A Modern Purgatory

by Carlo de Fornaro

The warden and the keepers always suspect prisoners of faking sickness or feigning insanity. As a rule the convicts do not like to stay very long in the hospital, as they are not allowed to smoke, and the time is very slow and tedious without any kind of work.

A small, stocky, bearded, wild-looking Italian was brought over from the Tombs before his trial. He would not touch food, and the Tombs keepers were afraid that he might die on their hands.

It took six men and one doctor, sitting on his arms, legs and stomach, to feed him a glass of milk by a rubber tube through his nostrils. It was a nauseating performance, and luckily it was not repeated.

We have to dress and undress him every morning and night. About six o'clock every morning he starts walking up and down from the bathroom to the bay window, a distance of about twenty-five paces; and he continues it all day long, without rest or pause, until nine o'clock at night. Every fifteen minutes or so he calls out in a sing-song, southern dialect: "Oh! Giorgio Washington! Warden of this great prison! My dear wife! My beautiful little children!" And then he looks up at the clock and adds: "And the Holy Ghost of the clock!"

After he has been put to bed he covers his head with the bed sheets, but every hour he sticks his head out and like a cuckoo bird in a Swiss clock he repeats his monotonous story.

Everybody is kept awake, the patients as well as the keepers. The first night an old keeper who was on watch tried to hush him up, but without success; so he stood at the head of the bed watching for the moment when the man would uncover his head again and sing out.

We waited breathlessly, looking forward to the expected minute. Suddenly the head appeared and the old keeper swiftly hit it a stinging whack with a wet towel, which cut the "Giorgio Washington" in two; the head went right back under the bed sheets for the rest of the night.

After two weeks the man was finally sent back to the Tombs. Although he had eaten only once in that time, it took half a dozen sturdy men to dress him up and turn him over to the sheriff.

Once in a moment of lucidity he asked me to get him some food, for which he was willing to pay. Then he begged me to write to his wife, and when the letter was written and addressed, he became mad again and tore it to little bits, and resumed his peripatetic, insane round.

A young Pole, about twenty-five years old, is brought over from the workhouse. His face is blue and his lips are bleeding from blows. We have to dress and undress him also like a child. Whenever food is brought, and he is told to eat, he weeps; whenever anybody speaks to him he weeps; and he whines and carries on like a frightened baby in a strange place. He has the body of a powerful longshoreman and the mentality of a new born baby.