The Comedians

by Graham Greene

  ‘Then I can promise you, lieutenant, that he will never be a passenger in this ship.’

  The sound of his rank seemed to mollify the police officer a little. ‘He may be hidden,’ he said, ‘without your knowledge.’

  ‘In the morning before sailing I will have the ship searched, and if he is found, I shall put him ashore.’

  The man hesitated. ‘If he is not here,’ he said, ‘he must have gone to the British Embassy.’

  ‘It would be a more natural place,’ the captain said, ‘than the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company.’ He handed the revolver to the second officer. ‘You will give it him,’ he said, ‘at the foot of the gangway.’ He turned his back and left the officer’s black hand floating in mid-air like a catfish in an aquarium.

  We waited in silence until the second officer returned and told the captain that the lieutenant had driven away with his men; then I let Jones out of the lavatory. He was effusively grateful. ‘You were superb, captain,’ he said.

  The captain regarded him with dislike and contempt. He said, ‘I told him only the truth. If I had discovered you stowing away I would have put you on shore. I am glad I did not have to lie. I would have found it hard to forgive myself or you. Please leave my ship as soon as it is safe.’ He removed his jacket, he pulled his white nightshirt out of his trousers so that he could remove them with modesty, we went away.

  Outside I leant over the rail and looked at the policeman who had returned to the foot of the gangway. He was last night’s policeman, and there was no sign of the lieutenant or his men. I said, ‘It’s too late now for the British Embassy. It will be well guarded by this time.’

  ‘What do we do then?’

  ‘God knows, but we’ve got to leave the boat. If we are still here in the morning the captain will be as good as his word.’

  The purser, who woke quite cheerfully from his sleep (he was lying flat on his back when we entered with a lubricious smile on his face), saved the situation. He said, ‘There is no difficulty about Mr Brown leaving, the policeman knows him already. But there is only one solution for Mr Jones. He must leave as a woman.’

  ‘But the clothes?’ I asked.

  ‘There is an acting box here for the ship’s parties. We have the dress of a Spanish señorita and a peasant-costume from Vollendam.’

  Jones said piteously, ‘But my moustache.’

  ‘You must shave it off.’

  Neither the Spanish costume, which was designed for a flamenco-dancer, nor the elaborate headgear of the Dutch peasant was inconspicuous. We tried our best to make an unobtrusive mixture of the two, jettisoning the Vollendam headgear and the wooden sabots of the one and the mantilla of the other, as well as a great many underskirts in both cases. Meanwhile Jones gloomily and painfully shaved – there was no hot water. Oddly enough he looked more reliable without his moustache; it was as though before he had been wearing an incorrect uniform. Now I could almost believe in his military career. Odder still, when once the great sacrifice had been made, he entered with a kind of expert enthusiasm into the spirit of the charade.

  ‘You have no rouge or lipstick?’ he asked the purser, but the purser had none and Jones had to make do for cosmetics with a stick of Remington pre-shave powder. It gave him, above the black Vollendam skirt and the spangled Spanish blouse, a look of lurid pallor. ‘At the foot of the gangway,’ he told the purser, ‘you must kiss me. It will help to hide my face.’

  ‘Why not kiss Mr Brown?’ the purser asked.

  ‘He’s taking me home. It wouldn’t be natural. You have to imagine that we’ve passed quite an evening together, all three of us.’

  ‘What kind of an evening?’

  ‘An evening of riotous abandonment,’ Jones said.

  ‘Can you manage your skirt?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course, old man.’ He added mysteriously. ‘This is not the first time. Under very different circumstances, of course.’

  He went down the gangway on my arm. The skirts were so long that he had to gather them in one hand like a Victorian lady picking her way across a muddy street. The ship’s sentry stared at us agape: he hadn’t known there was a woman aboard, and such a woman, too. Jones, as he passed the sentry, gave him an appraising and provocative glance from his brown eyes. I noticed how fine and bold they looked now below his shawl; they had been killed by the moustache. At the foot of the gangway he embraced the purser and left him smudged on both cheeks with pre-shave powder. The policeman watched us with dulled curiosity – it was obvious that Jones was not the first woman to leave the boat in the early hours, and he could hardly have appealed to any man acquainted with the girls at Mère Catherine’s.

  We walked slowly arm in arm to the place where I had left my car. ‘You’re holding your skirt too high,’ I warned him.

  ‘I was never a modest woman, old man.’

  ‘I mean the flic can see your shoes.’

  ‘Not in the dark.’

  I would never have believed our escape could prove so easy. No footsteps followed us, the car was there, unwatched, peace and Columbus reigned over the night. I sat and thought while Jones arranged his skirts. He said, ‘I played Boadicea once. In a skit. To amuse the fellows. I had royalty in the audience.’

  ‘Royalty?’

  ‘Lord Mountbatten. Those were the days. Would you mind lifting your left leg? My skirt’s caught.’

  ‘Where do we go from here?’ I said.

  ‘Search me. The man I wrote the introduction to, he’s dossing down in the Venezuelan Embassy.’

  ‘It’s the most heavily guarded of the lot. They have half the general staff there.’

  ‘I’d be quite satisfied with something more modest.’

  ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t be taken in. You aren’t exactly a political refugee, are you?’

  ‘Doesn’t deceiving Papa Doc count as resistance?’

  ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t be welcome as a permanent guest. Have you thought of that?’

  ‘They’d hardly push me out, would they, if I were once safely in?’

  ‘I think one or two of them might even do that.’

  I started the engine, and we began to drive slowly back into the town. I didn’t wish to give the impression of flight. I watched before every turn for the light of another car, but Port-au-Prince was as empty as a cemetery.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘To the only place I can think of. The ambassador’s away.’

  I felt relief as we mounted the hill. There would be no roadblock on this side of the familiar turning. At the gates a policeman looked briefly into the car. He knew my face and Jones passed easily enough for a woman when the dashboard-light was out. Obviously there had not yet been a general alarm – Jones was only a criminal; he was not a patriot. They had probably warned the road-blocks and put some Tontons Macoute around the British Embassy. With the Medea covered and probably my hotel, too, they must think they had him cornered.

  I told Jones to stay in the car and I rang the bell. Somebody was awake, for I could see a light burning in a window on the ground floor. Yet I had to ring twice, and I waited with impatience as heavy steps came from a long way back inside, ponderous and unhurried. A dog yapped and whined – I was puzzled by the noise, for I had never seen a dog in the house. Then a voice – I supposed that it was the night-porter’s – asked who was there.

  I said, ‘I want Señora Pineda. Tell her it is Monsieur Brown. Something urgent.’

  The door was unlocked, unbolted and then unchained, but the man who threw it open was not the porter. The ambassador himself stood there, peering myopically. He was in his shirtsleeves, and he wore no tie: I had never before seen him less than immaculate. Beside him, on guard, was a horrible miniature dog, all long grey hair, the shape of a centipede. ‘You want my wife?’ he said. ‘She is asleep.’ Seeing his tired and wounded eyes, I thought: He knows, he knows everything.

  ‘Do you want me to wake her?’ he asked. ‘Is it so urgent? She is with my son. They are
both asleep.’

  I said lamely and ambiguously, ‘I didn’t know that you had returned.’

  ‘I came in on tonight’s plane.’ He put up his hand to where his tie should have been. ‘There’s a lot of work waiting for me to do. Papers to be read . . . you know how it is.’ It was as though he were apologizing to me and proffering me humbly his passport – Nationality: human being. Special peculiarities: cuckold.

  I said with a sense of shame, ‘No, please don’t wake her. It was really you I wanted to see.’

  ‘Me?’ I thought for a moment he would give way to a panic impulse, that he would retreat inside and close the door. Perhaps he believed I was about to tell him what he was afraid to hear. ‘Won’t it wait until morning?’ he implored me. ‘So late. So much to do.’ He felt for a cigar-case which wasn’t there. I think he half intended to press a bundle of cigars into my hands as another might have pressed money – to persuade me to go. But there weren’t any cigars. He said in miserable surrender, ‘Come in then if you must.’

  I said, ‘The dog doesn’t like me.’

  ‘Don Juan?’ He rapped out an order to the miserable creature, which began to lick his shoe.

  I said, ‘I have a companion,’ and signalled to Jones.

  The ambassador watched with despairing incredulity the appearance of Jones. He must still have thought that I intended to confess all and perhaps demand the break-up of his marriage, and what part, he probably demanded, could ‘she’ play in the affair; was she a witness, a nurse to look after Angel, a substitute wife? In a nightmare anything, however cruel or grotesque, is possible and this to him was certainly a nightmare. First out of the car came the heavy rubber-soled shoes, a pair of socks striped in scarlet and black like a school-tie worn in the wrong place, then fold after fold of blue-black skirt, and last the head and shoulders wrapped in a scarf, the Remington-white face and the provocative brown eyes. Jones shook himself like a sparrow after a dust-bath and advanced rapidly to join us.

  ‘This is Mr Jones,’ I said.

  ‘Major Jones,’ he corrected me. ‘I’m glad to meet you, Your Excellency.’

  ‘He wants asylum here. The Tontons Macoute are after him. There’s not a hope of getting him into the British Embassy. It’s too well guarded. I thought perhaps . . . although he is not a South American . . . He is in extreme danger.’

  A look of enormous relief spread over the ambassador’s face while I spoke. This was politics. This he could deal with. This was everyday. ‘Come in, Major Jones, come in. You are very welcome. My house is at your disposition. I will wake my wife at once. One of my rooms shall be prepared.’ In his relief he threw his possessive articles around like confetti. Then he closed, locked, bolted and chained the door, and absent-mindedly offered his arm to Jones to escort him into the house. Jones took it and moved magnificently across the hall like a Victorian matron. The horrible grey dog swept the ground beside him with his matted hair, smelling at the fringe of Jones’s skirt.

  ‘Luis!’ Martha stood on the landing and looked down at us with sleepy amazement.

  ‘My dear,’ the ambassador said, ‘let me introduce you – this is Mr Jones. Our first refugee.’

  ‘Mr Jones!’

  ‘Major Jones,’ Jones corrected them both, lifting the scarf from his head as though it were a hat.

  Martha leant over the banisters and laughed; she laughed till her eyes filled with tears. I could see her breasts through her nightdress and even the shadow of her hair, and so, I thought, could Jones. He smiled up at her and said, ‘In the women’s army, of course,’ and I remembered the girl called Tin Tin at Mère Catherine’s who, when I asked her why she liked him, had said to me, ‘He made me laugh.’

  II

  There was not much of the night left for me in which to sleep. As I returned to the Trianon the same police officer who had boarded the Medea stopped me at the entrance to the drive and demanded where I had been. ‘You know that as well as I do,’ I said, and he searched my car very thoroughly in revenge – a stupid man.

  I rummaged in the bar for a drink; but the ice-containers had been left dry, and there was only a bottle of Seven-Up remaining on the shelves. I laced it heavily with rum and sat out on the verandah to wait for the sun to rise – the mosquitoes had long ceased to trouble me, I was stale and tainted meat. The hotel behind me seemed emptier than it had ever done before; I missed the limping Joseph as I might have missed a familiar wound, for perhaps unconsciously I had ached a little with him in his halting progress from the bar to the verandah and up and down the stairs. His footstep was at least one I could easily recognize, and I wondered in what waste of mountain it was sounding now, or whether he was dead already among the stony knobs of Haiti’s spine. It seemed to me the only sound to which I had ever had the time to become accustomed. I was filled with self-pity, sweet like the bourbon biscuits of Angel. Could I yet separate even the sound of Martha’s footsteps, I asked myself, from another woman’s? I doubted it, and certainly I had never learnt to know my mother’s before she left me behind with the fathers of the Visitation. And my real father? He had deposited not so much as one childish memory. Presumably he was dead, but I wasn’t sure – this was a century in which old men lived beyond their time. But I felt no genuine curiosity about him; nor had I any wish to seek him out or find his tombstone, which was possibly, but not certainly, marked with the name Brown.

  Yet my lack of curiosity was a hollow where a hollow should not have been. I had not plugged the hollow with a substitute, as a dentist puts in a temporary filling. No priest had come to represent a father to me, and no region of the earth had taken the place of home. I was a citizen of Monaco, that was all.

  The palms had begun to detach themselves from the anonymous darkness; they reminded me of the palms outside the casino on that blue artificial coast where even the sand was an importation. A faint breeze stirred the long leaves, which were serrated like the keyboard of a piano; the keys were depressed two or three at a time as though by an invisible player. Why was I here? I was here because of a picture-postcard from my mother which could easily have gone astray – no odds at any casino could have been higher than that. There are those who belong by their birth inextricably to a country, who even when they leave it feel the tie. And there are those who belong to a province, a county, a village, but I could feel no link at all with the hundred or so square kilometres around the gardens and boulevards of Monte Carlo, a city of transients. I felt a greater tie here, in the shabby land of terror, chosen for me by chance.

  The first colours touched the garden, deep green and then deep red – transience was my pigmentation; my roots would never go deep enough anywhere to make me a home or make me secure with love.

  CHAPTER 2

  I

  THERE were no longer any guests in the hotel; when the Smiths departed, the cook who had made my kitchen famous with his soufflés gave up all hope and moved to the Venezuelan Embassy, where at least there were a few refugees to feed. For my meals I would boil myself an egg or open a tin, or share the Haitian food with my last remaining maid and the gardener, or sometimes I would have a meal with the Pinedas, not often, though, for the presence of Jones irritated me. Angel now went to a school organized by the Spanish Ambassador’s wife, and in the afternoons Martha would drive quite openly up the Trianon drive and leave her car in my garage. The fear of discovery had left her, or perhaps a complaisant husband now gave us a limited freedom. In my bedroom we would pass the hours making love or talking and only too often quarrelling. We even quarrelled about the ambassador’s dog. ‘It gives me the creeps,’ I said. ‘Like a rat wearing a wool-shawl, or a long centipede. What induced him to buy it?’

  ‘I suppose he wanted company,’ she said.

  ‘He has you.’

  ‘You know how little he has of me.’

  ‘Have I got to feel sorry for him too.’

  ‘It wouldn’t do any of us harm,’ she said, ‘to feel sorry for someone.’

  She was mor
e astute than I at seeing the distant cloud of a quarrel when it was still no bigger than a man’s hand, and she would usually take the right avoiding action, for when an embrace was over the quarrel was usually over too – for that occasion at least. Once she spoke of my mother and their friendship. ‘Strange wasn’t it? My father was a war-criminal and she was a heroine of the Resistance.’

  ‘You really think she was?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I found a medal in a piggy-bank, but I thought it might be the memento of a love-affair. There was a holy medal in the pig too, but that meant nothing – she was certainly not a pious woman. When she left me with the Jesuits it was for convenience only. They could afford an unpaid bill.’

  ‘You were with the Jesuits?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I remember now. I used to think you were – nothing.’

  ‘I am nothing.’

  ‘Yes, but a Protestant nothing, not a Catholic nothing. I am a Protestant nothing.’

  I had a sense of coloured balls flying in the air, a different colour for every faith – or even every lack of faith. There was an existentialist ball, a logical-positivist ball. ‘I even thought you might be a Communist nothing.’ It was gay, it was fun so long as with great agility one patted the balls around: it was only when a ball fell to the ground one had the sense of an impersonal wound, like a dog dead on an arterial road.

  ‘Doctor Magiot’s a Communist,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose so. I envy him. He’s lucky to believe. I left all such absolutes behind me in the chapel of the Visitation. Do you know they even thought once that I had a vocation?’

  ‘Perhaps you are a prêtre manqué.’

  ‘Me? You are laughing at me. Put your hand here. This has no theology.’ I mocked myself while I made love. I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.

  What made us, after that short furious encounter, talk of Jones again? I am confusing together in memory many afternoons, many love-makings, many discussions, many quarrels, all of them a curtain-raiser for the final quarrel of all. For example there was the afternoon when she left early and to my inquiry why she was going – Angel would not be back from school for a long time yet – she replied, ‘I promised Jones that he could teach me gin-rummy.’ It was only ten days after I had deposited Jones under her roof, and when she told me that, I felt the premonition of jealousy like the first shiver which announces a fever.