Papillon (71 page)

Authors: Henri Charriere

BOOK: Papillon

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FREEDOM

An extraordinary thing happened. I found the Venezuelans so appealing I decided to join my fate to theirs. No, I wouldn’t go on a
cavale
. I would accept my unwarranted position as a prisoner in the hope that I would someday be one of them. It may seem paradoxical. The savage way they treated their prisoners was hardly likely to make me want to live with them, yet I came to understand why both prisoners and soldiers found the punishment normal. If a soldier did something wrong, he got a whipping too. And, a few days later, the same soldier would be talking to whoever had flogged him as if nothing had happened.

This barbarous system was the product of the dictator Gomez and had outlived him. There is still a civilian official who punishes the people under him with lashings of the bullwhip.

My liberation came in the wake of a revolution. A coup d’état, half military, half civilian, unseated General Angarita Medina, the president of the republic and one of the greatest liberals in Venezuela’s history. He was such a good democrat that he didn’t even try to resist the coup d’état. They say that he refused to let Venezuelans kill each other to keep him in power. I cannot believe that that great democratic soldier knew what was being perpetrated at El Dorado.

One month after the revolution all the officers were transferred. There was an inquiry into the death of the con who had stabbed Negro Blanco. The warden and his brother-in-law disappeared and were replaced by a former lawyer-diplomat.

“Papillon, I’m setting you free tomorrow, but I wish you’d take poor old Picolino with you. He has no identity card, but I’ll make him one. Here’s yours. It’s all in order and has your right name. Now these are the conditions: you must live in the country for a year before you move into the city. It will be a sort of parole so we can see how you’re faring and what you’re doing with yourself. If at the end of the year the district leader gives you a certificate of good conduct—as I believe he will—then your confinement is at an end. I think Caracas would be an ideal city for you. In any event, you’re now legally authorized to live in this country. Your past is of no concern to us. It’s up to you to show that you deserve the opportunity to become a respectable person. I hope you’ll be my fellow citizen before five years are out. God go with you! And thanks for taking care of Picolino. I can give him his freedom only if someone states in writing that he’ll take charge of him. Maybe a hospital can do something for him. Let’s hope so.”

I was to be set free with Picolino the next morning at seven. I felt a great warmth in my heart. I was done forever with the road of the condemned. It was October 18, 1945. I’d been waiting fourteen years for this day.

I withdrew into my little house. I made my excuses to my friends; I needed to be alone. The emotion I felt was too vast and too beautiful to expose to others. I turned my identity card over and over in my hand: my picture was in the left-hand corner and above it the number 1728629, and the date. In the middle, my last name, and under that, my first name. On the back was the date of my birth: November 16, 1906. Everything was in order—it was even signed and stamped by the Director of the Identification Service. My category in Venezuela: “resident.” That was really something, that word
resident
. It meant I was domiciled in Venezuela. My heart was thumping. I wanted to get down on my knees to pray and thank God. “But, Papi, you don’t know how to pray, and you’ve never been baptized. What God do you propose to pray to when you don’t belong to any religion? The God of the Catholics? Of the Protestants? The Jews? The Mohammedans?” Whichever I chose, I would have to make up a prayer from scratch because I’d never known any prayer from start to finish. But what did it matter which God I prayed to? Whenever I’d called on Him or cursed Him in the past, hadn’t I always thought of Him as the God that belonged to the baby Jesus in his manger with the donkey and the cows standing around? Maybe my subconscious still held a grudge against the good sisters in Colombia. So why didn’t I close my mind to everything but the one and only sublime Bishop of Curaçao, Monsignor Irénée de Bruyne, and, further back still, the good father at the Conciergerie?

For all that I was innocent of the murder for which one public prosecutor, a few cops and twelve cheesehead jurymen had condemned me to hard labor for life, the fact is that I had been a bum. It was because I had been a bum and an adventurer that they had found it so easy to graft on their tissue of lies. I grant you, opening other people’s safes is not a commendable profession, and society has the right and duty to protect itself from the likes of me. If I had been pitched down the road of the condemned, I have to be honest and admit that I had been a permanent candidate for the
bagne
. True, my punishment wasn’t worthy of the French people, and if society needed to protect itself, it didn’t have to sink so low—but that’s beside the point. I can’t erase my past with a swipe of the sponge. I must rehabilitate myself in my own eyes first, then in the eyes of others.

The great majority of Frenchmen will not admit that a man with my past can become a good man. That’s the difference between the Venezuelan people and the French. You remember that poor fisherman in Irapa who tried to explain to the chief of police that no man is ever lost for good, that he must be given a chance to become an honest man? Those almost illiterate fishermen lost in the Gulf of Paria in the vast estuary of the Orinoco have a humane philosophy that many of my countrymen could envy. We have too much technological progress, life is too hectic, and our society has only one goal: to invent still more technological marvels to make life even easier and better. The craving for every new scientific discovery breeds a hunger for greater comfort and the constant struggle to achieve it. All that kills the soul, kills compassion, understanding, nobility. It leaves no time for caring what happens to other people, least of all criminals. Even the officials in Venezuela’s remote areas are better for they’re also concerned with public peace. It gives them many headaches, but they seem to believe that bringing about a man’s salvation is worth the effort. I find that magnificent.

Yes, by God, I’d do everything in my power to become honest and stay that way. The one difficulty was that I’d never worked at anything, I didn’t know how to do anything. But I wouldn’t care what I did to earn a living. It might not be easy, but I’d manage somehow. I was sure of it. Tomorrow I’d be like other men.

Should I let my father know I was free? He’d had no word from me for years. I wondered where he was. Probably the only news he’d had about me was when the police looked him up each time I made a
cavale
. No, I mustn’t hurry that one. I had no right to open a wound that the years might almost have healed. I’d write him when I was established, when I had a steady job, when my problems were behind me and I could say to him, “Father, your son is finally free and an honest man. Here’s where I’m living, this is what I’m doing. You can hold your head up now. That’s why I’m writing to say that I love you and will always think of you with deep respect.”

It’s not all that easy to step out of the chains you’ve been dragging around for fourteen years. They tell you you’re free, they turn their backs on you, you’re no longer being watched. It’s that simple. Yet you still wonder.... You don’t make over a life the way you sew on a button. And if today, twenty-three years later, I’m a married man with a daughter, living happily in Caracas as a Venezuelan citizen, I have to confess to many more adventures between then and now, some of them successful, some failures, but always as a free man and a good citizen. Maybe some day I’ll write them down, along with other interesting stories I didn’t have room for in this book.

GLOSSARY

Bagnard:
A convict serving out his sentence in a
bagne
.

Bagne:
A penal colony, from the Italian
bagno
because Italian convicts were kept in cellars below sea level. When sails superseded galleys, convicts were given other forms of hard labor instead. Starting in 1854, all French convicts were deported to French Guiana. The penal colonies were suppressed during World War II. All prison sentences are now served in metropolitan France.

Camelote:
Junk or shoddy goods, from the old French
coesmelot
, meaning a dealer in odds and ends.

Cavale:
From
cavaler
, to beat it, or scram, especially from the police. Derived from the Latin
cabalus
, meaning horse. First used by Victor Hugo.

Gourbi:
An Arabic word for primitive shelter. In military usage, a temporary shelter for soldiers in the trenches, dating from 1841. Now used to describe any kind of abode from a hole-in-the-wall to an apartment.

Libéré:
A liberated convict serving out his
doublage
(the supplementary sentence, equal in length to his
bagne
sentence, which the convict had to serve in French Guiana before he could move on).

Mec:
Originally meaning
pimp
, it has been rubbed down to signify
man, guy, pal, buddy
and the like (except among the “better class” of Frenchmen).

Plan:
A metal cylinder for holding money which the convict carries in his lower intestine to safeguard it from frisking or theft. Probably from
plan
as in
plan d’évasion
, meaning plan of escape. By inference, the basic ingredients needed to realize such a plan.

Relégué:
A chronic repeater of petty crimes, i.e., a small-time criminal.

CREDITS

Cover design by Gregg Kulick

COPYRIGHT

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1970 by William Morrow and Company.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

PAPILLON
. Copyright © 1970 for U.S. edition translation by William Morrow and Company. French edition published by Robert Laffont, Paris, copyright © 1969 by Robert Laffont. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

First Perennial edition published 2001.

First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2006.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Perennial edition as follows: Charrière, Henri.

[Papillon. English]

Papillon / Henri Charrière ; with an introduction by Jean-Pierre Castelnau ; translated by June P. Wilson and Walter B. Michaels.—1st Perennial ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York: W. Morrow, 1970.

ISBN 0-06-093479-4

1. Charrière, Henri, 1906-1973. 2. Prisoners—French Guiana—Biography. I. Title.

HV8956.G8 C513 2001

356’.6’092—dc21

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