by Norman Lewis
Of the experiences of the early days of the occupation, one alone may have been of importance for the light it throws on a controversy that never seems to have been satisfactorily settled. I was in Cologne on the day when the Allied authorities put up posters for the first time reproducing photographs taken at Belsen at the time of our entry into the camp. My instructions were to mingle with the crowds of German civilians gathering wherever the posters were on display and to listen to their comments — basically to be able to decide whether this form of propaganda was effective. The Germans’ reaction was one of total incredulity. The onlookers were wholly in agreement that the pictures had been faked, and that this was no more than a cynical attempt further to undermine their morale. In 1974 Walter Kempowski published a book entitled Haben Sie Davon Gewusst? (Did You Know About It?) which argued, on the basis of an opinion poll taken of 300 persons living in the days of the Third Reich, that the generality of the Germans of those days knew of the existence and function of the extermination camps. From my experience in Cologne, and from some hundreds of previous interrogations in Austria of average, unimportant civilians and soldiers of low rank, I formed the opinion that this was not the case.
In 1946, as soon as I was free from the Army, I made a quick trip to Guatemala to see Ernestina. I was not surprised to be told that she had had a long-standing relationship with a Guatemalan, a member of one of the fourteen families, and a relation of the President of the day. I received the news with philosophy. Few marriages, I imagined, remained intact after a separation of six years. Living together, people could to some extent evolve together, influencing each other in their development as human beings, sharing and interchanging tastes, antipathies, prejudices, attitudes and ideas. As the years of severance stretched out, the points of contact were inevitably lost to sight and new directions followed. A deadly consideration had entered into our relationship. Ernestina and I had become strangers.
Following this meeting she went to Mexico to obtain a divorce — which were readily and cheaply available there — and she and Rafael Aparicio were married. Shortly after this he was appointed Ambassador to Haiti, and Ernestina naturally accompanied him there. Haiti may not have been considered as in the first rank of diplomatic appointments, but the local colour and interest of this extraordinary island must have compensated to some extent for any drawbacks of the posting.
Guatemala was, and has remained for me, the most beautiful country in the world, and I saw all that I could of it while I was there. There is hardly a part of it that is not embellished by the view of a volcano, and there are charming and pacific Indians everywhere; half the population of five millions being composed of Mayas of a number of tribes. In these days they conducted their religious ceremonies, and retained the ancient speech and many versions of pre-Columbian dress, but recent governments have embarked on a policy of doing all they can to destroy such evidence of ‘Indianness’. In 1954 I wrote my first modestly successful novel, The Volcanoes Above Us, based on the overthrow of democracy in Guatemala by US intervention. This, greatly to my surprise, was not only well received in this country but sold six million ‘magazine edition’ copies in the Soviet Union. Although no royalties were paid I was rewarded by a free and lavish trip through Russia and some of Central Asia.
The tragedy of Guatemala lies in its geographical location in the US ‘backyard’, and the consequential subjugation of its rulers to American political interests. There have only been two democratically elected civilian presidents in the country’s history, the second of whom, Jacobo Arbenz, being swiftly removed to be replaced by a military puppet after he had most ill-advisedly broached the question of land reforms which might have damaged US investments in fruit. Since then a series of iron-fisted military dictators have governed without recourse to popular opinion.
With the arrival on the scene of one of these — Ydígoras Fuentes — Ernestina and Rafael were in trouble, and one of the last letters to be received from Ernestina described the affair with sparkling relish. Rafael had made the mistake of falling in love with Ydígoras Fuentes’ niece and shortly found himself called to the palace for a discussion with the President over the matter of his intentions. He was put in a chair so low that he was almost sitting on the floor, this being a regular device employed to place visitors at a psychological disadvantage. Seated above him at a vast desk flanked by a pair of dog-faced bodyguards, the President, a sinister old buffoon, questioned him in cat-and-mouse fashion about the pregnancy laid at his door. ‘My boy,’ he said, foaming, smiling and twitching, ‘tell me, what do you propose to do about this child?’
‘Give it my name, sir,’ Rafael replied, and Fuentes — said Ernestina — went possibly quite unconsciously through the motions of a man sharpening a knife. ‘That is not enough,’ the President said. ‘You will marry my niece forthwith.’
‘I already have a wife,’ Rafael told him, beginning at this stage, as he admitted to Ernestina, to break out into a cold sweat.
‘So they tell me,’ Fuentes said, ‘but that is the least of our problems. You will leave on tomorrow’s plane for Mexico City, where you will divorce your present wife, after which you will return and marry my niece. The marriage will take place within two weeks, otherwise you will be found dead in a ditch.’
The expression ‘muerto en un arroyo’ was, and is, familiar to all Guatemalans. Their city had been built, following the destruction by earthquake of the two previous capitals, on a tongue of rock surrounded by deep ravines, in the fallacious belief that these would cushion it from seismic shock. Now the ravines were used as a temporary place of concealment for those who died by violence, and since there have always been so many of them, no day dawns in Guatemala without an inspection of the ravines by a special fire-fighting team equipped to remove the victims of the night in that supremely violent land.
Rafael therefore complied without demur. Ten days later his wedding to the President’s niece was celebrated, and although the wedding could not be held in the Cathedral, Ydígoras Fuentes graced the reception by his presence. Perhaps the enforced marriage with the niece, who was difficult to live with, rankled, but for one reason or another a few months later Rafael was involved in one of the plots against the presidency that are a feature of Guatemalan life, and he, his new wife, and Ernestina were banished from the country. The three of them went to Madrid. After that correspondence between us dwindled, then ceased.
Returning to England I confronted not only the normal problems of psychological resettlement, but more unusual ones of a psychosomatic or even physical order. After the doldrums of Tunis I had entered a phase of incessant, almost frenetic activity, of an improvised life full of emergencies. Now even the nerves and the muscles were in revolt against the torpor of peace. Medical advice was that I should make no attempt to come to terms with a regulated and sedentary existence, but go into action again in any way I could.
I stayed for a while with the Corvajas, with whom I remained on excellent terms, and with my mother, still cheerfully occupied with her healing mission. Then, deciding to go rock-climbing, I moved to Tenby in West Wales, and took over the tenancy of St Catherine’s Fort. This was a military folly built in 1868 with the encouragement of the Prince Consort by the whimsical Colonel Jervois, Inspector General of Fortifications, whose obsession it was that, despite a peaceful relationship with France at that time, the French were secretly preparing an invasion of Britain and that such an attack was likely to be launched in the Tenby area.
For a rental of £6 per week I enjoyed the amenities of four main bedrooms, sixteen rooms in the four turrets, a banqueting hall — including in its furnishings a lifesize marble statue of Queen Victoria, and the skin of a twelve-foot grizzly bear. The fort had been built on an island in the bay and was cut off by the tide for six hours at a time. For this reason and because of its reputation for being haunted by the ghost of a previous tenant, who had hanged himself from a hook still in position in the ceiling of the banqueting hall, domestic hel
p was ruled out, neither even would tradesmen deliver supplies. For all that the fort was perfectly situated as a centre for rock-climbing, bird-watching and for marathon walks along the splendid — and at that time quite unspoiled — cliffs of Pembrokeshire, and in such activity I spent many rewarding months.
In 1947 I carried out a reconnaissance of the coast of Spain in search of a remote village providing no temptation to entice me away from an energetic life, and eventually lit on Farol, a small fishing community tucked among the cliffs at the end of a bad road on its north-east coast. I contrived to be accepted by the fishermen, moved into a local house, took out a fishing licence, and spent three seasons there fishing. It never occurred to me that I would write about this place, and although I filled many notebooks with my observations, they were largely to do with catching fish.
Some time after I left Farol I wrote a novel, The Day of the Fox, drawing for its plot on incidents of the village’s life, but over twenty years passed before I got out my old notebooks again and read what I had written in those days before the tourist influx brought so drastic a change to southern Europe. I found that in setting down data about the weather and the winds, the movements of the sea, and the arrangements of nets and lines I had, rather by accident, been led to describe the remnants of an archaic Mediterranean society of Chaucerian scenes and pilgrimages, village enchanters, fishermen who spoke in blank verse, pre-Christian credences and taboos, and none of us would ever see its like again. Voices of the Old Sea, published in 1984, was my attempt to record the vanished experiences of those days.
In 1950 the take-over by the communists in China convinced me that the world had embraced a phase of rapid and irreversible change. It had always been my ambition to travel in the Far East, and now that the frontiers of China were closed I decided to make no delay in visiting such countries as were still accessible, and embarked on a journey of some three months through Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam. Nationalist rebellions were in full swing against French colonial rule in all three countries, and this made travelling conditions sometimes arduous. For all that I was just in time to see what remained, as travellers in the last century and before would have seen of it: its mandarins, its warlords and their private armies, above all the hill tribes retaining so much of their ancient custom and ceremony, on the brink of disappearance when the limited anti-colonial struggle was transformed into a modern war, with its free-fire zones, carpet-bombing, napalm and defoliants. I had gone to Indo-China with the intention of writing a book, and A Dragon Apparent appeared in 1951. Most unfortunately, it was at this time when I was out of touch with home news for three months that both my mother and Ernesto Corvaja died quite suddenly, and it was a matter of great sorrow to me that I was unable to be with them at their end.
A journey to Burma followed in the same year. This too was a difficult country to get around in, and so it has remained ever since, being the only Far Eastern land that has wholly and successfully resisted change. I spent about two months travelling in the interior, finding myself so exhausted by the time I returned to Rangoon that I went to bed in the Strand Hotel and stayed there for nearly a week. Golden Earth, describing the confrontation I experienced with this withdrawn and contemplative corner of the Buddhist East, was published in 1952.
This was almost the last of my eastern peregrinations — I visited Thailand and North Vietnam the following year where I witnessed the prelude to Dien Bien Phu and US involvement in the affairs of South-East Asia — but although I switched for some years to the writing of novels, I found that I had picked up the habit of travel, and that it had become an almost indispensable stimulant. I catered for this form of self-indulgence by undertaking occasional journalism. This has taken me, writing for one or other of the Sunday newspapers, to many parts of the world, but especially the countries of Latin America. In 1968 I went to Brazil for the Sunday Times and helped to publicize that country’s massacre of its forest Indians.
This always seems to me to have been the most effective episode of my life. News had leaked out of the massacres perpetrated against the Indians of that vast country, and what appeared as almost incredible was that these atrocities had been committed, not only despite the efforts of the Government’s Indian Protection Service, but with its connivance and frequently its actual co-operation.
It was discovered that in many cases where there had been thousands of Indians, there were now hundreds or even tens. To quote an example, where 19,000 Munducuras had been included in a census conducted in the thirties, only 1,200 were counted in 1968. The Indians were close to extermination because they were seen as being in the way of loggers, gold and oil prospectors and land-grabbers of assorted kinds. Those who were charged with their protection had been bribed to look the other way, while the tribes had been wiped out by mass inoculations with the virus of smallpox, the distribution of poisoned food supplies, bombing from the air, and mass murder by professional gunmen organized in full-scale expeditions. A Government White Paper blamed in part the post-war flood of American fundamentalist missionaries into the country, who by destroying the Indians’ cultural identity had deprived them of the power to defend themselves.
It was an investigation in which difficulties that were to be expected arose owing to the involvement of powerful interests. The results published in the Sunday Times provoked a world reaction, a change in the Brazilian law relating to the treatment of Indians, and the formation of organizations such as Survival International dedicated to the protection of aboriginal people.
A strong stomach is called for in the pursuit of investigations of this kind, for although one is rarely at the scene of the crime at the time of its commission, its aftermath presents only too often a sickening spectacle. This was certainly the case in Brazil, yet none of the incidents I described at that time affected me in the way of a single experience in a mission camp in Paraguay. I had gone as a result of a report that the Aché Indians in the east of that country were being hunted by armed American missionaries. This proved to be the case. Not only had members of a fanatical sect captured many naked and wholly peaceful Indians at the point of the gun, but they had profited from their victims’ misery. Able-bodied males were supplied as forced labour to local farmers, for which the missionaries were paid, and young girls were packed off to the capital, Asunción, for what purpose we can only guess.
Some, however, were quite simply shot down, and Donald McCullin, who was with me, was able to photograph a woman who had been wounded in the side while attempting to escape. What made this episode in a way more haunting and macabre than the violences of battle he had photographed in Vietnam, was that oppression and cruelty here wore a pseudo-religious mask, that crimes were committed in the intervals of prayer, and that voices raised in praise of God drowned the screams of terrified children. This sombre and unforgettable episode was the genesis of a book, published in 1988, entitled The Missionaries.
Part Five
Isola Farnese
Chapter Twenty-Three
I HAD REMARRIED, AND WITH three small children now to consider, the future assumed new dimensions and warned of new problems. We had settled in rural Essex, in a house with a large garden, in pleasant village surroundings. Then, suddenly, the great environmental change took place. East Anglia, with an economy based on cereal crops, discovered the use of herbicides and of defoliants developed in the Vietnam war. For some years thereafter, road verges and hedgerows everywhere were scorched brown throughout the summer months, the flowers began to disappear, then the birds, the rabbits, the hares, even the frogs. There were periods when not a day passed when we were not obliged to put a poisoned pigeon out of its misery, and hardly a week without burying a dead owl. School children called upon to recite Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark’ from that time on had never heard one sing.
There was the problem of education. A determined effort had been made with what the State provided, but the time came when we had to admit defeat. Neither of us cared for boarding schools and
the irrevocable commitment to the class attitudes they appeared to dictate.
With this I was overtaken by an urge to go and live in Italy. The children would be brought up in an environment in which class played a lesser part. In due course they would become bilingual and modestly cosmopolitan, and I would fill in the years writing books in surroundings which had become comfortable and familiar during the eighteen war months spent in this most engaging and civilized of all countries.
Being always at the mercy of sudden impulse, little planning preceded action. Someone told me about an international school near Rome. I rang them up a week before the beginning of the school year, and was offered two places. Two days later I presented myself at St George’s, La Storta, just off the Via Cassia, nine miles north of the capital, which, as hoped for, was large, cheerful and up to date, and staffed by teachers from England who had acquired Mediterranean gestures and boxy Italian cars. The only remaining problem was to find somewhere to live. From my experience the city itself had become an inferno of battling traffic and noise, but at La Storta, within easy reach of the school, the green fields came into sight. My eye was drawn to Lake Bracciano, shown on the map as about five miles to the north. This, by reason of its considerable size, and the many lakeside villages marked, offered possibilities, and with a mental picture of the choice offered by an array of picturesque and romantic settings I hired a car and drove over to inspect the lake.