Papillon

The two commanding officers, the captain of the ship and the head of the convoy, talked privately. The captain gave an order to a quartermaster, who went up on deck. A few moments later a Breton sailor appeared, a giant of a man, with a wooden bucket of sea water and a rope as thick as your wrist. The convict was tied to the bottom step of the ladder, on his knees. The sailor wetted the rope in the bucket and then deliberately, with all his strength, he set about flogging the poor devil’s back and buttocks. Not a sound came from the convict: blood flowed from his buttocks and his sides. A shout from our cage broke the graveyard silence. ‘You bloody sods!’

That was all that was needed to start everybody roaring. ‘Murderers! Swine! Bastards!’ The more they threatened to fire if we did not shut up the more we bellowed until suddenly the captain shouted, ‘Turn on the steam!’

Sailors turned various wheels and jets of steam shot out at us with such force that in a split second everyone was flat on his belly. The jets came at chest-height. We were all struck with panic. The men who had been scalded dared not cry out. The whole thing lasted under a minute, but it terrified every man there.

‘I hope you obstinate brutes have grasped what I mean. The slightest trouble, and I turn on the steam. You get me? Stand up!’

Only three men had been seriously scalded. They were taken to the sick-bay. The man who had been flogged was put back with us. Six years later he died while making a break with me.

During those eighteen days of the voyage we had plenty of time to try to learn about what was coming or to get at least some notion of the penal settlement. Yet when we got this nothing turned out quite as we had expected, although Julot had done his very best to pass on his knowledge.

We did know that Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni was a village seventy-five miles from the sea on a river called the Maroni. Julot told us about it. ‘That’s the village that has the prison, the one that’s the centre of the penal settlement. That’s where they sort you out according to your category. The preventive detentions go straight to a prison called Saint-Jean, about ninety miles away. The right convicts are separated into three groups. First the ones labelled very dangerous: as soon as they arrive they’re called out and shoved into cells in the punishment-block until they can be transferred to the Iles du Salut. There they are interned either for a given number of years or for life. These islands are three hundred miles and more from Saint-Laurent and sixty from Cayenne. There are three of them. Royale, the biggest; Saint-Joseph, which has the settlement’s solitary-confinement prison; and Devil’s Island, the smallest of them all. Apart from a very few exceptions, convicts don’t go to Devil’s Island. The people there are politicals. Then comes dangerous, second category: they stay at the Saint-Laurent camp, and they’re put to gardening and working on the land. Whenever there’s a need for men they’re sent to the very tough camps – Camp Forestier, Charvin, Cascade, Crique Rouge and Kilometre 42, the one they call the death camp. Then there’s the ordinary category: they’re given jobs in the offices and kitchens, or put to cleaning in the village and the camp, or they’re sent to the different workshops – carpentry, painting, blacksmith’s shop, electricity, mattress-making, tailor’s shop, laundry and so on. So zero hour is the moment you get there. If you’re called out and taken to a cell, that means you’re going to be interned on the islands, so good-bye to any hope of escape. There’s only one chance, and that’s to mutilate yourself quick – open your knee or your belly so as to get into the hospital and escape from there. At all costs you have to avoid going to the islands. There’s one other hope: if the ship that’s to take the internees to the islands isn’t ready you can bring out your money and offer it to the medical orderly. He’ll give you a shot of turpentine in a joint or draw a urine-soaked hair through a cut so that it’ll go bad. Or he’ll give you sulphur to inhale and then tell the doctor you’ve got a temperature of 102. During those few days of waiting you have to get into hospital, no matter what it costs.

‘If you’re not called out but left with the others in the huts at the camp, then you have time to get working. If this happens, you mustn’t look for a job inside the camp. What you want to do is to pay the clerk to be given a scavenger’s or a sweeper’s job in the village, or else to get taken on at an outside firm’s sawmills. Going out of the prison to work and coming back into the camp every night gives you time to get in touch with the time-expired convicts who live in the village or with the Chinese, so that they can get your break ready for you. Avoid the camps outside the village. Everybody dies quickly in them – there are some where no one has been able to stand it for three months. Out there in the deep bush, men are forced to cut a cubic yard of wood every day.’

Throughout the voyage Julot had gone over and over all this valuable information. For his part, he was quite ready. He knew that he was going straight to the punishment cell, because he was an escaped man who had been retaken. So he had a very small blade, not much more than a penknife, in his charger. When we got there he was going to take it out and rip his knee open. As we came down the gangway he was going to fall, right there in front of everyone. He thought he’d be taken straight from the quay to the hospital. And that indeed was exactly what happened.

Saint-Laurent-Du-Maroni

The warders had gone off in relays to change. Each in turn came back dressed in white with a sun-helmet instead of a kepi. Julot said. ‘We’re almost there.’ It was appallingly hot, for they had shut the port-holes. Through the glass you could see the bush. So we were in the Maroni. The water was muddy. Untouched virgin forest, green and impressive. Disturbed by the ship’s siren, birds rose and flew across the sky. We went very slowly, and that allowed us to pay close attention to the thick, dark-green, overflowing vegetation. We saw the first wooden houses, with their corrugated iron roofs. Black men and women stood at their doors, watching the ship go by. They were quite used to seeing it unload its human cargo, and so they never even bothered to wave as it passed. Three blasts on the siren and the churning of the propeller told us that we were there, and then the engines stopped entirely. Not a sound: you could have heard the buzzing of a fly.

Nobody spoke. Julot had his knife open and he was cutting his trousers at the knee, making the edges of the slash look like a tear. It was only on deck that he was going to cut his knee, so as not to leave a trail of blood. The warders opened the door of the cage and lined us up in threes. We were in the fourth rank, with Julot between Dega and me. Up on deck. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and suddenly the blazing sun hit my cropped head and my eyes. We were formed up on the deck and then we moved towards the gangway. When the column hesitated for a moment, just as the first man stepped on to the gangway. I held Julot’s kitbag in place on his shoulder while he used both hands to stretch the skin of his knee, drive the knife in and slash through three or four inches of flesh in one sweep. He passed me the knife and held the kitbag himself. The moment we set foot on the gangway he fell and rolled right down to the bottom. They picked him up, and finding that he was hurt they called the stretcher-bearers. Everything ran just as he had worked it out, and he disappeared, carried by two men on a stretcher.

A motley crowd watched us with some curiosity. Negroes, half-castes, Indians, Chinese and wrecks of white men (they were certainly freed convicts) stared at each one of us as he set foot on land and lined up behind the others. On the other side there were warders, well-dressed civilians, women in summer dresses and children, all with sun-helmets on. They too watched the new arrivals. When there were two hundred of us ashore, the column moved off. We marched for some ten minutes and came to a very high gate made of massive beams, with the words Penitentiary of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. Capacity, 3,000 men. The gate opened and we went in by ranks of ten. ‘Left, right. Left, right. Left, right!’ A good many convicts watched us come in. They had climbed up on the windows or on big stones to see us better.

When we reached the middle of the court a voice shouted, ‘Halt. Put your bags down in front of you. You there, hand out the hats.’ They gave us each a straw hat, and we needed it – two or three men had already dropped from sunstroke. Dega and I exchanged a glance, for a screw with stripes had a list in his hand. We thought of what Julot had told us. Guittou was called. ‘Here!’ he said. Two warders took him away. Suzuni, the same: Girasol likewise.

‘Jules Pignard!’

‘Jules Pignard (that was our Julot) has been hurt. He’s gone to hospital.’

‘Right.’ Those were the internees for the islands. Then the warder went on, ‘Listen carefully. Each man whose name I call is to step from the ranks with his kitbag on his shoulder and go and line up in front of that yellow hut, number one.’

The roll-call went on, with So-and-so – Present, etc., and Dega, Carrier and I ended up with the others, in line over against the hut. They opened the door and we went into a rectangular hall some twenty yards long. Down the middle ran a passage about two yards wide with an iron bar on either side, the whole length of the room. Canvas hammocks were slung between the bar and the wall, and each held a blanket. Every man chose his own place. Dega, Pierrot le Fou, Santori, Grandet and I moved in all next to one another, and little groups began to take shape at once. I went down to the far end of the room: showers on the right, latrines on the left: no running water.

The men who had left the ship after us began to arrive, and we watched them, clinging to the bars over the windows. Louis Dega, Pierrot le Fou and I were delighted – since we were in an ordinary barrack-room it meant we weren’t going to be interned. Otherwise we’d already have been put into a cell, as Julot had explained. Everybody was very pleased until about five o’clock, when it was all over; but then Grandet said, ‘It’s funny, but they haven’t called out a single man for internment in this whole convoy. Odd. Still, so much the better, as far as I’m concerned.’ Grandet was the man who stole the safe from one of the central prisons, a job that had made the whole country laugh.

In the tropics day and night come without any sort of twilight. You go straight from the one to the other, and at the same time all through the year. Suddenly, at half-past six, it’s night. And at half-past six two old convicts brought two oil lamps that they hung on a hook in the ceiling and that gave a very little light. Three-quarters of the room was perfectly dark. By nine o’clock everybody was asleep, for now that the excitement of our arrival was over, we were quite overcome by the heat. Not a breath of air, and everyone was stripped to his drawers. My hammock was between Dega and Pierrot le Fou: we whispered a while and then went back to sleep.

It was still dark the next morning when the bugle blew. Everyone got up, washed and dressed. They gave us coffee and a hunk of bread. There was a plank fixed to the wall for your bread, mug and other belongings. At nine o’clock two warders came in, together with a young convict dressed in white without stripes. The two screws were Corsicans, and they talked Corsican to the convicts from their country. Meanwhile the medical orderly walked about the room. When he reached me he said, ‘How goes it, Papi? Don’t you recognize me?’

‘No.’

‘I’m Sierra l’Algérois: I knew you in Paris, at Dante’s.’

‘Oh, yes, I recognize you now. But you were sent down in ’29. It’s ’33 now: how come you’re still here?’

‘Yes. There’s no getting out of here in a hurry. You report sick, will you? Who’s this guy?’

‘He’s Dega, a friend of mine.’

‘I’ll put you down for the doctor too, Dega. Papi, you’ve got dysentery. And you, dad, you’ve got fits of asthma. I’ll see you at the medical at eleven o’clock. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ He went on his way, calling out ‘Who’s sick there?’, going over to those who held up their hands, and writing down their names. When he came back he had a warder with him, an elderly sunburnt man. ‘Papillon, let me introduce my boss, Medical-Warder Bartiloni. Monsieur Bartiloni, these two are the friends I told you about.’

‘OK, Sierra, we’ll see to that at the medical: rely on me.’

At eleven they came for us. There were nine men going sick. We walked through the camp among the hutments. When we reached a newer building than the rest, the only one painted white with a red cross on it, we went in and found a waiting-room with about sixty men in it. Two warders in each corner. Sierra appeared, in spotless medical overalls. He said, ‘You, you and you: go in.’ We went into a room that was obviously the doctor’s. He talked to the three older men in Spanish. There was one Spaniard there I recognized straight away: he was Fernandez, the one who killed the three Argentines at the Cafe de Madrid in Paris. After they had exchanged a few words Sierra showed him to a little room communicating with the main hall and then came back to us. ‘Papi, let me embrace you. I’m delighted to be able to do you and your friend a very good turn. You’re both of you down for internment … No, let me finish. You’re down for life, Papillon; and Dega, you’re down for five years. You got any cash?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then give five hundred francs apiece and tomorrow morning you’ll be sent to hospital. You for dysentery. And you, Dega, you must bang on the door during the night – or better still, let someone call the screw and ask for the orderly, because Dega’s asthma’s killing him. I’ll look after the rest of it. There’s just one thing I ask of you, Papillon, and that is to give me fair warning if you clear out: I’ll be there when you say. They’ll be able to keep you in the hospital for a month, at a hundred francs a week each. You must move fast.’

Fernandez came out of the little room and in front of us he handed Sierra five hundred francs. Then I went in, and when I came out I gave him not a thousand but fifteen hundred francs. He refused the five hundred. I did not like to press him. He said, ‘This dough you’re giving me’s for the screw. I don’t want anything for myself. We’re friends, aren’t we?’

The next day Dega, Fernandez and I were in an enormous cell in the hospital. Dega was hurried in during the middle of the night. The attendant in charge of the ward was a man of thirty-five called Chatal. He knew all about us three from Sierra. When the doctor came round he was to show a motion that would make me look like I was falling apart with amoebas. Ten minutes before the inspection he was to burn a little sulphur for Dega and make him breathe the gas with a towel over his head. Fernandez had an enormously swollen face: he had pierced the skin inside his cheek and had blown as hard as he could for an hour. He had done it so conscientiously that the swelling closed one eye. The cell was on the first floor and there were about seventy patients in it, many of them dysentery cases. I asked Chatal where Julot was. He said, ‘In the building just over the way. You want me to tell him something?’

‘Yes. Tell him Papillon and Dega are here; ask him to show himself at the window.’

The attendant could come and go as he liked. All he had to do was to knock at the ward door and an Arab would open it. The Arab was a turnkey, a convict acting as an auxiliary to the warders. There were chairs on the right and the left of the door, and three warders sat there, rifles on their knees. The bars over the windows were lengths of railway line: I wondered how one could ever get through them. I sat there at the window.

Between our building and Julot’s there was a garden full of pretty flowers. Julot appeared at a window: he had a slate in his hand, and he had chalked BRAVO on it. An hour later the attendant brought me a letter from him. It said, ‘I’m trying to get into your ward. If I fail, try to get into mine. The reason is you’ve got enemies in your ward. So it seems you’re interned? Keep your heart up: we’ll do them in the eye yet.’

Julot and I were very close to one another because of that business at Beaulieu, where we had suffered together. Julot specialized in the use of a wooden mallet, and that was why they called him the hammer-man. He would drive up to a jeweller’s shop in the middle of the day, when all the finest jewels were on show in their cases. Someone else would be at the wheel, and they’d pull up with the engine running. Julot hopped out with his mallet, smashed the window with one blow, grabbed as many jewel-cases as he could hold and darted back into the car, which shot away with a scream of tyres. He brought it off in Lyons, Angers, Tours and Le Havre, and then he had a go at a big Paris shop, at three in the afternoon, getting away with jewels to the value of close on a million. He never told me how or why he was identified. He was sentenced to twenty years and he escaped at the end of four. And as he told us, it was in coming back to Paris that he was arrested: he was looking for his fence, so as to kill him, for the fence had never given Julot’s sister the large sum he owed him. The fence saw him prowling in the street where he lived and tipped off the police. Julot was picked up and he went back to Guiana with us.

It was a week now that we had been in hospital. Yesterday I gave Chatal two hundred francs: that was the weekly price for keeping both of us. By way of making ourselves popular we gave tobacco to the people who had nothing to smoke. A sixty-year-old tough guy from Marseilles, one Carora, had made friends with Dega. He was his adviser. Many times a day he told him that if he had plenty of money and it was known in the village (the French papers gave the news about all the important cases), then it was much better for him not to escape, because the freed convicts would kill him for his charger. Old Dega told me about his conversations with old Carora. It was in vain that I said the antique was certainly no sort of use, since he had stayed here for twenty years: he paid no attention. The old man’s tales made a great impression on Dega, and although I kept his courage up as well as I could it was heavy going.

I sent a note to Sierra asking him to let me see Galgani. It didn’t take long. Galgani was in hospital the next day, but in an unbarred ward. How was I to set about giving him back his charger? I told Chatal it was absolutely necessary for me to talk to Galgani: I let him imagine we were preparing a break. He told me he could bring him at five to twelve on the nose. Just as the guard was being changed he would bring him up on to the verandah to talk to me through the window; and he’d do it for nothing. Galgani was brought to me at the window at noon: straight away I put his charger into his hands. He stood there before me and wept. Two days later I had a magazine from him with five thousand-franc notes in it and the single word, Thanks.

Chatal passed me the magazine; and he had seen the money. He did not mention it, but I wanted to give him some: he would not take it. I said, ‘We want to get out. Would you like to come with us?’

‘No, Papillon, I’m fixed elsewhere. I don’t want to try to escape for five months, when my mate will be free. The break will be better prepared that way, and it’ll be more certain. Being down for internment, I know you’re in a hurry: but getting out of here, with all these bars, is going to be very difficult. Don’t count on me to help you – I don’t want to risk my job. Here I can wait in peace until my friend comes out.’

‘OK, Chatal. It’s better to speak straight. I won’t ever talk to you about this again.’

‘But still,’ he said, ‘I’ll carry notes for you and deliver messages.’

‘Thanks, Chatal.’

That night we heard bursts of machine-gun fire. Next day we heard it was the hammer-man who had got away. God be with him: he was a good friend. He must have seen a chance and made the most of it. So much the better for him.

Fifteen years later, in 1948, I was in Haiti, and there, together with a Venezuelan millionaire, I was working out a deal with the chief of the casino for a contract to run the gambling in those parts. One night I came out of a club where we had been drinking champagne, and one of the girls who was with us – coal-black, but as well brought up as the daughter of a good French provincial family – said to me, ‘My grandmother’s a voodoo priestess, and she lives with an old Frenchman. He escaped from Cayenne. He’s been with us now for fifteen years, and he’s almost always drunk, Jules Marteau is his name.’

I sobered up instantly. ‘Chick, you take me to your grandma’s right away.’

She spoke to the cab-driver in Haitian patois and he drove off at full speed. We passed a night-bar, still open and all lit up. ‘Stop.’ I went in, bought a bottle of Pernod, two of champagne and two of local rum. ‘Let’s go.’ We reached a pretty little red tiled white house on the beach. The sea almost lapped its steps. The girl knocked and knocked, and first there came out a big black woman with completely white hair. She was wearing a wrapper that came down to her ankles. The two women spoke in patois and then she said, ‘Come in, Monsieur: the house is all yours.’ An acetylene lamp lit up a very clean room, filled with birds and fishes. ‘Would you like to see Julot? He’s just coming. Jules! Jules! Here’s someone who wants to see you.’

An old man appeared, barefoot and wearing striped blue pyjamas that reminded me of our prison uniform. ‘Why, Snowball, who can be coming to see me at this time of night? Papillon! No! It can’t be true!’ He clasped me in his arms. He said, ‘Bring the lamp closer, Snowball, so that I can see my old friend’s face. It’s you all right, mate! It’s certainly you! Welcome, welcome, welcome! This kip, what little dough I’ve got, and my old woman’s grand-daughter – they’re all yours. You only have to say the word.’

We drank the Pernod, the champagne and the rum; and from time to time Julot sang. ‘So we did them in the eye after all, didn’t we, Papi? There’s nothing like bashing around. Take me, I came through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Jamaica; and then, about fifteen years ago now, I reached here; and I’m happy with Snowball – she’s the best woman a man could ask for. When are you leaving? Are you here for long?’