The Napoli’s siren made me jump. It wiped out that remote past, those pictures of my eighteenth year, when my father and I walked out of the gendarmerie where I had just enlisted. But immediately afterward there rose up the unhappiest memory of them all, the moment when I saw him for the very last time.
It was in one of those grim visiting rooms at the Sante prison--each of us in a barred box separated by a corridor a yard wide. I was racked by shame and disgust for what my life had been and for what had brought my father here into this wild-beast cage.
He had not come to reproach me for being suspect number one in a dirty underworld job. He had the same ravaged face I had seen the day he told me of my mother’s death, and he had come into this prison of his own accord to see his boy for half an hour, not to condemn his bad behavior or to make him understand what this business meant for his family’s honor and peace of mind, or to say, “You are a bad son,” but to beg my forgiveness for not having succeeded in bringing me up properly. What he said was the last thing I should ever have expected, the one thing that could touch my heart more deeply than all the reproaches in the world: “I believe, Riri, that it is through my fault that you are here. Forgive me for having spoiled you too much.”
Nothing could have been more hostile than the iron discipline of the navy in 1923. The ratings were classed in six categories, according to their level of education. I was in the top, the sixth. And this seventeen-year-old boy, just out of the class preparing for the Arts et Metiers, could not understand or adapt himself to blind, instant obedience to orders given by quartermasters belonging to the lowest intellectual level.
I was in trouble right away. I could not obey orders that had no rhyme or reason. I refused to go on any specialized course, the normal thing for a man with my education, and I was at once classed among the estrasses, the undisciplined, the no-good “unspecialized” types.
We were the ones who had all the nastiest, dullest, stupidest jobs. Potato peeling, head cleaning, brass polishing all day long, coal shoveling, deck swabbing: all for us.
“What the hell are you doing there, hiding behind the smokestack?”
“We have finished swabbing the deck, quartermaster.”
“Is that right? Well, just you start again, and this time swab it from aft forward. And if it’s not cleaner this time, you’ll hear from me.”
A sailor is a fine sight, with his pompom, his jersey with its wide blue collar, his slightly tilted cap as flat as a pancake and his uniform made to fit properly. But we good-for-nothings were not allowed to have our things recut. The worse we were dressed and the drearier we looked, the better the quartermasters were pleased. In an atmosphere like this a rebel never stops thinking up offenses. Every time we were alongside a quay, for example, we stole ashore and spent the night in the town. Where did we go? To the brothels, of course. With a friend or two I would fix things in no time at all. Right away each of us had our whore; and we not only made love for free but would also get a bill or two for a drink or a meal from our women.
The punishments became more frequent. Fifteen days’ detention; then thirty. To get back at a cook who refused us a bit of meat and a crust after the potato-peeling detail, we stole a whole leg of mutton, done to a turn, fishing it out with a hook we slid down a ventilator over the stove when he had his back turned; we ate it in the coal bunker. Result: forty-five days in the naval prison; in the middle of winter I was stark naked in the Toulon prison yard, opposite a washhouse with its huge tub of icy water, into which we had to plunge.
It was a seaman’s cap not worth ten francs that brought me up before the disciplinary board. Charge: destruction of naval property.
In the navy, everybody changed the shape of his cap. Not destructively--it was a question of being well turned out. You first wetted it, and then three of you would pull as hard as possible, so that when you put a piece of whalebone around inside, it was as flat as a pancake. “It’s terrific, a regular flat cap,” said the girls. Particularly a cap with a pretty carrot-colored pompom on it, carefully trimmed with scissors. All the girls in the town knew it brought good luck to touch a pompom, and that you had to pay for touching it with a kiss.
The master-at-arms was a thickheaded brute--I became his pet aversion. He never left me in peace; he kept after me night and day. So much so that three times I went awol. Never more than five days and twenty-three hours, though, because at six days you were put down as a deserter. And a deserter I very nearly was at Nice. I’d spent the night with a terrific girl and woke up late. One more hour and I should have been on the list. I scrambled into my clothes and left at a run, looking for a cop to get myself arrested. I caught sight of one, hurried over to him and asked him to arrest me. He was a fat, kindly old soul. “Come now, boy, don’t fly into a panic. Just you go back quietly to your ship and tell them all about it. We’ve all been young once.”
I told him one hour more and I was a deserter; but it was no good, he wouldn’t listen. So I picked up a stone, turned to a shop window and said to the cop, “If you don’t arrest me, I’ll smash this window in one second flat.”
“The boy’s crazy. Come along, young fellow; the station for you.”
But it was for having stretched a cap to make it prettier that they sent me to the disciplinary sections at Calvi, in Corsica. No one can doubt that this was my first step toward the penal settlement.
They called the disciplinary section la cam ise, and you had a special uniform. As soon as you got there you went in front of a reception committee, and they decided whether you were to be rated a genuine cam isard. You had to prove you were a man by fighting two or three seniors one after another. With my training at the Crest high school, I did pretty well. During the second fight, when my lip was split and my nose a bleeding mess, the seniors stopped the test. I was rated genuine cam isard.
La camise. I worked in a Corsican senator’s vineyards from sunrise to sunset: no break, no little favors; the difficult sort had to be brought to heel. We weren’t even sailors anymore: we belonged to the 173 Infantry Regiment at Bastia. I can still see that citadel at Calvi, our three-mile walk, pick or shovel on our shoulder, to Calenzana, where we worked, and our quick march back to the prison. It was unendurable, we rebelled; and as I was one of the ringleaders, I was sent, along with a dozen others, to a still tougher disciplinary camp at Corte.
A citadel right up on top of the mountain: six hundred steps to go up and down twice a day to work at making a playing field for the enlisted men near the station.
It was when I was in that hell, with that herd of brutes, that a civilian from Corte secretly passed me a note: “Darling, if you want to get out of that horrible place, cut off your thumb. The law is that the loss of a thumb, with or without preservation of the metacarpal, automatically brings about transfer to the auxiliaries; and if this injury is caused by an accident in the course of duty, it brings about permanent incapacity for armed services and therefore discharge. Law of 1831, circular of July 23, 1883. I am waiting for you. Clara. Address, Le Moulin Rouge, Quartier Réservé, Toulon.”
I did not delay. Our work consisted of digging about two cubic yards of earth out of the mountain every day and wheeling it off in barrows to a place fifty yards away, where trucks took away everything that wasn’t needed for leveling the ground. We worked in teams of two. I must not cut off my thumb with an edged tool, or I should be accused of self-mutilation, and that would cost me another five years of la camise.
My Corsican mate, Franqui, and I started on the mountain at the bottom, and we dug a fair-sized cave into it. One more blow with the pick and everything above would fall in on me. The supervising NCOs were tough: Sergeant Albertini was just two or three yards behind us. This made the job tricky but also afforded one advantage--if all went well, he would be an impartial witness.
Franqui put a big stone with a fairly sharp edge under an overhanging piece; I laid my left thumb on it and stuffed my handkerchief into my mouth so as not to let out the least so
und. There would be five or six seconds for us to bring the whole mass of earth down on me. Franqui was going to smash my thumb with another stone weighing about twenty pounds: it could not fail. They would be forced to amputate it even if the blow did not take it off entirely.
The sergeant was three yards away from us, scraping earth off his boots. Franqui grasped the stone, lifted it up as high as it would go and brought it down. My thumb was a shattered mess. The sound of the blow mingled with the noise of the pickaxes all round, and the sergeant saw nothing. Two swings with the pick and the earth came down all over me. I let myself be buried. Bellowing, shouts for help: they dug for me and at last I appeared, covered with earth and my thumb destroyed. And I was suffering like a soul in hell. Still, I did manage to say to the sergeant, “They’ll say I did it on purpose: you see.”
“No, Charrière. I saw the accident: I’m a witness. I’m tough but I’m fair. I’ll tell them what I saw, never you fear.”
Two months later, discharged with a pension and with my thumb buried at Calvi, I was transferred to the No. 5 Depot at Toulon, and there they let me go.
I went to say thank you to Clara at the Moulin Rouge. She was of the opinion that nobody would even notice the absence of a thumb on my left hand, and that I could make love as well with four fingers as with five. That’s what really mattered.
“You’ve changed in some way, Riri. I can’t quite tell how. I hope your three months with those undesirables have not left too many traces.”
There I was with my father in my childhood home: I had hurried back after my discharge. Was there some deep change in me? “I can’t tell you, Papa: I don’t know. I think I’m more violent and less willing to obey the rules of life you taught me when I was a little boy. You must be right: something has changed in me. I feel it, being here in this house, where we were so happy with Mama and my sisters. It doesn’t hurt as much as it used to. I must have grown harder.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What do you advise?”
“Find a position as soon as possible. You’re twenty now, my boy.”
Two exams. One at Privas for the post office; the other at Avignon for a civilian job in the military administration. Grandfather Thierry went with me.
Both the written and the oral parts went very well. I was playing the game; I had no objection to following my father’s advice--I’d be a civil servant and lead a proper, honorable life. But now I can’t help wondering how long the young Charrière would have stayed a civil servant with everything that was boiling up inside him.
When the morning post brought the results of the exam, my delighted papa decided to have a little party in my honor. A huge cake, a bottle of real champagne and a colleague’s daughter invited to the feast. “She would make a fine wife for my boy.” For the first time for ten years, the house bubbled with joy.
I walked around the garden with the girl Papa dreamed of as a daughter-in-law, a girl who might make his little boy happy. She was pretty, well brought up and very intelligent.
Two months later, the bombshell! “Since you have not been able to provide our central office with a good-conduct certificate from the navy, we regret to inform you that you cannot enter our service.”
After the letter came, shattering all his illusions, Papa was sad, saying very little. He was suffering.
Why go on like this? Quick, a suitcase and a few clothes: take advantage of the teachers’ meeting at Aubenas and get out.
My grandmother caught me on the stairs. “Where are you going, Henri?”
“I’m going somewhere where they won’t ask me for a goodconduct certificate from the navy. I’m going to see one of the men I knew in the disciplinary sections at Calvi, and he’ll teach me how to live outside this society I was stupid enough to believe in--a society that knows very well I can expect nothing from it. I’m going to Paris, to Montmartre, Grandmother.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet, but certainly no good. Good-bye, Grandmother. Give Papa a big kiss from me.”
We were getting close to the land, and now we could even see the windows of the houses. I was coming back after a very, very long journey to see my people: to see them after twenty-six years.
For them, I was dead; for their children, I had never existed--my name had never been pronounced. Or perhaps just a few times, when they were alone with Papa. It was only during these last five years that they must gradually have given their kids some idea of Uncle Henri, who lived in Venezuela.
We had corresponded for five years; but even so wouldn’t they be afraid of what people might say? Wouldn’t they feel rather nervous about meeting an escaped ex-convict at a rendezvous in Spain?
I did not want them to come out of duty; I wanted them to come with their hearts full of genuine feeling for me.
Ah, but if they only knew... if they only knew--the coast was coming nearer slowly now, but how it had raced away from me twenty-six years ago--if they only knew how I had been with them all the time during those fourteen years of prison!
If only my sisters could see all the visions of our childhood I made for myself in the cells and the wild-beast cages of the Reclusion!
If only they knew how I kept myself going with them and with all those who made up our family, drawing from them the strength to beat the unbearable, to find peace in the midst of despair, to forget being a prisoner, to reject suicide--if they only knew how the months, days, hours, minutes and seconds of those years of total solitude and utter silence had been filled to overflowing with the smallest events of our wonderful childhood!
The coast drew nearer and nearer; we saw Barcelona: we were about to enter its harbor. I had a wild desire to cup my hands and shout, with all my strength, “Hey there! I’m coming! Come as fast as you can!” just as I used to call out to them when we were children in the fields of Fabras and I had found a great patch of violets.
“What are you doing here, darling? I’ve been looking for you this last hour. I even went down to the car.”
Without getting up I put my arm round Rita’s waist; she bent down and gave me a little kiss on the cheek. Only then did I realize that, although I was going to meet my people full of selfquestioning and full of questions to ask as well, there in my arms was my own private family, the family that I had founded and that had brought me to this point. I said, “Darling, I was living over the past again as I watched the land come closer, the land that holds my people, the living and the dead.”
Barcelona: our gleaming car on the quay with all the baggage neatly in the trunk. We did not stay the night in the great city; we were impatient to drive on through the sunlit countryside toward the French frontier. But after two hours my feelings overcame me so that I had to pull in to the side of the road--I could not go on.
I got out of the car: my eyes were dazzled with looking at this landscape, these plowed fields, huge plane trees, trembling reeds, the thatched or tiled roofs of the farms and cottages, the poplars singing in the wind, the meadows with every possible shade of green, the cows with the bells tinkling as they grazed, the vines-- ah, the vines with their leaves that could not hide all the grapes. This piece of Catalonia was exactly the same as all my French gardenlike landscapes: all this was mine and had been mine since I was born; it was among these same colors, these same growing things, these same crops that I had wandered hand in hand with my grandfather; it was through fields like these that I had carried my father’s game bag when he went shooting and when we urged our bitch Clara to startle a rabbit or flush a covey of partridges. Even the fences around the farms were the same as they were at home! And the little irrigation canals with their planks set across here and there to guide the water into one field or another; I did not have to go up to them to know there were frogs that I could bring out, as many as I wanted, with a hook baited with a piece of red cloth, as I had done so often as a child.
And I quite forgot that this vast plain was Spanish, so exactly was it li
ke the valley of the Ardèche or the Rhone.
We stopped at the hotel nearest the French frontier. The next day Rita took the train to fetch Tante Ju from Saint-Peray. I should have gone myself, but for the French police I was still a man who had escaped from Guiana. While Rita was away I found a very fine house at Rosas, right on the edge of the beach.
A few more minutes of waiting, Papi, and then you will see Tante Ju step out of the train, the woman who loved your father, and who wrote you such beautiful letters, bringing back to life your memories of those who loved you and whom you loved so much.
It was Rita who got out first. As carefully as a daughter, she helped her tall companion climb down to the platform. And then two big arms enfolded me, two big arms pressed me to her bosom, two big arms conveying the warmth of life and a thousand things that cannot be expressed in words. And it was with one arm around Rita and the other around my second mother that I walked out of the station, quite forgetting that suitcases do not come with their owners unless they are carried.
It was eleven in the morning when Rita and Tante Ju arrived, and it was three the next morning when Tante Ju went to her bedroom, worn out by the journey, by her age, by emotion and by sixteen hours of uninterrupted exchange of memories.
I fell into my bed and went straight to sleep, exhausted, without a breath of energy to keep me awake. The outburst of urgent happiness is as shattering as the worst disaster.
My two women were up before me, and it was they who pulled me out of my deep sleep to tell me it was eleven in the morning, that the sun was shining, the sky blue, the sand warm, that breakfast was waiting for me and that I should eat it quickly so as to go to the frontier to fetch my sister and her tribe, who were to be there in two hours. “Rather earlier,” said Tante Ju, “because your brother-in-law will have been forced to drive fast, to keep the family from bullying him, they are so eager to see you.”