Papillon

by Henri Charrière

  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 tak
e 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.

  Only one wave out of every seven was as large as the monster that had flung my sack back against the rocks. The others were little more than half its size. From noon to sundown I watched to see if this was always so, if there wasn’t an occasional shift or whim that altered the regularity.

  There wasn’t. The ground swell never came sooner, never came later. There were six waves about twenty feet high, then, forming about three hundred yards from shore, the ground swell. It came in straight as a cannonball, growing in size and height as it approached. There was hardly any spray on its crest compared to the other six, very little, in fact. It had its own special noise, like far-off thunder. When it broke on the two rocks and hurled itself into the passage between them, crashing against the cliff, its great mass caused it to choke and turn on itself. Then, after ten or fifteen seconds, the eddies would work their way out with a wild churning, tearing off huge stones and rolling them back and forth, making a rumble like a hundred wagonloads of stones being dumped.

  I put a dozen coconuts in a sack and added a fifty-pound rock. As the ground swell broke, I threw the sack in. I couldn’t follow it with my eyes because of the spray, but I saw it for a second as the water was sucked back to the sea. It did not return. The next six waves lacked the strength to throw it back on shore, and by the time the seventh had formed three hundred yards out, the sack must have drifted beyond it, for I didn’t see it again.

  Bursting with excitement, I went back to camp. I had it! I had found the perfect launching. No question of luck here. Still I would do another trial run, this time under the conditions of the real cavale: two sacks of coconuts tied together and; on top, two or three rocks weighing a total of a hundred and fifty-five pounds. I told Chang about it and he listened closely.

  “It’s good, Papillon. I think you got it. I help you for real thing. Wait for high tide twenty-five feet. Soon equinox.”

  With Chang’s help and that of the twenty-five-foot equinoctial tide, we threw the two sacks and three rocks into the famous wave.

  “What was name of little girl you tried save on Saint Joseph?”

  “Lisette.”

  “We call wave that take you away Lisette. O.K.?”

  “O.K.”

  Lisette arrived with the roar of an express train pulling into a station. Standing straight as a rampart, she grew larger with every second. It was an impressive sight. She broke with such power that Chang and I were swept off the rock and the sacks fell into the chasm. In the flash of a second we realized we couldn’t hold onto the rock, so we threw ourselves back—which didn’t protect us from a mighty soaking but did prevent our falling into the chasm. This happened at ten in the morning. We weren’t taking any risk because the three guards were busy doing inventory at the other end of the island. The sacks were carried off—we could see them clearly far out from shore. Were they beyond the ground swell? We waited. The six waves that followed Lisette were not able to catch them. Lisette came and went a second time, but still no sacks. They were beyond her reach.

  We climbed quickly up to Dreyfus’ bench to see if we could see them again and, to our joy, we caught sight of them four different times riding the crest of the waves. And these waves were not coming toward Diable but heading west. We had the proof. I would sail toward the great adventure on the back of Lisette.

  “Look, there she comes.” One, two, three, four, five, six … then Lisette.

  The sea was always heavy below Dreyfus’ bench, but it was especially bad today. Lisette was advancing with her usual noise. She seemed even bigger, carrying more water than ever. Her monstrous mass struck the two rocks faster and straighter than ever before. And when she crashed against them, the noise was even more deafening, if that was possible. “That’s where you want us to jump from? Well, pal, you sure found a great spot! But not for me. I want to go on a cavale, not commit suicide.”

  Sylvain was impressed with my description of Lisette. He had come to Diable three days before and, naturally, I suggested we leave together, each of us on our own raft. If he accepted, I’d have a companion on Grande Terre to help with the second stage of the cavale. Being alone in the bush was no picnic.

  “There’s no point in being scared ahead of time. I realize that on first thought any man might hesitate a little. But it’s the only wave that’ll take us far enough out.”

  “Calm down. Look, we tried it,” Chang said. “It’s sure thing. Once off, you never pushed back on Diable or Royale.”

  It took me a week to convince Sylvain, a man with the body of an athlete, all solid muscle and six feet tall.

  “O.K. I can see we’ll be carried far enough
out. But after that, how long will it take us to get to Grande Terre?”

  “To be honest, Sylvain, I don’t know. The speed of the drift depends on the weather. The wind’ll have little effect because we’ll be so low in the water. But if we have heavy weather, the waves will be bigger and push us faster. Seven, eight, ten tides at the most and we should reach the mainland. It could take anywhere between forty-eight and sixty hours.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “From the islands to the mainland isn’t more than twenty-four miles. The drift is the hypotenuse of the triangle. Look at the direction of the waves. We have to do between seventy-five and ninety miles maximum. The nearer we get to shore, the more directly the waves aim us at the coast. Wouldn’t you guess that a piece of driftwood at this distance from the coast would travel at least three miles an hour?”

  He listened very attentively to my explanations. The big guy was pretty intelligent.

  “It sounds all right to me. If it wasn’t for the low tides, which will pull us back, it wouldn’t take more than thirty hours to reach the coast. Taking them into account, I think you’re right—it’ll take somewhere between forty-eight and sixty hours.”

  “Are you convinced?”

  “Almost. But once we’re on Grande Terre, in the bush, what then?”

  “We have to find our way to the outskirts of Kourou. It’s a fairly big fishing village, and there are also people there searching for gold and balata trees. You have to be careful, though, because it has a camp for bagnards. There’ll be some kind of path going toward Cayenne, and also toward the Chinese camp called Inini. We’ll have to force a con or a black civilian to take us to Inini. If he behaves himself, we’ll give him five hundred francs—then make him beat it. If it’s a con, we’ll make him join our cavale.”

  “What do we do in Inini in a camp for Chinese?”

  “Chang’s brother is there.”