"Good luck, Frenchman! From this moment, you're free. _Adios!_"

The officer of the El Dorado penal settlement waved and turned his back.

And it was no harder than that to get rid of the chains I had been dragging for fourteen years. I held Picolino by the arm, and we took a few steps up the steep path from the riverbank, where the officer had left us, to the village of El Dorado. Now, sitting here in my old Spanish house on the night of August 18, 1971, to be exact, I can see myself on that pebbly track with unbelievable clarity; and not only does the officer's voice now ring in my ears in just the same way, deep and clear, but I make the same movement that I made twenty-six years ago-I turn my head.

It is midnight: outside the night is dark. But for me, for me alone, the sun is shining: it's ten o'clock in the morning, and I stare at the loveliest back I have even seen in my life-the back of my jailer as he moves farther and farther away, symbolizing the end of the watching, the eavesdropping, the prying that I endured every day, night, minute and second for fourteen years.

I turn my head for a last look at the river, a last look, beyond the guard, at the island with its Venezuelan penal settlement, a last look at a hideous past when I was trampled upon, degraded and ground down.

Abruptly, I catch Picolino by the arm, turn my back on the picture and lead him quickly up the path, first giving myself a shake to get rid of the filth of the past for good and all.

Freedom? Yes, but where? At the far end of the world, way back in the plateaus of Venezuelan Guiana, in a little village deep in the most luxuriant virgin forest you can imagine. I was at the southeastern tip of Venezuela, close to Brazilian frontier: an enormous sea of green, broken only here and there by the waterfalls of the rivers and streams that run through it-a green ocean dotted with little communities, each gathered around a chapel.