Papillon (41 page)

I was hardly in the room when the white-clad
bagnards
came at me from all sides. “Papi, come over here,” or, “No, come to us.” Grandet took my pack and said, “He’s going to make
gourbi
with me.” I followed him. My hammock was hung up and stretched good and tight. “
Mec
, here’s a feather pillow for you,” Grandet said. A lot of my old friends were there: men from Corsica and Marseilles, a few from Paris, all people I’d known in France, or at the Santé or Conciergerie, or in the convoy. “Why are you all here?” I asked. “Why aren’t you out working?”

Everybody laughed. “Nobody here works more than an hour a day. Then we come back to our
gourbis
.”

I had a wonderful reception. But I soon realized something I hadn’t anticipated: in spite of the four days I spent in the hospital, I would have to learn all over again how to live in a community.

Then, to my surprise, a man came in, dressed in white, carrying a platter covered with a white cloth and calling out, “Steaks, steaks, who wants some steaks?” He gradually made his way to us, stopped and lifted the white cloth, revealing neat piles of steaks just like in a butcher shop. It was clear that Grandet was a regular customer. He wasn’t asked if he wanted any, but how many.

“Five.”

“Sirloin or shoulder?”

“Sirloin. How much do I owe you? You better give me your bill because there’s one more of us now.”

The steak seller took out a notebook and started to add up. “A hundred and thirty-five francs all told.”

“Here’s your money. We’ll start from scratch now.”

When the man had gone, Grandet said, “If you don’t have money here, you starve. But we have a system so you’ll never be without it. We call it ‘the deal.’”

In the hard-labor camps “the deal” was the way each person managed to get money. The camp cook sold the meat intended for the prisoners. When the meat arrived at his kitchen, he cut up about half. Depending on the cuts, he made steaks, or stew or soup meat. One part went to the guards—their wives did the buying—and one part to the cons who could afford it. Naturally the cook gave a share of his earnings to the kitchen guard. The first building he went to with his merchandise was always ours—Special Building A.

So “the deal” was that the cook sold meat and fats; the baker sold the rolls and long loaves intended for the guards; the butcher sold meat too; the orderly sold injections; the clerk took money to get you a good job or to release you from a work gang; the gardener sold fresh vegetables and fruits; the cons who worked in the labs sold analyses and would even work up a fake tuberculosis, leprosy, dysentery, etc.; there were specialists in robbery who lifted chickens, eggs and French soap from around the guards’ houses; the houseboys trafficked with their employers to provide you with whatever you asked for—butter, condensed milk, powdered milk, canned tuna fish, sardines, cheese, and of course wines and liquor (our
gourbi
was never without a bottle of Ricard, and English or American cigarettes); and the same for the men who fished for lobsters.

But the best and most dangerous “deal” was to be a croupier. There was a rule that no building could have more than five croupiers. If you decided you wanted to be one, you presented yourself at the start of the evening’s game and said, “I want to be croupier.”

The players would say, “No.”

“Everybody says no?”

“Everybody.”

“All right, then. I want So-and-so’s place.”

The man he singled out understood. He got up, they went to the center of the room, and there the two men fought it out with knives. Whoever won became croupier. Croupiers got 5 percent of each winning hand.

The gambling also gave rise to other smaller “deals.” There was the man who prepared the tightly stretched blanket we played on, someone else who rented out small benches for players who couldn’t sit cross-legged on the floor, and the cigarette vendor who scattered cigar boxes containing French, English, American and even hand-rolled cigarettes on the blanket. Each cigarette had its price, and as the player took one, he dropped the exact amount in the box. And then there was the man who prepared the gas lamps and watched to see that they didn’t smoke. (The lamps were made from milk containers with a wick that was stuck through a hole in the top. It needed a lot of trimming.) For non-smokers there were candy and cakes baked through a special “deal.” Each building had at least one Arab-style coffee maker. Covered with a couple of jute bags, it kept hot the whole night. From time to time the coffee vendor passed through the door selling hot coffee or cocoa from a handmade pot.

Then there was
camelote
. It was a kind of artisans’ “deal.” Some worked the tortoiseshell from turtles caught by the fishermen. A shell with thirteen plates could weigh as much as four and a half pounds. They were made into bracelets, earrings, necklaces, cigarette holders, combs, the backs of brushes. I saw a small box of pale tortoiseshell that was really beautiful. Other craftsmen worked coconuts, cattle and buffalo horns, ebony and the wood on the islands. Still others did very fine cabinetwork using only joints—never nails. The cleverest of all worked in bronze. And there were also painters.

Sometimes several talents were combined to make one object. For example, a fisherman caught a shark and fixed his mouth in an open position, the teeth straight and well-polished. Then a cabinetmaker fashioned a small-scale anchor out of a smooth, finegrained piece of wood, with enough space in the middle for a painting. The shark’s jaw was attached to the anchor and the artist painted a scene showing the Iles du Salut surrounded by water. One of the favorites was a view of the point of Ile Royale, the channel and He Saint-Joseph, with the setting sun casting bright rays over the blue sea and, in the water, a boat with six convicts naked from the waist up, their oars held upright, behind them three guards holding submachine guns. In the prow of the boat two men were raising a casket from which slid a flour sack containing the corpse of a dead con. Sharks were swimming about with their mouths open, waiting for the body. In the lower right-hand corner of the painting was the inscription: “Burial at Royale,” and the date.

The
camelote
was sold in the guards’ houses. The best pieces were often bought in advance or made to order. The rest was sold on the boats that shuttled between the islands. This “deal” was the boatmen’s domain. There were also the forgers: someone would take a dented old mug and engrave on it: “This mug belonged to Dreyfus, Ile du Diable,” and the date. They did the same with spoons and mess plates. Breton sailors fell for anything that had the name “Sezenec” on it.

This trade brought a lot of money into the islands and it was in the guards’ interest not to interfere. Besides, the men were easier to handle and adapted better to
bagne
life if they were busy.

Homosexuality had official sanction. From the warden on down, everybody knew that So-and-so was So-and-so’s wife, and if you sent one of them to another island, you made sure the other went with him.

Among all these men, not three in a hundred were interested in a
cavale
. Not even the ones with life sentences. The only possibility was to get disinterred and sent to Grande Terre, Saint-Laurent, Kourou, or Cayenne. And this worked only for those with short sentences. If you had life, you had to commit murder so you’d be sent to Saint-Laurent to appear before the tribunal. But since you had to plead guilty in order to go, you risked getting five years in solitary, and there was no knowing if you’d be able to use the short stay in Saint-Laurent—three months at the most—to bring off an escape.

You could also try to get disinterned for medical reasons. If you were found to be tubercular, you were sent to the camp for tuberculars called Nouveau Camp, about fifty miles from Saint-Laurent.

There was also leprosy or dysentery. It was fairly easy to fake these, but they carried with them the terrible danger of living isolated in a special ward for nearly two years with men who really had the disease. It was a short step from faking leprosy to having it, or from having healthy lungs to getting tuberculosis, but many took that step. Dysentery was the most contagious of all.

I was now installed in Building A with my hundred and twenty comrades. It was hard learning how to live in this community where you were so quickly pigeonholed. First you had to make it clear that you were dangerous. Once they were afraid of you, you had to win their respect by the way you handled yourself with the guards—you never accepted certain jobs, you refused to work with certain gangs, you never recognized the authority of the turnkeys, you never obeyed an order, even if it meant a run-in with a guard. If you gambled all night, you skipped roll call. The trusty for our
case
(the buildings were called
cases)
would call out “Sick in bed.” In the other two
cases
the guards usually made the “sick” man take roll call. This never happened to us. Obviously, what everybody—from the highest to the lowest—wanted most was a peaceful
bagne
.

Grandet, my
gourbi
mate, was thirty-five and from Marseilles. He was very tall, as thin as a rail, but very strong. We had been friends in France and used to see each other around Toulon, Marseilles and Paris. He was a well-known safecracker and a good guy, although a little too dangerous perhaps.

Today I was almost alone in the huge room. The man in charge of our
case
was sweeping and mopping the cement floor. I noticed another man fixing a watch with a gadget in his left eye. Above his hammock he had a shelf with at least thirty watches hanging from it. His face looked thirty, but his hair was completely white. I went up to him and watched him work, then tried to start a conversation. He didn’t open his mouth; he didn’t even look up. This made me a little angry, so I left him and went into the yard to sit by the washhouse. Titi la Belote was there playing a card game. His nimble fingers shuffled the thirty-two cards with incredible speed. Without interrupting the rhythm of his magician’s hands, he said, “How goes it, pal? You like Royale?”

“Sure, but today I’m bored. I think I’ll go do a little work to get out of camp. I wanted to have a talk with that
mec
who fixes watches, but he wouldn’t open his mouth.”

“You can say that again, Papi. That
mec
doesn’t give a damn for anybody. He lives for his watches and the hell with everything else. But after what happened to him, he has every right to feel bitter. You know they gave that kid—he’s not thirty years old—the death penalty last year for supposedly raping the wife of a guard. It was a real phony. He’d been screwing her for a long time—she was the wife of a Breton guard. He worked for them as a house-boy, and each time the Breton was on duty, the watch repairer gave it to her. But they made a mistake: the broad wouldn’t let him do the laundry or ironing any more. She did it herself, and since her husband knew she was bone lazy, he began to wonder what was going on. But since he couldn’t prove anything, he thought up a scheme to surprise her in
flagrante delicto
, then kill them both. One day he left his post two hours after arriving and asked another guard to go home with him, saying he wanted to make him a present of a ham he’d just received from home. He crept up to his house and was just opening the door when his parrot shrieked: ‘Here comes the boss!’ which it did whenever the guard came home. Immediately the wife started to scream, ‘Help, help! I’m being raped!’ The two guards entered the room just as the woman was tearing herself from the con’s arms; the con jumped through the window and the husband started to shoot, nicking him in the shoulder. Meanwhile the broad was clawing at her breasts and cheeks and ripping her dressing gown. The con fell, but just as the Breton was going to finish him off, the other guard disarmed him. When I tell you this guy was a Corsican, you’ll understand right away that he knew the whole thing was a fake, that it was no more a rape than a twenty-five-franc lay. But he was in no position to tell this to the Breton, so he pretended he believed it was a rape. The watch fixer was condemned to death. Not that all this was particularly unusual. It was later that it became interesting.

“On Royale the cons with special punishments are kept in the same place they keep the guillotine. Every week the executioners and his aides go into the yard, mount the guillotine and slice a couple of banana trunks to make sure it’s in good working order.

“The watch repairman was in a cell for cons with the death sentence along with three Arabs and a Sicilian. All five were waiting for verdicts on their appeals.

“One morning they set up the guillotine and threw open the watch fixer’s door. The executioners jumped on him, bound his wrists and looped the rope around his feet. Then they cut away his collar and he shuffled out into the early-morning light. You probably know that when you arrive in front of the guillotine you face an upright board to which you’re strapped. They were about to put his neck in the curved part when Coco Sec—the head warden has to be present at all executions—showed up. He was carrying a big hurricane lantern, and as he aimed it at the scene, he saw that the screwball guards had made a mistake: they were going to cut off the watch fixer’s head when it wasn’t his day at all.

“‘Stop! Stop!’ Barrot hollered.

“He was so upset it was all he could get out. He dropped the lantern, elbowed past the guards and executioners and unstrapped the
mec
himself. Finally he managed to say, ‘Orderly, take him back to his cell. Take care of him, stay with him, give him some rum. And you, you idiots, go get Rencasseu. He’s the one you’re supposed to execute today.’