The Man Within My Head (14 page)

But life is difficult for newcomers to the Land of the Free from a very different system; Carlos soon ended up in New Jersey, and then headed down to Florida, the very place he’d told me he never wanted to go (“Too much like Cuba”). He wrote to me constantly, and we spoke often on the phone—it had rarely been possible before—and when I flew down to Havana again, for my sixth visit, he suggested we meet up, on the way, in Miami.

He was staying in a beat-up motel, I gathered, though he made sure that I didn’t see it; he insisted on putting me up (at his expense) in a top-floor suite in the smallish hotel where he was working now. We were happy to meet again; it felt as if we’d been through several lifetimes together. But there was no talk of a bookstore café now, I noticed. The future had seemed illimitable in Cuba, so long as it had not been something real.

“You hear from Peter and Lourdes?” he asked me.

“Now and then. I’ll see them this week when I’m back in Havana.” (Peter, though, was in prison now, and when I went to visit him there, exulted in the fact that he had three solid meals a day, a steady roof above his head, all the things he could not be sure of on the outside.)

Carlos took me to a mall, the very brightest and splashiest, I could imagine, in South Florida. We stood outside the entrance to a theme-park café. It was a long line, and we both thought of the long line we’d been standing in our first morning together, when he’d asked me for my passport, so he could enjoy a piece of my life.

“You know, I write to Peter and Lourdes,” he now said. “I talk to them on the telephone sometimes. I tell them, ‘Is better where you are. For me is okay here. I can hustle.’ ” The crinkly eyes had not changed at all. “But for them is better in La Habana. No work, but no hassle. No future but no schedule.”

“Death by gunshot or death by starvation,” I said, reminding him of what an old man in Santiago had said to us about the difference between life under Batista and life under Fidel.

He smiled, in recognition. Greene had been ignorant, by his own admission, of some of the brutalities that were taking place behind the devil-may-care atmosphere he so enjoyed, and when he went back to Cuba and became a friend of Fidel’s, he seemed almost perversely eager to champion the place as a way of tweaking the newly dominant world power in Washington. “There is a touch of ancient Athens about Havana today,” he’d written in London’s
Sunday Telegraph
, after a trip in 1963. “The Republic is small enough for the people to meet in the agora.” It was often suspected that he was reporting on the island for MI6, and that maybe even his support of the Revolution was a front.

But beneath all the geopolitical ironies, and the ways he’d chosen to turn the place into a free-and-easy escape of sex shows and bordellos, Greene had given me something deeper, which now I couldn’t shake off. We had dinner at the theme-park café, and we talked about everything but the future—or the present. When I looked at Carlos, I tried not to say all the things that were coming to both our minds, as he smiled, ambiguously as ever, and asked me if I wanted dessert.

O
ften, as the years went on, I told myself I’d had enough of Greene. I never wanted to hear another word from him or about him. I had no interest in encountering again his close readings of
The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies
or reading how
The Roly-Poly Pudding
, by Beatrix Potter, is a “masterpiece,” by an author comparable to Henry James. I grew tired of his self-conscious talk of Russian roulette and suicide, though I could believe—since it came out so often in his work—that he frequently did see death as a release or a liberation. I wasn’t sure even the younger Greene would have liked the scold of later years, lecturing the press on Central America—although my travels there had shown me he was right—and I found it hard to get inside his frequent melancholy. The “honesty” with which Greene insisted on telling his women about the other women in his life sounded like pure selfishness; the confessor is determined to get his betrayals off his chest, even if that means just foisting them on someone else.

He was like any friend, in short, with whom one’s spent a lot
of time; I thought of Louis’s eagerness to run away from the good deed he’d so instinctively performed in Ethiopia, though that did nothing to diminish the goodness or the deed. Greene was the opposite of a holy book, by his own admission; he was a human book, in whose novels the characters act well only in spite of themselves, and after a long series of self-betrayals. I knew the paradoxical truth he was getting at—“If only you’d forget your guilt,” his wife used to say to him, “you’d treat me more nicely”—but I couldn’t bear reading the early stories, so bitter and cruel and thick with dissatisfaction. And his travel books were a near-perfect example of how not to write or think about travel.

P
ick up
The Lawless Roads
, Greene’s account of wandering through Mexico, in fact, and you will never want to pick him up again. It’s hard to imagine any work about a journey abroad—the completion of a trip that the author has planned and looked forward to for two and a half years—so dyspeptic, so loveless, so savagely self-enclosed and blind. “Hate” is the word that resounds throughout, as in much of the early work, like an inverted “Amen.” Within a day or two of arriving in Mexico, Greene declares, “That, I think, was the day I began to hate the Mexicans.” Many pages later, he is still intoning, “I have never been in a country where you are more aware all the time of hate.”

The book might almost be a parody not just of Graham Greene, but of the kind of Englishman who hates Abroad the minute he sets foot in it, yet punishes himself—and the
rest of us—by choosing to go there again and again. A child in Mexico is “odious.” Mexicans are “like mangy animals in a neglected zoo” observing “the jungle law.” By the time the trip, which lasted less than two months, is coming to an end, Greene is confidently asserting, “It is not inconceivable that the worst evil possible to natural man may be found years hence in Mexico.”

“The whole atmosphere of the place is rotten.” “Lunch was awful, like the food you eat in a dream, tasteless in a positive way, so that the very absence of taste is repellent.” A market is “far more squalid than anything I had seen in the West African bush.” Sex is the “deed of darkness” and when he records a “silly dream,” it is one of “triumph and happiness.”

Every now and then the thirty-three-year-old Englishman does catch a glimpse of simplicity and peace, as of life before the Fall, but this only makes the rest of his days more terrible. “One did want, I found, an
English
book in this hating and hateful country,” he writes, and decides to pick up Cobbett and Trollope as he’s passing through some of the most spectacular scenery he could have encountered in his young life. He is developing, he notes, “an almost pathological hatred” for Mexico. As he nears the end of the trip, as if impervious to all he’s been saying and thinking, he writes, “How one begins”—begins!—“to hate these people.”

A few months after completing the nightmare journey—England, when he returns, is so miserable, he wonders how he could have hated Mexico—Greene wrote a novel, arising out of one stray detail he’d picked up on his journey: a story of a drunken priest so feckless that he’d christened a boy “Brigitta.” In
The Lawless Roads
the tale is merely one more instance of Mexican clumsiness and folly, another reason to hold the malfunctioning country in contempt. In the novel, however,
The
Power and the Glory
, the tiny anecdote becomes the foundation for a devastating, heartfelt story of a priest who violates every rule of the church and yet can never quite manage to betray its spirit.

The novel was so full of compassion and fellow feeling for the man—indeed, for all the luckless and broken figures in the Mexican landscape (not least the lieutenant in pursuit of the priest)—that it became the book that established Greene as a major writer on religion and remained the one novel even its contentious maker admitted to liking through most of his life. When Catholicism was on the run, he’d side even with the Catholics. When a priest was a fallen, sinning man much like the rest of us, Greene could summon sympathy even for a priest. All that was so hateful and bereft of light and beauty to the traveler, watching from the sidelines, becomes moving and deeply personal for the novelist, as soon as he sees and feels from within an abandoned little girl and the fugitive who’s been trying for ten years to run away from what he loves.

T
hat Greene should find hate everywhere in Mexico was off-putting enough; but that Greene should sense that this hate was really in himself was even more harrowing, especially for an admirer. He was a professional writer of fiction, yet Greene was never one to lie to himself, I felt, despite those two versions of his diary. That was what commanded respect even when I couldn’t give him affection; he looked unblinkingly at precisely the shadows in the self (and in the world) that most of us try to look away from, drilling, as a dentist might, into the most tender and infected spaces because that
was where the trouble lay. That was what allowed so many to write so venomously about Greene; he gave them all the evidence they needed in his compendious accounts of what he called his “evasions and deceits.”

There is a moment in
The Lawless Roads
that stuck with me every time I read it. Greene goes to Villahermosa—or “Beautiful City,” as it would be in English—and in the midst of what looks as if it might almost be redeeming, he catches sight of a dentist’s office, with its “floodlit chair of torture.” As if caught in some nightmare in which he can’t escape himself, he is told, improbably, “Why, everybody in Villahermosa is called Greene—or Graham.” Two pages later, “a young Mexican dentist called Graham joined us.” As he leaves Villahermosa, Greene goes into the depths of the jungle, where (of course) his landlord is “dumb with misery—he had toothache.”

It is as if he is trapped in a hall of mirrors, and every road he travels brings him back to his own pain. He is lost, raging, inside his own head. One can feel the anguish of such a situation—but that makes it no easier to like the man who’s going through it.

I thought again of his early stories set in England, so full of places called “Fetter Lane” and “Leadenhall Street”—“Wotton-under-Edge”—and the overwhelming impression was of a man imprisoned, in a cell that he has committed himself to of his own free will. He has given himself to a marriage, though he knows that he can never settle down; pledged himself to a faith, though his captious mind refuses to believe in anything but uncertainty; and put himself inside a family though nothing makes him feel less at home. The medicine he’s taken is the one that makes him ill—and the only person he can blame for all his suffering is himself.

In his early novel
Stamboul Train
(the one that helped
make him truly independent, after it was bought by Hollywood), every character on the eponymous train is a fugitive and a solitary of sorts, and the very carriages that might seem vessels of freedom become vehicles of imprisonment. But the worst of the itinerant figures is a thief and adulterer who is even, we are made to guess, guilty of murder. Greene gives him, a little implausibly, the name “Grünlich,” which in German, of course, means “greenish.”

And yet
The Power and the Glory
, arising out of the trip he so claimed to hate, seemed to release Greene a little: from Britain, from his sense of enclosure, from self-division. There is more daylight, even sunshine in the books that follow—the Mexican novel is the first with no Englishman at the center and with a vivid habitation of a foreign landscape—and though there is always contention at their heart, it is sweetened, sometimes soothed by the passions of a foreign country, as the writer’s alter ego tries to bring his loves in tune with the complex environment around him. In time he would step beyond even those tensions and give us the gentler landscape of friendship (in
Monsignor Quixote
) or of a too-innocent man being introduced to the follies of moralism by a woman (
Travels with My Aunt
). The country he claimed to hate would turn him towards love.