I WAS THE ONE who should have been the French commissioner, I thought, following my duck-legged aristo through the wicket gate of the Eastern State Penitentiary, passing between clipped privet hedges into a central chamber from which seven long passages radiated like spokes on a Catherine wheel. On either side of every spoke was a long row of low cell doors.

Twice he touched me on the arm as if in tenderness.

Everywhere about us was silence, although sometimes the thick walls gave a muffled clue to the living nightmares they contained, the distant thuck of a weaver's shuttle, the ching of a hammer striking steel. Behind every one of those numbered double doors-first oak, then steel-was a human soul, a mind in its bone cage, the center of its solar system, burning with regret and rage, condemned to silent solitary labor world without end.

This spoked device was a machine of reform, it had been explained to the commissioner in the lifeless garden. We were shown a black hood and invited to try it on. How bloody kind. This hood is the crown given to every prisoner at the wicket gate. He enters blind. He does not see the garden. He shuffles along the penitential corridor to his cell, alone, in terror, not knowing if his next step will be to a deadly fall, if he is alone on earth or surrounded by others in a castle ten miles long.

This Eastern State Penitentiary is the work of the Quakers of Pennsylvania who would not tear a man apart or pour molten lead into his intestines as was done by the bastard kings of old. Instead they work direct upon the soul.

I listened to Olivier de Garmont question the cost of construction. I was John Larrit, clown and secretaire who had already lived too long, who carried paper and carbon paper.

The first poor devil we visited was seated at his loom and never ceased his endless shuff and thump the entire time he spoke. He offered a grimace and a shrug and reminded me of one I loved. He told us he had always liked to dance-a joke-he shuffled his feet before his loom. And as his lordship's servants must once have collected moths and butterflies, I collected this conversation for his important book to be titled On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France.

Mesdames, Messieurs, voila. The very thing. Les conversations pittoresques.

"The prisoner had been there five years," I wrote, "and is to remain five more. He has been convicted as a receiver of stolen goods but, even after his long imprisonment, denies his guilt."

"Add this," his lordship demanded. "Each cell is aired by a ventilator, and contains a fosse d'aisance whose construction makes it perfectly odorless. One must have seen all the cells of the Philadelphia prison and have passed entire days in them, to form an exact idea of their cleanness and the purity of the air one breathes in them." Oh, lucky man.

Of my own accord I wrote, "He has a Bible, a slate, and a pencil. His razor, plate, can, and basin hang upon the wall. His bedstead turns up against the wall, which leaves more space for him to work in. He labors, sleeps and wakes, counts the seasons as they change, and grows old."

We moved to the next cell whose lonely inmate had smuggled in a cat or rabbit of which there was no sign except its dreadful smell.

The French commissioner's report was as follows: "The inmate knows how to read and write, he was condemned for murder. He says that his health, without being bad, is poorer than it was outside the prison. He strongly denies having committed the crime which was the cause of his condemnation; otherwise he confesses readily that he was a drunkard, turbulent and irreligious. But today, he adds, his soul is changed; he finds a sort of pleasure in the solitude, and is tormented only by the desire to see his family again and give his children a moral and Christian education, something he had never considered."

What pigwash, I thought, writing it down, correcting my employer's English. Democracies and monarchies, it does not matter-the world is filled with poor men tortured by the state. The rich make an endless supply of them, and when the Americans won their independence the king must find a new place to put his prisoners. So- Australia was invented by the British, that whole dry carcass, its withered dugs offered to our criminal lips. Now that, sir, is a place of penance.

In Philadelphia I wrote with my right hand but wandered in my mind, a mighty garden wild with weeds. I thought little Olivier is doubtless a clever man but has no idea what powers this sad bootmaker has locked within him. His lordship has, as they say, no fucking clue. In Sydney he would quickly become the proprietor of a stinking tannery. A drunkard, yes, who wasn't? Turbulent, yes. And irreligious, but a man with all life and hope ahead of him.

The previous night I had told tender Olivier about the flogging, but I said that only to ease the humiliation of my tears. It was a lie. I never saw a man flogged, thank Jesus, only a piece of human flesh glistening with black flies at the barracks gate.

I should never have left those shores, that's the truth.

I was tricked onto that ship. Worse, I permitted myself to be tricked because I understood myself to be a poor little boy, betrayed, abandoned, a victim of an awful fate. I always had it in my head that I must get home where I belonged.

I was a fool to cry at Duponceau's, but I was a much bigger fool to leave Port Jackson. I had a wife, a child, a home, but for all that I did not understand it was my home. She, my wife, would not call it home either. All around us everyone was the same-soldiers, convicts, even captains with their holds stock-full of rum. Home did not mean here. That was elsewhere. When will we be in our real home at last, we asked each other. We manured the earth, she and I, and grew cabbage, and roasted the tails of kangaroo, and held each other through the entire night, breathing that perfume that lies on the skin of young boys and girls. We swam at night, bare as God made us. We gathered oysters from the rocks and shucked their living juices down our cruel and eager throats. We laughed and farted. We had fevers and were well. We were at home, while waiting to go home, while missing home. We looked up at that cobalt sky, and out at the ultramarine seas, not seeing their beauty but only the cold empty distance between us and home. And so we made our lives, pining all the while.

In this way a self-pitying boy grew to be an artist blessed to see what had not been seen in all of London. When I saw Duponceau's folio, I understood what treasure I had thrown away. I had been more talented, more decent. I had been a better man in New South Wales.

That was why I cried, but who knows why I cried? Her name was Aoibheann. I thought she was Eevan until we signed the papers. She was soft and Irish, fair-skinned, hair like my own, an angel with her swollen lips, her sturdy legs. It was really love and really marriage and even though the two of us built the house-she at one end of the saw as we cut the sandstone blocks-I did not consider it a real home, no matter the blisters on our hands.

The first day in the Eastern State Penitentiary I assisted the French commissioner interview four prisoners. I can think of no more disturbing labor, such a soup of gullibility and lies, horror and aristocratic imbecility. At day's end we were outside the crenellated walls and I inquired of my employer if he had some curiosity to taste the arrack, as this was the drink the prisoners had been destroyed by, every one.

"Indeed," said he.

We turned into a low sort of inn where we were given a flask of arrack and a water jug and two glasses.

Said he at last, "I have a question."

Said I, "It is better we speak English here."