“The bank opens at seven for the cleaners. At that moment the whole thing may turn sour: at seven in the morning, that is to say not long after we’ve left. This is what I suggest: we finish the job by six on Sunday evening. By the time we’ve shared it out, it’ll be about eight. If we leave at eight, that will give us at least eleven hours’ start if the thing blows up at seven, and thirteen hours if it holds tight till nine.”
In the end everybody fell in with my suggestion. We drank our champagne, and as we drank it we put on records Paulo had brought--Maurice Chevalier, Piaf, the Paris of the little dance halls.... - Sitting there with his glass, each of us dreamed of the great day. It was there, so close you could almost touch it with your finger.
Your bill, Papi, the bill you’ve got there engraved on your heart, you’ll be able to collect on it in Paris pretty soon. If all goes well and if luck’s with me, I’ll come back from France to El Callao and fetch Maria. My father: that would be for later on. Poor, wonderful Dad! Before I go and embrace him I’ll have to bury the man I was, the hustler.... - It won’t take long once I’ve had my revenge and I’m fixed up properly.
It was two days after our champagne celebration that the thing happened, but we didn’t know it until the day after that. We’d been to look at a General Electric welding-and-cutting set in a neighboring town. My pal and I, dressed very properly, set out on foot and joined up with Paulo and Auguste in the car about a mile away.
“We’ve deserved this trip, boys. Breathe it in, breathe it in deep; this is the wonderful air of freedom!”
“You’re dead right, Paulo; we’ve certainly deserved it. Don’t drive too fast; let’s have time to admire the countryside.”
We split up and stayed in two different hotels, spending three days in this charming port stuffed with ships and swarming with cheerful, motley crowds. Every evening we all met. “No nightclubs, no brothels, no girls off the street; this is a business trip, men,” Paulo said. He was right.
Paulo and I went to look at the set, taking our time about it. It was terrific but it had to be paid for in cash and we didn’t have enough. Paulo wired Buenos Aires and fortunately gave the address of the hotel in the port where he was staying. He decided to take us back to the villa and then return by himself a day or two later to get the dough and the welder. We drove back, thoroughly set up by these three days of holiday,
Paulo dropped Gaston and me at the corner of our little road as usual. The villa was a hundred yards away. We were walking calmly along, pleased with the idea of seeing our masterpiece of a tunnel again, when all at once I grabbed Gaston’s arm and stopped him dead. What was going on outside the villa? There were cops, a dozen people milling around, and then I saw two firemen heaving earth out of the middle of the road. I didn’t have to be told what had happened. The tunnel had been discovered!
Gaston began to tremble as though he had a fever, and then with his teeth chattering he stammered out, “They’ve smashed our beautiful tunnel in! Oh, the shits! Such a beautiful tunnel!”
At this very moment this guy with a pig’s face you could tell a mile off was watching us. But the whole situation seemed so comic to me I burst out in such cheerful, genuine, open laughter that if the pig had had some slight doubt about us, it passed off right away. Taking Gaston’s arm I said out loud in Spanish, “What a fucking great tunnel those robbers have dug!”
And slowly we turned our back on our masterpiece and walked away from the road--no hurry and no hitch. But now we had to get moving quick. I asked Gaston, “How much have you got on you? I’ve nearly six hundred dollars and fifteen hundred bolivars. What about you?”
“Two thousand dollars in my plan,” said Gaston.
“Gaston, the best thing to do is for us to part right here in the Street.”
“What are you going to do, Papi?”
“I’ll go back to the port we came from and try to get a boat for no matter where--straight for Venezuela, if possible.”
We could not embrace one another there in the open street, but Gaston’s eyes were as wet with emotion as mine as we shook hands. There’s nothing that makes such a bond between men as the experience of danger and adventure.
“Good luck, Gaston.”
“Same to you, Papi.”
Paulo and Auguste went home by different roads, the one to Paraguay, the other to Buenos Aires.
I managed to get on a boat for Puerto Rico: from there I took a plane to Colombia and then another boat to Venezuela.
It was only some months later that I learned what had happened. A water main had burst in the big avenue on the other side of the bank and the traffic was diverted into the streets running parallel. A huge truck loaded with iron girders took our road, passed over our tunnel, and plunged its back wheels into it. Shrieks, amazement, police; they grasped the whole thing in a moment.
7
Carotte: the Pawnshop
In Caracas it was Christmas. Splendid lights in all the big streets, cheerfulness everywhere, carols sung with the Venezuelans’ marvelous sense of rhythm. For my part I was rather depressed by our failure, but I wasn’t bitter. We’d gambled and we’d lost, but I was still alive and freer than ever. And then after all, as Gaston said, it had been a lovely tunnel!
Gradually the atmosphere of these songs about the Child of Bethlehem seeped into me; and easy in my mind, my heart peaceful again, I sent Maria a telegram: “MARIA, MAY THIS CHRISTMAS FILL THE HOUSE WHERE YOU GAVE ME SO MUCH JOY.”
I spent Christmas Day at the hospital with Picolino, sitting on a bench in the little hospital garden. I’d bought two hallacas, specialties they make only at Christmas, and they were the most expensive and the best I could find. I also had two little flat bottles of delicious Chianti in my pockets.
It was a Christmas of two men brought back to life, a Christmas ablaze with the light of friendship, a Christmas of total freedom--freedom even to splash money about as I had done. The snowless Christmas of Caracas, filled with the flowers of this little hospital garden: a Christmas of hope for Picolino, whose tongue no longer hung out now he was being treated, who no longer dribbled. Yes, a miraculous Christmas for him, since he distinctly--and happily--pronounced the word “Yes” when I asked him if the hallacas were good.
But Lord above, how hard it was to make a new life! I went through some very tough weeks, yet I did not lose heart. I had two things in me: first, an unshakable confidence in the future, and second, love for life. Even when it would have been more sensible for me to be worrying, a mere trifle in the Street would make me laugh; and if I met a friend I might spend the evening with him, having fun like a twenty-year-old.
Dr. Bougrat gave me a little job in his beauty-products laboratory. I didn’t earn much, but enough to be well dressed, almost elegant. I left him for a Hungarian woman who had a little yogurt factory in her villa; and it was there that I met a pilot whose real name I won’t mention because at this moment he’s in command of an Air France jet. I’ll call him Carotte.
He was working for the Hungarian woman, too, and we made enough to be able to have some fun. Every evening we’d stroll around the Caracas bars, and we often had a drink or two at the Hotel Majestic, in the Silencio district. It has vanished now, but at that time it was the only modem place in the city.
It was then, during one of those periods when you think nothing fresh can possibly turn up, that a miracle took place. One day Carotte vanished, a little while later he came back again, from the United States, with a plane--a little observation plane with two seats, one behind the other. A wonderful gadget. I asked no questions about where it came from; the only question I did ask was what he was going to do with it.
He laughed and said, “I don’t know yet. But we might be partners.”
“To do what?”
“It doesn’t matter what, as long as we have fun and make a little dough.”
“Okay. We’ll look around.”
The sweet Hungarian woman, who couldn’t have had many illusions about how
long our jobs would last, wished us good luck; and then began an utterly demented and extraordinary month.
Oh, the things we did with that huge great butterfly!
Carotte was an ace. During the war he used to fly French agents out of England, land them by night in fields guarded by the Resistance and fly others back to London. He often came down with no more guidance than torches held by the men who were waiting for him. He was completely reckless, and he dearly loved a laugh. Once, without a word of warning, he banked so hard, right over, that I almost lost my pants, and all this just to frighten a fat woman who was quietly doing her business in the garden, her bottom bare to the winds.
I so loved that machine and our darting about in the air that when we had no money to buy juice, I brought up the brilliant idea of turning myself into a planeborne peddler.
This was the only time in my life that I ever conned anyone. He was called Coriat and he owned a men and women’s clothes shop, the Almacen Rio. He was in business with his brother. Coriat was a medium-sized Jew, dark, with an intelligent head; he spoke very good French. His shop was well run and he was making money hand over fist. On the women’s side he had all the newest, most fashionable dresses imported from Paris. So I had the choice of a whole range of very salable merchandise. I persuaded him to let me have a quantity of blouses, trousers and dresses, on sale or return; they were worth a good deal of money and the idea was that we would sell them in the remoter parts of the country.
We set off, going wherever we liked and coming back whenever it suited us. But although we sold our stuff pretty well, we didn’t make enough to cover our expenses, and Coriat’s share vanished in gas for the plane. There was nothing left for him.
Our best customers were the whores, and of course we never failed to go around the brothels. It was a great temptation for them when I spread our things out on the dining-room table-- garish blouses, the latest in the way of pants, silk scarves, flowered skirts--and started my spiel. “And listen to what I say, ladies. This is not a useless luxury as far as you are concerned. If I may say so, it is more like a business investment, because the more attractive you are, the more the customers come crowding in. As for those ladies who just think of saving, I can tell them for sure that it’s a deeply unwise economy not to buy from me. Why? Because all the really well-dressed girls are going to be dangerous competitors.”
There were some pimps who didn’t much care for our doing business this way; it made them feel bad to see money going into pockets other than their own. A good many of them sold “professional equipment” to their girls--on credit, sometimes--and the bastards wanted to monopolize the profit.
We often went to Puerto La Cruz, because there was a good airfield at Barcelona, a town a short way off. The best-run, classiest brothel there had sixty women in it, but the boss was an ugly great sod of a man, vulgar, pretentious and obstinate. He was a Panamanian. His wife was a Venezuelan, and she was charming; but unfortunately he was the one who gave the orders, and there was no question of even opening our cases for a quick look, far less of spreading things out on a table.
One day he went too far. He fired a girl then and there for having bought a scarf I was wearing around my neck. The argument turned nasty, and the cop on duty told us to get out and never come back.
“Okay, you fat shit,” Carotte said. “We won’t come back by land but by air. You can’t keep us from doing that.”
I didn’t understand the threat until the next morning, when we were taking off at dawn from Barcelona and he said to me on the intercom, “We’ll go and say hello to the Panamanian. Don’t be frightened and hold on tight.”
“What are you going to do?”
He made no reply, but when we came within sight of the brothel he climbed a little and then he dived straight for it at full throttle, shot under the high-tension cable just outside and roared over the corrugated-iron roof, almost touching it. Several of the sheets of iron were loose, and they flew off, displaying the rooms, with their beds and the people in them. We banked, climbed and flew back a little higher to contemplate the sight. I’ve never seen anything more utterly comic than those naked women and their naked customers, hopping mad in their lidless boxes, shaking furious fists at the plane, which had cut them short either in their games or in an exhausted sleep. Carotte and I laughed until we were almost sick.
We never went back, because now there’d be not only a furious boss, but a furious pack of women, too. Later I did find one girl who had the good taste to laugh at the whole thing with us. Apparently, in his rage, the fat cunt of a Panamanian had insisted on fixing the corrugated sheets on all the women’s rooms himself, with enormous bolts.
Carotte and I were both devoted to nature, and we often flew off just to look for beautiful places. That was how we came to find one of the real wonders of the world--Los Roques, about a hundred and fifty miles out at sea, a scattering of more than three hundred and sixty little islands, close together in an oval and forming a huge lake in the ocean. A calm lake, because the islands made a barrier, and its pale green water was so clear you could see the bottom sixty or seventy feet down. Unfortunately, in those days there was no landing strip, and we flew the whole length and breadth of the cluster ten times before pitching on another island called Las Aves, some twenty miles to the west.
Carotte really was a won4erful pilot. I’ve seen him land on a steeply sloping beach with one wing touching the sand and the other sweeping the sea. Isla de Aves means “island of birds.” There were thousands and thousands of them, and they had gray feathers except when they were young; then they were white all over. They were rather slow-witted and perfectly trusting. It was an extraordinary feeling, being there, just the two of us, stark naked on an island as flat as a pancake and being surrounded by birds that landed on you or walked about without the least fear, never having seen a man. We spent hours browning in the sun, lying on the narrow beach that ran all around the island. We played with the birds, taking them in the hollow of our hands; some were deeply interested in our heads, and gently pecked our hair. We swam, sunbathed again, and when we were hungry we could always find crayfish warming themselves on the surface. We’d catch a few with our hands and grill them on the spot. The only difficulty was finding enough dry stuff for the fire, because almost nothing grew on the island.
Sitting there on that untouched beach, eating those succulent crayfish and drinking a full-bodied white wine--we always had a few bottles on board--with the sea, the sky and the birds all around us and nothing else at all, gave us such a feeling of paradise that we didn’t have to speak to be wholly in touch with one another.
And when we took off again, before nightfall, our hearts were filled with sun and happiness and zest for life; we did not give a damn for anything, not even for finding the money for the fuel for the trip--a trip whose only reason was to let us live in a beautiful and unexpected world.
At Las Aves we discovered a huge sea cave: at low tide its mouth was above the surface, and light and air came in. I had a passion for this splendid grotto; you could swim into it, and inside the water was clear and shallow--not more than three feet deep. When you stood up in the middle and looked around, the roof and the walls seemed to be covered with cicadas. They weren’t cicadas, of course, but thousands of little crayfish clinging to the rock. We sometimes stayed there a long while, never disturbing them. The only time we interfered was when a big octopus, a great lover of baby crayfish, put out an arm to gather a few. We jumped on him right away and turned him inside out. There he could lie and rot, if he had the time, because he was unusual treat for the crabs.
We often went to Las Aves and spent the night there. Each of us had a big flashlight, and we gathered crayfish, each weighing about two and a half pounds, until we had filled two sacks with them. We dumped all the finery we were meant to be selling at Carlotta, the airfield in the middle of Caracas, and that meant we could bring back close to half a ton of crayfish. It was insane to load the plane like that, bu
t it was all part of the fun. We could just about get off the ground, and as for gaining height, the stars were in no danger! We would labor up the twelve miles of valley from the coast to Caracas, just skimming the housetops; and there we would sell our crayfish at the ridiculous price of two bolivars fifty apiece. At least it paid for the fuel and kept us going. But when you go after crayfish with your hands you often get hurt, and sometimes we’d come back without any. It didn’t matter; we never gave a damn--we were living to the full.
One day as we were on our way to Puerto La Cruz and not very far from it, Carotte said to me over the intercom, “Papi, we’re short of juice. I’m going to put her down on the San Tome oil company’s field.” We flew over the strip to show we wanted to come down on their private landing place, and the jackasses instantly ran a tanker full of gasoline or water, God knows which, right out into the middle of the strip. Carotte had nerves of steel, and although I told him again and again I couldn’t see where we could possibly touch down, he just said, “Hold on, Papi,” and sideslipped toward a fairly wide road. He landed without bumping too much, but the speed carried him along toward a turn in the route, and around this corner came a trailer filled with bullocks, tearing along as fast as it could go. The shriek of the brakes must have drowned our shrieks of horror, because if the driver hadn’t lost control and run his trailer into the ditch, we should certainly have been done for. We jumped out of the plane and Carotte hushed the swearing driver--he was an Italian. “Help us push the plane and you can beef later.” The Italian was still trembling all over and as white as a sheet. We helped him catch his beasts--they had escaped when the trailer came to pieces.
This prodigious landing made such a stir that the government bought Carotte’s plane and made him a civilian instructor at the Carlotta camp.
My life as an airman was over. Sad. I’d had a few hours of lessons and I was coming on well. Never mind. The only one who came out of this business a loser was Coriat. The extraordinary thing was he never sued me. Some years later I paid him back every penny; and here I should like to thank him for the generosity of his attitude.