Henri Charrière - Banco - the Further Adventures of Papillon

Everything interested her. She spent hours sitting in the circle around an Arab teller of tales. So much so that one storyteller, tired of seeing this child who never gave him anything always there in the front row, butted her with his head. Ever afterward, she sat in the second row.

She didn't know much, but that didn't keep her from dreaming vividly about the great mysterious world where all those huge ships with strange names came from. To travel far away- that was her great ambition, and one that never left her. But little Riquita's idea of the world was rather special. North America was top America and South America bottom America; top America meant New York, which covered it completely. All the people there were rich and film actors. In bottom America lived the Indians, who gave you flowers and played the flute; there was no need to work there, because the blacks did everything that had to be done.

But aside from the _souks_, the camel drivers, the mysterious veiled women and the swarming life of the port, what she liked most was the circus. She went twice-once by slipping under the edge of the tent, and once thanks to an old clown who was touched at the sight of the pretty barefoot kid; he let her in and gave her a good seat. She longed to go off with the circus; one day she would be the one who danced on the tightrope, making pirouettes and receiving all the applause. When the circus left for bottom America, she yearned with all her heart to go with it-to go far off and come back rich, bringing money for her family.

Yet it was not the circus she went off with, but her family. Oh, not very far, but still it was a voyage. They went and settled at Casablanca, where the port was bigger and the liners longer. Now she was sixteen and always dressed in pretty little dresses she made herself, because she worked in a shop, Aux Tissus de France, and the boss often gave her short lengths of cloth. Her dream of traveling could not fail to grow stronger, because the shop, in the Rue de l'Horloge, was very close to the offices of the Latécoère airline. The pilots often dropped in. And what pilots! Mermoz, Saint-Exupery, Mimile the writer, Delaunay, Didier. They were handsome, and what's more they were the greatest and the bravest travelers in the world. She knew them all, and they all made passes at her; now and then she would accept a kiss, but that was all, because she was a good girl. What voyages through the sky she made with them, listening to the stories of their adventures as she ate ice cream in the little pastry shop next door. They liked her; they thought of her as their little protégée; they gave her small but highly valued presents; and they wrote her poems, some of which were published in the local paper.

When she was nineteen she married a man who exported fruit to Europe. They worked hard, they had a little daughter, and they were happy. They had two cars, they lived very comfortably, and Rita could easily help her mother and her relations.

Then in quick succession two ships loaded with oranges reached port with damaged cargoes. Two whole cargoes completely lost, that meant ruin. Her husband was deeply in debt, and if he set about working to pay his creditors, it would take him years and years. So he decided to slip off to South America. It wasn't hard for him to persuade Rita to go with him, to make this wonderful voyage to a land of milk and honey where you could just shovel up the diamonds, gold and oil. They entrusted their little girl to Rita's mother, and Rita, full of adventurous dreams, waited impatiently to board the big ship her husband had told her about.

The "big ship" was a fishing boat thirty-six feet long and sixteen wide. The captain, a somewhat piratical Estonian, had agreed to ship them to Venezuela without papers, along with a dozen other irregulars. Price: five hundred pounds. And it was in the crew's quarters of this old fishing boat that Rita made the voy age, packed in with ten Spanish republicans escaping from Franco, one Portuguese escaping from Salazar, and two women, one a twenty-five-year-old German, the captain's mistress, and the other a fat Spanish woman, the wife of Antonio the cook.

A hundred and twelve days to reach Venezuela! With a long stop at the Cape Verde islands, because the boat leaked and during one spell of rough weather very nearly sank.

While it was being repaired in dry dock, the passengers slept ashore. Rita's husband no longer trusted the boat. He said it was madness to launch out into the Atlantic in a rotten tub like that. Rita put courage into him: the captain was a Viking, she said, and the Vikings were the best seamen in the world; they could have total confidence in him.

Then an incredible piece of news. The Spaniards told Rita that the captain was a double crosser, that he had made a deal with another group of passengers and that he was going to take advantage of their being ashore to set off for Dakar by night, leaving them there. Instant turmoil! They warned the authorities and went to the ship in a body. The captain was surrounded and threatened; the Spaniards had knives. Calm returned when the captain promised they would go to Venezuela. In view of what had happened, he agreed to remain under the constant supervision of one of the passengers. The next day they left Cape Verde and faced the Atlantic.

Twenty-five days later they came in sight of Los Testigos Islands, the most outlying point of Venezuela. They forgot everything, the storms, the sharks' fins, the backs of the playful dolphins rushing at the boat, the weevils in the flour and the business at Cape Verde. Rita was so happy she forgot the captain had meant to betray them and she hugged him, kissing him on both cheeks. And once again they heard the song the Spaniards had made up during the crossing; because wherever there are Spaniards there is always a guitar and a singer:

A Venezuela nos vamos

Aunque no hay carretena.

A Venezuela nos vamos

En un bar quito de vela.

(We're going to Venezuela, although there is no road. 'We're going to Venezuela, in a little boat with a sail.)

On April 16, 1948, after a voyage of 4,900 miles, they reached La Guaira, the port of Caracas, fifteen miles from the city.

To call aboard the health authorities, the captain used a flag made out of a petticoat belonging to Zenda, the German girl; and when the passengers saw the Venezuelan patrol boat, all their sun-cooked faces beamed with joy. This was Venezuela: they had won!

Rita had held out splendidly, although she had lost twenty pounds. Never a complaint nor a sign of fear, though from time to time there had been plenty to worry about in that cockleshell right out in the full Atlantic! She had only faltered once, and even then no one had known about it. When she left Tangiers she had packed the one book she should have left behind-Jules Verne's _Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea_. One day, in really tough weather, she had been unable to bear it anymore and had tossed the book overboard: night after night she had been dreaming that a giant octopus was dragging their boat, like the _Nautilus_, down to the bottom.

A few hours after their arrival, the Venezuelan authorities agreed to allow them into the country, although not one of them had any papers. "We'll give you identity cards later on." They sent two who were ill to the hospital, and they clothed, housed and fed the others for several weeks. Then each found himself a job.

That was Rita's story.

Wasn't it strange that I should have met the woman who had filled my horrible solitude in the Reclusion for two years, and then that this woman should have come here just as I had done, making a break-although indeed a very different kind of break? Without papers, too, and, like me, generously treated by this nation?

Nothing happened to disturb our happiness for more than three months. Then one fine day, unknown hands opened the safe of the Richmond Company, for which I was still organizing and running the geological expeditions. How the local pigs found out about my past I never could discover. But what is certain is that I was pulled in as suspect number one and shut up in the Maracaibo prison.