Papillon (37 page)

All this may not be very interesting to people who like action and confrontations. You can skip these pages if you’re bored. However, I feel obligated to describe as faithfully as possible my first impressions of my new cell and my reaction to those first hours of entombment.

I’d been walking a long time. My ears picked out a murmur in the night—the changing of the guard. The first guard was a tall, bony man; the new one was small and fat. He dragged his slippers. I could hear them scraping along two cells before mine and two after. He wasn’t 100 percent silent like his comrade. I went on walking. It must be late. What time? I wondered. Tomorrow I’d get back some sense of time. I had to open the wicket in my door four times a day; that would give me an approximate idea. During the night, knowing when the first guard came on duty and the length of his watch, I’d be able to figure out the time by when the second came on, then the third, and so on.

One, two, three, four, five.... I automatically resumed my endless walk and, with the help of fatigue, took flight into the past. To fight the darkness of my cell, I sat down in the full sunlight of the beach with my tribe. The boat Lali was fishing from rocked on the opal sea about two hundred yards offshore. I dug my feet into the sand. Zoraima brought me a large fish cooked over the coals and wrapped in a banana leaf to hold in the heat. I ate with my fingers, and she watched me as she sat cross-legged in front of me. She was happy to see that the big flakes separated neatly from the fish, and she read in my face how good it tasted.

I was far away from my cell. I hadn’t heard of the Réclusion, or Saint-Joseph, or the islands. I rolled on the beach and cleaned my hands by rubbing them in the coral sand—so fine you would have said it was flour. Then I walked to the sea to rinse my mouth in that wonderfully clear and salty water. I cupped the water in my hands and splashed it on my face. As I rubbed my neck, I realized how long my hair had grown. When Lali came back, I’d have her cut it. I spent the whole night with my tribe. I undid Zoraima’s loincloth, and there on the sand, in full daylight with the sea breeze caressing us, I took her. She moaned with love as she did when she felt special pleasure. Perhaps the wind carried this amorous music to Lali. Perhaps she saw us and knew we were making love. Yes, she must have seen us, for the boat was coming back to shore. She stepped out, smiling. On the way back she had untied her hair and shaken the wet strands with her long fingers to dry it in the glorious sun. I went up to her. She put her right arm around my waist and pulled me up the beach toward our hut. As we walked, it was clear what she was thinking: “What about me?” In the house she pushed me down on a folded hammock and, once inside her, I forgot that the world existed. Zoraima came in when she knew our lovemaking was over. Sated with love, we lay naked on the hammock. She sat down next to us and tapped her sister’s cheek with her fingers, repeating a word that must have meant something like “glutton.” Then she rearranged my loincloth and Lali’s with a gesture of tender modesty.

I spent the entire night in Guajira, not sleeping a wink. I didn’t even lie down. I just kept on walking in a kind of trance, transported to a delicious day I’d lived six months before.

The light went out and I could see daylight begin to invade the shadows of the cell, chasing away the floating mist that enveloped everything around me. Then came the sound of the whistle and the bunks slamming against the wall; I even heard my neighbor’s hook as he fixed it to the ring. He coughed and I heard the sound of water. How did you wash in this place?

“Guard, please, how do you wash in this place?”

“
Réclusionnaire
, I’ll excuse you since you’re new. But remember, you get punished for talking to a guard. To wash yourself, you stand over the pail and pour from the pot of water with one hand as you clean yourself with the other. Didn’t you unfold your blanket?”

“No.”

“You’ll find a towel inside it.”

How about that! You can’t even talk to a guard. Not for any reason. Not even if you’re in pain, or about to croak, or if you have a heart attack, or appendicitis, or an attack of asthma. You can’t call for help even if it’s a matter of life or death? It’s incredible. On the other hand, it’s not really so incredible. It would be too easy to create a disturbance when you were at the end of your resistance, when your nerves had snapped. Just to hear voices, just to have somebody speak to you even if he only said, “Go ahead and croak, but shut up.” But it’s a sure thing that out of the two hundred and fifty poor bastards here, someone will provoke some kind of dialogue to let off—like a safety valve—the intolerable pressure in his head.

No psychiatrist could have thought up these cages; no doctor would have so disgraced himself. And certainly no doctor was responsible for the regulations. But the two who did plan this place—the architect and the bureaucrat—and worked out the details of the punishment must have been loathsome monsters, vicious and cunning psychopaths wallowing in sadistic hatred for the prisoners.

From the dungeons in Beaulieu and Caen, as deep as they were, there was a chance that echoes of the tortures and the horrible treatment inflicted on the prisoners might filter up and eventually reach the public’s ear. The proof of this was that, when they’d taken off my handcuffs and thumbscrews, I saw real fear on the guards’ faces—even if it was only the fear of troublesome complications.

But here, in the Réclusion, where only officials of the Administration knew what was going on, they were safe.

Clack, clack, clack, all the wickets opened. I moved over to mine, risked putting my eye to it, then stuck my head out a little, and finally put my whole head out in the corridor. There, on my left and my right, was a whole multitude of heads. Obviously, the minute the wickets opened, everybody did what I’d done. The one on my right looked at me without a trace of expression. Brutalized by masturbation, probably. His blank idiot’s face was wan and sweaty. The one on my left asked quickly, “How long?”

“Two years.”

“I have four. I’ve done one. What’s your name?”

“Papillon.”

“Mine’s Georges, ‘Jojo l’Auvergnat.’ Where’d they get you?”

“Paris. What about you?”

He didn’t have time to answer. The guards carrying the coffee and bread were two cells away from mine. He pulled in his head; I did the same. I held out my mug and they filled it with coffee and gave me my bread. But I wasn’t quick enough: as they closed the wicket, the bread rolled onto the floor. In less than fifteen minutes silence had returned. At noon we got soup with a piece of boiled meat. At night, a bowl of lentils. For two years the menu changed only at night: lentils, kidney beans, split peas, chick-peas, white beans and rice with fat. The noon meal was always the same.

Every two weeks we put our heads out and a con with barber’s shears cut our beards.

I’d been here three days. I began to worry. At Royale my friends had told me they’d be sending me food and tobacco. I hadn’t received anything yet, and furthermore, I couldn’t see how such a miracle could be brought off. I wasn’t surprised I hadn’t received anything. The cigarettes didn’t matter; it would be dangerous to smoke, and besides, it was a luxury. But food was vital. The soup at noon was only hot water with two or three green leaves floating around and a little piece of meat weighing perhaps four ounces. At night we got a ladleful of water with a few dried peas or beans swimming about. To be honest, I didn’t so much suspect the Administration of not giving us proper rations as I did the cons who prepared and distributed the food. This occurred to me because some nights there was a little guy from Marseilles who doled out the vegetables and his ladle went right down to the bottom of the pot, giving us more beans than water. The others did just the opposite. They stirred a little, then skimmed the water off the top. Lots of water, few beans. This undernourishment was very dangerous. To keep up your morale, a certain degree of physical strength was essential.

They were sweeping the corridor, and it seemed to me they swept a long time outside my cell. The broom kept pushing against my door. I looked closely and noticed a piece of white paper poking through. Somebody was trying to slip me something under the door and couldn’t get it any farther. They were waiting for me to pick it up before moving on. I reached for it and unfolded a note written in phosphorescent ink. I waited until the guard had passed by and read:

“Papi, starting tomorrow you’ll find five cigarettes and a coconut in your pail every day. Chew the coconut well if you want to get the most out of it, then swallow the pulp. Smoke in the morning when they’re emptying the pails, or right after the noon and evening meals, but never after morning coffee. Enclosed is a pencil stub and a piece of paper. If you ever need anything, write it down, and when the man sweeps outside your cell, scratch the door with your fingers. If he scratches back, slip him the paper. Don’t ever give him the paper before he’s scratched back. Hide the paper behind your ear so you don’t have to use your
plan
, and put the pencil somewhere at the base of the wall. Chin up. We send love. Ignace—Louis.”

The message was from Galgani and Dega. A feeling of warmth crept up my throat. To have such faithful and devoted friends was a very warming thing. With even greater faith in the future and the certainty that I’d get out of this tomb alive, I started off with a gay and sprightly step: one, two, three, four, five and turn.... As I walked, I thought how remarkable those two men were. They must run a grave risk, perhaps even the risk of losing their jobs. What a wonderful gesture, not to mention how expensive it must have been. The number of people they must have had to buy off between Royale and my cell!

I should explain that dried coconut is so full of oil that if you grate six coconuts and soak the pulp in warm water, you can skim a quart of it off the top the next day. This oil made up for the lack of fat in our diet and was full of vitamins as well. A coconut a day almost guaranteed good health or, at the very least, prevented dehydration and death from starvation.

For over two months I received food and cigarettes without interruption. I took every kind of precaution when I smoked, inhaling the smoke deep down, then letting it out only a little at a time while fanning it away with my right hand.

A funny thing happened one day. I don’t know whether I did the right thing or not. A guard up on the walk leaned over the railing and peered into my cell. He lit a cigarette and, after a couple of drags, let it fall into my cell. Then he walked on. I waited for him to come back and then made a big thing of crushing the cigarette with my foot. He stopped to watch me, then moved on. Had he felt pity for me? Was he ashamed of the Administration he belonged to? Or was it a trap? I didn’t know, and it bothered me. When you’re suffering, you’re oversensitive to everything. If this guard was trying to be kind, I didn’t want to hurt him with a gesture of contempt.

As I said, I’d been here over two months. It was clear to me that at the Réclusion escape was impossible. A deal, a “combination,” was out of the question. So I worked on splitting myself in two and developed a foolproof method: in order to roam among the stars, to summon up various stages in my life or build my amazingly realistic castles in Spain, I first had to tire myself out. I would walk for hours without sitting down, never stopping, thinking about nothing in particular. Once I was truly exhausted, I stretched out on my bunk and wrapped the blanket around my head. This way, the little air there was in my cell was further cut off. My lungs became asphyxiated and my head started to burn. Suffocating with the heat and lack of air, I suddenly found myself in flight. Ah! What indescribable sensations! I spent nights of love that were more intense than real ones. I could sit down with my mother, dead these seventeen years. I could play with her dress while she stroked my curls, which she had left long to make me look like a girl. I caressed her slender fingers, her soft silky skin. She laughed over my foolish desire to dive into the river as I had seen the big boys do one day on a walk. I even saw the way she wore her hair, the love that flowed from her bright eyes, her gentle words: “My little Riri, you must be good, you must be very good so that your mummy can love you a lot. Later on, when you’re a little bigger, you can dive into the river too. You’re too small now, my treasure. The day will come soon, too soon, when you’ll be a big boy.”

Hand in hand, we followed the river home. I was actually there, in the house of my childhood. I held my hands over my mother’s eyes so that she had to play the piano without looking at the music. I was there; it wasn’t my imagination. I was with her, standing on a chair behind the piano stool, and I pressed my small hands against her large eyes so she couldn’t see. Her nimble fingers continued to skim over the piano until she had played “The Merry Widow” to the end.

Neither you, inhuman prosecutor, nor you, dishonest policemen, nor you, miserable Polein, who bought your liberty for the price of a lie, nor the twelve jurymen who were such cheeseheads they believed the lot of you, nor the guards here in the Réclusion—worthy associates of
la mangeuse d’hommes
—no one, absolutely no one, not even these thick walls, nor the remoteness of this island lost in the Atlantic, nothing, nothing physical or mental, can stop my delicious wanderings, bathed in the rosy hue of bliss.

When I figured out earlier how much time I would be spending with myself, I was wrong to limit it to hours. There were times when it should have been measured in minutes. For example, the emptying of the pails took place about an hour after the distribution of the morning coffee and bread. It was with the return of the empty pail that I received the coconut, the five cigarettes and sometimes a note. Not every time, but often enough, I’d count the time in minutes. It wasn’t hard, for I’d adjusted my steps to one to the second, and with my body acting as a pendulum, I arrived at the turn at the end of five steps and mentally registered “one.” When I reached twelve, a minute had passed. But don’t think it was the food I was worried about—the coconut my life depended on—or the cigarettes—the exquisite pleasure of being able to smoke ten times every twenty-four hours (for I cut each cigarette in half). No. About coffee time I was often seized with a fear that something might have happened to the people who were helping me at the risk of their own necks. It was only when I saw the coconut that I could relax. It was there; therefore all was well
with them
.