Papillon (12 page)

“Oh, shut up, La Chouette!”

Four shadows emerged from the hut.

“Approach gently, friend. I bet you’re the man with the carbine. If you’ve got it with you, put it on the ground; you have nothing to fear from us.”

“Yes, that’s me. But I don’t have the carbine now.”

I inched forward. I was close now, but it was dark and I couldn’t make out their features. Stupidly I put out my hand. No one took it. I understood too late that such a gesture was not made here: they didn’t want to contaminate me.

“Let’s go back to the hut,” La Chouette said.

The little cabin was lit by an oil lamp on a table. “Have a seat.”

I sat down on a stool. La Chouette lit three more lamps and placed one of them on a table directly in front of me. The smoke of the coconut oil had a sickening smell. The five of them stood, so that I couldn’t make out their faces. Mine was well lighted because I was at the same height as the lamp, which is what they had intended.

The voice which had told La Chouette to shut up now said, “L’Anguille, go ask at the main house if they want us to bring him over. Come back with the answer right away. And make sure it’s all right with Toussaint. “We can’t offer you anything to drink here, friend, unless you don’t mind swallowing eggs.” He placed a basket full of eggs in front of me.

“No, thank you.”

Then one of them sat down near me and that’s when I saw my first leper. It was horrible. I had to make an effort not to look away or otherwise show my feelings. His nose was completely eaten away, flesh and bone; there was only a hole in the middle of his face. I mean what I say: not two holes, but a single hole, as big as a silver dollar. The right side of the lower lip was also eaten away and exposed three long yellow teeth that jutted out of the bone of the upper jaw. He had only one ear. He was resting a bandaged hand on the table. It was his right hand. With the two fingers remaining on his left hand he held a long, fat cigar. He had probably made it from a half-ripe tobacco leaf, for it was greenish in color. Only his left eye had an eyelid; the lid of his right eye was gone and a deep scar stretched from the eye to the top of his forehead, where it disappeared into his shaggy gray hair.

In a hoarse voice he said, “We’ll help you,
mec
. I don’t want you to stay around here and become like me.”

“Thank you.”

“My name is Jean sans Peur. I was handsomer, healthier and stronger than you when I first came to the
bagne
. Look at what ten years have done to me.”

“Doesn’t anybody take care of you?”

“Sure. I’m much better since I started giving myself injections of chauhnoogra oil. Look.” He turned his head and showed me his left side. “It’s drying up there.”

Feeling an immense pity for this man, I made a motion to touch his cheek as a sign of friendship. He threw himself back and said, “Thank you for wanting to touch me, but you must never touch a leper, nor eat or drink from his bowl.” Of all the lepers, his is the face I remember, this man who had the courage to make me look.

“Where’s the
mec
?” In the doorway I saw the shadow of a very small man not much bigger than a dwarf. “Toussaint and the others want to see him. Bring him to the center.”

Jean sans Peur got up and said, “Follow me.” We all set off into the night, four or five in front, me next to Jean sans Peur, more behind. After three minutes we arrived at a clearing faintly lit by the moon. It was the flat summit of the island. In the middle was a house. Light came from two windows. In front about twenty men waited for us. As we arrived at the door, they stood back to let us through. I found myself in a room thirty feet long and twelve feet wide with a kind of fireplace in which wood was burning, surrounded by four huge stones of the same height. The room was lighted by two large hurricane lanterns. On one of the stone stools sat an ageless man with black eyes set in a white face. Behind him on a bench were five or six others.

“I’m Toussaint, the Corsican; you must be Papillon.”

“I am.”

“News travels fast in the
bagne
. Almost as fast as you do. Where is your carbine?”

“We threw it in the river.”

“Where?”

“Opposite the hospital wall, exactly where we jumped.”

“So it would be possible to recover it?”

“I suppose so. The water isn’t very deep there.”

“How do you know?”

“We had to wade through it to carry my injured friend to the boat.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“He broke his leg.”

“What have you done for him?”

“I split some branches and made him splints.”

“Is he in pain?”

“Yes.”

“Where is he?”

“In the boat.”

“You said you came for help. What kind of help?”

“A better boat.”

“You want us to give you a boat?”

“Yes. I have money to buy it with.”

“Good. I’ll sell you mine; it’s a great boat and brand-new. I stole it last week in Albina. It’s not a boat; it’s a transatlantic steamer. There’s only one thing missing: a keel. But in
two hours
we can fix it up with a good one. It has everything else you could want: a rudder, a thirteen-foot mast of ironwood and a brand-new heavy linen sail. What will you give me for it?”

“Tell me what you want. I don’t know what things are worth here.”

“Three thousand francs if you have it. If you don’t, go find the carbine tomorrow night and I’ll give you the boat in exchange.”

“No, I’d rather pay.”

“O.K. It’s a sale. La Puce, let’s have some coffee!”

La Puce, the near-dwarf who had first come for me, went over to a board fixed to the wall above the fire, took down a bowl, shining new and clean, poured in some coffee from a bottle and put it on the fire. After a moment he took the bowl and poured the coffee in some mugs. Toussaint leaned down and passed the mugs to the men behind him. La Puce handed me the bowl, saying, “Don’t worry. This bowl is only for visitors. No lepers drink from it.”

I took the bowl and drank, then rested it on my knee. It was then that I noticed a finger stuck to the bowl. I was just taking this in when La Puce said:

“Damn, I’ve lost another finger. Where the devil is it?”

“It’s there,” I said, showing him the bowl.

He pulled it off, threw it in the fire and said, “You can go on drinking. I have dry leprosy. I’m disintegrating piece by piece, but I’m not rotting. I’m not contagious.” The smell of grilled meat reached me. It must be his finger.

Toussaint said, “You’ll have to stay through the day until low tide. Go tell your friends. Bring the man with the broken leg into one of the huts. Take everything you have from the boat and sink it. Nobody here can help you. You understand why.”

I returned to my companions and we carried Clousiot to the hut. One hour later everything was out of the boat and carefully stowed away. La Puce asked if we’d make him a present of it and also a paddle. I gave it to him and he took it away to sink it in a special place he knew. The night went fast. All three of us were in the hut, lying on new blankets sent over by Toussaint. They were delivered in the heavy paper they’d been shipped in. As we lay there, I brought Clousiot and Maturette up to date on what had happened since our arrival on the island, and the bargain I had struck with Toussaint. Clousiot said without thinking, “Then this
cavale
is really costing six thousand francs. I’ll pay half, Papillon, or the three thousand I have.”

“We’re not here to haggle like a bunch of Armenians. As long as I have money, I’ll pay. After that we’ll see.”

During the night we were left to ourselves. When day broke, Toussaint was there. “Good morning. Don’t be afraid to come out. Nobody can bother you here. There’s a man watching for police boats on the river from a cocoa tree on top of the island. We haven’t seen any so far. As long as the white rag is up, there’s nothing in sight. If he sees anything, he’ll come down and tell us. Pick yourselves some papayas if you like.”

I said, “Toussaint, what about the keel?”

“We’re going to make it from the infirmary door. It’s made of heavy snakewood. The keel will need two planks. We brought the boat up while it was dark. Come see it.”

We went. It was a magnificent boat sixteen feet long, brand-new, with two benches, one with a hole for the mast. It was heavy, and Maturette and I had trouble turning it over. The sail and the ropes were also new. There were rings on the sides for hanging a barrel of water. We went to work. By noon a keel, tapered from front to back, was solidly in place with long screws and four angle irons.

The lepers formed a circle around us, watching in silence. Toussaint told us what to do and we obeyed. There wasn’t a sign of a sore on Toussainte face; he looked perfectly normal, but when he talked you noticed that only one side of his face moved, the left side. He told me that he, too, had dry leprosy. His torso and right arm were paralyzed and he expected his right leg to go before long. His right eye was fixed, like a glass eye; he could see with it, but he couldn’t move it.

I only hoped that no one who ever loved these lepers knew their terrible fate.

As I worked, I talked to Toussaint. No one else spoke. Just once, when I was about to pick up one of the angle irons, one of them said: “Don’t touch them yet. I cut myself when I was removing one of them from a piece of furniture, and there’s still blood on it even though I tried to wipe it off.” One of the lepers poured rum on it and set it on fire, then repeated the operation. “Now you can use it,” the man said. While we were working, Toussaint said to one of the men, “You’ve left the island several times. Papillon and his friends haven’t, so tell them how to do it.”

“Low tide is early tonight. The tide will start to ebb at three o’clock. When night falls, around six, you’ll have a very strong current which in three hours will take you about sixty miles toward the mouth of the river. At nine o’clock you must stop. Get a good grip on an overhanging tree and wait out the six hours of the rising tide—that is, until three in the morning. But don’t leave then; the current isn’t moving fast enough yet. At four-thirty beat it into the middle of the river. You have an hour and a half before daybreak to do your thirty miles. This is your last chance. When the sun rises at six, you make for the sea. Even if the guards spot you, they won’t be able to catch you because they’ll be arriving at the bar just as the tide turns. They won’t be able to get over it and you’ll have made it. Your life depends on this half-mile headstart. This boat has only one sail. What did you have on your boat?”

“A mainsail and a jib.”

“This is a heavy boat; it can take two more sails—a spinnaker from the bow to the mast, and a jib that will help keep the nose pointing into the wind. Use all your sails and go straight into the waves; the sea is always heavy at the mouth of the estuary. Get your friends to lie flat in the bottom of the boat to stabilize it, and you hold the tiller tight in your hand. Don’t tie the sheet to your leg, but put it through the ring and hold it with a single turn around your wrist. If you see that the force of the wind plus the size of the waves is about to capsize you, let everything go—the boat will immediately find its own equilibrium. Don’t stop; let the mainsail luff and keep going with your spinnaker and the jib. When the sea calms down, you’ll have time to take down your sail, bring it in and move on after hoisting it again. Do you know the route?”

“No. All I know is that Venezuela and Colombia are north-west.”

“Right. But be careful you’re not driven back to the coast. Dutch Guiana, opposite us, turns in all escaped cons; so does British Guiana. Trinidad doesn’t turn them in, but you can only stay two weeks. Venezuela will turn you in after making you work on a road gang for a year or two.”

I listened closely. He told me that he left the island from time to time, but since he was a leper, he was always sent back in short order. He admitted that he had never been farther than Georgetown in British Guiana. He wasn’t an obvious leper, having lost only his toes, as I could see since he was barefoot. Toussaint made me repeat my instructions and I did so without making a mistake.

At that point Jean sans Peur said, “How much time should he spend on the open sea?”

I answered straight off, “I’ll do three days north northeast. With the drift, that makes due north. On the fourth day I’ll head northwest, which comes out to due west.”

“Bravo,” said the leper. “The last time I did it, I spent only two days going northeast and I hit British Guiana. If you take three days going north, you’ll pass north of Trinidad or Barbados, you’ll bypass Venezuela, and before you know it you’ll find yourself in Colombia or Curaçao.”

Jean sans Peur asked, “Toussaint, how much did you sell your boat for?”

“Three thousand. Is that too much?”

“No, that isn’t why I asked. I just wanted to know. Have you got the money, Papillon?”

“Yes.”

“Will you have any left?”

“No, it’s all we have, exactly three thousand francs belonging to my friend, Clousiot.”

“Toussaint, will you buy my revolver?” said Jean sans Peur. “I’d like to help these
mecs
. How much will you give me for it?”