Not only was she ready to plunge unhesitatingly into the dangers of this long journey all by herself, but she had so much trust in me--in me, the ex-convict--that she would leave everything in my hands. She knew she could rely on me.
Rita had only rented the hotel, with an option to purchase. So to keep it from slipping out of our hands, the first thing to do was buy it. Now I really learned what it meant, struggling to make one’s place in life by honest means.
I got the Richmond Company to let me go, and with the six thousand bolivars I received, and Rita’s savings, we gave the owner 50 percent of the price. And then began a positive battle day after day, and night after night, to make money and meet our installments. Both she and I worked like crazy eighteen hours and sometimes nineteen hours a day. We were united by a wonderful will to win at all costs and in the shortest possible time. Neither she nor I ever mentioned our weariness. I did the buying and helped with the cooking and received the guests. We were everywhere at once, always smiling. We died on our feet, and then we began again the next morning.
To make a little more money, I filled a two-wheeled cart with jackets and trousers to sell in the Plaza Baralt market. These clothes were manufacturers’ rejects, which meant I could buy them very cheaply at the factory. Under the blazing sun I reeled off my spiel, bawling like a jackass and putting so much energy into it that one day, tweaking a jacket to show how strong it was, I split it from top to bottom. It was all very well explaining that I was the strongest man in Maracaibo, but I sold precious few that morning. I was in the market from eight until noon. At half past twelve I hurried to the hotel to help at waiting in the restaurant.
The Plaza Baralt was the commercial heart of Maracaibo, one of the liveliest places in the town. At the far end stood the church, at the other, one of the most picturesque markets in the world, a market where you would find anything you could possibly think of in the way of meat, game, seafood and shellfish, not forgetting big green iguanas--a lovely dish--with their claws tied so they could not escape; and there were alligator, tortoise, and turtle eggs, armadillos and morocoys, a kind of land tortoise, all sorts of fruit and fresh hearts of palm. The market of this ebullient town swarmed with people in the scorching sun--skins of every color, eyes of every shape, from the Chinese slit to the Negro round.
Rita and I loved Maracaibo, although it was one of the hottest places in Venezuela. This colonial town had a lovable, warmhearted population that lived happily. They had a musical way of speaking; they were fine, generous people with a little Spanish blood and all the best qualities of the Indians. The men were fiery creatures; they had a very strong sense of friendship, and to those they liked they could be real brothers. The Maracucho--the inhabitant of Maracaibo--did not much care for anything that came from Caracas. He complained that they provided the whole of Venezuela with gold by means of their oil, and that the people of the capital always overlooked him: the Maracucho felt like a wealthy man who was being treated as a poor relation by the very people he had enriched. The women were pretty and rather small: faithful, good daughters and good mothers. The whole town seethed with life and the noise of living, and everywhere there was brilliant color--the clothes, the houses, the fruit, everything. Everywhere, too, there was movement, business, activity. The Plaza Baralt was full of street traders and small-time smugglers who scarcely bothered to hide the liqueurs, spirits or cigarettes they were selling. It was all more or less among friends: the policeman was only a few yards away, but he would turn his back just long enough for the bottles of whisky, the French cognac or the American cigarettes to pass from one basket to another.
Running a hotel was no trifle. When Rita first came, she made a decision completely opposed to the customs of the country. The Venezuelan customers were used to eating a substantial breakfast--corn muffins (arepas), ham and eggs, bacon, cream cheese. And as the guests were paying full room and board, the day’s menu was written up on a slate. The first day Rita wiped the whole list out and in her pointed hand wrote, “Breakfast: black coffee or café au lait, bread and butter.” Well, what do you think of that? the guests must have said; by the end of the week half of them had changed their quarters.
Then I turned up. Rita had made some alterations, but my arrival brought a downright revolution.
First decree: double the prices.
Second decree: French cooking.
Third decree: air conditioning throughout.
People were astonished to find air conditioning in all the rooms and in the restaurant of a colonial house turned into a hotel. The clientele changed. First came commercial travelers; then a Basque settled in: he sold “Swiss” Omega watches manufactured entirely in Peru, and he ran his business from his room, selling only to retailers, who hawked them from door to door and all through the oil fields. Although the hotel was safe, he was so suspicious that he had three big locks put on his door at his own expense. And in spite of the locks he noticed that from time to time a watch disappeared. He thought his room was haunted until the day he found that, in fact, there was a female thief, our bitch Bouclette. She was a poodle, and so cunning she would creep in without a sound, and right under his nose would rip off a strap for pure fun, whether it had a watch attached or not. So here he was, shrieking and bawling, saying I had trained Bouclette to steal his things. I laughed till I could laugh no more, and after two or three rums managed to convince him that I’d had nothing to do with his lousy watches and that I would really be ashamed of selling such phony stuff. Comforted and easy in his mind, he shut himself up in his room again.
Among our guests there were people of every possible kind. Maracaibo was full to overflowing, and it was almost impossible to find a room. A flock of Neapolitans went from house to house, swindling the citizens by selling lengths of cloth folded so there seemed to be enough for four suits when in fact you could only make two. They were dressed as sailors and carried big bags on their shoulders, they combed the town and the country round, above all the oil fields. I don’t know how these sharp-witted creatures discovered our hotel. As all the rooms were full, there was only one solution--for them to sleep in the patio. Every evening they came back about seven and had a shower. They had dinner at the hotel, so we learned to make spaghetti a la napolitaine. They spent their money freely, and they were good customers.
At night, we brought out iron bedsteads, and the two little maids helped Rita make them up in the patio. As I made the Neapolitans pay in advance, there was the same argument every night--paying the price of a room for sleeping in the open was too much. And every night I told them that on the contrary it was perfectly logical and completely fair. To bring out the beds, put on the sheets, the blankets and the pillows and then take them all in again in the morning was a huge amount of work-- beyond price. “And don’t you go on beefing too much, or I’ll put up your rent. Because here I am, literally slaying myself shifting things in and out--all I make you pay is the cost of moving.”
They would pay up and we would all have a laugh. But although they were making a lot of money, the next evening the whole thing would start all over again. They beefed even more one night when it rained and they had to run in with all their clothes and their mattresses and sleep in the restaurant.
A woman who kept a brothel came to see me. She had a very big house two or three miles from Maracaibo, at the place called La Cabeza de Toro: the brothel was the Tibiri-Tabara. Eléonore was her name, and she was an enormous mass of flesh: intelligent; very fine eyes. More than a hundred and twenty women worked at her place--only at night.
“There are some French girls who want to get out,” she told me. “They don’t like spending twenty-four hours a day in the brothel. Working from nine in the evening until four the next morning, that’s fine. But they want to be able to eat well and sleep in peace in comfortable rooms away from the noise.”
I made a deal with Eléonore: the French and Italian girls could come to our hotel. We could raise the price by ten bolivars a day without worr
ying: they would be only too happy to be able to stay at the Vera Cruz with French people. We were supposed to take six, but after a month, I don’t quite know how, we had twice as many.
Rita laid down iron-hard rules. They were all young and all lovely, and Rita absolutely forbade them to receive any male at the hotel, even in the courtyard or the dining room. But there was no trouble at all; in the hotel these girls were like real ladies. In everyday life they were proper, respectable women who knew how to behave. In the evening, taxis came for them, and they were transformed--gorgeously dressed and made up. Discreet, without any noise, they went off to the “factory,” as they called it. Now and then a pimp would come from Paris or Caracas, drawing as little attention to himself as possible. His girl could see him at the hotel, of course. Once he had made his haul, collected his money and made his girl happy, he would go off again as quietly as he had come.
There were often little things that were good for a laugh. A visiting pimp took me aside one day and asked to have his room changed. His woman had already found another girl who was willing to switch. Reason: his neighbor was a full-blooded, wellequipped Italian, and every night, when his girl came back, this Italian made love to her at least once and sometimes twice. My pimp was not yet forty, and the Italian must have been fifty-five.
“Man, I just can’t keep up with Rital, if you follow me. There’s no getting anywhere near that kind of a performance. My broad and me being next door, we hear the lot--groans, shrieks, the whole works. And as I can barely make it with my chick once a week, I ask you to imagine what I look like. She doesn’t believe in the headache excuse anymore; and of course she makes comparisons. So if it doesn’t put you out, do this for me.”
I kept my laughter inside me, and moved by such an unanswerable argument, I switched his room.
Another time, at two o’clock in the morning, Eléonore called me up. The cop on duty had found a Frenchman who could not speak a word of Spanish perched in a tree opposite the brothel. The cop asked him how he came to be in that curious position--was he there to steal or what?--and all the fellow answered was “Enrique of the Vera Cruz.” I jumped into my car and darted out to the Tibiri-Tabara.
I recognized the fellow right away. He was from Lyons and he had already been to the hotel. He was sitting there, and the madam, too; standing in front of them were two grim-faced cops. I translated what he told me--he put it very briefly. “No, the gentleman wasn’t in the tree with the idea of doing anything wrong. It’s just that he is in love with one of the women, but he won’t say which. He climbed up to admire her in secret, because she won’t have anything to do with him. It’s nothing serious, as you see. Anyhow, I know him, and he’s a good citizen.”
We drank a bottle of champagne; he paid, and I told him to leave the change on the table--someone would surely pick it up. Then I drove him back in my car. “But what the hell were you doing, perched up in that tree? Have you gone crazy, or are you jealous of your girl?”
“It’s not that. The trouble is the take has dropped off without any reason for it. She’s one of the prettiest there and she earns more than the others. So I thought I’d come and watch how often she went to work without her knowing. That way, it seemed to me, I’d soon find out if she was holding out on me and keeping back my money.”
Although I was sore at having been pulled out of bed in the middle of the night on account of a pimp, I roared with laughter at his explanation. This “tree-perched pimp,” as I called him from that time on, left for Caracas the next day. It was no longer worth his while keeping a check. The whole business had made a lot of noise in the brothel; like everybody else, his woman knew all about it, but she was the only one who knew why her fancy man had chosen just that tree--it was dead opposite her room.
We worked hard, but the hotel was a cheerful place, and we had fun all the time. There were some evenings, after the girls had gone off to their factory, when we made the dead speak. We all sat at a round table with our hands flat on the top, and each one called up the spirit he wanted to question. It was a goodlooking woman of about thirty, a painter, who started these seances--she was a Hungarian, I think. She called up her husband every evening, and of course, with my foot under the table, I helped his spirit reply; otherwise we’d be there yet.
She said her husband was tormenting her. Why? She couldn’t tell. At last, one night the spirit came through by means of the table, and after that he never left it quiet. He accused her of having round heels. We all exclaimed that that was very serious, and that this jealous spirit might take a horrible revenge; all the more so as she was perfectly willing to admit that in fact her heels were quite round. What was to be done about it? We discussed it very gravely and we told her there was only one thing to do: at full moon she was to provide herself with a brand-new machete, stand stark naked in the middle of the patio with her hair down and no makeup on, having washed all over with yellow soap, but with no trace of scent and no jewels, clean from head to foot. Nothing but the machete in her hand. When the moon was right over the patio, casting no shadow except directly beneath her, she was to slash the air exactly twenty-one times.
It worked perfectly, and the night after the exorcism (we had laughed fit to burst, hidden behind the shutters) Rita said the joke had lasted long enough; so the table replied that from now on her late husband would leave her in peace and her heels could be as round as she liked, always provided she never slashed the air with a sword at full moon anymore, because it hurt him too much.
We had another poodle called Minou, quite a big poodle, which had been given to us by a French guest who was passing through Maracaibo. Minou was always perfectly clipped and brushed, and the stiff, thick hair on the top of his head was cut in the shape of a tall, impressive fez. He had puffed-out thighs, shaved legs, a Chaplin moustache and a little pointed beard. The Venezuelans were astonished at the spectacle, and often one of them would overcome his shyness and ask what kind of animal this strange beast might be.
Minou very nearly brought about a serious clash with the Church. The Vera Cruz stood in the Calle Venezuela; our Street led to a church, and processions often went along it. Now Minou loved sitting at the hotel door to watch the people walking about. He never barked, whatever happened in the street. But although he did not bark, he did cause a sensation; and one day the priest and the choirboys belonging to a procession found themselves all alone while, fifty yards behind, the faithful of Maracaibo stood massed in front of the hotel, gazing at this extraordinary object. They had forgotten to follow the procession. Questions ran through the group, and they jostled to see Minou close up; some were of the opinion that the unknown creature might very well be the soul of a repentant sinner, since it had sat there so quietly, watching a priest and his choirboys all dressed in red go by singing heartily. At last the priest realized that things were very silent behind, and turning around he saw there was no one left. He came striding back, crimson with fury and bawling out his parishioners for their lack of respect for the ceremony. Alarmed, they fell back into line and marched off. But I noticed that some who had been most struck by the sight walked backward so as not to lose a minute of Minou. After that we kept an eye on the Maracaibo paper, Panorama, for the date and time when a procession should come along our street, so that we could tie him up in the patio.
It seems this was the season for incidents with the clergy. Two French girls left Eléonore’s brothel and the hotel; they had made up their minds to be independent and set up a little “house” in the center of the town where they would just work by themselves, the two of them. It was quite a good scheme, because this way the customers would not have to get their cars and drive six miles there and back to see them. To get themselves known, they had cards printed, saying “Julie and Nana: conscientious work” and the address. They handed them out in the town; but instead of giving them directly to the men, they often slipped them under the windshield wipers of parked cars.
They had the bad luck to put two, one under
each wiper, on the car belonging to the bishop of Maracaibo. This set off a hell of an explosion. To show the profane nature of their action, the paper La Religion published a picture of the card. But the bishop and the clergy were indulgent: the little brothel was not closed, and the ladies were only begged to be more discreet. Anyhow, there was no point in going on handing out the cards; after the free publicity in La Religion, a very considerable number of customers hurried to the given address. Indeed, the crowd was so great that to provide a reasonable excuse for this troop of men at their door, the girls asked a hot-dog seller to wheel his cart quite close, so it would look as if the line was standing there to buy a perro caliente.
That was the picturesque side of life at the hotel. But we weren’t living on a planet far out in space; we were living it in Venezuela, and we were involved with the country’s economic and political ups and downs. In 1948 politics were not so peaceful. Gallegos and Betancourt had been governing the country since 1945, in the first attempt at a democratic régime in the history of Venezuela. On November 13, 1948, scarcely three months after I had set to work with Rita to buy the hotel, there came the first shot directed against the régime. A major called Thomas Mendoza had the nerve to stage an uprising all by himself. He failed.
On the twenty-fourth of the same month the soldiers seized power in a coup d’etat run with clockwise precision: there were almost no victims. Gallegos, the president of the republic and a distinguished writer, was forced to resign. Betancourt, a real political lion, took refuge in the Colombian embassy.
In Maracaibo we lived through hours of very tense anxiety. There was one moment when all at once we heard a passionate voice on the radio crying, “Workers, come out into the streets! They want to steal your freedom from you, close down your unions and impose a military dictatorship by force! Everybody occupy the squares, the . - .” Click, and it went dead, the mike snatched from the brave militant’s hands. Then a calm, grave voice: “Citizens! The army has withdrawn the power from the men to whom they entrusted it after having dismissed General Medina, because they made an unworthy use of their authority. Do not be afraid: we guarantee the life and property of one and all, without exception. Long live the army! Long live the revolution!”
Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon Page 19