Calenzana, where we worked, and our quick march back to the prison. It was unendurable, we rebelled; and as I was one of the ringleaders, I was sent, along with a dozen others, to a still tougher disciplinary camp at Corte.
A citadel right up on top of the mountain: six hundred steps to go up and down twice a day to work at making a playing field for the enlisted men near the station.
It was when I was in that hell, with that herd of brutes, that a civilian from Corte secretly passed me a note: 'Darling, if you want to get out of that horrible place, cut off your thumb. The law is that the loss of a thumb, with or without preservation of the metacarpal, automatically brings about transfer to the auxiliaries; and if this injury is caused by an accident in the course of duty, it brings about permanent incapacity for armed services and therefore discharge. Law of 1831, circular of July 23, 1883. I am waiting for you. Clara. Address, Le Moulin Rouge, Quartier Reserve, Toulon.'
I did not delay. Our work consisted of digging about two cubic yards of earth out of the mountain every day and wheeling it off in barrows to a place fifty yards away, where trucks took away everything that wasn't needed for leveling the ground. We worked in teams of two. I must not cut off my thumb with an edged tool, or I should be accused of self-mutilation, and that would cost me another five years of _la camise_.
My Corsican mate, Franqui, and I started on the mountain at the bottom, and we dug a fair-sized cave into it. One more blow with the pick and everything above would fall in on me. The supervising NCOs were tough: Sergeant Albertini was just two or three yards behind us. This made the job tricky but also afforded one advantage-if all went well, he would be an impartial witness.
Franqui put a big stone with a fairly sharp edge under an overhanging piece; I laid my left thumb on it and stuffed my handkerchief into my mouth so as not to let out the least sound. There would be five or six seconds for us to bring the whole mass of earth down on me. Franqui was going to smash my thumb with another stone weighing about twenty pounds: it could not fail. They would be forced to amputate it even if the blow did not take it off entirely.
The sergeant was three yards away from us, scraping earth off his boots. Franqui grasped the stone, lifted it up as high as it would go and brought it down. My thumb was a shattered mess. The sound of the blow mingled with the noise of the pickaxes all round, and the sergeant saw nothing. Two swings with the pick and the earth came down all over me. I let myself be buried. Bellowing, shouts for help: they dug for me and at last I appeared, covered with earth and my thumb destroyed. And I was suffering like a soul in hell. Still, I did manage to say to the sergeant, 'They'll say I did it on purpose: you see.'
'No, Charriere. I saw the accident: I'm a witness. I'm tough but I'm fair. I'll tell them what I saw, never you fear.'
Two months later, discharged with a pension and with my thumb buried at Calvi, I was transferred to the No. 5 Depot at Toulon, and there they let me go.
I went to say thank you to Clara at the Moulin Rouge. She was of the opinion that nobody would even notice the absence of a thumb on my left hand, and that I could make love as well with four fingers as with five. That's what really mattered.
'You've changed in some way, Riri. I can't quite tell how. I hope your three months with those undesirables have not left too many traces.'
There I was with my father in my childhood home: I had hurried back after my discharge. Was there some deep change in me? 'I can't tell you, Papa: I don't know. I think I'm more violent and less willing to obey the rules of life you taught me when I was a little boy. You must be right: something has changed in me. I feel it, being here in this house, where we were so happy with Mama and my sisters. It doesn't hurt as much as it used to. I must have grown harder.'
'What are you going to do?'
'What do you advise?'
'Find a position as soon as possible. You're twenty now, my boy.'
Two exams. One at Privas for the post office; the other at Avignon for a civilian job in the military administration. Grandfather Thierry went with me.
Both the written and the oral parts went very well. I was playing the game; I had no objection to following my father's advice-I'd be a civil servant and lead a proper, honorable life. But now I can't help wondering how long the young Charriere would have stayed a civil servant with everything that was boiling up inside him.
When the morning post brought the results of the exam, my delighted papa decided to have a little party in my honor. A huge cake, a bottle of real champagne and a colleague's daughter invited to the feast. 'She would make a fine wife for my boy.' For the first time for ten years, the house bubbled with joy.
I walked around the garden with the girl Papa dreamed of as a daughter-in-law, a girl who might make his little boy happy. She was pretty, well brought up and very intelligent.
Two months later, the bombshell! 'Since you have not been able to provide our central office with a good-conduct certificate from the navy, we regret to inform you that you cannot enter our service.'
After the letter came, shattering all his illusions, Papa was sad, saying very little. He was suffering.
Why go on like this? Quick, a suitcase and a few clothes: take advantage of the teachers' meeting at Aubenas and get out.
My grandmother caught me on the stairs. 'Where are you going, Henri?'
'I'm going somewhere where they won't ask me for a goodconduct certificate from the navy. I'm going to see one of the men I knew in the disciplinary sections at Calvi, and he'll teach me how to live outside this society I was stupid enough to believe in-a society that knows very well I can expect nothing from it. I'm going to Paris, to Montmartre, Grandmother.'
'What are you going to do?'
'I don't know yet, but certainly no good. Good-bye, Grandmother. Give Papa a big kiss from me.'
We were getting close to the land, and now we could even see the windows of the houses. I was coming back after a very, very long journey to see my people: to see them after twenty-six years.
For them, I was dead; for their children, I had never existed-my name had never been pronounced. Or perhaps just a few times, when they were alone with Papa. It was only during these last five years that they must gradually have given their kids some idea of Uncle Henri, who lived in Venezuela.
We had corresponded for five years; but even so wouldn't they be afraid of what people might say? Wouldn't they feel rather nervous about meeting an escaped ex-convict at a rendezvous in Spain?
I did not want them to come out of duty; I wanted them to come with their hearts full of genuine feeling for me.
Ah, but if they only knew… if they only knew-the coast was coming nearer slowly now, but how it had raced away from me twenty-six years ago-if they only knew how I had been with them all the time during those fourteen years of prison!
If only my sisters could see all the visions of our childhood I made for myself in the cells and the wild-beast cages of the Reclusion!
If only they knew how I kept myself going with them and with all those who made up our family, drawing from them the strength to beat the unbearable, to find peace in the midst of despair, to forget being a prisoner, to reject suicide-if they only knew how the months, days, hours, minutes and seconds of those years of total solitude and utter silence had been filled to overflowing with the smallest events of our wonderful childhood!
The coast drew nearer and nearer; we saw Barcelona: we were about to enter its harbor. I had a wild desire to cup my hands and shout, with all my strength, 'Hey there! I'm coming! Come as fast as you can!' just as I used to call out to them when we were children in the fields of Fabras and I had found a great patch of violets.
'What are you doing here, darling? I've been looking for you this last hour. I even went down to the car.'
Without getting up I put my arm round Rita's waist; she bent down and gave me a little kiss on the cheek. Only then did I realize that, although I was going to meet my people full of selfquestioning and full of questions to ask as well, there in my arms was my own private family, the family that I had founded and that had brought me to this point. I said, 'Darling, I was living over the past again as I watched the land come closer, the land that holds my people, the living and the dead.'
Barcelona: our gleaming car on the quay with all the baggage neatly in the trunk. We did not stay the night in the great city; we were impatient to drive on through the sunlit countryside toward the French frontier. But after two hours my feelings overcame me so that I had to pull in to the side of the road-I could not go on.
I got out of the car: my eyes were dazzled with looking at this landscape, these plowed fields, huge plane trees, trembling reeds, the thatched or tiled roofs of the farms and cottages, the poplars singing in the wind, the meadows with every possible shade of green, the cows with the bells tinkling as they grazed, the vines- ah, the vines with their leaves that could not hide all the grapes. This piece of Catalonia was exactly the same as all my French gardenlike landscapes: all this was mine and had been mine since I was born; it was among these same colors, these same growing things, these same crops that I had wandered hand in hand with my grandfather; it was through fields like these that I had carried my father's game bag when he went shooting and when we urged our bitch Clara to startle a rabbit or flush a covey of partridges. Even the fences around the farms were the same as they were at home! And the little irrigation canals with their planks set across here and there to guide the water into one field or another; I did not have to go up to them to know there were frogs that I could bring out, as many as I wanted, with a hook baited with a piece of red cloth, as I had done so often as a child.
And I quite forgot that this vast plain was Spanish, so exactly was it like the valley of the Ardeche or the Rhone.
We stopped at the hotel nearest the French frontier. The next day Rita took the train to fetch Tante Ju from Saint-Peray. I should have gone myself, but for the French police I was still a man who had escaped from Guiana. While Rita was away I found a very fine house at Rosas, right on the edge of the beach.
A few more minutes of waiting, Papi, and then you will see Tante Ju step out of the train, the woman who loved your father, and who wrote you such beautiful letters, bringing back to life your memories of those who loved you and whom you loved so much.
It was Rita who got out first. As carefully as a daughter, she helped her tall companion climb down to the platform. And then two big arms enfolded me, two big arms pressed me to her bosom, two big arms conveying the warmth of life and a thousand things that cannot be expressed in words. And it was with one arm around Rita and the other around my second mother that I walked out of the station, quite forgetting that suitcases do not come with their owners unless they are carried.
It was eleven in the morning when Rita and Tante Ju arrived, and it was three the next morning when Tante Ju went to her bedroom, worn out by the journey, by her age, by emotion and by sixteen hours of uninterrupted exchange of memories.
I fell into my bed and went straight to sleep, exhausted, without a breath of energy to keep me awake. The outburst of urgent happiness is as shattering as the worst disaster.
My two women were up before me, and it was they who pulled me out of my deep sleep to tell me it was eleven in the morning, that the sun was shining, the sky blue, the sand warm, that breakfast was waiting for me and that I should eat it quickly so as to go to the frontier to fetch my sister and her tribe, who were to be there in two hours. 'Rather earlier,' said Tante Ju, 'because your brother-in-law will have been forced to drive fast, to keep the family from bullying him, they are so eager to see you.'
