Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (7 page)

While I was strolling about I thought over this remark of Maria’s. It worried me. I did not know Caracas, a big city, but people had talked about it and I could imagine what it was like. The idea certainly attracted me; but once I was there, what should I do, and how could I do it?

I walked slowly across the square of El Callao with my hands behind my back. The sun was blazing down. I went over to an almendro, a huge, very leafy tree, to take shelter from the furious heat. Under the shade there stood two mules, and a little old man was loading them. I noticed the diamond prospector’s sieve and the gold prospector’s trough, a kind of Chinese hat they use to wash the gold-bearing mud in. As I gazed at these things--they were still new to me--I went on pondering. In front of me there was this biblical picture of a quiet, peaceful life with no sounds apart from those of nature and the patriarchal way of living; and I thought of what it must be like at that very moment in Caracas, the busy, teeming capital that drew me on. All the descriptions I had heard turned into exact images. After all, it was fourteen years since I had seen a big town! Since I could now do as I liked, there was no doubt about it--I was going to get there, and as quick as I could.

3

Jesus, the song was in French! And it was the little old prospector singing. I listened.

        
The old sharks are there already

        
They’ve smelled the body of a man.

        
One of them chews an arm like an apple,

        
Another eats his trunk and tra-la-la

        
The quickest gets it, the rest have none.

        
Convict farewell; long live the law!

I was thunderstruck. He sang it slowly, like a requiem. The “tra-la-la” had an ironic merriment, and the “long live the law” was full of the mockery of the Paris underworld: it sounded like an indisputable truth. But to feel the full irony of it you had to have been there.

I looked closely at the man: barely five feet tall. One of the most picturesque ex-convicts I had ever come across. Snowy white hair with long, gray whiskers cut on the slant. Blue jeans; a big, broad leather belt; on the right, a long sheath with a curved handle coming out of it at the height of his groin. I walked over to him. He had no hat on--it was lying on the ground--so I could see his broad forehead, speckled with a red even darker than his old sunbaked pirate’s tan. His eyebrows were so long and thick he surely had to comb them. Beneath them, steely gray-green eyes like gimlets bored through me. I hadn’t taken four steps before he said to me, “You come from the clink, as sure as my name’s La Passe.”

“Right. My name’s Papillon.”

“I’m Jojo La Passe.” He held out his hand and took mine frankly, just as it should be between men, not so hard it crushes your fingers the way the show-offs do, nor too flabby, like hypocrites and fairies. I said, “Let’s go to the bar and have a drink. It’s on me.”

“No. Come to my place over the way, the white house. It’s called Belleville, where I lived when I was a kid. We can talk there in peace.”

Indoors it was swept and clean--his wife’s field of action. She was young, very young; perhaps twenty-five. He--God knows-- sixty at least. She was called Lola, a dusky Venezuelan.

“You’re welcome,” she said to me, with a pleasant smile.

“Thanks.”

“Two anisettes,” said Jojo. “A Corsican brought me two hundred bottles from France. You’ll see whether it’s good or not.”

Lola poured it out and Jojo tossed back three-quarters of his glass in one gulp. “Well?” he said, fixing me with his eye.

“Well what? You don’t think I’m going to tell you the story of my life, do you?”

“Okay, mac. But Jojo La Passe, doesn’t that ring any bells?”

“No.”

“How quickly they forget you! Yet I was a big shot in the clink. No one came within miles of me for throwing the seven and eleven with dice just touched with a file--not loaded, of course. That wasn’t yesterday, to be sure; but after all, men like us, we leave traces--we leave legends. And now according to what you tell me, in a few years it’s all forgotten. Didn’t one single bastard ever tell you about me?” He seemed deeply outraged.

“Frankly, no.”

Once again the gimlets bored right into my guts. “You weren’t in stir for long; you’ve scarcely got the face at all.”

“Fourteen years altogether, counting El Dorado. You think that’s nothing?”

“It’s not possible. You’re scarcely marked, and only another con could tell that’s where you come from. And even then, a con who was not a diabolically clever face reader might get it wrong. You had it easy, right?”

“It wasn’t as easy as all that: the islands; solitary.”

“Balls, man, balls! The islands--it’s a holiday camp! All it lacks is a casino. For you, penal colony meant the sea breeze, crayfish, no mosquitoes, fishing, and now and then a real treat-- the pussy or the ass of some screw’s wife kept too short of it by her cunt of a husband.”

“Still, you know...”

“Blah-blah-blah: don’t you try to fool me. I know all about it. I wasn’t on the islands, but I’ve been told about them.” This man, maybe he was picturesque, but things were likely to turn nasty for him: I felt my temper rising fast. He went on, “Jail, the real jail, was Kilometer Twenty--four. That doesn’t say anything to you? No, it doesn’t, and that’s for sure. With your mug, you’ve certainly never pissed in those parts. Well, mate, I have. A hundred men, every one of them with diseased guts. Some standing, some lying down, some groaning like dogs. There’s the bush in front of them, like a wall. But it’s not them that are going to cut the bush down: the jungle is going to do the cutting. Kilometer Twenty-four is not a working camp. As the prison administration puts it, it’s a conveniently hidden little dell in the Guiana forest--you toss men into it and they never bother you again. Come, Papillon, don’t try and impress me with your islands and your solitary. It won’t wash with me. You’ve got nothing of the look of a dog with all the spirit beaten out of it, nor the hollow face of a skin-and-bones lag with a life sentence, nor the dial you see on all those poor buggers who escaped from that hell by some miracle--unfortunate sods who look as if they’d been worked over with a chisel to give them an old man’s face on a young man’s head. There’s nothing like that about you at all. So there’s no possible mistake about my diagnosis: For you, prison meant a holiday in the sun.”

How he did nag on and on, this little old bastard. I wondered how our meeting was going to end.

“For me, as I’ve been telling you, it meant the hollow nobody ever comes out of alive--amoebic dysentery, a place where you gradually shit your guts out. Poor old Papillon: you didn’t even know what the clink was all about.”

I looked closely at this terribly energetic little man, working out just where to plant my fist on his face, and then all at once I shifted into reverse and decided to make friends. No point in getting worked up: I might need him. “You’re right, Jojo. My stint didn’t amount to much, since I’m so fit it takes someone in the know, like you, to tell where I come from.”

“Okay, we’re in agreement, then. What are you doing now?”

“I’m working at the Mocupia gold mine. Eighteen boilvars a day. But I’ve got a permit to go wherever I like; my
con finamiento
is over.”

“I bet you want to head for Caracas and take up your old life again.”

“You’re right: that’s just what I want to do.”

“But Caracas, it’s the big city; so trying to pull off anything there means a hell of a risk. You’re scarcely out, and you want to go back inside again?”

“I’ve got a long bill for the bastards who sent me down--the pigs, the witnesses, the prosecutor. A fourteen-year stretch for a crime I never committed: the islands, whatever you may think of them, and solitary at Saint-Joseph, where I went through the most horrible tortures the system could think up. And don’t forget I was only twenty-three when they framed me.”

“Hell: so they stole the whole of your youth. Innocent, really innocent, cross your heart, or are you still pleading before the judge?”

“Innocent, Jojo. I swear by my dead mother.”

“Christ. Well, I see that must lie heavy on your chest. But you don’t have to go to Caracas if you want dough to straighten out your accounts--come with me.”

“What for?”

“Diamonds, man, diamonds! Here the government is generous: this is the only country in the world where you can burrow wherever you like for gold or diamonds. There’s only one thing: no machinery allowed. All they let you use is shovel, pickax and sieve.”

“And where’s this genuine El Dorado? Not the one I’ve just left, I hope?”

“A good way off. A good way off in the bush. A good many days on a mule and then in a canoe and then on foot, carrying your gear.”

“It’s not what you’d call in the bag; hardly child’s play.”

“Well, Papilion, it’s the only way of getting hold of a fat sack of dough. You find just one bomb and there you are, a wealthy man--a man who has women that smoke and fart in silk. Or, if you like it that way, a man who can afford to go and present his bill.”

Now he was going full steam, his eyes blazed; he was all worked up and full of fire. A bomb, he told me--and I’d already heard it at the mine--was a little mound no bigger than a peasant’s handkerchief, a mound where by some mystery of nature a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand carats of diamonds were clustered together. If a prospector found a bomb in some far-off hole, it didn’t take long before men started coming from north, south, east and west, as if they’d been told by some grapevine. A dozen, then a hundred, then a thousand. They smelled the gold or the diamonds the way a starving dog smells a bone or an old bit of meat. They came flooding in from every point of the compass. Rough types with no trade who’d had enough of battering away with a pick at twelve bolivars a day for some employer. They got sick of it, and then they heard the call of the jungle. They didn’t want their family to go on living in a rabbit hutch, so they went off, knowing very well what they were in for--they were going to work from one sun to the next in a wicked climate and a wicked atmosphere, condemning themselves to several years of hell. But with what they sent home, their wives would have light, roomy little houses, the children would be properly fed and clothed and they’d go to school--even go on with their own schooling, perhaps.

“So that’s what a bomb gives?”

“Don’t be such a dope, Papillon. The guy that finds a bomb never goes back to mining. He’s rich for the rest of his life, unless he goes so crazy with joy that he feeds his mule with hundred-boilvar notes soaked in kümmel or anisette. No, the man I’m talking about, the ordinary guy, he finds a few little diamonds every day, even though they may be very, very small. Even that means ten or fifteen times what he gets in the town. Then again, he lives as hard as possible, right down to bedrock; because Out there you pay for everything in gold or diamonds. But if he lives hard, he can still keep his family better than before.”

“What about the others?”

“They come in every shape and size. Brazilians, guys from British Guiana and Trinidad: they all escape from exploitation in the factories or cotton plantations or whatever. And then there are the real adventurers, the ones who can only breathe when they’re not hemmed in by the horizon, the ones who will always stake everything for the jackpot--Italians, Englishmen, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Portuguese--men from all over. Christ, you can’t imagine the types that come rushing into this promised land! The Lord above may have filled it with piranhas and anacondas and mosquitoes and malaria and yellow fever, but He’s also scattered gold, diamonds, topazes and emeralds and such all over its surface. There’s a swarm of adventurers from everywhere in the world, and they stand there in holes up to their bellies in the water, working so hard they never feel the sun or the mosquitoes or hunger or thirst, digging, tossing out the slimy earth and washing it over and over again, straining it through the sieve to find the diamonds. Then again, Venezuela has enormous frontiers, and there you won’t meet anyone who asks you for your papers. So there’s not only the charm of the diamonds, but you can be sure of the pigs leaving you in peace. A perfect place to hole up and get your breath if you’re on the run.”

Jojo stopped. There was nothing he had forgotten: now I knew the whole story. I thought quickly and then said, “You go off alone, Jojo. I can’t see myself working like a Trojan. You’d have to be possessed--you’d have to believe in your bomb like you believe in God Almighty to stand it in that kind of a hell. Yes, you go off by yourself. I’ll look for my bomb in Caracas.”

Once again his hard eyes pierced me through and through. “I get it; you haven’t changed. Do you want to know what I really think?”

“Go ahead.”

“You’re quitting El Callao because it makes you sick, knowing there’s an unprotected heap of gold at La Mocupia. Right or wrong?”

“Right.”

“You’re leaving it alone because you don’t want to muck things up for the ex-cons who are living here in retirement. Right or wrong?”