Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (21 page)

I wasn’t broke, but I didn’t have much: three thousand bolivars at the outside, the sum total of two years on the loose.

What had happened during this time?

One: the heap of gold at El Callao. No point in brooding over that: it was something you gave up voluntarily so the ex-cons there could go living in peace. You regret it? No. Okay, then forget the ton of gold.

Two: craps at the diamond mines. You nearly got yourself killed twenty times for ten thousand dollars you never cashed in on. Jojo died in your place: you came out alive. Without a cent, true enough; but what a terrific adventure! You’ll never forget all those nights, keyed up to the breaking point, the gamblers’ faces under the carbide lamp, the unmoved Jojo. Nothing to regret there either.

Three: the tunnel under the bank. Not the same thing at all; there really was no luck about that job. Still, for three months you lived at full blast twenty-four hours a day. Even if you got no more out of it than that, you don’t have to be sorry for yourself. Do you realize that for three months on end, even in your dreams, you felt you were a millionaire with never a doubt about getting your hands on the dough? Doesn’t that mean anything? Of course, just a trifle more luck might have given you a fortune; but on the other hand you might have been much more unlucky. Suppose the tunnel had caved in while you were at the far end? You’d have died like a rat or they would have caught you like a fox in its earth.

Four: what about the pawnshop and its refrigerators? No complaints, except for the Public Works Department of that damnable country.

Five: the plot. Frankly, you were never really wholehearted about that business. These political jobs and those bombs that might kill anybody--it’s not your line. What it really comes to is that you were taken in first by the sales pitch of two very nice guys and then by the promise of being able to carry out your plan. But your heart wasn’t in it, because you never felt it was quite legit to attack the government that had let you out.

Still, on the credit side you had four months of fun with the musketeers, their wives and the kid; and you aren’t likely to forget those days full of the joy of life.

Conclusion: You were unjustly imprisoned for fourteen years and almost all your youth was stolen from you. But you’ve been free the last two years, and in those two years you’ve had countless experiences and terrific adventures. You’ve had wonderful love; you’ve known men of every kind who’ve given you their friendship--men you’ve risked your life with; and after all this, do you still keep moaning? You’re broke, or nearly broke? What does that matter? Poverty’s not a difficult disease to cure. So glory be to God, Papil You’re fit, which is the really important thing.

Let’s wipe it all out and begin again, gentlemen. The chips are down! Make your last bets--this is it! Banco lost, banco again: banco again and again and again. Banco right along the line. But let your whole being thrill and quiver, singing a song of hope that one day you’ll hear, “Nine on the nose! Rake it in, Monsieur Papillon! You’ve won!”

The sun was almost touching the horizon. Red in the evening, that meant hope. The breeze had freshened, and with a calmer mind I stood up, happy to be free and alive; my feet sank in the wet sand as I went back toward the house, where they were waiting for what I had caught for the evening meal. As I walked back, I gave myself over to all the colors, the countless touches of light and shade playing on the crests of the little waves stretching out forever. They stirred me so deeply, what with my remembering past dangers overcome, that I couldn’t help thinking of their creator, of God. “Good night, Big Guy, good night! In spite of all these flops, I still thank You for having given me such a beautiful day full of sun and freedom and, to finish it off, this marvelous sunset!”

9

One day, when I was making a quick trip to Caracas, a friend introduced me to a former Paris model who was looking for someone to help her in a new hotel she had just opened at Maracaibo. I very willingly accepted the job of being her man Friday. She was called Laurence; I think she had come to Caracas to show a collection, and then decided to settle in Venezuela. Six hundred miles lay between Caracas and Maracaibo, and that suited me fine; it was always possible the police might reopen their inquiries into our coup d’etat.

A friend gave me a lift, and after fourteen hours’ driving I had my first sight of Lake Maracaibo--they call it a lake, although in fact it is a huge lagoon nearly a hundred miles long and sixty wide at the broadest point, and it is joined to the sea by a channel about eight miles across. Maracaibo lies to the north, on the west bank of the channel, which is now linked to the east bank by a bridge. In those days, though, if you came from Caracas, you had to cross on a ferry.

This lake was really extraordinary, dotted with thousands of derricks. It looked like a huge forest stretching away out of sight, a forest whose trees, all exactly lined up, allowed you to see as far as the horizon. But these trees were oil wells, and each oil well had an enormous pendulum that went to and fro all day and all night, never stopping, perpetually pumping up the black gold from the bowels of the earth.

A ferry ran nonstop between the end of the Caracas road and Maracaibo, carrying cars, passengers and goods. During the crossing I hurried from one side to the other, absolutely fascinated by the iron pylons rising from the lake; and as I stared at them I thought that twelve hundred miles from here, down at the far end of the country in Venezuelan Guiana, the Good Lord had stuffed the ground with diamonds, gold, iron, nickel, manganese, bauxite, uranium and all the rest, while here He had filled it with oil, the motor of the world--with such enormous quantities of oil that these thousands of pumps could suck away day and night without ever sucking it dry. Venezuela, you’ve got no call to blame the Lord!

The Hotel Normandy was a splendid villa surrounded by a carefully kept garden full of flowers. The lovely Laurence welcomed me with open arms. “This is my kingdom, Henri,” she said, laughing.

She had opened the hotel just two months before. There were only sixteen rooms, but all were luxurious and in the best taste, each with a bathroom fit for the Ritz. She had designed all the interior herself, from the bedrooms to the staff bathrooms, taking in the drawing room, terrace and dining room on her way.

I set to work, and it was no laughing matter being Laurence’s right-hand man--she was under forty and she got up at six to see to her guests’ breakfast or even make it herself. She was tireless, and all day long she hurried about, seeing to this and that, supervising everything, and yet still finding time to look after a rose bush or weed a garden path. She had grasped life with both hands; she had overcome almost impossible difficulties to set this business going; and she had so much faith in its success that I was seized with a will to work almost as consuming as her own. I did everything I could to help her cope with the hundreds of difficulties that kept cropping up. Money difficulties, above all. She was in debt up to her neck, because to turn this villa into something like a luxury hotel she had borrowed every penny.

One day, by a private deal I carried out without consulting her, I got something marvelous out of an oil company.

“Good evening, Laurence.”

“Good evening. It’s late, Henri: eight o’clock already. I’m not blaming you, now; but I haven’t seen you this whole afternoon.”

“I’ve been for a stroll.”

“Is this a joke?”

“Yes, I’m laughing at life. It’s always good for a laugh, don’t you think?”

“Not always. And at this time I should have liked your support; I’m in a bad jam.”

“Very bad?”

“Yes. I’ve got to pay for all these fittings and alterations, and although the place is running well, it’s not easy. I owe a great deal.”

“Here comes the big surprise, Laurence; hold on. You don’t owe anything anymore.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“No. Listen: you’ve brought me in as a kind of partner, and in fact I’ve noticed a good many people think I’m the boss.”

“What of it?”

“Well, one of the people who thought that way is a Canadian belonging to the Lumus Company, and a few days back he talked to me about a deal he thought we might make. I went to see him this afternoon; I’ve just come back.”

“Tell me quickly!” cried Laurence, her eyes wide with interest.

“The result is the Lumus Company takes your hotel, the whole of it, with full board,
for a year!
”

“It’s not possible!”

“It is, I promise you.” In her emotion, Laurence kissed me on both cheeks and collapsed into a chair. “Of course, there was no question of
me
signing this terrific contract, so tomorrow they’ll call you to their office.”

This contract meant that Laurence made a small fortune out of the Hotel Normandy. The first quarter’s advance alone let her pay off all her debts.

After the signing of the contract, Laurence and I drank champagne with the Lumus bosses. I was happy, very happy, as I lay there in my big bed that night. With the help of the champagne I saw life a fine rosy pink. Papi, you’re no more of a fool than Laurence: so isn’t it possible to get rich
by working?
Well, Christ above, this was a real discovery I’d made here at the Hotel Normandy. Yes, a real discovery, because in France, for the few years I’d been able to take a quick glance at life, it had always seemed to me that a workingman stayed a workingman all his life. And this completely wrong idea was even more wrong here in Venezuela, where the man who really wants to do something has every opportunity open to him.

It was not from love of money that I had gone for crooked jobs: I wasn’t a thief out of a deep liking for theft. It was just that I’d never been able to believe it was possible to get to the top in life by starting from scratch--nor, as far as I was concerned, to get hold of a lump of money big enough for me to go and present my bill in Paris. But it was possible, and only one thing was necessary to start--a little bit of capital, a few thousand bolivars; and it would be easy to save that once I’d found a good job.

The only snag was that if I went about it this way, I would need a good deal of time before being able to take my revenge: I couldn’t scrape the necessary cash together in a day. “Revenge is a dish you want to eat cold,” Miguel had said at the diamond diggings. I was going to find out about that.

Maracaibo was seething. There was excitement in the air, and so many businesses and oil refineries were springing up that everything, from beer to cement, was sold on the black market. Everything was snapped up right away--there was never enough to meet the demand. Labor was making money, jobs were well paid and every kind of business was doing well.

When there is an oil boom, a district’s economy goes through two completely different phases. First comes the period before the wells begin to yield, the period of pre-exploitation. The companies turn up and settle in; they need offices, camps, roads, high-tension lines; they have to drill the wells, put up the derricks and pumps, etc. This is the golden age, golden for all the skilled workers and golden for every level of the community.

The people, the genuine horny-handed people, have dough in their pockets; they begin to discover the meaning of money and of security. Families start to get themselves organized, homes grow bigger or better, and the children go to school in good clothes, often taken by companies’ buses.

Then comes the second phase, the one that corresponds to my first view of Lake Maracaibo, with all I could see of it turned into a forest of derricks. This is the period of exploitation. Thousands of pumps, working away there by themselves, tirelessly suck out millions of tons of black gold every day.

But this unbelievable mass of dough does not pass through the people’s hands: it goes straight into the coffers of the state banks or the companies. Things begin to grow sticky, staff is cut down to the strict minimum, there’s no more money just floating around, all the active business is over. The coming generations will only know about it when they hear their grandfathers say, “Once upon a time, when Maracaibo was wealthy, there was. - .”

But I was lucky. I came in for Maracaibo’s second boom. It had nothing to do with the pumps on the lake, but several oil companies had just got new concessions running from the Perijá Mountains down to the lake and the sea, and they were wild with excitement. The moment might have been made for me.

I was going to dig in here. And I swore the hole I made would be a sizable cavern. I’d work at anything I could lay my hands on to gather in every possible crumb of this gigantic cake.

Good French cook, 41, seeks position with oil company. Minimum salary $800
.

I’d learned the rudiments of cooking with Laurence and her chef, and I decided to try my luck. The advertisement came out in the local paper, and a week later I was cooking for the Richmond Exploration Company. I was sorry to leave Laurence, but she could not possibly pay me wages like that, not by a long shot.

Now, having been through that school, I know a good deal about cooking; but when I first started my job I quaked for fear that the other guys in the kitchen would soon see that the French cook knew precious little about saucepans. To my surprise I soon saw that they, too, were all atremble in case the French cook should find out that they were only dishwashers, every last one of them! I breathed again; and all the deeper because I had a great advantage over them--
I owned a cookbook in French
--a present from a retired whore.