Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (24 page)

“How did you know I was French?”

“From your way of speaking Spanish. Come with me, please.”

I picked up my bag, and following her, I walked into a clean, cool, well-furnished room that opened onto the patio.

I cooled myself down with a shower, washed, shaved and smoked a cigarette; and it was only after that, as I sat on the edge of the bed in this hotel room, that I really came to believe I was not dreaming. “She’s here, man, here, just a few yards away! But don’t go and lose your head. Don’t let this stab in the heart make you do or say anything foolish.” My heart was beating violently and I tried to calm myself. “Above all, Papillon, don’t tell anyone this crazy story, not even her. Who would believe you? Unless you want to get yourself laughed at, how can you possibly tell anyone that you knew this woman, touched her, kissed her, had her, years ago, when you were rotting in the cells of an abominable prison? Keep your trap shut tight. The princess is here; that’s what matters. Now you’ve found her, she won’t escape you. But you must go about it gently, step by step. Just from looking at her, you can see she must be the boss of this little hotel.”

It was in the patio, a garden in miniature, that one splendid tropical night I said my first words of love. She was so completely the angel I had dreamed of that it was as though she had been waiting for me for years. Rita, my princess was called; she came from Tangiers, and she had no ties at all to hamper me. I was frank: I told her I had been married in France, that I did not know just how things were at present and that there were serious reasons why I could not find out. And that was true: I couldn’t write to the
mairie
of my village for a statement of my position-- there was no telling how the law might react to a request like that: maybe by a demand for extradition. But I said nothing about my past as a crook and a convict. I devoted all my strength and all the resources of my mind to persuading her. I felt this was the greatest chance in my life, and I could not let it go by.

“You are beautiful, Rita, wonderfully beautiful. Let yourself be loved by a man who has nobody in his life either, but who needs to love and be loved. I haven’t much money, it’s true, and with your little hotel you are almost rich; but believe me, I want our two hearts to be just one, forever, until death. Say yes, Rita. Rita as lovely as the orchids, I can’t tell you when or how, but I’ve known you and loved you for years and years.” But Rita was not an easy girl; it was only after three days that she agreed to be mine. She was very shy, and she asked me to hide when I came to her room. Then one fine morning, without making any sort of announcement, we quite naturally made our love obvious and official; and quite naturally I stepped into the role of the hotel’s boss.

Our happiness was whole and entire, and a new life opened before me, a family life. Now that I, the pariah, the fugitive from the French penal settlement, had succeeded in overcoming that road down the drain,
I had a home
, and a girl as lovely in her body as she was in her soul. There was only one little cloud in our happiness--the fact that, having a wife in France, I could not marry her.

Loving, being loved, having a home of my own--God, how great You are to have given me all this!

Wanderers on the roads, wanderers on the seas, men on the loose who need adventure as ordinary people need water and bread, men who fly through life as migrating birds fly through the sky, wanderers of the cities who search the streets of the slums night and day, ransack the parks and hang around the wealthy districts, their angry hearts watching for a job to pull off, wandering anarchists, liberated prisoners, servicemen on leave--all, all without exception suffer from not having had a home at one moment or another; and when Providence gives them one, they step into it as I stepped into mine, with a new heart, full of love to give and burning to receive it.

So I, too, like ordinary people, like my father, like my mother, like my sisters, like all my family, I too had my home at last, with a girl who loved me inside it.

For this meeting with Rita to change my whole way of living and make me feel this was the turning point of my life, she had to be someone quite exceptional.

In the first place, like me, she had first come to Venezuela after making a break. Not a break from a penal settlement, of course, nor from prison, but still a break.

She had arrived from Tangiers some six months before with her husband; he had left her about three months later to go try some kind of adventure two hundred miles from Maracaibo-- she didn’t want to go with him. He left her with the hotel. She had a brother in Maracaibo, a commercial traveler who moved around a great deal.

She told me about her life, and I listened intently: my princess had been born in a poor part of Tangiers; her widowed mother had bravely raised six children, three boys and three girls. Rita was the youngest. When she was a little girl, the street was her field of action. She did not spend her days in the two rooms where the seven members of the family had their being. Her real home was the town with its parks and its souks, among the dense crowds of people who filled them, eating, singing, drinking, talking in every conceivable language. She went barefoot. To the kids of her age and to the people of her quarter she was Riquita. She and her friends, a lively flock of sparrows, spent more time on the beach than at school; but she knew how to look after herself and keep her place in the long line at the pump when she went to fetch a bucket of water for her mother. It wasn’t till she was ten that she consented to put on a pair of shoes.

Everything interested her. She spent hours sitting in the circle around an Arab teller of tales. So much so that one storyteller, tired of seeing this child who never gave him anything always there in the front row, butted her with his head. Ever afterward, she sat in the second row.

She didn’t know much, but that didn’t keep her from dreaming vividly about the great mysterious world where all those huge ships with strange names came from. To travel far away-- that was her great ambition, and one that never left her. But little Riquita’s idea of the world was rather special. North America was top America and South America bottom America; top America meant New York, which covered it completely. All the people there were rich and film actors. In bottom America lived the Indians, who gave you flowers and played the flute; there was no need to work there, because the blacks did everything that had to be done.

But aside from the
souks
, the camel drivers, the mysterious veiled women and the swarming life of the port, what she liked most was the circus. She went twice--once by slipping under the edge of the tent, and once thanks to an old clown who was touched at the sight of the pretty barefoot kid; he let her in and gave her a good seat. She longed to go off with the circus; one day she would be the one who danced on the tightrope, making pirouettes and receiving all the applause. When the circus left for bottom America, she yearned with all her heart to go with it--to go far off and come back rich, bringing money for her family.

Yet it was not the circus she went off with, but her family. Oh, not very far, but still it was a voyage. They went and settled at Casablanca, where the port was bigger and the liners longer. Now she was sixteen and always dressed in pretty little dresses she made herself, because she worked in a shop, Aux Tissus de France, and the boss often gave her short lengths of cloth. Her dream of traveling could not fail to grow stronger, because the shop, in the Rue de l’Horloge, was very close to the offices of the Latécoère airline. The pilots often dropped in. And what pilots! Mermoz, Saint-Exupery, Mimile the writer, Delaunay, Didier. They were handsome, and what’s more they were the greatest and the bravest travelers in the world. She knew them all, and they all made passes at her; now and then she would accept a kiss, but that was all, because she was a good girl. What voyages through the sky she made with them, listening to the stories of their adventures as she ate ice cream in the little pastry shop next door. They liked her; they thought of her as their little protégée; they gave her small but highly valued presents; and they wrote her poems, some of which were published in the local paper.

When she was nineteen she married a man who exported fruit to Europe. They worked hard, they had a little daughter, and they were happy. They had two cars, they lived very comfortably, and Rita could easily help her mother and her relations.

Then in quick succession two ships loaded with oranges reached port with damaged cargoes. Two whole cargoes completely lost, that meant ruin. Her husband was deeply in debt, and if he set about working to pay his creditors, it would take him years and years. So he decided to slip off to South America. It wasn’t hard for him to persuade Rita to go with him, to make this wonderful voyage to a land of milk and honey where you could just shovel up the diamonds, gold and oil. They entrusted their little girl to Rita’s mother, and Rita, full of adventurous dreams, waited impatiently to board the big ship her husband had told her about.

The “big ship” was a fishing boat thirty-six feet long and sixteen wide. The captain, a somewhat piratical Estonian, had agreed to ship them to Venezuela without papers, along with a dozen other irregulars. Price: five hundred pounds. And it was in the crew’s quarters of this old fishing boat that Rita made the voy age, packed in with ten Spanish republicans escaping from Franco, one Portuguese escaping from Salazar, and two women, one a twenty-five-year-old German, the captain’s mistress, and the other a fat Spanish woman, the wife of Antonio the cook.

A hundred and twelve days to reach Venezuela! With a long stop at the Cape Verde islands, because the boat leaked and during one spell of rough weather very nearly sank.

While it was being repaired in dry dock, the passengers slept ashore. Rita’s husband no longer trusted the boat. He said it was madness to launch out into the Atlantic in a rotten tub like that. Rita put courage into him: the captain was a Viking, she said, and the Vikings were the best seamen in the world; they could have total confidence in him.

Then an incredible piece of news. The Spaniards told Rita that the captain was a double crosser, that he had made a deal with another group of passengers and that he was going to take advantage of their being ashore to set off for Dakar by night, leaving them there. Instant turmoil! They warned the authorities and went to the ship in a body. The captain was surrounded and threatened; the Spaniards had knives. Calm returned when the captain promised they would go to Venezuela. In view of what had happened, he agreed to remain under the constant supervision of one of the passengers. The next day they left Cape Verde and faced the Atlantic.

Twenty-five days later they came in sight of Los Testigos Islands, the most outlying point of Venezuela. They forgot everything, the storms, the sharks’ fins, the backs of the playful dolphins rushing at the boat, the weevils in the flour and the business at Cape Verde. Rita was so happy she forgot the captain had meant to betray them and she hugged him, kissing him on both cheeks. And once again they heard the song the Spaniards had made up during the crossing; because wherever there are Spaniards there is always a guitar and a singer:

        
A Venezuela nos vamos

        
Aunque no hay carretena.

        
A Venezuela nos vamos

        
En un bar quito de vela.

(We’re going to Venezuela, although there is no road. ‘We’re going to Venezuela, in a little boat with a sail.)

On April 16, 1948, after a voyage of 4,900 miles, they reached La Guaira, the port of Caracas, fifteen miles from the city.

To call aboard the health authorities, the captain used a flag made out of a petticoat belonging to Zenda, the German girl; and when the passengers saw the Venezuelan patrol boat, all their sun-cooked faces beamed with joy. This was Venezuela: they had won!

Rita had held out splendidly, although she had lost twenty pounds. Never a complaint nor a sign of fear, though from time to time there had been plenty to worry about in that cockleshell right out in the full Atlantic! She had only faltered once, and even then no one had known about it. When she left Tangiers she had packed the one book she should have left behind--Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
. One day, in really tough weather, she had been unable to bear it anymore and had tossed the book overboard: night after night she had been dreaming that a giant octopus was dragging their boat, like the
Nautilus
, down to the bottom.

A few hours after their arrival, the Venezuelan authorities agreed to allow them into the country, although not one of them had any papers. “We’ll give you identity cards later on.” They sent two who were ill to the hospital, and they clothed, housed and fed the others for several weeks. Then each found himself a job.

That was Rita’s story.

Wasn’t it strange that I should have met the woman who had filled my horrible solitude in the Reclusion for two years, and then that this woman should have come here just as I had done, making a break--although indeed a very different kind of break? Without papers, too, and, like me, generously treated by this nation?

Nothing happened to disturb our happiness for more than three months. Then one fine day, unknown hands opened the safe of the Richmond Company, for which I was still organizing and running the geological expeditions. How the local pigs found out about my past I never could discover. But what is certain is that I was pulled in as suspect number one and shut up in the Maracaibo prison.