there in painful flight—and fall there, heavily, with broken wings, in the mud …
A man, a woman. He: magnificent athletic shoulders, short neck, forehead low with compressed power, a kind of black fire in the deep sockets under the ridge of the brow. He: terror … a
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ALEXANDER_
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