Papillon (59 page)

D
IABLE

D
IABLE
[D
EVIL
’
S
I
SLAND
]
IS THE
smallest of the three lies du Salut. It is also the northernmost, and the most exposed to wind and waves. After a flat coastal area it rises rapidly to a high plateau where there was the guardhouse and one lone barracks for the
bagnards
, who numbered about ten. Officially Diable was not supposed to receive ordinary criminals, only those condemned and deported for political reasons.

Each political prisoner had a small house with a tin roof. On Monday he was given his food for the week and, every day, a loaf of bread. There were about thirty of these men. Their orderly was a Dr. Leger who had poisoned his family somewhere near Lyon. The political prisoners had nothing to do with the regular
bagnards
and sometimes wrote to Cayenne, complaining about this or that
bagnard
on the island. He was then returned to Royale.

There was a cable connecting Royale with Diable because often the sea was so rough that the launch from Royale couldn’t dock at the cement pier.

I was greeted by the head guard at the camp (there were three), who was a big brute with an eight-day beard named Santini.

“Papillon, I hope you behave on Diable. Don’t give me any trouble and I’ll leave you in peace. Go on up to the camp. I’ll see you later.” There were six cons in my room: two Chinese, two blacks, a man from Bordeaux and another from Lille. One of the Chinese knew me well. He’d been at Saint-Laurent under suspicion of murder. Actually he was from Indochina and a survivor of the revolt in the
bagne
at Poulo Condor.

He had been a professional pirate. He used to attack sampans and sometimes murder everybody on board—men, women and children. Although he was very dangerous, he was a good man to live with; something about him inspired sympathy and confidence.

“How things go, Papillon?”

“How about you, Chang?”

“Not bad. It’s okay here. You eat with me. You sleep there, next to me. I do cooking two times a day. You catch fish. Here many fishes.”

Santini arrived. “So you’re all moved in. Tomorrow morning you go with Chang to feed the pigs. He’ll carry the coconuts. You split them open with the hatchet. Save the milk for the piglets. You do it again at four in the afternoon. Except for those two hours you’re free to do anything you like. All the men who fish have to give my cook two pounds of fish or
langoustines
. That way everybody’s happy. Is that okay with you?”

“Yes, Monsieur Santini.”

“I know you’re a
cavale
man, but I’m not going to worry about it—escape from here is impossible. You’re locked up at night, but I know some get out all the same. Watch out for the political prisoners. They all have machetes. If you go near their houses, they think you’ve come to steal their eggs or chickens. You can get hurt or even killed. They can see you, remember, and you can’t see them.”

After feeding a good two hundred pigs, I spent the rest of the day wandering over the island with Chang, who knew every inch of it: An old man with a long white beard crossed our path as we were circling the island down by the shore. He was a journalist from New Caledonia who had written pro-German pieces during the First World War. We also met the bastard who had had Edith Cavell shot—the English or Belgian nurse, I forget which, who saved the lives of English fliers in 1917. He was a repulsively large, fat man and he was beating a huge eel about five feet long and as thick as my thigh with a stick.

The orderly also lived in one of the little houses, even though these were supposed to be only for political prisoners.

Dr. Leger was a big husky fellow. He was always dirty except for his face, and he had long graying hair that hung down over his neck and temples. His hands were covered with badly healed cuts and gashes he must have gotten from the rough rocks along the coast.

“If you need anything, come to me and I’ll give it to you. But only come when you’re sick. I don’t like being visited, and I like being talked to even less. I sell eggs and sometimes a hen or chicken. If you ever happen to slaughter a baby pig on the sly, bring me a leg and I’ll give you a chicken and six eggs. Since you’re here, take this bottle of quinine tablets—there are a hundred and twenty capsules in it. You must have come here to escape, so if by some miracle you manage to succeed, you’ll need these in the bush.”

Morning and evening I caught a vast number of rock mullet. I sent seven or eight pounds a day to the guards’ mess. Santini was in heaven. He had never had so much fish or so many
langoustines
. A couple of times, at low tide, I caught as many as three hundred of them.

Dr. Germain Guibert came to Diable yesterday. The sea was calm, so he came with the warden of Royale and Mme. Guibert. This extraordinary person was the first woman ever to set foot on Diable. I talked to her for over an hour, and she walked with me to the bench where Dreyfus had gazed out over the sea toward the France that had cast him out.

Dreyfus’ bench was high on the northernmost point of the island, a good hundred and twenty feet above the sea.

“If this polished stone could only tell us what Dreyfus’ thoughts were …” she said, stroking the stone. “Papillon, this
is
probably the last time we’ll see each other if you’re going to try a
cavale
soon. I shall pray to God that He let you succeed. And before you go, I ask that you come back and spend a last minute on this bench as a farewell to me.”

The warden gave me permission to send the doctor
langoustines
and fish by the cable any time I wanted to. Santini agreed.

“Good-by, Doctor. Good-by, madame.” I tried to act natural as I said good-by before the launch pulled away from the pier. Mme. Guibert looked at me with wide-open eyes as if to say, Don’t ever forget us. We’ll always remember you.

I didn’t go fishing today. I was holding over two hundred pounds of mullet in a natural pool and about five hundred
langoustines
in an iron barrel chained to a rock. No need to fish. I had enough to send the doctor and enough for Santini, the Chinese and me.

It was 1941. I’d been in prison eleven years. I was thirty-five. “T’d spent the best years of my life in either a cell or a dungeon. The only freedom I’d had was the seven months with my Indian tribe. The children I had by my two Indian wives must be eight years old. Jesus! How the time had flown! But as I looked back, those hours and minutes became cruelly long, each one separately imbedded in my stations of the cross.

Thirty-five years! Where were Montmartre, Pigalle, the Place Blanche, the ball at the Petit Jardin, the Boulevard de Clichy? Where was big Nénette with her madonna’s face, like a cameo, and her huge black eyes filled with despair as she cried out at the trial, “Don’t worry, baby, I’ll get you out of there!” Where was Raymond Hubert with his “We’ll be acquitted”? And the prosecutor? How were my father and my sisters’ families doing under the German occupation?

So many
cavales
. How many had there been?

The first was when I knocked out the guards and escaped from the hospital.

The second was in Colombia, at Rio Hacha.

That was a beautiful
cavale
. A real success. Why did I leave my tribe? A quiver of physical longing flowed through my body. It was as if I were feeling again the sensations of making love to my wives.

Then there were the third, fourth, fifth and sixth at Barranquilla. What lousy luck I had had with those
cavalesl
The stunt at mass that ended so badly.... The dynamite that fizzled, and the next time when Clousiot’s damn pants caught … and the sleeping potion that wouldn’t work....

The seventh was on Royale when that filthy bastard, Bébert Celier, ratted on me. That one would have worked for sure if it hadn’t been for him. If he had kept his trap shut, I’d be free with my poor buddy Carbonieri.

And the last one, the eighth, from the asylum. A mistake, a stupid-ass mistake on my part. I should never have let the Italian choose our launching place. Two hundred yards farther down, near the butcher’s, would have been a much better place....

Dreyfus’ bench, where that innocent man condemned to death had found the courage to go on living, would inspire me. I would not admit defeat. I would try another
cavale
.

Right. This silky, polished stone hanging out over the rocky shore, where the waves pounded and broke without letup, would inspire me. Dreyfus never gave up; he fought for his vindication to the very end. True, he had Emile Zola and his famous
“J’accuse.”
But all the same, if he hadn’t had a will of iron, the injustices he suffered would surely have sent him hurtling into the abyss from this very bench. He had held on. I could not be a lesser man than he. But I would give up the idea of a “win or die”
cavale
. I’d forget about the “dying” and concentrate exclusively on winning and being free.

During the long hours I spent sitting on Dreyfus’ bench, my brain shuttled between dreams of the past and of a rosy future. Often my eyes would become dazzled by the glare and the platinum reflections of the breaking waves. From looking at the sea so long—almost without seeing it really—I came to know every quirk of the wind and waves. Tirelessly the sea attacked the island’s exposed rocks. It worked away at them, searched and stripped them as if to say, Diable, go, disappear, you’re in my way, you bar my passage to Grande Terre! That is why, every day, relentlessly, I remove a little piece of you.

When there was a storm, the sea gave Diable the full force of its fury, raging in to snatch its piece of the island, then sweeping it away. It hurled its water into every nook and cranny so as to undermine little by little the giant rocks that seemed to say, You shall not pass.

And that’s how I made a very important discovery. Immediately opposite Dreyfus’ bench were some enormous craggy rocks that the waves broke against with particular violence. The tons of water had no place to go because the two rocks formed a horse-shoe about five or six yards wide and a cliff rose directly above them, leaving the waves no exit except back out into the sea.

What made this important was that if, just as the wave was flinging itself into the chasm, I was to take a sack of coconuts and jump from the rock directly into its center, it would beyond the shadow of a doubt take me with it as it retreated.

I knew where I could find the jute bags for the coconuts; there were plenty of them in the pigsty.

The first thing was to test my theory. During the full moon the tides were higher, hence the waves were bigger. I would wait for the full moon. I hid my carefully sewn bag of dry coconuts in a cave I knew which could only be reached from the water. I had come upon it one day when I was looking for
langoustines
. The shellfish clung to its ceiling, which was completely under water except at low tide. To the bag of coconuts I strapped another bag containing a rock weighing between eighty and ninety pounds. Since I’d be leaving with two bags instead of one, and I weighed a hundred and fifty-five pounds, the proportions were about right.

I was very excited about the experiment. This side of the island was taboo. Nobody would ever suspect that the most windswept and dangerous spot on the island would be used for an escape.

Besides, it was the only place where, if I did manage to get clear of the coast, I would be carried out into the open sea without the hazard of cracking up on Royale.

This had to be the place.

The bag of coconuts and the rock were heavy and hard to carry. I wouldn’t be able to do it alone so I spoke to Chang, who said he’d come and help me. He brought along some fishing tackle and heavy lines; if we were caught, we could say we were setting up traps for sharks.

“Keep pushing, Chang. A little farther and we’re there.”

The light of the full moon made it as bright as day. The noise of the waves was deafening. Chang said, “Ready, Papillon? Into this next one?” A fifteen-foot wave lunged at the rock as if possessed and broke just below us, but the shock was so violent that the crest passed over us and drenched us. Still we were able to throw the sacks in at the moment the wave went into reverse. Like a straw, the bag was swept back toward the open sea.

“That’s it, Chang! It works.”

“Wait and see if it comes back.”

Sure enough. My heart sank when, five minutes later, I saw my bag riding back on the crest of a wave over twenty feet high. It smashed against the rocks, scattering the coconuts in every direction and tumbling the rock into the chasm below.

Wet to the bone, battered and almost swept off our feet, Chang and I left that bedeviled place without so much as a backward glance.

“No good, Papillon. No good,
cavale
from Diable. Royale better. Leave from south coast, much better.”

“Yes, but an escape from Royale would be discovered in less than two hours. The bag of coconuts moves only with the waves—they’d catch me in no time. Here there’s no boat, and I have the whole night before they find out I’m gone, and even then they’ll probably think I drowned while fishing. Also there’s no telephone on Diable. If I leave in a heavy sea, they’ll have no way of communicating with Royale. So here is where I have to leave from. But how?”

The noon sun was leaden—a tropical sun to boil the brain in your skull; a sun that shriveled the plants not yet grown strong enough to resist it; a sun that, in a few hours, dried up all but the deepest salt-water pools, leaving only a white film of salt; a sun that set the air to dancing—it literally moved before my eyes—its reflection on the water burning my pupils. But that did not prevent me from returning to Dreyfus’ bench and taking up again my study of the sea. It was then I discovered what an idiot I’d been.