'And what about you, Spaghetti?'
'I wasn't with those men.'
'Okay.'
I slipped off the table. I could barely stand, but once I was up I felt a healthy burning on the soles of my feet. That pleased me although it hurt, and I felt the blood flowing inside me, racing round my whole body with such strength that it thumped in the farthest veins and arteries.
I thought that for one day I had gone as far in horror as possible, but I had got it wrong, quite wrong.
They put Pedro and me side by side, and the chief, who had now recovered his self-assurance, called out, 'Take off their overalls.'
They took them off, and there I was, naked to the waist: straight away I started shivering with cold again.
'And now take a good look at this, _hombres_.'
From under a table they dragged a kind of rigid parcel and stood it up on end in front of us. It was a frozen corpse, as stiff as a board. Its eyes were wide open and fixed, like two marbles: it was hideous to see, terrifying. Big Leon! They had frozen him alive!
'Take a good look, horn bres,' said the chief again. 'Your accomplice wouldn't talk; so all right, we went all the way with him. Now it's your turn, if you're as stubborn as he was. I've been given orders to be merciless, because this job of yours is much too serious. The pawnshop is run by the state, and there's an ugly rumor in the town-people think it's a racket worked by some of the officials. So either you talk, or in half an hour you'll be like your friend here.'
My wits had not yet come back, and the sight so churned me up that for three long seconds I felt like talking. The only thing that prevented me was that I didn't know where the other hiding places were. They'd never believe me and I'd be in worse danger than ever.
To my utter amazement I heard a very collected voice, Pedro's voice, say, 'Come on now; you can't frighten us with that stuff. Why, of course it was an accident- you never meant to freeze him; it was an error of judgment, that's all; but you don't want another error with us. One you can get away with; but three, three foreigners turned into blocks of ice, that mounts up. And I can't see you giving airtight explanations to two different embassies. One, okay. Three, it's too much.'
I could not help admiring Pedro's steely nerve. Very calmly the pig looked at the Chilean, not speaking. Then, after a little pause, 'You're a crook, and that's for sure; but I have to admit that you've also got guts.' Turning to the others he said, 'Find them each a shirt and take them back to the prison: the judge will look after them. With brutes like this there's no point in going on with the party-it's a waste of time.' He turned his back and walked off.
A month later they let me out. The tie merchant admitted I had never been to his shop, which was true: the barmen stated that I had had two whiskies by myself, that I had already booked a table for one before the other two appeared, and that we had seemed very surprised to meet one another in this town. Still, they ordered me to leave the country in five days, because they were afraid that as Leon 's so-called countryman (Leon also had an Italian passport) I would go and tell the consulate what had happened.
During the inquiries, we had been brought face to face with a guy I did not know but Pedro did-the pawnshop employee who had put him on to the job. The very evening we divided up the take, this silly cunt presented a girl from an all-night bar with a splendid antique ring. The pigs were tipped off, and they had no difficulty in making him talk: that was why Big Leon and Pedro were identified so quickly. Pedro the Chilean stayed there, hooked on this business.
I took the plane with five hundred dollars in my pocket. I never went near my hiding place; it was too risky. I took stock, to see how things stood after the hideous nightmare I had just been through; the papers reckoned the pawnshop job at two hundred thousand dollars; even if they had exaggerated and doubled it, that still left a hundred thousand; so in my hole I had about thirty thousand. Since the value had been reckoned according to the amount lent on the jewels, that is to say half their real value, and if I sold them without going through a fence, then by my calculations I should be the owner of more than sixty thousand dollars! So I had what I needed for my revenge, as long as I did not break into it for living. This money was sacred; it was for a sacred purpose, and I must never use it for anything else _upon any pretext whatsoever_.
In spite of the horrible way it ended for my friend Leon, this job had been a triumph for me. Unless indeed I was forced to help the Chilean; but in a few months he was sure to send a trusted friend to collect his nest egg so he could pay his lawyer and maybe organize a break. Anyhow, that was our agreement- each with his own hiding place so that no one of us should be connected with the fate of the others. I hadn't been in favor of that method, but it was the customary way of working in the South American underworld-once the job was done, then each for himself and God for all.
And God for all… if it was really Him that had saved me, then He had been more than noble; He had been magnanimous. And yet God could not possibly have been the artisan of my revenge. He did not want me to take it, and that I knew. I remembered that day in El Dorado, the day before I was to be let out for good. I had wanted to thank the God of the Catholics, and in my emotion I had said to Him, 'What can I do to prove that I am sincerely grateful for your kindness?' And it seemed to me that I heard the words, just as though a voice were speaking to me, 'Give up your revenge.'
And I'd said no; anything else, but not that. So it could not have been God who took care of me in this business. Impossible. I'd had luck, that was all, the luck of the devil. The good Lord above had nothing to do with that kind of shit.
But the result-oh, the result was there all right, buried at the foot of an ancient tree. It was a huge weight off my mind, knowing I possessed what I needed to carry out the plan I had been feeding my heart with these last fourteen years.
How I hoped the war had spared the villains who sent me down! Now all I had to do, while I waited for my D-Day, was to look for a job and live quietly until I could go and dig up my treasure.
The plane was flying at a great height in a brilliant sky, way above a carpet of snow-white clouds. It was purity up here, and I thought of my people, my father, my mother, my family and of my childhood bathed in light. Beneath that white cumulus there were dirty clouds, a grayish, unclean rain-a fine image of the earthly world: that desire for power, that desire to prove to others that you are better than them, that dry, heartless desire you see in the kind of people who do not give a damn if they destroy a human being as long as by doing so they gain something or prove something.
8 The Bomb
Caracas again. It was with real pleasure that I walked the streets of this great living city once more.
I had been free twenty months now, and yet I still hadn't become a member of this community. It was all very well to say, 'All you have to do is get a job,' but besides not being able to find any suitable work, I had trouble speaking Spanish, and many doors were closed to me because of this. So I bought a textbook, shut myself in my room and determined to spend however many hours it took to learn Spanish. I grew angrier and angrier; I could not manage to hit the pronunciation, and after a few days I flung the book to the other end of the room and went back to the streets and the cafes, looking for someone I knew who could find me something to do.
More and more Frenchmen were coming over from Europe, sickened by its wars and political upheavals. Some were on the run from an arbitrary justice that varied according to the political climate of the moment; others were looking for peace and quiet-a beach where they could breathe without someone coming tip every other moment to take their pulse.
These people were not like Frenchmen, though they were French. They had nothing in common with Papa Charriere or any of the people I had known in my childhood. When I was with them, I found they had ideas so different and so twisted in comparison with those of my young days that I was quite at sea. Often I'd say to them, 'I believe that maybe you shouldn't forget the past, but that you should stop talking about it. Is it possible that even now, after the war is over, there are supporters of Nazism among you? I'll tell you something: when you talk about the Jews, it's like seeing one race spew out hatred against another race.
'You're living in Venezuela, in the midst of its people, and yet you aren't capable of grasping their wonderful philosophy. Here there's no discrimination, either racial or religious. If anyone should be infected with the virus of revenge against the privileged classes, the poorest class should be because of their wretched conditions of life. Well now, _that virus doesn't even exist in this country_.
'You aren't even capable of settling down to living for the sake of living. Please, don't come here as Europeans filled with notions of the superiority of your race. True, you have had more intellectual training than the majority of the people here, but what of it? What good is it to you, since you're a more stupid bunch of clods than they are? As far as you're concerned education doesn't mean intelligence, generosity, goodness and understanding, but only learning things from books. If your hearts stay dry, selfish, rancorous and fossilized, what you've learned doesn't mean a thing.
'When I look at you and listen to you, it occurs to me that a world run by bastards like you will mean nothing but wars and revolutions. Because although you say you long for peace and quiet, you only long for it if it agrees with your point of view.'
Every one of them had his list of people to be shot, proscribed or shoved into jail; and although it upset me, I couldn't help laughing when I heard these people, sitting in a cafe or the lounge of some third-rate hotel, criticizing everything and coming to the conclusion that they were the only ones who could really run the world.
And I was afraid, yes, I was afraid, because I had a very real feeling of the danger that these newcomers brought with them- the virus of the old world's fossilized ideological passions.
1947. I'd come to know an ex-con by the name of Pierre-Rene Deloifre. He had only one object of worship, and that was General Medina Angarita, the former president of Venezuela, who had been overthrown by the last military coup d'etat, in 1945. Deloffre was a high-powered character. Very active, but openhearted and enthusiastic. He summoned all his passion to persuade me that the people who had profited by this coup d'etat weren't worth Medina Angarita's bootlaces. To tell the truth, he did not convince me; but since I was in a tricky position I was not going to cross him.
He found me a job through a financier, a truly remarkable guy called Armando. He came from a powerful Venezuelan family; he was noble-minded, generous, intelligent, well educated, witty and unusually brave. There was only one drawback-he was burdened with a stupid brother, Clemente. (Some of this brother's recent capers have made it clear to me that he hasn't changed in these last twenty-five years.) Deloifre introduced me to the financier with no beating about the bush: 'My friend Papillon, who escaped from the French penal settlement. Papillon, this is the man I was telling you about.'
Armando adopted me right away, and with the directness of a real nobleman he asked me whether I was in need of money.
'No, Monsieur Armando; I'm in need of a job.'
I wanted to see how the land lay first; it was better to take one's time. What's more, I was not really short of cash for the moment.
'Come and see me at nine tomorrow.'
