Table Of ContentBANCO
the Further Adventures of Papillon
by Henri Charriere
translated from the French by Patrick O’Brien
Flyleaf:
In Banco, Henri Charriere tells the gripping story of his years on the
loose in Venezuela after his escape from Devil’s Island. A story packed with
hair-raising adventure, it is also a heart-warming account of readjustment to life
on the outside and the sesolution of a conflict of motives within himself: on the
one hand, the lure of the underworld, offering daring and danger, but also the
possibility of revenge for the lost years in lonely, stinking cells; on the other, the
appeal of going straight in a beautiful country where the free love of generous
women promised to soothe even the most restless man.
Running through the story is the theme of the banco--of the chance
taken, the stakes risked, when the simple exhilaration of the game inspired
Papillon to say to every kind of challenge: “Deal me in ... Banco lost? Well,
then, banco again!” Thus, for instance, when he joined up with an ex-con and
got involved in a crooked dice game with tough, suspicious gold-and diamond-
miners in the Venezuelan interior. Even when the angry miners murdered his
partner and vanished with the profits accumulated during two perilous weeks
and Papi, then penniless, escaped only by the skin of his teeth--even then he
remained undaunted. So also with his many other, varied adventures... That lust
for life, that indomitability of spirit that made Papillon unique have by no means
deserted him here.
A number-one best seller in Western Europe, Banco is indeed as
vibrantly alive as Papillon--ferocious, funny, tender, and crowded with incident
and excitement.
English translation Copyright 1973 by Hart-Davis, MacGibbon.
Originally published in France Copyright 1972 by Editions Robert Laffont S.A.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to William Morrow
and Company, Inc., 105 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016.
Design by Helen Roberts
To the memory of Dr. Alex Guibert-Germain, to Madame Alex Guibert-
Germain, to my countrymen, the Venezuelans, to my French, Spanish, Swiss,
Belgian, Italian, Yugoslav, German, English, Greek, American, Turkish,
Finnish, Japanese, Israeli, Swedish, Czechoslovak, Danish, Argentine,
Colombian, and Brazilian friends, and all those friends who are faceless but who
have done me the honor of writing to me.
Contents
Translator’s Introduction
1 First Steps into Freedom
2 The Mine
3 Jojo La Passe
4 Farewell to El Callao
5 Caracas
6 The Tunnel under the Bank
7 Carotte: the Pawnshop
8 The Bomb
9 Maracaibo: Among the Indians
10 Rita--the Vera Cruz
11 My Father
12 I Become a Venezuelan
13 My Childhood
14 The Revolution
15 Camarones
16 The Gorilla
17 Montmartre--My Trial
Translator’s Introduction
Middle-aged, impoverished by an earthquake and worried about his future,
Henri Charrière sat down to write a book to restore his fortunes: it was his first,
and he called it Papillon, the name by which he had been known in the
underworld of Paris and in the French penal settlements. He had no great opinion
of himself as an author and he was quite willing to have it improved, cut about
and put into “good French”; but the first publisher he sent it to happened to
employ a brilliant editor who at once realized the exceptional quality of the
manuscript and who delivered it to an astonished public in its original state,
merely tidying up the punctuation, the spelling and a very few points of style.
That was in 1970, the year of the phénomene Papillon, a phenomenon almost
unparalleled in the annals of publishing: it was not only that an extraordinary
number of people read the book (850,000 copies were sold in the first few
months), but that the readers embraced the whole spectrum of literary opinion,
from the Académie Française to those whose lips moved slowly as they made
their fascinated way through the strange adventures of an indomitable man
struggling against the society that had sent him to rot in the infamous tropical
prisons of Guiana with a life sentence for a murder that he had never committed.
They were all deeply moved by the burning sense of injustice that runs right
through the book and that gives it its coherence and validity, but even more by
Papillon’s sheer narrative power, his innate genius for telling a story. “This is a
literary prodigy,” said François Mauriac. “It is utterly fascinating reading... This
new colleague of ours is a master!” And he pointed out that it was not enough to
have been a transported convict and to have escaped again and again;
extraordinary talent was required to give the book its ring of truth and to make
its value “exactly proportional to its immense success.”
The soundness of Mauriac’s words can be seen not only from the immense
quantities of hopeless manuscripts by other exprisoners (purple characters, but
untouched by genius) that flow into publishers’ offices every week, but also by
the baldness of the following summary that is intended to put the reader of this
second volume into the picture: the main facts are here, but I am the first to
admit that the heart of the matter is lacking.
The facts, then: in 1931 Henri Charrière, alias Papillon, was sentenced to hard
labor for life, and in 1933 he was taken away with some hundreds of others in a
prison ship bound for South America, for French Guiana. Here he found himself
in an appallingly tough and savage world where corruption, terrorism, sodomy
and murder were commonplace; he was well equipped for survival in this world,
being as tough as any man there, perfectly loyal to his friends and perfectly
uncompromising in his hatred of the official establishment, and in time he could
have carved out a respectable place for himself. But he had no intention of
staying; he had sworn not to serve his unjust sentence, and forty-two days after
his arrival he made a break. With two companions (one broke his leg in
escaping) he made his way down the Maroni River in a crazy boat; at a remote
lepers’ island they changed boats and so rode out to sea, sailing under the
broiling sun day after day until at last they reached Trinidad. On and on to
Curaçao, where the boat was wrecked; on to Rio Hacha in Colombia, where the
wind failed them and they were taken prisoner. Another break, this time with a
Colombian friend, and eventually Papillon reached hostile Indian territory, alone
and on foot. They took him in, gave him two wives, and then, when at last he
would stay no longer, a bag of pearls. Back to Colombia, only to be arrested and
imprisoned once more, and, after several abortive breaks, handed over to the
French authorities. Then solitary confinement on the Ile Saint-Joseph--a deeply
moving account of the silence, the heat and the utter loneliness of that dim,
timeless, underground cage-- two years of it. When at last it was over and he was
out in the light again, he began to make a raft for another break; but a fellow
convict informed upon him, and having killed the informer he went back to
solitary--an eight years’ sentence cut to nineteen months for rescuing a little girl
from the sharks. Another attempt at escape; transfer to Devil’s Island; and then
the final break at last, riding two sacks of coconuts through the shark-infested
sea to the mainland. A new boat and a new series of adventures brought him to
Venezuela and to the Venezuelan penal settlement at El Dorado, where he was
held on the charge of being a rogue and a vagabond. But a coup d’etat in Caracas
brought the promise of release, and the last pages of the book show Papillon,
equipped with genuine papers at last, and dressed in good civilian clothes, ready
to walk out into freedom after fourteen years of being in prison or on the run.
That is where the present volume starts, and from now on his story is told in his
own infinitely more living words.
PATRICK O’BRIAN
What you think of yourself matters more than what others think of you
(author unknown to Papillon)
1
First Steps into Freedom
“Good luck, Frenchman! From this moment, you’re free. Adios!”
The officer of the El Dorado penal settlement waved and turned his back.
And it was no harder than that to get rid of the chains I had been dragging for
fourteen years. I held Picolino by the arm, and we took a few steps up the steep
path from the riverbank, where the officer had left us, to the village of El
Dorado. Now, sitting here in my old Spanish house on the night of August 18,
1971, to be exact, I can see myself on that pebbly track with unbelievable clarity;
and not only does the officer’s voice now ring in my ears in just the same way,
deep and clear, but I make the same movement that I made twenty-six years ago-
-I turn my head.
It is midnight: outside the night is dark. But for me, for me alone, the sun is
shining: it’s ten o’clock in the morning, and I stare at the loveliest back I have
even seen in my life--the back of my jailer as he moves farther and farther away,
symbolizing the end of the watching, the eavesdropping, the prying that I
endured every day, night, minute and second for fourteen years.
I turn my head for a last look at the river, a last look, beyond the guard, at the
island with its Venezuelan penal settlement, a last look at a hideous past when I
was trampled upon, degraded and ground down.
Abruptly, I catch Picolino by the arm, turn my back on the picture and lead him
quickly up the path, first giving myself a shake to get rid of the filth of the past
for good and all.
Freedom? Yes, but where? At the far end of the world, way back in the
plateaus of Venezuelan Guiana, in a little village deep in the most luxuriant
virgin forest you can imagine. I was at the southeastern tip of Venezuela, close
to Brazilian frontier: an enormous sea of green, broken only here and there by
the waterfalls of the rivers and streams that run through it--a green ocean dotted
with little communities, each gathered around a chapel. Often these pueblitos are
linked to others by only a truck or two, and looking at the trucks, you wonder
how they ever got so far. In their isolation these simple, poetic people live just as
people did hundreds and hundreds of years ago, free from all the taints of
civilization.
When we had climbed up to the edge of the plateau where the village of El
Dorado begins, we almost stopped; and then slowly, very slowly, we went on. I
heard Picolino draw his breath, and, like him, I breathed in very deeply, forcing
the air right down into the bottom of my lungs and letting it out gently, as though
I were afraid of living these wonderful minutes too fast, these first minutes of
freedom.
The broad plateau opened in front of us; to the right and left were houses, all
bright and clean and surrounded by flowers. Some children had caught sight of
us, and even though they knew where we came from, they approached us, not
unfriendly at all; no, they were kind, and they walked beside us without a words
They seemed to understand how grave this moment was, and they respected it.
In front of the first house there was a little wooden table where a fat black
woman was selling coffee and are pas, corn muffins.
“Good morning, lady.”
“Buenas dias, hombres!”
“Two coffees, please.”
“Si, senores.” And the good fat creature poured us two cups of delicious coffee;
we drank standing, there being no chairs.
“What do I owe you?”
“Nothing.”
“How come?”
“It’s a pleasure for me to give you the first coffee of your freedom.”
“Thank you. When’s the next bus?”
“Today’s a holiday, so there’s no bus; but there’s a truck at eleven.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
A black-eyed, light-skinned girl came out of a house. “Come in and sit down,”
she said with a lovely smile.
We walked in and sat down with a dozen people who were drinking rum.
“Why does your friend loll out his tongue?”
“He’s sick.”
“Can we do anything for him?”
