Colony

Colony

A Novel

Hugo Wilcken

For Julie and Léon

I did not die – yet nothing of life remained

Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIV

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

COLONY ONE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

COLONY TWO

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

COLONY THREE

I

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Hugo Wilcken

Copyright

About the Publisher

I

Lurid rumours abound about life in the penal colony. There are the labour camps where they make you work naked under the sun; the jungle parasites that bore through your feet and crawl up to your brain; the island where they intern leper convicts; the silent punishment blocks where the guards wear felt-soled shoes; the botched escapes that end in cannibalism. As the stories move through the prison ship, they mutate at such a rate that it becomes impossible to gauge their truth.

In Sabir’s cage, there’s only one man who’s already been out there and actually knows what it’s like. He’s a grizzled assassin called Bonifacio. Although not tall, he’s bulkily built, with the bulging, tattooed biceps of a Paris hoodlum. His cool menace unnerves most prisoners but doesn’t stop a few from pestering him for information. The questions obviously irritate him and he only bothers to reply when bribed with cigarettes, which are in short supply on board. Sabir asks nothing himself, but listens as he lies on his hammock, gazing through the tiny porthole into the punishing intensity of the blue outside. It’s from these overheard fragments that he gradually builds up a picture of what awaits him across the ocean. He now knows that they’ll disembark at Saint-Laurent, a small frontier town on the banks of a river called the Maroni, somewhere north of the Amazon, somewhere south of Venezuela. A splinter of France lost in the jungle.

‘That’s where the main penitentiary is. Where they do the selection,’ he hears Bonifacio explain one day in his thick Corsican accent, shot through with Montmartre. ‘If they think you’re dangerous, you go straight to the islands. There are three of them. Diable is for political prisoners. The main barracks are on Royale and the punishment cells on Saint-Joseph. If you end up on the islands, there’s no chance of escape. But you won’t have to do hard labour.

‘If you don’t have a trade, they’ll send you to one of the forest camps. Some are near Saint-Laurent, some are on the coast. Do anything to avoid them. They’re the worst. You’re out in the sun all day chopping trees. If you don’t fill your quota, you don’t get your rations. You end up with fever, dysentery. If you’re down for the camps, bribe the bookkeeper to get you a job at Saint-Laurent. If that doesn’t work, pay one of the Blacks or Arabs to chop your wood for you. Then buy your way out as quick as you can.

‘If you’ve got a trade they can use, you get to stay at Saint-Laurent. Or they send you up to the capital, Cayenne. You work for the Administration. There are cooks, butchers, bakers, mechanics, bookkeepers, porters … If you get a job, make sure it’s outside the penitentiary. That way, you’re out during the day, you’re unguarded. Best thing is to work for an official, as houseboy or cook. You get to sleep at their house. But you won’t score a job like that first off.

‘To survive, you need dough. To escape, you need dough. To get it, you need a scam. Everyone’s got a scam. The guys who work at the hospital steal quinine and sell it on. The iron-mongers make knives and plans and sell them on. In the camps they catch butterflies and sell them to the guards, who sell them to collectors in America. Everyone’s got a scam.’

So much to take in. During the long sleepless nights, Sabir turns it all over in his mind. In the solitude of the darkness, problems seem insurmountable. How to avoid these forest camps, for instance? As far as he knows, Sabir hasn’t been classed dangerous, but he has no particular skill other than basic soldiery. He has no money. He knows that most of the other prisoners do, banknotes tightly fitted into the little screw-top cylinder they call a plan, hidden in the rectum. Money given to them by their families. Sabir’s father has disowned him; his mother is dead. No trade, no money; no brawn either: Sabir is a smallish man with a slight build. There are nights when a paralysing nervousness invades him, worse even than the anxiety attacks of the Belgian trenches. It’s such a long time since he’s had to consider a future. He’s got too used to being a judicial object, shunted from prison to prison, prison to court, court to prison. He’s got used to lawyers talking for him, being his voice, just as all the others talk about him and around him. Almost as if he weren’t there at all.

The new life that awaits him seems very different. Not at all like a mainland prison. Deeply strange and yet somehow familiar: it’s the world of the romans à quatre sous, the pulp novels that Sabir used to devour when on leave from the front. In Sabir’s mind, the bagne – as the penal colony is called – is a savage fantasy land, peopled with shaven-headed convicts in striped pyjamas, boldly tattooed from head to foot, guarded by men in pith helmets and dress whites. The coastline is an impenetrable wall of green jungle; gaudy parrots scream from the trees; crocodiles lurk just below the water’s surface; natives glide to and fro in dugout canoes; bare-breasted women tend to children in palm-roofed huts; wide-mouthed rivers disgorge into an infinite ocean. It’s a netherworld of no definable location, surging up out of the tropics like an anti-Atlantis. When he was a child, Sabir’s mother would tell him that unless he behaved, ‘tu finiras bien au bagne.’ This oft-repeated threat was every bit as real, and yet every bit as fantastic as his long-dead grandmother’s warning that Robespierre stole naughty boys away in their sleep. And every day on the streets of Paris you could hear people grumbling: ‘Quel bagne! Quelle galère! C’est le bagne!’

What strikes Sabir about most of the other prisoners on board is their extreme youth and vulnerability. Very few of them actually seem like Bonifacio, like the tough hommes du milieu that populate the Paris or Marseilles underworld of Sabir’s imagination: the pimps, the drug dealers, safe crackers, hit men, gangsters. Gaspard, for example – the nervy, cowering country lad to Sabir’s left who cries himself to sleep – looks barely sixteen. One evening, without any prompting, Gaspard sobs out his story, banal and tragic in equal parts. He and another farmhand friend broke into the village café one night for a dare, and forced the till. The café owner came down to see what the disturbance was. Panicked, Gaspard grabbed a bottle of spirits, hurled it at the owner and fled. The man slipped on the stone floor, cracked his head open and bled to death overnight. The gendarmes picked Gaspard up the next day and he confessed that same morning. This boy seems typical of so many of the transportés on board: juvenile, illiterate, from peasant stock, lost, bewildered, completely out of his depth. Only thirty himself, Sabir feels ancient and worldly among these petrified adolescents. As though he’s lived and died an entire life in comparison.

Discipline on board is lax, not at all like in a mainland prison. Most of the men have stripped off and wear nothing but towels around their waists. They sit in small groups, chatting quietly, smoking, fretting, occasionally fighting. The hard men from the military jails in the African colonies – the forts-à-bras – even run a poker game with a makeshift pack of cards cut from cardboard. A stained blanket on the steel floor serves as the card table. These men are generally much older than the others, and everyone’s scared of them. Little cliques have already formed in each of the eight prison cages: the Parisians band together, as do the Corsicans, the Bretons, the Marseillais, the Arabs, the Indo-Chinese. There are a couple of Germans too in Sabir’s cage, deserters from the Foreign Legion who speak hardly any French and sit whispering together. A tall, thin man huddles in the corner and pores obsessively over a tattered map torn from an atlas. Over and over he mouths a string of unfamiliar words, like a magic incantation: Paramaribo, Albina, Maroni, Orinoco, Oyapock, Sinnamary …

As the boat reaches the tropics, the heat and lack of air inside the cages become almost unbearable. Walking, standing, sitting or lying, it’s impossible to get comfortable and just as impossible to sleep. Twice a day the prisoners are given a collective shower: sailors come down into the hold with hoses and drench the men with fresh salt water. It’s a delicious relief, but five minutes later Sabir is dry again and horribly itchy from the salt. Thirst is now an overriding problem; the drinking water has become contaminated and the guards pour rum into the barrels to make it more palatable. On this final leg of the voyage, Sabir feels constantly dizzy, but he can’t tell whether it’s because of the heat, the bad water, the rum, the seasickness or just the stench of six hundred bodies. The men lie listlessly now in their hammocks and conversations have died down to a low mutter, barely audible over the groan of the engine room.

One day the birds finally reappear, at first trailing in the boat’s wake then wheeling around the funnels, filling the air with their sad cries. It’s dawn. Sabir’s hammock is hooked up by a porthole and he can just make out a dark blade cutting across the horizon. Over the next hour the blade thickens and resolves into a vivid green. Not long after, the sea turns yellow. It happens literally from one moment to the next, as if the boat has just crossed a border. A gargantuan river mouth comes into view, several kilometres across. Everyone flocks to the portholes as the river swallows the boat up. An air of nervous expectation hangs over the cages; only Bonifacio remains impassive, unshakeable, as he lies in his hammock smoking cigarette after cigarette.

To avoid mudbanks the boat has to zigzag its way upstream, sometimes steaming down the middle, sometimes straying perilously close to the French bank – almost close enough for a man to reach out and touch the green foliage that bursts out over the water. On one occasion they pass what they take to be an Indian village: a rudimentary collection of five or six huts, a few inhabitants by the shore. It’s hard to make out what the Indians are actually doing as they gaze out across the river and beyond, apparently quite uninterested in the faces pressed to the portholes. Occasionally the boat gives a piercing hoot, although there’s no sign of other traffic on the river. And each time it does, great clouds of birds rise gracefully from the trees before dispersing into the sky.

At around noon, their destination finally comes into view: a couple of boulevards hewn out of the jungle, heading into nowhere; a large complex of buildings to the left of a long pier; then beyond that a neatly laid-out residential quarter. Saint-Laurent has the air of an unremarkable French village, miraculously transplanted to the South American jungle. Its little pink bungalows and spruce gardens look faintly ridiculous, cowed by this river and rainforest of unearthly proportions. With so many prisoners now jostling for a glimpse, Sabir manages only brief moments at the porthole. The trees that imprison the town are the tallest Sabir has ever seen. Some of them even sprout out of the river itself, blurring the boundary between land and water. It is indeed the green wall of Sabir’s imagination, sliding slowly along the bank as the boat steams towards Saint-Laurent. The immensity of the forest frightens him, because he knows that from now on he’ll have to live surrounded by it, and that one day soon he’ll have to escape through it.

When the engine cuts out, the silence is extraordinary. Sabir can hear the river lapping at the side of the boat. His blue cloth uniform, which had offered so little protection against the European winter, now suffocates him and he has to resist the temptation to rip it off. Sabir sets his cloth cap carefully on his head. Strange how you feel some vanity even in such circumstances. The town lies ahead, quite still in the dead of the noonday sun. They have been twenty-four days at sea. The air shimmers in the dripping heat. The date is 29 February 1928. It’s Ash Wednesday.

II

The march to the penitentiary takes only minutes. Sabir is struck by the colourful headdresses of the Creole women among the crowd lining the boulevard, curious to see the new convoy. Some of these women are laughing, calling out to the convicts: ‘Allez, les gars … bonne chance … t’es beau, toi!’The banter sounds too spontaneous, too unnatural; it’s a peculiar counterpart to the scenes on the other side of the Atlantic, just a few weeks before, as the men boarded the ship. Then, the women were weeping, not laughing. Then, Sabir vainly searched the crowd of female faces for a glimpse of his fiancée. Was she there? Most likely not. Sabir had asked her to stay away. Nonetheless a violent feeling, almost hate, grips him now as he thinks of her probable absence that day. It’s practically the first time he’s thought of her since boarding the ship.

To the right, colonial buildings with wide, inviting verandas. To the left, a statue of a man staring imperiously into the river, two black men crouching down beside him. As he marches, Sabir follows the statue’s gaze, beyond the river to the other side. The Dutch bank, according to Bonifacio. There, too, is a smart, whitewashed colonial village: the mirror image of Saint-Laurent. It, too, is completely surrounded by jungle, perched uncertainly by the water as if cornered by an invading army. Although it looks exactly the same, this other side of the river is in fact like a photographic negative, Sabir realises. Because it’s not French. Not a penal colony. Its jungle looks seductive, alive with possibility. A man might disappear into it and emerge on the other side completely changed, a different person.

Little knots of convicts stand idly by the penitentiary gates; they appear to be totally unsupervised. In their red and white striped uniforms and wide straw hats, they remind Sabir of the vaudeville clowns in the shows his mother used to take him to as a boy. As the new convoy are marched through the gates, one of the convicts shouts out: ‘Anyone from Lyons in your cage?’ No one dares answer. Another convict sidles up to the tall man marching beside Sabir – the one who spent the whole trip staring at his tattered map. Apparently they know each other. ‘I’ll send you a note tonight,’ Sabir overhears the convict whisper. ‘I’m working in the botanical gardens. It’s a good job. We’re a man short. When they ask what you do, say you’re a gardener.’

Even once the convoy are inside, the gates of the penitentiary stay open. Convicts seem to wander in and out as they please. This laxness perplexes Sabir because it makes escape look easy, when he’s heard that it isn’t at all. They’re herded into a vast hall with an array of equipment: height gauges, scales, a camera mounted on a tripod, a table with ink-pads for fingerprinting. While Sabir strips, a clerk makes an inventory of the various marks on his body, every wart and mole. Sabir has a small flower tattooed on his left shoulder blade, dating from his army days. The clerk – who Sabir only now realises is actually another convict – examines it very carefully, devotes a short paragraph to it in the registre matricule. ‘What sort of flower is it? What’s its name?’ Flummoxed, Sabir has no response. But later, when he’s asked what his profession is, Bonifacio’s warning about what happens to unskilled prisoners comes back to him. He remembers the convict at the gates and says: ‘Gardener.’

Before lock-up, an officer issues everyone with a sheet of writing paper and a stamped envelope. He tells them that there’s no postal service out in the forest camps, and that, in any case, in future they’ll have to buy their own stamps and paper. Sabir spends the rest of the afternoon earning a couple of francs writing letters for the illiterate convicts. Pleas to wives to stay faithful; to come to Guiana; to on no account come to Guiana. Letters begging lovers not to forget them; to brothers commending the care of their wives and children to them; to parents asking for money, assuring them that everything’s all right, that they’re doing well. Appeals to the Ministry of Justice for pardons; instructions to lawyers in the hope of last-minute miracles; threats of vengeance; last wills and testaments …

Those with money have already bought coffee and cigarettes from one of the turnkeys. One prisoner has bought a fresh supply of cigarettes for Bonifacio as well. He has crouched down, wetted his finger and traced a rough map of the river and coastline on the dirt floor. He’s explaining the three routes out of Saint-Laurent: west, across the river; east, through the jungle; and north, down the river and into the sea.

‘Across the river gets you out of French territory and into Dutch Guiana. Opposite you’ve got the town of Albina. From there, there’s a road to the capital, Paramaribo, on the coast. But your uniform’ll give you away. The Dutch will send you back across the river. So you need false papers and workman’s clothes. That way you can pretend you’re working in one of the mines down the river. Even then, they’ll check back with Saint-Laurent if they think you’re French.

‘Or you can try the jungle. It looks the easiest way, but it’s the hardest. I don’t know anyone who’s made it through to Brazil. Jungle’s so thick you can only do a couple of kilometres in a day. There are huge rivers to cross. Without a gun there’s nothing you can catch. You’ll poison yourself eating the fruit. Or the Indians will find you. They’re paid ten francs for each convict they bring back. Or you’ll go crazy with hunger and come back after a few days. If you can find your way back.

‘Then there’s the sea. It’s the riskiest way. The hardest to organise. But it’s your best bet. You need a lot of dough. You need a boat with a sail, food and water for at least ten days. You paddle down the river at night, to catch the dawn tide. Then you’re in open sea. Because of the winds you can’t go south. So you have to head north-west till you get to Trinidad. The English won’t let you stay. But they won’t hand you back to the French either. They give you a few days to sort yourself out and find fresh supplies. Then you have to sail on. You can’t put to shore in Venezuela, because they’ll send you back to Saint-Laurent. But if you make it to Colombia, you’re free.’

In the tropics, night approaches with almost visible speed, sweeping across the forest like a black tide. Within the barracks a feeble night-light casts spindly shadows: everything is obscure, humid. The night brings no particular relief from the heat and the smallest movement seems to take an enormous effort. Unfamiliar noises reach Sabir through the bars, but in the barracks itself there’s silence. It’s as if the strain and shame of their arrival has exhausted everyone to the point where there’s no room for any further emotion. It’s not just the silence that’s different, but the stillness too. Sabir had got used to the gentle rocking of the boat, and the knot in his gut is like a reverse seasickness. For Sabir, this absolute stillness feels as though something that had once been faintly alive has now finally died.

The barracks holds sixty men – roughly the same ones as in Sabir’s cage on the prison boat, minus those already admitted to hospital. Unconsciously, they’ve reconstructed the cage in the barracks, as if afraid of what novelty might bring. To Sabir’s right lies Bonifacio; to his left Gaspard the country lad – who has tearfully dictated a wrenching letter to his parents begging forgiveness. Despite the heat and humidity, he’s shivering and curled up in foetal position: already Sabir has noticed the intense pressure the boy is under from the forts-à-bras to give in to their advances. Soon he might have to choose one of them, if only to protect himself from the others. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out for you,’ Sabir told him as he wrote the boy’s letter. ‘I’ll try to help you if I can.’ And somehow this promise felt like an act of rebellion, not against the life of the bagne as imposed by the authorities, but against a convict-created world.

Bonifacio, on the other hand, is dozing peacefully. He’s stripped to the waist; a huge tattoo of a Christian cross covers his back. Sabir remembers how, early on in the trip, someone made a mocking remark about this tattoo. Bonifacio simply got out of his hammock and delivered a single, perfectly executed blow to the man’s stomach, then lay back down. The man was so badly winded that everyone thought he was going to die. Even as he snores now, Bonifacio’s muscleman biceps remain taut, threatening.

Like a proper professional, Bonifacio has never bragged, never once talked about his past. But Sabir has already heard his story, from another prisoner on the ship. Years before, Bonifacio got twenty years’ transportation with hard labour for a run of jewel heists. He was sent out to French Guiana but escaped eighteen months later, making his way to Argentina. There, he was helped out by friends in the prostitution racket. Eventually, he set himself up in the business, running a network of French girls in Buenos Aires. It was a comfortable, prosperous existence, but there was one thing that still rankled. During his trial, Bonifacio had arranged for a fence to send him his cut from the jewel heists. He never got the money. It was quite a fortune – easily enough to have financed an escape from the penal colony as soon as he got there.

One day, years after his escape to Argentina, he risked a return to France. Back in the Paris underworld, there was stupefaction at his sudden reappearance. But thanks to his reputation as an homme régulier, friends helped him trace the man he was after. Bonifacio soon found his former fence living in a bourgeois apartment building not far from the Bois de Boulogne. The man begged for mercy, but Bonifacio showed him none. He gunned him down in front of his wife and children. A few days later, Bonifacio was picked up again, as he strolled down the boulevard Clichy with his Argentinian mistress. Someone had betrayed him to the police. Scared off by Bonifacio’s underworld friends, the fence’s wife refused to testify against him. Unable to pin the murder on him, the authorities simply put Bonifacio on the next prison ship out to Saint-Laurent to finish his original sentence.

Throughout the afternoon, various convicts from other barracks have come up to the bars to talk with Bonifacio in low voices. Sabir also notices that Bonifacio hasn’t bothered to write his letter: he’s sold his paper and envelope to one of the German prisoners for a few sous. Sabir hasn’t had time for his own letter yet. There’s only one he wishes to write, and after that there’ll be no further need. On the boat he dreamt up all sorts of fantasies about escaping back to France, maybe reuniting with his fiancée, somehow returning to his former life. He was going to write to her to tell her he’d arrived safely. But now he changes his mind. Already, something has moved inside him since his arrival in the bagne. During the long, humid afternoon spent transcribing the impossible wishes of others, the realisation has grown in him that his old life is dead. That he can now never expect to resurrect it. That his survival – should he want it – depends on sloughing off this dead skin. That his only real hope is to become someone else entirely.