The camelote was sold in the guards’ houses. The best pieces were often bought in advance or made to order. The rest was sold on the boats that shuttled between the islands. This “deal” was the boatmen’s domain. There were also the forgers: someone would take a dented old mug and engrave on it: “This mug belonged to Dreyfus, Ile du Diable,” and the date. They did the same with spoons and mess plates. Breton sailors fell for anything that had the name “Sezenec” on it.
This trade brought a lot of money into the islands and it was in the guards’ interest not to interfere. Besides, the men were easier to handle and adapted better to bagne life if they were busy.
Homosexuality had official sanction. From the warden on down, everybody knew that So-and-so was So-and-so’s wife, and if you sent one of them to another island, you made sure the other went with him.
Among all these men, not three in a hundred were interested in a cavale. Not even the ones with life sentences. The only possibility was to get disinterred and sent to Grande Terre, Saint-Laurent, Kourou, or Cayenne. And this worked only for those with short sentences. If you had life, you had to commit murder so you’d be sent to Saint-Laurent to appear before the tribunal. But since you had to plead guilty in order to go, you risked getting five years in solitary, and there was no knowing if you’d be able to use the short stay in Saint-Laurent—three months at the most—to bring off an escape.
You could also try to get disinterned for medical reasons. If you were found to be tubercular, you were sent to the camp for tuberculars called Nouveau Camp, about fifty miles from Saint-Laurent.
There was also leprosy or dysentery. It was fairly easy to fake these, but they carried with them the terrible danger of living isolated in a special ward for nearly two years with men who really had the disease. It was a short step from faking leprosy to having it, or from having healthy lungs to getting tuberculosis, but many took that step. Dysentery was the most contagious of all.
I was now installed in Building A with my hundred and twenty comrades. It was hard learning how to live in this community where you were so quickly pigeonholed. First you had to make it clear that you were dangerous. Once they were afraid of you, you had to win their respect by the way you handled yourself with the guards—you never accepted certain jobs, you refused to work with certain gangs, you never recognized the authority of the turnkeys, you never obeyed an order, even if it meant a run-in with a guard. If you gambled all night, you skipped roll call. The trusty for our case (the buildings were called cases) would call out “Sick in bed.” In the other two cases the guards usually made the “sick” man take roll call. This never happened to us. Obviously, what everybody—from the highest to the lowest—wanted most was a peaceful bagne.
Grandet, my gourbi mate, was thirty-five and from Marseilles. He was very tall, as thin as a rail, but very strong. We had been friends in France and used to see each other around Toulon, Marseilles and Paris. He was a well-known safecracker and a good guy, although a little too dangerous perhaps.
Today I was almost alone in the huge room. The man in charge of our case was sweeping and mopping the cement floor. I noticed another man fixing a watch with a gadget in his left eye. Above his hammock he had a shelf with at least thirty watches hanging from it. His face looked thirty, but his hair was completely white. I went up to him and watched him work, then tried to start a conversation. He didn’t open his mouth; he didn’t even look up. This made me a little angry, so I left him and went into the yard to sit by the washhouse. Titi la Belote was there playing a card game. His nimble fingers shuffled the thirty-two cards with incredible speed. Without interrupting the rhythm of his magician’s hands, he said, “How goes it, pal? You like Royale?”
“Sure, but today I’m bored. I think I’ll go do a little work to get out of camp. I wanted to have a talk with that mec who fixes watches, but he wouldn’t open his mouth.”
“You can say that again, Papi. That mec doesn’t give a damn for anybody. He lives for his watches and the hell with everything else. But after what happened to him, he has every right to feel bitter. You know they gave that kid—he’s not thirty years old—the death penalty last year for supposedly raping the wife of a guard. It was a real phony. He’d been screwing her for a long time—she was the wife of a Breton guard. He worked for them as a house-boy, and each time the Breton was on duty, the watch repairer gave it to her. But they made a mistake: the broad wouldn’t let him do the laundry or ironing any more. She did it herself, and since her husband knew she was bone lazy, he began to wonder what was going on. But since he couldn’t prove anything, he thought up a scheme to surprise her in flagrante delicto, then kill them both. One day he left his post two hours after arriving and asked another guard to go home with him, saying he wanted to make him a present of a ham he’d just received from home. He crept up to his house and was just opening the door when his parrot shrieked: ‘Here comes the boss!’ which it did whenever the guard came home. Immediately the wife started to scream, ‘Help, help! I’m being raped!’ The two guards entered the room just as the woman was tearing herself from the con’s arms; the con jumped through the window and the husband started to shoot, nicking him in the shoulder. Meanwhile the broad was clawing at her breasts and cheeks and ripping her dressing gown. The con fell, but just as the Breton was going to finish him off, the other guard disarmed him. When I tell you this guy was a Corsican, you’ll understand right away that he knew the whole thing was a fake, that it was no more a rape than a twenty-five-franc lay. But he was in no position to tell this to the Breton, so he pretended he believed it was a rape. The watch fixer was condemned to death. Not that all this was particularly unusual. It was later that it became interesting.
“On Royale the cons with special punishments are kept in the same place they keep the guillotine. Every week the executioners and his aides go into the yard, mount the guillotine and slice a couple of banana trunks to make sure it’s in good working order.
“The watch repairman was in a cell for cons with the death sentence along with three Arabs and a Sicilian. All five were waiting for verdicts on their appeals.
“One morning they set up the guillotine and threw open the watch fixer’s door. The executioners jumped on him, bound his wrists and looped the rope around his feet. Then they cut away his collar and he shuffled out into the early-morning light. You probably know that when you arrive in front of the guillotine you face an upright board to which you’re strapped. They were about to put his neck in the curved part when Coco Sec—the head warden has to be present at all executions—showed up. He was carrying a big hurricane lantern, and as he aimed it at the scene, he saw that the screwball guards had made a mistake: they were going to cut off the watch fixer’s head when it wasn’t his day at all.
“‘Stop! Stop!’ Barrot hollered.
“He was so upset it was all he could get out. He dropped the lantern, elbowed past the guards and executioners and unstrapped the mec himself. Finally he managed to say, ‘Orderly, take him back to his cell. Take care of him, stay with him, give him some rum. And you, you idiots, go get Rencasseu. He’s the one you’re supposed to execute today.’
“The next day the watch repairer’s hair was white, as white as it is today. His lawyer, a guard from Calvi, wrote the Minister of Justice, telling him about the incident and asking for a new pardon. The mec was pardoned and given a life sentence instead. Since then he spends his time fixing the guards’ watches. It’s his passion. He tests them endlessly; that’s why he’s got them hanging from his shelf. Now you understand why he’s a little peculiar?”
Every day I learned a little more about my new life. Case A was a concentration of really formidable men because of what they had done in the past and also because of the way they acted around the camp.
One morning they called out Jean Castelli’s name on the list of people to work in the coconut plantation. He stepped out of ranks and asked, “What goes on here? You’re putting me to work?”
?
??Yes,” said the guard in charge of the work gang. “Here, take this pickaxe.”
Castelli looked at him coldly. “You must be crazy. You have to come from the sticks to know how to use those things. I’m a Corsican from Marseilles. In Corsica we throw work tools into the sea. In Marseilles they don’t even know they exist. Keep your pickaxe and leave me alone.”
The young guard didn’t know about our group yet and started to raise the handle of the pickaxe over Castelli’s head. With one voice a hundred and twenty men shouted, “Asshole, touch him and you’re dead.”
“Break ranks!” Grandet called out, and ignoring the guards who had taken up attack positions, we went back into our case.
Case B filed by on its way to work, followed by Case C. A dozen guards came to ours and closed the grill. An hour later we had forty guards flanking the door, submachine guns in hand. The assistant warden, the head guard, the guards, everybody was there except the head warden, who had left at six for an inspection tour of Diable.
The second-in-command said, “Dacelli, call up the men one by one.”
“Grandet?”
“Present.”
“Come out here.”
He went out into the middle of the forty guards.
Dacelli said, “Go to your work.”
“I can’t.”
“You refuse?”
“No, I’m not refusing. I’m sick.”
“Since when? You didn’t report sick at roll call.”
“I wasn’t sick this morning. But I am now.”
The first sixty called up all said the same thing. Only one man refused without giving an excuse. He probably hoped to be taken to Saint-Laurent in order to go before the tribunal. When he was asked, “You refuse?” he answered, “Yes, I refuse.”
“Why?”
“Because you make me puke. I refuse absolutely to work for shits like you.”
The tension was mounting. The guards, especially the young ones, couldn’t take being humiliated by bagnards. They were waiting for the one threatening gesture that would justify their going into action with their guns.
“Everybody who was called up, strip! Then go to your cells.” As our clothes hit the ground, you could hear the occasional clatter of a knife. Then the doctor arrived.
“O.K. Stop. Doctor, please examine these men. Those who are not really sick will go to the dungeons. The others will stay in their case.”
“You have sixty sick?”
“Yes, Doctor, except for that one there who refuses to work.” To the first in line the doctor said, “Grandet, what’s wrong with you?”
“I’ve got indigestion, Doctor. The guards make me sick to my stomach. All of us here have got long sentences, most of them life. We’ve got no hope of escaping, and there’s no way we can stand it unless there’s some give-and-take in the regulations. This morning a guard threatened a friend with a pickaxe handle. It wasn’t a question of self-defense; the man hadn’t lifted a finger. All he said was he didn’t want to use the pickaxe. And that’s the reason for this indigestion epidemic. You judge.”
The doctor looked down, thought for a minute, then said, “Orderly, write down the following: ‘Due to a widespread alimentary infection, I direct that the infirmary guard give twenty grams of sulfate of soda as a purgative to all those who reported sick this morning. As for convict X, place him under observation in the hospital so we may determine if his refusal to work was made when in full possession of his faculties.”
Then he turned on his heel and was gone.
“Everybody inside!” the second-in-command called out. “Pick up your clothes. Don’t forget your knives.” For the rest of the day everybody stayed in the case. Nobody was allowed out, not even the man who sold us our bread. Toward noon the infirmary guard and two convict-orderlies came around with a wooden bucket full of the purgative instead of soup. Only three men swallowed the stuff. The fourth fell over the bucket in a perfect imitation of an epileptic fit, and the purgative, bucket and all, flew off in all directions. Our guard mopped up the mess and the incident was ended.
Jean Castelli came over to eat with us and I spent the afternoon talking with him. He was in a gourbi with a man from Toulon called Louis Gravon who had been convicted for stealing furs. When I brought up the subject of a cavale, his eyes glistened.
“I almost escaped last year,” he said, “but it fizzled. I didn’t think you were the type to stay here indefinitely. But talk cavale here and you might as well be talking Hebrew. I don’t think you understand the bagnards on the islands yet; ninety percent are relatively happy here. But nobody will squeal on you, whatever you decide to do. Even if you kill somebody, there’s never a witness. Whatever a man does, everybody comes to his rescue. The island bagnards are scared of only one thing: that a cavale might succeed. When that happens, there’s just no peace: there are constant searches, no more cards, no more music—instruments are destroyed during the searches—no more checkers or chess, no books, no nothing. Not even making camelote. Everything stops. They search all the time. Sugar, oil, steak, butter, all that disappears. Every time a cavale has made it from the islands, the men have been picked up on Grande Terre. But in the eyes of the Administration, the cavale was successful: the mecs got away. And so the guards get hell and they in turn take it out on us.”
I listened closely and didn’t bring the subject up again. I had never thought of it that way.
“In short,” Castelli said, “the day you decide to prepare a cavale, beware. Unless it’s with a close friend, think twice before discussing it with anybody.”
Jean Castelli was a professional burglar and a man of unusual guts and intelligence. He loathed violence. His nickname was “the Antique.” He washed only with Marseilles soap. If I happened to wash with Palmolive, he’d say to me, “Say, you smell like a queer! You washed with whore’s soap!” Unfortunately he was fifty-two, but his iron will was a joy to see. He told me one day, “Papillon, you’re like my son. Life on the islands isn’t for you. You eat well because you want to keep in shape, but you’re never going to settle down and accept island life. I congratulate you. Among all these cons there aren’t half a dozen like you. It’s perfectly true that a lot of them would pay a fortune to get disinterned so they could go to Grande Terre and escape from there. But here nobody even gives it a thought.”
Old Castelli gave me some good advice. He said I should learn English, and talk Spanish with a Spaniard as often as possible. He lent me a book that was supposed to teach me Spanish in twenty-four lessons, and a French-English dictionary. He had a very good friend, a man from Marseilles called Gardès who was nearly fifty and knew volumes about cavales. He’d done two, one from a Portuguese bagne and one from Grande Terre. He had one point of view on the subject, Jean Castelli another, Gravon yet another, all of them different. From that day on I decided to make up my own mind and stop talking about it.
The only thing they agreed on was that gambling was interesting only as a way to make money and that it was very dangerous: at any moment you could be forced into a battle of knives with the first troublemaker who came along.
Last night I gave my case a demonstration of the way I saw things. A little guy from Toulouse was challenged by a man from Nîmes. The little fellow’s nickname was Sardine and the bully from Nîmes was called Mouton. Mouton, bare from the waist up, was standing in the middle of the alley with his knife in his hand: “You pay me twenty-five francs a hand or you don’t play.” Sardine answered, “Nobody’s ever had to pay to play poker. Why take it out on me? Go fight the bankers.”
“Never mind about that. Pay, don’t play, or fight.”
“I’m not fighting.”
“You’re chicken?”
“Yes. I don’t want to risk being chopped up by someone like you who’s never even been on a cavale. I’m a cavale man. I’m not here to kill or get killed.”
We were all waiting to see what happened next. Grandet said, “The little guy’s got guts. It’s too bad we can’t i
nterfere.” I opened my knife and placed it under my thigh. I was sitting on Grandet’s hammock.
“O.K., chicken,” the man from Nîmes continued. “What do you say?” He moved a step nearer Sardine.
I said, “Shut up, Mouton. Leave the guy alone!”
“You crazy, Papillon?” Grandet said.
Still sitting with the open knife under my left leg, my hand on the handle, I said, “No, I’m not crazy.” Then in a louder voice, “Listen to me, Mouton. Before I fight you—which I’m prepared to do as soon as I’ve had my say—I want to get something off my chest. Since I’ve been in this case, I’ve come to realize that the most beautiful, the most important, the only true thing—yes, a cavale—is not respected here. I think every man who’s given proof that he’s a cavale man, who’s got enough guts to risk his life in a cavale, deserves respect. Does anybody here disagree?” Silence. “You’ve got a lot of rules, but you lack the most important one: the obligation not only to respect but to aid and abet the cavale man. Nobody has to go, and I know most of you have decided to make your life here. But if you don’t have the courage to start a new life, at least have some respect for the men who do. And I can guarantee serious consequences for anyone who forgets this rule. O.K., Mouton. Let’s go!”