Papillon

by Henri Charrière

  Papillon, you’re destined to live with tides. Whether you like it or not, the moon has been a big thing in your life. It was thanks to the tides that you were able to sail out of the Maroni when you escaped from the bagne. You had to play the tides when you left Trinidad and Curaçao. You were arrested in Rio Hacha because the tide wasn’t strong enough to take you out, and here you are permanently at its mercy.

  Some will say, “He deserved it. If he had stayed in the bagne, this never would have happened to him.” But let me tell you something: I hadn’t lost hope, not at all. And I’ll tell you something else. I was better off in the dungeon of this old Colombian fortress built by the Spanish Inquisition than on the lies du Salut, where I should have been right then. In the dungeon there was still a lot I could do toward a cavale; even in this stinking hole I was fifteen hundred miles from the bagne. They would have to think up something really good to get me back there! I thought of my Indians and how it would never have occurred to them to invent this sort of punishment, much less to punish a man who had never committed the slightest offense against them.

  I smoked a couple of cigarettes lying on the plank at the rear of my cell so that the others couldn’t see me. I threw the piece of wood back to the black and with it a lighted cigarette. Like me, he hid while he smoked. Such details may not seem important, but to me they meant a lot. It proved that although we might be outcasts, we still had some manners and decency.

  Who had told the police I was at the convent? If I ever found out, that person would pay for it! Then I said to myself, “Don’t be a damn fool, Papillon! You have work to do in France—your revenge. You didn’t come to this filthy country to get into more trouble. Life itself will punish whoever it was, and if you ever come back, it won’t be for revenge but to bring happiness to Lali and Zoraima and perhaps the children they will have borne you. If you ever come back to this hole, it will be for them and the Guajiros who did you the honor of adopting you. You may still be on the road of the condemned, but even in this dungeon under water you are—whether they like it or not—en cavale—on the road to freedom. And that’s God’s truth.”

  I got my paper and pencil and two packs of cigarettes. I had been here three days or, I should say, three nights, for it was always night here. As I was lighting a Piel Roja, I couldn’t help admiring the extraordinary devotion of the prisoners to each other. The Colombian who had delivered the parcels to me was running a big risk: if he were caught, it would undoubtedly mean a stay in these same dungeons. Since he was probably well aware of that, the way he helped me through my ordeal was an act of unusual courage and nobility. By the light of the burning paper I read: “Papillon, we’ve heard you’re holding up well. Bravo! Give us some news. Nothing new here. A sister who spoke French came by to see you. They wouldn’t let her talk with us, but a Colombian reported that he just had time to tell her that the Frenchman was in the death cell. She said, ‘I’ll be back.’ That’s all. We send love. Your friends.”

  Answering wasn’t easy, but I did manage to write, “Thanks for everything. I’m holding up. Write the French consul. You never know. Have the same man do all the errands so that if he’s caught, only one man is punished. Don’t anyone touch the points of the arrows. Vive la cavale!”

  THE CAVALE AT SANTA MARTA

  Thanks to the Belgian consul, a man named Klausen, I was out of that foul hole twenty-eight days later. The black, whose name was Palacios, had been let out three weeks after my arrival and had the brilliant idea of asking his mother to tell Klausen that there was a Belgian in the dungeon. He had thought of this one Sunday when the consul was visiting a Belgian prisoner.

  So one day I was taken to the chief warden’s office. He said to me, “You’re a Frenchman. Why are you appealing to the Belgian consul?”

  In the office with him was a man of about fifty dressed in white with a round rosy face and blond, almost white hair. He was sitting in an armchair, a leather briefcase on his lap. I immediately grasped the situation.

  “It’s you who said I was French. Admittedly I escaped from French justice, but I am in fact Belgian.”

  “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  “I didn’t think it would make any difference as far as you were concerned. I had committed no offense in your country except to escape, which any prisoner will try to do.”

  “Very well. I’ll put you in with your friends. But I warn you, Señor Consul, any attempt at escape and I put him right back where he came from. Take him to the barber, then put him in with his gang.”

  “Thank you, Consul. Thank you for going to all this trouble for me.”

  “God, how you must have suffered in that ghastly place! Now quick, on your way. Don’t give that monster time to change his mind. I’ll come see you again. Good-by.”

  The barber wasn’t there, so they took me straight to my friends. I must have looked pretty strange because they kept saying, “It can’t be you! It’s impossible! What did those bastards do to you to make you look like that? Talk. Say something. Are you blind? What’s the matter with your eyes? Why do you blink all the time?”

  “I can’t get used to the light. It’s so bright here. My eyes are used to the dark. They hurt.” I sat down with my back to the light. “That’s better.”

  “You stink something awful.”

  I stripped and put my clothes near the door. My arms, back, thighs and legs were covered with red bites like a bedbug’s, plus those from the tiny crabs that came in with the tide. I didn’t need a mirror to tell me how horrible I looked. These five cons had seen plenty, yet they were so upset at my condition they couldn’t speak. Clousiot called to a guard and said that even if there was no barber there was at least some water in the yard. The guard said to wait until it was time to go outside.

  I went out naked. Clousiot carried the new clothes I was to put on. With the help of Maturette, I washed and washed with the local black soap. The more I washed, the more the scabs came off. Finally, after many soapings and rinsings, I felt clean. Five minutes in the sun and I was dry. I put on my clothes and the barber appeared. He wanted to shear me like a sheep, but I said, “No. Cut it in the normal way and give me a shave. I’ll pay you.”

  “How much?”

  “One peso.”

  “Do it well,” Clousiot said, “and I’ll give you two.”

  “How high did the water come? What about the rats? The centipedes? And the mud? What about the crabs and the crap? And what about the guys who died? Did they die naturally or did they hang themselves? Or did the guards help them ‘commit suicide’?”

  The questions kept coming, and talking so much made me thirsty.

  There was a man selling coffee in the yard. During our three hours there I must have drunk at least ten cups of strong coffee sweetened with brown sugar. It tasted like the greatest drink in the world. My black friend from the dungeon came to say hello. Under his breath he explained the business of the Belgian consul and his mother. I shook his hand. He was very proud and happy to have helped me get out of the dungeon, and as he left, he said, “We’ll talk more tomorrow. Enough for today.”

  My friends’ cell seemed like a palace to me. Clousiot had a hammock he had bought with his own money and insisted I lie in it. I stretched out in it crosswise. He was astonished when I explained that this was the correct way to use a hammock.

  We ate, we drank, we slept, we played checkers, we played cards; we talked Spanish among ourselves and with the Colombian police and the prisoners in order to learn the language. Our days on into the night were very active. It was hard to go to bed at nine. Then all the details of the cavale from the hospital at Saint-Laurent to Santa Marta would roll before my eyes, demanding a sequel. The movie could not stop there; it must go on. It will go on, mecs! Just give me time to get back my strength and you’ll have some new episodes, never fear! I found my small arrows and two leaves of coca, one completely dried, the other still a little green. I chewed the green one. Everyone watched me with cur
iosity. I explained that these were the leaves from which cocaine was made.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Have a taste.”

  “I can’t feel my tongue or my lips.”

  “Do they sell it here?”

  “I don’t know. Hey, Clousiot, how come you have so much dough?”

  “I’m a changed man since Rio Hacha. Everybody thinks I’m rich now.”

  I said, “I’ve got thirty-six gold pieces in the head warden’s keeping, and each piece is worth three hundred pesos. One of these days I’m going to get it back.”

  “I’d make a bargain with him. These people are starving.”

  “That’s an idea.”

  I spoke to the Belgian consul and the Belgian prisoner on Sunday.

  The prisoner had broken a contract with an American banana company. The consul promised to help us both. He filled out a form which stated that I had Belgian parents living in Brussels. I told him about the sisters and the pearls. Being a Protestant, he didn’t know the nuns, but he did know the bishop a little. As for the money, he advised me not to claim it now. It was too risky. He would be informed of our departure for Barranquilla twenty-four hours before. “Claim the money in my presence—as I understand it, there were witnesses.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But for now, do nothing. They’re quite capable of putting you back in those terrible dungeons, or even killing you. Those gold pieces are a small fortune. “We mustn’t tempt the devil. The pearls are something else again. Let me think about them.”

  I asked the black if he wanted to escape with me, and did he have any ideas on how to go about it. His skin went gray at the very thought.

  “Man, don’t you even think of it. If it goes wrong, it means slow death. You’ve had a taste of it. Wait until you’re somewhere else, like Barranquilla. To try it here is suicide. You want to die? O.K., then, take it easy. In all of Colombia there’s no dungeon like the one we were in. So why risk it here?”

  “Yes, but the wall here is low. It should be pretty easy to climb over.”

  “Man, easy or not, don’t count on me. I’m not going. And I’m not going to help you. I don’t even want to talk about it.” Then he added, his eyes full of terror, “Frenchie, you’re not normal. You’re crazy to think of such a thing at Santa Marta.” With that he walked away.

  Every morning and afternoon I watched the Colombians in the prison for serious offenses. They all had the faces of murderers, yet they seemed obsessed by something. They were paralyzed with terror at the thought of those dungeons. Four or five days ago a huge monster of a man had been let out of one of them. He was a good head taller than I and was called El Caiman. He had the reputation of being a very dangerous man. I talked to him, and after three or four walks together I asked him in Spanish, “Do you want to escape with me?”

  He looked at me as if I were the devil himself and said, “To end up back where I just came from? No thanks. I’d rather kill my mother than go back down there.”

  That was my last try. I would never discuss escape with anyone again.

  That afternoon the chief warden came walking by. He stopped, looked at me and asked, “How are you?”

  “O.K., but I’d be better off if I had my gold pieces.”

  “Why?”

  “Because then I could pay for a lawyer.”

  “Come with me.”

  He took me into his office. We were alone. He held out a cigar—not a bad one at all—and lit it for me. Things were getting better and better.

  “Do you know enough Spanish to talk to me? We’ll talk very slowly.”

  “All right.”

  “Good. You say you want to sell your twenty-six pieces?”

  “No, my thirty-six pieces.”

  “Ah, yes; yes! And with this money you will pay for a lawyer? But only the two of us know you have these pieces.”

  “No, there’s the sergeant and the five men who arrested me and the assistant warden who took them from me before giving them to you. Then there is my consul.”

  “Well, good. It’s better if lots of people know. Then everything is out in the open. You know, I did you a great favor. I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t even try to find out if there had been a theft of gold pieces in the places you passed through.”

  “But you should have.”

  “No, for your sake, it was better not to.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You want me to sell them for you?”

  “For how much?”

  “Oh, three hundred pesos each—that’s the price you said they paid you for three of them. You give me a hundred pesos apiece for the favor I did you. What do you say?”

  “No. You give me back the pieces ten at a time, and I’ll give you two hundred instead of a hundred apiece. That should pay you back for what you’ve done for me.”

  “Frenchie, you’re much too clever. I’m only a poor Colombian officer. I’m stupid and too trusting. You’re smart and, as I said already, too clever.”

  “O.K., then, make me a reasonable offer.”

  “Tomorrow I’ll have the buyer come here to my office. He looks the pieces over, he makes an offer, and we go fifty-fifty. It’s that or nothing. I send you off to Barranquilla with the gold pieces, or I keep them here for the investigation.”

  “No, this is my last offer: the man comes here, looks the pieces over, and everything over three hundred and fifty pesos each goes to you.”

  “Good enough. I give you my word. But where are you going to keep all this money?”

  “The minute you get the money, you get the Belgian consul to come here. I’ll give it to him to pay my lawyer.”

  “No, I don’t want any witnesses.”

  “There’s no risk in it for you. I’ll sign on the dotted line that you gave me back my thirty-six pieces. You better accept the proposition, and if you’re straight with me, I’ll make you still another.”

  “What is it?”

  “Trust me. It’s as good as the other one, and this time we go fifty-fifty.”

  “What is it? Tell me.”

  “No, not now. Just do your best tomorrow, and at five o’clock, when my money is safe in the hands of the consul, I’ll tell you about it.”

  Our interview had been a long one. When, very pleased with myself, I returned to the yard, my friends had already gone back to the cell.

  “Well, what goes on?”

  I repeated the whole conversation. We laughed like crazy in spite of our bleak situation.

  “What a fox that mec is! But you beat him. You think he’ll go for it?”

  “I’ll bet you one hundred pesos against two hundred that he does. Any takers?”

  “No, I think he will too.”

  I thought long and hard the whole night. The first proposal was okay. The second was okay too—he would be only too happy to recover the pearls. The third: what about the third? All right, I’d offer him everything I’d got back if he’d let me steal a boat in the harbor. I could buy the boat with the money in my plan. We’d see how well he could resist that temptation. Was I running too great a risk? Hell, after the first two propositions, he couldn’t even punish me. But we’d have to see. Don’t count your chickens, etc. I could wait until Barranquilla. But why? Bigger city, therefore bigger prison, therefore more guards and higher walls. I should go back and live with Lali and Zoraima: I must escape quickly, spend a few years with the Indians, then go up into the mountains with the tribe that keeps its cattle there and make contact with the Venezuelans. This cavale must succeed at all costs. I spent the whole night figuring out the third proposal.

  The next day things moved fast. At nine o’clock they came for me to see a man in the chief warden’s office. The police stayed outside. I found myself in front of a man of almost sixty wearing a gray suit and a gray tie. On the table was a large gray felt cowboy hat. A large silvery gray-blue pearl was imbedded in his tie as if in a jewel case. Thin and dry, the man was not without a certain elegance
.

  “Good morning.”

  “Do you speak French?”

  “Yes, I’m originally from Lebanon. I hear you have some gold pieces in one-hundred-peso denominations. I’m interested. Would you take five hundred for each?”

  “No, six hundred and fifty.”

  “You’ve been misinformed, sir! The maximum price per piece is five hundred and fifty.”

  “Listen, if you’ll take them all, I’ll give them to you for six hundred.”

  “No, five hundred and fifty.”

  To cut it short, we agreed on five hundred and eighty. Sold.

  The warden spoke up, in Spanish. “What did you say? How did it go?”

  “Chief, we struck a bargain at five hundred eighty. The sale will take place at noon.”

  The man left.

  The warden stood up and said, “All right. How much for me?”

  “Two hundred fifty apiece. See, I’m giving you two and a half times what you asked for.”

  He smiled and said, “What about the other matter?”

  “The consul has to come for the money first. This afternoon, when he’s gone, I’ll tell you about the second proposition.”

  “You mean it when you say there’s a second proposition?”

  “You have my word.”

  “It better be.”

  The consul and the Lebanese were there at two o’clock. The latter gave me 20,880 pesos. I gave the consul 12,600 and the chief warden 8,280. I signed a receipt for the warden showing he had given me back my thirty-six gold pieces. When they’d gone, I told the warden about my meeting with the Mother Superior.

  “How many pearls did you have?”

  “Between five and six hundred.”

  “That woman’s a thief. She should have given them back to you, or sent them here, or turned them over to the police. I’m going to expose her.”

  “No. Go see her and give her a letter from me written in French. But before you mention the letter, ask her to send for the Irish nun.”