Henri Charrière - Banco - the Further Adventures of Papillon

And every night Pablito gave me a report on his grandmother's health. One day there was an important request: he needed forty bolivars to buy a secondhand mattress. His grandmother could not lie in a hammock anymore, because of her asthma: the doctor said it compressed her chest.

He often used to sit in my car, and one day the policeman on guard was talking to him, leaning on the door and playing with his revolver: without the least bad intention he put a bullet into Pablito's shoulder. They rushed him to the hospital and operated. I went to see him the next day. I asked where his hut was and how to get to it; he said it was impossible to find it without a guide, and the doctor wouldn't let him get up in that condition.

That night I looked for Pablito's friends, hoping one of them would take me to his grandmother. The terrific solidarity of street urchins: they all said they did not know where he lived. I didn't believe a word of it, because every day a whole gang of them waited for one another to go home together.

I was interested and puzzled, and I asked the nurse to call me when Pablito had a visitor she knew was a member of the family or a neighbor. Two days later she called and I went to the hospital.

"Well, Pablito, and how are you coming along? You look worried."

"No, Enrique; it's only that my back hurts."

"Yet he was laughing only a few minutes ago," said his visitor.

"Are you one of his family, Madame?"

"No. I'm a neighbor."

"How are his grandmother and the little ones?"

"What grandmother?"

"Why, Pablito's grandmother."

"But Pablito hasn't got a grandmother."

I took the woman aside. Yes, he had a little sister, and yes, he had a little brother, but no grandmother. His mother was not in prison; she was a wreck of a woman, very dim-witted.

That wonderful Caracas street kid did not want his friend Enrique to know his mother was half crazy, and he had invented this splendid asthmatic grandmother so that his buddy the Frenchman, giving because of her, might relieve his poor mother's unhappiness and distress.

I went back to my little friend's bed: he was ashamed to look me in the face. Gently I pulled his chin up; his eyes were closed, but when at last he opened them I said, "_Pablito, eres un tronco de hombre_." (You're a real man.)

I slipped him a hundred-boilvar note for his family and walked out, thoroughly proud and pleased with myself for having such a friend.

By 1967 proceedings against me had lapsed. I left for France by myself; to keep the business running properly you had to have authority and courage and the power of making yourself respected, and only Rita could do that. She said to me, "Go and embrace your people in their own homes; go and pray at your father's grave."

I went back to France by way of Nice. Why Nice? Together with my visa, the French consulate in Caracas had given me a document verifying the lapse of proceedings; but as he handed the papers to me, the consul said, "Wait until I have instructions from France about the conditions under which you can return." They didn't have to spell it out. If I went back to the consul and he had received the reply from Paris, he would tell me I was _forbidden to enter the Département of the Seine_ for _life_. But I had every intention of making a trip to Paris.

This way I avoided getting the notification; and since I had neither received nor signed it, I would be committing no offense unless the consul learned that I'd left and told the police at the Paris airport to hand me the notification. Hence my two stops- I should arrive at Nice as though I were coming from Spain.

1930-1967: thirty-seven years had gone by.

Fourteen years of the road down the drain: twenty-two years of freedom, twenty of them with a home, which meant that I could go straight, reintegrated into society.

In 1956, there'd been a month with my people in Spain; then a gap of eleven years, though during these eleven years our many letters had kept me in contact with my family.

In 1967 I saw them all. I went into their homes, I sat at their tables, I had their children on my knee and even their grand. children. Grenoble, Lyons, Cannes, Saint-Priest and then SaintPeray, where I found Tante Ju in my father's house, still faithful at her post.

I listened to Tante Ju as she told me why Pap had died before his time. He watered his garden himself and he carried the cans for hours and hours over a distance of more than two hundred yards. "Just imagine that, my dear, at his ages He could have bought a rubber hose, but Lord above, he was as stubborn as a mule. And one day, as he was carrying these watering cans, his heart failed."

I could just see my father lugging those heavy cans all the way to his beds of lettuces, tomatoes and stringbeans. And I could see him obstinately persisting in not getting the hose his wife, Tante Ju, kept begging him to buy. And I could see him, that country schoolmaster, stopping to draw breath and to mop his forehead, advise a neighbor or give a botany lesson to one of his grandsons.

Before going to see his grave in the cemetery, I asked Tante Ju to go with me on his favorite walks. And we went at the same pace he used to go, following the same stony paths lined with rushes, poppies and daisies until a milestone or some bees or the flight of a bird would remind Tante Ju of some little happening long ago that had touched them. Then, quite delighted, she would recall for me how my father had told her about his grandson's being stung by a wasp. "There, Henri, do you see? He was standing just there."

I listened, with my throat constricted, thirsty for more, still more of the smallest details about my father's life. "You know, J u," my father had said to her, "when my boy was very small, five or six at the most, he was stung by a wasp when we were out for a walk-not once, like my grandson, but twice. Well, he never cried at all; and on top of that, we had the greatest difficulty keeping him from going off to look for the wasps' nest to destroy it. Oh, Riri was so brave!"

I did not travel on into the Ardèche; I went no farther than Saint-Peray. For my return to my village I wanted Rita with me.

I got out of the train at the Gare de Lyon, and put my bags in a locker at the station so as not to have to fill out a registration form at the hotel. And then, once more, there was the asphalt of Paris under my feet.

But this asphalt was not my asphalt until I was in my own district, Montmartre. I went there by night, of course. The only sun the Papillon of the Thirties knew was that of the electric lights.

And here it was, Montmartre: the Place Pigalle and the Pierrot Café and the moonlight and the Passage Elysee des Beaux-Arts and the heilbenders whooping it up and the jokers and the whores and the pimps that anyone in the know could recognize right off just by the way they walked, and the joints crammed tight with people at the bar. But all this was just my first impression.

Thirty-seven years had gone by, and nobody took any notice of me. Who was going to look at an old man of sixty? The girls might even ask me upstairs, and the young men might be so disrespectful as to elbow me out of my place at the bar.

Just one more stranger, a possible client, a provincial manufacturer-that's what this well-dressed, tie-wearing gent must be; a middle-class guy, another who had lost his way at this late hour and in this dubious bar. You could see right away he wasn't used to these parts; you could feel he was uneasy.

Sure I was uneasy, and that was understandable. These were not the same people or the same faces; at the first whiff you could tell that everything was mixed up now. Pigs, lesbians, flits, knowit-aIls, squares, blacks, and Arabs; there were only a few characters from Marseille or Corsica, speaking with a southern accent, to remind me of the old times. It was a completely different world from the one I had known.