“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” categor
y, 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.”
FREEDOM
An extraordinary thing happened. I found the Venezuelans so appealing I decided to join my fate to theirs. No, I wouldn’t go on a cavale. I would accept my unwarranted position as a prisoner in the hope that I would someday be one of them. It may seem paradoxical. The savage way they treated their prisoners was hardly likely to make me want to live with them, yet I came to understand why both prisoners and soldiers found the punishment normal. If a soldier did something wrong, he got a whipping too. And, a few days later, the same soldier would be talking to whoever had flogged him as if nothing had happened.
This barbarous system was the product of the dictator Gomez and had outlived him. There is still a civilian official who punishes the people under him with lashings of the bullwhip.
My liberation came in the wake of a revolution. A coup d’état, half military, half civilian, unseated General Angarita Medina, the president of the republic and one of the greatest liberals in Venezuela’s history. He was such a good democrat that he didn’t even try to resist the coup d’état. They say that he refused to let Venezuelans kill each other to keep him in power. I cannot believe that that great democratic soldier knew what was being perpetrated at El Dorado.
One month after the revolution all the officers were transferred. There was an inquiry into the death of the con who had stabbed Negro Blanco. The warden and his brother-in-law disappeared and were replaced by a former lawyer-diplomat.
“Papillon, I’m setting you free tomorrow, but I wish you’d take poor old Picolino with you. He has no identity card, but I’ll make him one. Here’s yours. It’s all in order and has your right name. Now these are the conditions: you must live in the country for a year before you move into the city. It will be a sort of parole so we can see how you’re faring and what you’re doing with yourself. If at the end of the year the district leader gives you a certificate of good conduct—as I believe he will—then your confinement is at an end. I think Caracas would be an ideal city for you. In any event, you’re now legally authorized to live in this country. Your past is of no concern to us. It’s up to you to show that you deserve the opportunity to become a respectable person. I hope you’ll be my fellow citizen before five years are out. God go with you! And thanks for taking care of Picolino. I can give him his freedom only if someone states in writing that he’ll take charge of him. Maybe a hospital can do something for him. Let’s hope so.”
I was to be set free with Picolino the next morning at seven. I felt a great warmth in my heart. I was done forever with the road of the condemned. It was October 18, 1945. I’d been waiting fourteen years for this day.
I withdrew into my little house. I made my excuses to my friends; I needed to be alone. The emotion I felt was too vast and too beautiful to expose to others. I turned my identity card over and over in my hand: my picture was in the left-hand corner and above it the number 1728629, and the date. In the middle, my last name, and under that, my first name. On the back was the date of my birth: November 16, 1906. Everything was in order—it was even signed and stamped by the Director of the Identification Service. My category in Venezuela: “resident.” That was really something, that word resident. It meant I was domiciled in Venezuela. My heart was thumping. I wanted to get down on my knees to pray and thank God. “But, Papi, you don’t know how to pray, and you’ve never been baptized. What God do you propose to pray to when you don’t belong to any religion? The God of the Catholics? Of the Protestants? The Jews? The Mohammedans?” Whichever I chose, I would have to make up a prayer from scratch because I’d never known any prayer from start to finish. But what did it matter which God I prayed to? Whenever I’d called on Him or cursed Him in the past, hadn’t I always thought of Him as the God that belonged to the baby Jesus in his manger with the donkey and the cows standing around? Maybe my subconscious still held a grudge against the good sisters in Colombia. So why didn’t I close my mind to everything but the one and only sublime Bishop of Curaçao, Monsignor Irénée de Bruyne, and, further back still, the good father at the Conciergerie?
For all that I was innocent of the murder for which one public prosecutor, a few cops and twelve cheesehead jurymen had condemned me to hard labor for life, the fact is that I had been a bum. It was because I had been a bum and an adventurer that they had found it so easy to graft on their tissue of lies. I grant you, opening other people’s safes is not a commendable profession, and society has the right and duty to protect itself from the likes of me. If I had been pitched down the road of the condemned, I have to be honest and admit that I had been a permanent candidate for the bagne. True, my punishment wasn’t worthy of the French people, and if society needed to protect itself, it didn’t have to sink so low—but that’s beside the point. I can’t erase my past with a swipe of the sponge. I must rehabilitate myself in my own eyes first, then in the eyes of others.
The great majority of Frenchmen will not admit that a man with my past can become a good man. That’s the difference between the Venezuelan people and the French. You remember that poor fisherman in Irapa who tried to explain to the chief of po
lice that no man is ever lost for good, that he must be given a chance to become an honest man? Those almost illiterate fishermen lost in the Gulf of Paria in the vast estuary of the Orinoco have a humane philosophy that many of my countrymen could envy. We have too much technological progress, life is too hectic, and our society has only one goal: to invent still more technological marvels to make life even easier and better. The craving for every new scientific discovery breeds a hunger for greater comfort and the constant struggle to achieve it. All that kills the soul, kills compassion, understanding, nobility. It leaves no time for caring what happens to other people, least of all criminals. Even the officials in Venezuela’s remote areas are better for they’re also concerned with public peace. It gives them many headaches, but they seem to believe that bringing about a man’s salvation is worth the effort. I find that magnificent.
Yes, by God, I’d do everything in my power to become honest and stay that way. The one difficulty was that I’d never worked at anything, I didn’t know how to do anything. But I wouldn’t care what I did to earn a living. It might not be easy, but I’d manage somehow. I was sure of it. Tomorrow I’d be like other men.
Should I let my father know I was free? He’d had no word from me for years. I wondered where he was. Probably the only news he’d had about me was when the police looked him up each time I made a cavale. No, I mustn’t hurry that one. I had no right to open a wound that the years might almost have healed. I’d write him when I was established, when I had a steady job, when my problems were behind me and I could say to him, “Father, your son is finally free and an honest man. Here’s where I’m living, this is what I’m doing. You can hold your head up now. That’s why I’m writing to say that I love you and will always think of you with deep respect.”
It’s not all that easy to step out of the chains you’ve been dragging around for fourteen years. They tell you you’re free, they turn their backs on you, you’re no longer being watched. It’s that simple. Yet you still wonder.... You don’t make over a life the way you sew on a button. And if today, twenty-three years later, I’m a married man with a daughter, living happily in Caracas as a Venezuelan citizen, I have to confess to many more adventures between then and now, some of them successful, some failures, but always as a free man and a good citizen. Maybe some day I’ll write them down, along with other interesting stories I didn’t have room for in this book.