Lockdown

  Lockdown

  Originally published in Brazil in 1999 as Estação Carandiru by Companhia das Letras

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 1999 by Drauzio Varella

  English language translation © Alison Entrekin, 2012

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Drauzio Varella to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Picture permissions: Drauzio Varella 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13; Rachel Guedes 10; João Wainer 14; Folha Imagem 15 (Lalo de Almeida), 16 (Jorge Araújo), 17 (Luiz Carlos Murauskas)

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  A CIP catalogue copy for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-84983-865-8 (B format paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-47110-106-9 (Export trade paperback)

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-84983-866-5

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Introduction

  When I was young, I would watch black-and-white prison films – in which the inmates wore uniforms and planned breathtaking escapes – while riveted to my chair.

  In 1989, when I had already graduated and had been working as an oncologist for twenty years, I filmed a video about AIDS in the infirmary of the São Paulo State Penitentiary, a building designed by Brazilian architect Ramos de Azevedo in the 1920s, in the Carandiru prison complex in the city of São Paulo. When I walked in and the heavy door slammed behind me, I felt the same tightening in my throat that I had as a boy at matinées in Cine Rialto, in the São Paulo neighbourhood of Brás.

  In the following weeks, I couldn’t get the images of the prison out of my mind. The prisoners at the doors of their cells, the unshaven warder, a distracted military police officer on the rampart, holding a machine gun, echoes in the gloomy corridor, the smell, the swagger of hardened criminals, tuberculosis, cachexia, loneliness and the silent figure of Dr Getúlio, my former student, who cared for the prisoners with AIDS.

  Two weeks later, I went to see Dr Manoel Schechtman, in charge of the prison system’s medical department, and offered to implant a voluntary AIDS-prevention programme at the prison. Dr Schechtman told me that the epidemic wasn’t as bad at that penitentiary as at the Casa de Detenção, Brazil’s largest prison, with 7200 inmates, located in the same complex, just ten minutes from the bustling heart of downtown São Paulo.

  The programme was implemented in 1989. With the support of the private Paulista University, we conducted epidemiological research into the prevalence of HIV, organised talks, recorded videos, published the comic book O Vira Lata [‘The Stray’], written by Paulo Garfunkel and illustrated by Líbero Malavoglia, and I treated the sick. As the years went past, I gained confidence and was able to pass freely through the prison. I heard stories, struck up true friendships, and furthered my knowledge of medicine and many other things. The experience gave me an insider’s understanding of certain mysteries of prison life to which I wouldn’t have had access if I hadn’t been a doctor.

  In this book, I try to show that the loss of freedom and restriction of one’s physical space do not lead to barbaric behaviour, contrary to what many people think. In captivity, men, like all other large primates (orang-utans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos), create new rules of conduct in order to preserve the integrity of the group. In the case of the Casa de Detenção, this adaptive process was governed by an unwritten penal code, as in Anglo-Saxon law, which was applied with extreme rigour: ‘Among us, there’s no statute of limitations, Doctor.’

  Paying one’s debts, not informing on fellow inmates, respecting other people’s visitors, not coveting the neighbour’s wife, and exercising solidarity and altruism gave prisoners dignity. Failure to observe the above was punished with social ostracism, physical punishment and even the death penalty. ‘In the world of crime, a man’s word is stronger than an army.’

  The objective of this book is not to speak out against an antiquated penal system, to offer solutions for crime in Brazil or to defend human rights. As in the films of old, I seek to walk among the characters who inhabited the prison: thieves, swindlers, smugglers, rapists, murderers and the handful of unarmed warders who watched over them.

  The narrative is interrupted by the characters themselves so that readers may appreciate their stories first-hand. For ethical reasons, the incidents described didn’t always happen to the characters to whom they have been attributed. As the criminals themselves used to say: ‘In a prison, no one knows where the truth resides.’

  Contents

  Carandiru Station

  The Big House

  The Pavilions

  The Cells

  Day and Night

  Weekends

  Intimate Visits

  Slamming

  In the Cinema

  Rita Cadillac

  Tumult in Divinéia

  Welcome

  Making a Difference

  Biotônico Fontoura

  Leptospirosis

  Angels and Demons

  The Warders

  The Flock

  Yellow

  All On The Spoon

  To Bring Down the Cons

  The Inside Deal

  Idleness

  Capital Punishment

  Fall Guys

  Good Guys

  Transvestites

  Innocence

  Lover Boy

  The Power Puzzle

  Santão

  Women, Motels and Partying

  Maria-Louca

  Miguel

  Disappearing Act

  Deusdete and Mané

  Mother Dear

  Edelso

  Lula

  Margô Suely

  Chico

  The General Kitchen

  Reunion

  Zé from Casa Verde

  Blackie

  Mango

  Old Jeremias

  Veronique, the Japanese

  Black Guy

  Eye for an Eye

  Head Over Heels

  Not-a-Hope

  Valdomiro

  The Prodigal Son

  Condoms for Cons

  The Uprising

  The Attack

  The Aftermath

  Afterword

  Note On The Author

  List of Illustrations

  Carandiru Station

  ‘Prison is a place inhabited by evil.’

  I took the metro to Carandiru Station, where I got off and turned right, in front of the military police barracks. In the background, as far as the eye could see, stretched a grey wall with guard towers. Next door to the barracks was a majestic entrance with CASA DE DETENÇÃO written above it in black letters.

  The gate from the street led into a full parking lot. Through it circulated lawyers, women carrying plastic bags and corpulent warders in jeans who talked about work, laughed at one another and changed the subject whenever someone they didn’t know approached. They had to be greeted decisively; otherwise, your hand would be crushed by their handshake.

  Thirty paces into the complex was a small administration building, behind a green gate in which a smaller gate for pedestrians was se
t. You didn’t need to knock to enter; all you had to do was put your head near the window in the gate and the guard’s poorly lit face would appear, telepathically, on the other side.

  The opening of the gate obeyed the old prison routine, according to which a door could only be opened when the ones before and after it had been closed. It was good manners to wait without useless demonstrations of impatience.

  I heard the clink of the gate unlocking and found myself in the ‘Rat-trap’, a barred atrium with two booths on the left, where visitors had to identify themselves. Behind the booths was a corridor leading to the director general’s office, which was large and full of light. The table was old. On the wall behind it was a photograph of the governor and a copper plate, hung there by one of the directors, an experienced jailer, that said: ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Casa de Detenção.’

  I returned to the Rat-trap, waited for the inner gate to open and found myself facing the wall that surrounded the prison, guarded by military police officers armed with submachine guns.

  I stepped into Divinéia, a large funnel-shaped courtyard. At the narrow end was the body search room, a compulsory stopover for those entering the prison, except for doctors, directors and lawyers. Before gaining access to the pavilions, it was necessary to enter this room and lift your arms up in front of the friskers, who would merely pat your waist and the sides of your thighs.

  Frisking was another prison ritual.

  Those who thought such a mechanical search was just for show, however, were mistaken: people were frequently caught with drugs, arrested and ended up doing time in the Criminal Observation Centre.

  Once, five inmates from Pavilion Five armed with knives took some warders hostage in the laundry and demanded to be transferred to another prison. Police officers and reporters with cameras swarmed to the prison door. A warder took advantage of the confusion to enter carrying 1.5 kilos of cocaine. He was caught in the body search room. Jesus, director of security, a former professional wrestler turned Protestant pastor, did everything in his power to identify who the cocaine was for.

  ‘You’re better off talking. Look at your situation: in the morning, you come to work as the head of a family, respected; in the afternoon, you leave here under arrest. You’re going to get five or six years over in the Criminal Observation Centre. Your boys are now a con’s sons. Your wife is no longer married to a public servant, but a criminal.’

  The emotional appeal was useless. Contact with the inmates had taught the drug-dealing employee the supreme commandment among criminals: ‘Crime is silence.’

  Another time, a thickset, moustached Pavilion Eight warder tried to smuggle in a package of crack strapped to his inner thigh. The frisker, who was somewhat suspicious, found it. Caught out, the warder sprinted off into the prison hoping to make it to Pavilion Eight, at the back of the complex, where he could count on the help of the drug owners to have him let off. He was unsuccessful; he was knocked down in the chase by his colleagues.

  Next to the body search room was the director’s kitchen, a more recent construction built by the inmates themselves. When it was almost done, one of them had made a point of showing me his work. Eyes shining with pride, he had pointed at the beams in the ceiling painstakingly aligned by himself and a companion with a squint who was standing beside him, vigorously shaking his head in complete agreement with the chief-carpenter’s explanations. Finally, I shook their hands and said goodbye. Only then did I hear the helper’s voice: ‘Reform Xavier at your service, Doctor.’

  Divinéia was bustling during the day. Everything entering or leaving the prison had to pass through it. Without crossing it, the only other way in or out was to jump the wall or dig a tunnel. Trucks would offload food, bricks, wood and material for the work in the labour departments, in addition to removing tons of rubbish. It was humanly impossible to inspect everything that entered. It would have paralysed the prison.

  Divinéia was the last stop for the police vans that would bring prisoners in or take them away: to give testimony in court, to identify suspects in police lineups or to be transferred to other prisons.

  Newcomers would climb out of the backs of the police vans in handcuffs, blinded by the sudden light. At night, when it was dark in Divinéia, the scene of people arriving in the prison was melancholic. The Casa de Detenção had a bigger population than many towns. There were more than seven thousand men, double or triple the projected number in the 1950s, when the first pavilions were built. In its worst phases, it housed as many as nine thousand.

  Because the work of loading and offloading was done by the prisoners, it was in Divinéia that I had my first contact with them. They were easy to recognise by their beige trousers, the compulsory uniform. Jackets were prohibited and their hair had to be worn short. They were not allowed to go barefoot, shirtless or unshaven. Shirts, jumpers and sweatshirts were allowed; T-shirts were sovereign. The black and white kit of the Corinthians, one of the country’s most popular football teams, was by far the most popular, outnumbering Palmeiras, São Paulo and Santos colours combined. In FIFA World Cup periods, Brazilian seleção shirts would tinge the corridors canary-yellow, then fall into disuse and disappear. No one wore T-shirts with political propaganda; it was frowned upon.

  A toothless inmate came strutting towards me, in a pair of flip-flops and an impeccable New York University T-shirt.

  ‘Just got here, Doctor?’

  ‘Yes. How was your weekend?’

  ‘OK.’

  At the wide end of the Divinéia funnel, the courtyard was closed off by a big wall decorated with Christmas figures painted years earlier: a pastor against a starry sky, snow-tipped mountains and three kindly sheep. Behind them rose the upper floors of the central pavilion, Six.

  To the left of Divinéia, there was a wood with monkeys in the trees and a rickety bandstand. A paved path through the trees led to the gate to pavilions Two, Five and Eight.

  On the other side, next to the director’s kitchen, were a flowerbed and a little fountain in a pond lined with fragments of ceramic, where ornamental fish once swam.

  The fountain was simple: three concentric discs lined with blue tiles, increasing in diameter from top to bottom, sat on a concrete axis. From the top disc, a trickle of water drizzled onto the others, too exhausted to spout up into the air and, when it fell, oxygenate the water where the fish once lived, according to the original design. It did no justice to the Brazilian tradition of fountains.

  On this side, opposite the entrance to Two, between the country-style garden and the fountain, was the gate to the pavilions on the right side of the prison: Four, Seven and Nine. On the top floor of Four was the infirmary, the setting for many of the stories in this book.

  The Big House

  The Casa de Detenção was an old, poorly conserved prison. The pavilions were grey, square, five-storey buildings (counting the ground floor) with central courtyards, outdoor games courts and football pitches.

  There were cells on both sides of a corridor – universally referred to as the ‘gallery’ – that followed the four walls of the building. As such, the inside cells had windows facing onto the inner courtyard, while the others had windows looking out of the building.

  There were high walls separating the pavilions, and a wide paved path, nicknamed ‘Radial’ after a busy São Paulo avenue, connected them to one another.

  The gate to the pavilions was guarded by an unarmed warder in plain clothes. Staff were differentiated from inmates by the dark trousers or jeans that they wore. No one was allowed to enter the prison armed, except for the feared military police riot squad on search days.

  The cells were opened in the morning and locked in the late afternoon. During the day, the prisoners were allowed to move freely through the courtyard and the corridors. Approximately one thousand inmates had transit cards which enabled them to circulate between pavilions. They were cleaners, loaders, postmen, messengers, bur
eaucrats, people who were trusted by administration, in addition to those who got hold of such cards by illicit means. For the warders, this coming and going made the prison uncontrollable, and, if each pavilion could have been isolated as an autonomous unit, guarding them would have been easier.

  For security purposes, the entrance to each pavilion was a barred cage with outer and inner doors that restricted access to the stairs and the ground-floor galleries. The same cage system was repeated at the entrance to each floor. When the cages were locked, anyone coming through the gallery had to open two doors to get access to the stairs and another two when they reached the ground floor in order to get out of the pavilion.

  There were no electric doors like in films: they were opened and closed manually.

  Casa folklore contains many references to Rua Dez, or ‘Street Ten’, where many violent disputes took place. Rua Dez was in fact nothing more than the section of gallery opposite the entrance to each floor, on the other side of the building, out of the sight of the guards who to get there had to move through the side galleries, where they could be seen by spotters, strategically located at the two ends of Rua Dez at critical moments.

  There were no fistfights on Rua Dez; differences were settled with pieces of wood and knives under the excited gaze of onlookers. The loser, when he came out alive, would head down to Incarceration and ask to be transferred to a different pavilion, generally Five. His adversary would move up in the ranking. At other times, a condemned man would be lured there and stabbed to death by a varying group of men. In these situations, some would take the opportunity to deliver a few extra blows, even to people who hadn’t done them any harm.

  Old Jeremias, with his head of white tightly curled hair, survivor of fifteen rebellions and father of eighteen children by the same wife, didn’t consider bravery the forte of such attackers. ‘I’ve been inside for many years, Doctor,’ he once told me, ‘and I’ve never seen anyone kill a man on his own. Some twenty or thirty’ll mill about and take a swipe at the one who’s gonna die. It doesn’t matter how strong he is, he can’t defend himself. Prison warps men’s minds so much that the guy’ll be getting a workin’ over and people who’ve got nothin’ to do with the story’ll jump on the bandwagon and take a stab at him too, out of sheer cruelty. It’s the height of cowardice!’