Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (33 page)

Two months later, the bombshell! “Since you have not been able to provide our central office with a good-conduct certificate from the navy, we regret to inform you that you cannot enter our service.”

After the letter came, shattering all his illusions, Papa was sad, saying very little. He was suffering.

Why go on like this? Quick, a suitcase and a few clothes: take advantage of the teachers’ meeting at Aubenas and get out.

My grandmother caught me on the stairs. “Where are you going, Henri?”

“I’m going somewhere where they won’t ask me for a goodconduct certificate from the navy. I’m going to see one of the men I knew in the disciplinary sections at Calvi, and he’ll teach me how to live outside this society I was stupid enough to believe in--a society that knows very well I can expect nothing from it. I’m going to Paris, to Montmartre, Grandmother.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet, but certainly no good. Good-bye, Grandmother. Give Papa a big kiss from me.”

We were getting close to the land, and now we could even see the windows of the houses. I was coming back after a very, very long journey to see my people: to see them after twenty-six years.

For them, I was dead; for their children, I had never existed--my name had never been pronounced. Or perhaps just a few times, when they were alone with Papa. It was only during these last five years that they must gradually have given their kids some idea of Uncle Henri, who lived in Venezuela.

We had corresponded for five years; but even so wouldn’t they be afraid of what people might say? Wouldn’t they feel rather nervous about meeting an escaped ex-convict at a rendezvous in Spain?

I did not want them to come out of duty; I wanted them to come with their hearts full of genuine feeling for me.

Ah, but if they only knew... if they only knew--the coast was coming nearer slowly now, but how it had raced away from me twenty-six years ago--if they only knew how I had been with them all the time during those fourteen years of prison!

If only my sisters could see all the visions of our childhood I made for myself in the cells and the wild-beast cages of the Reclusion!

If only they knew how I kept myself going with them and with all those who made up our family, drawing from them the strength to beat the unbearable, to find peace in the midst of despair, to forget being a prisoner, to reject suicide--if they only knew how the months, days, hours, minutes and seconds of those years of total solitude and utter silence had been filled to overflowing with the smallest events of our wonderful childhood!

The coast drew nearer and nearer; we saw Barcelona: we were about to enter its harbor. I had a wild desire to cup my hands and shout, with all my strength, “Hey there! I’m coming! Come as fast as you can!” just as I used to call out to them when we were children in the fields of Fabras and I had found a great patch of violets.

“What are you doing here, darling? I’ve been looking for you this last hour. I even went down to the car.”

Without getting up I put my arm round Rita’s waist; she bent down and gave me a little kiss on the cheek. Only then did I realize that, although I was going to meet my people full of selfquestioning and full of questions to ask as well, there in my arms was my own private family, the family that I had founded and that had brought me to this point. I said, “Darling, I was living over the past again as I watched the land come closer, the land that holds my people, the living and the dead.”

Barcelona: our gleaming car on the quay with all the baggage neatly in the trunk. We did not stay the night in the great city; we were impatient to drive on through the sunlit countryside toward the French frontier. But after two hours my feelings overcame me so that I had to pull in to the side of the road--I could not go on.

I got out of the car: my eyes were dazzled with looking at this landscape, these plowed fields, huge plane trees, trembling reeds, the thatched or tiled roofs of the farms and cottages, the poplars singing in the wind, the meadows with every possible shade of green, the cows with the bells tinkling as they grazed, the vines-- ah, the vines with their leaves that could not hide all the grapes. This piece of Catalonia was exactly the same as all my French gardenlike landscapes: all this was mine and had been mine since I was born; it was among these same colors, these same growing things, these same crops that I had wandered hand in hand with my grandfather; it was through fields like these that I had carried my father’s game bag when he went shooting and when we urged our bitch Clara to startle a rabbit or flush a covey of partridges. Even the fences around the farms were the same as they were at home! And the little irrigation canals with their planks set across here and there to guide the water into one field or another; I did not have to go up to them to know there were frogs that I could bring out, as many as I wanted, with a hook baited with a piece of red cloth, as I had done so often as a child.

And I quite forgot that this vast plain was Spanish, so exactly was it like the valley of the Ardèche or the Rhone.

We stopped at the hotel nearest the French frontier. The next day Rita took the train to fetch Tante Ju from Saint-Peray. I should have gone myself, but for the French police I was still a man who had escaped from Guiana. While Rita was away I found a very fine house at Rosas, right on the edge of the beach.

A few more minutes of waiting, Papi, and then you will see Tante Ju step out of the train, the woman who loved your father, and who wrote you such beautiful letters, bringing back to life your memories of those who loved you and whom you loved so much.

It was Rita who got out first. As carefully as a daughter, she helped her tall companion climb down to the platform. And then two big arms enfolded me, two big arms pressed me to her bosom, two big arms conveying the warmth of life and a thousand things that cannot be expressed in words. And it was with one arm around Rita and the other around my second mother that I walked out of the station, quite forgetting that suitcases do not come with their owners unless they are carried.

It was eleven in the morning when Rita and Tante Ju arrived, and it was three the next morning when Tante Ju went to her bedroom, worn out by the journey, by her age, by emotion and by sixteen hours of uninterrupted exchange of memories.

I fell into my bed and went straight to sleep, exhausted, without a breath of energy to keep me awake. The outburst of urgent happiness is as shattering as the worst disaster.

My two women were up before me, and it was they who pulled me out of my deep sleep to tell me it was eleven in the morning, that the sun was shining, the sky blue, the sand warm, that breakfast was waiting for me and that I should eat it quickly so as to go to the frontier to fetch my sister and her tribe, who were to be there in two hours. “Rather earlier,” said Tante Ju, “because your brother-in-law will have been forced to drive fast, to keep the family from bullying him, they are so eager to see you.”

I parked the Lincoln right next to the Spanish frontier post.

Here they were! They were on foot, running--they had abandoned my brother-in-law in his Citroën back there in the line by the French customs.

First came my sister Hélène, her arms out. She ran across the stretch of no-man’s-land from the one post to the other, from France to Spain. I went toward her, my guts tied up with emotion. At four yards we stopped to look one another right in the face. Our tear-dimmed eyes said, “It is really her, my childhood Nène” and “It is really him, my little brother Riri from long ago.” And we flung ourselves into each other’s arms. Strange. For me this fifty-year-old sister was as she had always been. I did not see her aging face; I saw nothing except that the brilliant animation of her eyes was still the same and that for me her features had not altered.

Our embrace lasted so long we forgot all about the others. Rita had already kissed the children. I heard “How pretty you are, Aunt!” and I turned, left my Nène, and thrust Rita into her arms, saying, “Love her dearly, because it is she who has brought me to you all.”

My three nieces were splendid and my brother-in-law was in great form. The only one missing was his eldest boy, Jacques, who had been called up for the war in Algeria.

We left for Rosas, the Lincoln in front, with my sister at my side. I shall never forget that first meal, with us all sitting at a round table. There were times when my legs trembled so that I had to take hold of them under the cloth.

1930--1956. So many, many things had happened, both for them and for me. I did not talk about the penal settlement during the meal. I just asked my brother-in-law whether my being found guilty had caused them a great deal of trouble and unpleasantness. He reassured me kindly, but I could feel how much they must have suffered, having a convict as brother and brother-inlaw.

No, I said nothing about prison, and I said nothing about my trial. For them and, I sincerely believe, for me, too, my life began the day when, thanks to Rita, I buried my old self, the man on the loose, to bring Henri Charrière back to life, the son of the Ardèche schoolteachers.

That August on the sands of Rosas beach went by too fast. I rediscovered the cries of my childhood, the laughter with no cause, the outbursts of joy of my young days on the beach of Palavas, where we used to go with my parents.

One month: thirty days. How long it is in a cell alone with oneself, and how terribly short it is with one’s own people. I was literally drunk with happiness. Not only had I my sister and my brother-in-law again, but I had also discovered new people to love--my nieces, unknown only the other day, and now almost daughters to me.

Rita was radiant with joy at seeing me so happy. Bringing us together at last, out of reach of the French police, was the finest present she could have given either them or me. I lay on the beach; it was very late--midnight perhaps. Rita was stretched out on the sand, too, with her head against my thigh; I stroked her hair. “They all fly away tomorrow. How quickly it has passed; but how wonderful it was! One must not ask too much, darling, I know; but still, I’m sad at having to part from them. God knows when we’ll see one another again. A journey like this costs so much.”

“Trust in the future: I’m sure we’ll see them again one day.”

We went with them as far as the frontier. They were taking Tante Ju in their car. A hundred yards from the French border we parted. There were no tears, because I told them of my faith in the future--in a couple of years we should spend not one month of holiday together but two.

“Is it true, what you say, Uncle?”

“Of course, darlings, of course.”

A week later my other sister landed at Barcelona airport, by herself. She had not been able to bring her family. Among the forty-odd passengers coming off the plane I recognized her at once, and after she had passed through customs she came straight toward me without the least hesitation.

Three days and three nights--she could spend only a little while with us, so since we did not want to lose a minute, it was three days and three nights of memories almost without a pause. She and Rita liked one another at once, so we could tell one another everything--she her whole life story and me all that could be told.

Two days later Rita’s mother arrived from Tangiers. With her two fine, gentle hands on my cheeks she kissed me tirelessly, saying, “My son, I am so happy that you love Rita and that she loves you.” Her face shone with a serene beauty in its halo of white hair.

We stayed in Spain too long, our happiness hiding the days that passed. We could not go back by boat--sixteen days was more than we could spare--so we flew (the Lincoln coming later by ship), because our business was waiting.

Still, we did make a little tour of Spain, and there in the hanging gardens of Granada, that wonder of the Arab civilization, I read these words of a poet, cut into the stone at the foot of the Marador tower:
Dale lirnosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada
; give him alms, woman, because there is no greater sadness in life than being blind in Granada.

Yes, there is something worse than being blind in Granada, and that is being twenty-four, full of health and trust in life, undisciplined, maybe, and even a little dishonest, but not really corrupt through and through or at least not a killer, and to hear yourself condemned to a life sentence for another man’s crime: a sentence that means vanishing forever without appeal, without hope, condemned to rot bodily and mentally, without one chance in a hundred thousand of ever raising your head and being a man again someday.

How many men whom a pitiless justice and an inhuman penitentiary system have crushed and destroyed inch by inch would have preferred to be blind in Granada!

14

The plane we had boarded at Madrid came down gently at Maiquetla, the Caracas airport, and there was our daughter waiting for us, together with some friends. Twenty minutes later we were back home. The dogs welcomed us enthusiastically, and our Indian maid, who was one of the family, never stopped asking, “And how are Henri’s people, Señora? And Henri, what did you think of Rita’s mama? I was afraid you would never come back, with all those people over there to love you. Thanks be to God, here you are, all in one piece.”