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, Señora_. 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 Latécoère 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 protégée; 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 was deeply in debt, and if he set about working to pay his creditors, it would take him years and years. So he decided to slip off to South America. It wasn't hard for him to persuade Rita to go with him, to make this wonderful voyage to a land of milk and honey where you could just shovel up the diamonds, gold and oil. They entrusted their little girl to Rita's mother, and Rita, full of adventurous dreams, waited impatiently to board the big ship her husband had told her about.
The "big ship" was a fishing boat thirty-six feet long and sixteen wide. The captain, a somewhat piratical Estonian, had agreed to ship them to Venezuela without papers, along with a dozen other irregulars. Price: five hundred pounds. And it was in the crew's quarters of this old fishing boat that Rita made the voy age, packed in with ten Spanish republicans escaping from Franco, one Portuguese escaping from Salazar, and two women, one a twenty-five-year-old German, the captain's mistress, and the other a fat Spanish woman, the wife of Antonio the cook.
A hundred and twelve days to reach Venezuela! With a long stop at the Cape Verde islands, because the boat leaked and during one spell of rough weather very nearly sank.
While it was being repaired in dry dock, the passengers slept ashore. Rita's husband no longer trusted the boat. He said it was madness to launch out into the Atlantic in a rotten tub like that. Rita put courage into him: the captain was a Viking, she said, and the Vikings were the best seamen in the world; they could have total confidence in him.
Then an incredible piece of news. The Spaniards told Rita that the captain was a double crosser, that he had made a deal with another group of passengers and that he was going to take advantage of their being ashore to set off for Dakar by night, leaving them there. Instant turmoil! They warned the authorities and went to the ship in a body. The captain was surrounded and threatened; the Spaniards had knives. Calm returned when the captain promised they would go to Venezuela. In view of what had happened, he agreed to remain under the constant supervision of one of the passengers. The next day they left Cape Verde and faced the Atlantic.
Twenty-five days later they came in sight of Los Testigos Islands, the most outlying point of Venezuela. They forgot everything, the storms, the sharks' fins, the backs of the playful dolphins rushing at the boat, the weevils in the flour and the business at Cape Verde. Rita was so happy she forgot the captain had meant to betray them and she hugged him, kissing him on both cheeks. And once again they heard the song the Spaniards had made up during the crossing; because wherever there are Spaniards there is always a guitar and a singer:
A Venezuela nos vamos
Aunque no hay carretena.
A Venezuela nos vamos
En un bar quito de vela.
(We're going to Venezuela, although there is no road. 'We're going to Venezuela, in a little boat with a sail.)
On April 16, 1948, after a voyage of 4,900 miles, they reached La Guaira, the port of Caracas, fifteen miles from the city.
To call aboard the health authorities, the captain used a flag made out of a petticoat belonging to Zenda, the German girl; and when the passengers saw the Venezuelan patrol boat, all their sun-cooked faces beamed with joy. This was Venezuela: they had won!
Rita had held out splendidly, although she had lost twenty pounds. Never a complaint nor a sign of fear, though from time to time there had been plenty to worry about in that cockleshell right out in the full Atlantic! She had only faltered once, and even then no one had known about it. When she left Tangiers she had packed the one book she should have left behind-Jules Verne's _Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea_. One day, in really tough weather, she had been unable to bear it anymore and had tossed the book overboard: night after night she had been dreaming that a giant octopus was dragging their boat, like the _Nautilus_, down to the bottom.
A few hours after their arrival, the Venezuelan authorities agreed to allow them into the country, although not one of them had any papers. "We'll give you identity cards later on." They sent two who were ill to the hospital, and they clothed, housed and fed the others for several weeks. Then each found himself a job.
That was Rita's story.
Wasn't it strange that I should have met the woman who had filled my horrible solitude in the Reclusion for two years, and then that this woman should have come here just as I had done, making a break-although indeed a very different kind of break? Without papers, too, and, like me, generously treated by this nation?
Nothing happened to disturb our happiness for more than three months. Then one fine day, unknown hands opened the safe of the Richmond Company, for which I was still organizing and running the geological expeditions. How the local pigs found out about my past I never could discover. But what is certain is that I was pulled in as suspect number one and shut up in the Maracaibo prison.
Naturally enough, Rita was questioned about me, and she suddenly learned everything I had hidden from her-learned it from the pigs. Interpol had given them all the information. But still she did not leave me in the lurch, and while I was in prison she helped me as much as she possibly could. She paid for a lawyer, who got me out within two weeks-charge dismissed. My complete innocence was established; but the damage had been done.
When she came to fetch me from the prison, Rita was deeply moved, but she was very sad, too. She did not look at me the same way as before. I sensed that she was really frightened-that she was hesitating about taking up with me again. I had the feeling that everything was lost. And I wasn't wrong, because right away she asked, "Why did you lie to me?"
No, I must not, must not lose her. I'd never have another chance like this. Once again I had to fight with all my strength. "Rita, you've just got to believe me. When I met you, I liked you so much, I loved you so much right away, that I was afraid you wouldn't want to see me anymore if I told you the truth about my past."
"You lied to me… you lied to me," she kept repeating, over and over again. "And I who thought you were a decent man."
She was crazy with fear, as if she were living in a nightmare. Yes, she's afraid, man, _she's afraid of you_.
"And who's to say I can't be a decent guy? I believe that like everybody else I deserve a chance of becoming good, honest and happy. Don't forget, Rita, that for fourteen years I had to fight against the most horrible prison system in the world. I love you with all my heart, Rita; and I love you not with my past but with my present. You must believe me: the reason I didn't tell you the story of my life was just that I was afraid of losing you. I said to myself that although I'd lived crooked before, my future with you would be the complete opposite. I saw the whole of the road we were to travel together, hand in hand, and I saw it all clean and straightforward, all in lovely colors. I swear it's true, Rita, I swear by the head of my father, whom I've made to suffer so much." Then I cracked, and I began to weep.
"Is it true, Henri? Is that really how you saw things?"
I got a hold on myself; my voice was hoarse and broken as I replied, "It has to be like that, because now in our hearts that's the way it is. You and me-we have no past. All that matters is the present and the future."
Rita took me in her arms. "Henri, don't cry anymore. Listen to the breeze-it's our future that is beginning. But swear to me that you'll never do another dishonest thing. Promise you'll never hide anything from me anymore and that there'll be nothing dirty in our lives to be kept hidden."
We held one another tight, and I made my oath. I felt my life's greatest chance was at stake. I saw that I should never have hidden from this brave, honest woman that I was a man with a life sentence, a fugitive from the penal settlement.
So I told her everything. It was all on the move inside me, even the idea that had been obsessing me since 1931-my revenge. I decided to lay it at her feet-to give it up as a proof of my sincerity. "To prove how much I love you, Rita, I offer you the greatest sacrifice I can make. From this moment on, I give up my revenge. The prosecutor, the pigs, the false witness, all those people who made me suffer so-let them die in their beds. To fully deserve a woman like you, I must-not forgive, because that's impossible-but put out of my mind this desire to punish mercilessly the men who tossed me into the prison cells. Here before you is a completely new man; the old one is dead."
Rita must have thought over this conversation all day, because that evening, after work, she said to me, "And what about your father? Since you're now worthy of him, write to him as soon as you can."
"Since 1933 neither he nor I have heard from one another. Since October, 1933, to be exact. I used to see the convicts being given their letters, those wretched letters, opened by the screws, in which you could say nothing. I used to see the despair on the faces of the poor guys who had no mail at all, and I could make out the disappointment of the ones who read a longed-for letter and didn't find what they had hoped for in it. I've seen them tear letters to pieces and stamp on them; and I've seen tears fall on the ink and blur the writing. And I could imagine just what those damned letters from the penal settlement might mean when they got to the families outside-the Guiana stamp would make the postman and the neighbors and the people in the village café say, 'The jailbird has written. There's a letter, so he's still alive.' I could guess the shame of taking it from the postman, and the pain when the postman asked, 'Is your son getting along all right?' So I wrote my sister Yvonne just one letter, the only letter I wrote from prison, saying, 'Never expect to hear from me, and never write. Like Alfred de Vigny's wolf, I shall know how to die without howling.'"
"All that belongs to the past, Henri. You'll write to your father?"
"Yes. Tomorrow."
"No. Now-at once."
A long letter set off for France, just telling my father what could be told without wounding him. I described no part of my sufferings; only my resurrection and my life at present. The letter came back: "Moved without leaving an address."
Dear Lord above, who could tell where my father had gone to hide his shame because of me? People were so evil they might have made life impossible for him.
Rita's reaction came at once. "I'll go to France and look for your father." I stared at her. She went on, "Give up your exploring job; it's too dangerous in any case. While I'm away, you'll run the hotel."
Not only was she ready to plunge unhesitatingly into the dangers of this long journey all by herself, but she had so much trust in me-in me, the ex-convict-that she would leave everything in my hands. She knew she could rely on me.
Rita had only rented the hotel, with an option to purchase. So to keep it from slipping out of our hands, the first thing to do was buy it. Now I really learned what it meant, struggling to make one's place in life by honest means.
I got the Richmond Company to let me go, and with the six thousand bolivars I received, and Rita's savings, we gave the owner 50 percent of the price. And then began a positive battle day after day, and night after night, to make money and meet our installments. Both she and I worked like crazy eighteen hours and sometimes nineteen hours a day. We were united by a wonderful will to win at all costs and in the shortest possible time. Neither she nor I ever mentioned our weariness. I did the buying and helped with the cooking and received the guests. We were everywhere at once, always smiling. We died on our feet, and then we began again the next morning.
To make a little more money, I filled a two-wheeled cart with jackets and trousers to sell in the Plaza Baralt market. These clothes were manufacturers' rejects, which meant I could buy them very cheaply at the factory. Under the blazing sun I reeled off my spiel, bawling like a jackass and putting so much energy into it that one day, tweaking a jacket to show how strong it was, I split it from top to bottom. It was all very well explaining that I was the strongest man in Maracaibo, but I sold precious few that morning. I was in the market from eight until noon. At half past twelve I hurried to the hotel to help at waiting in the restaurant.
The Plaza Baralt was the commercial heart of Maracaibo, one of the liveliest places in the town. At the far end stood the church, at the other, one of the most picturesque markets in the world, a market where you would find anything you could possibly think of in the way of meat, game, seafood and shellfish, not forgetting big green iguanas-a lovely dish-with their claws tied so they could not escape; and there were alligator, tortoise, and turtle eggs, armadillos and _morocoys_, a kind of land tortoise, all sorts of fruit and fresh hearts of palm. The market of this ebullient town swarmed with people in the scorching sun-skins of every color, eyes of every shape, from the Chinese slit to the Negro round.
Rita and I loved Maracaibo, although it was one of the hottest places in Venezuela. This colonial town had a lovable, warmhearted population that lived happily. They had a musical way of speaking; they were fine, generous people with a little Spanish blood and all the best qualities of the Indians. The men were fiery creatures; they had a very strong sense of friendship, and to those they liked they could be real brothers. The Maracucho-the inhabitant of Maracaibo -did not much care for anything that came from Caracas. He complained that they provided the whole of Venezuela with gold by means of their oil, and that the people of the capital always overlooked him: the Maracucho felt like a wealthy man who was being treated as a poor relation by the very people he had enriched. The women were pretty and rather small: faithful, good daughters and good mothers. The whole town seethed with life and the noise of living, and everywhere there was brilliant color-the clothes, the houses, the fruit, everything. Everywhere, too, there was movement, business, activity. The Plaza Baralt was full of street traders and small-time smugglers who scarcely bothered to hide the liqueurs, spirits or cigarettes they were selling. It was all more or less among friends: the policeman was only a few yards away, but he would turn his back just long enough for the bottles of whisky, the French cognac or the American cigarettes to pass from one basket to another.
Running a hotel was no trifle. When Rita first came, she made a decision completely opposed to the customs of the country. The Venezuelan customers were used to eating a substantial breakfast-corn muffins (_arepas_), ham and eggs, bacon, cream cheese. And as the guests were paying full room and board, the day's menu was written up on a slate. The first day Rita wiped the whole list out and in her pointed hand wrote, "Breakfast: black coffee or café au lait, bread and butter." Well, what do you think of that? the guests must have said; by the end of the week half of them had changed their quarters.
Then I turned up. Rita had made some alterations, but my arrival brought a downright revolution.
First decree: double the prices.
Second decree: French cooking.
Third decree: air conditioning throughout.
People were astonished to find air conditioning in all the rooms and in the restaurant of a colonial house turned into a hotel. The clientele changed. First came commercial travelers; then a Basque settled in: he sold "Swiss" Omega watches manufactured entirely in Peru, and he ran his business from his room, selling only to retailers, who hawked them from door to door and all through the oil fields. Although the hotel was safe, he was so suspicious that he had three big locks put on his door at his own expense. And in spite of the locks he noticed that from time to time a watch disappeared. He thought his room was haunted until the day he found that, in fact, there was a female thief, our bitch Bouclette. She was a poodle, and so cunning she would creep in without a sound, and right under his nose would rip off a strap for pure fun, whether it had a watch attached or not. So here he was, shrieking and bawling, saying I had trained Bouclette to steal his things. I laughed till I could laugh no more, and after two or three rums managed to convince him that I'd had nothing to do with his lousy watches and that I would really be ashamed of selling such phony stuff. Comforted and easy in his mind, he shut himself up in his room again.
Among our guests there were people of every possible kind. Maracaibo was full to overflowing, and it was almost impossible to find a room. A flock of Neapolitans went from house to house, swindling the citizens by selling lengths of cloth folded so there seemed to be enough for four suits when in fact you could only make two. They were dressed as sailors and carried big bags on their shoulders, they combed the town and the country round, above all the oil fields. I don't know how these sharp-witted creatures discovered our hotel. As all the rooms were full, there was only one solution-for them to sleep in the patio. Every evening they came back about seven and had a shower. They had dinner at the hotel, so we learned to make spaghetti _a la napolitaine_. They spent their money freely, and they were good customers.
At night, we brought out iron bedsteads, and the two little maids helped Rita make them up in the patio. As I made the Neapolitans pay in advance, there was the same argument every night-paying the price of a room for sleeping in the open was too much. And every night I told them that on the contrary it was perfectly logical and completely fair. To bring out the beds, put on the sheets, the blankets and the pillows and then take them all in again in the morning was a huge amount of work- beyond price. "And don't you go on beefing too much, or I'll put up your rent. Because here I am, literally slaying myself shifting things in and out-all I make you pay is the cost of moving."
They would pay up and we would all have a laugh. But although they were making a lot of money, the next evening the whole thing would start all over again. They beefed even more one night when it rained and they had to run in with all their clothes and their mattresses and sleep in the restaurant.
A woman who kept a brothel came to see me. She had a very big house two or three miles from Maracaibo, at the place called La Cabeza de Toro: the brothel was the Tibiri-Tabara. Eléonore was her name, and she was an enormous mass of flesh: intelligent; very fine eyes. More than a hundred and twenty women worked at her place-only at night.
"There are some French girls who want to get out," she told me. "They don't like spending twenty-four hours a day in the brothel. Working from nine in the evening until four the next morning, that's fine. But they want to be able to eat well and sleep in peace in comfortable rooms away from the noise."
I made a deal with Eléonore: the French and Italian girls could come to our hotel. We could raise the price by ten bolivars a day without worrying: they would be only too happy to be able to stay at the Vera Cruz with French people. We were supposed to take six, but after a month, I don't quite know how, we had twice as many.
Rita laid down iron-hard rules. They were all young and all lovely, and Rita absolutely forbade them to receive any male at the hotel, even in the courtyard or the dining room. But there was no trouble at all; in the hotel these girls were like real ladies. In everyday life they were proper, respectable women who knew how to behave. In the evening, taxis came for them, and they were transformed-gorgeously dressed and made up. Discreet, without any noise, they went off to the "factory," as they called it. Now and then a pimp would come from Paris or Caracas, drawing as little attention to himself as possible. His girl could see him at the hotel, of course. Once he had made his haul, collected his money and made his girl happy, he would go off again as quietly as he had come.
There were often little things that were good for a laugh. A visiting pimp took me aside one day and asked to have his room changed. His woman had already found another girl who was willing to switch. Reason: his neighbor was a full-blooded, wellequipped Italian, and every night, when his girl came back, this Italian made love to her at least once and sometimes twice. My pimp was not yet forty, and the Italian must have been fifty-five.
"Man, I just can't keep up with Rital, if you follow me. There's no getting anywhere near that kind of a performance. My broad and me being next door, we hear the lot-groans, shrieks, the whole works. And as I can barely make it with my chick once a week, I ask you to imagine what I look like. She doesn't believe in the headache excuse anymore; and of course she makes comparisons. So if it doesn't put you out, do this for me."
I kept my laughter inside me, and moved by such an unanswerable argument, I switched his room.
Another time, at two o'clock in the morning, Eléonore called me up. The cop on duty had found a Frenchman who could not speak a word of Spanish perched in a tree opposite the brothel. The cop asked him how he came to be in that curious position-was he there to steal or what?-and all the fellow answered was "Enrique of the Vera Cruz." I jumped into my car and darted out to the Tibiri-Tabara.
I recognized the fellow right away. He was from Lyons and he had already been to the hotel. He was sitting there, and the madam, too; standing in front of them were two grim-faced cops. I translated what he told me-he put it very briefly. "No, the gentleman wasn't in the tree with the idea of doing anything wrong. It's just that he is in love with one of the women, but he won't say which. He climbed up to admire her in secret, because she won't have anything to do with him. It's nothing serious, as you see. Anyhow, I know him, and he's a good citizen."
We drank a bottle of champagne; he paid, and I told him to leave the change on the table-someone would surely pick it up. Then I drove him back in my car. "But what the hell were you doing, perched up in that tree? Have you gone crazy, or are you jealous of your girl?"
"It's not that. The trouble is the take has dropped off without any reason for it. She's one of the prettiest there and she earns more than the others. So I thought I'd come and watch how often she went to work without her knowing. That way, it seemed to me, I'd soon find out if she was holding out on me and keeping back my money."
Although I was sore at having been pulled out of bed in the middle of the night on account of a pimp, I roared with laughter at his explanation. This "tree-perched pimp," as I called him from that time on, left for Caracas the next day. It was no longer worth his while keeping a check. The whole business had made a lot of noise in the brothel; like everybody else, his woman knew all about it, but she was the only one who knew why her fancy man had chosen just that tree-it was dead opposite her room.
We worked hard, but the hotel was a cheerful place, and we had fun all the time. There were some evenings, after the girls had gone off to their factory, when we made the dead speak. We all sat at a round table with our hands flat on the top, and each one called up the spirit he wanted to question. It was a goodlooking woman of about thirty, a painter, who started these seances-she was a Hungarian, I think. She called up her husband every evening, and of course, with my foot under the table, I helped his spirit reply; otherwise we'd be there yet.
She said her husband was tormenting her. Why? She couldn't tell. At last, one night the spirit came through by means of the table, and after that he never left it quiet. He accused her of having round heels. We all exclaimed that that was very serious, and that this jealous spirit might take a horrible revenge; all the more so as she was perfectly willing to admit that in fact her heels were quite round. What was to be done about it? We discussed it very gravely and we told her there was only one thing to do: at full moon she was to provide herself with a brand-new machete, stand stark naked in the middle of the patio with her hair down and no makeup on, having washed all over with yellow soap, but with no trace of scent and no jewels, clean from head to foot. Nothing but the machete in her hand. When the moon was right over the patio, casting no shadow except directly beneath her, she was to slash the air exactly twenty-one times.
It worked perfectly, and the night after the exorcism (we had laughed fit to burst, hidden behind the shutters) Rita said the joke had lasted long enough; so the table replied that from now on her late husband would leave her in peace and her heels could be as round as she liked, always provided she never slashed the air with a sword at full moon anymore, because it hurt him too much.
We had another poodle called Minou, quite a big poodle, which had been given to us by a French guest who was passing through Maracaibo. Minou was always perfectly clipped and brushed, and the stiff, thick hair on the top of his head was cut in the shape of a tall, impressive fez. He had puffed-out thighs, shaved legs, a Chaplin moustache and a little pointed beard. The Venezuelans were astonished at the spectacle, and often one of them would overcome his shyness and ask what kind of animal this strange beast might be.
Minou very nearly brought about a serious clash with the Church. The Vera Cruz stood in the Calle Venezuela; our Street led to a church, and processions often went along it. Now Minou loved sitting at the hotel door to watch the people walking about. He never barked, whatever happened in the street. But although he did not bark, he did cause a sensation; and one day the priest and the choirboys belonging to a procession found themselves all alone while, fifty yards behind, the faithful of Maracaibo stood massed in front of the hotel, gazing at this extraordinary object. They had forgotten to follow the procession. Questions ran through the group, and they jostled to see Minou close up; some were of the opinion that the unknown creature might very well be the soul of a repentant sinner, since it had sat there so quietly, watching a priest and his choirboys all dressed in red go by singing heartily. At last the priest realized that things were very silent behind, and turning around he saw there was no one left. He came striding back, crimson with fury and bawling out his parishioners for their lack of respect for the ceremony. Alarmed, they fell back into line and marched off. But I noticed that some who had been most struck by the sight walked backward so as not to lose a minute of Minou. After that we kept an eye on the Maracaibo paper, _Panorama_, for the date and time when a procession should come along our street, so that we could tie him up in the patio.
It seems this was the season for incidents with the clergy. Two French girls left Eléonore's brothel and the hotel; they had made up their minds to be independent and set up a little "house" in the center of the town where they would just work by themselves, the two of them. It was quite a good scheme, because this way the customers would not have to get their cars and drive six miles there and back to see them. To get themselves known, they had cards printed, saying "Julie and Nana: conscientious work" and the address. They handed them out in the town; but instead of giving them directly to the men, they often slipped them under the windshield wipers of parked cars.
They had the bad luck to put two, one under each wiper, on the car belonging to the bishop of Maracaibo. This set off a hell of an explosion. To show the profane nature of their action, the paper _ La Religion _ published a picture of the card. But the bishop and the clergy were indulgent: the little brothel was not closed, and the ladies were only begged to be more discreet. Anyhow, there was no point in going on handing out the cards; after the free publicity in _ La Religion _, a very considerable number of customers hurried to the given address. Indeed, the crowd was so great that to provide a reasonable excuse for this troop of men at their door, the girls asked a hot-dog seller to wheel his cart quite close, so it would look as if the line was standing there to buy a _perro caliente_.
That was the picturesque side of life at the hotel. But we weren't living on a planet far out in space; we were living it in Venezuela, and we were involved with the country's economic and political ups and downs. In 1948 politics were not so peaceful. Gallegos and Betancourt had been governing the country since 1945, in the first attempt at a democratic régime in the history of Venezuela. On November 13, 1948, scarcely three months after I had set to work with Rita to buy the hotel, there came the first shot directed against the régime. A major called Thomas Mendoza had the nerve to stage an uprising all by himself. He failed.
On the twenty-fourth of the same month the soldiers seized power in a coup d'etat run with clockwise precision: there were almost no victims. Gallegos, the president of the republic and a distinguished writer, was forced to resign. Betancourt, a real political lion, took refuge in the Colombian embassy.
In Maracaibo we lived through hours of very tense anxiety. There was one moment when all at once we heard a passionate voice on the radio crying, "Workers, come out into the streets! They want to steal your freedom from you, close down your unions and impose a military dictatorship by force! Everybody occupy the squares, the. -." Click, and it went dead, the mike snatched from the brave militant's hands. Then a calm, grave voice: "Citizens! The army has withdrawn the power from the men to whom they entrusted it after having dismissed General Medina, because they made an unworthy use of their authority. Do not be afraid: we guarantee the life and property of one and all, without exception. Long live the army! Long live the revolution!"
That was all I saw of a revolution which caused no blood to flow at all; and when we woke up next day, there was the membership of the military junta in the papers: three colonels-Delgado Chalbaud as president, Perez Jiménez and Llovera Páez.
At first, we were afraid this new régime would mean the suppression of the rights given by the former one. But nothing of the kind. Life went on just the same, and we scarcely noticed the change of government, except that the key posts were taken over by soldiers.
Then two years later came the assassination of Delgado Chalbaud. A very ugly business with two conflicting explanations. First theory: they meant to murder all three and he was just the first to be killed. Second theory: one or both of the other colonels had had him put out of the way. The truth was never known. The murderer was arrested, and he was shot and killed while he was being transferred to prison-a lucky shot that prevented any embarrassing statement. From that day on Perez Jiménez was the strong man of the régime, and he officially became dictator in 1952.
So our life went on, and although we never went out for any fun or entertainment or even a drive, this life and our eagerness to work filled us with a wonderful joy. For what we were building up by our labors was our home-to-be, the home where we would live happily, having earned it ourselves, united as two people can be only when they love one another as we did.
And into this home would come Clotilde, Rita's daughter, who would be mine, and my father, who would be theirs. And to this house my friends would come, to catch their breath awhile when they were in need. And in this home filled with happiness we would be so thoroughly contented that never again should I think of taking my revenge upon those who had caused so much suffering to me and my people.
At last the day came-we had won. In December, 1950, a beautiful document was drawn up at the lawyer's, and we became the owners of the hotel for good and all.