This lake was really extraordinary, dotted with thousands of derricks. It looked like a huge forest stretching away out of sight, a forest whose trees, all exactly lined up, allowed you to see as far as the horizon. But these trees were oil wells, and each oil well had an enormous pendulum that went to and fro all day and all night, never stopping, perpetually pumping up the black gold from the bowels of the earth.
A ferry ran nonstop between the end of the Caracas road and Maracaibo, carrying cars, passengers and goods. During the crossing I hurried from one side to the other, absolutely fascinated by the iron pylons rising from the lake; and as I stared at them I thought that twelve hundred miles from here, down at the far end of the country in Venezuelan Guiana, the Good Lord had stuffed the ground with diamonds, gold, iron, nickel, manganese, bauxite, uranium and all the rest, while here He had filled it with oil, the motor of the world--with such enormous quantities of oil that these thousands of pumps could suck away day and night without ever sucking it dry. Venezuela, you’ve got no call to blame the Lord!
The Hotel Normandy was a splendid villa surrounded by a carefully kept garden full of flowers. The lovely Laurence welcomed me with open arms. “This is my kingdom, Henri,” she said, laughing.
She had opened the hotel just two months before. There were only sixteen rooms, but all were luxurious and in the best taste, each with a bathroom fit for the Ritz. She had designed all the interior herself, from the bedrooms to the staff bathrooms, taking in the drawing room, terrace and dining room on her way.
I set to work, and it was no laughing matter being Laurence’s right-hand man--she was under forty and she got up at six to see to her guests’ breakfast or even make it herself. She was tireless, and all day long she hurried about, seeing to this and that, supervising everything, and yet still finding time to look after a rose bush or weed a garden path. She had grasped life with both hands; she had overcome almost impossible difficulties to set this business going; and she had so much faith in its success that I was seized with a will to work almost as consuming as her own. I did everything I could to help her cope with the hundreds of difficulties that kept cropping up. Money difficulties, above all. She was in debt up to her neck, because to turn this villa into something like a luxury hotel she had borrowed every penny.
One day, by a private deal I carried out without consulting her, I got something marvelous out of an oil company.
“Good evening, Laurence.”
“Good evening. It’s late, Henri: eight o’clock already. I’m not blaming you, now; but I haven’t seen you this whole afternoon.”
“I’ve been for a stroll.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Yes, I’m laughing at life. It’s always good for a laugh, don’t you think?”
“Not always. And at this time I should have liked your support; I’m in a bad jam.”
“Very bad?”
“Yes. I’ve got to pay for all these fittings and alterations, and although the place is running well, it’s not easy. I owe a great deal.”
“Here comes the big surprise, Laurence; hold on. You don’t owe anything anymore.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No. Listen: you’ve brought me in as a kind of partner, and in fact I’ve noticed a good many people think I’m the boss.”
“What of it?”
“Well, one of the people who thought that way is a Canadian belonging to the Lumus Company, and a few days back he talked to me about a deal he thought we might make. I went to see him this afternoon; I’ve just come back.”
“Tell me quickly!” cried Laurence, her eyes wide with interest.
“The result is the Lumus Company takes your hotel, the whole of it, with full board, for a year!”
“It’s not possible!”
“It is, I promise you.” In her emotion, Laurence kissed me on both cheeks and collapsed into a chair. “Of course, there was no question of me signing this terrific contract, so tomorrow they’ll call you to their office.”
This contract meant that Laurence made a small fortune out of the Hotel Normandy. The first quarter’s advance alone let her pay off all her debts.
After the signing of the contract, Laurence and I drank champagne with the Lumus bosses. I was happy, very happy, as I lay there in my big bed that night. With the help of the champagne I saw life a fine rosy pink. Papi, you’re no more of a fool than Laurence: so isn’t it possible to get rich by working? Well, Christ above, this was a real discovery I’d made here at the Hotel Normandy. Yes, a real discovery, because in France, for the few years I’d been able to take a quick glance at life, it had always seemed to me that a workingman stayed a workingman all his life. And this completely wrong idea was even more wrong here in Venezuela, where the man who really wants to do something has every opportunity open to him.
It was not from love of money that I had gone for crooked jobs: I wasn’t a thief out of a deep liking for theft. It was just that I’d never been able to believe it was possible to get to the top in life by starting from scratch--nor, as far as I was concerned, to get hold of a lump of money big enough for me to go and present my bill in Paris. But it was possible, and only one thing was necessary to start--a little bit of capital, a few thousand bolivars; and it would be easy to save that once I’d found a good job.
The only snag was that if I went about it this way, I would need a good deal of time before being able to take my revenge: I couldn’t scrape the necessary cash together in a day. “Revenge is a dish you want to eat cold,” Miguel had said at the diamond diggings. I was going to find out about that.
Maracaibo was seething. There was excitement in the air, and so many businesses and oil refineries were springing up that everything, from beer to cement, was sold on the black market. Everything was snapped up right away--there was never enough to meet the demand. Labor was making money, jobs were well paid and every kind of business was doing well.
When there is an oil boom, a district’s economy goes through two completely different phases. First comes the period before the wells begin to yield, the period of pre-exploitation. The companies turn up and settle in; they need offices, camps, roads, high-tension lines; they have to drill the wells, put up the derricks and pumps, etc. This is the golden age, golden for all the skilled workers and golden for every level of the community.
The people, the genuine horny-handed people, have dough in their pockets; they begin to discover the meaning of money and of security. Families start to get themselves organized, homes grow bigger or better, and the children go to school in good clothes, often taken by companies’ buses.
Then comes the second phase, the one that corresponds to my first view of Lake Maracaibo, with all I could see of it turned into a forest of derricks. This is the period of exploitation. Thousands of pumps, working away there by themselves, tirelessly suck out millions of tons of black gold every day.
But this unbelievable mass of dough does not pass through the people’s hands: it goes straight into the coffers of the state banks or the companies. Things begin to grow sticky, staff is cut down to the strict minimum, there’s no more money just floating around, all the active business is over. The coming generations will only know about it when they hear their grandfathers say, “Once upon a time, when Maracaibo was wealthy, there was. - .”
But I was lucky. I came in for Maracaibo’s second boom. It had nothing to do with the pumps on the lake, but several oil companies had just got new concessions running from the Perijá Mountains down to the lake and the sea, and they were wild with excitement. The moment might have been made for me.
I was going to dig in here. And I swore the hole I made would be a sizable cavern. I’d work at anything I could lay my hands on to gather in every possible crumb of this gigantic cake.
Good French cook, 41, seeks position with oil company. Minimum salary $800.
I’d learned the rudiments of cooking with Laurence and her chef, and I decided to try my luck. The advertis
ement came out in the local paper, and a week later I was cooking for the Richmond Exploration Company. I was sorry to leave Laurence, but she could not possibly pay me wages like that, not by a long shot.
Now, having been through that school, I know a good deal about cooking; but when I first started my job I quaked for fear that the other guys in the kitchen would soon see that the French cook knew precious little about saucepans. To my surprise I soon saw that they, too, were all atremble in case the French cook should find out that they were only dishwashers, every last one of them! I breathed again; and all the deeper because I had a great advantage over them--I owned a cookbook in French--a present from a retired whore.
The personnel manager was a Canadian, Monsieur Blanchet. Two days later he put me in charge of cooking for the camp executives, a dozen of them--the big chiefs!
The first morning I showed him a menu like something out of the Ritz. But I pointed out that before I could prepare the food the kitchen would have to be better stocked. It was decided that I should have a separate budget, and that I should run it myself. I don’t have to tell you I greased my own palm pretty handsomely when I did my buying; but still, the executives stuffed themselves heartily, no doubt about that. This way, everybody was happy.
Every evening I stuck up the next day’s menu in the hall: written in French, of course. These grand-sounding names out of the cookbook made a terrific impression. What’s more, in the town I’d discovered a shop that specialized in French things, so what with canned goods and my recipes I managed so well that the executive guys often brought their womenfolk. Twenty would turn up instead of twelve. From one point of view it was a damn nuisance, but from another, it meant they took less notice of what I spent; because by the rules I was supposed to feed only the people on the list.
I saw they were so pleased that I asked for a raise--twelve hundred dollars a month, an increase of four hundred. They said no, but they gave me a thousand; and although I kept telling them it was wretched pay for a big-time chef like me, I let myself be persuaded.
Some months went by like this, but in time these set hours began to irk me like a shirt collar that’s too tight. I’d had about enough of this job and I asked the chief of the geologists to take me with him when he went out on a prospecting expedition into the most interesting regions, even if they were dangerous.
The point of these expeditions was to make a geological survey of the Sierra de Perijá, the mountain chain to the west of Lake Maracaibo that divides Venezuela from Colombia. It is the country of a very fierce, warlike tribe of Indians, the Motilón: so much so that the Sierra de Perijá is often called the Sierra de los Motilónes. Even now nobody knows just where this tribe came from; their language and their customs are quite unlike those of the neighboring tribes, and they are so dangerous that “civilization” is barely beginning to make its way among them. They live in communal huts that house from fifty to a hundred people, men, women and children all mixed up together. Their only domestic animal is the dog. They are so wild that you hear of many cases where Motilón Indians captured by “civilized” people absolutely refuse to eat or drink; and although they may be well treated, they end up by killing themselves, biting the veins in their wrists with their front teeth, which are specially filed for tearing meat. Since the days I am talking about, the Franciscans have bravely settled on the banks of the Rio Santa Rosa, only a few miles from the nearest communal house. The Father Superior uses the most modern methods, dropping food, clothing, blankets and photographs of Franciscans over the huts from a plane. Even better, he parachutes straw figures dressed in Franciscan robes, the pockets filled with different kinds of food and even cans of milk. No fool, the good father: the day he turns up on foot, they’ll believe he’s dropped from heaven.
But when I asked to take part in these expeditions it was back in 1948, a long time before those attempts at “civilized” penetration.
As far as I was concerned, these expeditions had three positive advantages. In the first place, they meant a completely different life from the one I was leading in the kitchen of the Richmond Company’s camp; and I had seen just about all I ever wanted to see of that. It would be an adventure again, but honest-to-god adventure this time. There was real danger, of course, as there is in any adventure--quite often an expedition would come back short one or two members, because the Motilón Indians were highly skilled at archery. (Where a Motilón sets his eye, there he sets his arrow, as they say in those parts.) But if you were killed, at least you were not eaten, because they were not cannibals. There was always that to be thankful for.
Second advantage: these three-week tours in the deep, unexplored, dangerous bush were very well paid. I’d make more than twice what I earned at my kitchen stove.
Third: I liked being with the geologists. They knew a great deal. Although I was well aware it was too late for me to learn enough to make me a different man, I had the feeling that I would not be wasting my time, going about with these scientists.
So, as a member of their expedition, I set off full of confidence and enthusiasm. No need for any cookbooks; I just had to know how to open cans and make bread and pancakes.
My new friend, the geologist in charge of the expedition, was named Crichet. He had been lent to the Richmond by the California Exploration Company. He knew absolutely everything about the oil side of geology, but he wasn’t quite sure whether Alexander the Great came before Napoleon or after. In any case, he didn’t give a damn one way or the other; he didn’t need to know history to be very fit, to have a splendid wife, to give her babies, and to provide his company with the geological information they needed. Still, I dare say he did know more than he let on--in time I learned to watch out for his sort of half-English humor, quite unlike what we were used to in my native Ardèche. We got along very well.
An expedition of this kind lasted between twenty and twentyfive days, with a week’s leave when you got back. It was made up of a geologist in charge, two other geologists, and from twelve to eighteen porters and helpers--strength and discipline were all that was asked of them. They had their own tents and their own cook. I only looked after the three geologists. The men were not fools in any way, and among them there was a militant member of the left-wing Acción Democrática who saw the union laws were obeyed. His name was Carlos. There was a good overall understanding, and I was the one who kept count of the overtime, which they always put down with absolute precision.
This first expedition fascinated me. Getting hold of geological intelligence about oil fields is a very interesting business. The idea is to follow the rivers up into the mountains as far as possible, keeping to the passage they have cut through the rock. You go as far as you can in trucks, and then take to jeeps; when there is no path anymore, you paddle up the river in canoes; and when the river is too shallow you get out and shove, still going up as far as you can toward the source. The equipment is carried by the porters, about a hundred pounds a man, but the three geologists and the cooks don’t carry anything.
Why go so far into the mountains? Because you see all the successive geological formations, just like in a school book, along the course the river has dug out. You cut samples from the walls, sort them, label them and pack them away in little bags. The geologists note the direction of the different layers sloping toward the plain. And so, with these hundreds of geological samples taken from different places, they draw up a map of the strata that should be found in the plain at a depth of, say, between three thousand and six thousand feet. And by working it out very carefully from all this information, one day they hit oil perhaps fifty miles away, in some place where nobody has ever been, because they know in advance that the oil will be there at a given depth. Talk about the wonders of science--I was filled with admiration.
All this would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the Motilón Indians. Often members of the expeditions were killed or wounded by their arrows. This hazard did not make recruiting any easier, and it cost the companies a great
deal of money.
I went on several expeditions, and I had some marvelous experiences. One of the geologists was a Dutchman named Lapp. One day he was gathering alligator’s eggs--they are very good, once they are dried in the sun. You can easily find them by following the track the alligator leaves as it crawls on its belly from the river to the dry place where it lays its eggs: it sits on them for hours and hours. Taking advantage of the alligator’s absence, Lapp dug up the eggs and calmly carried them back to the camp. He had scarcely reached our clearing before the alligator appeared, tearing along like a racing car and coming straight for him. It had followed the robber’s trail and was going to punish him. About ten feet long, it gasped hoarsely as it came, as if it had laryngitis. Lapp started to run, darting around and around a big tree; and I howled with laughter at the sight of this big guy in shorts bounding about and bawling for help. Crichet and his men came running; two explosive bullets stopped the alligator dead. As for Lapp, he fell on his ass, as pale as death. Everybody was shocked by my behavior. I told them there was nothing I could have done in any case, because I never carried a rifle--it got in the way.
That evening, while we ate my canned dinner in the tent, Crichet said to me, in his sort of French, “You not so young; at least thirty-four, eh?”
“Rather more. Why?”
“You living, you behaving like man of twenty.”
“Well, you know, I’m not much more. I’m twenty-seven.”
“Not true.”
“Yes, it is, and I’ll tell you why. For fourteen years I was stuffed into a cupboard. So I didn’t live those fourteen years then. I have to live them now. And since fourteen from forty-one makes twenty-seven, I’m twenty-seven years old.”
“Don’t follow.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Yet it was true enough: my heart was that of a boy of twenty. I had to live those fourteen years that had been stolen from me; I needed them and I had to get them back. I had to burn them up, not giving a damn for anything at all, the way you do when you are twenty and your heart is filled with a crazy love for life.