“A cinch? Why?”
“The way they’re organized, the OAS men don’t have to get into Venezuela by the ordinary ways, the ports or airfields. The land frontiers are enormous--Brazil, Colombia, British Guiana--not to mention a coastline of over a thousand miles. They can come in just when they want, on the day and at the time that suits them, without anyone’s being able to do anything about it. That’s your first mistake, Commissaire. But there’s another, too.”
“What’s that?” asked Belion, smiling.
“If these OAS guys are as sharp as people say, they’ve taken great care not to contact the French living here. Because since they know the cops are going straight to the Frenchmen, their very first precaution must be to go nowhere near a single one of them. And don’t forget, no evil-intentioned guy is ever going to stay in a hotel. There are hundreds of people here who’ll rent a room to no matter who without declaring him. So you see there’s no point in looking for people who might make an attempt on Dc Gaulle’s life among the Frenchmen here, crooks or not.”
When Belion left he told me to come and see him when I returned to Paris; and he played it straight with me. Unlike some other Frenchmen, I was not expelled from Caracas during De Gaulle’s stay--a stay that passed off with no trouble at all.
Like a fool, I went along and cheered De Gaulle.
And, like a fool, in the mere presence of this great leader who had saved my country’s honor, I forgot that that same country had sent me to the clink for life.
And, like a fool, I would have given one of my fingers to shake his hand or be there at the embassy’s reception in his honor: a reception to which I was not invited, of course. But the underworld was able to take an indirect revenge, because some old, retired French whores slipped in: they had turned over a new leaf, as you might say, by making a good marriage, and there they were with their arms full of flowers for De Gaulle’s delighted wife.
I went to see the French consul, and he read me out the notification that proceedings against me lapsed the next year. One more year and I’d go to France.
Our situation improved rapidly, and I went back into all-night bars, buying the Scotch Club in Chacaito, in the very middle of Caracas. This was an odd business, because I went into it in the first place to rescue a poor French hairdresser some ugly bastards were trying to fleece. Later this Robin Hood caper paid off very well.
So for several years I was living by night again. The Caracas nightlife was growing more and more vulgar, losing that touch of bohemianism that was its charm. The men who lived it up were no longer the same, and the new customers lacked culture and good manners.
I stayed in the bar as little as possible, living in the street almost all the time, wandering about the neighboring districts. I came to know the kids of Caracas, the urchins who drifted about all night looking for a few cents, and the wonderful inventiveness of these children whose parents lived in rabbit hutches. Not always model parents, either; for there were a good many who, in their poverty, had no hesitation in exploiting their children.
And these kids bravely launched themselves into the night to bring home the amount required of them. They were any age between five and twelve; some were shoeshine boys, others waited at the door of all-night joints, offering to guard the customer’s car as he went in, and others rushed to open the car door ahead of the doorman. A thousand dodges, a thousand clever gimmicks to add bolIvar to bolivar until they had ten or thereabouts, so that at five or six in the morning they could go home.
Often, when a customer I knew was just going to get into his big car, I would urge him to be generous, using this formula: “Be handsome, now! Think of the money you’ve spent in this joint-- a hundredth part of what you’ve splashed about would be a godsend to this poor kid.” Nine times out of ten it worked, and the playboy would give the kid a ten- or twenty-bolIvar note.
My best friend was named Pablito. He was rather small and thin, but he was tough, and he fought older, bigger boys like a lion. For there were conflicting interests in this struggle for life, and if a customer had not specially pointed out one boy to guard his car, then when the man came out again, the quickest off the mark got the coin. That meant a pitched battle.
My little friend was bright, and he had learned to read from the papers he sold now and then. There was none like him at outstripping all competition when a car drew up; and he was the quickest at running little errands--fetching things the bar was short of, like sandwiches or cigarettes.
Every night my little Pablito carried on the struggle so that he could help his grandmother; she was a very, very old grandmother, it seemed, with white hair, faded blue eyes and rheumatism so bad she couldn’t work at all. His mother was in jail for having crowned a neighbor with a bottle when he tried to steal her radio. And he, at nine, was the only breadwinner in the family. He wouldn’t let his grandmother, his little brother or his little sister come out into the streets of Caracas, either by day or by night. He was the man of the house, and he had to look after all his people and protect them.
So I helped Pablito when he had had a bad night or in cases of emergency, with money for his grandmother’s medicines or for a taxi to take her to see a doctor at the free hospital.
“And she has these bouts of asthma, too, my grandmother. Do you realize what that costs, Enrique?”
And every night Pablito gave me a report on his grandmother’s health. One day there was an important request: he needed forty bolivars to buy a secondhand mattress. His grandmother could not lie in a hammock anymore, because of her asthma: the doctor said it compressed her chest.
He often used to sit in my car, and one day the policeman on guard was talking to him, leaning on the door and playing with his revolver: without the least bad intention he put a bullet into Pablito’s shoulder. They rushed him to the hospital and operated. I went to see him the next day. I asked where his hut was and how to get to it; he said it was impossible to find it without a guide, and the doctor wouldn’t let him get up in that condition.
That night I looked for Pablito’s friends, hoping one of them would take me to his grandmother. The terrific solidarity of street urchins: they all said they did not know where he lived. I didn’t believe a word of it, because every day a whole gang of them waited for one another to go home together.
I was interested and puzzled, and I asked the nurse to call me when Pablito had a visitor she knew was a member of the family or a neighbor. Two days later she called and I went to the hospital.
“Well, Pablito, and how are you coming along? You look worried.”
“No, Enrique; it’s only that my back hurts.”
“Yet he was laughing only a few minutes ago,” said his visitor.
“Are you one of his family, Madame?”
“No. I’m a neighbor.”
“How are his grandmother and the little ones?”
“What grandmother?”
“Why, Pablito’s grandmother.”
“But Pablito hasn’t got a grandmother.”
I took the woman aside. Yes, he had a little sister, and yes, he had a little brother, but no grandmother. His mother was not in prison; she was a wreck of a woman, very dim-witted.
That wonderful Caracas street kid did not want his friend Enrique to know his mother was half crazy, and he had invented this splendid asthmatic grandmother so that his buddy the Frenchman, giving because of her, might relieve his poor mother’s unhappiness and distress.
I went back to my little friend’s bed: he was ashamed to look me in the face. Gently I pulled his chin up; his eyes were closed, but when at last he opened them I said, “Pablito, eres un tronco de hombre.” (You’re a real man.)
I slipped him a hundred-boilvar note for his family and walked out, thoroughly proud and pleased with myself for having such a friend.
17
Montmartre -- My Trial
By 1967 proceedings against me had lapsed. I left for France by myself; to keep the business running properly you had
to have authority and courage and the power of making yourself respected, and only Rita could do that. She said to me, “Go and embrace your people in their own homes; go and pray at your father’s grave.”
I went back to France by way of Nice. Why Nice? Together with my visa, the French consulate in Caracas had given me a document verifying the lapse of proceedings; but as he handed the papers to me, the consul said, “Wait until I have instructions from France about the conditions under which you can return.” They didn’t have to spell it out. If I went back to the consul and he had received the reply from Paris, he would tell me I was forbidden to enter the Département of the Seine for life. But I had every intention of making a trip to Paris.
This way I avoided getting the notification; and since I had neither received nor signed it, I would be committing no offense unless the consul learned that I’d left and told the police at the Paris airport to hand me the notification. Hence my two stops-- I should arrive at Nice as though I were coming from Spain.
1930--1967: thirty-seven years had gone by.
Fourteen years of the road down the drain: twenty-two years of freedom, twenty of them with a home, which meant that I could go straight, reintegrated into society.
In 1956, there’d been a month with my people in Spain; then a gap of eleven years, though during these eleven years our many letters had kept me in contact with my family.
In 1967 I saw them all. I went into their homes, I sat at their tables, I had their children on my knee and even their grand. children. Grenoble, Lyons, Cannes, Saint-Priest and then SaintPeray, where I found Tante Ju in my father’s house, still faithful at her post.
I listened to Tante Ju as she told me why Pap had died before his time. He watered his garden himself and he carried the cans for hours and hours over a distance of more than two hundred yards. “Just imagine that, my dear, at his ages He could have bought a rubber hose, but Lord above, he was as stubborn as a mule. And one day, as he was carrying these watering cans, his heart failed.”
I could just see my father lugging those heavy cans all the way to his beds of lettuces, tomatoes and stringbeans. And I could see him obstinately persisting in not getting the hose his wife, Tante Ju, kept begging him to buy. And I could see him, that country schoolmaster, stopping to draw breath and to mop his forehead, advise a neighbor or give a botany lesson to one of his grandsons.
Before going to see his grave in the cemetery, I asked Tante Ju to go with me on his favorite walks. And we went at the same pace he used to go, following the same stony paths lined with rushes, poppies and daisies until a milestone or some bees or the flight of a bird would remind Tante Ju of some little happening long ago that had touched them. Then, quite delighted, she would recall for me how my father had told her about his grandson’s being stung by a wasp. “There, Henri, do you see? He was standing just there.”
I listened, with my throat constricted, thirsty for more, still more of the smallest details about my father’s life. “You know, J u,” my father had said to her, “when my boy was very small, five or six at the most, he was stung by a wasp when we were out for a walk--not once, like my grandson, but twice. Well, he never cried at all; and on top of that, we had the greatest difficulty keeping him from going off to look for the wasps’ nest to destroy it. Oh, Riri was so brave!”
I did not travel on into the Ardèche; I went no farther than Saint-Peray. For my return to my village I wanted Rita with me.
I got out of the train at the Gare de Lyon, and put my bags in a locker at the station so as not to have to fill out a registration form at the hotel. And then, once more, there was the asphalt of Paris under my feet.
But this asphalt was not my asphalt until I was in my own district, Montmartre. I went there by night, of course. The only sun the Papillon of the Thirties knew was that of the electric lights.
And here it was, Montmartre: the Place Pigalle and the Pierrot Café and the moonlight and the Passage Elysee des Beaux-Arts and the heilbenders whooping it up and the jokers and the whores and the pimps that anyone in the know could recognize right off just by the way they walked, and the joints crammed tight with people at the bar. But all this was just my first impression.
Thirty-seven years had gone by, and nobody took any notice of me. Who was going to look at an old man of sixty? The girls might even ask me upstairs, and the young men might be so disrespectful as to elbow me out of my place at the bar.
Just one more stranger, a possible client, a provincial manufacturer--that’s what this well-dressed, tie-wearing gent must be; a middle-class guy, another who had lost his way at this late hour and in this dubious bar. You could see right away he wasn’t used to these parts; you could feel he was uneasy.
Sure I was uneasy, and that was understandable. These were not the same people or the same faces; at the first whiff you could tell that everything was mixed up now. Pigs, lesbians, flits, knowit-aIls, squares, blacks, and Arabs; there were only a few characters from Marseille or Corsica, speaking with a southern accent, to remind me of the old times. It was a completely different world from the one I had known.
There wasn’t even what there had always been in my timetables with groups of poets, painters or actors, with their long hair that reeked of Bohemia and an avant-garde intellectuality. Now every silly little jerk had long hair.
I wandered from bar to bar like a sleepwalker, and I climbed stairs to see if the pool tables of my youth were still on the second floor, and I civilly refused a guide’s offer to show me Montparnasse. But I did ask him, “Do you think that since 1930 Montmartre has lost the soul it had in those days?”
I felt like slapping him down for an answer that insulted my own personal Montmartre: “Oh, but Monsieur, Montmartre is immortal. I’ve lived here forty years, seeing I came when I was ten, and believe me, Place Pigalle, Place Blanche, Place Clichy and all the streets running off them are just the same and always will be the same forever.”
I fled from the dreary bastard and walked along under the trees on the raised part in the middle of the avenue. From here, yes-- as long as you didn’t see the people clearly, as long as you saw only their shapes--from here, yes, Montmartre was still the same. I went slowly toward the very spot where I was alleged to have shot Roland Lepetit on the night of March 25--26, 1930.
The bench, probably the same bench repainted every year (a public bench might perfectly well last thirty-seven years with wood that thick), the bench was there, and the lamppost, and the bar over the way, and the half-closed shutters on the house opposite, they were still there. They were the first, the only, the true witnesses of the tragedy; they knew very well the man who fired that night was not me. Why didn’t they say so?
People went by, unconcerned, never noticing this sixty-year-old man leaning against a tree, the same tree that had been there when the shot was fired.
Twenty-four I was in 1930, when I used to run down the Rue Lepic, that street I can still walk up pretty briskly. The ghost has come back in spite of you all; he’s pushed back the gravestone under which you buried him alive. Stop, stop, you half-blind creatures passing by! Stop and have a look at an innocent man who was condemned for a murder on this very ground, before these same trees and these same stones--stop and ask these dumb witnesses, ask them to speak out today. And if you lean close, you will hear them whispering faintly, “No, this man was not here at half past three on the night of twenty-fifth to twenty-sixth March thirty-seven years ago.”
“Where was he, then?” the doubters will ask. Simple: I was in the Iris Bar, maybe a hundred yards from here. In the Iris Bar, when a taxi driver burst in, crying, “There was a shot outside just now.”
“It wasn’t true,” said the pigs. “It wasn’t true,” said the boss and the waiter of the Iris, prompted by the pigs.
Once again I saw the inquiry; I saw the trial: I could not avoid being brought face to face with the past. You want to live through it again, man? Nearly forty years have passed, and you still want to go through tha
t nightmare again? You’re not afraid this going back will make you long for a revenge you gave up ages ago?
Sit down there, on this same green bench, the one that saw the killing just opposite the Rue Germain-Pilon, right here on the Boulevard de Clichy, by the Clichy Bar-Tabac, where the tragedy began after the inquiry.
It’s the night of March 25--26: half past three in the morning. A man comes into the Clichy and asks for Madame Nini.
“That’s me,” a tart says.
“Your man’s just been shot in the guts. Come on; he’s in a taxi.”
Nini runs after the unknown guy, together with a girl friend. They get into the taxi, where Roland Lepetit is sitting on the back seat. Nini asks the unknown guy who told her to come, too. He says, “I can’t,” and disappears.
“Quick, the Lariboisière hospital!”
It was only during the drive that the taxi driver, a Russian, learned that his passenger was wounded: he had not noticed anything before. The moment his fare was unloaded at the hospital he hurried off to tell the police what he knew: he had been hailed by two men arm in arm outside 17, boulevard de Clichy: only one of them got in--Roland Lepetit. The other told him to drive to the Clichy Bar and followed on foot. This man went into the bar and came out with two women; then he vanished. The two women told him to drive to the Lariboisière hospital: “It was during the trip that I learned the man was wounded.”
The police carefully wrote all this down; they also wrote down Nini’s declaration that her boyfriend had played cards all that night in that same bar where she plied her trade, had played cards with an unknown man; he’d played dice and had a drink at the bar with some men, still all of them unknown; and Roland had left after the others, alone. There was nothing in Nini’s statement to indicate that anyone had come to fetch him. He’d gone out by himself, after the others, the unknowns, had left.