One day, when I was making a quick trip to Caracas, a friend introduced me to a former Paris model who was looking for someone to help her in a new hotel she had just opened at Maracaibo. I very willingly accepted the job of being her man Friday. She was called Laurence; I think she had come to Caracas to show a collection, and then decided to settle in Venezuela. Six hundred miles lay between Caracas and Maracaibo, and that suited me fine; it was always possible the police might reopen their inquiries into our coup d'etat.
A friend gave me a lift, and after fourteen hours' driving I had my first sight of Lake Maracaibo-they call it a lake, although in fact it is a huge lagoon nearly a hundred miles long and sixty wide at the broadest point, and it is joined to the sea by a channel about eight miles across. Maracaibo lies to the north, on the west bank of the channel, which is now linked to the east bank by a bridge. In those days, though, if you came from Caracas, you had to cross on a ferry.
This lake was really extraordinary, dotted with thousands of derricks. It looked like a huge forest stretching away out of sight, a forest whose trees, all exactly lined up, allowed you to see as far as the horizon. But these trees were oil wells, and each oil well had an enormous pendulum that went to and fro all day and all night, never stopping, perpetually pumping up the black gold from the bowels of the earth.
A ferry ran nonstop between the end of the Caracas road and Maracaibo, carrying cars, passengers and goods. During the crossing I hurried from one side to the other, absolutely fascinated by the iron pylons rising from the lake; and as I stared at them I thought that twelve hundred miles from here, down at the far end of the country in Venezuelan Guiana, the Good Lord had stuffed the ground with diamonds, gold, iron, nickel, manganese, bauxite, uranium and all the rest, while here He had filled it with oil, the motor of the world-with such enormous quantities of oil that these thousands of pumps could suck away day and night without ever sucking it dry. Venezuela, you've got no call to blame the Lord!
The Hotel Normandy was a splendid villa surrounded by a carefully kept garden full of flowers. The lovely Laurence welcomed me with open arms. "This is my kingdom, Henri," she said, laughing.
She had opened the hotel just two months before. There were only sixteen rooms, but all were luxurious and in the best taste, each with a bathroom fit for the Ritz. She had designed all the interior herself, from the bedrooms to the staff bathrooms, taking in the drawing room, terrace and dining room on her way.
I set to work, and it was no laughing matter being Laurence's right-hand man-she was under forty and she got up at six to see to her guests' breakfast or even make it herself. She was tireless, and all day long she hurried about, seeing to this and that, supervising everything, and yet still finding time to look after a rose bush or weed a garden path. She had grasped life with both hands; she had overcome almost impossible difficulties to set this business going; and she had so much faith in its success that I was seized with a will to work almost as consuming as her own. I did everything I could to help her cope with the hundreds of difficulties that kept cropping up. Money difficulties, above all. She was in debt up to her neck, because to turn this villa into something like a luxury hotel she had borrowed every penny.
One day, by a private deal I carried out without consulting her, I got something marvelous out of an oil company.
"Good evening, Laurence."
"Good evening. It's late, Henri: eight o'clock already. I'm not blaming you, now; but I haven't seen you this whole afternoon."
"I've been for a stroll."
"Is this a joke?"
"Yes, I'm laughing at life. It's always good for a laugh, don't you think?"
"Not always. And at this time I should have liked your support; I'm in a bad jam."
"Very bad?"
"Yes. I've got to pay for all these fittings and alterations, and although the place is running well, it's not easy. I owe a great deal."
"Here comes the big surprise, Laurence; hold on. You don't owe anything anymore."
"Are you making fun of me?"
"No. Listen: you've brought me in as a kind of partner, and in fact I've noticed a good many people think I'm the boss."
"What of it?"
"Well, one of the people who thought that way is a Canadian belonging to the Lumus Company, and a few days back he talked to me about a deal he thought we might make. I went to see him this afternoon; I've just come back."
"Tell me quickly!" cried Laurence, her eyes wide with interest.
"The result is the Lumus Company takes your hotel, the whole of it, with full board, _for a year!_"
"It's not possible!"
"It is, I promise you." In her emotion, Laurence kissed me on both cheeks and collapsed into a chair. "Of course, there was no question of _me_ signing this terrific contract, so tomorrow they'll call you to their office."
This contract meant that Laurence made a small fortune out of the Hotel Normandy. The first quarter's advance alone let her pay off all her debts.
After the signing of the contract, Laurence and I drank champagne with the Lumus bosses. I was happy, very happy, as I lay there in my big bed that night. With the help of the champagne I saw life a fine rosy pink. Papi, you're no more of a fool than Laurence: so isn't it possible to get rich _by working?_ Well, Christ above, this was a real discovery I'd made here at the Hotel Normandy. Yes, a real discovery, because in France, for the few years I'd been able to take a quick glance at life, it had always seemed to me that a workingman stayed a workingman all his life. And this completely wrong idea was even more wrong here in Venezuela, where the man who really wants to do something has every opportunity open to him.
It was not from love of money that I had gone for crooked jobs: I wasn't a thief out of a deep liking for theft. It was just that I'd never been able to believe it was possible to get to the top in life by starting from scratch-nor, as far as I was concerned, to get hold of a lump of money big enough for me to go and present my bill in Paris. But it was possible, and only one thing was necessary to start-a little bit of capital, a few thousand bolivars; and it would be easy to save that once I'd found a good job.
The only snag was that if I went about it this way, I would need a good deal of time before being able to take my revenge: I couldn't scrape the necessary cash together in a day. "Revenge is a dish you want to eat cold," Miguel had said at the diamond diggings. I was going to find out about that.
Maracaibo was seething. There was excitement in the air, and so many businesses and oil refineries were springing up that everything, from beer to cement, was sold on the black market. Everything was snapped up right away-there was never enough to meet the demand. Labor was making money, jobs were well paid and every kind of business was doing well.
When there is an oil boom, a district's economy goes through two completely different phases. First comes the period before the wells begin to yield, the period of pre-exploitation. The companies turn up and settle in; they need offices, camps, roads, high-tension lines; they have to drill the wells, put up the derricks and pumps, etc. This is the golden age, golden for all the skilled workers and golden for every level of the community.
The people, the genuine horny-handed people, have dough in their pockets; they begin to discover the meaning of money and of security. Families start to get themselves organized, homes grow bigger or better, and the children go to school in good clothes, often taken by companies' buses.
Then comes the second phase, the one that corresponds to my first view of Lake Maracaibo, with all I could see of it turned into a forest of derricks. This is the period of exploitation. Thousands of pumps, working away there by themselves, tirelessly suck out millions of tons of black gold every day.
But this unbelievable mass of dough does not pass through the people's hands: it goes straight into the coffers of the state banks or the companies. Things begin to grow sticky, staff is cut down to the strict minimum, there's no more money just floating around, all the active business is over. The coming generations will only know about it when they hear their grandfathers say, "Once upon a time, when Maracaibo was wealthy, there was. -."
But I was lucky. I came in for Maracaibo 's second boom. It had nothing to do with the pumps on the lake, but several oil companies had just got new concessions running from the Perijá Mountains down to the lake and the sea, and they were wild with excitement. The moment might have been made for me.
I was going to dig in here. And I swore the hole I made would be a sizable cavern. I'd work at anything I could lay my hands on to gather in every possible crumb of this gigantic cake.
_Good French cook, 41, seeks position with oil company. Minimum salary $800_.
I'd learned the rudiments of cooking with Laurence and her chef, and I decided to try my luck. The advertisement came out in the local paper, and a week later I was cooking for the Richmond Exploration Company. I was sorry to leave Laurence, but she could not possibly pay me wages like that, not by a long shot.
Now, having been through that school, I know a good deal about cooking; but when I first started my job I quaked for fear that the other guys in the kitchen would soon see that the French cook knew precious little about saucepans. To my surprise I soon saw that they, too, were all atremble in case the French cook should find out that they were only dishwashers, every last one of them! I breathed again; and all the deeper because I had a great advantage over them-_I owned a cookbook in French_-a present from a retired whore.
The personnel manager was a Canadian, Monsieur Blanchet. Two days later he put me in charge of cooking for the camp executives, a dozen of them-the big chiefs!
The first morning I showed him a menu like something out of the Ritz. But I pointed out that before I could prepare the food the kitchen would have to be better stocked. It was decided that I should have a separate budget, and that I should run it myself. I don't have to tell you I greased my own palm pretty handsomely when I did my buying; but still, the executives stuffed themselves heartily, no doubt about that. This way, everybody was happy.
Every evening I stuck up the next day's menu in the hall: written in French, of course. These grand-sounding names out of the cookbook made a terrific impression. What's more, in the town I'd discovered a shop that specialized in French things, so what with canned goods and my recipes I managed so well that the executive guys often brought their womenfolk. Twenty would turn up instead of twelve. From one point of view it was a damn nuisance, but from another, it meant they took less notice of what I spent; because by the rules I was supposed to feed only the people on the list.
I saw they were so pleased that I asked for a raise-twelve hundred dollars a month, an increase of four hundred. They said no, but they gave me a thousand; and although I kept telling them it was wretched pay for a big-time chef like me, I let myself be persuaded.
Some months went by like this, but in time these set hours began to irk me like a shirt collar that's too tight. I'd had about enough of this job and I asked the chief of the geologists to take me with him when he went out on a prospecting expedition into the most interesting regions, even if they were dangerous.
The point of these expeditions was to make a geological survey of the Sierra de Perijá, the mountain chain to the west of Lake Maracaibo that divides Venezuela from Colombia. It is the country of a very fierce, warlike tribe of Indians, the Motilón: so much so that the Sierra de Perijá is often called the Sierra de los Motilónes. Even now nobody knows just where this tribe came from; their language and their customs are quite unlike those of the neighboring tribes, and they are so dangerous that "civilization" is barely beginning to make its way among them. They live in communal huts that house from fifty to a hundred people, men, women and children all mixed up together. Their only domestic animal is the dog. They are so wild that you hear of many cases where Motilón Indians captured by "civilized" people absolutely refuse to eat or drink; and although they may be well treated, they end up by killing themselves, biting the veins in their wrists with their front teeth, which are specially filed for tearing meat. Since the days I am talking about, the Franciscans have bravely settled on the banks of the Rio Santa Rosa, only a few miles from the nearest communal house. The Father Superior uses the most modern methods, dropping food, clothing, blankets and photographs of Franciscans over the huts from a plane. Even better, he parachutes straw figures dressed in Franciscan robes, the pockets filled with different kinds of food and even cans of milk. No fool, the good father: the day he turns up on foot, they'll believe he's dropped from heaven.
But when I asked to take part in these expeditions it was back in 1948, a long time before those attempts at "civilized" penetration.
As far as I was concerned, these expeditions had three positive advantages. In the first place, they meant a completely different life from the one I was leading in the kitchen of the Richmond Company's camp; and I had seen just about all I ever wanted to see of that. It would be an adventure again, but honest-to-god adventure this time. There was real danger, of course, as there is in any adventure-quite often an expedition would come back short one or two members, because the Motilón Indians were highly skilled at archery. (Where a Motilón sets his eye, there he sets his arrow, as they say in those parts.) But if you were killed, at least you were not eaten, because they were not cannibals. There was always that to be thankful for.
Second advantage: these three-week tours in the deep, unexplored, dangerous bush were very well paid. I'd make more than twice what I earned at my kitchen stove.
Third: I liked being with the geologists. They knew a great deal. Although I was well aware it was too late for me to learn enough to make me a different man, I had the feeling that I would not be wasting my time, going about with these scientists.
So, as a member of their expedition, I set off full of confidence and enthusiasm. No need for any cookbooks; I just had to know how to open cans and make bread and pancakes.
My new friend, the geologist in charge of the expedition, was named Crichet. He had been lent to the Richmond by the California Exploration Company. He knew absolutely everything about the oil side of geology, but he wasn't quite sure whether Alexander the Great came before Napoleon or after. In any case, he didn't give a damn one way or the other; he didn't need to know history to be very fit, to have a splendid wife, to give her babies, and to provide his company with the geological information they needed. Still, I dare say he did know more than he let on-in time I learned to watch out for his sort of half-English humor, quite unlike what we were used to in my native Ardèche. We got along very well.
An expedition of this kind lasted between twenty and twentyfive days, with a week's leave when you got back. It was made up of a geologist in charge, two other geologists, and from twelve to eighteen porters and helpers-strength and discipline were all that was asked of them. They had their own tents and their own cook. I only looked after the three geologists. The men were not fools in any way, and among them there was a militant member of the left-wing Acción Democrática who saw the union laws were obeyed. His name was Carlos. There was a good overall understanding, and I was the one who kept count of the overtime, which they always put down with absolute precision.
This first expedition fascinated me. Getting hold of geological intelligence about oil fields is a very interesting business. The idea is to follow the rivers up into the mountains as far as possible, keeping to the passage they have cut through the rock. You go as far as you can in trucks, and then take to jeeps; when there is no path anymore, you paddle up the river in canoes; and when the river is too shallow you get out and shove, still going up as far as you can toward the source. The equipment is carried by the porters, about a hundred pounds a man, but the three geologists and the cooks don't carry anything.
Why go so far into the mountains? Because you see all the successive geological formations, just like in a school book, along the course the river has dug out. You cut samples from the walls, sort them, label them and pack them away in little bags. The geologists note the direction of the different layers sloping toward the plain. And so, with these hundreds of geological samples taken from different places, they draw up a map of the strata that should be found in the plain at a depth of, say, between three thousand and six thousand feet. And by working it out very carefully from all this information, one day they hit oil perhaps fifty miles away, in some place where nobody has ever been, because they know in advance that the oil will be there at a given depth. Talk about the wonders of science-I was filled with admiration.
All this would have been fine if it hadn't been for the Motilón Indians. Often members of the expeditions were killed or wounded by their arrows. This hazard did not make recruiting any easier, and it cost the companies a great deal of money.
I went on several expeditions, and I had some marvelous experiences. One of the geologists was a Dutchman named Lapp. One day he was gathering alligator's eggs-they are very good, once they are dried in the sun. You can easily find them by following the track the alligator leaves as it crawls on its belly from the river to the dry place where it lays its eggs: it sits on them for hours and hours. Taking advantage of the alligator's absence, Lapp dug up the eggs and calmly carried them back to the camp. He had scarcely reached our clearing before the alligator appeared, tearing along like a racing car and coming straight for him. It had followed the robber's trail and was going to punish him. About ten feet long, it gasped hoarsely as it came, as if it had laryngitis. Lapp started to run, darting around and around a big tree; and I howled with laughter at the sight of this big guy in shorts bounding about and bawling for help. Crichet and his men came running; two explosive bullets stopped the alligator dead. As for Lapp, he fell on his ass, as pale as death. Everybody was shocked by my behavior. I told them there was nothing I could have done in any case, because I never carried a rifle-it got in the way.
That evening, while we ate my canned dinner in the tent, Crichet said to me, in his sort of French, "You not so young; at least thirty-four, eh?"
"Rather more. Why?"
"You living, you behaving like man of twenty."
"Well, you know, I'm not much more. I'm twenty-seven."
"Not true."
"Yes, it is, and I'll tell you why. For fourteen years I was stuffed into a cupboard. So I didn't live those fourteen years then. I have to live them now. And since fourteen from forty-one makes twenty-seven, I'm twenty-seven years old."
"Don't follow."
"It doesn't matter."
Yet it was true enough: my heart was that of a boy of twenty. I had to live those fourteen years that had been stolen from me; I needed them and I had to get them back. I had to burn them up, not giving a damn for anything at all, the way you do when you are twenty and your heart is filled with a crazy love for life.
One day, just before dawn, a scream jerked us all awake. As he was hanging up the hurricane lamp he had lit before making the coffee, the men's cook had been struck by two arrows-one in his side, the other in his buttock. He had to be taken straight back to Maracaibo. Four men carried him as far as the canoe on a kind of litter; the canoe took him down to the jeep, the jeep to the truck, and the truck to Maracaibo.
The day went by in a heavy, brooding atmosphere. We could sense the Indians all around us in the bush, though we never heard or saw them. The farther we went, the more we had the feeling we were right in their hunting grounds. There was a fair amount of game, and as all the men had a rifle, every now and then they shot a bird or a kind of hare. Everyone was serious, nobody sang; and after they had fired a shot they stupidly talked very low, as though they were afraid someone might hear them.
Gradually a general fear came over the men. They wanted to cut the expedition short and go back to Maracaibo. Our leader, Crichet, kept on up the river. The union man, Carlos, was a brave guy, but he, too, felt uneasy. He took me aside.
"Enrique, what do you say to turning back?"
"What for, Carlos?"
"The Indians."
"True enough, there are Indians; but they might just as easily attack us on the way back as if we go on."
"I'm not so sure about that, Enrique. Maybe we're close to their village. Look at that stone there: they've been crushing grain."
"There's something in what you say, Carlos. Let's see Crichet."
The American had been through the Normandy landings; it took a lot to shake him, and he was completely in love with his job. When all the men were gathered together, he said we were in one of the richest districts for geological information. He lost his temper, and in his anger he said the one thing he never should have said-"If you're afraid, all right, go back. I'm staying."
They all went off, except for Carlos, Lapp and me. But I stayed only on the condition that when we left we'd bury the equipment, because I did not want to carry anything heavy. Ever since I had broken both my feet during one of my unsuccessful breaks from Barranquilla, walking with a load made me tire very quickly. Carlos would see to the samples.
Crichet, Lapp, Carlos and I went on for five days without anyone else at all. Nothing happened, but I've never had a more thrilling and stirring time than those five days, when we knew we were being watched twenty-four hours a day by God knows how many pairs of unseen eyes. We gave up when Crichet, who had gone down to the edge of the river to relieve himself, saw the reeds move and then two hands gently parting them. That wrecked his urge; but with his usual calmness he turned his back on the reeds as though nothing had occurred and came back to the camp.
He said to Lapp, "I believe the moment has come for us to return to Maracaibo. We've got enough samples of rocks, and I'm not sure it's scientifically necessary to leave the Indians four interesting samples of the white race."
We reached Burra, a hamlet of some fifteen houses, without trouble. We were having a drink, waiting for the truck to come pick us up, when a drunken half-caste Indian of those parts took me aside and said, "You're French, aren't you? Well, it's not worth being French if you're as ignorant as all that."
"Ah? How come?"
"I'll tell you. You make your way into Motilón country, and what do you do? You blaze away right and left at everything that flies or runs or swims. All the men carry guns. It's not a scientific exploration; it's an enormous great hunting party."
"What are you getting at?"
"If you carry on that way, you'll destroy what the Indians look upon as their food reserve. They haven't got much. They just kill what they need for a day or two. Not more. Then again, their arrows kill with no noise-they don't make the other animals run away. Whereas you kill everything and you frighten away all the game with your shooting."
It was not so foolish, what this guy said. I was interested. "What'll you drink? It's on me."
"A double rum, Frenchman. Thanks." And he went on, "It's because of this that the Motilón Indians shoot arrows at you. They say that because of you it's going to be hard for them to eat."
"So we are robbing their larder?"
"You're dead right, Frenchman. Then again, when you go up a stream, have you ever noticed that, where it's narrow or where there's so little water you have to get out of the canoe and shove, you destroy a kind of dam made of branches and bamboos?"
"Yes, I have. Often."
"Well, the things you destroy like that, never thinking twice, are fish traps built by the Motilón Indians; so there again you do them harm. Because there's a great deal of work in these traps. They are a kind of maze, and the fish that are running up the stream pass through zigzag afterzigzag until they reach a big trap at the end, and then they can't escape. There's a wall of bamboos in front, and they can't find the entrance again, because it's made of little creepers that the fish pushed aside to get in. The current pushes them back against the gate once the fish has passed. I've seen traps more than fifty yards long from one end to the other, Beautiful work."
"You're right, absolutely right. You have to be vandals like us to smash work of that kind."
As we traveled back, I thought about what the rum-soaked halfbreed had told me, and I made up my mind to try something. As soon as we reached Maracaibo, even before I went home for my week's leave, I left a letter for Monsieur Blanchet, the personnel manager, asking him to see me next day.
He called me in, and there with him I saw the top geologist. I told them there would be no more killed or wounded in the expeditions if they would leave the management to me. Crichet would still be the official boss, of course, but I would be the one who saw to the discipline. They decided to have a try; Crichet had put in a report saying that if they could get higher up than the last expedition, that is to say into an even more dangerous region, they would find a real treasure-house of information. As to the pay for my new job, which would be in addition to being cook (I was still to be the geologists' chef), that would be settled when I came back. Of course I said nothing about the reasons that I could guarantee the expedition's safety, and since the Yankees are practical people, they asked me no questions either- it was the result that mattered.
Crichet was the only one who knew about the arrangement. It suited him, so he fell in with the scheme and relied on me. He was sure I had found some certain way of avoiding trouble; and the fact that I had been one of the three who stayed when all the others left had made a good impression.
I went to see the governor of the province and explained my business. He was friendly and understanding, and thanks to his letter of recommendation, I got the National Guard to give orders that the last post before Motilón territory should take all the weapons carried by the men on my list before letting the expedition through. They would think up some likely, comforting excuse. Because if the men knew back in Maracaibo that they were going into Motilón country unarmed, they wouldn't even start. I'd have to catch them short and con them on the spot.
It all passed off perfectly. At Burra, the last post, their weapons were taken away from all the men except two, and I told those two never to fire except in immediate danger-never for hunting or for fun. I had a revolver, and that was all.
From that day on, there was no trouble whatsoever in any of our expeditions. The Americans got the message, and being for efficiency above all, they never asked me the reason.
I got along with the men, and they obeyed me. My job fascinated me. Now, instead of smashing the fish traps with our canoes, we worked around them, destroying nothing. Another thing: since I knew the Motilón Indians' chief problem was hunger, I left old cans filled with salt or sugar every time we struck camp; and according to what we could spare, we'd also leave a machete or a knife or a little ax. When we came back through these camping places we never found a thing. Everything had vanished, even the old cans themselves. So my tactics worked, and since nobody in Maracaibo knew what it was all about, there was a rumor that I was a brujo, a wizard, or that I had a secret understanding with the Motilón Indians.
It was during one of these expeditions that I had an extraordinary lesson in how to fish-in how to catch a fish without bait, hook or line, just quietly picking it up on the surface. My teacher was a _danta_, a tapir, an animal bigger than a large pig, sometimes more than six feet long. One afternoon, when I was near the stream, I saw a _danta_ for the first time. It came out of the water, and I watched, keeping perfectly still so as not to frighten it. Its skin was rather like that of a rhinoceros; its front legs were shorter than its back ones; and over its mouth it had a short but distinct trunk. It went over to a creeper and ate a good deal of it-so it was a herbivore. Then I saw it go down to the stream again, walk in toward a stretch of slack water. There it stopped, and began to sort of belch, like a cow-so it was a ruminant. Then it brought up a green liquid through its trunk. Very cleverly it mixed this stuff with the water, stirring with its big head. I was still wondering about the reason for all this when a few minutes later, to my astonishment, I saw fish come to the surface, belly uppermost, moving slowly as though they had been drugged or put to sleep. And then there was my _danta_ taking the fish one by one, not hurrying at all; and calmly he ate them up. I was absolutely amazed.
After that, I had a try. I carefully marked down the creeper I had seen the _danta_ eating, gathered an armful and crushed it between two stones, collecting the juice in a gourd. Then I poured the juice into a part of the river where there was no current. Victory! A few minutes later I saw the fish come to the top, knocked out, just as they had done for the _danta_. There's only one precaution you have to take: if the fish are edible, you must gut them right away, otherwise they go bad in two hours. After this experiment, the geologists' table often had splendid fish dishes. I told the men that they should never, under any circumstances, kill such a charming fisherman, particularly since tapirs are perfectly harmless.
Sometimes, in these expeditions, 1 took a family of alligator hunters along as guides, the Fuenmayors, a father and his two sons. This suited everybody, because the Fuenmayors knew the region very well; but if they were alone they would be easy prey for the Motilón Indians. Going along with the expedition, they guided us by day in exchange for their keep, and at night they hunted alligators.
They were people from Maracaibo, Maracuchos, very sociable souls. They spoke in a musical way, and they had a very high notion of friendship. There was a great deal of Indian blood in their veins and they had the Indian qualities of wisdom and intelligence. I had some wonderful, indestructible friendships with the Maracuchos, and I have them still. The women are beautiful, and they know how to love and how to make themselves loved.
Hunting alligators, creatures seven to ten feet long, is a very dangerous business. One night I went along with Fuenmayor and his elder son. The father sat at the back of this very narrow, very light canoe, steering, with me in the middle and his son in front. It was pitch dark; all you could hear was the noises of the bush, and, very faintly, the lapping of the water against the canoe. We didn't smoke; we didn't make the slightest sound. The paddle that moved the canoe and at the same time steered it was never allowed to scrape against the side.
Every now and then we sent the beam of a huge flashlight sweeping the surface, and pairs of red dots appeared. Two red points: one alligator. In front of these eyes there would be the nostrils, because the eyes and the nose are the only two parts of an alligator that show when it is resting on the surface. The victim was chosen according to the shortest distance between the hunters and the red dots. Once it was selected, we felt our way toward it with the light out. Old Fuenmayor was wonderfully skillful at fixing the alligator's exact position, by just one flash of the light lasting no more than a second. We paddled quickly toward it and aimed the beam, and almost always the brute just lay there, dazzled. The beam stayed on the alligator until we were two or three yards away. In the front of the canoe young Fuenmayor kept his flashlight aimed with his left hand and with all the strength of his right arm he threw a harpoon weighted with twenty pounds of lead-the only thing that could pierce a hide that tough and go through to the flesh.
Now we had to get moving, because the second the alligator was harpooned it dived; we took our three paddles and rapidly made for the shore. You really have to hop to it, because if you give the alligator time it comes to the surface again, rushes for you and with one sweep of its tail capsizes the canoe, turning the hunters into a quarry for the other alligators, who've been warned by the turmoil. You have scarcely reached the bank before you jump out, rush for a tree and loop the rope around 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.