The Man Within My Head (31 page)

S
o,” said Anna, after accompanying us back to the room of wailing men. It was still New Year’s Day. “You would like dinner?”

She felt sorry for me, I could tell, and though I longed to return to my room and nurse my wounds—my legs were aching and my body was stiff, and I wanted to call Hiroko and hear the solace of her voice—it seemed cruel to abandon our new friend after all her hard work. We sat in a little cafeteria, and she told me of her dreams of practicing medicine, of how difficult everything was in Bolivia, of her hobby, singing. In some ways I might have been with the sweet tour guide in Lake Titicaca from my previous trip: Anna could not have been less pushy, kinder, more innocent in what she hoped for. She still lived with her parents, though close to thirty, and when we walked out into the street just before midnight, she said, “I will see you in the hospital at nine a.m. tomorrow” and got onto a bus home with a welcome lack of fuss, waving to me from the window.

The next day she was as good as her word. She spoke to the doctors. “Of course they say he must stay. They want a rich foreigner in their bed. There is no need. They are criminals, all of them.” She explained to the driver’s mother—relieved that her son now seemed okay—that we were touched, deeply touched, by their gesture,
but we could afford the five dollars the stay would cost. In the night, Louis told us, he had cried out for help, the pain was so intense. But the nurse had refused to give him even an aspirin. Of course, Anna said: you had to pay for medication in advance, and an aspirin could cost a cent. They didn’t want you to get one free.

It seemed wise to try to get away from the place, if only to the capital. Anna helped find us seats on a flight out at lunchtime. She called to La Paz to locate a hospital that would take Louis, an international facility in the embassy district. She called to double-check that an ambulance would be waiting for us when we landed. At Sucre’s little airport, she accompanied us to the tiny office where a man ensured that Louis was fit to fly.

When we got to Sopocachi, and a truly sleek facility in La Paz, with a doctor who spoke English, Louis asked if it had been madness to get on a plane.

“Yes,” said the doctor, matter-of-factly.

“So if there was a problem, I could have …”

“Yes. It was very stupid.”

Then we managed to get flights out of the country, back to the safety of our homes, and the letters from Anna, kind and imploring (“You know how it is in Bolivia”), began to stream in.

I
still bear scars, visible and less so, from our accident in Bolivia; somehow the world it opened onto was so charged and dark, so far from logic, that I cannot easily leave it behind.
Driving up hairpin turns in the Indian foothills of the Himalayas three months later, the boys at the wheel accelerating wildly around blind switchbacks, I had to close my eyes, gripping the seat between my knuckles, because I could feel it all happening again. My house burned down as I watched, I was in a car in Egypt that ran over a little boy in a village—his bloody body thrown into our backseat so that there were stains all over—I have seen close friends possessed or try to commit suicide; but none of that so unnerved me, or haunts me still, as the boy in the tomato-red T-shirt. The modern world has yet to make many inroads on Bolivia—that was why I wanted to share it with Louis—and it was possible to believe, as Greene had believed in places like Liberia and Haiti, that one was back in a much more potent world where none of our easy defenses or learned reflexes could help us.

It was not fashionable to believe all that; I’d resisted such implications for most of my life. It was exactly what we had been trained to disbelieve at school, even as we were being taught about a man walking on water and offering his body for us to eat, rising from the dead and turning water into wine. Most English literature, if it stuck resolutely enough to the social, could pretend that devils (and certainly gods) didn’t exist, and it was always easier to think so. Religion, in that sense, was part of the way Greene rebelled against his upbringing, affirming the subconscious. It wasn’t faith that was the escape, he always maintained, but atheism. Yet he had seen and traveled enough to have an acute, almost obsessive sense of the limits of what we can explain or know, and to realize that darkness can be more important to acknowledge than light, precisely because we are so happy to discount its existence.

Besides, an adopted father can never die, I thought again;
that’s one of the great advantages he has over a real one. Indeed, if he’s departed the world already, a virtual or a chosen father need never even age; he’s always at the stage you need him to be, and you can hold him in all his ages at the same time, if you so choose. He grows old as you do, the books ripening and taking on new colors, so that what once seemed comical gathers shadows all around it. Yet he never grows too old, or loses his memory. He’s always there for you. Like a god, Greene might have added—except that a human, faltering, contradictory god is sometimes easier to believe in.

W
hen I went to the last room my father ever occupied—it turned out to be on the same road where I was sleeping, though down in the flats, while I was in the mountains—I saw his books arranged by his seat on the floor, where he liked to reach for them, and the mass of yellow, sky blue, grey folders that he always kept, with horoscopes, photocopies, caduceus symbols, records of important documents stashed inside them. His ashtray was on the table, and the pack of cigarettes that had in fact brought him to his death was sitting there, waiting to be opened. He had died not many days before, and it fell to me to sort his things out.

As I was going through the books he kept beside him, heavily marked up, I saw that he was reading Gandhi, as ever, his chosen father, and was also collecting books (perhaps he’d always collect these more than read them) on how to improve his health. Then I saw, to my astonishment, a cover that looked familiar, and noticed that it was a copy of the first book I’d
ever written, in the old, burned-down house, while he was still wondering if there was evil in California.

I opened it and found it as marked up as any of his old books of philosophy or poetry might have been: heavy double underlinings in some places, cryptic arrows or infinity signs in red and black in the margin; parentheses that denoted some intense response beside the words. I couldn’t tell what the feeling was exactly, but he seemed to have devoured my book as intensely, with as much rigor, and even approval, as if it were a copy of
The Republic
or Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
. Then I went into his bedroom, where his slippers sat by the bed, as if waiting for him to get out from under the covers and slip off to the bathroom.

There were a few more volumes by his bedside—maybe company for the night—and one of them, I saw to my amazement, was another copy of that first book, which couldn’t have been the easiest one for a father to delight in with its raucous and heedless adventures across ten countries in the East.

In all its 378 pages, there was only one marking: at the top of one page, my father had carefully copied out a sentence I’d cited from Proust, “The real paradises are the paradises lost.”

A son may choose never to listen to a father, but a father, as Greene saw as well as anyone, is always bound to a son, and real disinheritance is hard. Another advantage virtual fathers have.

“In the time left to me,” Greene had written in his letter, after I’d asked if he might be willing to sit still for a profile in
Time
magazine, and the phrase had stuck with me, haunting, as the words of those in their eighties often are. Even though more and more of his stories, as he went on, are set in autumn, one of the main occupations of his characters is to see how
far they’ve come, or fallen rather, since the spring. Yet insofar as spring—youth—is visible, there’s always the possibility of vicarious renewal or hopefulness, and the mixed feelings of seeing someone else’s perhaps too-innocent illusions.

His inability to trust himself would not have mattered if he hadn’t so hungered for peace, and his longing for peace would not have been so poignant if it hadn’t been his unquiet mind that always kept him from finding it. “From childhood I had never believed in permanence,” Fowler says, “and yet I had longed for it.”

There weren’t many things I still had to ask him; his life was an open book, he’d laid himself so naked to the world on the page. If I met my father I might have asked—though perhaps something would always prevent me from broaching the difficult stuff—“How much did you really believe? What is it that most compels you? Where do the lines of faith run in you and where do they stop?” But with Greene there’d be no need of words at all. He knew me better than I did myself. I knew him better than I knew Louis or my father or many of the people closest to me, when it came to his secrets, his sins, his most intimate needs. I closed the door of my father’s final temporary residence and got back into my car to drive up the hill, to where a rebuilt house, no longer yellow, sat alone on a ridge, and a quiet American, inside a faded orange book, was ready to keep me company with talk about the importance of never mocking innocence too readily—and the snarls that invariably turn around compassion.

T
hank you, first of all, to my dear old friend (and sometime editor) Louise Dennys, who, along with her late sister, Amanda, and brother Nicholas (all following in the footsteps of their mother, Elisabeth), has done so much to keep alive the legacy of her uncle Graham, and with her husband, Ric Young, has passed so much of Greene’s memory down to the rest of us; to my old colleague Bernard Diederich, for remaining so staunch a protector of his longtime friend, and for sharing with me, over many years, talk of their adventures together; and to my newer friends Paul Theroux and Michael Mewshaw, for offering glimpses into the older writer who took them in and showed them kindness. And thank you, of course, to the unmet Norman Sherry, for his untiring work of biographical excavation, to which this book, as so many others, is transparently indebted.

Thank you to my old school friend Louis, for showing me, amidst so much else, how belief in God could be not just a namby-pamby, Sunday Schoolish kind of thing, but a catalyst to deeply engaged, thoughtful compassion in the world,
extended even to such half believers as me; to U2, for some of the same; and to Sigur Rós, for offering a glimpse of peace and clarity without the clutter of personality. And thank you to the monks of New Camaldoli, for providing shelter, warm friendship, silence and, most of all, a vision of surrender to so many of us caught up in the storms of the world.

Thank you to everyone at Alfred A. Knopf, my books’ first home for more than a quarter of a century now, starting with my literary godfather, Sonny Mehta, and my editor, Dan Frank, who has, so searchingly and tenaciously, over five books now, pushed me to go deeper and closer to the bone, then come up with dozens of inspired textual suggestions; to my old friends at the company, among them Marty Asher, Robin Desser, Pam Henstell, Sheila Kay, Nicholas Latimer and the brilliant jacket designer Abby Weintraub; and to my irreplaceable friend and agent, Lynn Nesbit, as well as to Cullen Stanley, among many other stalwart protectors at Janklow & Nesbit Associates.