Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon by Henri Charrière

Author:Henri Charrière [Charrière, Henri]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: General, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780007378890
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2012-10-10T14:00:00+00:00

Maracaibo was seething. There was excitement in the air, and so many businesses and oil refineries were springing up that everything, from beer to cement, was sold on the black market. Everything was snapped up right away--there was never enough to meet the demand. Labor was making money, jobs were well paid and every kind of business was doing well.

When there is an oil boom, a district’s economy goes through two completely different phases. First comes the period before the wells begin to yield, the period of pre-exploitation. The companies turn up and settle in; they need offices, camps, roads, high-tension lines; they have to drill the wells, put up the derricks and pumps, etc. This is the golden age, golden for all the skilled workers and golden for every level of the community.

The people, the genuine horny-handed people, have dough in their pockets; they begin to discover the meaning of money and of security. Families start to get themselves organized, homes grow bigger or better, and the children go to school in good clothes, often taken by companies’ buses.

Then comes the second phase, the one that corresponds to my first view of Lake Maracaibo, with all I could see of it turned into a forest of derricks. This is the period of exploitation. Thousands of pumps, working away there by themselves, tirelessly suck out millions of tons of black gold every day.

But this unbelievable mass of dough does not pass through the people’s hands: it goes straight into the coffers of the state banks or the companies. Things begin to grow sticky, staff is cut down to the strict minimum, there’s no more money just floating around, all the active business is over. The coming generations will only know about it when they hear their grandfathers say, “Once upon a time, when Maracaibo was wealthy, there was. - .”

But I was lucky. I came in for Maracaibo’s second boom. It had nothing to do with the pumps on the lake, but several oil companies had just got new concessions running from the Perijá Mountains down to the lake and the sea, and they were wild with excitement. The moment might have been made for me.

I was going to dig in here. And I swore the hole I made would be a sizable cavern. I’d work at anything I could lay my hands on to gather in every possible crumb of this gigantic cake.

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