Free Men in Prison by Victor Serge Page B

nurture, with all its lodgings and gathering places, the labor, the meditation or the relaxation of
all
men. In America, its skyscrapers, those mechanical creations of the business mentality, bring together apartments, banks, movie theaters, hospitals, schools, and churches in carefully ordered confusion, all behind the same totally anonymous and undistinguishable façade. Its architects have added practically nothing to the legacy of the past except, for its victims, this scientifically imperfectible hive of crimes, vices, and iniquities.
    A modern prison—the Spanish more openly call it
Carcel Model,
or
model prison
—successfully resolves the problem of economy in space, labor, and surveillance. Housing a crowd, it effects the total isolation of each individual in that crowd. Busier than a beehive, it is able to accomplish, silently and systematically, as many different tasks as there are lives tossed into its grinding cogs. The chance of escape is reduced to infinitesimal proportions. They used to escape from the Bastille. They used to escape from Noumea, in spite of the ocean fraught with squalls. They still escape from Guiana, across the virgin forest. No one escapes from the model jail.
    Modern prisons are imperfectible, since they are perfect. There is nothing left but to destroy them.

FIVE
In a Cell
    HERE I AM BACK IN A CELL . A LONE . M INUTES, HOURS, DAYS SLIP AWAY WITH terrifying insubstantiality. Months will pass away like this, and years. Life! The problem of time is everything. Nothing distinguishes one hour from the next: The minutes and hours fall slowly, torturously. Once past, they vanish into near nothingness. The present minute is infinite. But time does not exist. A madman’s logic? Perhaps. I know how much profound truth there is in it. I also know that a captive is, from the very first hour, a mentally unbalanced person.
    My cell is one of those whose perfect order and irreproachable maintenance are probably noted in official reports. On the second story of galleries a shiny door, bolted, exactly like the others: Fourteenth Division, Number thirty-nine. I am Number “14–39.” Three or four yards in length, the same in width. A little oak table, bolted to the wall; a heavy chair, attached to the wall by a chain to prevent it becoming a weapon in the hands of the unknown man whose despair and fury have been anticipated. A camp bed of satisfactory cleanliness folds up against the wall during the day and hardly takes up any room. The inmate makes his bed in the evening at a signal given by a bell, after which it is forbidden to be seen standing up. It is folded in the morning at a signal. Even in case of illness, it is absolutely forbidden to lie down during the day without the doctor’s permission. There is also, in a corner, a board which is used as a shelf: For the moment, only the tin “quarter” and the wooden porringer which serves as a spoon can be seen on it. Two windows at the top of the back wall, long and low, with bars and frosted glass. In one corner, a porcelain toilet and a water faucet. In the door, the Judas, a shelf for the food that is pushed through. Inside the Judas, the spyhole, an eye whose metallic blinking is heard every hour when the guards make their rounds. The walls are painted a dark brown up to the level of one yard; above that a yellowish, light ocher. The light which falls on you is always dirty.
    It is not like a room; it is more like an oversized bathroom or a monk’s cell. It’s habitable, nonetheless. I came to understand this with time. For man needs but few things to live! Hardly more than the six feet of earth necessary for his rest when he has finished living. As in the monk’s cell, the proximity of death can be felt here. It is also a tomb. Prison is the
House of the Dead.
Within these walls we are a few thousand living dead …
    I have nonetheless done a great deal of living there, and very intensely. I have changed cells several times. It has never