His account demonstrates that barbarism exists, but also explains why: the writer owns the fruits of his labor and the very act of conveying a battle of the lesser members of the society through language shows that some get the suffering while others benefit from it. Revueltas’s narrator regards the gladiators as savages who lack all moral scruples simply because he can: the master of the grammatical rules that shape society’s norms (integral to authority), he is there to narrate the theater of the panopticon as the public applauds from the outside.
A Christological reading of the novel’s Expressionist ending — “lines and more lines, bars and more bars… the monstrous blueprint of this gargantuan defeat of liberty, all the fault of geometry” — is inevitable: Revueltas himself uses crucified to describe how the prisoners are ultimately subjugated. An April 5, 1969, journal entry from the author (twenty days after he finished writing the book) suggests, however, a different reading of these mysterious final pages: “An invisible web of fiction surrounds us and we struggle as prisoners inside it like those who struggle to free themselves from a spider’s web from which there is no escape.” This fiction that secures us as in a spider web is the whole political system — and its masters, us, the owners of speech, should be held responsible for the inequality it produces even when our acts are generally well intended and harmless. There is no way out, but there is a thread to follow: imagining a justice system that could do without the spectacle of punishment.
The publication of The Hole in the United States at this precise moment in time could not be more pertinent: it’s a perfect fable about our complicity — all writers and readers — in the triumph of mass incarceration as the only solution to problems that could be resolved in more rational ways.
Everybody knows that jail doesn’t help reintegrate those who have renounced the pursuit of society’s norms; it only serves as a spectacle that feeds our leisure hours with the newspaper and television — the panopticon that we contemplate as evidence of our moral superiority. In a country and an era of unparalleled imprisonment we are all, along with the novel’s narrator, an amused audience, a bunch of cold witnesses. We are accomplices and we are all directly compromised.
THE HOLE
They were captive there, the apes, just like the rest, male and female; or rather, male and male, the pair of them in their cage, not quite despairing, not yet totally desperate, pacing from one side to the other, detained but in motion, trapped on the zoological scale as if someone, the others, all humanity, had irreverently washed their hands of the matter, this matter of them being apes, which they to wanted to forget, apes when all’s said and done, who didn’t or refused to get it, captive whichever way you looked at them, penned in that two-story-high barred cage, in their blue uniforms with shining badges on their heads, in their unregimented to- and fro-ing, easy and yet fixed, never managing to take the one step that would allow them to emerge from their interspecies, where they moved, walked, copulated, cruel and lacking all recollection, he-apes and she-apes in Paradise, identical, same hair, same sex, but male and female, imprisoned, fucked. His head carefully and expertly cocked to press his left ear against the horizontal metal sheet that closed the narrow hatch, Polonio squinted down on them from above, his right eye looking along the sharp line of his nose, watching how they paced from one side to the other, the bunch of keys hanging from their blue cloth jackets, jangling against their thighs to the swing of each step. First one then the other, the two apes were sized up, monitored from the second floor by that head with just one eye to observe them, the head on Salome’s platter, poking out of the hatch, the talking fairground head, detached from the torso — like at the fair, the head that tells the future and recites rhymes, John the Baptist’s head, only in this case tilted sideways, resting on its ear — preventing the left eye from seeing anything below, just the surface of the metal sheet that sealed the hatch, while the apes, in the cage, crossed paths as they paced from one end to the other, and that talking head — delivering insults in a long, slow, plangent, cynical drawl, dragging out the vowels on a wave of something like a melody of jarring alternate accents — told them to go fuck their mothers each time either one of them moved into his good eye’s field of vision. “Those fucking
ape sons of bitches.” They were captive. More captive than Polonio, more captive than Albino, more captive than the Prick. For a few seconds it was empty, that rectangular cage, the apes disappearing momentarily as they paced back and forth in opposite directions to the far walls of the cage — thirty meters or so, sixty there and back — and that virgin, formless space transformed into inalienable sovereign territory under Polonio’s stubborn right eye, which took in, millimeter by millimeter, each and every detail of that section of the wing. Apes, arch-apes, stupid, vile, and naïve, naïve as a ten-year-old whore. So stupid they didn’t seem to notice that they alone were the captives, they and their mothers and their children and their forefathers. They were born to keep watch and they knew as much, to spy, to constantly look around, making sure no one escaped their clutches in that city with its iron grid of streets, barred corridors, corners multiplying on all sides, and that stupid face they wore was nothing but the manifestation of a certain, hazy longing for other unattainable aptitudes, a certain stutter of the soul in their simian features, underlaid with grief for an irremediable loss of which they remained ignorant, eyes all over them, a mesh of eyes covering their bodies, a river of pupils rushing over their limbs, napes, necks, arms, chests, balls, all to put food on the table at home, or so they told themselves, where their ape families danced and screeched — the little boys and girls and the wife, hairy on the inside — during their twenty-four long hours with the master ape at home, after his twenty-four hour shift in the penitentiary, stretched out on the bed, foul and clammy, the grease-smeared banknotes from petty bribes laying on the bedside table, but never leaving the prison, vile and captive in an endless circulation, ape-notes, which the wife repeatedly smoothed and pressed in the palm of her hand, slowly, terribly, not knowing what she was doing. Life was one long not knowing anything at alclass="underline" not knowing that there they were in their cage, husband and wife, husband and husband, wife and children, father and father, sons and fathers, terrified, universal apes. The Prick begged to watch them from the hatch, too. Polonio could think of nothing but how vile it was to have the Prick there, just as caged, just as holed. “You know you can’t, man… !” He spoke in the same long, rolling cadences he used to abuse the guards in their box, one voice and yet indifferent, used by all like a personal trademark, and which, whether blindly or merely in the dark, didn’t much help to tell them apart, except for the fact that it was the kind of voice that oozed smug complacency and a sense of superiority and hierarchy upheld by a certain class oblivious of what thugs they really were. Of course he couldn’t. Not because of the skill it required to place your head through the hatch and position it there, at an angle, ears catching as it slid across the metal sheet to rest on Salome’s platter, but because the Prick was missing his right eye, and with the left one alone he wouldn’t see a thing apart from the metal surface, close up, coarse, abrasive — and well, that’s why they called him the Prick, for being such a useless prick, blind in one eye, dragging himself around with the shakes and a lame leg, no dignity at all, known throughout the Penitentiary for his habit of carving up his veins each time he was banged up in the