Now events moved very rapidly. As a Venezuelan I could have a passport, and I got one right away. I trembled with emotion when they handed it to me, and trembled again when I got it back from the Spanish embassy with an elegant three months' visa. I trembled when they stamped it as I went aboard the _Napoli_, the splendid liner that was taking Rita and me to Europe, to Barcelona. I trembled when the Guardia Civil gave it back to me in Spain, with the entrance visa. This passport, which had made me the citizen of a country once more, was so precious that Rita sewed a zipper on each side of my inside coat pockets so that I could not lose it, whatever happened.
Everything was beautiful during this voyage, even the sea when it was rough, even the rain when it came driving across the deck, even the ill-tempered guy in charge of the hold, who unwillingly let me go below to make sure the big Lincoln we had just bought was properly stowed. Everything was beautiful because our hearts were on holiday. Whether we were in the dining room, at the bar, or in the saloon, and whether there were people around us or not, our eyes kept meeting so we could speak without anyone's hearing-because we were going to Spain, right up by the French border, and we were going for a reason I hadn't dared to hope for these many years.
The purpose of this hurriedly prepared voyage was to let me see my family once more, on Spanish territory out of reach of the French police. It was twenty-six years since I had seen them. We were going to spend a whole month together, and they were coming as my guests.
Day after day went by, and I often went to the bow, spending a long time there, as if this part of the ship were closer to our destination. We had passed Gibraltar; we had lost sight of land again; we were getting very near.
1 settled myself comfortably in a deckchair, and my eyes tried to pierce the horizon where any minute now the land of Europe would appear. The land of Spain, joined to that of France.
1930-1956: twenty-six years. I had been twenty-four then; I was fifty now. A whole lifetime. My heart beat violently when at last I made out the coast. The liner ran on fast, carving a huge V in the sea, a V whose far ends spread and spread until gradually they vanished and melted into the ocean.
When I left France aboard _ La Martinière _, the accursed ship that was taking us to Guiana-yes, when she steamed away from the coast, I did not see it: I did not see the land, _my land_, drawing gradually away from me forever (as I thought then), because we were in iron cages at the bottom of the hold.
And now here I was with my new passport in the pocket of my yachtsman's blazer, well protected by Rita's zipper-the passport of my new country, my other identity. Venezuelan? You, a Frenchman, born of French parents-of schoolteachers, and from the Ardèche into the bargain?
I was perhaps five when my grandfather Thierry bought me a beautiful mechanical horse. How splendid he was, my lovely stallion! Almost red; and such a mane! It was black, real horsehair, and it always hung down on the right side. I pedaled so hard that on a level surface our maid had to run to keep up with me; then she would push me up the little slope I called the hill; and so, after another level stretch, I reached the nursery school.
Madame Bonnot, the headmistress and a friend of Mama's, wel. comed me in front of the school; she stroked the long curly hair that came down to my shoulders like a girl's and said to Louis the caretaker, "Open the door as wide as it will go so that Riri can ride in on his splendid horse."
I pedaled with all my strength and flew into the playground. First I made a great sweep all around it and then I gently dismounted, holding the bridle so it would not roll away. I kissed Thérèse, the maid, who handed Madame Bonnot my sandwiches. And all the other boys and girls, my friends, came to admire and stroke this wonder, the one and only mechanical horse in these two little villages, Pont-d'Ucel and Pont-d'Aubenas.
Every day before I set out, Mama told me to lend it to each one in turn; this I found rather hard, but still I did it. When the bell rang, Louis the caretaker put the horse away under the lean-to, and once we were in line we marched into school, singing, "_Nous n'irons plus au bois_."
I know my way of telling my story will make some people smile; but you have to understand that when I am talking about my childhood it is not a man of sixty-five who is writing but a kid-it is Riri of Pont-d'Ucel who writes, so deeply is that childhood imprinted on his mind, and he writes with the words he used then.
My childhood… A garden with gooseberries that my sisters and I ate before they were ripe, and pears that we were forbidden to pick before Papa said we could. (By crawling like a Red Indian so that no one could see me from a window in the apartment I had my fill from the pear tree, and a bellyache afterward.)
I was eight, but still I would often go to sleep on my father's lap or in my mother's arms. Sometimes, when she tucked me into my little bed, I would half wake up, put my arms around her neck and hold her tight, and we would stay like that for what seemed to me a long, long time, our breath mingling; and at last I would go to sleep without knowing when she left me.
How beautiful Mama was! Tall, slim, always elegant. You ought to have seen how she played the piano, even when I knelt on a chair behind her music stool and closed her eyes with my little hands. Mama was never meant to be a schoolmistress. My grandfather was very rich, and Mama and her sister Léontine had been to the most expensive schools in Avignon. It was not Mama's fault that my grandfather Thierry had liked living high; her father was very kind, but because he had loved giving splendid parties in Avignon and meeting too many pretty farmers' wives, Mama had no dowry, and she was forced to earn her own living.
My grandfather was terrific. He had a little goatee and a snowwhite moustache. Hand in hand we went round the farms in the morning, and as he was secretary of the _mairie_ ("He has to earn his tobacco money," said Tante Léontine), he always had papers to take to the peasants or to fetch from their homes. I noticed how right my aunt was when she said he always lingered at a certain farm where the woman of the house was good-looking. I was delighted, because it was the only farm where they let me ride the little donkey and where I could meet Mireille, a girl of my age who was much better at playing papa and mama than the girl next door at Pont-d'Ucel.
Eight, and already I was beginning to fool around. Secretly I went to swim in the Ardèche. I had learned by myself in the canal; it was deep, but it was only five yards across. We had no bathing suits, of course, so we swam naked, seven or eight of us, all boys together. Oh, those sunny days in the water of my Ardèche! The trout we caught with our hands! I never went home until I was quite dry.
1914. The war, and Papa was called up. We went with him as far as the train. He was going with the Chasseurs Alpins, and he would soon be back. He said to us, "Be good children and always obey your mother. And you girls must help with the housework, because she is going to look after both classes, mine and hers, all by herself. This war won't last long; everybody says so." And standing there on the platform, the four of us watched the train go, with my father leaning half out of the window to wave at us a little longer. Those four years of war had no influence on our happiness at home. We drew a little closer to one another. I slept in the big bed with Mama; I took the place of my father, who was fighting at the front.
Four years in the history of the world is nothing. Four years for a kid of eight was an eternity.
I was growing fast; we played at soldiers and at battles. I would come home covered with bruises and with my clothes torn, but whether I had won or lost I always came home happy, never crying. Mama bandaged the scrapes and put raw meat on a black eye. She would scold me a little, but gently, never shouting. Her reproaches were more like a whisper. "Be kind, little Riri, your mama is tired. This class of sixty children is utterly exhausting. I am completely worn out, you see; it's more than I can manage. Darling, you must help me by being good and obedient." It always ended with kisses and a promise to behave well.
Somebody was stealing our wood, stacked under the lean-to in the playground; and at night Mama was frightened. I cuddled close, putting my child's arm round her to make her feel that I was a protection. "Don't be afraid, Mama; I'm the man of the house and I'm big enough to defend you." I took down Papa's gun and slipped two buckshot cartridges into it-he used them for wild boar.
One night Mama woke up, shook me and whispered in my ear, "I heard the thieves. They made a noise, pulling out a log." She was sweating.
"Don't be afraid, Mama."
I got up very quietly, with the gun in my hands. With infinite care I opened the window; it squeaked a little, and I held my breath. Then, pulling the shutter toward me with one hand, I unhooked it with the barrel; holding the butt against my shoulder, ready to fire on the thieves, I pushed the shutter. It opened without a sound. The moon lit up the courtyard as though it were day, and I saw perfectly well that there was nobody at all in the playground. The heap of wood was still neatly arranged. "There's no one, Mama; come and see." And, clinging to one another, we stayed at the window for some time, both comforted by seeing there were no thieves, and Mama happy at finding that her little boy was brave.
In spite of all this happiness, I would sometimes behave badly. A cat tied by the tail to a front-door bell; the water bailiff's bicycle thrown over the bridge into the Ardèche-he had gone down to the river to catch poachers fishing with a net. And other things… sometimes we hunted birds with slings; and twice, when I was between ten and eleven, little Riquet Debannes and I went off into the country with Papa's gun to shoot a rabbit Riquet had seen skipping about in a field. Getting the gun in and out of the house without my mother's noticing, and twice at that, was a tremendous feat.
1917. Papa was wounded. He had many little shell splinters in his head, but his life was not in danger. The news came by the Red Cross. Twenty-four hours passed. Mama taught her class as usual-nobody knew a thing. I watched my mother, and I admired her. Normally I was in the front row in class; that day I sat at the back to keep an eye on all the pupils, determined to step in if any of them fooled about during lessons. By half past three Mama was at the end of her rope; I knew it, because we should have had natural science, but she went out, writing an arithmetic problem on the blackboard and saying, "I must go out for a few minutes: do this sum in your arithmetic books."
I went out after her; she was leaning against the mimosa just to the right of the gate. She was crying; my poor dear mama had given in.
I hugged her tight; and of course _I_ did not cry. I tried to comfort her, and when she said to me, sobbing, "Your poor papa is wounded," just as if I did not know, my kid's heart found this reply, "So much the better, Mama. This way the war is over for him and we can be sure he'll come back alive." And all at once Mama realized that I was right.
"Why, that's perfectly true! You're quite right, darling; Papa will come back to us alive!"
A kiss on my forehead, a kiss on my cheek, and we went back to the classroom hand in hand.
The Spanish coast was quite visible, and I could make out the specks of white that must be houses. The coast was becoming more distinct, just like those holidays in 1917 that we spent at Saint-Chamas, where Papa had been sent to guard the powderworks. His wounds were not very serious, but the minute splinters could not be removed yet. He was classed as an auxiliary; no more front line for him.
We were all together again, full of happiness.
Mama was radiant: we had got right out of this horrible war; but for other people it was still going on, and she said to us, "Darlings, you must not be selfish and spend all your days running about and picking jujubes; you must set aside three hours a day for thinking of others."
So we went with her to the hospital, where every morning she looked after the patients and cheered them up. Each of us had to do something useful-push a badly wounded man in his wheelchair, lead a blind patient about, make soft bandages, write letters or listen to what the men confined to bed had to say about their families.
It was when we were going home in the train that Mama felt so ill at Vogue. We went to my father's sister at Lanas, about twenty miles from Aubenas-to Tante Antoinette, who was a schoolmistress, too. We were kept away from Mama, because the doctor's diagnosis was some unknown infectious disease, presumably caught when she was looking after the Indochinese at Saint. Chamas. My sisters went to the Aubenas high school as boarders and I to the boys' high school.
It seemed that Mama was getting better. But in spite of everything I was sad, and one Sunday I refused to go out for a walk with the others. I was alone, and I threw a knife at a plane tree; almost every time it stuck there in the bark.
That was how I was spending my time, in the road almost opposite the school, low-spirited and depressed. The road came up from the Aubenas station, some five hundred yards away. I heard a train whistle as it came in, and then again as it pulled out. I was not expecting anyone, so there was no point in looking down the road to see the people who had got out.
Tirelessly I threw my knife, on and on. My steel watch showed that it was five o'clock. The sun was low now, and it was getting in my eyes; so I changed sides. And it was then that I saw death coming silently toward me.
Death's messengers, their heads bowed, their faces hidden behind black crepe veils almost down to the ground: I knew them well in spite of their funeral trappings-Tante Ontine, Tante Antoinette, my father's mother, and then behind them the men, as though they were using the women as a screen. My father, bent almost double, and my two grandfathers, all of them in black.
I did not go toward them; my blood was all gone, my heart had stopped, my eyes so longed to weep they could not bring out a single tear. The group stopped more than ten yards from me. They were afraid-or rather they were ashamed: I was certain they would sooner be dead than face me with what I already knew, because without having to utter a sound their black clothes told me, "Your mother has died."
Papa was the first to come forward; he managed to stand almost straight. His poor face was a picture of the most desperate suffering and his tears fell without ceasing; still I did not move. He did not open his arms to me; he knew very well I could not stir. At last he reached me and embraced me without a word. Then at last I burst into tears as I heard the words, "She died saying your name."
The war was over; Papa came home. A man called to see him, and they ate cheese and drank a few glasses of red wine. They enumerated the dead of our region, and then the visitor said a dreadful thing: "As for us, we came out of this war all right, eh, Monsieur Charrière? And your brother-in-law, too. We may have won nothing, but at least we lost nothing either."
I went out before he left. Night had fallen. I waited for the man to go by and then I threw a stone with my sling, hitting him full on the back of the head. He went bellowing into a neighbor's house to have his wound dressed-it was bleeding. He did not understand who could have flung the stone at him, or why. He had no idea that he had been struck for having forgotten the most important victim, the one whose loss could least be mended, in his list of the war dead. My mother.
No, we had not come out of this accursed war all right. Far from it.
Every year when the new term began, I went back as a boarder to the high school at Crest, in the Drome, where I was preparing for the entrance exam to the Aix-en-Provence _Arts et Métiers_. * [* Roughly equivalent to a college of industrial design and engineering.]
At school I grew very tough and violent. In rugby I tackled hard: I asked no favors and I certainly gave none either.
Six years now I had been a boarder at Crest, six years of being an excellent pupil, particularly in mathematics; but also six years with no marks for good behavior. I was in all the roughest stuff that went on. Once or twice a month, always on Thursdays, I had a fight: Thursday was the day the boys' parents came to see them.
The mothers came to take their sons out to lunch, and then, if it was a fine afternoon, they would stroll about with their boys under the chestnut trees in our playground. Every week I swore I would not watch from the library window; but it was no good. I just had to settle down in a place from where I could see everything. And from my window I discovered that there were two sorts of attitudes, both of which made me furiously angry.
There were some boys whose mothers were plain or badly dressed or looked like peasants. Those fellows had the air of being ashamed of them, the swine, the dirty little creeps! It was perfectly obvious. Instead of going right round the courtyard or walking from one end to the other, they would sit on a bench in the corner and never move. The rascals had already got some idea of what educated, distinguished people were like, and they wanted to forget their origins before they were _Arts et Metiers_ engineers.
It wasn't hard to pick a quarrel with that type. If I saw one send his embarrassing mother away early and come into the library, I would lay into him at once. "Say, Pierrot, why did you make your mother go so soon?"
"She was in a hurry."
"That's not true; your mother takes the train for Gap at seven. I'll tell you why you sent her off: it's because you're ashamed of her. And don't you dare tell me that's not true, you jerk!"
In these fights I nearly always came out on top. I fought so often that I became very good with my fists. Even when I got more than I gave, I didn't give a damn-I almost liked it. But I never went for a weaker boy.
The other kids that sent me into a rage, the kids I fought most savagely, were the ones I called the swaggerers. These were the guys with pretty, well-dressed, distinguished mothers. When you are sixteen or seventeen you are proud of showing off a mother like that, and they would strut about the yard, holding her arm and mincing and simpering until it drove me mad.
Whenever one of them swaggered too much for my liking, or if his mother had a way of walking that reminded me of my own, or if she wore gloves and took them off and held them gracefully in one hand, then I couldn't bear it: I went out of my mind with fury.
The minute the culprit came in I went for him. "You don't have to parade about like that, you big ape; not with a mother dressed in last year's fashions. Mine was better looking, brighter and more distinguished than yours. Her jewels were real, not phony like your mother's. Such trash! Even a guy who knows nothing about it can see that right away."
Naturally, most of the guys didn't even wait for me to finish before hitting me in the face. Sometimes the first swipe would go right to my head. I fought rough: butting, mule-kicking, using my elbows in the infighting; and joy welled up inside me, as though I were smashing all the mothers who dared to be as pretty and fine-looking as my mama.
I really could not control it; ever since my mother's death when I was nearly eleven, I'd had this red-hot fury inside me. You can't understand death when you are eleven: you can't accept it. The very old might die, maybe. But your mother, full of youth and beauty and health, how can she die?
It was because of a fight of this kind that my life changed completely.
The guy was a pretentious asshole, proud of being nineteen, proud of his success in math. Tall, very tall; no good at games because he studied all the time, but very strong. One day, when we were going for a walk, he lifted a massive treetrunk all by himself so that we could get at the hole where a field mouse was hiding.
And this fellow had really let himself go that particular Thursday. A tall, slim mother, in a white dress with blue polka dots. If she had been trying to imitate one of Mama's dresses she couldn't have done better. Big black eyes; a pretty little hat with a white tulle veil.
And this engineer-to-be swaggered about the courtyard the whole of that afternoon, up and down, to and fro, round and round. Often they kissed; they were almost like lovers.
As soon as he was alone I started on him. "Well, you're the wonder of the world, all right. You're as good at putting on a circus act as you are at math. I didn't know you were such a…"
"What's wrong with you, Henri?"
"What's wrong with me is that I just have to tell you that you show your mother like they show a bear in a circus, to amaze your buddies. Well, get this: I'm not amazed. Because your mother is just nothing at all compared with mine: she takes after the showy tarts I've seen during the season at Vals-les-Bains."
"Take that back, or I'll spoil your face for you; and you know I hit hard. You know I'm stronger than you."
"Trying to get out of it, eh? Listen: I know you're stronger than me. So to balance things, we'll have a duel. Each with compasses. Go and fetch yours and I'll fetch mine. If you're not a shit and if you can stand up for yourself, I'll be waiting for you behind the john in five minutes."
"I'll be there."
A few minutes later he went down, my compass point buried deep just under his heart.
I was seventeen when my father and I saw the examining magistrate in charge of my case. He told my father that the only way to stop the proceedings was to make me join the navy. At the gendarmerie of Aubenas I signed on for three years.
My father did not really reproach me for the serious thing I had done. "If I understand rightly, Henri," he said-he called me Henri when he meant to be severe-"and I believe what you say, you suggested fighting with a weapon because your opponent was stronger than you?"
"Yes, Papa."
"Well, you did wrong. That is the way ruffians fight. And you are not a ruffian, my boy."
"No."
"Look at the mess you have got yourself into. Think of how you must have hurt your mother."
"I don't think I hurt her."
"Why not, Henri?"
"It was her I was fighting for."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I can't bear seeing other boys flaunt their mothers at me."
"I will tell you something, Henri: it was not for your mama that this fight and all the others before it came about. It was not out of real love for her. The reason is that you are selfish; because fate took your mother from you, you would like it to be the same for all the other boys.
"If you were really a reflection of your mother's heart, you would be happy at the happiness of others. Now, see, in order to get out of this you have to join the navy: three years at least, and they are not going to be easy ones. I am going to be punished, too, since for three years my son is going to be far away from me." And then he said something that has always remained engraved on my heart: "You know, my dear boy, you can become an orphan at any age. Remember that all your life."
The _Napoli's_ siren made me jump. It wiped out that remote past, those pictures of my eighteenth year, when my father and I walked out of the gendarmerie where I had just enlisted. But immediately afterward there rose up the unhappiest memory of them all, the moment when I saw him for the very last time.
It was in one of those grim visiting rooms at the Sante prison-each of us in a barred box separated by a corridor a yard wide. I was racked by shame and disgust for what my life had been and for what had brought my father here into this wild-beast cage.
He had not come to reproach me for being suspect number one in a dirty underworld job. He had the same ravaged face I had seen the day he told me of my mother's death, and he had come into this prison of his own accord to see his boy for half an hour, not to condemn his bad behavior or to make him understand what this business meant for his family's honor and peace of mind, or to say, "You are a bad son," but to beg my forgiveness for not having succeeded in bringing me up properly. What he said was the last thing I should ever have expected, the one thing that could touch my heart more deeply than all the reproaches in the world: "I believe, Riri, that it is through my fault that you are here. Forgive me for having spoiled you too much."
Nothing could have been more hostile than the iron discipline of the navy in 1923. The ratings were classed in six categories, according to their level of education. I was in the top, the sixth. And this seventeen-year-old boy, just out of the class preparing for the _Arts et Metiers_, could not understand or adapt himself to blind, instant obedience to orders given by quartermasters belonging to the lowest intellectual level.
I was in trouble right away. I could not obey orders that had no rhyme or reason. I refused to go on any specialized course, the normal thing for a man with my education, and I was at once classed among the estrasses, the undisciplined, the no-good "unspecialized" types.
We were the ones who had all the nastiest, dullest, stupidest jobs. Potato peeling, head cleaning, brass polishing all day long, coal shoveling, deck swabbing: all for us.
"What the hell are you doing there, hiding behind the smokestack?"
"We have finished swabbing the deck, quartermaster."
"Is that right? Well, just you start again, and this time swab it from aft forward. And if it's not cleaner this time, you'll hear from me."
A sailor is a fine sight, with his pompom, his jersey with its wide blue collar, his slightly tilted cap as flat as a pancake and his uniform made to fit properly. But we good-for-nothings were not allowed to have our things recut. The worse we were dressed and the drearier we looked, the better the quartermasters were pleased. In an atmosphere like this a rebel never stops thinking up offenses. Every time we were alongside a quay, for example, we stole ashore and spent the night in the town. Where did we go? To the brothels, of course. With a friend or two I would fix things in no time at all. Right away each of us had our whore; and we not only made love for free but would also get a bill or two for a drink or a meal from our women.
The punishments became more frequent. Fifteen days' detention; then thirty. To get back at a cook who refused us a bit of meat and a crust after the potato-peeling detail, we stole a whole leg of mutton, done to a turn, fishing it out with a hook we slid down a ventilator over the stove when he had his back turned; we ate it in the coal bunker. Result: forty-five days in the naval prison; in the middle of winter I was stark naked in the Toulon prison yard, opposite a washhouse with its huge tub of icy water, into which we had to plunge.
It was a seaman's cap not worth ten francs that brought me up before the disciplinary board. Charge: destruction of naval property.
In the navy, everybody changed the shape of his cap. Not destructively-it was a question of being well turned out. You first wetted it, and then three of you would pull as hard as possible, so that when you put a piece of whalebone around inside, it was as flat as a pancake. "It's terrific, a regular flat cap," said the girls. Particularly a cap with a pretty carrot-colored pompom on it, carefully trimmed with scissors. All the girls in the town knew it brought good luck to touch a pompom, and that you had to pay for touching it with a kiss.
The master-at-arms was a thickheaded brute-I became his pet aversion. He never left me in peace; he kept after me night and day. So much so that three times I went awol. Never more than five days and twenty-three hours, though, because at six days you were put down as a deserter. And a deserter I very nearly was at Nice. I'd spent the night with a terrific girl and woke up late. One more hour and I should have been on the list. I scrambled into my clothes and left at a run, looking for a cop to get myself arrested. I caught sight of one, hurried over to him and asked him to arrest me. He was a fat, kindly old soul. "Come now, boy, don't fly into a panic. Just you go back quietly to your ship and tell them all about it. We've all been young once."
I told him one hour more and I was a deserter; but it was no good, he wouldn't listen. So I picked up a stone, turned to a shop window and said to the cop, "If you don't arrest me, I'll smash this window in one second flat."
"The boy's crazy. Come along, young fellow; the station for you."
But it was for having stretched a cap to make it prettier that they sent me to the disciplinary sections at Calvi, in Corsica. No one can doubt that this was my first step toward the penal settlement.
They called the disciplinary section _la cam ise_, and you had a special uniform. As soon as you got there you went in front of a reception committee, and they decided whether you were to be rated a genuine cam isard. You had to prove you were a man by fighting two or three seniors one after another. With my training at the Crest high school, I did pretty well. During the second fight, when my lip was split and my nose a bleeding mess, the seniors stopped the test. I was rated genuine _cam isard_.
_La camise_. I worked in a Corsican senator's vineyards from sunrise to sunset: no break, no little favors; the difficult sort had to be brought to heel. We weren't even sailors anymore: we belonged to the 173 Infantry Regiment at Bastia. I can still see that citadel at Calvi, our three-mile walk, pick or shovel on our shoulder, to 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 Réservé, 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, Charrière. 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 Charrière 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 Ardèche 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."
I parked the Lincoln right next to the Spanish frontier post.
Here they were! They were on foot, running-they had abandoned my brother-in-law in his Citroën back there in the line by the French customs.
First came my sister Hélène, her arms out. She ran across the stretch of no-man's-land from the one post to the other, from France to Spain. I went toward her, my guts tied up with emotion. At four yards we stopped to look one another right in the face. Our tear-dimmed eyes said, "It is really her, my childhood Nène" and "It is really him, my little brother Riri from long ago." And we flung ourselves into each other's arms. Strange. For me this fifty-year-old sister was as she had always been. I did not see her aging face; I saw nothing except that the brilliant animation of her eyes was still the same and that for me her features had not altered.
Our embrace lasted so long we forgot all about the others. Rita had already kissed the children. I heard "How pretty you are, Aunt!" and I turned, left my Nène, and thrust Rita into her arms, saying, "Love her dearly, because it is she who has brought me to you all."
My three nieces were splendid and my brother-in-law was in great form. The only one missing was his eldest boy, Jacques, who had been called up for the war in Algeria.
We left for Rosas, the Lincoln in front, with my sister at my side. I shall never forget that first meal, with us all sitting at a round table. There were times when my legs trembled so that I had to take hold of them under the cloth.
1930-1956. So many, many things had happened, both for them and for me. I did not talk about the penal settlement during the meal. I just asked my brother-in-law whether my being found guilty had caused them a great deal of trouble and unpleasantness. He reassured me kindly, but I could feel how much they must have suffered, having a convict as brother and brother-inlaw.
No, I said nothing about prison, and I said nothing about my trial. For them and, I sincerely believe, for me, too, my life began the day when, thanks to Rita, I buried my old self, the man on the loose, to bring Henri Charrière back to life, the son of the Ardèche schoolteachers.
That August on the sands of Rosas beach went by too fast. I rediscovered the cries of my childhood, the laughter with no cause, the outbursts of joy of my young days on the beach of Palavas, where we used to go with my parents.
One month: thirty days. How long it is in a cell alone with oneself, and how terribly short it is with one's own people. I was literally drunk with happiness. Not only had I my sister and my brother-in-law again, but I had also discovered new people to love-my nieces, unknown only the other day, and now almost daughters to me.
Rita was radiant with joy at seeing me so happy. Bringing us together at last, out of reach of the French police, was the finest present she could have given either them or me. I lay on the beach; it was very late-midnight perhaps. Rita was stretched out on the sand, too, with her head against my thigh; I stroked her hair. "They all fly away tomorrow. How quickly it has passed; but how wonderful it was! One must not ask too much, darling, I know; but still, I'm sad at having to part from them. God knows when we'll see one another again. A journey like this costs so much."
"Trust in the future: I'm sure we'll see them again one day."
We went with them as far as the frontier. They were taking Tante Ju in their car. A hundred yards from the French border we parted. There were no tears, because I told them of my faith in the future-in a couple of years we should spend not one month of holiday together but two.
"Is it true, what you say, Uncle?"
"Of course, darlings, of course."
A week later my other sister landed at Barcelona airport, by herself. She had not been able to bring her family. Among the forty-odd passengers coming off the plane I recognized her at once, and after she had passed through customs she came straight toward me without the least hesitation.
Three days and three nights-she could spend only a little while with us, so since we did not want to lose a minute, it was three days and three nights of memories almost without a pause. She and Rita liked one another at once, so we could tell one another everything-she her whole life story and me all that could be told.
Two days later Rita's mother arrived from Tangiers. With her two fine, gentle hands on my cheeks she kissed me tirelessly, saying, "My son, I am so happy that you love Rita and that she loves you." Her face shone with a serene beauty in its halo of white hair.
We stayed in Spain too long, our happiness hiding the days that passed. We could not go back by boat-sixteen days was more than we could spare-so we flew (the Lincoln coming later by ship), because our business was waiting.
Still, we did make a little tour of Spain, and there in the hanging gardens of Granada, that wonder of the Arab civilization, I read these words of a poet, cut into the stone at the foot of the Marador tower: _Dale lirnosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada_; give him alms, woman, because there is no greater sadness in life than being blind in Granada.
Yes, there is something worse than being blind in Granada, and that is being twenty-four, full of health and trust in life, undisciplined, maybe, and even a little dishonest, but not really corrupt through and through or at least not a killer, and to hear yourself condemned to a life sentence for another man's crime: a sentence that means vanishing forever without appeal, without hope, condemned to rot bodily and mentally, without one chance in a hundred thousand of ever raising your head and being a man again someday.
How many men whom a pitiless justice and an inhuman penitentiary system have crushed and destroyed inch by inch would have preferred to be blind in Granada!