The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  Taxis with “Droopy” on the top juddered past on the Himalayan slopes, and before long I was stepping into a bus to travel across the Andean plateau. The Altiplano is as desolate and humbling an area as I have seen; figures in the distance are reduced to specks and all that is really visible are the huge shadows the sun casts across the mountains. It’s not hard to feel as if you’re entering the realm of parable, with humans just disposable tokens in a much grander drama of changelessness and change.

  As the bus, groaning and faltering, began to sputter out of town, the other great presence of my life came back to me again. It had been a mild October day—I was at college—and my girlfriend of the time had seen my father unexpectedly walking across the courtyard to our room. As in some bedroom farce, Kristin had slithered out of a back window—she was the incarnation, we both knew, of every parent’s worst fears—while I prepared myself for the sudden visitation. My college had been my father’s college, too, and I guessed he had just flown over from California to England, on his way to an annual Club of Rome meeting to discuss the future of mankind.

  As soon as I heard his knock, I opened up, to see him in his regular gear: black corduroy jacket, dark slacks, an overcoat against the early autumn chill and a blazing yellow shirt. What he saw—it struck me now—would be a skinny teenager with hair made (the boy hoped) for a lead guitarist, and lots of high-toned European novels more made to impress than really to enlighten.

  As he walked into the room, my father might have been walking into his own vanished youth, twenty-six years before; when the college authorities, thoughtfully, assigned a warm room in a modern building to the boy from Bombay, unused to English winters, he had requested quarters in the ancient cloisters, so he could be in the center of this stony history. Now, as he looked at me, my father started talking about the French poet Jean Cocteau.

  On his first official day, at college, he told me, my father had met another newcomer, a boy called “Jell,” who found himself next to him in the alphabetical line. Jell was a student of French literature and obsessed with the sometime opium addict and suicide’s son Cocteau. He wrote him letters, he sent him invitations, he seemed to live for and through the difficult writer’s words. One day, after years of silence, suddenly the poet responded, with a letter.

  But the letter, uncannily, though written in regular French, could—at a certain angle, when seen from a distance—be taken to represent a human face. And not any face, but a harrowed, almost demonic face, twisted up in pain.

  As soon as the letter arrived, Jell put his prize trophy up on his wall. But night after night he was unable to sleep, the devil on the wall laughing down at him. Was this a savage trick the notoriously perverse Cocteau was playing? Was it only Jell’s overactive imagination that turned the letter into a face? In either case, the message that came from the poor boy’s hero became his undoing, and not so many years later he took his own life.

  Why was my father telling me such a story, I wondered at the time? What did it have to do with any of my nineteen year-old hopes or projects? It was only decades later that I began to think that perhaps, like any father, he was trying to protect his dangerously unworldly only child from all the things the boy was so sure he knew about. Or warning him against some of the too easy ways he might try to forge his own identity.

  Now, as we passed across the emptiness of the dry brown plain in Bolivia, I noticed a woman near the front of the bus stealing glances at me. She was in her late thirties, I guessed, with many of her youthful dreams exhausted, but she hadn’t given up on her earliest hopes entirely. She had applied some lipstick and blusher this morning and put on a cross that silvered her throat; she seemed to be trying to work out who I was as I sat in my row alone, looking out on the sand-colored quiet.

  Finally, as we drew near Copacabana, she struggled back through the jouncing vehicle and asked if I was the person who had requested a guide. I was, so she sat down beside me and, pulling her shoulder-length hair back from her face, smiled and began to tell me the facts of Bolivia in a spirited near-English.

  Whatever was really compelling here, though, lay outside the reach of facts and figures: a brown-hooded Catholic priest was standing outside the main church as we drew into town, blessing the toy cars and houses that villagers had brought to him. Some of the indigenous souls before him were carrying dolls swaddled in blankets, and he was making the sign of the cross above them and above some SUVs. This was the leap of faith I had seen, in both directions, on every continent: the Indians would believe that this figure could stand for something greater—as wide as the high skies above them—regardless of the man he was in private; he, in turn, would leave his usual self behind to try to extend some blessing to these strangers. My guide looked up at me, and I asked her how much these people were Christian, how much listening to some older law.

  She couldn’t say exactly—or didn’t want to—and when we got off the bus, I suggested she take a couple of hours off, so she could be free of me and the recitation of numbers; when we met up again in early afternoon, she broke into a warm smile as if we were long-lost friends. We got into a boat and traveled out to a sunlit island—the Capri of Lake Titicaca, it could seem—and climbed up a hill to look down upon the water. “This is a place to escape to,” she said, and something wistful came into the midsummer day. Maybe this was not only a job for her, but an excursion, a way to step into another life?

  On the boat back into town, she started to rub the stress out of my shoulders. “Too much reading,” she said, with a shy smile. “Too much writing.”

  Night was beginning to fall as we got into the bus for the long trip back. Most of the other passengers were falling asleep where they sat, and in any case we were curtained off from them by the foreign language we spoke. The seats were small, so we were very close. As she asked me about my life in Japan, I could see all the glimmering lights—freedom, mobility, the lure of the far-off—that had come into the friendly woman’s life this day. I’d found this theme echoed in every page of Graham Greene: the foreigner, precisely by going to another country, brings a whiff of a different world into the lives of the locals he meets. From that point on, both are in the shadow-land that lies between the existence we lead and the one we occasionally dream of.

  “It’s strange to have lost my passport today,” I said, as occasional lamps from passing huts flickered behind us in the dark. “It’s almost like losing my identity.”

  We’d come to a small lake that morning and stepped into a rowboat to go across it. When we’d emerged at the other shore, two policemen in uniforms had asked us for IDs. I’d presented a passport (a backup one I carried for just such moments), and they’d looked at it, looked at me and then taken the passport away. I never saw it again.

  “Of course!” my guide had said, with a laugh. “The last foreign people who came here who looked like you were hiding in La Paz while they prepared their attack on New York City. Why else would someone from a poor country come to Bolivia?”

  Now, as we remembered the moment, the woman laughed again and put a hand on my arm. A local habit, I thought; but perhaps not only a local habit. I could see her smile in the dark—it was pitch black outside as we lurched through the emptiness—and a part of me wondered what she was smiling at, or for. My life was as hazy to her as hers might be to me; each of us could fill in the empty space with anything we chose.

  In Graham Greene books such equivocal partnerships may be all that we can hope for; in a world where there are no absolutes, a qualified friendship based on your lack of illusions in the other (and in yourself) may be the only thing you can trust. In life, however, I’m not sure how much anyone is really happy on such uncertain ground; this woman had two children, whom this day was supporting, and I had a wife, Hiroko, in Japan. As we began to inch through the jam-packed streets not far from El Alto—the huge slum that marked the fastest growing city in South America—I passed on my hopes for her children’s future and, a little guiltily (I was never g
ood at telling people what they needed to hear), warm thanks for all her guidance. Hastily, stumbling a little as she stood up—was it embarrassment? or only disappointment?—she rose to her feet in the narrow aisle and I pressed some notes in her palm, saying there was no need for her to come all the way to my hotel, I could find my way back there alone.

  She fumbled her way through the bus and as it pulled away, she waved from the crowded sidewalk, in the dark, and then became just another face in the crowd, turning around to walk down the almost black, unpaved alleyways that led to corrugated-iron shacks, mountains of trash rising by their sides.

  Graham Greene is often taken to be the patron saint of the foreigner alone, drifting between certainties; his territory is the small apartment in the very foreign town, the passion that is temporary, the border crossing that seems the perfect home for the man who prays to a God he’s not sure he believes in. In the last twenty-seven years of his life he inhabited a simply furnished two-room apartment above the port in Antibes, in France, not far from Monaco, and shared his afternoons (though not his nights) with Yvonne Cloetta, the longtime companion who remained married throughout their affair. Though he was technically married for sixty-five years, he spent the last forty-three of them alone.

  If you try to push him into a compartment, you’ll always get it a little wrong. Call him a “Catholic novelist,” as many did, and you’ll be reminded that he liked to call himself a “Catholic agnostic” and stressed, as the years went on, that he had faith but not belief (the emotional but not the rational basis for religion). Note how many of his novels are set along what were in his lifetime the shabby, forgotten margins of the world—Havana, Saigon, the Belgian Congo, West Africa—and you have to concede that those foreign places and their people are mostly backdrops for a much more personal, exacting enquiry into states of being—goodness, peace, involvement—he longed for but could never quite find. Point out how English he is, and you have to acknowledge that Englishness is precisely what he’s trying to get away from.

  A lonely man, finding himself in a turbulent place he doesn’t know quite what to do with—this is how his later fables begin, usually—takes on a pretty, young local companion; she gives him calm and kindness, but her very sweetness reminds him of how unworthy he is, and his sense of protectiveness makes him want to defend her even from himself. The tangled politics of the scene ensure that he has no shortage of enemies, though generally he has one good friend—another foreigner—whose very vulnerability intensifies the protagonist’s sense of unease. God hovers everywhere around the scene, but usually, like many a love, He is known only by His refusal to do what we most want.

  In Greene’s archetypal novel, The Quiet American, a middle-aged Englishman, Fowler, lives in Saigon during the last days of French rule there, with a twenty-year-old Vietnamese woman, Phuong, whom he’s met at the Grand Monde dance hall. As soon as a young American, Pyle, appears on the scene, Fowler senses that he is going to be displaced by this fresh and dangerously innocent new power. As his country will be displaced by America. When the young arrival, a picture of his parents on his desk, turns his chivalrous attention on Phuong, Fowler finds new reason to resent him—especially because the quiet American is clearly a more gallant and unstained, a more openly tender suitor than any jaded Englishman can be.

  After Pyle saves his life, Fowler feels more beholden (and therefore hostile) to him than ever. (Greene would always be shrewd enough to see that few of us can forgive a good deed done to us—God’s law and man’s seldom converge—and, as he puts it in the book, we can never be betrayed by an enemy, only by a friend.) Completed in 1955, the novel tells the story of Britain feeling its empire slipping away and trying to protect itself from hurt by claiming not to care. It tells the story (which is to say, the future) of young America coming to the older cultures of the world and determined to remake them with the latest ideas of Harvard Yard. And it tells the story of a supple and responsive Asia that, precisely by gauging the needs of every foreign visitor, and giving each back a reflection of his desires, will always remain on top of them, or at least outside their grasp.

  Yet on a more intimate level, it pierces much more deeply. We can feel the barely suppressed romanticism of the Englishman, who cannot admit even to himself how much he’s lost himself to the foreign land that has softened him and to the young woman who offers what he hungers for most poignantly, peace. We are stung by the young American’s unpreparedness for a world he is determined to rescue, whether it’s in need of rescue or not. And we can see how the Vietnamese in the middle, drawing on centuries of silent tradition, manages her destiny by putting pragmatism before emotion; romance and reality change places with every scene.

  “When I first came,” Fowler confesses of his time in Vietnam, “I counted the days of my assignment, like a schoolboy marking off the days of term.” Now he’s turned in the other direction and searches for ways of avoiding a return to anywhere he might think of as home. A schoolboy still, perhaps, in a decidedly complex version of Abroad, but alive so long as he’s surrounded by people, a culture, a faith he can’t get to the bottom of.

  CHAPTER 2

  Who are these figures who take residence inside our heads, to the point where we can feel them shivering inside us even when we want to “be ourselves”? Who put them there, and why this man I’ve never met, and not that one? If I were to choose a secret companion, an unofficial alter ego, I would most likely fasten on someone more dashing, more decisive, less unsettled than Greene; if Providence were choosing one, it might alight on someone who lived in the same high-school building as I, attended the same university, traveled around the Far East, as I did when young, visited the university where my parents were teaching and then watched his house in the California hills burn down, as I had done—someone like Aldous Huxley. But our shadow associates are, like parents (or godparents), presences we’ve never chosen and, like many of our loves or compulsions, blur the lines inside us by living beyond our explanations.

  They make as little sense as the gods we choose to believe in, or the devils. Graham Greene could never be a fantasy figure for me, like the smooth secret agents whose adventures we devoured in our wood-creaking rooms at the Dragon School in Oxford, or the Lakers shooting guard whose poster I put up on my wall in high school, near London, to mock the copy of Agamemnon on my desk. He was never a writer I dreamed of becoming, a wise man on top of things. If anything, as the product of the England where I grew up, he was part of all that I was trying to put behind me; he belonged with the hesitant stutter of the radiator in the red-brick classroom, the low grey skies and weathered walls that put us in our place and kept us there; he was the kind of writer teachers would urge us to pick up in the holidays, or enlist in their cunning gambits as they handed out this term’s divinity textbook, shrewdly called Guard Thou Our Disbelief.

  “Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower,” he’d written in The Quiet American—it was all but the heart of his doctrine and his work—and as soon as one voice is answered, there is another, then another, and that one may be inside of us. That wasn’t what we wanted to hear at all.

  But there he is, in spite of everything. Not a hero or a counselor or the kind of person I would otherwise want to claim as kin. I see the gangly, long-legged figure graciously receiving a visitor in his room and keeping the intruder at bay with an offer of a drink, folding his awkward limbs around himself on the sofa; I see the high color in his cheeks, and the pale, unearthly blue eyes that speak to everyone of the troubled depths he’s both concealing and perceiving in the world. He talks in a slightly strangled English voice, surprisingly thin and reedy, and, when amused, he breaks into an unhardened, high-pitched giggle, suddenly, that equally abruptly stops, as if he’s been caught out, the mischievous boy escaping, for a moment, from the sharp-eyed keeper of his own counsel. “A precocious schoolboy,” his friend Lady Read noted once, “with tremendous depths … and these are the depths one doesn’t enquire int
o.”

  I remember walking into a long-distance telephone parlor in the sleepy Mexican town of Mérida one hot August afternoon. I was with Hiroko, sharing with her the pyramids nearby, and we needed to make a call back to Japan. In 1996 telephones weren’t easy to come by in such places, and we knew a call from our hotel room would deliver us instantly into static, or possible bankruptcy at the same time.

  We wandered down the main street after lunch, away from the main plaza, strolling along the side of the road where there was shade, past cafés and little tourist shops, brightly colored piñatas and swinging donkeys, and came at last upon a little travel agency that advertised “International Calls.” Just like the places in California where Mexicans call back home, though here it was we who were the petitioners, and the ones who could barely speak the language. We went in and saw three little wooden booths—confessionals, in effect—and, in front of them, a counter and a young Mexican woman.

  In fumbled Spanish I told her that we wanted to place a call to Japan and, nodding, she began completing, very slowly, a request form on a pad of paper. As she did so, a man came out from the back—the boss—and, to my surprise, I saw that he was from India, surely the only person of Indian descent other than myself in this provincial Yucatán town. Perhaps he had seen me through a spyhole and wanted to satisfy his curiosity, as now I did mine? Perhaps he was simply eager, as I was, to find someone to speak English to? In either case, I might, at some level, have been looking at a reflection of myself, in this unlikely soul, in his thirties, alert and clearly inquisitive, who had chosen to live in a forgotten foreign place far from the obvious sustenance of home.