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  A group of twenty to thirty men employed in cleaning lived on the second floor and the other inhabitants were distributed throughout the other floors without any apparent order. On the fifth floor were the Solitary Confinement cells reserved for punishing those who had broken prison rules.

  The courtyard had a games court and two small, dusty football pitches, the setting for sporting battles in which the athletes weren’t exactly famed for their technique, much less the elegance of their attire.

  Seven was built to be a working pavilion. Work, sports and its relative lack of overcrowding were responsible for its reputation as a calm pavilion. Indeed, two or three years often passed without a single death in Seven.

  Because it was the pavilion closest to the external wall, however, Seven was the preferred site for underground escapes. It was known as the ‘tunnel factory’.

  Pavilion Eight

  Eight was situated at the back of the prison on the left, opposite Nine, and together they were known as the problematic rear of the prison.

  The pavilion was square-shaped like the others, but enormous, with galleries that were almost a hundred metres long. In total, some 1700 men lived in Eight, more than six times the population of Alcatraz in the United States, which was closed in the 1960s.

  The cleaners’ cells, housing 150 to 200 men, were located on the second floor.

  On the upper floors, in each of the cells facing onto the inner courtyard, lived an average of six men. Those on the outside wall of the pavilion were semi-communal, with two or three men, or communal, with ten or twelve. On the fifth floor there were eight Solitary Confinement cells, similar to the ones in the other pavilions.

  On the ground floor, in addition to the bureaucratic sectors, there was a Catholic chapel; an Umbanda centre; an Assembly of God, Universal Church, and God is Love Pentecostal Church temples.

  The courtyard of Eight had the prison’s largest football pitch. Internal football tournaments were held on its beaten earth surface, in addition to friendly games against district teams who were invited to take on the prison squad. Any inmate who treated a visitor disrespectfully on these occasions would live to regret it.

  Eight’s cells, like those in Seven, Five and Nine, had owners, a tradition in the Casa de Detenção which I will explain later. As such, those who didn’t have three or four hundred reais to purchase a cell had to live in the ‘showers’. Originally communal bathrooms, the showers housed six to ten men in a two-by-three-metre space. There were showers on the third, fourth and fifth floors.

  The main characteristic of Eight, however, wasn’t its physical layout or overcrowding, but its human landscape. This was the destination of repeat offenders; first-timers were rare. The concentration of inmates who knew the laws of the prison established well-defined behavioural codes.

  Rolney – who spent ten years in this pavilion and was released, only to return because when he found his wife shacked up with his best friend in his own house, he invited him for a beer at the local watering hole and when the friend tried to console him by saying that ‘that was life’, he put two bullets in him to prove that it wasn’t – described Eight in the following manner: ‘The men who live here have already been through the prison’s playgroup. With us there’s no dithering about. Things are black and white. Something is or it isn’t. If it isn’t, you’re dead.’

  Nineteen-year-old, HIV-positive Gersinho – a first-time offender who was accepted in the pavilion because a thief who had known him since he was a baby, and who may have been his mother’s boyfriend, had invited him to live in his cell – said he learned a lot from his contact with the inhabitants of Eight: ‘In Eight, each man bears his cross in silence. Sufferin’ for years inside teaches cons to lock themselves away in their own solitude. It’s a school of wise men.’

  It was the pavilion of those who had made their names in crime. The inhabitants of Eight tended to be older and stayed out of disputes. They would watch, listen and stay quiet. Their motto was not to act; but react: ‘They’re like rattlesnakes: they only strike when stepped on.’

  Pavilion Nine

  Nine could house over two thousand convicts, most serving their first term in jail. It had the same dimensions, organisation of service sectors and distribution of cells as Eight. That was where the similarities ended, however.

  In Nine, there were two distribution cells in which up to thirty prisoners slept head-to-toe on the ground, taking care not to let their feet touch their cellmates’ faces.

  The distribution cells were kept locked at all times. The prisoners were only allowed downstairs to greet visitors on Sundays or Wednesdays between eight and three, when they were let out to look for a cell to live in (to be explained further in the next chapter), a difficult task for unknown newcomers, because the inmates had owned their own living quarters for quite some time.

  When the pavilion was renovated after fighting broke out and led to a massacre in 1992, the wooden bunk beds riddled with bullets were replaced with concrete slabs. For this reason, in Nine, those who couldn’t afford an entire cell could only acquire the exclusive right to a ‘slab’, or bed.

  As soon as newcomers arrived, the other inmates would head up to see if there were any friends or enemies among them. In the case of the latter, the rival was threatened with death and had two alternatives: to ask for refuge, disgraced, in the Yellow wing of Five, or face the knives of his enemy and companions. ‘Nine is a pavilion of confrontations,’ the warders used to say.

  Although the prison directors deliberately kept some more experienced prisoners in Nine, the high concentration of impetuous young men was responsible for the frequent fighting in the pavilion.

  After the 1992 massacre, a cleaner in Eight said of his companions in Nine: ‘They’re a bunch of idiots, Doctor. In the middle of that kind of mess, lettin’ the warders go and leavin’ the cons alone in the pavilion is just askin’ for the riot squad to step in. Somethin’ like that would never have happened in Eight.’

  Majesty, a robber from the 1970s who had been in Nine for twenty years, explained the difference between Eight and Nine: ‘You can slip up in either one, except that in Eight, if you do, it’s your own fault. In Nine, it’s other people’s, and they’ll even spread soap on the floor for you to slip on.’

  The Cells

  The cell was the functional unit of the prison. Their dimensions varied without any apparent logic: some, even quite spacious ones, were individual, while ten, twenty, or even sixty men – which was the case in the distribution cells – were packed into others.

  The prison administration had lost cell ownership in the bigger pavilions – Five, Seven, Eight and Nine – many years earlier. In these pavilions, each cell had an owner and a market value. In Pavilion Five, they were cheaper: 150 to 200 reais; in Eight, there was a luxury cell worth 2000, with top-quality tiles, double bed and mirrors.

  The origin of this ownership is lost in the past, when the prison’s resources began to dry up and cell maintenance was left to the prisoners themselves, explained Juscelino, an inmate with a winning smile who used to buy marijuana in the backlands of Pernambuco and return to São Paulo in a sleeper coach with the drugs in his backpack: ‘A guy spent his money on the upkeep of his cell. Then the screws’d try to stick someone else in there to live for free. Where was the justice in that?’

  According to Dr Walter Hoffgen – who started out as a prison warder when he was still young, got a law degree and worked his way up to director general – the only way to solve the problem would have been to transfer all of the inmates, close the prison and start again: ‘In the middle of the night, you send a prisoner to a cell. The next morning, he comes out and says there’s no way he’s staying there, and he won’t explain why. You can insist, make threats, do whatever you want, but he won’t go back; he’s afraid of dying. There are cells where the owner is released and leaves a tenant paying rent or a friend living in it for free. If the owner comes back to the Casa, the occupant has to return t
he property. Look at the state we’ve got ourselves into!’

  In the beginning, administration went as far as to expel all of the occupants from a cell and lock it up for fifteen days. When they reopened it, it was useless: not a single prisoner was willing to live there.

  The situation was especially adverse for those who arrived in the prison without friends or money. Valtércio – a thief who stole eight television sets from cars on a World Cup day and later lost everything in a confrontation with the police – said bitterly: ‘Look where this country’s at, Doctor, having to pay to live in jail.’

  Light entered the cells through the barred windows. Opposite the windows were heavy metal doors with a sliding bar on the outside, which was locked with a robust padlock. The padlock, however, didn’t ensure the safety of those who were locked in, because the prison housed practitioners extraordinary in the art of picking any kind of lock. For this reason, some prisoners would weld a metal ring to the inside of their door, another to the doorjamb and padlock them together to lock themselves in. It was against prison rules and could cost a man thirty days in Solitary.

  One night, in Pavilion Five, during the distribution of the second edition of the comic book Vira Lata we published, I asked through the little window of a darkened cell how many men lived there, to know how many comics to give them. A big black man woke up, jumped out of bed and came to the door brandishing a knife (he took it out so quickly that it could only have been hidden under his pillow). Until he had grasped what was going on, he just stood there, utterly still, with terror in his eyes and the knife pointing at the door. He probably didn’t trust that the door bar was firm enough.

  In the middle of the door was a small window, covered inside with a curtain, through which deliveries were made and the daily head counts – a strict prison ritual – were conducted. The window was wide enough to allow a man’s head through it, which was how the inmates saw what was happening in the gallery at lock-up time.

  To ensure the privacy of the space inside, a sheet was hung from the ceiling, almost to the ground, a little behind the door.

  Unlike prisons in the cinema, in which the doors are barred so the prisoners can be seen at all times, in the Casa de Detenção, the men locked in their cells couldn’t be seen by anyone walking through the galleries. If the warders wanted to know what was going on, they had to be satisfied with what could be seen from the window or open the cell. When the situation was serious and they opted for the latter, the best technique was to have the inmates come out naked and place their hands on the gallery wall opposite the cell.

  Every cell had an old, but generally clean toilet, of differing varieties. Some were French-style, with a hole and two foot-supports; others were the classic ceramic bowls set in an upside-down concrete cone. The toilets ended in a dry hole, where the waste went when it was flushed. To sterilise it, the inmates would pour boiling water down it at night after the last man had used it. The more careful ones would cover the hole with a plastic bag filled with sand, to stop odours, cockroaches and rats coming in from the plumbing. So they didn’t have to touch the bag directly, they would hang it from a rope that passed through a pulley on the wall.

  All of the cells had a sink and a shower, or at least a water pipe jutting out of the wall. Many enjoyed the comfort of electric showers, which could be sold at a time of financial hardship or a deep craving for cocaine.

  In Pavilion Eight, at the back of a communal cell of twenty-seven men was a bathroom with a pipe so close to the wall that one could barely get under it, through which ran a trickle of water. Despite the gymnastics involved, having a daily shower was mandatory, even in the cold of June. The older ones made it their business to impose this obligation on the newcomers.

  The prison’s hydraulics were in a serious state of disrepair. Leaks were routine; they would infiltrate walls and flood galleries, the inner courtyard and the insides of cells. Some pipes had been patched so many times that they were hard to keep fixing.

  The bunk beds were made of bricks and mortar or wood, sometimes ingeniously placed over doors, next to the barred windows or so close to the ceiling that their occupants had to slither like snakes into the meagre space.

  Privacy in bed was obtained with colourful curtains that slid along wires attached to the bunk above them or the ceiling itself. ‘The curtain’s a must, otherwise there’s always someone lookin’ at me. Have you got any idea what it’s like, Doctor; year after year and not a minute to yourself? That’s where a lot of weaker men lose it and take their own lives.’

  In the big communal cells, like the distribution cells with sixty or seventy people in them, beds were replaced with small latex-foam mattresses laid side by side on the ground. Space could be so scarce that the men slept feet-to-face: ‘Cause it ain’t right for villains to be rubbin’ noses.’

  The less fortunate didn’t even have the small comfort of the foam, as there either weren’t enough mattresses to go around or they had been sold to pay off debts, as was routine among the crack-heads. In these cases they would lie on blankets or pieces of cardboard, with flip-flops for pillows.

  In the distribution cells, with men arriving and leaving all the time, priority in the choice of space was given to those who had been there the longest: ‘The last one in gets the short end of the stick. There’s nothin’ to ask; he goes and snuggles up next to the crapper. He only leaves there the day a newer recruit comes in.’

  The furniture was rustic: small cupboards for crockery, a few hangers for clothes and shelves for personal belongings; benches were roughly thrown together with wood that came from no-one-knows-where.

  At the end of one year, the São Paulo City Council set up a stage next to the football pitch in Pavilion Eight for a show in which a number of bands performed, including Reunidos por Acaso, the prison’s traditional pagode musical group. A few days later, when the organisers went to take the stage down, they discovered that it had disappeared. ‘So many planks just sittin’ there, Doctor, and there we were in such dire need; it was a godsend . . .’

  A fundamental item in every cell was the cooker: a brick with a groove in it through which snaked an electric heating element connected to the wiring that ran along the outside of the wall. When they received their meals many inmates would wash the food, add other seasonings and re-cook everything, which meant they often didn’t eat at the official mealtimes.

  Demonstrating cooking skills could be decisive when vying for a place in a decent cell. In exchange for a dwelling the cell cook would be responsible for everyone’s meals.

  The food that the prison served was a sorry affair. There wasn’t a man in the prison who could stomach it for more than a few days; the complaint was universal. Those who didn’t have work in the prison itself (and could thus buy themselves food) or a family to help, suffered. Saturated with starch and fat, the diet made the inmates put on weight. Obesity, together with the lack of physical exercise, was one of many health problems in the Casa.

  The galleries were washed late every afternoon by the cleaners, a group of men who comprised the spinal cord of the institution, as we shall see further along. Everything was clean; no one dared litter inside the prison. One rarely saw a dirty cell, but when it happened, its occupants were sworn at and treated with contempt.

  In the 1994 World Cup I watched Brazil play the United States in a cell with twenty-five inmates in Pavilion Two. There wasn’t a speck of dust on the furniture and the floor was spotless. The occupants took turns doing the daily cleaning: after breakfast, they would scrub the floor, pour a pan of boiling water into the two toilets, dust the furniture and beat the rugs; when lunch was over, a good sweep and boiling water in the toilets; after dinner, another scrub and the pans would be put on the cookers again to boil up water to pour down the toilets one last time.

  Songbird – a former São Paulo City Hall driver who used the official car to deliver cocaine in the city centre, until he fell in love with a City Hall employee and was reported to the
police by his jilted wife – explained the system: ‘We spend years in this place, so we have to look after it as if it was our home. I clean today and then I’m only up again twenty-six days from now. There’s no excuse for not givin’ it your best. Besides, it wouldn’t work. Tryin’ to pull a fast one among the likes of us never has a happy ending.’

  Wet clothes were hung to dry in the cells themselves, in a corner of the aisle between beds or pegged to a pole wedged through the window. Many made a living offering washing services.

  I once saw an argument in the gallery of Pavilion Five because Jaquelina – a transvestite doing time for a scam in which her customers were surprised having sex with her by her lover armed with a revolver – had been caught soaping up her clientele’s clothes in the toilet. Outraged, they were calling her names, while a haughty Jaquelina, hands on her waist, swore up and down that the can in her cell was cleaner than the beds that those classless no-goods slept on.

  Naked women decorated walls, cupboards and, typically, the backs of doors. These pictures were racy, clipped out of men’s magazines, which were exchanged or sold on small news stands set up in the galleries, displayed next to packets of pasta, ground coffee, tins of peas and old trainers. The most popular ones were the blondes on all fours photographed from behind, gazing provocatively over their shoulders at the lens. The inmates had no qualms about hanging them alongside images of saints, the goddess Iemanjá, Our Lady of Aparecida or the Sacred Heart, in colourful ecumenical panels.

  Never pictures of men; only if they were of a father, a brother or an actor in a transvestite’s cell. Those with jealous or religious wives would carefully remove their muses the day before visits, leaving solitary saints on the walls.