Three hundred yards from shore I dropped anchor; it caught immediately. I did this partly to watch the people’s reaction, partly to keep from scraping the boat if the bottom turned out to be coral. We let down the sails and waited. A small canoe came toward us. In it were two blacks paddling a white man in a colonial cap.
“Welcome to Trinidad,” the white man said in pure French. The blacks laughed, showing pearly white teeth.
“Thank you, sir. Is the bottom here coral or sand?”
“It’s sand. You can go up on the beach without danger.”
We pulled up the anchor and the waves pushed us gently to the beach. We had barely touched when ten men ran into the water and, with one heave, pulled the canoe up on land. They looked us over, they caressed us, and the women—black, Chinese and Hindu—made appreciative gestures. The white man explained that everybody wanted us to stay with them. Maturette picked up a handful of sand and made as if to kiss it. This enthralled our audience. I explained Clousiot’s condition to the white man, and he had him carried to his house near the beach. He told us that we could leave everything in the boat until morning, that no one would touch a thing. Everyone called me “captain” and this sudden baptism made me laugh. They said in English, “Good captain, long ride on small boat!”
Night came. I asked if our boat could be pushed up a little farther and tied to a bigger boat for safety. Then I followed the Englishman to his house. It was a bungalow, like those you see everywhere on English soil: a few wooden steps and a screen door. I entered after the Englishman with Maturette behind me. As I came in, there was Clousiot sitting in an armchair, his leg resting on another, basking in the attentions of two women.
“My wife and daughter,” the Englishman said. “I have a son in school in England.”
“Welcome to our house,” his wife said in French.
“Please sit down, sir,” the girl said as she brought up two rattan chairs.
“Thank you. Please don’t put yourselves out for us.”
“Why not? Don’t worry, we know where you’ve come from, and I repeat: Welcome to our house.”
The man was a lawyer and his name was Bowen. He had his office in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, about twenty-five miles away. They served us tea with milk, toast, butter and jam. It was our first evening as free men and I shall never forget it. Not a word about our past, no indiscreet questions: only how many days we had been at sea and how the trip had gone; if Clousiot was in pain, and did we want to advise the police of our arrival tomorrow or wait another day; had we parents, wives, or children. If we wanted to write to them, they would mail the letters. How shall I say it—it was an extraordinary reception for three fugitives, both on the part of the people on the beach and this English family.
Mr. Bowen telephoned a doctor who told him to bring Clousiot to his clinic the next afternoon for X-rays and to see what needed to be done. Mr. Bowen then telephoned the head of the Salvation Army in Port of Spain. The captain said he would prepare a room at the Salvation Army hostel, that we could come when it suited us, that we should keep our boat if it was a good one because we would need it when we were ready to leave. He asked whether we were bagnards or relégués, and we answered bagnards, which seemed to please the lawyer.
“Would you like to have a bath and shave?” the girl asked me. “Please don’t say no; it’s no trouble at all. You’ll find everything you need in the bathroom, I hope.”
I went into the bathroom, took a bath and shaved, and emerged in gray pants, white shirt, tennis shoes and white socks.
A Hindu knocked on the door. He had a package for Maturette and told him that the doctor had noticed that I was about the same size as he and therefore would be easy to fit, but that little Maturette would find it difficult because no one at the lawyer’s was that small. He bowed as Hindus do and left. Faced with so much kindness, what could we say? The emotion that filled my heart was beyond description. Clousiot went to bed early; then the five of us exchanged many thoughts on a variety of subjects. What intrigued the charming ladies most was how we planned to remake our lives. Nothing about the past; only the present and the future. Mr. Bowen was sorry that Trinidad didn’t permit escaped prisoners to stay. He told me that he had asked for permission several times before, but it had never been granted.
The girl talked in very pure French, like her father, without accent and with perfect pronunciation. She was blond, covered with freckles, and somewhere between seventeen and twenty. I didn’t dare ask her exact age.
She said, “You’re all still young and have your lives before you. I don’t know what you did to be imprisoned and I don’t want to know. But to have had the courage to go to sea in such a tiny boat and make such a long and dangerous voyage shows you’re willing to gamble a great deal to be free. And I think that is admirable.”
We slept until eight the next morning. The table was already set. The ladies told us that Mr. Bowen had left for Port of Spain and wouldn’t be back until afternoon, when he would have all the necessary information concerning our fate.
The fact that this man could go away leaving three escaped convicts in his house was a priceless lesson to us. He seemed to be saying: I consider you perfectly normal men; I have known you only twelve hours, but I have enough confidence in you to leave you in my home alone with my wife and daughter. After talking to you, I cannot believe you are capable of behaving badly in my home, and so I am leaving you there just as if you were old friends. This demonstration of faith moved us a great deal.
I am not a good enough writer to convey the intense emotion I felt over my newfound self-respect. It was a rehabilitation, if not yet a new life. This imaginary baptism, the immersion in purity, the elevation of my being above the filth in which I’d been mired and, overnight, this sense of responsibility, made me into a different man. The convict’s complexes that make him hear his chains and suspect he’s being watched even after he’s freed, everything I’d seen, gone through, suffered, everything that was making me tarnished, rotten and dangerous, passively obedient on the surface but terribly dangerous in rebellion, all that had disappeared as if by a miracle. Thank you, Mr. Bowen, barrister in His Majesty’s service, thank you for making a new man of me in so short a time!
The blond girl, her eyes as blue as the sea around us, was sitting with me under the coconut palm next to her father’s house. Red, yellow and mauve bougainvillea in full bloom gave the garden a suitably poetic touch.
“Mr. Henri [she called me Mister. How long had it been since anyone had called me Mister!], as Daddy told you yesterday, because of the stupid and unfair attitude of the British authorities, you unfortunately won’t be able to stay here. They give you just two weeks to rest over, then you have to go to sea again. I’ve been to look at your boat; it’s very small and very light for the long trip you have ahead of you. Let’s hope you land in a more hospitable and understanding country than ours. All the English islands are the same in this respect. I beg you—if your next trip brings you suffering—do not hold it against the people of these islands. They aren’t responsible. The orders come from England, from people who don’t know you. My father’s address is 101 Queen Street, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Please, God willing, write us a few words and let us know how you fare.”
Again, I was so touched I didn’t know what to say. Mrs. Bowen came over to us. She was a very handsome woman of about forty with light chestnut hair and green eyes. She was wearing a simple white dress with a white cord around her waist and light-green sandals.
“My husband won’t be back until five. He is trying to get permission for you to drive to the capital without a police escort. He also wants to prevent your having to spend your first night in the Port of Spain police station. Your friend with the broken leg will go directly to the clinic of a doctor friend of ours, and you two are to go to the Salvation Army hostel.”
Maturette joined us in the garden. He told us that he had gone to look at the boat and reported that it was surrounde
d by curious natives. Nothing had been touched. But in the course of their examination the natives had found a bullet lodged under the rudder and one of them had asked if he could take it as a souvenir. Maturette had said, “Captain, captain.” The native had understood that Maturette would have to ask his captain’s permission. He also asked why we didn’t set the turtles free.
“You have turtles?” the girl asked. “Let’s go see them!”
We went to the boat. On our way there, a beautiful little Hindu girl stopped me to shake my hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “Good afternoon,” she said in English. The entire motley crowd said, “Good afternoon.” I took out the two turtles and asked the girl, “What should we do? Throw them back into the sea? Or would you like them in your garden?”
“The little pool at the back is sea water. We could put them in the pool and then we’d have a souvenir of your visit.”
“Fine, that’s what we’ll do.” I distributed everything I could find in the boat to the people standing around, keeping only the compass, some tobacco, the water barrel, the knife, the machete, the hatchet, the blankets and the revolver, which I quickly hid under the blankets—no one saw it.
Mr. Bowen arrived at five o’clock. “Gentlemen, everything is arranged. I’ll drive you to the capital myself. We’ll drop Mr. Clousiot off first, then go on to the hostel.”
We placed Clousiot on the back seat of the car. I was saying good-by to the girl when her mother arrived with a suitcase and said, “Please take these things of my husband’s. They carry our best wishes.” What could you say to so much kindness? “Thank you, thank you so much.” And the car drove off.
We reached the clinic at quarter to six. It was called St. George’s. Orderlies lifted Clousiot onto a stretcher and placed him in a room where there was already a Hindu sitting on a bed. The doctor came in, shook hands with Bowen, then with the rest of us; he spoke no French, but told us through an interpreter that Clousiot would be well cared for and that we could come to see him as often as we liked. Back in Bowen’s car, we crossed the city. We were amazed by the lights, the cars, the bicycles. Whites, blacks, Hindus, Chinese crowded the sidewalks of this city built of wood. The Salvation Army hostel was in a brightly lit square near a store on which I read Fish Market. The ground floor of the building was of stone, the rest wood. The captain of the Salvation Army received us with his entire “general staff,” women as well as men. He spoke a little French, but everybody else spoke to us in English, which we didn’t understand. From their smiling faces and the welcome in their eyes, however, we knew they must be saying kind things.
They led us to a room on the third floor in which there were three beds—the third was for Clousiot, should he be able to join us. There was a connecting bathroom with soap and towels. After showing us our room, the captain said, “We all have dinner together at seven, a half-hour from now.”
“Thank you, but we’re not hungry.”
“If you would like to take a walk around the town, here are two Antilles dollars so that you can buy a cup of coffee or tea, or some ice cream. But don’t get lost. When you’re ready to come home, all you need to say is ‘Salvation Army, please.’”
Ten minutes later we were in the street. We walked on sidewalks, elbowing other people; nobody looked at us, no one paid us any attention. We breathed deeply, absorbing the wonder of our first free steps in a city. This continued confidence in us, letting us walk freely in a good-sized town, was very gratifying; it gave us not only confidence in ourselves but also the certainty that we would never betray their faith in us. Maturette and I walked slowly through the crowd. We needed to be close to people, to jostle them, become part of them. We went into a bar and asked for two beers. It doesn’t seem like much to say, “Two beers, please.” It came so naturally, and yet it seemed fantastic that a Hindu girl with a gold shell in her nose should say after serving us, “Half a dollar, sir.” Her pearly teeth when she smiled, her large violet-black eyes slanted up at the corners, her jet-black hair falling to her shoulders, her half-open blouse showing just enough of her breasts to suggest their beauty, all these little things that appeared so natural to everybody else seemed to us fantastic and magical. Come on, Papi! It’s not true; you must be kidding! You were so recently a member of the living dead, a con condemned for life, and here you are in the process of becoming a free man!
Maturette paid. He had only a half-dollar left. The beer was deliciously cold. He asked me, “Shall we have another?”
A second round didn’t seem wise. “Look here, you’ve been free less than an hour and already you want to get drunk?”
“Come on, Papi, don’t exaggerate! Having a couple of beers is not exactly getting drunk.”
“Maybe not, but I don’t think it would be right for us to gobble up all the pleasures all at once. We should taste each one a little at a time and not be gluttons. Besides, the money isn’t ours.”
“O.K. You’re right. Eyedroppers is what we should use. It’s more fitting.”
We left the bar and walked down Watters Street, the big main street that goes from one end of the city to the other. We were so amazed at the streetcars, the mules pulling their little carts, the cars, the flashing signs over the movie houses and night clubs, the eyes of the laughing young blacks and Hindus that suddenly we found ourselves at the port. In front of us were boats all lighted up, cruise ships bearing the magical names of ports like Panama, Los Angeles, Boston, Quebec; freighters from Hamburg, Amsterdam, London; and cheek by jowl the length of the quay, bars, cabarets and restaurants full of men and women drinking, singing and arguing noisily. I suddenly felt an irresistible need to join this crowd; vulgar it might be, but it was so bursting with life. Outside one of the bars, set out on beds of ice, was a display of oysters, sea urchins, shrimp, razor clams, mussels, an encyclopedia of seafood to tempt the passerby. Tables with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, most of them occupied, seemed to invite us to sit down. Girls with light-brown skins and fine profiles wore revealing, brightly colored blouses that invited you to extend the enjoyment further. I went up to one of them and asked, “French money good?” and handed her a thousand-franc bill. “Yes, I change for you.” “O.K.” She took the bill and disappeared into the noisy room. Then she returned. “Come here.” And she took me to the cashier, a Chinese.
“You French?”
“Yes.”
“Change thousand francs?”
“Yes.”
“All for Antilles dollars?”
“Yes.”
“Passport?”
“Don’t have one.”
“Sailor’s identification?”
“Don’t have one.”
“Immigration papers?”
“Don’t have one.”
“All right.” He spoke a couple of words to the girl; she looked around the room, went up to what looked like a sailor in a cap like mine—gold braid and anchor—and brought him over to the cashier.
The Chinese said, “Your identification?”
“Here.”
And coldly the Chinese made out a conversion voucher in his name and had him sign it. Then the girl took him by the arm and led him back to his seat. He was past knowing what was going on, and I had two hundred and fifty Antilles dollars, with fifty dollars in one- and two-dollar bills. I gave one dollar to the girl. We went out and sat down at one of the tables and treated ourselves to an orgy of seafood washed down with a delicious dry white wine.
FOURTH NOTEBOOK
THE FIRST CAVALE (CONTINUED)
TRINIDAD
I CAN RECALL, AS IF it were yesterday, that first night of freedom in the English town. We went everywhere, drunk with the lights and the warmth in our hearts, feeling at one with the happy, laughing crowd. The bars were full of sailors and girls waiting to fleece them. But these weren’t like the sordid women of the underworld in Paris, Le Havre, or Marseilles, with their crudely made-up faces, and eyes bright with greed and cunning. The girls of Trinidad were of
every color: yellow Chinese, black African, light chocolate with glossy hair; there were Hindu and Javanese women whose parents had been imported to cultivate the cocoa and sugar cane—“coolies,” who were a mixture of Chinese and Hindu and wore a gold shell in their noses. Then there were the Llapanes with their Roman profiles and bronzed faces illumined by enormous, brilliant black eyes, their breasts exposed as if to say: “See how perfect they are.” All these girls with flowers of different colors in their hair stimulated desire without making it dirty or commercial. They gave the impression that it wasn’t work, that they really enjoyed it, and you felt that money was not the main thing in their lives.
Like a pair of June bugs bumping against a light, Maturette and I zigzagged from bar to bar. As we emerged into a small, brightly lighted square, I saw the clock on a church. Two o’clock. It was two o’clock in the morning! We had to get back. We’d carried things a little too far. I hailed a taxi which took us to the hostel for two dollars. Feeling very ashamed of ourselves, we entered and were greeted by a woman officer of the Salvation Army—a blonde somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. She spoke a few words in English which sounded pleasant and welcoming, then gave us the key to our room and wished us good night. We got into bed. In my suitcase I had found a pair of pajamas. I was about to turn off the light when Maturette said, “Don’t you think we should thank the Lord for giving us so much so soon? What do you say, Papi?”
“You thank your Lord for me. He’s a great mec all right. And it’s true he’s been damn good to us. Good night.” And I put out the light.
This resurrection, this escape from the cemetery where I’d been buried and tonight’s immersion in the world of people had left me so excited I couldn’t get to sleep. In the kaleidoscope that passed before my eyes, I saw disconnected pictures and felt a confusion of sensations that were extraordinarily precise in outline: the Assizes, the Conciergerie, the lepers, Saint-Martin-de-Ré, Tribouillard, Jésus, the storm.... It was like a fantasmagoric ballet in which everything I had been through in the past year was trying to elbow its way into my mind. I tried to chase the images away, but they wouldn’t go. And the strangest part was that they were all mixed in with the squeals of pigs, the cackle of hoccos, the roar of the wind, the sound of the waves and the music of the Hindu violins in the bars we had just left.