Henri Charrière - Banco - the Further Adventures of Papillon

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 advertisement 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.