Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon by Henri Charrière Page B

wrong, you can always look after yourself in life. It wasn’t that you felt better than a street sweeper if you had a certain amount of education-- I had never despised any man except screws and pigs--but that, without it, you couldn’t do justice to your true self. You were stymied--you felt you might have been happy, but that you wouldn’t be, after all. I had both too much education and not enough. Hell, that was hardly the brightest outlook in the world.
    And it was true that I had to take my revenge, too: it was true I could not possibly forgive the people who had done me and my family so much harm. Calm down, Papi, calm down. You’ve got plenty of time. You must gradually learn to trust in the future. You’ve sworn to go straight in this country, but here you are, already hustling, forgetting your promise.
    I couldn’t help going to the doorway and gazing for a long while at the stars and the moon, and listening to the countless noises coming from the mysterious bush that surrounded the village with a wall as dark as the moon was brilliant.
    And then I slept, rocking gently in my hammock, happy to the core in the knowledge that I was free, free, free, and master of my fate .

 
     
     
     
    4
     
Farewell to El Callao
     
     
    At about ten the next morning I went to see the Lebanese. “So I go to El Callao or Ciudad BolIvar, to the addresses you’ve given me, and they pay me your bills of exchange?”
    “That’s right: you can go off with an easy mind.”
    “But what if they kill you too?”
    “It doesn’t matter, as far as you’re concerned. You will be paid whatever happens. You’re going to El Callao?”
    “Yes.”
    “What part of France are you from?”
    “Around Avignon, not far from Marseille.”
    “Why, I’ve got a friend from Marseille, but he lives a great way off. Alexandre Guigue is his name.”
    “Well, what do you know! He’s a close friend of mine.”
    “Of mine, too. I’m glad you know him.”
    “Where does he live, and how can I get there?”
    “He’s at Boa Vista. A very long and complicated journey.”
    “What does he do there?”
    “He’s a barber. Easy to find him--you just ask for the French barber-dentist.”
    “So he’s a dentist too?”
    I couldn’t help laughing, because I knew Alexandre Guigue very well: an extraordinary guy. He was sent out the same time as me, in 1933; we made the crossing together, and he had all the time in the world to tell me every last detail of his job.
    One Saturday night in 1929 or 1930, Alexandre and a friend climbed quietly down from the ceiling of Lisbon’s biggest jewelry shop. They had broken into a dentist’s office on the next floor up. To memorize the layout of the building, to be sure the dentist went away every weekend with his family and make impressions of the lock of the front door and the surgery, they had had to go there several times and have their teeth filled.
    “Very good work he did, too,” Alexandre told me, “seeing the fillings are still there. In two nights we had all the time we needed to shift the jewels and open two safes and a little steel cabinet, doing it neatly and without any noise. The dentist must have been fantastic at describing people, because as we were on the platform leaving Lisbon the pigs jumped on us without any hesitation at all. The Portuguese court sent us down for ten and twelve years. So there we were, a little while later, at their prison in Angola, down under the Belgian and French Congo. No problem about escaping: our friends came to get us in a taxi. Like an idiot I went to Brazzaville: my buddy, he chose Leopoldviile. A few months later I was picked up by the French police. The French wouldn’t give me back to the Portuguese: they sent me back to France and there I copped a twenty-year stretch instead of the ten they’d given me in Portugal.”
    He made a break from Guiana. I’d heard that he had passed through Georgetown, and that he’d gone to Brazil through the bush,