Henri Charrière - Banco - the Further Adventures of Papillon

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, but 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.

But at that particular moment, not only had I lost the plane, and not only had my job with the Hungarian woman been taken by someone else, but I also had to avoid the central parts of Caracas, because Coriat's shop was there and I had no wish to bump into him. So once more the position was far from brilliant. But I didn't care: those few weeks with Carotte had been too marvelous for me to regret anything at all.

Carotte and I often saw one another after that; we used to meet in a quiet little joint run by an old Frenchman who had retired from the Compagnie Transatlantique. One night when we were playing dominoes in a corner with a Spanish republican and an ex-con who now made a peaceful living by selling perfume on credit, two men wearing sunglasses came in-we didn't know them-and asked if it was true that a Frenchman often came here, a pilot.

Carotte stood up and said, "That's me."

I examined these strangers from head to foot and right away, in spite of his dark glasses, I recognized one of them. I felt a sudden wave of emotion. I went up to him. Before I could speak he knew me. "Papi!"

It was Big Leon, one of my best friends in the penal colony. A tall guy with a thin face; a real man, openhearted. This was not the moment to seem too friendly and he just introduced me to his sidekick Pedro the Chilean and said no more. We had a drink in a corner, and Leon said he was looking for a light plane with a pilot, and he had been told about this Frenchman.

"The pilot's here," said Carotte, "and I'm him. But the plane is not. It belongs to other people now."

"That's sad," Leon said laconically.

Carotte returned to his game of dominoes; someone else took my place. Pedro the Chilean went and stood at the bar, so we could talk quietly.