The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)
Page 86
Even the Mexican greeting between friends, the abrazo, upset Greene: ‘this immaturity, which gets most on the nerves in Mexico. Grown men cannot meet in the street without sparring like schoolboys. One must be as a little child, we are told, to enter the kingdom of heaven, but they have passed childhood and remain for ever in a cruel anarchic adolescence.’49
Returning from Chiapas by train from Oaxaca to Puebla, he describes with venom a black-clothed old woman with grey straggly hair, his attitude no doubt due in part to his being sick with dysentery:
[an] old woman … removing a tick – blowing her nose – trying to put up a blind or open a lemonade bottle, mooing with her mouth wide, fixing her eyes on people meaninglessly for minutes at a time, slowly revolving her black bulk all of a piece like a mule … The hideous inexpressiveness of brown eyes. People never seem to help each other in small ways, removing a parcel from a seat, making room with their legs. They just sit about. If Spain is like this, I can understand the temptation to massacre.
[An] odious child takes all the paper cups from the water-tap by the lavatory and destroys them one by one. Nobody stops him. The white dust from the appalling plain blows against the glass. The heat, with the windows shut, is stifling.50
When he was in Palenque and down with fever Greene found his guide looking at him. He could see the man was troubled: ‘He had a feeling of responsibility, and no Mexican cares for that. It’s like a disused limb they have learned to do without.’51
There is no doubt about the genuineness of Greene’s reactions during that journey through Mexico. For him to write ‘if Spain is like this, I can understand the temptation to massacre’ is a measure of the almost pathological hatred that developed during the journey.
Yet there were moments of pleasure. One came after he was able to seek out a priest and go to him for confession. It was in Orizaba, the main stopping place before reaching Veracruz, where he expected to take a ship across the Gulf of Mexico to the port of Frontera in Tabasco. Greene quotes what Mauriac wrote about a Catholic who frequently changed his confessor and how, suddenly, he received from a strange priest an unexpected consolation. In Orizaba, the priest was thin, unshaved, impoverished, and yet he ‘gained a sense of peace and patience and goodness’, and even a sense of ‘courage and endurance’. He was to need these qualities in travelling to Tabasco across the Gulf of Mexico and on into Chiapas.
It was one of those evenings ‘that conspire for happiness’ and he did experience peace. That night a crowd collected outside the Church. The air was warm and fresh and ‘little braziers burned along the pavement, and the bell clanged in the tower … A Catherine wheel whirled in the road, and the rockets hissed up into the sky and burst in flippant and trivial stars … between the dark shoulders of the crowd you could see a dark Joseph surrounded by light; the noise of the bell and the rockets and the crowd faded out at the church door and inside was quiet and the smell of flowers. This, he felt, was how a saint’s day should be celebrated – “joyfully, with fireworks and tortillas, domestically.’”52
*
He had hoped to stay in Veracruz for a while but discovered that a boat was leaving for Tabasco that night – it was a boat with a bad, if unspecified, reputation. An American consul regarded him as a fool – he had never known a foreigner to use one of those boats before: ‘You don’t know what you are in for,’ he said. Greene asked whether they were small. ‘Small?’ Words failed him, but he said he ‘wouldn’t go in one of those boats for a thousand dollars’. Greene asked whether they were unsafe – ‘They don’t often sink’, the consul conceded, ‘unless you hit a norther … Anyway … they insure you for five thousand pesos when you buy your ticket.’53
Since the ‘norther’ season was over, Greene decided to risk it and hired ‘a bright dapper young man like a hair dresser’s assistant’ to take him round the town during the afternoon. They saw the small squat church built by Cortes, the oldest in America, and very generously, when the guide’s allotted time was up and it was too late to find another customer, he stayed on with Greene as a friend, and he must have been able to give Greene some useful information since he came from Tabasco and had, moreover, travelled in the boat Greene was to travel in – the Ruiz Cano, though what he had to say must have been unnerving: ‘Nothing – nothing will ever make me go on that boat again. You don’t know – it’s terrible.’ Greene suggested changing to another boat, but the others were smaller: ‘The Ruiz Cano has a flat bottom. That is good. It will not sink easily.’ Moreover, if anything happened, they would pay 5,000 pesos to Greene’s family, though that would involve a lot of lawyers’ fees to prove who they were. His guide did offer to see the consul next day to tell him that if anything happened he must get the money for Greene’s family.54 In fact, after a meal with tequilas and beer mixed, his guide offered to accompany him to Tabasco, as a friend not a guide: ‘I will prove that a Mexican is as good a sport [as an Englishman].’ They pledged themselves in beer and shook hands drunkenly.
They went by taxi to the quay with the guide’s ten-year-old nephew, full of hero-worship for his uncle, his dog running behind, ‘gate-crashing past the sentry at the entrance to the docks’.
There was an English liner there from which the sound of music came, but there were no lights on the Ruiz Cano – ‘a flat barge with a few feet of broken rail, an old funnel you could almost touch with your hand from the shore, a bell hanging on a worn piece of string, an oil-lamp and a bundle of turkeys. One little rotting boat dangled inadequately from the davits.’ Groups of people stood on the quay, somebody wept on board and the turkeys rustled. Greene confessed he had never been more frightened than at the idea of spending ‘Forty-two hours or so in the Atlantic, in the Gulf of Mexico’, in a boat in which he would not have gone down the Thames.55
His guide, having gained much admiration from his nephew and the crowd on the quay in telling them of his journey, once the boat was moving, the engine shaking, everything knocking and rattling and the two of them sitting shivering on a bench, lost his courage – ‘a sudden wild doubt came into his eyes like a face at a window’ and he scrambled on to a lifeboat – ‘The old davits cracked under the strain’ – and leapt the three feet to the quay landing on his knees – ‘“If I had any clothes,” he called out … and we waved shamefacedly to each other.’56
Greene catches here the pathos of the situation and something of the adolescent nature of a certain type whose genuine urge to help and to offer friendship comes up against an inability to sustain it when reality has to be faced, but he never made use of this experience in his novels. The incident, though he does not mention it, suggests his own need for companionship now that he was embarking on the most dangerous part of his journey, though in writing to Nancy Pearn before he left Mexico City, he gave no indication of the dangers he might face: ‘I’m off again to Veracruz in a day or two: thence to Tabasco, & then a fortnight’s ride by horse across T[abasco], & Chiapas to the road & rail again. It should be interesting – almost untouched ground.’57 He did not mention that once he reached Chiapas he would be among Mexicans who spoke only Spanish and Indians who did not speak it, and that he had no companion – Hugh being increasingly involved in the situation in Germany as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. In Liberia it had been dangerous, but he had a companion – important in an alien world – and servants who knew the country and the native dialects and could help him. From his embarkation on the Ruiz Cano he would lead an increasingly lonely existence, yet if he had been accompanied he could not have written The Power and the Glory.
The Ruiz Cano sailed in almost complete darkness into the Mexican Gulf.
*
Greene wrote to his mother on 13 April and on Hotel Español notepaper, deliberately playing down the danger and discomfort: ‘I had a rather wearing trip, especially the journey from Veracruz to Frontera, Tabasco, in a 30 ton Mexican barque about as big as a canal barge. 42 hours on the sea & then 10 hours up the river to Villahermosa.’
The next morning under a grey sky, they were provided with breakfast handed through a hatch in the deck from the engine-room. It was a loaf of bread and a plate of fish scraps from which the eyeballs stood mournfully out. Greene could not face it. He made his way down to the only lavatory which was a horrible cupboard in the engine-room with no ventilation, no flushing, and the ordure of many days and voyages. That finished him for the rest of the day. He lay on his shelf, like the woman below him, morning and afternoon.
The next day the sun was out but it sucked out all the smells in the boat. Twice he dashed for the privy and the second time the whole door came off in his hands and fell on to the engine-room floor. He suffered from hunger but even more from thirst for, apart from a frightful kind of coffee, there was no beer or mineral water and the water available was from a tin filter above the wash-basin which, in any case, only lasted for the first twelve hours. By late morning of the second day, the coast came in sight reminding Greene of the West African coastline – a long low line of trees and sand – they had arrived at Tabasco’s port of Frontera.
fn1 Thirty thousand people were eventually involved in the strike which ended after eighteen months when a federal law set the minimum wage. Tragically, soon afterwards, automatic equipment for shelling nuts was introduced and the work force was reduced to about 600 girls.
fn2 After many attempts on Trotsky’s life, finally a man posing as an associate attacked Trotsky with an ice-pick on 20 August 1940 and he died two days later. During the attack, portions of his manuscript on Stalin were splattered with blood and other portions of the unrevised manuscript destroyed.
41
The Lawless Roads
Go where thou wilt … if thy soul is a stranger to thee, this world is unhomely.
– FROM SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY INDIA
AT FRONTERA IT was appallingly hot, but he was later to know ‘how hot the world can be’ when he arrived at the capital, Villahermosa.
Frontera, on the Grijalva River, was the scene of the Conquistadores’ first landing in Mexico in March 1519. The town itself was out of sight round a river bend and when they turned the bend Greene saw ‘the Presidencia and a big warehouse and a white blanched street running off between wooden shacks – hairdressers and the inevitable dentists, but no cantinas anywhere, for there is prohibition in Tabasco.’1
This was his first sight of Dictator Garrido Canabal’s ‘isolated swampy puritanical state’ where every church had been destroyed and every priest had been chased out of the state. Greene noticed the lily plants floating by, how the river divided round a green island half a mile from the shore and, Greene’s bête noire, ‘the vultures came flocking out, with little idiot heads and dusty serrated wings, to rustle round the shrouds.’2 He noticed that the soldiers stood in the shade of the Presidencia and watched the boat edge in towards the river bank.
They unloaded beer on the quay, 150 dozen bottles, the only liquor available and sold by the government at a peso a bottle. This was a ruinous price in Mexico, and Greene commented, ‘puritanism pays’.
To the authorities, he had given as his reason for visiting that he wished to see the ruins at Palenque. His real purpose was to visit the only two states left where Catholics could not receive the Sacrament except secretly. His intention was to discover the extent of the persecution of the Church and the secularisation imposed on the people. As a foreigner, considered undesirable under Clause 33 of the Constitution, he could have been expelled from the country.
Having reached Tabasco, his difficulties seemed to be only beginning. The owner of the warehouse to whom he had an introduction explained that while Palenque was only 100 miles away, getting there was not easy. There were no railways or roads and you had to travel by water to Villahermosa, the capital, and then by water again to Montecristo on the other side of the state. From there he had to get horses to the ruins of Palenque in Chiapas. Greene went back to the boat discouraged. There was a 10-hour passage the following day to the capital. He spent the night on the shelf in the boat and at sunset the mosquitoes began ‘a terrifying steady hum like that of a sewing-machine’. He had only two choices, ‘to be eaten on deck (and probably catch malaria) or to go below to the cabin and the appalling heat’. The only porthole was closed for fear of marauders, and mosquito nets seemed to shut out all the air. Greene lay naked under the net and sweated and every ten minutes he dried himself with a towel.3
Whatever the discomforts, it was on that boat, crowded next morning with passengers on their way to the capital, that he met the original for the seedy dentist Dr Tench in The Power and the Glory. He was an American, and was on his way to see a Dr Fitzpatrick, an Englishman, because of serious stomach trouble. He obviously made an impression on Greene as he kept on exclaiming, ‘God, what a country!’ and complaining at having to use dentists’ drills made in Japan which were then cheap but never lasted, sometimes breaking down after a single use. He had been the dictator Garrido Canabal’s dentist, though he longed now to leave the country, but whenever he thought he had saved enough money a revolution would break out. When Greene met him, because of the government’s expropriation of the oil fields, the exchange was falling rapidly. Because of his stomach trouble and his hopeless memory Dr Winter (as Greene called him) remained firmly in the novelist’s mind:
Something – perhaps the heat – had destroyed memory. Every few minutes he would bring out the one fact he had caught hold of, ‘You going off by aeroplane, eh?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Where to? Frontera?’
‘No. I told you. Salto – for Palenque.’
‘You don’t want to go to Salto. You want to go to Zapata.’
‘But I told you. I can’t get reliable guides there to Las Casas.’
‘Las Casas? What you want to go there for?’
He would pause for what seemed hours at street corners, unable to remember, I really believe, where he was going, standing like a cow chewing. ‘So you’re off by plane, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘To Frontera.’
And the whole explanation would begin again. It was inexpressibly tiring.4
Twice during that journey the barge went aground. Darkness fell quickly. Sometimes a canoe passed, paddled by Indians – white and silent and transparent like a marine insect – and the roar of the mosquitoes nearly extinguished the sound of the engines. The heat increased, and suddenly Villahermosa, capital of Tabasco, appeared. After long hours of darkness, the passengers were startled by the lights of the city burning down into the river, ‘a great crown outlined in electricity’ and ‘they called, triumphantly, “El puerto, el puerto.’”5
*
He had reached what his confessor in Orizaba had described as a very evil land, the Godless (and puritan) socialistic state. Then, at nine-thirty, all the lights went out and the passengers walked 15 feet along a plank bridging the mud river to the mud bank. By the light of an electric torch he saw a policeman take his case and shake it, listening for the clink of illicit bottles of alcohol-Tabasco was strictly teetotal but he did not find Greene’s secreted bottle of brandy. Villahermosa did nothing to improve his view of Mexico. The only possible hotel, its hallway filled by a dynamo, though it gave him the luxury of a bedroom with a shower (which did not work), did not provide meals. He ate, in the only restaurant in town, the worst food he was ever to eat in the country – ‘flies and dirty tablecloths and meat on the point of turning in this wet oven
of a place.’
He was in the town a week and describes what a camera panning round the small plaza would have recorded: ‘a dentist’s with a floodlit chair of torture; the public jail, an old white-pillared one-storey house which must have dated back to the Conquistadores, where a soldier sat with a rifle at the door and a few dark faces pressed against the bars; a Commercial Academy, the size of a village store; the Secretariat; the Treasury, a florid official building with long steps leading down to the plaza; the Syndicate of Workers and Peasants; the Casa de Agraristas.’6
He gained some information about the situation of Catholics in the state when he visited a Catholic family and was told by the wife, ‘we die like dogs here’, no religious ceremony being allowed at the grave.7 He also met Dr Fitzpatrick and the chief of police, a big, blond, cheery creature with curly hair, dressed too tightly in white drill, with a holster on his fat hip, to whom he did not warm – ‘He laughed aloud when he saw my passport, putting an arm round my shoulder with that false Mexican camaraderie’ – but who told him: ‘You’ve come home. Why, everybody in Villahermosa is called Greene – or Graham.’ Greene thought there must be English people in the town, but no – the Greenes were Mexican and if he came back to the police station at 4 p.m. he would be introduced to them.8
Greene’s hatred for the Villahermosa police festered. The police chief, his men, and the police station all find their way into The Power and the Glory: ‘The appointment was for four; I sat on a bench in the courtyard of the police station for an hour. The dirty whitewashed walls, the greasy hammocks, and the animal faces of the men – it wasn’t like law and order so much as banditry. The police were the lowest of the population: you had to look for honesty on the faces of the men and women waiting to be fined or blackguarded. You gained an overwhelming sense of brutality and irresponsibility as they took down their rifles from the rack and sloped away on patrol or ambled drearily across the yard in the great heat with their trousers open.’9