The Way Out

all of that information when you complete the form requesting access, but they repeated it again in case you made a mistake or gave different information, or they might have done it purely out of routine. The point was to wear the visitors down and treat them like they were going to be arrested. They took photos of me from the front and in profile and kept me there for several long minutes under the blinding light, to intimidate me, I suppose. The voice issuing from the loudspeakers continued a while later with instructions. Stand up straight, raise your chin, throw your shoulders back, take off your glasses, look forward, turn to the left, now to the right, stay in profile. Take off your clothes, leave them on the floor. Stand facing away, bend over, spread your buttocks (“show your ass”). Stand up straight, face forward now, raise your arms, show your armpits, lift your testicles. Okay, now turn your face toward the light, open your mouth and stick out your tongue, show your teeth. Hands apart, fingers spread, palms facing up, palms facing down. Get dressed. The light went out. They imagined that you might be hiding drugs in some orifice, or maybe a shiv wrapped up in plastic tape hidden in the inner linings of the soul. A knife, it could be, a bit of coke for the boys in jail, a bulletin from the Workers Party printed on invisible rice paper. For years I’d gone to prison to visit Beto Carranza, a friend who’d had the fortune to fall prisoner before the military coup of 1976 and, though he did undergo torture and several simulated executions, was given over to the custody of the Executive Power and saved from being murdered in secret. In the Devoto prison, when I visited him, the guards back then would warn you that they were keeping a file on you and would ask if you were from La Orga, if you were a lefty or gay, if you were Jewish and communist (or just Jewish), and finally they’d ask you for cash to buy cigarettes. Friends of the inmates did indeed pass on letters written in microscopic writing on cigarette rolling papers, or they conveyed messages from memory. I remember that Carranza was always content and optimistic when he showed up in the visiting room, and he gave hope to us, the ones who came in from the street.

With the inspection now finished, I left the room and went into an office, where I deposited the money I had with me, my credit cards, my keys. The Conrad book was one of the objects that could be taken into a high-security area.

When I left the identification room, Dr. Beck was waiting for me. According to him, the prison was one of the most peaceful places in the world, you could walk at night along the corridors between cells without any trouble. Life was suspended here, it had no purpose or meaning. In a cell, you might see a brownish blanket on the cement floor and a man who couldn’t fall asleep, or who wasn’t even trying to sleep, sitting on the edge of the bed with his bare feet on the blanket, motionless, waiting for morning to come. “There’s a large number of Black and Latino prisoners (they make up 67% of the population), and of the remaining prisoners, 25% are white,” said the doctor, “and the other 8% are Asian, yet 67% of the guards are white, generally poor whites from Louisiana or Virginia who used to work in the loading and unloading zones at plantations or on the docks but had lost their jobs and were hired as prison guards. They preferred living locked up in here to having no work.” Dr. Beck had also come here to work because he saw no other prospects, and he was comfortable in this role because, except for the ones who got injured in fights—stabbings, headbutts that broke their noses—and the ones who were sexually assaulted, the majority had only minor ailments and spent time in the infirmary to ease the tension of communal living.

As for Munk, everyone treated him with great respect and called him the Professor; they transferred him to solitary, but, as he hadn’t killed any guards, he was considered a normal prisoner. “He’s fine now,” said Doctor Beck, “we’re convinced that he isn’t a psychopath, quite the opposite, he’s a friendly, studious man who says very little. Ah, I don’t think it would be easy to find another person like him. A great man, a brilliant mind. He lives in his own world, thinking all the time. He’s expanded my intelligence, not only because I get the chance to talk to him every now and then, but also because of his history. He lived alone in the woods with no electric light or TV, so he feels like he’s on cloud nine here, he never says so but I can tell.”

We’d gone down floor after floor in a cement stairwell until we reached the gray area, also called the Short Cut. Down there were the murderers, the psychopaths, the most hardened criminals waiting out their sentences. It was what you could technically call the psychiatric wing of the prison, although Beck laughed at that designation. “The lunatics are on the outside, my friend, I know what I’m talking about, down here there are only criminals beyond hope,” he said, and left me alone, facing a cement hallway so clean that it looked glazed.

2

The visiting room was a white enclosure with high barred windows and bright light. A guard admitted me and placed me before a rectangular table, and then he stationed himself at the end of the empty room like a bored docent in a museum who looks at the masterworks on display without seeing them. One of the walls gave the impression of being a Gesell camera, that is, a one-way mirror that would allow us