Book 204: French Guiana (French) – Papillon (Henri CHARRIÈRE)

We didn’t heave [the warders] into the ward: we went straight off with the three rifles. Clousiot first, then the kid, then me: down the stairs, half-lit by a lantern. Clousiot had dropped his iron; I still had mine in my left hand, and in my right the rifle. At the bottom of the stairs, nothing. Ink-black night all round us. We had to look hard to make out the wall over on the river side. We hurried towards it. Once we were there, I bent down. Clousiot climbed up, straddled the top, hauled Maturette up and then me. We let ourselves drop into the darkness on the far side. Clousiot fell badly into a hole, twisting his foot. Maturette and I landed properly. We two got up: we had left the rifles before we went over. Clousiot tried to get to his feet but couldn’t: he said his leg was broken. I left Maturette with Clousiot and ran towards the corner of the wall, feeling it all the way with my hand. It was so dark that when I got to the end of the wall I didn’t know it, and with my hand reaching out into emptiness I fell flat on my face. Over on the river side I heard a voice saying, ‘Is that you?’  

From one country where a small island (Príncipe) was used as a cruel prison to another…

Sadly, French Guiana is one of the few countries in South America that I haven’t visited. From Porsche’s take on Cayenne, I assume that the capital has very bad roads on which the locals drive very fast…

I’m sure that Papillon (Charrière) would have loved to have a Porsche Cayenne. It would have helped him on his escape attempts, of which there were so many that I lost count!

In reading all the independent nations of the world, I stuck to novels. Although I’ll still try to preference novels when reading the non-independent ones, I might occasionally be a bit more liberal. In Papillon, Charrière claims to be telling the true story of his life. Though it is substantially true, it subsequently turned out that he had fictionalised it somewhat (or quite a lot), which is why I’ve included it here – apart from the fact that it’s one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. (Wikipedia describes it as an ‘autobiographical novel’ and discusses its authenticity). Papillon spent a total of 13 years in prison (between 1931 and 1945), in Colombia and Venezuela as well as in France and French Guiana (including on Devil’s Island), and they all seem to have been brutally inhumane. What kept him going (when so many others died), apart from the help of his friends, was his burning desire for revenge, and yet, once free, he gives that up and is determined to prove his goodness by living as a model citizen.

If we can believe what he tells of himself, Papillon comes across as an honest and honourable man, towards his fellow prisoners, the outsiders, and even his jailers. He passes over his life before his sentencing, but he admits (at the end) that he was part of the Paris underworld and a criminal, though he always insisted that he was innocent of the murder for which he was convicted and transported to French Guiana.

When I read Papillon, it was a bit of a jolt to realise that France was still transporting convicts to its colony until 1945 (Britain sent its last convicts to Australia in 1868), and that the European Space Agency spaceport in Kourou was then one of the prison camps – the description of it here was fascinating.

I did feel that some of the reported conversations were slightly unbelievable (sometimes a bit too moralising). But they must surely be reconstructed rather than remembered verbatim.

Papillon comes across as a man almost addicted to escaping. Even when there is nothing to escape from, he has to get away – most stupidly, to my mind, from the paradisaical sojourn with the Guajiro American Indians in Colombia with two lovers (sisters), one of whom is pregnant with his children (did he ever meet them?) Again, we don’t know whether life among them is truly as idyllic as he portrays – it feels like part of the long French tradition of admiring the ‘noble savages’ and contrasting them with the corruption of Western society, which goes back to Rousseau. But I have no reason to doubt it. In any case, he abandons them with barely a thought, as he does later to his equally lovely (Asian) Indian wife – not to mention the wife he already had in France. Still escaping.

Papillon’s lauding of his adopted homeland Venezuela seems a bit at odds with what he witnessed there (and was it really so much better than Colombia, for example?) I couldn’t help feeling that he was trying to ingratiate himself with his new countrymen. I would have thought that he would have learnt good Spanish while living in Venezuela, but there are still lots of mistakes in his reported Spanish conversations from the escape attempts.

I won’t spoil the tale by repeating any more of what happens, you have to read the story for yourself if you haven’t already. (By the way, the plots of the two movies are quite different from what Papillon relates). Charrière is a great writer and story-teller, and unlike most prisoner memoirs his book counts as great literature too. It is enthralling. (I’m now reading the sequel, Banco).

Charrière, Henri (1906 – 1973), Papillon, Paris, Pocket, 2002, ISBN 9782266118354

(originally published 1969)

English translation:

Papillon, translated from French by Patrick O’Brian, London, Panther, 1970

Book 188: Cape Verde (English) – Chiquinho: a novel of Cabo Verde (Baltazar LOPES)

I started seeing my island as a vast laboratory of human experience. People who refuse to be crushed by despair, who possess a crucial will to resist, regardless of the outcome of their efforts. Above all of this, there was the constant presence of escapism into the spaces of dream, distance, unknown destinations always offered up by the restless blue curve of the ocean. Moral resistance. What other name could describe the faith of my people, always planting seed, and replanting again, endlessly? The struggle against the Lunário’s forecasts, against earthworms that ruin the corn, against the absence of rain every October, against the harmattan and all bad weather. The sailor Chico Zepa’s struggle against the destiny that prevented him from taking a boat to São Vicente and from there escaping on any convenient steamer to those distant lands that would steal him away for good from the hoe. Nhô João Joana’s tattooed arms. On his right arm, a long-haired woman with a warm, seductive gaze, offering him the delights of never-ending love. And my grandfather, who died so young aboard the whaling ship that was taking him back to Cabo Verde. Mamãe-Velha must have loved him very much, this grandfather with his sparkling eyes, his dark skin, and his black, silky hair that now only a mermaid could caress in endless hours of almost unnerving love. How much he would have liked to come above the waters, back to the deck of his ship, to hunt whales, fight against the treacherous Sargasso seaweed, and defeat, with the force of his youthful courage, storms, cyclones, and uncontrollable winds! 

 

Well, we’re getting towards the pointy end of this project! Mostly, all we have left to cover are the European micro-states, and several island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific – and two (former Portuguese colonies) in Africa. Today, we’re in Cabo Verde.

For us in Australia, this group of islands off the west coast of Africa is almost totally unknown. I knew little myself, apart from the haunting morna “Sodade” (”Longing”) sung by Cesária Évora. It is much better known by Europeans, who have flocked to its beaches in recent years. So for me, this is just the kind of novel that fits my current project perfectly. I learned so much about life and history in the Cape Verde Islands. In following the career of the eponymous hero before he (like so many of his compatriots) is forced to emigrate, Young Chiquinho is torn between his longing for adventure and his ‘sodade’ for his homeland, especially the island of Sao Nicolau made famous by the above-mentioned song. He becomes a writer and gets involved in politics in the early stirrings of the movement for independence from Portugal, establishing a Grémio (Society) influenced by South Africa’s ANC.

I was fascinated by the apparently close relationship of the locals with mythology and folklore, and history – Charlemagne is not forgotten here, nor the Paraguayan war, nor the Chanson de Roland epic. The many shipwrecked sailors can look forward to meeting mermaids. Life in the beautiful islands seems incredibly tough, both for the sailors and the disregarded farmers, even between the recurrent severe droughts and locust plagues. It was heartbreaking when as a teacher Chiquinho sees his students dying one by one. It is hard to blame them for leaving for the supposed paradise of the US where the islands’ intelligentsia ends up buried in mind-numbing factories.

I would have liked to learn more about the close relationship between the independence movements of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, and what happened between them after they gained freedom in 1975 but this is outside the timescale of the book. There were also a lot of names to remember – too many for me. But apart from that minor quibble, I found this a really enjoyable and enlightening novel.

 

LOPES, Baltazar (1907 – 1989), Chiquinho: a novel of Cabo Verde, translated from Portuguese by Isabel P.B. Fêo Rodrigues and Carlos A. Almeida with Anna M. Klobucka, Dartmouth, Mass., Tagus, 2019, ISBN 978-1-933227-85-6

(originally published in Portuguese 1947)

Book 98: Portugal (Portuguese) – Ensaio sobre a Cegueira = Blindness (José SARAMAGO)

The signal finally went green, suddenly the cars sped away, but then it became obvious that not all of them had raced off like that. The first one in the middle lane was stopped, there must have been some mechanical problem, the accelerator loose, the gear lever stuck, or a breakdown in the hydraulic system, locked brakes, a fault in the electrical circuit, if not simply running out of fuel, it wouldn’t be the first time that that had happened. The new gathering of pedestrians on the footpath sees the driver of the immobilised car gesticulating through the windscreen, while the cars behind it honk madly. Some of the drivers have already sprung out into the street, ready to push the broken-down car to somewhere where it won’t block the traffic, and beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head towards them, to one side, to the other, they can see him yelling something, from his mouth movements they gather that he is repeating one syllable, no not one, two in fact, from what they will find when someone, finally, manages to open a door: I’m blind.

[my translation]

And so it all begins, a pandemic even stranger than covid-19. Here is a novel which is unique. In an unnamed place, a mystery illness starts striking everyone which causes them to go suddenly blind. The panicked government starts to cruelly sequester the victims. We follow a group isolated into a mental institution, one of whom appears inexplicably immune (and is here only because of her loyalty to her newly blind husband). We basically see the scenario through her eyes, just as she effectively becomes the group’s eyes. The group quickly revert to basic instincts and reveal (if that’s the right word) their good or bad natures. The institution basically degrades into a Lord of the Flies of adults.
The narrator is an omniscient observer, but doesn’t know everything, for example speculating as to people’s motives, and sometimes seems to be channelled through the eyes and knowledge of the victims. The characters are unnamed, but are described, as if we (at least) can see them. The writing style has very long flowing sentences but for once I didn’t find that annoying but rather a very effective technique with a mesmerising rhythm.
Blindness made me aware of how fragile the veneer of our civilisation and infrastructure is, how it could be unexpectedly thrown into disarray (as has happened to all of us since my reading), and how we might suddenly have to make real moral choices outside a philosophy class. You can’t help asking yourself, how you would act in similar circumstances – would you be a good human being, to what extent would you try to help your fellows and to what extent would you fight for your own survival?
This is a totally moving and thought-provoking story by a master writer. I will definitely be reading more Saramago (a worthy winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature).

SARAMAGO, José (1922 – 2010), Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, Porto, Porto Editora, 2017 (first published 2014), ISBN 978-972-0-04683-3