Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (25 page)

Naturally enough, Rita was questioned about me, and she suddenly learned everything I had hidden from her--learned it from the pigs. Interpol had given them all the information. But still she did not leave me in the lurch, and while I was in prison she helped me as much as she possibly could. She paid for a lawyer, who got me out within two weeks--charge dismissed. My complete innocence was established; but the damage had been done.

When she came to fetch me from the prison, Rita was deeply moved, but she was very sad, too. She did not look at me the same way as before. I sensed that she was really frightened--that she was hesitating about taking up with me again. I had the feeling that everything was lost. And I wasn’t wrong, because right away she asked, “Why did you lie to me?”

No, I must not, must not lose her. I’d never have another chance like this. Once again I had to fight with all my strength. “Rita, you’ve just got to believe me. When I met you, I liked you so much, I loved you so much right away, that I was afraid you wouldn’t want to see me anymore if I told you the truth about my past.”

“You lied to me... you lied to me,” she kept repeating, over and over again. “And I who thought you were a decent man.”

She was crazy with fear, as if she were living in a nightmare. Yes, she’s afraid, man,
she’s afraid of you
.

“And who’s to say I can’t be a decent guy? I believe that like everybody else I deserve a chance of becoming good, honest and happy. Don’t forget, Rita, that for fourteen years I had to fight against the most horrible prison system in the world. I love you with all my heart, Rita; and I love you not with my past but with my present. You must believe me: the reason I didn’t tell you the story of my life was just that I was afraid of losing you. I said to myself that although I’d lived crooked before, my future with you would be the complete opposite. I saw the whole of the road we were to travel together, hand in hand, and I saw it all clean and straightforward, all in lovely colors. I swear it’s true, Rita, I swear by the head of my father, whom I’ve made to suffer so much.” Then I cracked, and I began to weep.

“Is it true, Henri? Is that really how you saw things?”

I got a hold on myself; my voice was hoarse and broken as I replied, “It has to be like that, because now in our hearts that’s the way it is. You and me--we have no past. All that matters is the present and the future.”

Rita took me in her arms. “Henri, don’t cry anymore. Listen to the breeze--it’s our future that is beginning. But swear to me that you’ll never do another dishonest thing. Promise you’ll never hide anything from me anymore and that there’ll be nothing dirty in our lives to be kept hidden.”

We held one another tight, and I made my oath. I felt my life’s greatest chance was at stake. I saw that I should never have hidden from this brave, honest woman that I was a man with a life sentence, a fugitive from the penal settlement.

So I told her everything. It was all on the move inside me, even the idea that had been obsessing me since 1931--my revenge. I decided to lay it at her feet--to give it up as a proof of my sincerity. “To prove how much I love you, Rita, I offer you the greatest sacrifice I can make. From this moment on, I give up my revenge. The prosecutor, the pigs, the false witness, all those people who made me suffer so--let them die in their beds. To fully deserve a woman like you, I must--not forgive, because that’s impossible--but put out of my mind this desire to punish mercilessly the men who tossed me into the prison cells. Here before you is a completely new man; the old one is dead.”

Rita must have thought over this conversation all day, because that evening, after work, she said to me, “And what about your father? Since you’re now worthy of him, write to him as soon as you can.”

“Since 1933 neither he nor I have heard from one another. Since October, 1933, to be exact. I used to see the convicts being given their letters, those wretched letters, opened by the screws, in which you could say nothing. I used to see the despair on the faces of the poor guys who had no mail at all, and I could make out the disappointment of the ones who read a longed-for letter and didn’t find what they had hoped for in it. I’ve seen them tear letters to pieces and stamp on them; and I’ve seen tears fall on the ink and blur the writing. And I could imagine just what those damned letters from the penal settlement might mean when they got to the families outside--the Guiana stamp would make the postman and the neighbors and the people in the village café say, ‘The jailbird has written. There’s a letter, so he’s still alive.’ I could guess the shame of taking it from the postman, and the pain when the postman asked, ‘Is your son getting along all right?’ So I wrote my sister Yvonne just one letter, the only letter I wrote from prison, saying, ‘Never expect to hear from me, and never write. Like Alfred de Vigny’s wolf, I shall know how to die without howling.’“

“All that belongs to the past, Henri. You’ll write to your father?”

“Yes. Tomorrow.”

“No. Now--at once.”

A long letter set off for France, just telling my father what could be told without wounding him. I described no part of my sufferings; only my resurrection and my life at present. The letter came back: “Moved without leaving an address.”

Dear Lord above, who could tell where my father had gone to hide his shame because of me? People were so evil they might have made life impossible for him.

Rita’s reaction came at once. “I’ll go to France and look for your father.” I stared at her. She went on, “Give up your exploring job; it’s too dangerous in any case. While I’m away, you’ll run the hotel.”

Not only was she ready to plunge unhesitatingly into the dangers of this long journey all by herself, but she had so much trust in me--in me, the ex-convict--that she would leave everything in my hands. She knew she could rely on me.

Rita had only rented the hotel, with an option to purchase. So to keep it from slipping out of our hands, the first thing to do was buy it. Now I really learned what it meant, struggling to make one’s place in life by honest means.

I got the Richmond Company to let me go, and with the six thousand bolivars I received, and Rita’s savings, we gave the owner 50 percent of the price. And then began a positive battle day after day, and night after night, to make money and meet our installments. Both she and I worked like crazy eighteen hours and sometimes nineteen hours a day. We were united by a wonderful will to win at all costs and in the shortest possible time. Neither she nor I ever mentioned our weariness. I did the buying and helped with the cooking and received the guests. We were everywhere at once, always smiling. We died on our feet, and then we began again the next morning.

To make a little more money, I filled a two-wheeled cart with jackets and trousers to sell in the Plaza Baralt market. These clothes were manufacturers’ rejects, which meant I could buy them very cheaply at the factory. Under the blazing sun I reeled off my spiel, bawling like a jackass and putting so much energy into it that one day, tweaking a jacket to show how strong it was, I split it from top to bottom. It was all very well explaining that I was the strongest man in Maracaibo, but I sold precious few that morning. I was in the market from eight until noon. At half past twelve I hurried to the hotel to help at waiting in the restaurant.

The Plaza Baralt was the commercial heart of Maracaibo, one of the liveliest places in the town. At the far end stood the church, at the other, one of the most picturesque markets in the world, a market where you would find anything you could possibly think of in the way of meat, game, seafood and shellfish, not forgetting big green iguanas--a lovely dish--with their claws tied so they could not escape; and there were alligator, tortoise, and turtle eggs, armadillos and
morocoys
, a kind of land tortoise, all sorts of fruit and fresh hearts of palm. The market of this ebullient town swarmed with people in the scorching sun--skins of every color, eyes of every shape, from the Chinese slit to the Negro round.

Rita and I loved Maracaibo, although it was one of the hottest places in Venezuela. This colonial town had a lovable, warmhearted population that lived happily. They had a musical way of speaking; they were fine, generous people with a little Spanish blood and all the best qualities of the Indians. The men were fiery creatures; they had a very strong sense of friendship, and to those they liked they could be real brothers. The Maracucho--the inhabitant of Maracaibo--did not much care for anything that came from Caracas. He complained that they provided the whole of Venezuela with gold by means of their oil, and that the people of the capital always overlooked him: the Maracucho felt like a wealthy man who was being treated as a poor relation by the very people he had enriched. The women were pretty and rather small: faithful, good daughters and good mothers. The whole town seethed with life and the noise of living, and everywhere there was brilliant color--the clothes, the houses, the fruit, everything. Everywhere, too, there was movement, business, activity. The Plaza Baralt was full of street traders and small-time smugglers who scarcely bothered to hide the liqueurs, spirits or cigarettes they were selling. It was all more or less among friends: the policeman was only a few yards away, but he would turn his back just long enough for the bottles of whisky, the French cognac or the American cigarettes to pass from one basket to another.

Running a hotel was no trifle. When Rita first came, she made a decision completely opposed to the customs of the country. The Venezuelan customers were used to eating a substantial breakfast--corn muffins (
arepas
), ham and eggs, bacon, cream cheese. And as the guests were paying full room and board, the day’s menu was written up on a slate. The first day Rita wiped the whole list out and in her pointed hand wrote, “Breakfast: black coffee or café au lait, bread and butter.” Well, what do you think of that? the guests must have said; by the end of the week half of them had changed their quarters.

Then I turned up. Rita had made some alterations, but my arrival brought a downright revolution.

First decree: double the prices.

Second decree: French cooking.

Third decree: air conditioning throughout.

People were astonished to find air conditioning in all the rooms and in the restaurant of a colonial house turned into a hotel. The clientele changed. First came commercial travelers; then a Basque settled in: he sold “Swiss” Omega watches manufactured entirely in Peru, and he ran his business from his room, selling only to retailers, who hawked them from door to door and all through the oil fields. Although the hotel was safe, he was so suspicious that he had three big locks put on his door at his own expense. And in spite of the locks he noticed that from time to time a watch disappeared. He thought his room was haunted until the day he found that, in fact, there was a female thief, our bitch Bouclette. She was a poodle, and so cunning she would creep in without a sound, and right under his nose would rip off a strap for pure fun, whether it had a watch attached or not. So here he was, shrieking and bawling, saying I had trained Bouclette to steal his things. I laughed till I could laugh no more, and after two or three rums managed to convince him that I’d had nothing to do with his lousy watches and that I would really be ashamed of selling such phony stuff. Comforted and easy in his mind, he shut himself up in his room again.

Among our guests there were people of every possible kind. Maracaibo was full to overflowing, and it was almost impossible to find a room. A flock of Neapolitans went from house to house, swindling the citizens by selling lengths of cloth folded so there seemed to be enough for four suits when in fact you could only make two. They were dressed as sailors and carried big bags on their shoulders, they combed the town and the country round, above all the oil fields. I don’t know how these sharp-witted creatures discovered our hotel. As all the rooms were full, there was only one solution--for them to sleep in the patio. Every evening they came back about seven and had a shower. They had dinner at the hotel, so we learned to make spaghetti
a la napolitaine
. They spent their money freely, and they were good customers.

At night, we brought out iron bedsteads, and the two little maids helped Rita make them up in the patio. As I made the Neapolitans pay in advance, there was the same argument every night--paying the price of a room for sleeping in the open was too much. And every night I told them that on the contrary it was perfectly logical and completely fair. To bring out the beds, put on the sheets, the blankets and the pillows and then take them all in again in the morning was a huge amount of work-- beyond price. “And don’t you go on beefing too much, or I’ll put up your rent. Because here I am, literally slaying myself shifting things in and out--all I make you pay is the cost of moving.”

They would pay up and we would all have a laugh. But although they were making a lot of money, the next evening the whole thing would start all over again. They beefed even more one night when it rained and they had to run in with all their clothes and their mattresses and sleep in the restaurant.

A woman who kept a brothel came to see me. She had a very big house two or three miles from Maracaibo, at the place called La Cabeza de Toro: the brothel was the Tibiri-Tabara. Eléonore was her name, and she was an enormous mass of flesh: intelligent; very fine eyes. More than a hundred and twenty women worked at her place--only at night.

“There are some French girls who want to get out,” she told me. “They don’t like spending twenty-four hours a day in the brothel. Working from nine in the evening until four the next morning, that’s fine. But they want to be able to eat well and sleep in peace in comfortable rooms away from the noise.”