Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  ‘Il est défendu de visiter …,’ said the policemen.

  ‘… Trop dangéreux.’

  I asked them if anyone ever went there.

  Just officials, they said, to repair the Dreyfus house.

  But no one actually sees it?

  ‘C’est vache,’ they shrugged. That’s how it is.

  Next to me were the remains of a tower. Once a cable had run from here to the island, carrying a hopper for warders and supplies. It was never much of a place. Until 1895 Devil’s Island was merely a dump for the colony’s lepers. But then, that year, news came of a new inmate. The lepers were removed, and their huts burned. Any tree capable of making a boat was cut down, and the cottages were built. One of them had a wall around it so that the special prisoner would have no view of the sea. The surveillants feared that one day a huge Prussian fleet would appear on the horizon and spring him from his cell. He was, of course, Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

  Dreyfus is an odd man to find at the centre of this scandal. He is dowdy and neat, and has a stiff Alsatian accent. Clemenceau will describe him as a ‘pencil salesman’. But he’s a good officer, and when, in 1894, French military secrets start turning up in German hands, he’s not an obvious suspect. But the investigative officer, a thoughtless oaf called Paty de Clam, thinks differently. He’s not looking for an obvious candidate, simply a Jew. The evidence against Dreyfus is trimmed into shape, and he’s convicted, and, at the age of thirty-six, he’s sent to Devil’s Island.

  He arrives in April 1895 and soon the great punishment machine is grinding him down. The island is like a bagne-within-a-bagne. Dreyfus sees no one except his guards, and they are forbidden to talk to him. Most of his time he spends in solitary confinement, and at night he’s shackled to his bed. ‘So profound is my solitude,’ he writes, in a letter to his wife, ‘that I often seem to be lying in a tomb.’ All he has to comfort him is Shakespeare, and he starts learning English.

  Meanwhile, in Paris, the novelist Emile Zola is outraged and stirs up dissent. On 13 January 1898 he publishes his famous letter to the president, entitled ‘J’accuse’. ‘These, Sir, are the facts’, he writes, ‘that explain how this miscarriage of justice came about. The evidence of Dreyfus’s character, his affluence, the lack of motive and his continued affirmation of innocence combine to show that he is the victim of the lurid imagination of Major du Paty de Clam, the religious circles surrounding him, and the “dirty Jew” obsession that is the scourge of our time.’

  It is a well-aimed blow, and everything will be different after this. Zola is forced into exile, but the following year Dreyfus is returned to France and eventually freed. He will never mention Devil’s Island again but will rejoin the army, show himself a diligent Frenchman at Verdun and die peacefully, in his own bed, in 1935. France is also changed, although no one’s quite sure how. (It’s said that, among other things, the legacy of Dreyfus includes Zionism, the wedge between church and state, les Pétainistes and the Tour de France.) But Devil’s Island too will never be the same. To the establishment it’s proved the perfect political deterrent, a blend of oblivion and terror. From now on it will house all France’s public enemies – its dissidents, traitors, spies, New Caledonians and mutineers, and the Viêt Quôc. Consignments of Vietnamese are still arriving, miserably beaten and starved, in 1931.

  To liberals, however, Devil’s Island becomes a symbol of all that’s wrong with la patrie: the secrecy, the perverted science and the excess of authority. Zola and Clemenceau extend their protest to the entire settlement and demand that it’s closed. The movement is helped by a rash of foreign books, embarrassing France: The Dry Guillotine, Horrors of Cayenne, Hell on Trial, Loose among Devils and The Isle of the Damned. Eventually, in 1938, the government of the Popular Front announces that no more transports will be sent and that the colony will die a natural death, gradually withering away.

  All that’s needed is a good war to help the withering along.

  After three days on the islands I took a boat to Kourou. There was nowhere on this journey that I liked so little. It was a cruel, hard-baked town, with its origins in pain. Although little of the old penal camp remained, there was still the road, known as ‘Route Nationale 1’. The convicts had called it ‘Route Zéro’, as though nothing better expressed the futility of their lives in Guyane. The road was supposed to have linked Kourou with Cayenne, sixty miles to the west. By 1906, after half a century of work, only fifteen miles had been completed.

  After landing, I asked a taxi-driver to find me somewhere to stay.

  ‘Hotel des Roches?’ he asked.

  Fine, I said, let’s give it a try.

  The driver was a Creole, covered in ropes of gold.

  ‘Les Roches is full of pigs,’ he said. ‘Their barracks are next door.’

  It was also painfully expensive, too much for concrete.

  ‘And I’m sorry,’ said the receptionist, ‘the café is only for police.’

  ‘Allons-y!’ I told the driver. We’ll try somewhere else.

  ‘OK,’ he said agreeably, ‘Un petit tour de Kourou …’

  Beyond Les Roches the town still hadn’t lost its temporary feel. It had the layout of a great city, but with the buildings yet to arrive. Around the edge was a scattering of tyre shops and stores. The roundabouts were bald, and the ponds looked like pits. For the more upmarket whites there was a little, prefabricated Nicetown, with street names such as rue Degas and rue Van Gogh. Then there were the shanty towns. Every distant upheaval seems to have produced another one; there were straw shacks for the Amerindians, cement for the N’Djukas and tin for the Bonis. Everywhere there was broken glass, always a sign of people moving on. At one point we came across an entire slum, blackened with soot. ‘KOUROU ENSORCELÉ!’ said the graffiti: ‘Accursed Kourou!’

  Eventually we ended up where we’d begun, in le vieux bourg. It was a rickety quarter of sticks and peeling paint, built by the convicts. The houses here had rooves like pagodas, which will have pleased the Chinese, who owned all the shops. Outside one of them, called Proxi, there was a stippling of blue, flashing lights.

  ‘Encore un vol,’ said the driver. Another robbery.

  The police were standing around with their hands in their pockets. I asked whether it happened a lot.

  ‘Peut-être deux fois chaque jour.’

  Twice a day? How can anyone put up with that?

  The Creole just smiled.

  ‘It used to be worse,’ he said. ‘We once had a gang that stole little kids.’

  Eventually, we found a house that rented out rooms.

  Call me if you need me, said the driver, and left. On his card it said: ‘JEANNOT COSMIQUE – VA OU TU VEUX’ (‘Cosmic Johnny – Go anywhere you like’).

  The house was made of concrete, and the owner was a métro.

  ‘Actually, I was born in Indochine,’ he said, ‘I could never live in France.’

  My room had metal furniture and steel bars, just like a cell.

  ‘It’s safe,’ said the métro. ‘If I hear anyone, I’ll shoot them.’

  That evening I negotiated the shutters and gates and headed for the cafés. It was an unsettling walk, through the roundabouts and plots of dried-up mud. Across one plot there were some cars, all well spaced out. It was a sort of impromptu flea market, selling only sex. Each little Citroën and each little Clio was its own little brothel on wheels. As I passed by, the driver’s doors would open and long, dark legs would unfold to the ground. I could still hear the voices tumbling after me even as I reached the street. ‘Mon cheri …un moment …!’ Officially most of these girls were Brazilian, servicing an outbreak of AIDS wholly unrivalled on this side of the globe.

  The cafés on Charles de Gaulle looked as though they’d never got over the end of the bagne. Along one wall was a mural of Montmartre, complete with hoods and tarts and ‘swallows’, or cops. I chose a bar run by some Vietnamese. All the other customers were métros: sallow, stubbly men, who sat at the zinc with their pichets
of plonk. I suppose some of them had been farmers and soldiers but to me – raddled and hungry – they just looked like the remnants of an earlier age, a bunch of old cons.

  After the closure of the bagne, life wasn’t easy for those left behind. France still had no idea how to fill so much space. It certainly wasn’t keen to drain it of people and send the convicts home. After the war it even offered Guyane as a homeland for the Jews (only losing out to Israel). There was also a plan to fill the camps with ‘displaced persons’, such as Romanians and Poles. A few came. St-Jean was Polish for a while, until its football team drowned and everyone went home. The colony was bankrupt, and there was nothing there to keep them. In 1947 there were already 1,800 libérés demanding to get home. Most were Arabs, just keen to die in Muslim soil.

  After them, the government dragged its feet. It took seven years to get the last 2,000 home. In the end it was the Salvation Army who helped the convicts out. That still left the political prisoners, such as the Indochinese. Some of them would remain in their camps until 1963.

  Not everyone left. Some libérés saw no future in France or had been here so long they knew no other life. It’s said that about 400 stayed. Everyone had stories about ‘the old boys’. There was the one who spent his time writing to the Queen of England, demanding a pension. And the Russian who told everyone he’d designed a rocket, and who was carted away when the Cold War began. I once saw some pictures of these people, taken in the ’90s. Shrunken and damp, they looked hopelessly benign. Gradually they all died out, and the great experiment finally came to an end.

  Meanwhile, France had found a new breed of settler. In 1964 they took over all the old camps and the Iles du Salut. This time they weren’t slaves or convicts, but a colony of spacemen.

  Behind Kourou stretched a wilderness, often referred to as the Gateway to Space. It didn’t look much like a gate, at least not on my map. It was more of a hole, filled with saltgrass and estuaries and 800 square kilometres of swamp. Roads seemed to shy away from it, and those that still wandered through it had turned white, like little bones in the sun. There were no villages any more, just names from the past. Amid all the symbols for moisture and bog, I could see nothing except a few masts and beacons and the words ‘CENTRE SPATIAL GUYANAIS’.

  Before leaving Kourou, I got Cosmic Johnny to drive me out there.

  ‘Centre spatial Européen,’ he corrected.

  Jeannot had never seen the point in Le CSG.

  ‘It just brings trouble,’ he said. ‘More police and more of les métros.’

  I was puzzled. ‘Doesn’t the CSG bring in the money?’

  ‘For some. They earn three times what we do, and then go home.’

  ‘I heard they make up a third of the town.’

  ‘True. They’ve got their own little quarter: La Ville Blanche.’

  ‘But isn’t there work for locals too?’

  ‘Just a few cleaners. The rest are from Europe.’

  Ahead of us was a wire fence.

  ‘Entrée inderdite aux guyanais,’ joked Jeannot. Even the Amerindians had been cleared out, he said, and dumped back in Kourou. From now on there was nothing but whites and rockets, and wild animals. With no hunting, the place was crawling with serpents et tigres.

  Then a rocket appeared, towering out of the trees. It was a mock-up of Ariane. This wasn’t the delicate, streamlined dart that turns up in films. It looked more like a child’s crayon, fifteen storeys high. Jeannot conceded that it was a beautiful sight as it set off over the sea. It was odd to think that Guyane was now the start of a journey instead of always being the end. Once it had taken ships months to get here from Africa. Now Kourou could lob one of these office blocks up through the stratosphere, and twenty minutes later its working parts would be floating over Kenya.

  At the centre de contrôle I joined a little tour. It was like being miniaturised and then climbing round an aircraft with a member of the flight crew. Everything was outsized. There were giant ashtrays, giant lampshades and giant trolleys, which all turned out to be parts of Ariane. At one point we found ourselves in a room like a Zeppelin shed, except finished off in giant wallpaper and carpet as deep as turf. Even our hostess was having trouble, in her dainty Parisian heels. She was better when she leaped up into the furniture and brought all the monitors to life. Suddenly we were enveloped in the history of French rockets. The first ones didn’t look too promising and flopped into the bog. But then someone tweaked the design, and in 1979 Ariane was launched. Since then it hasn’t stopped launching, and now the screens were full of burning crayons spurting off to Kenya. The CSG, said the hostess, now launches over half the world’s commercial satellites.

  ‘Pourquoi ici?’ someone asked her. Why here?

  ‘We’re on the equator,’ she replied. ‘A shorter trip into orbit.’

  ‘So even the Russians launch from here?’

  ‘Oui, Soyuz aussi. Et les italiens …’

  ‘I bet it makes some money?’

  ‘Evidemment’, she said sweetly. About a billion euros a year.

  ‘And do the locals like it?’

  ‘Oui, bien sûr. Avant le CSG, ils n’avaient même pas de frigos.’ (Yes, of course. Before the space port they didn’t even have fridges.)

  Then we were out in a bus, touring the launch pads. I still felt like one of the Borrowers Afloat. From a distance the rocket silos and propellant plants looked like cartons scattered through the bush. Up close they still looked like cartons, but we looked like ants. The biggest silos were called BIL and BAF, and were linked by some outsize Ivor-the-Engine rails. None of this did anything to dispel my suspicion that space travel – with all its journeys into nothing – is as much about fantasy as about science. France’s first rocket was called Astérix and was said to have been modelled on the cartoon spaceship in Destination Moon. That afternoon I still felt the hand of Tintin guiding things along. The jungle even had its own little army of khaki guards, and a fire brigade lent by the city of Paris. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, there was also the French Foreign Legion, to fight off whoever might invade.

  France had searched hard for this patch of rocket-lovers’ heaven. It had previously considered Algeria, Madagascar, Polynesia and the Seychelles. Rockets, it seems, had much the same requirements as convicts: wasteland, a vast body of open water and a dearth of human life.

  At last, Guyane was wanted, for being of no value at all.

  I once met a Welsh legionnaire who’d spent three years in Kourou.

  ‘It was OK, like. Pay was shit. Heat nearly killed us …’

  Most of the time they were out patrolling the forest.

  ‘Everything wants to eat you in there, even the fucking trees …’

  His regiment was one of the last to keep un bordel militaire. ‘We had four girls on camp. They changed them every month.’

  It wasn’t a bad life, he said. There was even a bit of fighting down in the town. ‘Nothing much. Just the local dickheads. No big deal.’

  To get to Cayenne, I hitched a lift with a physicist called Christian. He had long white hair and an ancient hatchback that creaked like a galley. Across the back seat were reams of figures, graphs, calculations and tables. If we’d ever had to stop suddenly, I’d have been crushed to death under a wave of mathematics.

  ‘You shouldn’t hitch-hike,’ said Christian.

  I noticed that he had a slight American accent.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘it looked OK to me.’

  ‘No, my friend, this place is still pretty wild.’

  Christian said he was constantly surprised by how wild things were. ‘I’ve been here many years, working on Ariane. I must have watched – I don’t know – a hundred launches? And I’ve seen billions of francs and euros poured into this land. But does it look any different? Has anything changed? You turn your back, and everything’s covered in rust, and all the bridges have collapsed. We have an army out there, trying to keep out the immigrants and find the cocaine. But does it make any differen
ce? It’s like trying to turn back the tide! This crazy coast will be whatever it wants to be. France has been here almost 400 years, and yet it looks like we just arrived! All around, what do you see? La forêt, les bambous, les étrangleurs … la terre sauvage!’

  Ahead of us the road sped away through the endless whips and barbs.

  ‘Some people,’ I ventured, ‘say France has too much control.’

  ‘Of course they do. They talk about l’apartheid guyanais. They say they’re ruled by scientists. Imagine that! What would it be called? Un régime pédagogique? A technocracy, I suppose. But they don’t know how little control we’ve got. Most of this country we can’t even get to. All we can do is throw a bit of hardware into space so that on the other side of the world people can chatter on their mobiles. That’s all! One day people won’t need mobiles any more, and then we’ll be gone. The space port will disappear into the forest, and who knows what the guyanais will do. They’ll probably come to France, and this will all be forgotten. It’ll be just another ruin – une énigme pour les archéologues …’

  ‘Yes, it will seem odd,’ I said, ‘especially BIL and BAF.’

  Christian gave a sort of Gallic huff of laughter. ‘Exactly. They’ll think we were talking to God instead of chatting to each other.’

  ‘So this isn’t the beginning of a golden age?’

  ‘No, it will never be mentioned again, just like le bagne.’

  ‘Le bagne?’

  ‘Yes, a subject you don’t talk about in France.’

  ‘So you think Space-Age Guyane will become taboo?’

  ‘Oui, just like every other plan for this magnificent land.’

  I spent four days in Cayenne. Most of the time I felt like an onlooker at some strange, slightly manic party. It helped that all the houses were pink or orange and had bright blue doors, rattly roofs and lace around the door. For ages nothing would happen, and then it would suddenly flicker into life. Feathered dancers would appear, and girls in sequins and masks. Somewhere, deep in the tin, hundreds of bands would begin to play, and people would drive around with their music so loud that it would set off the car alarms and make all the glasses rattle. Large crowds would gather on Les Palmistes, smelling faintly of anxiety and rum. Then the clouds would burst, everyone would scatter and huge rivers would appear, bringing with them branches and bottles and luxuriant waves of paper cups.