“Good day. I’m the chief of police.”
“Good day, sir.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you had five escaped prisoners from French Guiana? I hear they’ve been here eight days.”
“We were waiting till they were well enough to walk and their burns were healed.”
“Well, we’re taking them back to Güiria. A truck is coming for them.”
“Would you care for some coffee?”
“Yes, thanks.”
We sat down in a circle and everybody had some coffee. I looked at the chief of police and the rest of his men. They didn’t look mean. They gave the impression of obeying orders they didn’t necessarily go along with.
“You escaped from Diable?”
“No, we came from Georgetown in British Guiana.”
“Why didn’t you stay there?”
“It’s too hard earning a living there.”
He said with a smile, “You thought it would be better here than with the English?”
“Yes. Besides, we’re Latins like you.”
A group of seven or eight men came up to our circle. At their head was a man of about fifty, white-haired, almost six feet tall, with a light chocolate-colored skin. His huge black eyes betokened a rare intelligence and spirit. His right hand was resting on the handle of his machete. “Chief, what are you going to do with these men?”
“I’m taking them to the prison in Güiria.”
“Why can’t you let them live with us? Each family will take one.”
“Can’t. I have orders from the governor.”
“But they’ve done nothing wrong in Venezuela.”
“I know. But they’re dangerous men or they wouldn’t have been condemned to the French bagne. They must have committed some serious crimes. Besides, they escaped with no identification and their own police will certainly claim them when they learn they’re in Venezuela.”
“We would like to keep them with us.”
“Impossible. Governor’s orders.”
“Anything’s possible. What does the governor know about people like these? No man is ruined forever. No matter what he’s done, there comes a moment in his life when he can be saved, when he can be made into someone good and useful to the community. What do the rest of you say?”
Like a chorus, they said, “Yes. Leave them to us. We’ll help them make a new life. Eight days have been enough to show us they’re good men.”
The chief of police replied, “Men more civilized than us locked them up in dungeons so they couldn’t go on doing harm.”
“What do you call civilized, chief?” I asked. “You think because the French have elevators, airplanes and a train that runs underground it proves they are more civilized than these people who took us in and nursed us? In my opinion, these people here have a more humane civilization, more generous souls and greater understanding because they live close to nature and without the benefits of a technological civilization. What they lack in the way of progress they make up for in a Christian charity that puts the so-called civilized nations to shame. I’ll take an illiterate from this hamlet any day over a graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris—especially if he’s like the prosecutor who condemned me to the bagne. The first is a man, the second has forgotten how to be one.”
“I get your point. All the same, I’m only an instrument. And here’s the truck anyway. Please, try to have the right attitude—it will make things a lot easier.”
Each group of women embraced her particular charge. Tibisay, Nenita and La Negrita wept as they kissed me good-by. Each man in turn shook hands with us to show how he suffered to see us go to prison.
“Farewell, you good people of Irapa. If I’m ever free again, I’ll try to help others the way you—the first people I met in Venezuela—helped me.” I was to meet many more like them in later years.
THE BAGNE AT EL DORADO
Two hours later we arrived at Güiria, a big village with a port and the pretensions of a city. The chief of police turned us over personally to the district police commissioner. We weren’t too badly treated at the police station, but we had to submit to an interrogation by a dim-witted official who wouldn’t accept the fact that we had come from British Guiana and that we had been free men there. In addition, he asked us to explain why we had arrived in Venezuela in such a sorry condition after what had been really a very short trip. Then he accused us of trying to make a fool of him with our story of the typhoon.
“You tell me that two huge banana trees keeled over in that tornado, a freighter carrying bauxite went down with everyone on board, and you—in a fifteen-foot tub wide open to the elements—came through? Who’ll believe you? Not even a senile old beggar in the marketplace would fall for that one. You’re lying.”
“Why don’t you get in touch with Georgetown?”
“I don’t want to get involved with the English.”
God knows what kind of report that mulish, pretentious boob sent off to his superiors. In any event, we were awakened one morning at five o’clock, put in chains and loaded into a truck. With ten policemen to guard us, we headed for Ciudad Bolívar, the capital of the state of Bolivar. The dirt roads made the trip an agony. Police and prisoners alike, we rattled and shook like a sack of nuts on the truck floor; it was worse than a toboggan. The trip lasted five days. We slept in the truck every night, and every morning we started off again on this wild journey toward an unknown destination. We were all in very poor shape when we finally arrived in the village of El Dorado.
What was this El Dorado? First, it represented a dream of the Spanish conquistadores; they had noticed that the Indians from this region had gold and were therefore convinced that there must be a mountain of gold or, at the very least, half gold, half earth. Actually El Dorado was a village on a river full of piranhas—a carnivorous fish that devours man or beast in a few hours—and electric fish, the tembladores, that electrocute their prey as they swim around him, then suck the victim as he decomposes. In the middle of the river was an island and, on the island, a real concentration camp. This was the Venezuelan bagne.
This hard-labor camp was the most inhuman I’d ever seen. It was a compound about five hundred feet square, surrounded by barbed wire and with no shelter of any kind. Nearly four hundred men slept under the sky, exposed to all weathers. Here and there there were a few a small shelters roofed with zinc.
Without asking us a single question, without giving us any reason for what they were doing, they locked us into the bagne at El Dorado at three in the afternoon. We were dead from fatigue after the exhausting trip chained in the truck. At three-thirty—they hadn’t even asked us our names—two of us were given shovels and the other three pickaxes. Five soldiers surrounded us, rifles and bullwhips in hand, and a corporal ordered us to the work area under pain of being whipped. We got the point—they were out to demonstrate their authority. It would be very dangerous to disobey them now. Later on, perhaps.
When we reached the work area, we were told to dig a trench along the side of the road that was being built through the virgin forest. We obeyed without a word and went to work with what strength we had, never looking up. But this didn’t prevent us from hearing how the guards cursed and flayed the other prisoners. Not one of us was touched. I was convinced that we’d been put to work the moment we arrived to impress upon us our status as prisoners.
After work, covered with dust and sweat, we were admitted back into the prisoners’ camp. Still no formalities.
“The five Frenchies, this way.” It was our corporal. He was a half-breed, six feet four inches tall. He carried a bullwhip and was in charge of discipline inside the camp.
We were shown where to hang our hammocks near the entrance to the camp. It was in the open, although we did have a zinc roof to keep out the sun and rain.
The majority of the prisoners were Colombians; the rest were Venezuelans. None of the disciplinary camps in the French bagne could compare to the horrors of this place. A mule would have died from
the treatment they gave the prisoners, yet everybody seemed to be in good health. The reason for this was that the food was plentiful and good.
We held a council of war. We decided that if one of us was hit by a soldier, the best thing to do would be to stop work and lie on the ground. No matter how badly they beat us, we would not get up. Surely a superior officer would turn up one of these days, and somebody would tell us why we were in this bagne when we had committed no crime. Our two liberated cons—Guittou and Corbière—considered asking to be returned to France. Then we decided to call Negro Blanco, the corporal, over. I was chosen to do the talking. Guittou went to get him. The cutthroat arrived, his bullwhip in hand, and we gathered around him.
“What do you want?”
I spoke up. “We want to tell you something. We don’t intend ever to break a single rule of this bagne, and you’ll never have a reason to strike us. But we have noticed that you often hit people for no reason whatsoever. So we called you here to tell you that the day you strike any one of us, you’re a dead man. Understand?”
“Yes,” said Negro Blanco.
“One last piece of advice.”
“Yes,” he said in a low voice.
“If you have to repeat what I just told you, see that it’s to an officer, not a soldier.”
“O.K.” He went off.
This happened on a Sunday when the prisoners didn’t have to work.
An officer came to see us soon afterward. “What’s your name?”
“Papillon.”
“You’re the leader of the Frenchmen?”
“There are five of us and we’re all leaders.”
“Why were you the one who spoke to the corporal?”
“Because I speak better Spanish.”
He was only a captain in the national guard, not the warden of the prison. There were two officers above him, he said, but they were away. Since our arrival he’d been in charge. The other two would be coming back Tuesday.
“In speaking for your group, you threatened to kill the corporal if he struck any of you. Is that right?”
“Yes, and I meant it. But I want to point out that I also told him that at no time would we do anything that justified corporal punishment. Captain, do you know we haven’t been convicted by any court, that we’ve committed no crime in Venezuela?”
“I don’t know anything about that. You men arrived at the camp without papers and with only a note from the commissioner in the village: ‘Put these men to work as soon as they arrive.’”
“All right then, Captain, be fair. While you’re waiting for your superiors to arrive, tell your soldiers we’re not to be treated the same as the other prisoners. To repeat, we cannot be treated as convicts for we’ve committed no offense of any kind in Venezuela.”
“All right, I’ll deliver the order. I just hope you’re not trying to put something over on me.”
During the afternoon I took time out to study the prisoners. First, I was amazed to see how healthy they were. Second, I got the impression they were so used to being beaten that when Sunday came, and it was easy to avoid confrontations, they took a masochistic pleasure in provoking their tormentors. They insisted on doing things that were forbidden: they played with dice, they screwed in the toilets, they stole from their friends, they made obscene remarks to the women who came from the village with candy and cigarettes for the prisoners. These women also did some bartering, exchanging woven baskets or small sculptures for money and cigarettes. Some of the prisoners took what the women offered through the barbed wire, then ran off without paying up and disappeared into the crowd. It was obvious that the unfair and unreasonable corporal punishment had provoked a reign of terror throughout the camp which was without benefit to society, law, or order, and in no way corrected the unfortunate inmates.
Even so, the Réclusion at Saint-Joseph was much worse. There it was the silence. Here the fear was short-lived; you could talk at night and when you weren’t working, as on Sundays, and there was the rich and abundant food. It meant a man could easily get through his sentence, which was never more than five years in any case.
We spent Sunday smoking and drinking coffee as we talked among ourselves. Some Colombians tried to approach us, but we told them gently but firmly to go away. We were determined to be considered different from the other prisoners. Otherwise we were in for it.
The next day we ate a huge breakfast and filed off to work with the others. We were lined up in two rows facing each other: one row consisted of fifty prisoners, the other of fifty soldiers. One soldier to each prisoner. Between the two rows lay fifty tools: shovels, pickaxes and hatchets. The two rows looked at each other, the prisoners in a state of terror, the soldiers nervous and sadistic.
The sergeant called out a name and a tool. The poor bugger grabbed it, flung it over his shoulder and ran off to start work as the sergeant called out “Number X,” meaning a soldier. The soldier fell in behind the poor mec and beat him with his whip. This scene was repeated twice a day. It didn’t look like men going off to work; it looked like mule drivers thrashing their beasts.
We were scared shitless as we waited our turn. But with us it was different.
“The five Frenchies, this way! You younger ones, pick up those pickaxes; the old men, take these two spades.”
We set off toward the work area at a good clip, with four soldiers and a corporal to guard us. This day was worse than the first. Men who had been singled out for special abuse were at the end of their rope and were pleading on their knees for the beating to stop. In the afternoon the prisoners were ordered to gather some scattered pieces of wood from fires that hadn’t quite gone out in order to make one big pile. Others were to clean up behind them. The idea was that, instead of a hundred sticks smoldering here and there, there was to be one big fire in the middle of the field. Each soldier whipped his prisoner to make him move faster as he picked up the wood and ran with it to the pile. This devilish relay race had already pushed some of the mecs over the brink of sanity and in their hurry they were picking up wood that was still burning. Their hands were on fire, they were walking over the hot coals in their bare feet. This demon dance lasted three hours. Luckily for us, none of us were ordered to take part, for as we were digging, we had decided—in clipped sentences, barely raising our heads—that we would leap on our five soldiers and the corporal, disarm them and shoot into the band of savages on the field.
Tuesday we didn’t work but were summoned before the two officers. They were astonished that we should be at El Dorado without documents and without a tribunal having sent us there. They promised to ask the head warden for an explanation the next day.
It didn’t take long. The two officers were strict and unnecessarily repressive, but they were correct; they demanded that the head warden come and explain the situation in person.
He was now standing before us with his brother-in-law and the two officers. “I am the warden of the penal colony at El Dorado. You asked to speak with me. What do you want?”
“First, we want to know what tribunal condemned us to this camp? How long is our sentence and what was our crime? We arrived in Irapa by sea. We have committed no offense. So what are we doing here? How do you justify making us work?”
“First of all, we’re at war. We must know exactly who you are.”
“That may be, but it doesn’t justify being locked up in your bagne.”
“You escaped from French justice. We have to find out if France wants you back.”
“Again, that may be. But I repeat, why do you treat us as if we were serving a sentence?”
“For the moment you’re here under the vagrancy laws while we proceed to document your case.”
This discussion would have gone on forever if one of the officers hadn’t cut through the garbage. “Warden, in all honesty, we can’t treat these men the way we treat the other prisoners. I suggest that while we wait for word from Caracas, we find some other way of keeping them busy.”
“These ar
e dangerous men. They threatened to kill the corporal if he hit them. Isn’t that true?”
“Not only did we threaten him, sir, we threatened to kill anybody who took it into their heads to hit any one of us.”
“What if it was a soldier?”
“Same thing. We’ve done nothing to deserve this treatment. Maybe our laws and penal systems are worse than yours, but to be beaten like an animal, that’s too much.”
The warden turned toward the officers with a look of triumph. “See how dangerous these men are!”
The older of the two officers hesitated for a second. Then, to everybody’s astonishment, he said, “These French fugitives are right. There’s nothing in Venezuela that justifies their being made to serve a sentence or being subjected to the regulations of this colony. I agree with them there. Warden, either you find them some kind of work away from the other prisoners, or they don’t work at all. If they’re in with everybody else, sooner or later some soldier is bound to beat them.”
“We’ll see about that. Leave them in the camp for now. I’ll tell you what to do in the morning.” Then the warden and his brother-in-law left.
I thanked the officers. They gave us cigarettes and promised that at the evening report they would instruct the officers and soldiers not to strike us under any pretext.
We’d now been here eight days. We had stopped working. Yesterday was Sunday and a terrible thing happened. The Colombians drew lots to see who was to kill Negro Blanco. A man of about thirty lost. He was given an iron spoon, the handle of which had been sharpened on the cement into a pointed, double-edged lance. He stuck bravely by his pact and stabbed Negro Blanco three times near the heart. The half-breed was carried off to the hospital and his assassin was bound to a stake in the middle of the camp. The soldiers went berserk; they searched everybody for weapons and beat the prisoners mercilessly. I wasn’t fast enough taking off my pants and one of the frenzied soldiers whipped me on my rear. Corbière picked up a bench and raised it over the man’s head. Another soldier pierced his arm with his bayonet, and at the same moment I flattened my attacker with a kick in the belly. I had already picked up his rifle when a loud voice reached us:
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