Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon

  I parked the Lincoln right next to the Spanish frontier post.

  Here they were! They were on foot, running--they had abandoned my brother-in-law in his Citroën back there in the line by the French customs.

  First came my sister Hélène, her arms out. She ran across the stretch of no-man’s-land from the one post to the other, from France to Spain. I went toward her, my guts tied up with emotion. At four yards we stopped to look one another right in the face. Our tear-dimmed eyes said, “It is really her, my childhood Nène” and “It is really him, my little brother Riri from long ago.” And we flung ourselves into each other’s arms. Strange. For me this fifty-year-old sister was as she had always been. I did not see her aging face; I saw nothing except that the brilliant animation of her eyes was still the same and that for me her features had not altered.

  Our embrace lasted so long we forgot all about the others. Rita had already kissed the children. I heard “How pretty you are, Aunt!” and I turned, left my Nène, and thrust Rita into her arms, saying, “Love her dearly, because it is she who has brought me to you all.”

  My three nieces were splendid and my brother-in-law was in great form. The only one missing was his eldest boy, Jacques, who had been called up for the war in Algeria.

  We left for Rosas, the Lincoln in front, with my sister at my side. I shall never forget that first meal, with us all sitting at a round table. There were times when my legs trembled so that I had to take hold of them under the cloth.

  1930--1956. So many, many things had happened, both for them and for me. I did not talk about the penal settlement during the meal. I just asked my brother-in-law whether my being found guilty had caused them a great deal of trouble and unpleasantness. He reassured me kindly, but I could feel how much they must have suffered, having a convict as brother and brother-inlaw.

  No, I said nothing about prison, and I said nothing about my trial. For them and, I sincerely believe, for me, too, my life began the day when, thanks to Rita, I buried my old self, the man on the loose, to bring Henri Charrière back to life, the son of the Ardèche schoolteachers.

  That August on the sands of Rosas beach went by too fast. I rediscovered the cries of my childhood, the laughter with no cause, the outbursts of joy of my young days on the beach of Palavas, where we used to go with my parents.

  One month: thirty days. How long it is in a cell alone with oneself, and how terribly short it is with one’s own people. I was literally drunk with happiness. Not only had I my sister and my brother-in-law again, but I had also discovered new people to love--my nieces, unknown only the other day, and now almost daughters to me.

  Rita was radiant with joy at seeing me so happy. Bringing us together at last, out of reach of the French police, was the finest present she could have given either them or me. I lay on the beach; it was very late--midnight perhaps. Rita was stretched out on the sand, too, with her head against my thigh; I stroked her hair. “They all fly away tomorrow. How quickly it has passed; but how wonderful it was! One must not ask too much, darling, I know; but still, I’m sad at having to part from them. God knows when we’ll see one another again. A journey like this costs so much.”

  “Trust in the future: I’m sure we’ll see them again one day.”

  We went with them as far as the frontier. They were taking Tante Ju in their car. A hundred yards from the French border we parted. There were no tears, because I told them of my faith in the future--in a couple of years we should spend not one month of holiday together but two.

  “Is it true, what you say, Uncle?”

  “Of course, darlings, of course.”

  A week later my other sister landed at Barcelona airport, by herself. She had not been able to bring her family. Among the forty-odd passengers coming off the plane I recognized her at once, and after she had passed through customs she came straight toward me without the least hesitation.

  Three days and three nights--she could spend only a little while with us, so since we did not want to lose a minute, it was three days and three nights of memories almost without a pause. She and Rita liked one another at once, so we could tell one another everything--she her whole life story and me all that could be told.

  Two days later Rita’s mother arrived from Tangiers. With her two fine, gentle hands on my cheeks she kissed me tirelessly, saying, “My son, I am so happy that you love Rita and that she loves you.” Her face shone with a serene beauty in its halo of white hair.

  We stayed in Spain too long, our happiness hiding the days that passed. We could not go back by boat--sixteen days was more than we could spare--so we flew (the Lincoln coming later by ship), because our business was waiting.

  Still, we did make a little tour of Spain, and there in the hanging gardens of Granada, that wonder of the Arab civilization, I read these words of a poet, cut into the stone at the foot of the Marador tower: Dale lirnosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada; give him alms, woman, because there is no greater sadness in life than being blind in Granada.

  Yes, there is something worse than being blind in Granada, and that is being twenty-four, full of health and trust in life, undisciplined, maybe, and even a little dishonest, but not really corrupt through and through or at least not a killer, and to hear yourself condemned to a life sentence for another man’s crime: a sentence that means vanishing forever without appeal, without hope, condemned to rot bodily and mentally, without one chance in a hundred thousand of ever raising your head and being a man again someday.

  How many men whom a pitiless justice and an inhuman penitentiary system have crushed and destroyed inch by inch would have preferred to be blind in Granada!

  14

  The Revolution

  The plane we had boarded at Madrid came down gently at Maiquetla, the Caracas airport, and there was our daughter waiting for us, together with some friends. Twenty minutes later we were back home. The dogs welcomed us enthusiastically, and our Indian maid, who was one of the family, never stopped asking, “And how are Henri’s people, Señora? And Henri, what did you think of Rita’s mama? I was afraid you would never come back, with all those people over there to love you. Thanks be to God, here you are, all in one piece.”

  The struggle for life went on. We sold the restaurant: I had begun to have enough of steak and french fries, canard a l’orange and coq au vin. We bought an all-night joint, the Caty-Bar.

  In Caracas an all-night bar is a place where the customers are all men, because it has its own girls to keep them company, talk to them and, even more, listen to them, drink with them, and if they are not very thirsty, help them on a little. It’s quite a different kind of life from that of the day, much more intense and not in the least peaceful; but it is one where every night you discover something new and interesting.

  Senators, deputies, bankers, lawyers, officers and high officials hurried in at night to let off the steam that had piled up during the day, when they had to keep a hold on themselves and maintain an image of perfectly virtuous behavior in their various jobs. And at the Caty-Bar each one showed himself as he really was. It was a bursting out of the social hypocrisy they were forced to observe, a refuge from business or family worries.

  For these few hours every single one of them grew young again. With alcohol lending them a hand, they threw off their social chains and started right in on a life that left them free to shout and argue and play the Don Juan with the prettiest girls in the bar. In our place things never went further than that, because Rita ran the bar very strictly and no woman was allowed out during working hours. But all the men enjoyed the presence of these girls who were kind enough to listen when they talked (they loved that) and to fill their hours of freedom with beauty and youth.

  How often I have seen them at daybreak, all alone (because the girls left by another door), but nevertheless happy and easier in their minds. One was an important businessman who was always at his desk by nine; he was a regular customer, and I used to walk to his car wi
th him. He would put his hand on my shoulder, and waving the other arm toward the mountains of Caracas, sharp against the early-morning sky, he would say, “The night is over, Enrique; the sun is going to rise behind the Avila. No hope of going anywhere else--everything is shut; and with the daylight we come face to face with our responsibilities. Work, the office, the slavery of every day is waiting for me; but how could we go on without these nights?”

  Very soon I had another place, the Madrigal, and then a third, the Normandy. Together with Gonzalo Durand, a Socialist and an opponent of the régime who was ready night and day to defend the interests of nightclub, bar and restaurant owners, we formed an association for the protection of places of this kind. Some time later I was made president, and we defended our members as well as we could against the abuses of certain officials.

  I turned the Madrigal into a Russian joint, calling it the Ninotchka; and by way of adding to the local color I dressed a Spaniard from the Canaries as a Cossack and perched him on a horse I knew was placid because of its great age. The two of them were to act as porters. But the customers started giving the Cossack drinks--he was bored stiff at half a dollar an hour--and, what was worse, they did not slight the horse either. Of course, the horse couldn’t knock back glasses of whisky, but it dearly loved sugar dipped in liqueur, particularly kümmel. Result: when the old horse was drunk, and the Cossack tight as a drum, they would tear off down our street, the Avenida Miranda, an important artery crammed with traffic, galloping right and left, the Spaniard shrieking, “Charge! Charge!” You can just imagine the scene: brakes jammed on so hard they almost tore up the asphalt, cars banging into one another, drivers bawling, windows opening and angry voices shouting about the din at that time of night.

  To top it all, although I had only a single musician, he was not one of the ordinary kind. He was a German named Kurt Lowendal; he had a boxer’s hands and he played the cha-cha on his organ with such zeal that the walls trembled even up to the ninth floor. I could hardly believe it, but the concierge and the owner took me up with them one evening to see, and they weren’t exaggerating.

  My other joint, the Normandy, was really beautifully placed-- right opposite police headquarters. On one side of the street, terror and grilling, and on the other the gaiety of life. For once I was on the right side. Not that that prevented me from making things tricky for myself: I did the most dangerous thing I could-- I acted as a secret post office for the prisoners, both political and criminal.

  1958. For some months now things had been on the move in Venezuela: Perez Jiménez’s dictatorship was limping badly. Even the privileged classes were dropping away from him, and the only supporters he had left were the army and the Seguridad Nacional, the terrible political police, who were making more and more arrests.

  Meanwhile, in New York, the three most important political leaders, all in exile, had worked out their plan for seizing power. These were Rafael Caldera, Jovito Villalba and Romulo Betancourt. On January 1 an air force general, Castro Leon, tried to get his men to revolt, and a small group of pilots dropped a few bombs on Caracas, particularly on Perez Jiménez’s presidential palace. The operation failed, and Castro Leon fled to Colombia.

  But at two AM, on January 23, a plane flew over Caracas. It was Perez Jiménez going off with his family, his closest associates and part of his fortune--a cargo of such value in people and wealth that the Venezuelans christened the plane The Holy Cow. Perez J iménez knew he had lost the game--the army had abandoned him, after ten years of dictatorship. His plane flew straight to Santo Domingo, where another dictator, General Trujillo, could only welcome his colleague.

  For almost three weeks there were no police in the streets. Of course, there was pillaging and violence, but only against Perez J iménez’s supporters. A nation was bursting out after being muzzled for ten years. The Seguridad Nacional’s headquarters, opposite the Normandy, was attacked, and most of its members killed.

  During the three days that followed the departure of Perez J iménez I very nearly lost the result of twelve years’ work. Several people telephoned to tell me that all the bars, nightclubs, luxury restaurants and places frequented by the top supporters of Perez J iménez were being broken into and sacked. We had our apartment on the floor above the Caty-Bar. Our building was a little villa at the bottom of a blind alley, with the bar at street level, then our living quarters and then a flat roof over that.

  I was determined to defend my house, my business and my people. I got hold of twenty bottles of gasoline, made them into Molotov cocktails and lined them up neatly on the roof. Rita would not leave me: she was at my side with a lighter in her hand.

  Then they came! A crowd of pillagers--more than a hundred of them. Since the Caty-Bar was in a blind alley, anyone who came along it was coming to us.

  They came closer and among the shouts I heard, “This is one of the Pérezjiménists’ places! Sack it!” They broke into a run, waving iron bars and shovels. I lit the lighter.

  Suddenly the crowd halted. Four men with their arms stretched out were strung across the alley: they stopped the overexcited mob. I heard them say, “We are workers, we belong to the people, and we are revolutionaries, too. We’ve known these people for years. Enrique, the boss, is a Frenchman, and he’s a friend of the people--he’s proved it to us hundreds of times. Get out, there’s nothing for you to do here.”

  They began to argue, but more quietly, and I heard these splendid men explain why they were defending us. It lasted a good twenty minutes, with Rita and me still on the roof, holding the lighter. The four must have persuaded them to leave us in peace, because the mob withdrew without any threats.

  Lord, that was a close one! A close one for a good many of them, too, I may say. None of them ever came back.

  These four men of the people, our defenders, worked for the Caracas Water Company. And it so happened that the side door of the Caty-Bar, down at the bottom of the alley, was right next to the entrance to the company’s depot, the gate the tankers used when they went to supply places that were short of water. We often gave the men who worked there something to eat, and if they came for a bottle of Coke we said there was nothing to pay. Because of the dictatorship they almost never talked politics, but sometimes, when they had had a drink, a few would let out an incautious word--it was, overheard and reported. Then they were either imprisoned or sacked.

  Often either Rita or I had been able to get one of our customers to have the culprit let out or given back his job. In any case, among the senators, deputies and officers belonging to the régime, a good many were very kind and obliging. There were few who would not do a favor.

  On that day the Water Company’s men paid their debt to us, and they paid it with very great courage, because the mob was in no laughing mood. And the most extraordinary thing was that the same miracle happened for our two other places. Not a pane of glass smashed at the Ninotchka. Nothing, absolutely nothing destroyed and nothing stolen at the Normandy, right opposite the terrible Seguridad Nacional, the hottest spot of the whole revolution, with machine guns firing in all directions and revolutionaries burning and pillaging the shops right, left and center all along the Avenida Mejico.

  Under Perez Jiménez, nobody had argued; nobody had done anything but obey. The press was muzzled.

  Under his successor, Admiral Larrazábal, everybody danced, sang, disobeyed to his heart’s content, spoke or wrote anything that came into his head, drunk with joy at being able to sling bullshit in total freedom, with no inhibitions.

  The sailor was a poet into the bargain, an artist at heart, sensitive to the wretched position and poverty of the thousands of people who came flooding into Caracas, wave after wave of them, as soon as the dictator had fallen. He thought up the Emergency Plan, which handed out millions from the national funds to these unfortunate souls.

  He promised that there should be elections. More than true to his word, he prepared them very fairly; but although the admiral got in at Caracas, it was Betanco
urt who won the election. Betancourt had to face up to a tricky situation--not a day went by without some plot’s being hatched, not a single day without his having to win a battle against the forces of reaction.

  I had just bought the biggest café in Caracas, the Grand Café in the Gran Sabana: over four hundred seats. This was the café where Julot Huignard, the guard of Levy’s jewelry shop, had said we should meet when we were in the corridor of the Sante way back in 1931. “Keep your spirits up, Pap! We’ll meet at the Grand Café in Caracas.” Here I was at the rendezvous, twenty-eight years later, to be sure, but still here--and I owned it. But Huignard had not kept the appointment.

  The political state of the country did not make Betancourt’s job an easy one. A vile, cowardly attempt on his life suddenly upset the still youthful democracy. Under the remote control of Trujillo, the dictator of Santo Domingo, a car stuffed with explosives went off right by the president as he was driving to an official ceremony. The head of the military household was killed, the chauffeur very badly wounded; General Lopez Henriquez and his wife were horribly burned, and the president himself had his forearms painfully injured by the flames. Twenty-four hours later, with his hands bandaged, he addressed the Venezuelan nation. It seemed so unbelievable that some people claimed the man who spoke was his double.

  In such an atmosphere Venezuela, too, though blessed by the gods, began to be attacked by the virus of political passion. There were cops everywhere, and among the officials, there were some who made evil use of their political connections.