Papillon

by Henri Charrière

  “You sure?”

  “I not only know it’s a boat, I can also tell you it’s some kind of torpedo boat.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because there’s no smoke coming from it.”

  In point of fact, only an hour later it was all too clear that it was a warship and it was coming straight for us. It was getting bigger every minute, moving with extraordinary speed. If it came too close, it would be very dangerous in this heavy sea. With its wake going contrary to the waves, it could easily sink us.

  It was a pocket torpedo boat. As it came nearer, we could read Tarpon on its side, and a British flag hung from the bow. After making a semicircle, the boat came up slowly from behind, keeping carefully abreast of us. The crew was on deck, in the blue of the British Navy.

  From the bridge an officer shouted through a megaphone in English, “Stop! Stop, you!”

  “Cuic, let down the sails!”

  We had the mainsail, spinnaker and jib down in less than two minutes. Only the waves kept us moving now and we were starting to slip sideways. This would be dangerous if we kept it up for long, especially with these high waves. A boat without some form of propulsion—whether motor or sail—won’t respond to the tiller.

  I cupped my hands and shouted, “Captain, you speak French?”

  Another officer took the megaphone. “Yes, Captain, I understand French.”

  “What you want us to do?”

  “Bring your boat alongside.”

  “No, it’s too dangerous. We’ll crack up.”

  “We’re a warship on patrol. You must obey.”

  “I don’t give a damn who you are. We’re not at war with anybody.”

  “Aren’t you survivors of a torpedoed ship?”

  “No, we’re escaped prisoners from a French bagne.”

  “What bagne? What’s a bagne?”

  “A prison, a penitentiary. We’re convicts. Hard labor.”

  “Ah! Yes, now I understand. From Cayenne?”

  “Yes, Cayenne.”

  “Where you heading?”

  “British Honduras.”

  “It can’t be done. You must head south-southwest and make for Georgetown. That’s an order. You must obey it.”

  “O.K.” I told Cuic to hoist sail and head out in the direction indicated.

  We heard a motor behind us. It was a launch that had cast off from the bigger ship and was catching up with us. A sailor with a rifle slung over his shoulder stood in the bow. The launch came up on our starboard and literally grazed us without stopping or asking us to stop. With one leap the sailor was in our boat. Then the launch turned back and rejoined the torpedo boat.

  “Good afternoon,” the sailor said in English.

  He came and sat down beside me and put his hand on the tiller, pointing it a little more to the south. I watched him carefully. He was very good with the boat, no doubt about that. However, I stayed right next to him. You never knew....

  “Cigarettes?”

  He took out three packs of English cigarettes and gave each of us one.

  “My word,” Cuic said, “they must have given him the three packs just as he leapt off. After all, you don’t go around with three packs in your pockets.”

  I laughed, then turned my attention back to the Englishman, who was clearly a better sailor than I. I was free to let my mind wander. This time the cavale was really a success. I was free. A feeling of warmth crept through me and I realized my eyes were wet with tears.

  Before the war ended, I’d have time to become established and win people’s respect, wherever I ended up. The only difficulty was that, with the war on, I might not be able to choose where I wanted to live. But that made little difference. No matter where I settled, I would win the respect and confidence of both the ordinary people and the authorities. My way of life would have to be, would be, beyond reproach.

  My victory gave me such an extraordinary feeling of security that it was all I could think of. At last, Papillon, you’ve won. The nine years are behind you and you’ve won. Thank you, God. You could have done it a little sooner, but Your ways are mysterious. I’m not really complaining because it’s thanks to Your help that I’m still young, healthy and free.

  My mind was roaming over the two years of French prisons and nine years of bagne when I felt a nudge on my arm. The sailor said, “Land.”

  At four o’clock we passed a blacked-out lighthouse and entered a big river—the Demerara. The launch reappeared. The sailor turned the tiller over to me and posted himself in the bow of the boat. A heavy rope was thrown to him from the launch and he tied it to the forward bench. He lowered the sails himself and, towed very gently by the launch, we sailed twelve miles up the yellow river, the torpedo boat two hundred yards behind. There was a bend in the river and there, spread out in front of us, was a large city. “Georgetown,” announced the British sailor. There were freighters, warships and motorboats everywhere, and gun turrets bristled on either side of the water. There were whole arsenals on the navy ships, as well as on land.

  We knew a war was on, yet during the years since it had started we in the bagne had been completely untouched by it. But Georgetown was on a 100 percent war footing. It gave me a funny feeling to be in an armed city. We drew up to a military pier and the torpedo boat came alongside. Cuic and his pig, Hue carrying a small bundle, and I, empty-handed, climbed up onto the quay.

  TWELFTH NOTEBOOK

  CAVALE FROM GEORGETOWN

  EIGHT DAYS LATER, AFTER A few formalities necessitated by the war, we were free. We went to live with three escaped French convicts who had established themselves in the Hindu quarter of Georgetown and sold fresh vegetables to American sailors in port. I did some professional tattooing on the side. After various stints as restaurant keeper, dealer in butterflies and operator of a striptease joint up in a bauxite mining town—all of which got me and my Chinese partners into trouble with the police—I decided I’d had enough of British Guiana. Cuic-Cuic and Van Hue stayed behind.

  Without proper authorization—the war made this a serious offense—and naturally with no passports, five of us, all liberated or escaped cons, set out to sea in a sturdy boat and headed north. We ran into a terrible typhoon and lost everything, the top half of our mast, sail, tiller and all our supplies. All that remained were a small paddle and the clothes on our backs. We used the paddle as a rudder; then we stripped to our undershirts and, with the help of a small roll of wire that had survived the storm, we made a sail out of our pants, jackets and shirts, and attached it to what was left of the mast.

  The trade winds picked up and I used them to head due south. I didn’t care where we landed, even if it meant going back to British Guiana. The sentence that awaited us there would be welcome after what we’d gone through. My comrades had done themselves proud during and after the storm—which was hardly the word for it—better cataclysm, deluge, cyclone.

  We had been out six days—the last two in a dead calm—when we sighted land, or so I thought. I headed for it immediately but decided to say nothing until I was sure. Suddenly there were birds overhead; I must be right. My friends woke up at the sound of their cries. They had been lying in the bottom of the boat, stupefied by the sun and fatigue, their arms across their faces to protect them from the rays.

  “Where do you think we are, Papi?” said Chapar.

  “Frankly, I don’t know. If that piece of land isn’t an island, if it’s a bay, then it could be the tip of British Guiana—the part that extends to the Orinoco and divides it from Venezuela. But if there’s a big space between the land on the right and on the left, then it’s not a peninsula but Trinidad. The left side would be Venezuela; that would mean we were in the Gulf of Paria.”

  I seemed to remember this from the nautical maps I’d studied some time ago. If it was Trinidad on the right and Venezuela on the left, which should we choose? Our fate hung on this decision. With a good fresh wind in our sail, it wouldn’t be too difficult to make the coast. Fo
r the moment we were heading between the two. Trinidad would mean the same “roast-beefs,” the same government as British Guiana.

  “They’re sure to treat us well,” said Guittou.

  “Maybe, but what will they do to us for leaving British territory in time of war without proper authorization?”

  “What about Venezuela?”

  “There’s no way of knowing,” said Deplanque. “When President Gomez was in power, they made the cons work in road gangs under terrible conditions, then turned them over to France.”

  “The war may have changed all that.”

  “But from what I heard in Georgetown, they’re neutral.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Then it’s dangerous for us.”

  We could make out lights on both sides. Then we heard a foghorn—three blasts in a row. Signal lights showed on the right. The moon came out directly in front of our bow. Immediately ahead were two enormous pointed rocks, rising very black out of the sea. They must be the reason for the foghorn.

  “Look, floating buoys! There’s a whole line of them. Why don’t we tie up to one and wait here for daylight? Let down the sail, Chapar.”

  He dropped the remnants of pants and shirts I had dignified with the name of “sail” and, braking with the paddle, I turned toward one of the “buoys.” Luckily a length of rope hanging from the bow had escaped the typhoon’s fury. There—we were tied up. Not exactly to the buoy itself, for the strange contraption had nothing you could tie anything to, but to the chain that connected it with the next buoy. It seemed to be a cable marking the channel. We closed our ears to the persistent foghorn and lay down in the bottom of the boat, covered by the sail to protect us from the wind. I felt a gentle warmth creep through my body and fell into a deep sleep.

  I awoke to a clear day. The sun was just rising, the sea was fairly heavy, and its blue-green color indicated that the bottom was coral.

  “What we going to do? Are we going to land? I’m famished and dying of thirst.”

  It was the first complaint in all these days of forced fasting—today being the seventh.

  “We’re so near we might as well land.” It was Chapar talking.

  From my bench I could clearly see the broken coastline behind the two big rocks. It must be Trinidad to the right and Venezuela to the left. There was no doubt about it: we were in the Gulf of Paria, and the only reason the water wasn’t yellow with the silt from the Orinoco was that we were in the middle of the channel to the sea.

  “O.K. What do we do? You guys are going to have to decide. It’s too big a decision for one man. On the right, we’ve got the British island of Trinidad; on the left, Venezuela. One thing is certain—given the condition of our boat and our physical condition, we should get to shore as soon as possible. Two of you are liberated cons: Guittou and Corbière. The rest of us—Chapar, Deplanque and I—are in real danger. So actually the three of us should decide. What do you say?”

  “It would make more sense to go to Trinidad. Venezuela’s an unknown quantity.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have to make a decision. It looks like that launch is going to make it for us,” Deplanque said.

  Sure enough, a launch was heading straight at us. It stopped fifty yards off and a man picked up a megaphone. I could see that the flag wasn’t British: lots of stars, very beautiful. I’d never seen it before in my life. It had to be Venezuelan. (Later that flag was to be “my flag,” the flag of my new country—to me, the most moving symbol because there, wrapped up in a piece of cloth, were all the noblest qualities of a great people, my people.)

  “Who are you?” the man with the megaphone shouted in Spanish.

  “We’re French.”

  “Axe you crazy?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because you’re tied up to a string of mines!”

  “Is that why you don’t come closer?”

  “Yes. Get out of there fast.”

  It took Chapar just three seconds to untie the knot. Unbelievable! We had tied ourselves to a chain of floating mines! It was a miracle we hadn’t been blown to bits. The launch took us in tow and the crew passed us some coffee, hot sweetened milk and cigarettes.

  “Go to Venezuela. You’ll be treated well. We can’t tow you all the way because we just got an S O S to pick up someone who’s been badly hurt at the Barimas lighthouse. Don’t go to Trinidad. Nine chances out of ten you’ll strike a mine and then …”

  After a “Good-by, good luck,” the launch moved off, leaving us two quarts of milk. We hoisted sail. At ten o’clock, my stomach almost back in shape from the infusion of coffee and milk, a cigarette between my lips, heedless of all danger, I beached the boat on a stretch of fine sand. At least fifty people were standing waiting to see what on earth could be arriving in this strange vessel with its broken mast and a sail made of shirts and pants.

  THIRTEENTH NOTEBOOK

  VENEZUELA

  THE FISHERMEN OF IRAPA

  I DISCOVERED A WORLD, A people, a civilization totally unknown to me. Those first minutes on Venezuelan soil were so moving, it would take a talent far greater than mine to describe the warm welcome we received from these generous people. The men were both blacks and whites, though most of them were the tan of a white man who’s been in the sun a few days. Almost all wore their pants rolled up to the knees.

  “You poor people! You really are in sad shape …!” one of the men said.

  The fishing village where we had landed was called Irapa—it was located in the state of Sucre. The young women were all pretty, on the small side but very gracious and hospitable; the middle-aged and old women immediately turned into nurses and substitute mothers for us.

  They hung five woolen hammocks in a shed next to one of the houses, furnished it with a table and chairs, then coated us with cocoa butter from head to foot, not missing an inch of raw flesh. These good people of the coast knew we needed sleep and that we should be fed only in very small amounts.

  Almost asleep in our comfortable hammocks, we were fed tidbits by our volunteer nurses—like young birds being fed by their mother. I was so exhausted that what little strength I had gave way completely the moment I hit the hammock. With the layers of cocoa butter coating my raw sores, I literally melted away. I slept, ate, drank, without being fully aware of what was going on.

  My empty stomach rejected the first spoonfuls of tapioca. And I wasn’t the only one. All of us vomited most of the food the women tried to spoon into our mouths.

  The people of Irapa were very poor, but there wasn’t one who didn’t try to help. Thanks to their care and our youth, we were almost back to normal in three days. We spent long hours talking to the people as we sat in the pleasant shade of our palm-leaved shed. They couldn’t afford to clothe us all at once, so they formed little groups: one took care of Guittou, another of Deplanque, and so on. About ten people took care of me.

  For the first few days we wore anything and everything, but whatever it was, it was always spotlessly clean. Later, whenever they could manage it, they bought us a new shirt, or pants, a belt, or a pair of slippers. Among the women who took care of me were two very young girls—Indians mixed with Spanish or Portuguese blood. One was called Tibisay, the other Nenita. They bought me a shirt, pants and a pair of slippers they called aspargate. They had leather soles and the part that covered the foot was made of cloth. The toes were left bare and the material looped around the heel.

  “We don’t need to ask where you come from. We know from your tattoos you’re prisoners escaped from the French bagne.”

  That was amazing. They knew we were convicts, they knew about the prisons we’d been in from newspapers and magazines, yet these people thought it perfectly natural to come to our rescue and help us. To clothe someone when you’re well off, or to feed a hungry stranger when it doesn’t deprive you or your family of anything, is already something. But to cut a corn or tapioca cake in two and share with a stranger a meal
that is already too meager for your own people—not only a stranger but a fugitive from justice—that is truly admirable.

  Then, one morning, all the villagers were silent. They seemed upset and worried. What was going on? Tibisay and Nenita watched me as I shaved for the first time in two weeks. In the eight days we had been with these warm-hearted people, a thin skin had begun to form over my burns and I thought I could risk it. Because of my beard, the girls had had no idea how old I was. When they saw me clean shaven, they were thrilled and told me in their naïve way that they found me young. Although I was thirty-five, I still managed to look twenty-eight or thirty. But something was bothering them. I could feel it in my bones.

  “What’s going on? Tell me, Tibisay, what is it?”

  “We’re expecting the authorities from Güiria any minute. We don’t have any police here, but somehow their police found out about you. They’re on their way.”

  A tall handsome black woman came over to me, along with a young man with the beautifully proportioned body of an athlete. The woman was called La Negrita, the affectionate name for colored women used all over Venezuela, where there is absolutely no discrimination, either racial or religious. She said to me, “Señor Enrique, the police are on their way. I don’t know whether they mean good or ill. Why don’t you hide in the mountains for a while? My brother can show you the way to a small house where no one can possibly find you. Between Tibisay, Nenita and me, we can bring you the news and something to eat every day.”

  I was so touched that I reached for her hand to kiss it, but she pulled it back and, in the purest way, kissed me on the cheek.

  Then a group of horsemen came thundering in like an express train. Each had a machete hanging from his left side like a sword, a belt full of ammunition and an enormous revolver in a holster hanging from the right hip. They leapt to the ground, and a big, bronze skinned man with the Mongol features and hooded eyes of an Indian came up to us. He was about forty years old and wore an enormous straw hat.