"I'll go and talk to the driver if I can find him."

I did find him: we were to leave the next day at nine. As he already had one passenger, P icolino would travel in the cab and myself on the empty iron barrels behind. I hurried to the chief administrator; he handed over my papers and, like the good man he was, gave me some advice and wished me good luck. Then I went around seeing everybody who had given me friendship and help.

First to Caratal, where I picked up the few things I possessed. Charlot and I embraced one another, deeply moved. His black girl wept. I thanked them both for their wonderful hospitality.

"It's nothing, pal. You would have done the same for me. Good luck. And if you go to Paris, say hello to Montmartre from me."

"I'll write."

Then the ex-cons, Simon, Alexandre, Marcel, André. I hurried back to El Callao and said good-bye to all the miners and the gold and diamond prospectors and my fellow workers. All of them, men and women, said something from the heart to wish me good luck. It touched me a great deal and I saw even more clearly that if I had set up with Maria I should have been like Charlot and the others-I should never have been able to tear myself away from this paradise.

The hardest of all my farewells was to Maria. Our last night, a mixture of love and tears, was more violent than anything we had ever known. Even our caresses broke our hearts. The horrible thing was that I had to make her understand there would be no hope of my coming back. Who could tell what my fate would be when I carried out my plans?

A shaft of sunlight woke me. My watch said eight o'clock already. I hadn't the heart to stay in the big room, not even the few moments for a cup of coffee. Picolino was sitting in a chair, tears running down his face. Esmeralda had washed and dressed him. I looked for Maria's sisters, but I couldn't find them. They'd hidden so as not to see me go. There was only José standing there in the doorway. He grasped me in the Venezuelan _abrazo_ (one hand holds yours and the other is round your shoulders), as moved as I was myself. I couldn't speak, and he said only this one thing: "Don't forget us; we'll never, never forget you. Good-bye: God go with you."

With all his clean things carefully folded into a bundle, Picolino wept bitterly, and his movements and the hoarse sounds he uttered conveyed his wretchedness at not being able to bring out the millions of thanks he had in his heart. I led him away.

Carrying our baggage, we reached the driver's place. A splendid exit from the town, all right: his truck had broken down; no leaving today. We had to wait for a new carburetor. There was no way out of it-I returned to Maria's with Picolino. You can imagine the shrieks when they saw us coming back.

"God was kind to have broken the truck, Enrique! Leave Picolino here and walk around the village while I get the meal ready. It's an odd thing," Maria added. "But it could be you're not fated to go to Caracas."

While I was strolling about I thought over this remark of Maria's. It worried me. I did not know Caracas, a big city, but people had talked about it and I could imagine what it was like. The idea certainly attracted me; but once I was there, what should I do, and how could I do it?

I walked slowly across the square of El Callao with my hands behind my back. The sun was blazing down. I went over to an almendro, a huge, very leafy tree, to take shelter from the furious heat. Under the shade there stood two mules, and a little old man was loading them. I noticed the diamond prospector's sieve and the gold prospector's trough, a kind of Chinese hat they use to wash the gold-bearing mud in. As I gazed at these things-they were still new to me-I went on pondering. In front of me there was this biblical picture of a quiet, peaceful life with no sounds apart from those of nature and the patriarchal way of living; and I thought of what it must be like at that very moment in Caracas, the busy, teeming capital that drew me on. All the descriptions I had heard turned into exact images. After all, it was fourteen years since I had seen a big town! Since I could now do as I liked, there was no doubt about it-I was going to get there, and as quick as I could.

Jesus, the song was in French! And it was the little old prospector singing. I listened.

The old sharks are there already

They've smelled the body of a man.

One of them chews an arm like an apple,

Another eats his trunk and tra-la-la

The quickest gets it, the rest have none.

Convict farewell; long live the law!

I was thunderstruck. He sang it slowly, like a requiem. The "tra-la-la" had an ironic merriment, and the "long live the law" was full of the mockery of the Paris underworld: it sounded like an indisputable truth. But to feel the full irony of it you had to have been there.

I looked closely at the man: barely five feet tall. One of the most picturesque ex-convicts I had ever come across. Snowy white hair with long, gray whiskers cut on the slant. Blue jeans; a big, broad leather belt; on the right, a long sheath with a curved handle coming out of it at the height of his groin. I walked over to him. He had no hat on-it was lying on the ground-so I could see his broad forehead, speckled with a red even darker than his old sunbaked pirate's tan. His eyebrows were so long and thick he surely had to comb them. Beneath them, steely gray-green eyes like gimlets bored through me. I hadn't taken four steps before he said to me, "You come from the clink, as sure as my name's La Passe. "

"Right. My name's Papillon."

"I'm Jojo La Passe. " He held out his hand and took mine frankly, just as it should be between men, not so hard it crushes your fingers the way the show-offs do, nor too flabby, like hypocrites and fairies. I said, "Let's go to the bar and have a drink. It's on me."

"No. Come to my place over the way, the white house. It's called Belleville, where I lived when I was a kid. We can talk there in peace."

Indoors it was swept and clean-his wife's field of action. She was young, very young; perhaps twenty-five. He-God knows- sixty at least. She was called Lola, a dusky Venezuelan.

"You're welcome," she said to me, with a pleasant smile.

"Thanks."

"Two anisettes," said Jojo. "A Corsican brought me two hundred bottles from France. You'll see whether it's good or not."

Lola poured it out and Jojo tossed back three-quarters of his glass in one gulp. "Well?" he said, fixing me with his eye.

"Well what? You don't think I'm going to tell you the story of my life, do you?"

"Okay, mac. But Jojo La Passe, doesn't that ring any bells?"

"No."

"How quickly they forget you! Yet I was a big shot in the clink. No one came within miles of me for throwing the seven and eleven with dice just touched with a file-not loaded, of course. That wasn't yesterday, to be sure; but after all, men like us, we leave traces-we leave legends. And now according to what you tell me, in a few years it's all forgotten. Didn't one single bastard ever tell you about me?" He seemed deeply outraged.

"Frankly, no."

Once again the gimlets bored right into my guts. "You weren't in stir for long; you've scarcely got the face at all."

"Fourteen years altogether, counting El Dorado. You think that's nothing?"

"It's not possible. You're scarcely marked, and only another con could tell that's where you come from. And even then, a con who was not a diabolically clever face reader might get it wrong. You had it easy, right?"

"It wasn't as easy as all that: the islands; solitary."

"Balls, man, balls! The islands-it's a holiday camp! All it lacks is a casino. For you, penal colony meant the sea breeze, crayfish, no mosquitoes, fishing, and now and then a real treat- the pussy or the ass of some screw's wife kept too short of it by her cunt of a husband."