Read Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment for Free Online

shoulders forward, until I was as bent over as someone who does stoop labor in the fields. I dropped my head and let my chin sag down onto my chest. I knew nothing about the crime and yet I thought I had something to hide.
    When it was over, and along with the others I was led out of the room, I almost felt as if I had gotten away with something.
    “Instead of taking me back to the small cell, I was led down another corridor and put in what we used to call the tank. It was a large room, perhaps thirty feet by twenty, with benches on each of the four walls. On one side, two dirt-covered windows, so high up you could not reach them, much less see out of them, let in a gray, dismal light. Thirty or forty men were crowded together inside. Most were hunched over, staring down at the cement floor, or leaning back against the wall, their hands lying listlessly at their sides, or locked around an upraised knee, gazing straight ahead, an absent look in their eyes. Several were lying on the floor, arms crossed in front of them, sleeping off a drunk. The air was stagnant with the fetid smell of urine and sweat. Stepping carefully over the bodies on the floor, I found a place on the bench directly under the window. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I made out the figure of a man crouching low in the corner. It took me a minute before I realized that his pants were down around his ankles and he was squatting over the one toilet everyone was supposed to share. I turned away, disgusted. Then, convinced I must have been wrong, I looked again. He was sitting there, black hair matted down on his head, with a thick neck and huge fleshy arms, masturbating. In an instant, I was on my feet, moving across the room. Stumbling over the body of a drunk who woke up just long enough to swing his arm at my legs, I made it to the door and banged on it as hard as I could.
    ” ‘How long are you going to keep me in here?’ I demanded when the guard opened the peephole.
    ” ‘Be quiet,’ he shouted back as he closed it in my face.
    “I beat on the door again, yelling for the guard to come back, though I knew it was nothing more than an empty gesture of defiance. No one was going to help me, and the only thing I could do for myself was accept my situation without further complaint.
    “I spent that weekend—three nights that seemed like three years—surrounded by drunks, derelicts, people who could barely function, men who had lost the capacity to distinguish between what happened forty years ago, before they had become addicts and alcoholics, and what was happening right in front of their eyes. They were the victims of their own self-inflicted madness.
    “On the bench next to me, a bleary-eyed old man scratched the gray stubble on his cheek, trying to remember where he was.
    He opened his toothless mouth and, glancing up at me, began to talk in a rapid senseless monotone. At best, I could make out every third or fourth word as he rambled along, stopping every so often to ask, in a sudden burst of lucidity, ‘Don’t you see?’ He would wait until I gave some sign, a nod, a shrug, a smile, something that showed him that I understood, that I sympathized with what he was telling me, before he lost himself again in his own incoherence.
    “He babbled on and on, stopping every once in a while to see if I was still listening, an endless monologue that had meaning only for himself. Gradually, his voice grew fainter, as if he was slowly drifting away. ‘Don’t you see?’ he asked, suddenly alert.
    Then, without waiting for my response, he closed his eyes and a moment later began to snore. His shoulder slid up against my chest until the back of his head, greasy gray hair matted to his whitish skull, was directly below my chin. Careful not to let him fall, I got to my feet and left him slumped on the hard wooden bench, a harmless old man who, when he was not crawling into a bottle, was being shoved into a cell. I found myself wondering what stories he