Papillon

by Henri Charrière

  “If you’re not called up and you’re left behind in the camp barracks, you have time to do something. In that case, try not to get a job inside the camp. Pay the man in charge so that you can work in the village as a cesspool cleaner or a sweeper, or get a job in a sawmill run by civilians. On your way back and forth to work you’ll have a chance to make contact with liberated cons living in the village, or the Chinese, so they can start preparing your escape. Stay away from the camps around the village. Everybody there dies fast. There are camps where nobody lasts three months. They make you cut a quarter of a cord of wood a day in the middle of the bush.”

  Julot kept feeding us these precious bits of information all through the trip. He was prepared himself. He knew that, as a returned escapee, he’d be going directly into a dungeon. He also had a very small, very sharp knife, really a penknife, in his plan. As we docked, he planned to cut his knee open. Then, as he was leaving the boat, he would fall off the ladder in front of everybody. He hoped he’d be carried from the wharf directly to the hospital. And he was.

  SAINT-LAURENT-DU-MARON I

  Some of the guards went off duty so that they could change their clothes. They came back dressed in white, wearing the colonial cap instead of the kepi. Julot said, “We must be almost there.” The heat was intense because they had closed the portholes. Through them we could see the bush. So we were on the Maroni! The water was muddy, the virgin forest vividly green. Birds flew off, disturbed by the ship’s siren. We were going very slowly now, which allowed us plenty of time to examine the lush, dense, deep-green vegetation. Then came the first houses—wooden, with zinc roofs. Black men and women stood in front of their doors watching the ship go by. They were used to seeing it unload its human cargo and stood impassive. Three wails of the siren and the noise of the screws told us we were about to dock, then all sounds stopped. Silence. You could have heard the buzzing of a fly.

  No one spoke. Julot had his knife out and was cutting his pants at the knees and roughing up the edges. He would cut himself only when he reached the bridge so that there would be no tell-tale trail of blood. The guards opened the cage door and lined us up in threes. We were in the fourth row, Julot between Dega and me. We climbed up to the bridge. It was two in the afternoon and a fiery sun beat down on my eyes and sheared pate. We were lined up on the bridge, then marched toward the gangplank. As the first man reached it, there was a general hesitation. I held Julot’s pack to his shoulder; with his two hands he tore at the skin of his knees, dug the knife in and sliced off three or four inches of flesh. Then he slipped me the knife and resumed holding his pack. As we stepped on the gangplank, he fell and rolled to the bottom. He was picked up, and when they saw he was hurt, they summoned two stretcher-bearers. The scenario had been played out exactly as planned.

  A motley crowd was on hand to watch us. Blacks, mulattoes, Indians, Chinese, dregs of whites (probably liberated convicts) examined each of us as we stepped on land and lined up with the rest. Behind the guards stood well-dressed civilians, women in summer dresses, children wearing the colonial cap. They were watching the new arrivals too. When there were two hundred of us, the convoy set off. We walked about ten minutes until we arrived in front of a building. On its thick wooden gate was written: “Pénitencier, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. Capacité, 3000 hommes.” The gate opened and we entered in rows of ten. “One, two, one, two, march!” A number of cons were watching us arrive. They leaned out of windows and stood on rocks.

  When we reached the center of the yard, a guard shouted, “Stop! Put your packs down in front of you. You over there, pass out the hats!” Each of us was given a straw hat. We needed it, all right; two or three men had already fainted from sunstroke. A guard with stripes held a list in his hands. Dega and I looked at each other; we were thinking of what Julot had said. They called to Le Guittou: “This way!” Two guards flanked him and they left. Same thing with Santini. Girasole, ditto.

  “Jules Pignard!”

  “Jules Pignard [that was Julot] was hurt. He’s in the hospital.”

  “O.K. Now listen carefully. When I call your name, step out of ranks with your pack on your shoulder and go stand in front of the yellow barracks. It’s Number One.”

  So and so, present, etc. Dega, Carrier and I found ourselves among those lined up in front of the barracks. The door opened and we entered a hall about seventy feet long. Down the middle, a passage seven feet wide; to the right and left, iron bars that ran the length of the hall. Canvas hammocks stretched from the bars to the wall, and each hammock had a blanket. You could go where you liked. Dega, Pierrot le Fou, Santori, Grandet and I moved in next to each other and immediately set up housekeeping. I walked to the end of the hall: showers to the right, toilets to the left; no running water. We clung to the bars of the windows and watched the next arrivals. Our relief was intense; obviously we weren’t going to be interned because we were here together in a barracks. If we were, we’d already be in cells, as Julot had said.

  In the tropics there is no dusk or dawn. You pass from day to night just like that, at the same time, during the whole year. Night falls abruptly at six-thirty. And at six-thirty two old cons brought in two oil lamps which they hung from a hook in the ceiling. They gave only the faintest light. Three-fourths of the barracks was in total darkness. By nine o’clock everyone was asleep. The excitement of arrival had passed and we were overcome with the heat. There was not a breath of air; everyone was down to his undershirt. I was between Dega and Pierrot le Fou. We whispered for a while, then fell asleep.

  The next morning it was still dark when reveille sounded. Everybody got up, washed and dressed. We were given some coffee and a piece of bread. A plank attached to the wall served as a table for our food and a shelf for the rest of our belongings. At nine o’clock two guards entered together with a young con dressed in white without stripes. The two guards were Corsicans and talked Corsican with their countrymen.

  While this was going on, the infirmary orderly made a tour of the hall. When he reached me, he said, “How goes it, Papi? You don’t recognize me?”

  “No.”

  “I’m Sierra, the Algerian; I knew you at Dante’s in Paris.”

  “Ah, yes, now I recognize you. But you came over in ’twenty-nine. This is ’thirty-three and you’re still here?”

  “Yes, it’s not all that easy to get out of this place. Why don’t you report sick? What about him? Who is he?”

  “Dega. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “I’ll put him down for a visit too. You, Papi, have dysentery. And you, old man, you have attacks of asthma. I’ll see you at eleven. I want to talk to you.” He continued on his rounds, calling out in a loud voice, “Anyone sick here?” If a man raised a finger, he went over and put him on his list. The next time he passed us, he was accompanied by a very old and weathered guard.

  “Papillon, I want you to meet my boss, Bartiloni, the infirmary guard. Mr. Bartiloni, this man and that one there are the friends I told you about.”

  “O.K., Sierra. We can fix it up during the visit. You can count on me.”

  They came for us at eleven. We were nine. We crossed the camp between barracks until we came to a newer one painted white with a red cross. We went in and found ourselves in a waiting room with about sixty other men. Two guards stood in each corner. Sierra appeared, dressed in an immaculate white smock. He said, “You, and you and you, go in.” We went into what was obviously a doctor’s office. Sierra spoke to three old men in Spanish. I recognized one of the Spaniards right away. It was Fernandez, the man who had killed three Argentinians at the Café de Madrid in Paris. They exchanged a few words and Sierra led him to a bathroom that opened into the main hall. Then he came back to me and said, “Papi, let me embrace you. I’m so happy I can do something for you and your friend. You are both internees.... Wait, let me speak! You, Papillon, are in for life, and you, Dega, for five years. Have you got any money?”

  “Yes.”

  “You give me five hundred fran
cs each and I’ll see that you’re hospitalized tomorrow morning, you, Papi, for dysentery. You, Dega, you knock on the door, or better still, one of you call the guard and ask for the orderly, saying Dega is suffocating. I’ll take care of the rest. Papillon, I ask only one thing: if you make a break, warn me ahead of time and I’ll be there. For one hundred francs each, they’ll keep you in the hospital for a week. So you have to move fast.”

  Fernandez came out of the bathroom and handed Sierra five hundred francs. I went in, and when I emerged, I gave him not one thousand but fifteen hundred francs. He refused the extra five hundred. I didn’t insist. He said, “This money is for the guard. I don’t want anything for myself. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

  The next day Dega, Fernandez and I found ourselves in a huge cell in the hospital. Dega had been hospitalized in the middle of the night. The orderly was a man of thirty-five named Chatal. Sierra had given him all the dope on us. When the doctor passed through, he was to show him the report of a stool examination that made it appear that I was riddled with amoebae. For Dega, ten minutes before the doctor’s visit, he burned a little sulphur and made him breathe the fumes with a towel over his head. Fernandez’ cheek was tremendously swollen; he had pricked the skin inside and had panted so hard and conscientiously for an hour that the swelling had closed his eye. The cell was on the second floor of the building; there were almost seventy sick, many with dysentery. I asked the orderly where Julot was.

  “In the building across the way. Do you want me to give him a message?”

  “Yes. Tell him that Papillon and Dega are here and that he should get to a window.”

  The orderly was able to come and go as he liked. He had only to knock on the door and an Arab opened it. The Arab was the turnkey, a convict serving as an assistant to the guards. On either side of the door sat three guards, their rifles across their laps. The bars of the windows were rails, and I wondered how we would ever manage to cut through them.

  Between our building and Julot’s was a garden full of beautiful flowers. Julot appeared at a window with a slate in his hand on which he had chalked “Bravo.” An hour later the orderly brought me a letter from him. It said: “I’m trying to get to your room. If it doesn’t work, you try to come to mine. Say that you have enemies in your room. So you’re interned? Chin up, we’ll get them yet.” The incident in the Beaulieu jail where we had suffered together had created a great bond between us. Julot was an expert with the wooden mallet; that’s why he was nicknamed “the man with the hammer.” He would drive up to a jewelry shop in broad daylight when the best jewels were displayed in their cases in the shopwindow. The car, an accomplice at the wheel, would stop with the motor running. Julot would get out with his large mallet, smash the window with a single blow, grab all the jewel cases he could scoop up and leap back into the car, which would tear off at full speed. He had met with success in Lyon, Angers, Tours, Le Havre. Then he took on an important jeweler in Paris at three in the afternoon and carried off almost a million francs’ worth of jewels. He never told me why or how he was identified. He was condemned to twenty years and escaped at the end of four.

  We had now been in the hospital a week. Yesterday I gave Chatal two hundred francs, the payment for another week. To win friends, we gave everybody tobacco. A sixty-year-old con from Marseilles called Carora made friends with Dega. He acted as his adviser. He kept telling him that if he had a lot of money and people in the village found out about it (thanks to the French newspapers, everyone was up on the news), it would be better if he didn’t try to escape because the liberated convicts would kill him for his plan. Dega made me privy to his conversations with Carora. I told Dega that the old man was obviously a waste of time since he’d been stuck here for twenty years, but he wouldn’t listen to me. Dega was much impressed by the old man’s prattle, and I had a hard time keeping up my side of the argument.

  I passed Sierra a note asking him to send Galgani to me. It didn’t take long. The next day Galgani was in the hospital but in another room. How to give him back his plan? I told Chatal that I needed desperately to speak to Galgani, letting him think it concerned plans for an escape. He said he could bring him to me at exactly five minutes to noon when the guards were changing shifts. Chatal would have him climb to a porch and talk to me through the window, and for free. Galgani appeared at the window at noon and I put his plan directly into his hands. He stood there and cried. Two days later he sent me a magazine stuffed with five thousand-franc bills and the one word: “Thanks.”

  Chatal, who brought me the magazine, saw the money. He said nothing, but I tried to offer him some. He refused.

  “We want to get moving,” I said. “Do you want to come with us?”

  “No, Papillon. I’m involved in another one. I don’t want to try an escape until five months from now when my friend is free. Our cavale will be better prepared and a surer thing. I can see why you’re in a hurry—you’re an internee. But here, with these bars, it’s going to be hard. I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you. I don’t want to risk my job. I just want to wait here quietly until my friend is ready.”

  “Very good, Chatal. In this kind of life we have to be frank with each other. I won’t mention it again.”

  “But I’ll still carry your messages and do errands for you.”

  “Thanks, Chatal.”

  That night we heard a burst of machine-gun fire. We learned the next morning that Julot had escaped. May God go with him; he was a good friend. He must have seen an opening and made the most of it.

  Fifteen years later, in 1948, I happened to be in Haiti, where I’d come with a Venezuelan millionaire to make a deal with the president of the Casino to run his gambling tables. One night, as we came out of a night club where we’d been drinking champagne, one of the girls with us—as black as coal and as well educated as any daughter of a good French provincial family—said to me:

  “My grandmother is a voodoo priestess and lives with an old Frenchman. He escaped from Cayenne and he’s been with her a long, long time. He’s drunk all the time. His name is Jules Marteau.”

  I sobered up immediately. “Girl, let me see your grandmother right away.”

  She spoke to the taxi driver in Haitian dialect and off we went at top speed. We passed a brightly lighted night club. “Stop.” I went up to the bar, bought a bottle of Pernod, two bottles of champagne and two bottles of the local rum. “Let’s go.” We stopped by the edge of the sea in front of a cozy little white house with a red slate roof. The sea came up almost to the steps. The girl knocked and the door was opened by a large black woman with white hair. She was wearing a shift that reached to her ankles. The two women talked in dialect. Then the old woman said, “Come in, the house is yours.”

  An oil lamp illuminated a tidy room full of birds and fish.

  “You want to see Julot? Wait, he’s coming. Jules! Jules! Somebody’s here to see you.”

  An old man appeared, barefoot and dressed in blue-striped pajamas that reminded me of our uniform in the bagne.

  “Who wants to see me at this hour of the night, Boule de Neige? Papillon! It can’t be!” He took me in his arms and said, “Bring the lamp closer, Boule de Neige. I want to see my old pal’s face. Yes, it’s you, you old bastard! It’s really you! Welcome! The house, the little money I have, my wife’s granddaughter—it’s all yours. Just say the word.”

  We drank the Pernod, the champagne, the rum, and from time to time Julot broke into song.

  “What times we had, eh, old pal? There’s nothing like a little adventure. I went through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Jamaica. Since then I’ve been here with Boule de Neige, the best woman a man ever had. When do you leave? Are you here for long?”

  “No, just a week.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m trying to arrange with the president of the Casino to get the contract for his gambling tables.”

  “I’d like nothing better, pal, than to have you around for the rest of yo
ur life. But don’t have anything to do with that son of a bitch. He’ll have you murdered the minute he sees you’re doing good business.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “As for you, Boule de Neige, get your voodoo show ready, the one ‘not for tourists.’ I want the real thing for my friend.”

  So Julot made his escape, but Dega, Fernandez and I were still waiting. From time to time I casually examined the bars over the windows. They were real railroad tracks, so nothing doing there. But there was still the door. Day and night, three guards were stationed there. Since Julot’s escape the surveillance had tightened. The rounds were made at shorter intervals and the doctor was less friendly. Chatal came into the room only twice a day, to give injections and to take temperatures. A second week went by; again I paid two hundred francs.

  Dega talked of everything but escape. Yesterday he saw my lancet and said, “You still have it? Why?”

  I answered angrily, “To save my skin and yours, if I have to.”

  Fernandez was not a Spaniard but an Argentinian. He was a good man, a real adventurer, but he, too, was impressed by old Carora’s nonsense. One day I heard him tell Dega, “They say the islands are very healthy places, not like here, and it’s not so hot. Here you pick up germs and get dysentery just from going to the toilets.” Every day one or two of the seventy men in our room died of dysentery. And strangely, they all died when it was low tide in the afternoon or evening. No one ever died in the morning. Why? A mystery of nature.

  That night I had a talk with Dega and Fernandez. I told them that the Arab turnkey sometimes came into the room during the night to pull back the sheets and examine the very sick. It would be easy to knock him out and put on his uniform (we all wore only smocks and sandals). Once dressed, I’d go out, grab a rifle from one of the guards, aim it at them, force them into the cell and close the door. Then we’d jump over the hospital wall on the river side, dive into the water and drift with the current. After that we’d see. Since we had money, we could buy a boat and food and set out to sea. They both categorically rejected the project. I sensed they’d grown apathetic; I was very disappointed. And so the days passed.