Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (29 page)

Several times we hid them at the Vera Cruz. We never closed our doors to anyone at all, never asked for any man’s identification. I was only too glad to pay my tribute to these followers of Betancourt, whose régime had set me free and given me asylum. We ran the danger of losing everything, but Rita saw that there wasn’t anything else we could do.

Then again, the hotel had become something of a refuge for Frenchmen in a jam--for Frenchmen who had reached Venezuela with little in their pockets and who did not know where to go. They could eat and sleep at our place without paying while they were looking for a job. Our service became so famous that in Maracaibo they called me the Frenchmen’s consul.

In the course of these years something very important to me happened, something almost as important as my meeting with Rita--I renewed my ties with my family. As soon as Rita left, Tante Ju wrote to my two sisters. And all of them, both my sisters and Tante Ju, wrote to me. After twenty years the great silence was coming to an end. I trembled as I opened the first letter. Would they reject me forever, or would they... ?

Victory! These letters were a cry of joy--joy at knowing I was alive, earning an honest living and married to a woman Tante Ju described with all the kindness she had felt. Not only had I found my sisters once again, but I had also found their families, who now became
my
family.

My elder sister had four fine children, three girls and a boy. Her husband wrote himself to say that his affection had remained unaltered and that he was more than happy to know I was free and doing well. Photos and still more photos, pages and still more pages told the story of their lives and of the war and of what they had had to go through to bring up their children. I read every word, weighing and analyzing so I could understand their story thoroughly and savor all its charm.

After the great black hole of the prisons and the penal settlement my own childhood came to the surface: “My dear Riri,” wrote my sister. Riri... I could hear my mother calling me and see her lovely smile. It seemed that from a photo I had sent them my family decided I was the image of my father. My sister was convinced that if I was like him physically I must be like him in personality. Her husband and she were not afraid of my turning up again. The gendarmes must have heard about Rita’s journey in the Ardèche, because they had gone to ask about me, and my brother-in-law had replied, “Yes indeed, we have news of him. He’s very happy and he’s doing fine, thank you very much.”

My other sister was in Paris, married to a Corsican lawyer. They had two sons and a daughter, and he had a good job. The same cry: “You are free, you are loved, you have a home, a good position and you are living like everybody else. Well done, little brother! My children, my husband and I bless God for having helped you to come out a winner from that terrible prison into which they threw you.”

My elder sister offered to take our daughter so she could go on with her studies in France. But what warmed our hearts most was that not one of them seemed to be ashamed of having a brother who was an ex-convict who had escaped from the penal settlement.

To round off this influx of wonderful news, I managed to get hold of the address of my friend Dr. Guibert-Germain, the former doctor of the settlement, who had treated me as one of his family when I was on Royale, inviting me to his house, and protecting me from the screws. It was thanks to Dr. Guibert-Germain that the solitary confinement at Saint-Joseph was done away with; and it was thanks to him that I was able to get myself transferred to Devil’s Island and escape. I wrote to him, and one day I had the immense happiness of receiving this letter:

                    
           
           
Lyons, 21 February 1952

My dear Papillon,

We are very glad to have news of you at last. For a long while now I have felt sure you were trying to get in touch with me. When I was in Jibuti my mother told me she had received a letter from Venezuela, although she could not say exactly who had sent it. Then, very recently, she sent me the letter you wrote through Mme. Roesberg. So after a fair amount of trial we have managed to find you again. Since September 1915, when I left Royale, a good many things have happened.

.... And then in October 1951 I was posted to IndoChina; I am to stay there for two years, and I leave very soon, that is to say on 6 March. This time I am going by myself. Perhaps when I am there, and according to where they send me, I may be able to arrange for my wife to come out and join me.

So you see that since the last time we met I have traveled a fair number of miles! I retain some pleasant memories of those days; but alas I have not been able to get in touch with any of the men I used to like asking to the house. For quite a long while I did hear from my cook (Ruche), who settled at Saint-Laurent; but since leaving Jibuti I have had no word. Still, we were very pleased to know that you were happy, in good health and comfortably established at last. Life is a strange thing; but I remember you never gave up hope, and indeed you were quite right.

We were delighted with the photograph of you and your wife--it shows that you have been really successful. Who knows, perhaps one day we may come and see you! Events move faster than we do. We see from the photograph that you have excellent taste: Madame seems charming, and the hotel has a very agreeable look. My dear Papillon, you must forgive me for still using this nickname; but it brings back so many memories for us!

.... So there you have some idea of our doings, old fellow. We often talk about you, you may be sure, and we still remember that stirring day when Mandolini poked his nose into a place he should have left alone. * [* This was Bruet, the warder who found the raft in the grave in Papillon.]

My dear Papillon, I enclose a photograph of both of us; it was taken at Marseitle, on the Canebière, about two months ago.

And so I leave you, with all kinds of good wishes and hoping to hear from you now and then.

My wife and I send our kind regards to your wife and our best wishes to you.

                    
                       
           
A. Guibert-Germain

And following that, a few lines from Madame Guibert-Germain: “With my best compliments on your success and kindest wishes to you both for the New Year. Greetings to my protégé.”

Madame Guibert-Germain never did join her husband in IndoChina. He was killed in 1952, so I never saw him again, that selfeffacing medico who, together with Major Péan of the Salvation Army and a handful of others, was one of the very few men at the penal settlement who had the courage to stand up for humane ideas in favor of the convicts; and in his case, to succeed in getting some results while he was serving there. There are no words fine enough to express the respect due to people like him and his wife. In opposition to one and all and at the risk of his career, he maintained that a convict was still a man, and that even if he had committed a serious crime he was not lost forever.

The letters from Tante Ju were not the letters of a stepmother who has never known you, but real, motherly letters, saying things that only a mother’s heart could think of. Letters in which she told me about my father’s life up until the time he died, the life of that law-abiding schoolmaster, full of respect for the legal authorities, who nevertheless cried out, “My boy was innocent, I know it; and these swine have had him found guilty! Where can he be now that he has escaped? Is he dead or alive?” Every time the members of the Resistance in the Ardèche brought off an operation against the Germans, he would say, “If Henri were here, he would be with them.” Then the months of silence during which he no longer pronounced his son’s name. It was as though he had transferred his affection for me to his grandchildren, whom he spoiled more than most grandfathers.

I devoured all this like a starving man. Over and over again Rita and I read all these precious letters that renewed the links with my family; we kept them like positive relics. Truly I was blessed by the gods--without exception all my people had enough love for me and enough courage not to give a damn for what people might say, and to tell me of their joy that I was alive, free and happy. And indeed courage was necessary, because society does not easily forgive a family for having had a delinquent within it.

In 1953 we sold the hotel. Eventually the shattering heat got us down, and in any case Rita and I had never meant to spend the rest of our days in Maracaibo. All the less so as I’d heard of a tremendous boom in Venezuelan Guiana, where a mountain of almost pure iron had been discovered. It was at the other end of the country, so we were up and away for Caracas, meaning to stop there a while and look into the situation.

One fine morning we set off in my huge green De Soto station wagon, crammed with baggage, and left behind five years of quiet happiness and many friends.

Once again I saw Caracas. But hadn’t we hit on the wrong town?

At the end of Flamerich’s term Perez Jiménez had named himself president of the republic; but even before that he had set about turning the colonial town of Caracas into a typical ultramodern capital. All this during a period of unheard-of cruelty, on the part both of the government and of the underground opposition. Caldera, who has been president since 1970, escaped from a shocking attempt on his life; a powerful bomb was thrown into the room where he was sleeping with his wife and child. By an absolute miracle not one of them was killed; and with wonderful coolness--no shrieks, no panic--he and his wife just went down on their knees to thank God for having saved their lives.

But in spite of all the difficulties he had to deal with during his dictatorship, Perez Jiménez entirely transformed Caracas, and a good many other things, too. The old road from Caracas to the Maiquetia airfield and the port of La Guaira was still there. But Perez Jiménez had built a magnificent and technically outstanding thruway that meant you could get from the town to the sea in less than a quarter of an hour, whereas it had taken two hours by the old road. In the Silencio district Perez jiménez ran up enormous buildings the size of those in New York. And he built an astonishing six-lane highway right through the city from one end to the other--not to mention the building of working- and middle-class complexes that were models of urbanism, and many other changes. All this meant millions and millions of dollars swirling about; and it meant a great deal of energy burst out in this country that had been dozing for hundreds of years. Foreign capital came flowing in, together with specialists of every kind. Life changed completely; immigration was wide open, and fresh blood came in, giving a positive beat to the country’s new rhythm.

I took the opportunity of our stop in Caracas to get in touch with friends and to find out what had happened to Picolino. These last years I had regularly sent people to visit him and take him a little money. I saw a friend who had given him a small sum from me in 1952, a sum Picolino had wanted so he could settle in La Guaira, near the port. I’d often suggested that he should come live with us at Maracaibo, but every time he replied through his friends that Caracas was the only place with doctors. It seemed that he had almost recovered his speech and that his right arm more or less worked. But now nobody knew what had become of him. He had been seen creeping about the port of La Guaira, and then he had completely disappeared. Perhaps he had taken a ship back to France. I never learned; and I have always kicked myself for not having gone to Caracas earlier to persuade him to come to me in Maracaibo.

Everything was clear: if we couldn’t find what we wanted in Venezuelan Guiana, where there was this terrific boom and where General Ravard had just dynamited the burgeoning forest and its swollen streams to prove they could be tamed, we would go back and settle in Caracas.

With the De Soto full of luggage, Rita and I drove to the capital of the state, Ciudad Bolivar, on the banks of the Orinoco. After eight years I found myself once more in that charming provincial town with its kindly, welcoming people.

We spent the night at a hotel, and we had scarcely sat down on the terrace for our morning coffee when a man stopped in front of us. A man of about fifty, tall, thin and sun-dried; he had a little straw hat on his head, and he screwed up his small eyes until they almost disappeared.

“Either I’m crazy or you’re a Frenchman called Papillon,” he said.

“You’re not very discreet, buster. Suppose this lady here didn’t know?”

“Excuse me. I was so surprised I didn’t even notice I was talking like a fool.”

“Say no more about it: sit down here, with us.”

He was an old friend, Marcel B. We talked. He was quite amazed to see me in such good shape; he felt I had done well for myself. I told him it had mostly been luck, a great deal of luck; he didn’t have to tell me, poor soul, that he had not made a go of it--his clothes did the telling. I asked him to lunch.

After a few glasses of Chilean wine he said, “Yes, Madame, although you see me like this, I was a fine upstanding guy when I was young--afraid of nothing. Why, after my first break from jail I reached Canada and joined the Canadian Mounted Police, no less! I might have stayed there all my life, but one day I had a fight, and the other guy fell right onto my knife. It’s God’s truth, Madame Papillon. This Canadian fell right onto my knife. You don’t believe me, do you? Well, I knew the Canadian police wouldn’t believe me either, so I made my getaway that very minute, and going by way of the United States, I reached Paris. I must have been sold by some bum or other, because they picked me up and sent me back to the clink. That’s where I knew your husband: we were good friends.”