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There are some things I've never liked talking about. A
few days after I entered prison , I realized that I wouldn't
like talking about this part of my life.
Later on , though, I no longer saw any point to my
reluctance. In fact, I wasn't really in prison those first
few days : I was sort of waiting for something to happen.
last visit that it allIt was only after Marie's first and
started. From the day I got her letter (she told me she
would no longer be allowed to come, because she wasn't
my wife), from that day on I felt that I was at home in
my cell and that my life was coming to a standstill
there. The day of my arrest I was first put in a room
where there were already several other prisoners, most of
them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they
asked me what I was in for. I said I'd killed an Arab
and they were all silent. A few minutes later, it got dark.
They showed me how to fix the mat I was supposed to
sleep on. One end could be rolled up to make a pillow.
All night I felt bugs crawling over my face. A few days
later I was put in a cell by myself, where I slept on
wooden boards suspended from the wall. I had a bucket
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for a toilet and a tin washbasin. The prison was on
the heights above the town, and through a small window
I could see the sea. One day as I was gripping the bars,
my face straining toward the light, a guard came in and
told me I had a visitor. I thought it must be Marie. It
was.
To get to the visiting room I went down a long cor
ridor, then down some stairs and, finally, another cor
ridor. I walked into a very large room brightened by a
huge bay window. The room was divided. into three
sections by two large grates that ran the length of the
room. Between the two grates was a space of eight to
ten meters which separated the visitors from the prisoners.
I spotted Marie standing at the opposite end of the room
with her striped dress and her sun-tanned face. On my
side of the room there were about ten prisoners, most
of them Arabs. Marie was surrounded by Moorish women
and found herself between two visitors : a little, thin
lipped old woman dressed in black and a fat, bareheaded
woman who was talking at the top of her voice and
making lots of gestures. Because of the distance between
the grates, the visitors and the prisoners were forced to
speak very loud. When I walked in, the sound of the
voices echoing off the room's high, bare walls and the
harsh light pouring out of the sky onto the windows and
spilling into the room brought on a kind of dizziness.
My cell was quieter and darker. It took me a few seconds
to adjust. But eventually I could see each face clearly,
distinctly in the bright light. I noticed there was a
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guard sitting at the far end of the passage between the
two grates. Most of the Arab prisoners and their families
had squatted down facing each other. They weren't
shouting. Despite the commotion, they were managing to
make themselves heard by talking in very low voices.
Their subdued murmuring, coming from lower down,
formed a kind of bass accompaniment to the conversa
tions crossing above their heads. I took all this in very
quickly as I made my way toward Marie. Already pressed
up against the grate, she was smiling her best smile for
me. I thought she looked very beautiful, but I didn't
know how to tell her.
"Well?" she called across to me. "Well, here I am."
"Are you all right? Do you have everything you want?"
"Yes, everything."
We stopped talking and Marie went on smiling. The
fat woman yelled to the man next to me, her husband
probably, a tall blond guy with an honest face. It was the
continuation of a conversation already under way.
"Jeanne wouldn't take him," she shouted as loudly as
she could. "Uh-huh," said the man. "I told her you'd
take him back when you get out, but she wouldn't take
him."
Then it was Marie's turn to shout, that Raymond
sent his regards, and I said, "Thanks." But my voice was
drowned out by the man next to me, who asked, "Is he
all right?" His wife laughed and said, "He's never been
better." The man on my left, a small young man with
delicate hands, wasn't saying anything. I noticed that
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he was across from the little old lady and that they were
staring intently at each other. But I didn't have time to
watch them any longer, because Marie shouted to me
that I had to have hope. I said, "Yes." I was looking at
her as she said it and I wanted to squeeze her shoulders
through her dress. I wanted to feel the thin material and
I didn't really know what else I had to hope for other
than that. But that was probably what Marie meant,
because she was still smiling. All I could see was the
sparkle of her teeth and the little folds of her eyes. She
shouted again, "You'll get out and we'll get married! " I
answered, "You think so?" but it was mainly just to say
something. Then very quickly and still in a very loud
voice she said yes, that I would be acquitted and that we
would go swimming again. But the other woman took
her turn to shout and said that she had left a basket at
the clerk's office. She was listing all the things she had
put in it, to make sure they were all there, because they
cost a lot of money. The young man and his mother
were still staring at each other. The murmuring of the
Arabs continued below us. Outside, the light seemed to
surge up over the bay window.
I was feeling a little sick and I'd have liked to leave.
The noise was getting painful. But on the other hand, I
wanted to make the most of Marie's being there. I don't
know how much time went by. Marie told me about her
job and she never stopped smiling. The murmuring, the
shouting, and the conversations were crossing back and
forth. The only oasis of silence was next to me where
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the small young man and the old woman were gazing at
each other. One by one the Arabs were taken away.
Almost everyone stopped talking as soon as the first one
left. The little old woman moved closer to the bars,
and at the same moment a guard motioned to her son.
He said "Goodbye, Maman," and she reached between
two bars to give him a long, slow little wave.
She left just as another man came in, hat in hand,
and took her place. Another prisoner was brought in and
they talked excitedly, but softly, because the room had
once again grown quiet. They came for the man on my
right, and his wife said to him without lowering her
voice, as if she hadn't noticed there was no need to
shout anymore, "Take care of yourself and be careful."
Then i t was my turn. Marie threw me a kiss. I looked
back before disappearing. She hadn't moved and her face
was still pressed against the bars with the same sad, forced
smile on it.
Shortly after that was when she wrote to me. And
the things I've never liked talking about began. Anyway,
I shouldn't exaggerate, and it was easier for me than
for others. When I was first imprisoned, the hardest
thing was that my thoughts were still those of a free man .
For example, I would suddenly have the urge t o b e o n a
beach and to walk down to the water. As I imagined the
sound of the first waves under my feet, my body enter
ing the water and the sense of relief it would give me,
all of a sudden I would feel just how closed in I was by
the walls of my cell. But that only lasted a few months.
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Afterwards my only thoughts were those of a prisoner.
I waited for the daily walk, which I took in the courtyard,
or for a visit from my lawyer. The rest of the time I
managed pretty well. At the time, I often thought that
if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with
nothing to do but look up at the sky flowering overhead,
little by little I would have gotten used to it. I would
have waited for birds to fly by or clouds to mingle,
j ust as here I waited to see my lawyer's ties and just as,
in another world, I used to wait patiently until Saturday
to hold Marie's body in my arms. Now, as I think back
on it, I wasn't in a hollow tree trunk. There were others
worse off than me. Anyway, it was one of Maman's ideas,
and she often repeated it, that after a while you could
get used to anything.
Besides, I usually didn't take things so far. The first
months were hard. But in fact the effort I had to make
helped pass the time. For example, I was tormented by
my desire for a woman. It was only natural; I was young.
I never thought specifically of Marie. But I thought so
much about a woman, about women , about all the ones
I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had
enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their
faces and crowded with my desires. In one sense, i t
threw m e o ff balance. But in another, it killed time. I
had ended up making friends with the head guard, who
used to make the rounds with the kitchen hands at meal
time. H e's the one who first talked to me about women.
He told me it was the first thing the others complained
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about. I told him it was the same for me and that I
thought it was unfair treatment. "But," he said, "that's
exactly why you're in prison." "What do you mean that's
why?" "Well, yes-freedom, that's why. They've taken
away your freedom ." I'd never thought about that. I
agreed. "It's true," I said. "Otherwise, what would be
the punishment?" "Right. You see, you understand
these things. The rest of them don't. But they just end
up doing it by themselves." The guard left after that.
There were the cigarettes, too. When I entered
prison, they took away my belt, my shoelaces, my tie, and
everything I had in my pockets, my cigarettes in par
ticular. Once I was in my cell, I asked to have them back.
But I was told I wasn't allowed. The first few days were
really rough. That may be the thing that was hardest
for me. I would suck on chips of wood that I broke off
my bed planks. I walked around nauseated all day long.
I couldn't understand why they had taken them away
when they didn't hurt anybody. Later on I realized that
that too was part of the punishment. But by then I had
gotten used to not smoking and it wasn't a punishment
anymore.
Apart from these annoyances, I wasn't too unhappy.
Once again the main problem was killing time. Eventu
ally, once I learned how to remember things, I wasn't
bored at all. Sometimes I would get to thinking about
my room, and in my imagination I would start at one
corner and circle the room, mentally noting everything
there was on the way. At first it didn't take long. But
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every time I started over, it took a little longer. I would
remember every piece of furniture; and on every piece of
furniture, every object; and of every object, all the de
tails; and of the details themselves-a flake, a crack, or
a chipped edge-the color and the texture. At the same
time I would try not to lose the thread of my inventory,
to make a complete list, so that after a few weeks I
could spend hours just enumerating the things that
were in my room. And the more I thought about it, the
more I dug out of my memory things I had overlooked
or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived
only one day could easily live for a hundred years in
prison. He would have enough memories to keep him
from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage.
Then there was sleep. At first, I didn't sleep well at
night and not at all during the day. Little by little, my
nights got better and I was able to sleep during the day,
too. In fact, during the last few months I've been sleep
ing sixteen to eighteen hours a day. That would leave
me six hours to kill with meals, nature's call, my
memories, and the story about the Czechoslovakian .
Between my straw mattress and the bed planks, I
had actually found an old scrap of newspaper, yellow
and transparent, hal f-stuck to the canvas. On it was a
news story, the first part of which was missing, but
which must have taken place in Czechoslovakia. A
man had left a Czech village to seek his fortune. Twenty
five years later, and now rich , he had returned with a
wife and a child. His mother was running a hotel with
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his sister in the village where he'd been born. In order
to surprise them, he had left his wife and child at another
hotel and gone to see his mother, who didn't recognize
him when he walked in. As a joke he'd had the idea of
taking a room . He had shown off his money. During the
night his mother and his sister had beaten him to death
with a hammer in order to rob him and had thrown his
body in the river. The next morning the wife had come
to the hotel and, without knowing it, gave away the
traveler's identity. The mother hanged herself. The
sister threw herself down a well. I must have read that
story a thousand times. On the one hand it wasn't very
likely. On the other, it was perfectly natural. Anyway,
I thought the traveler pretty much deserved what he
got and that you should never play games.
So, with all the sleep, my memories, reading my
crime story, and the alternation of light and darkness,
time passed. Of course I had read that eventually you
wind up losing track of time in prison. But it hadn't
meant much to me when I'd read it. I hadn't understood
how days could be both long and short at the same time :
long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they
ended up flowing into one another. They lost their
d " d " " 'IInames. n y t e wor s yester ay an tomorrow st10 I h d "
had any meaning for me.
One day when the guard told me that I'd been in for
five months, I believed it, but I didn't understand it.
For me it was one and the same unending day that was
unfolding in my cell and the same thing I was trying to
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do. That day, after the guard had left, I looked at my
self in my tin plate. My reflection seemed to remain
serious even though I was trying to smile at it. I moved
the plate around in front of me. I smiled and it still had
the same sad, stern expression. It was near the end of the
day, the time of day I don't like talking about, that
nameless hour when the sounds of evening would rise up
from every floor of the prison in a cortege of silence. I
moved closer to the window, and in the last light of day
I gazed at my reflection one more time. It was still
serious-and what was surprising about that, since at
that moment I was too? But at the same time, and for . the first time in months, I distinctly heard the sound
of my own voice. I recognized it as the same one that
had been ringing in my ears for many long days, and I
realized that all that time I had been talking to myself.
Then I remembered what the nurse at Maman's funeral
said. No, there was no way out, and no one can imagine
what nights in prison are like.
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