by Hugo Wilcken
‘Then there’s the sea. It’s the riskiest way. The hardest to organise. But it’s your best bet. You need a lot of dough. You need a boat with a sail, food and water for at least ten days. You paddle down the river at night, to catch the dawn tide. Then you’re in open sea. Because of the winds you can’t go south. So you have to head north-west till you get to Trinidad. The English won’t let you stay. But they won’t hand you back to the French either. They give you a few days to sort yourself out and find fresh supplies. Then you have to sail on. You can’t put to shore in Venezuela, because they’ll send you back to Saint-Laurent. But if you make it to Colombia, you’re free.’
In the tropics, night approaches with almost visible speed, sweeping across the forest like a black tide. Within the barracks a feeble night-light casts spindly shadows: everything is obscure, humid. The night brings no particular relief from the heat and the smallest movement seems to take an enormous effort. Unfamiliar noises reach Sabir through the bars, but in the barracks itself there’s silence. It’s as if the strain and shame of their arrival has exhausted everyone to the point where there’s no room for any further emotion. It’s not just the silence that’s different, but the stillness too. Sabir had got used to the gentle rocking of the boat, and the knot in his gut is like a reverse seasickness. For Sabir, this absolute stillness feels as though something that had once been faintly alive has now finally died.
The barracks holds sixty men – roughly the same ones as in Sabir’s cage on the prison boat, minus those already admitted to hospital. Unconsciously, they’ve reconstructed the cage in the barracks, as if afraid of what novelty might bring. To Sabir’s right lies Bonifacio; to his left Gaspard the country lad – who has tearfully dictated a wrenching letter to his parents begging forgiveness. Despite the heat and humidity, he’s shivering and curled up in foetal position: already Sabir has noticed the intense pressure the boy is under from the forts-à-bras to give in to their advances. Soon he might have to choose one of them, if only to protect himself from the others. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out for you,’ Sabir told him as he wrote the boy’s letter. ‘I’ll try to help you if I can.’ And somehow this promise felt like an act of rebellion, not against the life of the bagne as imposed by the authorities, but against a convict-created world.
Bonifacio, on the other hand, is dozing peacefully. He’s stripped to the waist; a huge tattoo of a Christian cross covers his back. Sabir remembers how, early on in the trip, someone made a mocking remark about this tattoo. Bonifacio simply got out of his hammock and delivered a single, perfectly executed blow to the man’s stomach, then lay back down. The man was so badly winded that everyone thought he was going to die. Even as he snores now, Bonifacio’s muscleman biceps remain taut, threatening.
Like a proper professional, Bonifacio has never bragged, never once talked about his past. But Sabir has already heard his story, from another prisoner on the ship. Years before, Bonifacio got twenty years’ transportation with hard labour for a run of jewel heists. He was sent out to French Guiana but escaped eighteen months later, making his way to Argentina. There, he was helped out by friends in the prostitution racket. Eventually, he set himself up in the business, running a network of French girls in Buenos Aires. It was a comfortable, prosperous existence, but there was one thing that still rankled. During his trial, Bonifacio had arranged for a fence to send him his cut from the jewel heists. He never got the money. It was quite a fortune – easily enough to have financed an escape from the penal colony as soon as he got there.
One day, years after his escape to Argentina, he risked a return to France. Back in the Paris underworld, there was stupefaction at his sudden reappearance. But thanks to his reputation as an homme régulier, friends helped him trace the man he was after. Bonifacio soon found his former fence living in a bourgeois apartment building not far from the Bois de Boulogne. The man begged for mercy, but Bonifacio showed him none. He gunned him down in front of his wife and children. A few days later, Bonifacio was picked up again, as he strolled down the boulevard Clichy with his Argentinian mistress. Someone had betrayed him to the police. Scared off by Bonifacio’s underworld friends, the fence’s wife refused to testify against him. Unable to pin the murder on him, the authorities simply put Bonifacio on the next prison ship out to Saint-Laurent to finish his original sentence.
Throughout the afternoon, various convicts from other barracks have come up to the bars to talk with Bonifacio in low voices. Sabir also notices that Bonifacio hasn’t bothered to write his letter: he’s sold his paper and envelope to one of the German prisoners for a few sous. Sabir hasn’t had time for his own letter yet. There’s only one he wishes to write, and after that there’ll be no further need. On the boat he dreamt up all sorts of fantasies about escaping back to France, maybe reuniting with his fiancée, somehow returning to his former life. He was going to write to her to tell her he’d arrived safely. But now he changes his mind. Already, something has moved inside him since his arrival in the bagne. During the long, humid afternoon spent transcribing the impossible wishes of others, the realisation has grown in him that his old life is dead. That he can now never expect to resurrect it. That his survival – should he want it – depends on sloughing off this dead skin. That his only real hope is to become someone else entirely.
Thoughts. They become so clear in the darkness. Wondering now what to write to his fiancée, Sabir is inevitably reminded of all the things he’s lost. He recalls his arrival at the holding prison in France before embarkation: the bundle of prison clothes and clumsy wooden-soled shoes he was handed; the humiliating body inspection; the inventory of his personal effects the guard had made. It was only then that he was told that he could send on his things to his family if he wished, otherwise they’d be destroyed. There was a moment of anguish before relinquishing these few mementoes of a different life. He hadn’t realised he’d have to part with them. The letters and photo of his fiancée; a faded picture of his mother as a young girl; his military citation, along with the medal his unit had been awarded. He hadn’t realised these things were important to him. Particularly the photos. How would he be able to remember what his fiancée looked like? Already the face is blurred. It’s the feel of her breasts and body that remains with him most viscerally. Or perhaps it’s just the ghost of any young woman’s body – here in this world of men.
‘I’m never coming back,’ he now scribbles under the gloom of the night-light. ‘Consider me dead, and think of me no longer.’
III
A week later, at dawn parade, an officer singles out a dozen men, including Sabir. They’re to leave immediately for Renée, a new forest camp twenty kilometres down the river. ‘You’ve got until nightfall to report to the chief guard. Otherwise, you’ll be counted as missing.’
An Arab turnkey doles out their day’s rations and walks them out of the penitentiary. It’s the first time since his arrival that Sabir’s been outside, and as he’s watched the crowds of convicts herded in and out of the gates every day, as he’s listened to the incessant chatter about goings-on in town, Saint-Laurent has expanded in his mind. It is, after all, a capital city of sorts. The capital of the bagne. But now as they leave, he’s reminded again of how small it is, how insignificant it seems, compared with what surrounds it. After only a few minutes’ walk, the almost elegant boulevard crumbles into little more than a dirt track through a dusty shanty town.
The turnkey stops as they approach a little shop; a Chinaman lounges by its entrance, puffing on an ivory pipe of a type Sabir hasn’t seen before. ‘If you want to buy anything before you leave, you can get it here,’ says the turnkey. No doubt he gets his cut for bringing them here, that’s his scam. Inside there’s a counter with tobacco, rum, bananas, coconuts, loaves of bread, some kind of boiled meat and rice. Sabir has a few francs he’s earned as an écrivain: he’ll need plenty more to finance his escape, but the temptation to buy something is overwhelming. Such a thing hasn’t been allowed in so long! It’s
these half-tastes of freedom that are so dizzying. Sabir parts with some of his cash for a glass of rum – a ridiculous extravagance – and also some tobacco, since he’s heard that in the forest camps smoking is the best way to keep off the mosquitoes.
The turnkey leads them to a place where the dirt road disappears into the trees. ‘You have to follow that path. Camp Renée’s less than a day’s walk from here. You should get there by late afternoon.’ He turns away and is gone without a word: here, no one bothers with hellos or goodbyes. The men wait at the spot for a few minutes, too astonished to do anything. Sabir gazes over to Dutch Guiana across the river. Surely there must be a guard hidden somewhere, watching them, checking up on them, ready to shout, ready to fire on them if they try to get away … Eventually they hurry off down the trail the turnkey had pointed to. Sabir rounds each bend expecting to find a guard there, waiting to pick them up and take them to the camp. But there’s no one. They’re alone in the jungle. At times a darkness envelopes them: trees bow over the trail like two sides of a steeple, a violent blue only occasionally piercing the thick canopy.
Sabir doesn’t know the other men; they aren’t from his barracks. But no one introduces himself. They’re wraiths, walking in silence, each sunk in his own thoughts. It’s the shock of suddenly being alone, unsupervised, for the first time in months. The forest has no bars or walls – and yet the old hands back at the penitentiary have impressed on everyone that, in itself, it offers no salvation. To wander off unprepared, with no plan or rations, is to condemn yourself to failure. Sabir lets the other men get ahead until he really is by himself. The weird forest silence is punctuated by squawks and rustling sounds that might be the wind, a small animal or a snake or bird. Sometimes these noises make him start involuntarily. What would it be like to be here in the forest at night? It’s good to be alone, though, in daylight hours at least. The forced company of other prisoners merely accentuates the loneliness. Only when Sabir’s alone does a sense of himself as a man among others come back to him.
The forest camps, hard labour. He hasn’t been able to avoid that fate after all. Foolishly, he’d assumed he’d get a job at Saint-Laurent as a gardener. Such stupid faith in your hopes and dreams is one of the dangers of prison life. The past is dead, the future stolen away, the present an endless desert – so you retreat into a fantasy world, where finally you’re in control. Among the lifers he’s known, Sabir has seen the syndrome time and time again. You lose yourself in grandiose plans, unrealisable dreams, until life becomes a mirage. And escape can be the worst dream of all. It’s the fantasy paradise of the bagnards, just as the bagne is the fantasy hell for everyone else. Sabir must be on his guard against such daydreaming, because it’s never innocent. If he really is to escape, his plans must be firmly grounded in the real world.
At around noon, judging by the sun’s position, Sabir stops at a clearing. It’s on a small hill, in an otherwise flat terrain. It looks as though someone thought it a good idea to build here, cleared the high land, and then gave up. Before he sits down to eat his bread and dried sausage, Sabir hoists himself a few metres up a tree. For the first time he’s able to look right across the forest he’s in. A horizonless sea of green merges seamlessly into the primary blue of the tropical sky. Whatever direction you look in, it’s the same: blue, green, blue, green. If you stare long enough, the colours start to coalesce until it feels as if there’s no up or down, no left or right. Nothing to grab on to, except the filament of river and its random twists. Feeling giddy, Sabir climbs back down. His rations spill out of his tattered cloth sack.
As he eats his lunch, Sabir thinks of his fiancée, for the first time since writing that letter to her under the barracks night-light. It’s the stale, lumpy bread he’s chewing on that reminds him of her: when they’d been together, she’d been working in a bakery. Now, before him, he sees the room he briefly shared with her in Belleville, just around the corner from that bakery. The shabby chair, the table and the water jug: the vision is suddenly vivid and desperately alive. On the sagging single bed, his fiancée, naked and smiling. He stretches out his hand. But as soon as he’s able to discern her features, to focus on the curves of her body, she’s gone – the room, too. He finds himself staring at a line of ants on a tree as the picture fades. Ants, ants everywhere. This is the real life of the dead forest. It takes him a minute to pull out of the dazed sensation his vision has left him with, and finish his bread and sausage.
Now on the move again, through the forest. At times the narrow path feels horribly claustrophobic, barely making its way through the thick vegetation. Looking up can bring on vertigo: the trees stretch up twenty metres and more. There are moments of peculiar beauty – two trees of different species growing towards each other, their different-coloured leaves intermingling to form a dappled, stained-glass effect. Vines stringing from one trunk to another, like wild-growing lace. On one of those vines, Sabir sees a bunch of little white flowers miraculously high up among the dense green.
An hour more until Sabir passes near the first camp, Saigon. A dozen gaunt convicts are bent over, apparently hoeing at some cleared ground. Their movements are jerky, puppet-like. Hard to imagine what crop they might be trying to grow out here: most of the ground is hard caked mud and a tangle of tree roots. To one side, a turnkey stands chatting and smoking with a guard. All the convicts look up at Sabir and one asks where he’s going. The guard, however, just points to a new trail on the other side of the cleared ground and tells him to keep moving.
Sabir picks up his pace as he dives back into the darkness of the forest. In a way, he’s eager to get to his camp. However dire the situation, imagining one’s fate tends to be worse than living it – even in Belgium, the shelling and the attacks were not as bad as the nauseous dread that preceded them. Not long after his encounter with the labouring convicts, Sabir sees a group of practically naked men with axes, half-jogging along the path back to Camp Saigon. One of them stops and calls out Sabir’s name. He turns around to see a man with a hooked nose and a face that is lined and hollow, burnt black by the sun. The man stares at Sabir, shakes his head, murmurs: ‘Got pretty thin, haven’t I? You don’t recognise me.’
‘I do. But I thought you were dead.’
‘Likewise. And yet, here we are. Safe and sound.’
Edouard laughs mirthlessly at his own joke. That faintly aristocratic voice and laugh are his, and yet the ghostly face and bony body belong to someone else entirely. He’s not the first acquaintance Sabir’s bumped into in this colony, although he’s certainly the closest. In Belgium, Edouard and Sabir were stationed on the same trench section for months on end – an eternity of waiting and tedium. And during that time, they shared everything. Food, drink, tobacco, jokes, news, rumours, philosophical musings, card games, clothes, boots, lice – such pairings-off were both practical and more or less the norm in the trenches. Over winter they even slept together to conserve heat, a single blanket wrapped around them both. In short, they lived the life of a couple with more intensity than many husbands and wives. No doubt they saved each other’s lives on occasion, too. Sabir has a distinct memory of Edouard bringing him down with a tackle one morning while he was shaving in the rear ‘bathroom’ trench section. A rifle had been pointing out from a bomb crater not twenty metres away behind the lines. All day they played cat and mouse with the sniper, but Edouard got him in the end. Much later came the attack in 1917 that definitively broke up the unit. When the straggles of survivors finally assembled in one place, Edouard wasn’t there.
‘You know, I’ve often thought of you,’ Sabir finds himself saying now. ‘When you didn’t come back that morning, I was sure you’d been killed. We all did. What happened?’
‘Shrapnel in the eye. Knocked out in a foxhole. They didn’t pick me up for another three days. I was raving; thirst, I suppose. Month in hospital, then invalided out.’
‘It’s amazing, I …’ Sabir is on the verge of telling him how he tried to find Edouard’s family after t
he war, but stops himself. He stares. When Edouard looks his way, his eyes aren’t completely aligned. One appears to be glass. It’s difficult to tell with his tanned skin, but there doesn’t seem to be any scarring at all around the eye or anywhere else on his face. Unusual to be hit by shrapnel so precisely in the eye and nowhere else.
‘I haven’t thought of that time for so long,’ says Edouard. He chuckles to himself. ‘D’you remember that chap Durand? That madman who always wore a spiked helmet he’d looted from some dead German?’
‘Yes. I remember.’
‘Did you hear what happened to him?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Someone bet him fifty francs he wouldn’t walk into that bar in Lille with the spiked helmet on and order a beer in German.’
‘What happened?’
‘Some drunk English officer drinking there got up and shot him dead!’
They laugh. A flood of faces from the war return to Sabir. Julien Pardieu; le Petit Clouzot; that man with the purple birthmark on his face … most dead, but what has happened to the survivors? Married, with children and jobs? Or more like Sabir and Edouard? For a moment, Sabir’s back in the trenches. Once again, the days of shelling, the nights with prostitutes. His months there seem like the best of times, the camaraderie so different from the suspicion and isolation that reign here.
‘You’re going back to that camp over there?’ asks Sabir.
Edouard nods. ‘We’re supposed to be wood chopping. But if you’re quick, you can get your quota done earlier. Then you can go out butterfly hunting. There are a lot of Morphos round here; you get a franc a piece for them. So you came in on the last convoy?’
‘Yeah. I’m heading for Camp Renée. Know anything about it?’
‘I know it. Got a good friend there. It’s not so bad. Not exactly lax, but the chef de camp is new. The place has only been open a few months. All the clearing’s been done. There’s just construction work, no wood chopping. And that’s what kills you. The chopping.’