Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  It could have gone on for ever, said Zi-Zi.

  Maybe, said Jérôme. There were still cows here in 1951.

  I asked him whether it was the last place to close.

  No, he said, that was the Iles du Salut. First to open, last to close.

  ‘Et la plus belle!’ said the actors.

  Yes, said Jérôme, and probably the worst.

  These days a road soars through the swamps, off to the isles. It was a long, flat ride, through a soggy landscape of roots and knotted scrub. I was sorry that the actors couldn’t be persuaded to throw in their lives and come along too. They’d have enjoyed the roadblocks. About every fifty miles my minibus was stopped by some or other militia, and something always happened. But France has so many militias that it’s often hard to say whether you’ve offended the navy or the tax man, or just parked where you shouldn’t. These ones always found someone to question or to take off and search. I think they’d have worried me more if it wasn’t for their shorts. These were always half a dozen sizes too small, making them look magnificently gay, as though Village People had taken over the bush.

  ‘What are they after?’ I asked the driver.

  ‘Brésiliens,’ he whispered, ‘les brésiliens illégaux.’

  Then we’d get the nod, everyone would breathe again, and we’d be off.

  Behind us, the roadblocks sank back into the plain. In a rather bored way I tried to imagine what an earlier generation of officials would have made of their successors. The shorts would have raised a few eyebrows. In all the pictures I’d seen, the colony’s warders or surveillants are wearing sharp white drill and look passionately grim. It’s said that the French prison service was an offshoot of the marines, and that its foot soldiers regarded imprisoning as just another form of war. It would also have surprised them, the way things were done in modern Guyane. They’d spent their lives trying to keep people in, and now here was the army trying to keep them out.

  Eventually we arrived on the coast, and there, wrinkling the horizon, nine miles off shore, were the Iles du Salut.

  They’ve never raised much hope in the hearts of Frenchmen. Originally they were just a nautical feature, the Triangle Islands – three great lumps of granite on the way to somewhere else. But then, after disembowelling one too many passers-by, they became known as the Islands of the Devil. It was a good name for such a lifeless place, without even water. Sailors could hear it heaving and groaning for miles. There was only one moment of grace, and that was in 1763. It was the great expedition, now in the final stages of dysentery and damp. The last few thousand survivors had sought out the islands, just to feel dry. It would never be much of a home, but at least there were no mosquitoes. In their feverish gratitude they renamed the archipelago the Salvation Islands, and somehow the name has stuck.

  But there wasn’t much salvation in the years to come. For a while it was a leper colony, but then in 1852 the first convicts appeared. Suddenly the islands had a role. There was Royale for the incorrigible, and St-Joseph for punishment. Then, for those who’d courted oblivion – France’s rebels and its traitors – there was Diable, or Devil’s Island, the ultimate oubliette. Although none of these islands was more than a mile long, in the popular imagination they’d have the stature of Hell. L’enfer au Paradis, as the actors would say.

  Take your own food, they’d warned, and plenty of water.

  ‘Et faites attention aux trous …’

  ‘… et aux mille-pattes!’

  I now pondered this advice. It was easy to stock up on cheese, tins, ham and a flagon of water, but preparing for the holes and the centipedes was harder. Instead, I bought a bottle of wine and a hammock, and booked my passage on the boat to Royale.

  The next day, at dawn, it set out, breasting a truculent ocean swell. We were barely out of the estuary before huge curls of silt were bursting overhead. Then the whole boat would be lifted up and we’d have a dizzying view of the islands before burrowing back in the waves.

  Throughout 1938 there’s a constant traffic of new arrivals on Royale. Among them is a forger from Lille, called Francis Lagrange. He is scraggy and twitchy, slightly arched, with quick, beady eyes, thick glasses and more than a touch of the rat. He’s also a terrible forger – so bad that, at the age of thirty, the police were beating down his door. He has now been in the camp at St-Laurent for seven years and has taught himself to paint. Like his banknotes, his work is crude, or naïf, and his people have tiny heads and swollen shoulders and hands that look like spam. But cowardice has made him a shrewd observer, always watching to see how things turn out. His pictures are scandalously detailed, like a window on the life of the camp. There are the fights, the work camps, the escapes, the executions and the libérés lying in the street, dying and drunk.

  Lagrange also has an impressive memory, especially for women. He never forgets a well-rounded body and will remember Lille’s girls for years, long after they’ve hustled him out, followed by his trousers. This makes him a formidable pornographer, and in the scrawny world of St-Laurent he accumulates a little fortune. He uses the money to pay a boatman to row him over to Suriname. But the Dutch always send him back. Eventually, after an attempt on the commandant’s mistress, the court declares him ‘inco’, or incorrigible, and sends him to Royale.

  Lagrange likes the island more than he’d imagined. It’s like a trilby covered in jungle. The sides of the hat are covered in hanging gardens and neatly cobbled roads. He is marched uphill, under the shade of the coconut trees. There are huge retaining walls of orange and purple granite. Everyone has a little job up here, growing vegetables or selling fish – and there’s Papillon with his oxen, slopping out his buckets.

  At the top of the hill there’s a little plateau and a clearing in the trees. Even up here Lagrange can hear the surf, like the storm in a seashell. The plateau is shady, and around the edge there are houses, a church with a Norman spire, barracks, the lock-up and a shiny new lighthouse, built out of iron. At one end the convicts have cut a reservoir which is so vast that they call it la mer, or the sea. At the other end there’s an old stone hospital, with a brand new ice-machine that clanks away all night. Next to it is la maison des fous, or the madhouse, from which every morning a man emerges and clambers down to the rocks to assemble his stones in the sea. He’s building a causeway, he explains, along which to escape.

  Lagrange is taken to his barracks. These are like the sheds in St-Laurent, but older and with thick walls of stone. They’re called ‘the Crimson Barracks’, and life inside is never quite as breezy and wholesome as it is across the hill. Lagrange watches and paints. Gambling powers a miniature economy, run by Parisian hoods and the Corsican milieu. The big shots, or truands, wear suits made of flour sacks. Everyone has a racket, usually in drink or boys. It’s not unusual for the strong-arm men to have several ‘wives’, who are known as les mômes, or ‘the brats’. Arguments are settled with home-made blades, and when a person’s sliced open over the concrete, there are no questions asked. It’s said that more murders have been committed here than in any other building in the world.

  Alongside the barracks is the quartier des surveillants. It’s a compound of squat pink bungalows. An uneasy truce exists between them and the barracks. The surveillants will leave the convicts to their own devices, provided the convicts don’t escape. If they do, the warders will lose six months’ leave and their colonial allowance, and they’ll come smashing through the barracks, breaking everything they can. They have become brutalised by their proximity to the bagnards, although each insists he’s addressed formally as ‘Monsieur le surveillant’.

  Lagrange paints a wistful picture of warder life, called Le Garçon de famille. In it, the surveillant stares from the window of his little pink house. Outside, a ‘houseboy’, in red-striped uniform and pinafore, pegs washing on a line. Beneath him, with her back to her husband, the warder’s wife gazes up dreamily, with her breasts deliciously exposed. The bagnard is so distracted by her gaze that his head is n
ow twisted round, facing backwards. Everyone is distorted by being so compacted together. As George Seaton, the English convict, put it, the warders are just as imprisoned as he is. They suffer the same ‘blistering heat and the savage rains’, and they’re just as likely to get leprosy and TB. They’re like animal trainers in a circus, never daring to relax. ‘In the bagne,’ he writes, ‘one half watches the other …’

  Although it was now over fifty years since the last bagnards left, much of their lives remained. There was still a great stone breakwater, the walls and the lanes up the hill. The hanging gardens were overgrown but still scattered with coconuts and fruit. A small menagerie of animals – monkeys, agoutis and giant iguanas – now snuffled around among the roots. Sometimes I’d get a flash of macaw, and shreds of guava and mango would come fluttering down from the branches above. In the lower forest there were long-legged pigs, as bristly and crude as the convicts before.

  Up on the plateau there was still the same settlement clinking in the heat. Only the madhouse had been overwhelmed by creepers and torn apart. The pink bungalows were still there – now chalets for tourists – and the barracks and the cells and the mango trees for shade. The hospital floors had turned to dust and sifted into the cellars, and the ice-machine had rusted up, but the reservoir still worked. It now had a sign, saying ‘ATTENTION CAIMANS’, and down in the ponds below I could see a pair of old crusted lags sleeping off their kill.

  These days there were only two policemen. Every evening they ate at the old mess, a huge monastic place now used as an auberge. It was cool and fresh up here, right on the peak. Both officers were from the Alps and said they’d never imagined a job like this: une ville déserte, said one, a deserted town.

  And a network of empty roads, said the other.

  Just one old truck!

  And a population of pigs!

  I slung my hammock in the old Crimson Barracks. Someone had given my block a new tin roof, but otherwise not much had changed. I had a room for 120 men all to myself, although at night there was always something rustling in the rafters. As I lay there, I could also hear the surf all around, breathing on the rocks, and the drowsy tick of the lighthouse. It still emitted long spokes of light, which eventually found my window and sent the bars wheeling round the room. On my first night I realised that I was not a natural hammock-dweller and had bought a rope that was slightly elastic. Instead of dangling nicely out of reach of the wildlife, by 4 a.m., I was back down among it, scraping the concrete and beginning to itch.

  I was grateful for sunrise, got up and sat out on the steps. I ate a tin of mussels and dried the sea mist from my clothes. The agoutis were already out, under the mango trees, looking enjoyably absurd. They had too much bottom, I decided, and not enough head. When a peacock arrived and screamed, they all panicked and ran off into the cemetery. Being Royale, this graveyard was not quite as easy as it first appeared but was exclusively for children.

  Then someone came out and unlocked the church, and I wandered inside. It was a bland interior, despite a few murals over the altar. I hardly noticed them at first, but then, in a biblical scene behind the door, I thought I saw people I recognised: the cuckolded officer, some girls from Lille, the boy in the pinafore and Jesus Christ, with spammy hands. It was Lagrange, trying to purchase a little redemption. He’d even painted throughout the war, foregoing colour and making brushes from his hair. The effort had paid off, and in 1946, after eight years on Royale, he was finally freed.

  Lagrange never went home, or showed any sign of reform. He carried on painting but drank away his money. For a while he lived in Suriname, but in 1949 he was expelled when his atrocious forgeries once more let him down. Then he was discovered by an American journalist and invited to the States. It suited him for a while, rediscovering white women and getting married and divorced. But there was too much space in America, and too much insistence on playing it fair. He was soon on his way, this time to Martinique.

  He died, still painting and cheating, in 1964.

  Across a narrow neck of water was a far less lenient island. It was geography much better suited to the infliction of pain. The sea around St-Joseph was said to be incessantly violent. I’ve never seen the Atlantic looking so furious and brown. It was like old concrete that’s been brought to the boil. If the island wasn’t such an obstinate sprig of granite, it would have vanished millions of years ago and been spattered over the seabed. No doubt this infuriated the waves, which came rolling in with a noise like buildings and bridges and ground-up roads. Some days it couldn’t be reached at all, and on Royale people just watched and waited for the anger to subside.

  On my second day the boatman decided we’d probably get across.

  ‘I won’t stop,’ he said. ‘When we get to the quay, just jump.’

  Between the islands the sea heaved and arched, and I could feel the little boat being spun in the current. It would have been perfect for the disposal of bodies, like one of those sinks that glugs away the waste. Once every convict expected to end up here. Only warders and their families earned a place in the soil. For everyone else there was a bell and a rowing boat, and a plunge in the current. Lagrange called this ceremony le mouillage du forçat, or ‘mooring the old lag’. It’s said that the sharks got so used to the bell that they always turned up, like Pavlov’s dogs.

  At the quay I waited for my moment, and jumped.

  ‘Trois heures!’ shouted the boatman, as he was hauled off into the swell.

  Like Royale, St-Joseph bristled in palms, but it was smaller and more vicious. There were no hanging gardens and churches, just a bright red road of hand-crushed granite. At the far end, the Chapeau du Gendarme, where the surf impacted with the cliffs, the air seemed to stand still and shudder. It was like being struck suddenly deaf. There was only one beach, of six-foot breakers and pulverised shell. The wind here crackled with grit and had lashed the names off all the tombs. To the leaders of the Troisième République there was no better place to re-tune the errant human being, or to have him forgotten.

  I left the red road and followed a cobbled lane uphill. In the forest the sea soon became a dull, disorientating groan. Apart from the palms, the trees in here were sinewy and lean, with a tendency to strangle. At the top of the rise was a large sprawl of ruins, made of brick and stone. The trees were already among them, wrenching out the walls as though they were teeth. I climbed in through an old iron gate. The roof had long gone, and inside it was damp and the jungle was thicker. Dwarf palms erupted out of the brickwork, and long waxy trunks extended down from the canopy, like molten trees, trickling into the mortar. There were iron bars tufted with epiphytes, and across the walls marched huge formations of gingery ants. I realised that I was in a corridor, and that beyond it lay another and another. Along each corridor there were perhaps fifty cells, each a little box of captured forest. Here in 1904 France had developed the ultimate punishment, on an industrial scale. It was known as ‘The Man-Eater’ or, more formally, La Réclusion.

  Behind this complex of cells was the idea of inertia. In these tiny, blank spaces men would be deprived of all sense of the world around. There was hardly any light, and the silence was ruthlessly enforced. The men wore soundless canvas slippers and were forbidden from reading or smoking, or any form of human contact. They’d see nothing, hear nothing and do nothing, and – left only with their thoughts – they’d gradually come to a halt. It was like being buried alive, a sort of judicial suffocation of the mind. But it wasn’t something that happened overnight. Time was the punishment here, anything from six months to five years.

  The cells had bars instead of ceilings. Above them I could just make out the rusted stumps of a gantry. From up here the warders had kept watch on their charges without ever needing to enter the cells. Meanwhile, most of the old steel doors had gone, stolen or taken off for scrap. They were never opened during a man’s sentence. All food and waste went through a trappe, or hatch in the door, and once a fortnight the prisoner would put his head out
to be shaved. He’d have just enough food to survive but not enough to enjoy. His simple, bland diet never changed, although if he ever broke the rules it could be reduced or watered down.

  In Lagrange’s picture of this scene, Réclusion cellulaire à Saint-Joseph, the faces at the hatches are ghostly and brittle. They look as though they’re being processed, merely numbers in a line. Perhaps at the heart of revolutionary French thought there was always a weakness for solutions that were grandiose yet brutal. Places such as La Réclusion even survived the age of Auschwitz and Belsen, if only just. During the war the Vichy regime held out against an American blockade, and the bagnard’s bread ration fell to just 14 oz a day. Almost half of them died. Only after that did France finally lose its appetite for these distant penal camps. In 1946 the bagne was closed, and most of the prisoners set loose.

  Here at La Réclusion, the doors lay open, and the jungle crept back in.

  But the end of this experiment began much earlier, with l’affaire Dreyfus.

  One day I took my provisions out to a cove called L’Anse Legoff and sat on the headland. It was a beautiful place to ponder what had happened. Below me the convicts had built a pool, which was calm and black like an eye in the surf. From here I could also look out across Devil’s Island, the last and most exposed of the trio. It was also smaller than the others – not so much a hat as a soup plate. But, like them, it was densely tufted in palms, and among the trees I could just make out some tiny stone cottages. Other than that, there was nothing to the island except the beating of the sea. Huge rollers would come tumbling off the Atlantic and explode in the forest. I couldn’t see anywhere to land. The ocean was like a hammer, constantly smashing away at this little anvil of granite.