Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon Read Online Free Page B

to look after him. This one’s called Enrique, or Papillon. He’s a friend from France, an old-time friend.”
    “Welcome to this house,” the black girl said. “Don’t you worry, Charlot, your friends will be properly looked after. I’ll go and see to their room.”
    Charlot told me about his break--an easy one. When he first got to the penal colony he was kept at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, and after six months he escaped from there with another Corsican called Simon and a detainee. “We were lucky enough to reach Venezuela a few months after the dictator Gomez died. These open-handed people helped us make a new life for ourselves. I had two years of compulsory residence at El Callao, and I stayed on. Little by little, I took to liking this simple life, you know? I lost one wife when she was having a baby, and the daughter, too. Then this black girl you’ve just seen, Conchita, she managed to comfort me with her real love and understanding, and she’s made me happy. But what about you, Papi? You must have had a cruelly hard time of it; fourteen years is a hell of a stretch. Tell me about it.”
    I talked to this old friend for more than two hours, spilling out everything these last years had left rankling in me. It was wonderful for us both to be able to talk about our memories. But, oddly, there was not a single word about Montmartre, not a word about the underworld, no reminders of jobs that were pulled off or misfired, nothing about crooks still at large. It was as though for us life had begun when we stepped aboard La Martinière, me in 1933, Charlot in 1935.
    Good Chianti, excellent salad, a grilled chicken, goat cheese and a delicious mango, all put on the table by the cheerful Conchita, meant that Charlot could welcome me properly in his house, and that pleased him. He suggested going down to the village for a drink. I said it was so pleasant where we were I didn’t want to go out.
    “Thanks, my friend,” my Corsican said--he often put on a Paris accent. “You’re dead right: we are comfortable here. Conchita, you’ll have to find a girl friend for Enrique.”
    “All right: Enrique, I’ll introduce you to friends prettier than me.”
    “You’re the prettiest of them all,” CharIot said.
    “Yes, but I’m black.”
    “That’s the very reason why you’re so pretty, poppet. Because you’re a thoroughbred.”
    Conchita’s big eyes sparkled with love and pleasure; it was easy to see she worshipped Charlot.
    Lying quietly in a fine big bed I listened to the BBC news from London on Charlot’s radio: but being plunged back into the life of the outside world worried me a little--I was not used to it anymore. I turned the knob. Now it was Caribbean music that came through: Caracas in song. I didn’t want to hear the great cities urging me to live their life. Not this evening, anyway. I switched off quickly and began to think over the last few hours.
    Had we purposely avoided talking about the years when we both lived in Paris? No. Had we purposely not mentioned the men of our world who had been lucky enough not to be picked up? No again. So did what had happened before the trial no longer matter?
    I tossed and turned in the big bed. It was hot; I couldn’t bear the heat anymore and walked out into the garden. I sat down on a big stone, from where I could look Out over the valley and the gold mine. Everything was lit up down there. I could see trucks, empty or loaded, coming and going.
    Gold: the gold that came out of the depths of that mine. A lot of it, either in bars or turned into bills, would give you anything on earth. This prime mover of the world, which cost so little to mine, since the workers had such miserable wages, was the one thing you had to have to live well. Charlot had lost his freedom because he had wanted a lot of it, yet today he hadn’t even mentioned the stuff. He hadn’t told me whether the mine had much gold in it or not. These days his happiness was his black girl, his