it. He comes along, you feel him coming along to see what's holding him. He can't tell what's happening to him, apart from the pain in his back. So he comes to find out. Gently, without pulling, you take in the slack and pass it round the tree. He's going to come out-he's almost at the edge. Just as he emerges, young Fuenmayor, holding a thin, razor-sharp American ax, gives his head a tremendous crack. Sometimes it takes three to finish the alligator off. At each blow the animal gives a sweep with his tail that would send the axman to heaven if it touched him. Occasionally the ax does not kill the alligator, and then you have to give slack right away so the brute can go off into deep water, because he is so strong he would wrench out even a deeply planted harpoon. You wait a minute and then start heaving again.
That was a wonderful night: we killed several alligators, leaving them on the bank. At daybreak, the Fuenmayors returned and skinned the belly and the underside of the tail. The skin of the back is too hard to be of any use. Then they buried each huge creature-if the carcasses were thrown back they would poison the river. Alligators don't eat other alligators, not even dead ones.
I made several of these expeditions, earning a good living and managing to save a fair amount. And then there occurred the most extraordinary event in my life.
10 Rita – the Vera Cruz
When I was in the solitary-confinement cells at Saint-Joseph I used to take off for the stars and invent wonderful castles in Spain, trying to people the loneliness and the terrible silence. Often I would imagine myself free, a man who had conquered 'the road down the drain' and who'd begun a new life in some big city. Yes, it was a genuine resurrection; I pushed back the tombstone that crushed me down in the darkness and I came back into the daylight, into real life; and among the pictures my mind thought up, there would appear a girl as good as she was beautiful.
Yes, there in the stifling damp heat that deprived the unhappy prisoners of the Reclusion of the least waft of living air, when, half smothered, I breathed in that unbearable steam that hurt my lungs-gasping in the hope of finding some hint of freshness-and when in spite of my weakness, my unquenchable thirst and the anxiety that wrung my heart, I took off for the stars where the air was cool and the trees had fresh green leaves, and where the cares of everyday life did not exist because I had grown rich, there, in every vision, appeared the one I called my _belle princesse_. She was always the same, down to the very last detail. Nothing ever varied, and I knew her so well that every time she stepped into these different scenes it seemed to me quite natural- wasn't it she who was to be my wife and my good angel?
Coming back from one of these geological trips, I decided to give up my room in the Richmond Company's camp and live right in Maracaibo. So one day a company truck set me down with a small suitcase in my hand, in a shady little square somewhere in the city center. I knew there were several hotels or _pensions_ thereabouts and I took the Calle Venezuela, a street in a very good position, running between the two main squares of Maracaibo, the BolIvar and the Baralt. It was one of those narrow colonial streets lined with low houses-one story or at the most two. The heat was shattering, and I walked in their shade.
Hotel Vera Cruz. A pretty colonial house dating from the conquest, painted a pale blue. I liked its clean, welcoming look and I walked into a cool passage that gave onto a patio. And there, in the airy, shaded courtyard I saw a woman; and this woman was _she_.
I could not be wrong-I had seen her thousands of times in my dreams when I was a wretched prisoner. Now my _belle princesse_ was before me, sitting in a rocking chair. I was certain that if I went closer I should see her hazel-colored eyes and even the minute beauty spot on her lovely oval face. And these surroundings-I had seen them, too, thousands of times. So it was impossible that I could be wrong: the princess of my dreams was there before me; she was waiting for me.
'_Buenas dias, Senora_. Have you a room to let?' I put my bag down. I was certain she was going to say yes. I did not just look at her; I ate her up with my eyes. She stood up, rather surprised at being stared at so hard by someone she did not know, and came toward me.
'Yes, Monsieur, I have a room for you,' said my princess, in French.
'How did you know I was French?'
'From your way of speaking Spanish. Come with me, please.'
I picked up my bag, and following her, I walked into a clean, cool, well-furnished room that opened onto the patio.
I cooled myself down with a shower, washed, shaved and smoked a cigarette; and it was only after that, as I sat on the edge of the bed in this hotel room, that I really came to believe I was not dreaming. 'She's here, man, here, just a few yards away! But don't go and lose your head. Don't let this stab in the heart make you do or say anything foolish.' My heart was beating violently and I tried to calm myself. 'Above all, Papillon, don't tell anyone this crazy story, not even her. Who would believe you? Unless you want to get yourself laughed at, how can you possibly tell anyone that you knew this woman, touched her, kissed her, had her, years ago, when you were rotting in the cells of an abominable prison? Keep your trap shut tight. The princess is here; that's what matters. Now you've found her, she won't escape you. But you must go about it gently, step by step. Just from looking at her, you can see she must be the boss of this little hotel.'
It was in the patio, a garden in miniature, that one splendid tropical night I said my first words of love. She was so completely the angel I had dreamed of that it was as though she had been waiting for me for years. Rita, my princess was called; she came from Tangiers, and she had no ties at all to hamper me. I was frank: I told her I had been married in France, that I did not know just how things were at present and that there were serious reasons why I could not find out. And that was true: I couldn't write to the _mairie_ of my village for a statement of my position- there was no telling how the law might react to a request like that: maybe by a demand for extradition. But I said nothing about my past as a crook and a convict. I devoted all my strength and all the resources of my mind to persuading her. I felt this was the greatest chance in my life, and I could not let it go by.
'You are beautiful, Rita, wonderfully beautiful. Let yourself be loved by a man who has nobody in his life either, but who needs to love and be loved. I haven't much money, it's true, and with your little hotel you are almost rich; but believe me, I want our two hearts to be just one, forever, until death. Say yes, Rita. Rita as lovely as the orchids, I can't tell you when or how, but I've known you and loved you for years and years.' But Rita was not an easy girl; it was only after three days that she agreed to be mine. She was very shy, and she asked me to hide when I came to her room. Then one fine morning, without making any sort of announcement, we quite naturally made our love obvious and official; and quite naturally I stepped into the role of the hotel's boss.
Our happiness was whole and entire, and a new life opened before me, a family life. Now that I, the pariah, the fugitive from the French penal settlement, had succeeded in overcoming that road down the drain, _I had a home_, and a girl as lovely in her body as she was in her soul. There was only one little cloud in our happiness-the fact that, having a wife in France, I could not marry her.
Loving, being loved, having a home of my own-God, how great You are to have given me all this!
Wanderers on the roads, wanderers on the seas, men on the loose who need adventure as ordinary people need water and bread, men who fly through life as migrating birds fly through the sky, wanderers of the cities who search the streets of the slums night and day, ransack the parks and hang around the wealthy districts, their angry hearts watching for a job to pull off, wandering anarchists, liberated prisoners, servicemen on leave-all, all without exception suffer from not having had a home at one moment or another; and when Providence gives them one, they step into it as I stepped into mine, with a new heart, full of love to give and burning to receive it.
So I, too, like ordinary people, like my father, like my mother, like my sisters, like all my family, I too had my home at last, with a girl who loved me inside it.
For this meeting with Rita to change my whole way of living and make me feel this was the turning point of my life, she had to be someone quite exceptional.
In the first place, like me, she had first come to Venezuela after making a break. Not a break from a penal settlement, of course, nor from prison, but still a break.
She had arrived from Tangiers some six months before with her husband; he had left her about three months later to go try some kind of adventure two hundred miles from Maracaibo- she didn't want to go with him. He left her with the hotel. She had a brother in Maracaibo, a commercial traveler who moved around a great deal.
She told me about her life, and I listened intently: my princess had been born in a poor part of Tangiers; her widowed mother had bravely raised six children, three boys and three girls. Rita was the youngest. When she was a little girl, the street was her field of action. She did not spend her days in the two rooms where the seven members of the family had their being. Her real home was the town with its parks and its souks, among the dense crowds of people who filled them, eating, singing, drinking, talking in every conceivable language. She went barefoot. To the kids of her age and to the people of her quarter she was Riquita. She and her friends, a lively flock of sparrows, spent more time on the beach than at school; but she knew how to look after herself and keep her place in the long line at the pump when she went to fetch a bucket of water for her mother. It wasn't till she was ten that she consented to put on a pair of shoes.
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 Latecoere 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 protegee; 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
