They came back the next evening. They wore their shirts outside their pants, so they must have their guns up against their bellies. They settled into the shadows, of course, but still I could make them out. Their eyes never left the players’ movements. I had to watch them without their noticing it; and that meant I must not stare straight at them. I managed by coughing and leaning back, covering my mouth with my hand. Unfortunately there were only two in front of me. The others were behind, and I could only get quick glances of them by turning round to blow my nose.
Jojo’s coolness was something extraordinary. He remained perfectly unmoved. Still, from time to time he did bet on other men’s throws, which meant the risk of winning or losing by mere unaided chance. I knew that this kind of gambling set him all on edge, because it forced him to win the same money two or three times before keeping it for good. The disadvantage was when the game grew red-hot he became too eager to win and passed me over great wads of dough too fast.
As I knew these guys were watching me, I left my pile there in front of me for everyone to see. I didn’t want to behave like a living safe deposit.
Two or three times I told Jojo, in quick crook’s slang, that he was making me win too often. He looked as if he didn’t understand. I had worked the outhouse trick on them the day before and I had not come back; so it was no good doing it now--if these four guys meant to move in tonight, they were not going to wait for me to return: they’d get me between the shack and the shit house.
I felt the tension mount: the four images in each corner were more on edge than ever. Particularly one who kept smoking cigarette after cigarette, lighting each from the butt of the last.
So now I started making bancos right and left, in spite of Jojo’s ugly looks. To crown it all I won instead of losing and, far from shrinking, my pile kept on piling up. It was all there in front of me, mostly in five-hundred-boilvar notes. I was so keyed up that as I took the dice I put my cigarette down on them, and it burned two holes in a folded five hundred. I played and lost this note together with three others in a two-thousand-bolo banco. The winner got up, said, “See you tomorrow,” and went out.
In the heat of the game I took no notice of how the time passed, and then all at once, to my amazement, I saw the note there on the blanket again. I knew perfectly well who’d won it, a very thin, bearded white man of about forty, with a pale mark on the lobe of his left ear, standing out against the sunburn. But he was not here anymore. In a couple of seconds I had put the scene together again: he’d gone out alone, I was certain of that. Yet not one of those four guys had stirred. So they must have one or two accomplices outside. They must have a system of signaling from where they were that a guy was coming out loaded with cash and diamonds.
There were a good many gamblers standing up, so I couldn’t make out who had come in since the thin guy left. As for the ones sitting down, they had been the same for hours, and the place of the thin guy with the burned note had been filled the moment he left.
But who had played the note? I felt like picking it up and asking. But that would be very risky.
I was in danger: no doubt about that. There before my eyes was proof that the thin guy had got himself killed. My nerves were tense but they were under control; I had to think very fast. It was four in the morning; there’d he no daylight before six-fifteen, because in the tropics the sun comes up all at once, some time after six. If something was going to happen, it would happen between four and five. Outside it was as dark as hell: I knew, because I had just got up, saying I wanted a breath of fresh air in the doorway. I’d left my pile there where I sat, neatly stacked. I saw nothing unusual outside.
I came back and sat down calmly, but all my senses were on the alert. The back of my neck told me there were two pairs of eyes drilling into it.
Jojo rolled the dice, and I let other people cover his stakes. And now he began to have a fair-sized pile in front of him--something he hated.
The temperature was rising, rising; I felt that for sure, and in a very natural voice, not as if I were taking precautions, I said to Jojo in French, “I’m dead certain there’s trouble in the air, man; I can smell it. Get up at the same time as me and let’s cover the lot with our guns.”
Jojo smiled as though I were saying something pleasant: he no more bothered about me than about someone else understanding French, and he said, “My good friend, what’s the sense of this damn-fool attitude? And just who’s to be covered in particular?”
True enough. Cover who? And what reason could you give? But the situation was explosive, that was certain. The guy with the everlasting cigarette had two full cups of rum and he tossed them straight off one after the other.
It would be no good going out alone in the inky darkness, even holding a gun. The men outside would see me and I wouldn’t see them. Go into the next-door room? Worse still. Nine chances out of ten there was already a guy there; someone could easily have got in by lifting one of the planks in the wail.
There was only one thing to do, and that was to openly put all my winnings into my canvas bag, leave the bag there where I was sitting and go Out and have a piss. They wouldn’t signal, because I wouldn’t have the dough on me. There were more than five thousand bolos in my pile. Better lose them than my life.
Anyhow, there was no choice. It was the only way to get out of this trap, which might snap shut any minute.
I’d worked all this out very quickly, of course: it was now seven minutes to five. I gathered everything together, notes, diamonds, the aspirin tubes and all: everyone saw me. I deliberately stuffed this little fortune into the canvas bag. As naturally as could be I pulled the strings tight, put the bag down about a foot from me, and so that everybody should understand I said in Spanish, “Keep an eye on the bag, Jojo. I don’t feel so good. I’m going to take a breath of air.”
Jojo had been watching all my movements; he held out his hand and said, “Give it to me. It’ll be better off here than anywhere else.”
Unwillingly I held it out, because I knew he was putting himself in danger, immediate danger. But what could I do? Refuse? Impossible: it would sound very strange.
I walked out, my hand on my gun. I could see no one in the darkness, but I didn’t have to see them to know they were there. Quickly, almost running, I made for Miguel’s place. There was just a chance that if I came back with him and a big carbide lamp we might avoid the crunch. Unfortunately Miguel’s was more than two hundred yards from our shack. I began to run.
“Miguel! Miguel!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Get up quick! Bring your gun and your lamp. There’s trouble.”
Bang! Bang! Two shots in the pitch-black night.
I ran. First I got the wrong shack--insults from inside and at the same time they asked me what the shooting was about. I ran on. This was our shack--all lights out. I flicked my lighter. People came running with lamps. There was nobody left in the room. Jojo was lying on the ground, blood pouring from the back of his neck. He was not dead, but in a coma. A flashlight they’d left behind showed just what had happened. First they’d shot out the carbide lamp, at the same time knocking Jojo out. Using the flashlight, they’d swept up the pile lying in front of Jojo--my bag and his winnings. His shirt had been torn off, and the canvas belt he wore next to his skin had been ripped open with a knife or a machete.
All the gamblers had escaped, of course. The second shot had been fired to make them move faster. Anyhow, there had not been many of us left when I’d got up. Eight men sitting down, two standing, the four guys in the corners and the kid who poured out the rum.
Everybody offered to help. Jojo was carried to Miguel’s hut, where there was a bed made of branches. He lay there in a coma all the morning. The blood had clotted; it no longer ran out, and according to an English miner that was a good sign but also a bad one, because if the skull was fractured, the bleeding would go on inside. I decided not to move him. A miner from El Callao, an old friend of Jojo’s, set
off for another mine to fetch a so-called doctor.
I was all in. I explained everything to Mustafa and Miguel, and they comforted me by saying that since the whole business had been, as you might say, signaled hours ahead, and since I had given Jojo a clear warning, he ought to have followed my lead.
About three in the afternoon, Jojo opened his eyes. We made him drink a few drops of rum, and then, the words coming hard, he whispered, “It’s all up with me, buddy: I know it. Don’t let me be moved. It wasn’t your fault, Papi; it was mine.” He paused for a while and then went on, “Miguel, there’s a can buried behind your pigsty. Let the one-eyed guy take it to Lola, my wife.” His mind was clear for a few minutes after that, and then he relapsed into coma. He died at sunset.
Doña Carmencita, the fat woman from the first joint, came to see him. She brought a few diamonds and three or four notes she had found on the floor at our place during the morning. God knows hundreds of people had been there, yet not one of them had touched either the money or the diamonds.
Almost the whole of the little community came to the funeral. The four Brazilians were there, still wearing their shirts outside their trousers. One of them came up to me and held out his hand; I pretended not to see it and gave him a friendly shove in the belly. Yes: I had been right. The gun was there, just where I had thought it would be.
I wondered whether I ought to deal with them. Do it now? Later? Do what? Nothing: it was too late.
I wanted to be alone, but after a burial it was the custom to go and have a drink at every joint whose owner had turned up at the graveyard. They always came, all of them.
When I was at Doña Carmencita’s she came and sat by me, with her glass of anisette in her hand. When I put mine to my lips, she raised hers, too, but only to hide the fact that she was talking to me. “It was better him than you,” she said. “Now you can go wherever you want in peace.”
“What do you mean, in peace?”
“Because everybody knows you always sold your winnings to the Lebanese.”
“Yes, but suppose the Lebanese is killed?”
“That’s true. One more problem.”
I told Doña Carmencita the drinks were on me and walked off by myself, leaving my friends sitting there. Without really knowing why, I took the path that led to what they called the graveyard, a piece of cleared ground of about fifty square yards.
Eight graves there in the cemetery: Jojo’s was the latest. And there in front of it stood Mustafa. I went over to him. “What are you doing, Mustafa?”
“I’ve come to pray for an old friend--I was fond of him--and to bring him a cross. You forgot to make one.”
Hell, so I had! I’d never thought of it. I shook the good old Arab’s hand and thanked him.
“You’re not a Christian?” he asked. “I didn’t see you pray when they threw the earth on him.”
“Well, I mean... there’s certainly a God, Mustafa,” I said, to please him. “And what’s more, I thank Him for having looked after me instead of sending me away forever, along with Jojo. And I do more than say prayers for this old man; I forgive him: he was a poor little kid from the Belleville slums, and he was able to learn just one profession--shooting craps.”
“What are you talking about, brother? I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter. But remember this: I’m really sorry he’s dead. I did try to save him. But no one should ever think he’s brighter than the rest, because one day he’ll find a man who moves faster than him. Jojo is fine here. He’ll sleep forever with what he loved, adventure and the wild landscape; and he’ll sleep with God’s forgiveness.”
“Yes, God will forgive him for sure, because he was a good man.”
“That’s a fact.”
I walked slowly back to the village. It was true that I did not feel resentful toward Jojo, although he had very nearly been the death of me. His enthusiasm, his prodigious energy, and, in spite of his sixty years, his youth, and his underworld good breeding-- “Behave properly, God almighty, behave properly!” And then I’d been warned. I’d willingly send up a little prayer to thank José for his advice. Without him I shouldn’t be here.
Swinging gently in my hammock and smoking fat cigar after fat cigar, as much to soak myself in nicotine as to chase the mosquitoes away, I took stock of my accounts.
Right. I had ten thousand dollars after only a few months of freedom. And both here and at El Callao I had met men and women of all races and backgrounds, every one of them full of human warmth. Because of them and this life in the wild, in this atmosphere so unlike that of the city, I’d come to know how wonderful freedom was, the freedom I’d fought for so hard.
Then again the war had come to an end, thanks to Charlie de Gaulle and the Yankees, and in all this churning about of millions of people, a convict didn’t amount to much. So much the better for me: with all these problems to settle, they would have other things to do besides worrying about what I had been.
I was thirty-nine: fourteen years of penal settlement, fifty-three months of solitary confinement, counting the Sante, the Conciergerie and Beaulieu as well as the prison on the island, the Réciusion. It was hard to put a label on me. I wasn’t a poor bastard only capable of working with a pick or a shovel or an ax; nor did I have a real trade that would let me earn a decent living anywhere in the world, as a mechanic or an electrician, say. On the other hand, I couldn’t take on important responsibilities; I hadn’t enough education for that. While you’re in school you should always learn a good manual trade; then if school goes wrong, you can always look after yourself in life. It wasn’t that you felt better than a street sweeper if you had a certain amount of education-- I had never despised any man except screws and pigs--but that, without it, you couldn’t do justice to your true self. You were stymied--you felt you might have been happy, but that you wouldn’t be, after all. I had both too much education and not enough. Hell, that was hardly the brightest outlook in the world.
And it was true that I had to take my revenge, too: it was true I could not possibly forgive the people who had done me and my family so much harm. Calm down, Papi, calm down. You’ve got plenty of time. You must gradually learn to trust in the future. You’ve sworn to go straight in this country, but here you are, already hustling, forgetting your promise.
I couldn’t help going to the doorway and gazing for a long while at the stars and the moon, and listening to the countless noises coming from the mysterious bush that surrounded the village with a wall as dark as the moon was brilliant.
And then I slept, rocking gently in my hammock, happy to the core in the knowledge that I was free, free, free, and master of my fate.
4
Farewell to El Callao
At about ten the next morning I went to see the Lebanese. “So I go to El Callao or Ciudad BolIvar, to the addresses you’ve given me, and they pay me your bills of exchange?”
“That’s right: you can go off with an easy mind.”
“But what if they kill you too?”
“It doesn’t matter, as far as you’re concerned. You will be paid whatever happens. You’re going to El Callao?”
“Yes.”
“What part of France are you from?”
“Around Avignon, not far from Marseille.”
“Why, I’ve got a friend from Marseille, but he lives a great way off. Alexandre Guigue is his name.”
“Well, what do you know! He’s a close friend of mine.”
“Of mine, too. I’m glad you know him.”
“Where does he live, and how can I get there?”
“He’s at Boa Vista. A very long and complicated journey.”
“What does he do there?”
“He’s a barber. Easy to find him--you just ask for the French barber-dentist.”
“So he’s a dentist too?”
I couldn’t help laughing, because I knew Alexandre Guigue very well: an extraordinary guy. He was sent out the same time as me, in 1933; we made the crossing togeth
er, and he had all the time in the world to tell me every last detail of his job.
One Saturday night in 1929 or 1930, Alexandre and a friend climbed quietly down from the ceiling of Lisbon’s biggest jewelry shop. They had broken into a dentist’s office on the next floor up. To memorize the layout of the building, to be sure the dentist went away every weekend with his family and make impressions of the lock of the front door and the surgery, they had had to go there several times and have their teeth filled.
“Very good work he did, too,” Alexandre told me, “seeing the fillings are still there. In two nights we had all the time we needed to shift the jewels and open two safes and a little steel cabinet, doing it neatly and without any noise. The dentist must have been fantastic at describing people, because as we were on the platform leaving Lisbon the pigs jumped on us without any hesitation at all. The Portuguese court sent us down for ten and twelve years. So there we were, a little while later, at their prison in Angola, down under the Belgian and French Congo. No problem about escaping: our friends came to get us in a taxi. Like an idiot I went to Brazzaville: my buddy, he chose Leopoldviile. A few months later I was picked up by the French police. The French wouldn’t give me back to the Portuguese: they sent me back to France and there I copped a twenty-year stretch instead of the ten they’d given me in Portugal.”
He made a break from Guiana. I’d heard that he had passed through Georgetown, and that he’d gone to Brazil through the bush, riding on an ox.
What if I went to see him? Yes: I’d go to Boa Vista. That was a brilliant idea!
I set off with two men. They said they knew how to get to Brazil, and they were to help me carry the food and bedding. For ten days and more we wandered about the bush without even managing to reach Santa Helena, the last mining village before the Brazilian frontier, and after a fortnight we found ourselves at Aminos, a gold mine almost on the edge of British Guiana. With the help of some Indians we reached the Cuyuni River, and that led us to a little Venezuelan village called Castillejo. There I bought machetes and files as a present for the Indians, and I left my so-called guides. I had to control myself so as not to smash their faces in, because in fact they no more knew those parts than I did.