Caracas, particularly on Perez Jimenez's presidential palace. The operation failed, and Castro Leon fled to Colombia.
But at two AM, on January 23, a plane flew over Caracas. It was Perez Jimenez going off with his family, his closest associates and part of his fortune-a cargo of such value in people and wealth that the Venezuelans christened the plane _The Holy Cow_. Perez J imenez knew he had lost the game-the army had abandoned him, after ten years of dictatorship. His plane flew straight to Santo Domingo, where another dictator, General Trujillo, could only welcome his colleague.
For almost three weeks there were no police in the streets. Of course, there was pillaging and violence, but only against Perez J imenez's supporters. A nation was bursting out after being muzzled for ten years. The Seguridad Nacional's headquarters, opposite the Normandy, was attacked, and most of its members killed.
During the three days that followed the departure of Perez J imenez I very nearly lost the result of twelve years' work. Several people telephoned to tell me that all the bars, nightclubs, luxury restaurants and places frequented by the top supporters of Perez J imenez were being broken into and sacked. We had our apartment on the floor above the Caty-Bar. Our building was a little villa at the bottom of a blind alley, with the bar at street level, then our living quarters and then a flat roof over that.
I was determined to defend my house, my business and my people. I got hold of twenty bottles of gasoline, made them into Molotov cocktails and lined them up neatly on the roof. Rita would not leave me: she was at my side with a lighter in her hand.
Then they came! A crowd of pillagers-more than a hundred of them. Since the Caty-Bar was in a blind alley, anyone who came along it was coming to us.
They came closer and among the shouts I heard, 'This is one of the Perezjimenists' places! Sack it!' They broke into a run, waving iron bars and shovels. I lit the lighter.
Suddenly the crowd halted. Four men with their arms stretched out were strung across the alley: they stopped the overexcited mob. I heard them say, 'We are workers, we belong to the people, and we are revolutionaries, too. We've known these people for years. Enrique, the boss, is a Frenchman, and he's a friend of the people-he's proved it to us hundreds of times. Get out, there's nothing for you to do here.'
They began to argue, but more quietly, and I heard these splendid men explain why they were defending us. It lasted a good twenty minutes, with Rita and me still on the roof, holding the lighter. The four must have persuaded them to leave us in peace, because the mob withdrew without any threats.
Lord, that was a close one! A close one for a good many of them, too, I may say. None of them ever came back.
These four men of the people, our defenders, worked for the Caracas Water Company. And it so happened that the side door of the Caty-Bar, down at the bottom of the alley, was right next to the entrance to the company's depot, the gate the tankers used when they went to supply places that were short of water. We often gave the men who worked there something to eat, and if they came for a bottle of Coke we said there was nothing to pay. Because of the dictatorship they almost never talked politics, but sometimes, when they had had a drink, a few would let out an incautious word-it was, overheard and reported. Then they were either imprisoned or sacked.
Often either Rita or I had been able to get one of our customers to have the culprit let out or given back his job. In any case, among the senators, deputies and officers belonging to the regime, a good many were very kind and obliging. There were few who would not do a favor.
On that day the Water Company's men paid their debt to us, and they paid it with very great courage, because the mob was in no laughing mood. And the most extraordinary thing was that the same miracle happened for our two other places. Not a pane of glass smashed at the Ninotchka. Nothing, absolutely nothing destroyed and nothing stolen at the Normandy, right opposite the terrible Seguridad Nacional, the hottest spot of the whole revolution, with machine guns firing in all directions and revolutionaries burning and pillaging the shops right, left and center all along the Avenida Mejico.
Under Perez Jimenez, nobody had argued; nobody had done anything but obey. The press was muzzled.
Under his successor, Admiral Larrazabal, everybody danced, sang, disobeyed to his heart's content, spoke or wrote anything that came into his head, drunk with joy at being able to sling bullshit in total freedom, with no inhibitions.
The sailor was a poet into the bargain, an artist at heart, sensitive to the wretched position and poverty of the thousands of people who came flooding into Caracas, wave after wave of them, as soon as the dictator had fallen. He thought up the Emergency Plan, which handed out millions from the national funds to these unfortunate souls.
He promised that there should be elections. More than true to his word, he prepared them very fairly; but although the admiral got in at Caracas, it was Betancourt who won the election. Betancourt had to face up to a tricky situation-not a day went by without some plot's being hatched, not a single day without his having to win a battle against the forces of reaction.
I had just bought the biggest cafe in Caracas, the Grand Cafe in the Gran Sabana: over four hundred seats. This was the cafe where Julot Huignard, the guard of Levy's jewelry shop, had said we should meet when we were in the corridor of the Sante way back in 1931. 'Keep your spirits up, Pap! We'll meet at the Grand Cafe in Caracas.' Here I was at the rendezvous, twenty-eight years later, to be sure, but still here-and I owned it. But Huignard had not kept the appointment.
The political state of the country did not make Betancourt's job an easy one. A vile, cowardly attempt on his life suddenly upset the still youthful democracy. Under the remote control of Trujillo, the dictator of Santo Domingo, a car stuffed with explosives went off right by the president as he was driving to an official ceremony. The head of the military household was killed, the chauffeur very badly wounded; General Lopez Henriquez and his wife were horribly burned, and the president himself had his forearms painfully injured by the flames. Twenty-four hours later, with his hands bandaged, he addressed the Venezuelan nation. It seemed so unbelievable that some people claimed the man who spoke was his double.
In such an atmosphere Venezuela, too, though blessed by the gods, began to be attacked by the virus of political passion. There were cops everywhere, and among the officials, there were some who made evil use of their political connections.
Officials belonging to different ministries came and badgered me many times. Inspectors of every kind appeared: inspectors of drinks, of municipal taxes, of this and of that. Most of them had had no training and held the job only because they belonged to some political party or other.
What's more, since the government knew about my past, and since I was inevitably in contact with various crooks who passed through even though I had nothing to do with them in the way of business, and since on top of that I had been granted asylum here while proceedings against me were still in force in France, the pigs took advantage of my position to carry out a kind of blackmail. For example, they dug up the case of a Frenchman murdered two years back, in which the killer had never been found. Did I know anything about it? I knew nothing? Wasn't it in my interest, considering my position, to know a little?
Oh, this was beginning to be a splendid party, this was. I had had about enough of these bastards. It might not be very serious for the moment, but if it went on and I blew up, God only knew what would happen. No, I couldn't blow my stack here, not in this country that had given me my chance of being a free man once more and of making a home for myself.
There was no point in going round and round the mulberry bush: I sold the Grand Cafe and the other joints, and Rita and I went off to Spain. Maybe I'd be able to start some kind of business there.
But I couldn't get going. The European countries are too well organized. In Madrid, when I had obtained the first thirteen permits to open a business, they kindly told me I needed a fourteenth. It seemed to me that that was just one too many. And Rita, seeing that I was literally incapable of living far from Venezuela and that I missed even the jackasses who badgered me, agreed that although we had sold everything, we should go back there.
15 Camarones
Caracas once more. This was 1961, and sixteen years had passed since El Dorado. Nightlife had changed a great deal in Caracas, and finding a joint as clean, attractive and important as the Grand Cafe was impossible. A ridiculous new law held that the people who had bars and sold alcoholic drinks corrupted public morals- which meant all kinds of abuses and exploitation on the part of certain officials, and I didn't want to get back into that racket at all.
Something else was needed. I discovered not a mine of diamonds but a mine of very big shrimp, the kind called _camarones_ and even bigger ones called _langostinos_. And all this was back at Maracaibo once again.
We settled down in an elegant apartment: I bought a stretch of shore and founded a company called the Capitan Chico, after the district that included my beach. Sole shareholder, Henri Charriere; manager, Henri Charriere; director of operations, Henri Charriere; chief assistant, Rita.
And here we were, launched into an extraordinary adventure. I bought eighteen fishing boats. They were big craft, each with a fifty-horsepower outboard and a net five hundred yards long. A crew of five to each boat. As one fully equipped boat cost twelve thousand five hundred bolIvars, eighteen meant a lot of money.
We transformed the little villages around the lake, doing away with poverty and the dislike for work (since the work I gave was well paid) and bringing a new life in place of the old listlessness.
These poor people owned nothing, so without any guarantee from them we gave one full set of fishing gear for each crew of five. They fished as they chose, and their only obligation was to sell me the _langostinos_ and _camarones_ at the market price less half a bolIvar, because I paid for all the equipment and its upkeep.
The business ran at a tremendous pace, and it fascinated me. We had three refrigerated trucks that never stopped hurrying about the beaches to pick up my boats' catch.
I built a pier on the lake about a hundred feet long, and a big covered platform. Here Rita managed a team of between a hundred twenty and a hundred forty women who took off the heads of the _camanones_ and _langostinos_. Then, washed and washed again in ice-cold water, the shrimp were sorted for size, according to how many would go to one American pound. There might be ten to fifteen, or twenty to twenty-five, or twenty-five to thirty. The bigger they were, the more they brought. Every week the Americans sent me a green sheet which gave the market price for _camarones_ each Tuesday. Every day at least one DC-8 took off for Miami, carrying 24,800 pounds of _camarones_.
I would have made a lot of money, if I had not been such a fool as to take a Yankee partner one day. He had a moon face, and looked worthy, stupid and straight. He spoke neither Spanish nor French, and as I spoke no English we couldn't quarrel.
This Yankee brought in no capital, but he had rented the freezers of a well-known brand of ice that was sold all over Maracaibo and in the neighborhood. As a result, our _camarones_ and _langostinos_ were perfectly frozen.
I had to oversee the fishing, the boats, the loading of each day's catch into my three refrigerated trucks and the payment of the fishermen: and I had to provide these considerable sums out of my own pocket. Some days I would go down to the beach with thirty thousand bolIvars and come home withoui a cent.
We were well organized, but nothing tuns itself without a hitch, and I had a continual war with pirate buyers. As I've said, the fishermen who used my equipment
