Dry Guillotine by René Belbenoît

Author:René Belbenoît
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: French Guiana
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1937-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

In the hospital on Isle Royale I found that during my absence a scandal had broken out – a scandal far more serious than any which the guard’s daughter and I might have brought about had not the Commandant sent me post-haste to Saint Joseph. This was the scandal of Maurice, Raoul, and the wife of Leclerc, the island’s eldest guard.

Maurice, once a headwaiter in an exclusive restaurant on the boulevards, had during the years of his imprisonment in Guiana become a hardened, uncomplaining convict. He lived in the Second Platoon, in the Crimson Barrack, and his whole life seemed wrapped up in an intense homosexual relationship with a young convict named Raoul. The two were together every night in the farthest corner of the Crimson Barrack. While others played cards or occupied themselves with other activities Maurice and his young môme stayed back in the darkness – behind a blanket which Maurice habitually hung every night on a string, as a screen for their perverted orgies.

While I had been in the barrack, before being sent to the cells on Saint Joseph, Raoul had done no work. Maurice had supported him – providing Raoul with tobacco, clothes and other things in return for the satisfaction of his desires. But suddenly Raoul had been commanded to work each day in the house of Leclerc the guard. The youth was about twenty years old, was handsome in spite of a very weak mouth, and had several engaging mannerisms. Leclerc was past sixty and the climate had sapped his vitality to such an extent that his wife, who was much younger – and had led undoubtedly a wayward life before she came out to marry him – decided that she would carry on an affair with a younger man.

This is not an unusual state of affairs in the Guiana settlements, barracks, and camps. Many of the wives of the guards and even of the officials are former prostitutes. I doubt that a good woman, a woman of gentle birth, education, or refinement could stand living in French Guiana for more than a month or two. It would be like throwing a rose into a vat of smelly garbage and expecting it to survive. A guard, therefore, has a hard time finding a wife – unless he sends to France and offers that compromise to some dope addict or prostitute who, at the moment, may be especially down on her luck and willing to do anything. Each time the French mail-boat arrives from France there will be a few women on board, consigned officially to various guards and under-officials who have applied for them. They are married hastily by the civil authorities – but I never knew of such a wife or of a guard who thus lived happily ever afterwards.

Leclerc’s wife had a voluptuous figure. She used to torment us convicts frequently by walking up and down in the island breeze clad only in a sketchy, very thin dress. It was common gossip that it had been she who engineered Raoul’s transfer, during the day, to her household.

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