Papillon (70 page)

“First of all, we’re at war. We must know exactly who you are.”

“That may be, but it doesn’t justify being locked up in your
bagne
.”

“You escaped from French justice. We have to find out if France wants you back.”

“Again, that may be. But I repeat, why do you treat us as if we were serving a sentence?”

“For the moment you’re here under the vagrancy laws while we proceed to document your case.”

This discussion would have gone on forever if one of the officers hadn’t cut through the garbage. “Warden, in all honesty, we can’t treat these men the way we treat the other prisoners. I suggest that while we wait for word from Caracas, we find some other way of keeping them busy.”

“These are dangerous men. They threatened to kill the corporal if he hit them. Isn’t that true?”

“Not only did we threaten him, sir, we threatened to kill anybody who took it into their heads to hit any one of us.”

“What if it was a soldier?”

“Same thing. We’ve done nothing to deserve this treatment. Maybe our laws and penal systems are worse than yours, but to be beaten like an animal, that’s too much.”

The warden turned toward the officers with a look of triumph. “See how dangerous these men are!”

The older of the two officers hesitated for a second. Then, to everybody’s astonishment, he said, “These French fugitives are right. There’s nothing in Venezuela that justifies their being made to serve a sentence or being subjected to the regulations of this colony. I agree with them there. Warden, either you find them some kind of work away from the other prisoners, or they don’t work at all. If they’re in with everybody else, sooner or later some soldier is bound to beat them.”

“We’ll see about that. Leave them in the camp for now. I’ll tell you what to do in the morning.” Then the warden and his brother-in-law left.

I thanked the officers. They gave us cigarettes and promised that at the evening report they would instruct the officers and soldiers not to strike us under any pretext.

We’d now been here eight days. We had stopped working. Yesterday was Sunday and a terrible thing happened. The Colombians drew lots to see who was to kill Negro Blanco. A man of about thirty lost. He was given an iron spoon, the handle of which had been sharpened on the cement into a pointed, double-edged lance. He stuck bravely by his pact and stabbed Negro Blanco three times near the heart. The half-breed was carried off to the hospital and his assassin was bound to a stake in the middle of the camp. The soldiers went berserk; they searched everybody for weapons and beat the prisoners mercilessly. I wasn’t fast enough taking off my pants and one of the frenzied soldiers whipped me on my rear. Corbière picked up a bench and raised it over the man’s head. Another soldier pierced his arm with his bayonet, and at the same moment I flattened my attacker with a kick in the belly. I had already picked up his rifle when a loud voice reached us:

“Stop! Don’t touch the Frenchies! Frenchie, put down that rifle!” It was Captain Flores, the man who had received us the day we arrived.

He intervened just as I was about to shoot into the melee. If he hadn’t, we might have killed a couple of soldiers, but we certainly would have lost our own lives, stupidly, in the far reaches of Venezuela at the other end of the world in a
bagne
where we had no business being.

Thanks to the captain’s forceful intervention, the soldiers left us and vented their lust for carnage elsewhere. That was when we had to witness the ghastliest spectacle I’d ever seen.

The poor devil who was bound to the stake in the middle of the camp was systematically whipped by three men at a time, corporals as well as privates. It lasted from five in the afternoon to the next morning at six, meaning sunrise. It takes a long time to kill a man with a whip. They stopped briefly three times to ask him who his accomplices were, who had given him the spoon and who had sharpened it. The man said nothing, even when they promised to end the ordeal if he talked. He lost consciousness several times. They brought him to by throwing buckets of water on him. The worst came at four in the morning. The men whipping him noticed that he wasn’t reacting; the contractions of the muscles had stopped.

An officer asked, “Is he dead?”

“We can’t tell.”

“Well, untie him and put him on all fours.”

Propped up by four men, he was more or less on all fours. Then one of the executioners let go a snap of the whip between the man’s buttocks that must have reached up and around his genitals. That masterly stroke finally tore a cry of pain from him.

“Keep it up,” the officer said. “He isn’t dead yet.”

He was whipped until sunrise. This bastinado worthy of the Middle Ages was enough to kill a horse, but not this man. They left off the flogging for an hour, and then, watered down with several bucketfuls of water, he was able to get to his feet with the help of some soldiers.

For a moment he managed to stand all by himself. An orderly arrived with a glass in his hand.

“Drink this,” an officer ordered. “It’ll revive you.”

The man hesitated, then drank the stuff in one gulp. One minute later he had collapsed for all time. In his final agony one sentence escaped his lips, “You idiot, they’ve poisoned you.”

Not one prisoner, us included, moved so much as his little finger. We were terrorized to a man. For the second time in my life I wanted to die. Then my attention became riveted to the rifle a soldier near me was holding carelessly. All that held me back was the thought that I would probably be killed before I had time to work the damn breech and shoot.

A month later Negro Blanco was all well again and once more the terror of the camp. But it was in the cards that he would die at El Dorado. One night one of the soldiers on duty aimed his gun at him as he was passing by.

“Down on your knees,” the soldier ordered.

Negro Blanco obeyed.

“Say your prayers. You’re about to die.”

He let him say a short prayer and shot him three times. The prisoners said he’d done it because he couldn’t stand the savage way the brute beat up the prisoners. Others claimed that Negro Blanco had squealed on the soldier to his superiors, saying that he had known him in Caracas before he began his military service and that he was a thief. He must have been buried not far from the con who had tried to kill Negro Blanco in the first place. The poor devil was probably a thief, too, but a man of very rare courage.

These events delayed a quick decision on our case. None of the prisoners worked for two weeks. Corbière’s bayonet cut was expertly treated by a doctor in the village. For the moment we were held in respect. Chapar left us yesterday to become the warden’s cook. Le Guittou and Corbière were freed, for our reports finally arrived from France. They had finished serving their sentences. I’d been using an Italian name. Now the report came through with my real name, my fingerprints and my life sentence, also the report that Deplanque had twenty years, as did Chapar. Proudly sticking out his chest, the warden shared with us the news from France: “You may have done nothing wrong in Venezuela, but we’re going to keep you here a little longer before we give you your freedom. You’ll have to work and behave yourselves. This will be an observation period.”

The officers had complained to me several times about how hard it was to get fresh vegetables in the village. The colony had an area under cultivation but no vegetable garden. They grew rice, corn and black beans and that was all. I agreed to plant a kitchen garden if they provided the seeds. They agreed.

The good thing about this was that it got us out of camp. Two new cons had arrived—they’d been arrested in Ciudad Bolívar—and they joined Deplanque and me in the venture. Toto was from Paris and the other was a Corsican. We had two sturdy little houses built for us out of wood and palm leaves; Deplanque and I moved into one, our new friends into the other.

Toto and I made some high, sloping frames and set their legs in cans of gasoline to prevent the ants from reaching the seed. In no time we had healthy little plants of tomatoes, eggplants, melons and green beans. When they were large enough to resist the ants, we transplanted them. For the tomatoes, we dug a trench around each plant which was always filled with water. That kept the plants moist and discouraged the parasites that flourished in the virgin forest.

“Heh, look at this!” Toto said. “See how it sparkles!”

“Wash it,
mec
.”

Then he handed it to me. It was a small crystal as big as a chickpea. Once it was washed, it sparkled even more, especially where the matrix was cracked, for it was still covered with a hard gray crust.

“Could it be a diamond?”

“Shut your trap, Toto. If it’s a diamond, you don’t want to broadcast it. Maybe we’ve stumbled on a diamond mine. Let’s wait until tonight and meanwhile keep it hidden.”

I gave mathematics lessons in the evenings to a corporal who was preparing to become an officer. (Today that corporal is Colonel Francisco Bolagno Utrera, and during our twenty-five-year friendship he has proved himself a man of great nobility and integrity.)

I asked him, “Francisco, what is this? Is it a piece of rock crystal?”

He examined it closely. “No, it’s a diamond. Hide it and don’t let anybody see it. Where did you find it?”

“Under my tomato plants.”

“That’s strange. You must have brought it up with the river water you use on the plants. Maybe your pail scrapes the bottom and comes up with a little sand?”

“It’s possible.”

“That must be it. You brought your diamond up from the Rio Caroni. Why don’t you see if you didn’t bring up more of them? But be careful. You never find just one precious stone. If you find one, there have to be others.”

Toto went to work. He had never worked so hard in his life.

Our two pals—to whom we had said nothing—remarked, “What are you knocking yourself out for, Toto? You’re going to kill yourself bringing up all those pails from the river. And why do you always bring up so much sand?”

“That’s to lighten the soil,
mec
. If you mix it with sand, the water filters through better.”

In spite of the teasing, Toto went on doggedly with his buckets. One day, during one of his trips, he fell flat on his face in front of where we were sitting in the shade. He spilled the bucket, and there in the sand was a diamond as big as two chick-peas. We wouldn’t have noticed it except that the matrix was cracked. Toto made the mistake of grabbing it too fast.

“Hey!” Deplanque said. “That looks like a diamond! The soldiers told me there were diamonds and gold in the river.”

“That’s why I’ve been carrying all those buckets. I’m not as stupid as you think!” Toto was glad he could finally explain his labors.

To wind up the story of the diamonds, by the end of six months Toto had between seven and eight carats and I had a dozen, plus about thirty small ones in the “commercial” category, in mining terms. One day I found one of over six carats. I had it cut in Caracas later on and it produced a stone of nearly four carats which I had made into a ring. I still have it and wear it day and night. Deplanque also collected a few. I still had my
plan
so I put my stones in it. The others made
plans
out of the tips of cattle horns and kept their little treasures in those.

None of the soldiers knew anything about this except my friend the corporal. The tomatoes and all the rest grew tall and the officers paid us promptly for all the vegetables we brought to their mess.

We were relatively free. We worked without guards and slept in our little houses. We never went near the camp. We were respected and well treated. This didn’t keep us from pressing the warden every chance we got to give us our complete freedom. He always answered, “Soon.” Yet we’d been here eight months and nothing was happening. So I began to talk
cavale
. Toto wanted no part of it. Nor the others. I wanted to study the river, so I bought myself some fishing equipment. I sold the fish in addition to the vegetables, particularly the famous piranhas, weighing about two and half pounds each, with teeth like a shark’s and equally fearsome.

There was a curious guy in the camp. His torso was completely covered with tattoos. On his neck was written “Screw the Coiffeur.” His face was all twisted up, and his fat tongue hung out slobbering from his mouth. It was clear he had suffered a stroke. Where, no one knew. He was already there when we arrived. Where did he come from? The one sure thing was that he was an escaped
bagnard
. Tattooed on his chest was “Bat d’Af,” which was the nickname of the French punishment brigade in Africa. No question about it: that and his “Screw the Coiffeur” made it clear he’d been a con.

Everybody called him Picolino. He was very well treated, got his food regularly three times a day, plus cigarettes. His intense blue eyes were full of life and sometimes even expressed happiness. When his eyes lighted on someone he loved, they glistened with joy. He understood everything you said to him, but he couldn’t speak. Nor could he write, for his right arm was paralyzed and his left hand was missing the thumb and two fingers. This poor wreck spent hours hanging onto the barbed wire, waiting for me to come by on my way to the officers’ mess with my vegetables. Every morning I stopped to talk to Picolino. He would lean on the barbed wire and look at me with those lively blue eyes in his dead body. I’d make a few pleasantries and he’d bob his head or blink his eyes to let me know he understood. For a moment his paralyzed face lighted up and his eyes gleamed with all the things he wished he could tell me.... I always brought him a few tidbits—a tomato, a lettuce or cucumber salad already dressed, or a small melon, or a fish cooked over the coals. He wasn’t hungry because he ate so well, but it was a change from the regular diet. A few cigarettes rounded off my small offerings. These brief visits with Picolino became a habit, to such an extent that soldiers and prisoners referred to him as “Papillon’s son.”