Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (28 page)

“Henri, for my sake and for the sake of this girl who is coming to you, and who I am sure will love you, I ask you to give up your idea of revenge forever. If your father could speak, do you think he would approve of your idea of revenge? No. He’d tell you that neither the cops nor the false witness nor the prosecutor nor what you call the jurymen nor the wardens were worth your sacrificing a wife who loves you and whom you love, and my daughter who hopes to find a father in you, and your good, comfortable home, and your honest life.

“I’ll tell you how I see your revenge: it’s this--that our family should be a symbol of happiness for everybody; that with your intelligence and my help, we should succeed in life by honest means; and that when the people of this country talk about you not one would say anything but this--the Frenchman is straight and honest, a good man whose word is his bond. That’s what your revenge ought to be; the revenge of proving to them all that they were terribly mistaken about you; of proving that you managed to come through the horrors of prison unspoiled and to become a fine character. That is the only revenge worthy of the love and the trust I have placed in you.”

She had won. All night we talked, and I learned to drain the cup to the dregs. But I could not resist the temptation of knowing every last detail of Rita’s journey. She lay on a big sofa, exhausted by the failure of this long voyage and by her struggle with me. Sitting there on the edge of it, I leaned over her, questioning her again and again and again, and little by little I dragged out everything she had meant to hide.

At the very beginning, after she left Maracaibo for the port of Caracas, where she was to take the boat, she had a foreboding that she was going to fail: everything seemed to conspire to prevent her from leaving for France. Just as she was boarding the
Colombie
she noticed she was missing one of the necessary visas. A race against time to get it in Caracas, tearing along that dangerous little road I knew so well. Back to the port with the paper in her bag and her heart beating for fear the boat should leave before she got there. Then a terrible storm broke out, bringing landslides down over the road. It became so dangerous that the driver lost his head and turned back, leaving Rita there alone in the storm by the side of the road, among the landslides. She walked nearly two miles in the downpour and then by a miracle found a taxi that was returning to Caracas; but at the sight of the landslides it turned back for the port. And from the port she could hear ships’ sirens. In her panic she was sure it was the
Colombie
leaving.

Then when she reached her cabin at last, weeping with joy, there was some accident aboard and the ship could not leave for several hours. All this gave her a very uneasy feeling, as if the events were expressions of fate.

Then the ocean: Le Havre, Paris, and without a stop, Marseille, where she stayed with a woman she knew, who introduced her to a municipal councilor, who wrote her a cordial letter to a friend of his called Henri Champel, who lived at Vals-les-Bains in the Ardèche.

Then the train and the bus again, and it was not until she reached these wonderfully kind Champels that Rita could draw breath and begin to organize her search. Even then she was not at the end of her difficulties.

Henri Champel took her to Aubenas, in the Ardèche, where Maître Testud, the family lawyer, lived. Ah, that Testud! A heartless bourgeois. In the first place he told her my father was dead--just right out, like that. Then on his own initiative, without consulting anyone, he forbade her to go and see my father’s sister and her husband, my uncle and aunt Dumarche, retired teachers who lived in Aubenas. Many years later they welcomed us with open arms, indignant at the thought that because of this wretched Testud they had not been able to put Rita up and so to get in touch with me again. The same thing with my sisters: Testud refused to give their address. Still, Rita did manage to get this stony heart to tell her where my father had died--Saint-Peray.

The journey to Saint-Peray. There Henri Champel and Rita found my father’s grave and learned something else as well. After having been a widower for twenty years he had married again--a retired schoolmistress--when I was still in the penal settlement. They found her. The family called her Tante Ju, or sometimes Tata Ju.

A fine woman, said Rita, and with such a noble character that she had kept the memory of my mother alive in this new home. In the dining room Rita had seen big photographs of my mother, whom I worshipped, and of my father. She had been able to touch and fondle objects that had belonged to her. Tante Ju, who now suddenly came into my life--although at the same time I felt I already knew her--had done all she could to let Rita feel the atmosphere she and my father had wanted to keep alive--the memory of my mother and the continual presence of that vanished little boy who was still Riri to my father.

November 16 was my birthday, and every November 16 my father used to weep. Every Christmas there was a chair left empty. When the gendarmes came to tell them their son had escaped again, the Charrières almost kissed them for having brought such wonderful news. Because although Tante Ju did not know me, she had already adopted me in her heart as if I were her own son, and both she and my father shed tears of joy at hearing what was for them news of hope.

So she had received Rita more than kindly. Only one shadow: Tante Ju had not given her the address of my two sisters. Why not? I thought quickly. No doubt about it: she wasn’t sure how they would take the news of my reappearance. Since she did not say to Rita, “Hurry over and see them at such-and-such a place; they’ll be wild with delight to know their brother’s still alive and doing well, and to meet his wife,” she must have had her reasons. Maybe Tante Ju knew that neither my sister Yvonne nor my sister Hélène nor my brothers-in-law would care to be visited by the wife of their brother, the escaped jailbird, sentenced to life for murder. No doubt she did not want to take the responsibility for disturbing their peace.

They were married and they had children, and probably these children did not even know of my existence. Take care, she must have said to herself. It seemed to me that although throughout my fourteen years in the clink I had lived with them and through them, they, on the other hand, must have spent those fourteen years doing their best to forget me or at least trying to blot me out of their daily lives. So all my wife brought back was a little earth from my father’s grave and a photograph of the tomb where just four months before my father had been laid to rest forever.

Still, through Rita’s eyes (for Champel had driven her everywhere) I did see the bridge of Ucel once more, the bridge of my childhood. I listened as she told me every detail about the big primary school where we had lived in the flat over the classrooms. Once again I could see the war memorial opposite our garden, and the garden itself, where a splendid flowering mimosa seemed to have kept itself in full bloom so that Rita, whose eyes drank in the garden, the memorial and the house, should be able to say to me, “Nothing, or almost nothing, has changed; and you’ve so often described the scenes of your childhood that I did not feel I was seeing something new but rather that I was coming back to a place I knew already.”

Often in the evenings I would ask Rita to tell me some part of her journey all over again. At the hotel life went back to what it had been before. But deep inside me something inexplicable had happened. I had not felt this death as a fortyyear-old man in the prime of life feels when he hears of the death of a father he has not seen for twenty years, but like a boy of ten--like one who lives with his father, disobeys him, plays truant and then, on coming home, hears of his death.

Rita’s daughter Clotilde arrived. She was over fifteen, but she was so frail and slight you would have said she was twelve. She had long, thick, black, curling hair down to her shoulders. Her small jet-black eyes sparkled with intelligence and curiosity. Her little face was not that of a girl but of a child that might still be playing at hopscotch or with a doll. There was immediate sympathy between us.

When she appeared, something new came over me--the wish that she should be happy and that she should look upon me, if not as her father, then at least as her surest support.

Now that Rita was back again, I did the shopping later, at seven. And now I took Clotilde with me; she led Minou and Carlitos carried the baskets. Everything was new for her, and she wanted to see it all at once. When she found something unexpected she piped up loud and clear to know what it was. What struck her most was the Indian women with their long shimmering robes, painted cheeks, and shoes decorated with huge, many-colored woolen pompoms.

That in the midst of this hurrying, shouting crowd she felt completely protected, moved me deeply and filled me with a hitherto unknown feeling--the feeling of a father’s love. “Yes, Clotilde, go forward into life with a trusting, easy mind; you can be sure that until the end I shall do everything I can to keep your path clear of thorns.”

And we would go happily back to the hotel, always with something amusing to tell Rita about what had happened to us or what we had seen.

12

I know perfectly well that what the reader expects is my own personal adventures and not a history of Venezuela. Forgive me if I feel I should mention certain important political events that happened during the time I am writing about; they had a direct influence on my life and on the decisions I took.

For many people Venezuela is just a country in South America (most aren’t quite sure just where), a country exploited by the Americans as if it were a kind of oil-producing American colony. This is far from true.

To be sure, the oil companies did once have very great weight; little by little, though, the Venezuelan intellectuals have set the country almost entirely free from the influence of American policy.

At present Venezuela is completely independent politically, as it has proved at the United Nations and elsewhere. One thing all its political parties have in common is a great zeal for Venezuela’s freedom of action with respect to all foreign countries. Thus, ever since Rafael Caldera came to power, we have had diplomatic relations with every country in the world, whatever their political regimes.

It is true that economically Venezuela depends on its oil, but it has succeeded in selling the oil at a very high price and in making the oil companies hand over as much as 85 percent of their profits.

Venezuela has other things besides oil, such as iron and other raw materials; and Venezuela has a vast resource of men whose aim is to free their country entirely from all forms of economic pressure. Men who have begun to prove that Venezuela can set up a democracy as good as any other, respected and preserved.

The young people in the universities long for nothing but social justice and the radical transformation of their country. They are full of faith, and confident of succeeding without undermining the foundations of real freedom-confident of bringing happiness to the whole nation without falling into a dictatorship either of the extreme right or of the extreme left. I believe in the young people of this country: they will help make it a nation that can be held up as an example, both for its truly democratic régime and for its economy, because it must not be forgotten that its huge resources of raw materials will soon be completely industrialized. When that happens, Venezuela will have won a great battle--and Venezuela
will
win it.

Venezuela is also an ideal country for the kind of tourism that must develop in the coming years. Everything is in its favor--its beaches of coral sand, shaded by coconut palms; its sunshine, which surpasses all other countries’; its fishing of every kind in a sea that is always warm. Venezuela also offers a lower cost of living than other countries; islands by the hundred; a welcoming, hospitable people without the least trace of a color problem. And within an hour’s flying distance from Caracas you can find the Indians, the lake villages of Maracaibo, or the Andes with their everlasting snow.

In short, Venezuela is so rich in resources that the country doesn’t really need a politician at the helm so much as a good accountant, who will use the profits from oil to build factories and so increase the labor market for all who need or want work.

1951... Once again, as I remember this date, I have the same feeling I had then--the feeling of having nothing more to tell. You tell about storms and shooting the rapids of a swollen river; but when the water is calm and peaceful you feel like closing your eyes and resting on the placid current. Then rain comes pouring down again, the streams rise, the quiet water grows rough, the flood carries you away, and even if you longed to live in peace from everything, outside events have such an effect on your life that they force you to follow the current, avoiding the reefs and shooting the rapids in the hope of finding a quiet harbor at last.

After the mysterious killing of Chalbaud at the end of 1950, Perez Jiménez seized power, although he hid behind Flamerich, the figurehead president of the junta. The dictatorship began. First sign: the suppression of freedom of speech. The press and the radio were throttled. The opposition went underground, and the terrible political police, the Seguridad Nacional, went into action. The Communists and the Adecos (the members of the Acción Democrática, Betancourt’s party) were hunted down.