'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 together, 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.
In the end I found a man in the village who really did know the country and who agreed to guide me. Four or five days later I reached El Callao. Exhausted, worn out, thin as a lath, I knocked on Maria's door at nightfall.
'He's here! He's here!' shrieked Esmeraida at the top of her voice.
'Who?' asked Maria from another room. 'And why do you shout so?'
All stirred up by finding this sweetness again after the weeks I had just been through, I caught hold of Esmeraida and put my hand over her mouth to keep her from answering.
'Why all this noise about a visitor?' asked Maria, coming in. Then with a cry of joy, of love, of hope fulfilled, she threw herself into my arms.
When I had embraced Picolino and kissed Maria's other sister-Jose was away-I lay there a long, long while beside Maria. She kept asking me the same questions; she couldn't believe I had come straight to her house without stopping at Big Charlot's or at any of the village cafes.
'You're going to stay a little while in El Callao, aren't you?'
'Yes. I'll fix things so I stay for some time.'
'You must take care of yourself and put on weight; I'll cook such dishes for you, sweetheart. When you go, even if it wounds my heart forever-not that I blame you in any way, since you warned me-when you go, I want you to be strong, so that you can avoid the snares of Caracas as well as you can.'
El Callao, Uasipata, Upata, Tumeremo: little villages with names strange for a European, tiny points on the map of a country three times the size of France, lost at the back of beyond, where the word progress has no meaning and where men and women, young and old, live as people lived in Europe at the beginning of the century, overflowing with genuine passions, generosity, joy in life and kindness. Almost all the men who were more than forty had had to bear the most terrible of all dictatorships, the rule of Gomez. They were hunted down and beaten to death for nothing: any man in authority could flog them with a bull's pizzle. When they were between fifteen and twenty in the years 1925 to 1935, all of them had been hunted like animals by the army's recruiting agents and dragged off to the barracks. Those were the days when a pretty girl might be picked out and kidnapped by an important official and thrown into the street when he was tired of her; and if her family raised a finger to help her they were wiped out.
Now and then, to be sure, there were uprisings, suicidal revolts by men who were determined to have their revenge even if they died for it. But the army was always there at once, and those who escaped with their lives were so tortured they were crippled for the rest of their days.
And yet in spite of all that, the almost illiterate people of these little backward villages still retained their love for other men and their trust in them. For me it was a continual lesson, and one that touched me to the bottom of my heart.
I thought of all this as I lay beside Maria. I had suffered, that was true; I had been condemned unjustly, that was true again; the French wardens had been as savage as the tyrant's police and soldiers, and maybe even more devilish; but here I was, all in one piece, having just gone through a terrific adventure-a dangerous adventure, certainly, but how utterly fascinating! I'd walked, paddled my canoe, ridden through the bush; but as I lived it each day was a year, so full it was; that life of a man with no laws, free from all restraints, from all moral limits, all obedience to orders from outside.
So I wondered whether I was doing the right thing, going to Caracas and leaving this corner of paradise behind me. Again and again I asked myself that question.
The next day, bad news. The correspondent of the Lebanese, a little jeweler who specialized in gold orchids with Margarita pearls and in all kinds of other truly original ornaments, told me he couldn't pay anything on my notes of credit because the Lebanese owed him a huge sum of money. Okay, so I'd go and get my money at the other address in Ciudad Bolivar.
'Do you know this man?' I asked.
'Only too well. He's a crook. He's run off, taking everything, even some choice pieces I'd left with him on trust.'
If what this goddamn fool said was true, then I was even more broke than before I went off with Jojo. Fine, fine! Fate-what a mysterious business. These things only happened to me. And done by a Lebanese, into the bargain!
Bowed down and dragging my feet, I came back to the house. To win those wretched ten thousand dollars I'd risked my life ten and twenty times over; and now not the smell of a cent was left to me. Well, well; that Lebanese did not have to load the dice to win at craps. Better still, he did not even bother to move-he sat there at home, waiting for the cash to be brought to him.
But my zest for life was so strong that I bawled myself out. You're free, man, and here you are whining about fate! You can't be serious. So maybe you did lose your banco; what a marvelous caper it was! Lay your bets!
I was in control again now, and I could see the position clearly enough. I'd have to hurry back to the mine, before the Lebanese sneaked off. And since time is money, don't let's lose any. I'd go and find a mule, some stores and be on my way! I still had my gun and my knife. The only question was, would I find the way? I hired a horse-Maria thought it far better than a mule. The only thing that worried me was the idea of taking the wrong _pique_, because there were places where others came in from all directions.
'I know the paths: would you like me to go with you?' Maria asked. 'Oh how I should love that! I'd only go as far as the _posada_, where you leave the horses before taking to the canoe.'
'It's too dangerous for you, Maria. Above all, too dangerous coming back alone.'
'I'll wait for somebody who's returning to El Callao. That way I'll be safe. Please say yes, _mi amor!_'
I talked it over with Jose, and he agreed she should go. 'I'll lend her my revolver. Maria knows how to use it,' he said.
And that's how we came to be sitting there alone on the edge of the _pique_, Maria and I, after a five hours' ride-I had hired another horse for her. She was wearing breeches, a present from a friend, a _llanera_. The Venezuelan _llana_ is a huge plain, and the women who live there are brave and untamable; they fire a rifle or a revolver like a man, wield the machete like a fencer and ride like an Amazon-yet in spite of that they are capable of dying for love.
Maria was exactly the opposite. She was gentle and sensual and so close to nature you felt she was part of it. Not that that prevented her from knowing how to look after herself, with a weapon or without: she was courageous.
Never, never shall I forget those days of traveling before we reached the _posada_. Unforgettable days and nights when it was our hearts that sang after we were too tired to speak our happiness.
I'll never be able to describe the delight of those dreamlike halts when we played in the coolness of the crystal-clear water and then, still wet and mother-naked, made love on the grassy bank with butterflies and hummingbirds and dragonflies all around us.
We would go on, tottering with love and sometimes so filled with ecstasy that I felt myself to make sure I was still all in one piece.
The nearer we came to the _posada_ the more closely I listened to Maria's pure natural voice singing love songs. And the more the distance shortened, the more often I pulled in my horse and found excuses for another rest.
'Maria, I think we ought to let the horse cool a while.'
'At this pace, he's not going to be the one who's tired when we get there, Papi; we're the ones who'll be worn out,' she said, breaking into a laugh that showed her pearly teeth.
We managed to spend six days on the road before we came in sight of the _posada_. The instant I saw it, I was overcome with a longing to spend the night there and then go back to El Callao. The idea of having the purity of those six days of passion all over again suddenly seemed to me a thousand times more important than my ten thousand dollars. The desire was so strong it made me tremble. But even stronger, there was a voice that said, 'Don't be a fool, Papi. Ten thousand dollars is a
