The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  One policeman was assigned to hunt out the chief of police for Greene, and they walked from one end of the town to the other through the hot afternoon, looking in all the billiard rooms, but no chief was to be found.

  He did meet one rather scared Greene. His name was De Witt Greene and he had Dutch, American, English and pure Indian blood in him. His grandfather had come from Pennsylvania after the Civil War. De Witt Greene, walking across the plaza, pointed to a seedy Mexican, with drooping hat and a gun on his hip: ‘There’s another Greene,’ he said.

  The heat must have been very distressing. A year before Greene’s arrival, de Joaquin Bates, later to become secretary to the Governor, wrote this descriptive poem about Villahermosa:

  Casas Viejas, Old houses

  Diez fordcitos, Ten small Fords

  Muchachitas sin color, Little girls without colourfn1

  Uno, Dos, Tres Parquesitos One, Two, Three tiny parks

  Millonadas de Mozquitos y Calor, Calor, Calor Millions of Mosquitoes and Heat, Heat, Heat.

  And on Sundays, without cantinas or churches, which at the least had provided the poor with ‘one spot of coolness out of the vertical sun, a place to sit, a place where the senses can rest a little while from ugliness’, there was no escape. One could only sit in a rocking-chair waiting for the sunset and the mosquitoes and the vultures: ‘The tiny moron head, long neck, masked face, and dusty plumage peering this way and that attentively for a death.’11

  On his last night in Villahermosa, he sat on a rocking-chair at the head of the stairs with the old proprietor of the hotel and they swung back and forth, trying to stir a breeze. It was ‘an awful night’. There was a storm but the air in Villahermosa never cleared. The pavement ‘was black with beetles. They lay on every stair up from the electric dynamo to the hotel; they detonated against the lamp and walls and fell with little plops like hailstones.’ Greene went to his bedroom and killed seven beetles and the corpses moved as rapidly as in life across the floor pushed by the swarms of ants. He lay in bed and read Trollope, with nostalgia.12

  What was wrong with Tabasco, among other things, Greene felt, was a terrible lethargy: ‘the Catholics died slowly out – without Confession, without the Sacraments, the child unbaptized, and the dying man unshriven.’13 Greene put it down to the swamp and the extreme heat. In Chiapas there were mountains and less lethargy and there were Indians ‘with their wild beliefs and their enormous if perverted veneration [who] shamed the Catholics into some action’.

  Knowing that he faced a long, tough journey into Chiapas, Greene jettisoned everything he thought unnecessary, including dirty socks, and replaced these with a hammock, a serape (a brightly coloured blanket cloak), a kettle and a snake-bite remedy. He put on riding breeches and boots, in which he was to live for the next ten days, and went out to the airport on top of the hill beyond the cemetery with its blind wall, ‘where Garrido shot his prisoners’, and its white classical portico with its legend, ‘Silencio’, written in big black letters. He took off in a little, cramped, red, six-seater plane: below him was the Godless state.

  *

  The journey by air took a mere fifteen minutes. They came down first in a tiny clearing in a forest for a short stop: ‘Three people left the plane, a peasant woman with a basket and two men carrying leather satchels and umbrellas; they walked off – like season ticket holders – into deep forest.’14

  Then they were up again crossing the mountains. Salto de Agua lay right under the mountains on a bluff above a rapid green river. Travellers come down on a rough landing field and then cross the river in a dug-out canoe. After he watched the little red plane move back across the sky Greene felt marooned, very much alone and troubled by his poverty of Spanish in a land where few spoke English and a mistake could land him anywhere.

  He had a letter of introduction to a store-keeper asking him to find a reliable guide – to Palenque. A man carried his suitcase into the dark store with its back to a tiny dry plaza. He wondered why he had started on this journey.

  Now that he was in Chiapas he could drop the pretence that he wanted to see the ruins of Palenque, but it took a long time to explain in his poor Spanish that it was to the ‘very Catholic’ city of Las Casas that he wanted to go and not to Palenque – could he find a guide to take him as far as Yajalon, en route to Las Casas? The store-keeper said he would try.

  Every few hours Greene turned up at the store to see whether a guide had been found. But by nightfall, after spending most of the day in the single cantina, drinking expensive warm beer (expensive because it had to be brought over the mountains on muleback), no guide was to be found for Yajalon, the route which would take him in the direction of Las Casas. In desperation he fell back on Palenque and the store-keeper encouraged him with the story that there was a German-American there with a beautiful daughter and a fine finca, but Greene doubted this having heard such a rumour ever since Mexico City. When he returned from Palenque he was promised there would be a guide for Yajalon.

  Although he spent only one night in Salto, he felt he knew it as well as if he had been there years – a tiny barren place, the row of huts by the river, two parallel tracks running into the little plaza (not a soul there), the palms and the cantina, the eternal mineral water stand, the wooden bridge over a small ravine with a track running off into the hills; some mangy dogs, and flies of course, the tin-roofed shacks where men lay in hammocks swinging in the great heat. The little town was dead by midday.15

  His lodging was a room partitioned off with plywood from the rest of the house, with a bed made out of packing-cases, a straw mat laid on the top of them. Surprisingly he slept well, his mackintosh cape folded up as a pillow, his mosquito net in place, but then he heard rattling on his door, ‘something animal’ muttering and stamping and blowing windily. It was his young guide who, just after four o’clock in the morning, took him to his father’s home where he had coffee and biscuits.

  Everyone was asleep as he left Salto to embark on a journey he would never forget, he suffering extreme discomfort and sickness; but which was to be the basis of The Power and the Glory. They crossed the river by canoe, the two mules swimming beside them, ‘with just their muzzles and their eyes above the water like a pair of alligator heads, and then the long banana plantations on the other bank, the fruit plucked as we rode tasting tart and delicious in the open air at dawn.’16

  Greene had never ridden a mule before. That day was to be one of the worst he spent in all his thirty-three years, for the route lay across a bare exposed plateau and there was rarely any shade and only a few patches of forest. By nine in the morning the sun was blindingly up. In the heat, his sun helmet, bought for a few pesos in Veracruz, turned into damp, hot cardboard. He found riding the mule was like riding a camel – the whole back heaving and straining: ‘There is no rhythm you can catch by riding in the stirrups; you must surrender yourself to a merciless uneven bump.’ Travelling over the mountain in that brutal sun with his neck stiffening and his head aching, Greene learnt of the stubbornness of mules, the impossibility of getting out of them anything more than a walk, the eternal call in the mountains: ‘Mula. Mula. Mula. Echa, mula.’

  After six hours they reached a couple of wattle huts, chickens and turkeys tumbling across the dusty floor, a pack of mongrels, a few cows listless in the heat. Greene longed to stay the night. With immense difficulty he dismounted; his whole body had stiffened and they swung a string hammock up for him. He rested for half an hour. The urge to stay in that bare Indian hut was overpowering, anything was better than that baked plateau, but the guide, who had never himself travelled to Palenque and only knew the general direction, wanted to reach it that day. There were another eight hours to travel.

  Greene remembered little of the rest of the journey, raising his helmet for coolness and dropping it back for fear of sunstroke, his head aching, his mind becoming a blank. He did remember the guide ‘getting smaller and smaller in the distance’, and having to flog the mule into a backbone
wrenching trot to catch up with him, and a man with the mails travelling at a smart canter on a pony in the opposite direction. Then:

  somewhere on that immense rolling plain, in a spot where the grass grew long, the mule suddenly lay down under me. The guide was a long way off; I felt I could never get up on that mule again; I sat on the grass and tried to be sick and wanted to cry. The guide rode back and waited patiently for me to remount, but I didn’t think it was possible – my body was too stiff.17

  By 2 p.m. they had been riding for nine hours and according to his guide, Palenque was still about five hours away. Could they stay the night somewhere and go on the next day? There was nowhere to stay until they reached Palenque. String their hammocks on the tree and sleep there? But the guide had no hammocks ‘and besides, there was no food, no drink, and lots of mosquitoes, perhaps a leopard’. Greene recalled, ‘It was rather terrifying to believe you cannot go on, and yet have no choice.’18 The mule lay down four times.

  Eventually, after a patch of forest, they came to the dividing of the ways. The guide told him one way led to a German finca, the other to Palenque. This was the finca he had heard of so often but believed to be legendary, particularly because the pilot of the little red plane had made light of it, and so he chose the path to Palenque.

  The sun sank; night fell; the flies came out thick and sank into the mule’s neck, grappled and sucked until a stream of blood flowed down. Greene tried to dislodge the flies with his stick without success. He recalls that the smell of the blood and the mule was sickening. The journey went on and on and he felt that he had become a bundle of flesh and bone without a brain. The stars came out. Ahead, along a slope of grass, was a cemetery on a hill, abandoned, wall broken, crosses at angles also broken, the result of the useless persecution. They rode among mud huts where, on a little hill, there was a big, plain, ruined church. It was a scene he was to remember, and they arrived at Palenque, staggering off their mules, legs as stiff as stilts. They found a store near the church and had three warm beers and raw tequila which hardly quenched their thirst. That night they slept in a hut, once a stable, beside the ruined church, divided into three by thin partitions. Greene could hear small children crying behind one partition and the slow movements and regular coughing of cows behind the other.

  At midnight came the sound of a horse outside, of a fist beating on the bolted door, of shouting, ‘Con amistad – with friendship.’ The stranger moved heavily round the room, tied up a hammock, and took off his revolver holster. It was all very Mexican and somewhat romantic, but Greene had a touch of fever, needed to vomit, and was too tired to move.

  He went the next morning, absurdly after such a body-breaking journey and a fever, to see the ruins. They passed a bleached skeleton on the path. Periodically, the guide had to stop to cut a way through with his machete. After two and a half hours the ruins appeared, but Greene merely hung on to the pommel of his saddle for he was almost beyond caring. With an effort of will he climbed up two slopes and peered into cold snaky chambers. He sat on a stone and later slid to the ground while the guide set off with an Indian to explore another palace. He struggled to an Indian hut, a twig shelter without walls, with chickens scratching in the dust, a hammock and a packing case.

  Greene is not certain what happened next but thinks he must have dozed for he remembered the Indian and the guide looking down at him, troubled. They got him to another hut and gave him corn coffee. Again he wanted to sleep but the guide complained of mosquitoes and suggested the German finca and the beautiful daughter. Greene lay on his back still disbelieving. The finca they said was only a little way from Palenque, and they would take him in the cool of that evening. They pushed him back on the mule and on to Palenque where he fell off the mule, made for the village schoolmaster’s hammock and lay down. He could hear the plump complacent schoolmaster talking to a passing peasant about the sun as the origin of life; that without the sun we should cease to exist. Greene drank cup after cup of coffee, but was unable to eat. Liquid poured out of him and he lay in sweat for hours. Outside the street was silent.

  *

  The finca was not a myth, it did exist and it was paradise. Greene recalled, ‘It was like heaven’ finding that finca only fifteen minutes out of Palenque – the rolling down, the stream, a broken bridge, cows grazing, orange trees at the gate, a tulipan in blossom and a woman knitting on the verandah, a man beside her reading his paper. There was no beautiful daughter, that part of the story was untrue but the rest was no fantasy. They were a German farmer and his sister, good Lutherans. There was a big earthenware jar of fresh water with a dipper beside it, there was a soft bed with sheets and ‘most astonishing luxury of all’ a little clear sandy stream to wash in, six-week-old copies of New York papers, the tulipan which dropped its blossoms at night and prepared to bloom again with the day: ‘Only the bullet-hole in the porch showed the flaw in Paradise – that this was Mexico.’19

  At the finca Greene recovered from his fever, had his first feeling of happiness in Chiapas, and experienced a sense of remarkable peace. And it was there that he must have decided to take two days over the return journey to Salto de Agua, spending the night at the Indian hut where he had rested for half an hour, a bare Indian hut surrounded by chickens, pigs and turkeys with the ‘mauve surrealist flaps of skin they … toss aside to uncover the beak or eyes’. The old Indian lady with ‘a burnt pinched face and dry hair, like the shrivelled human head in the booth at San Antonio’, gave him corn coffee and stringy chicken. Greene lay all afternoon and evening in his hammock under the palm vine verandah. It might not have been unpleasant but he had an unreasonable and deeply superstitious dread of the movement of animals in the dark and feared that when darkness fell the turkeys might decide to perch on his hammock.

  At 2 a.m. came the sound of horses beating up across the plain and again there were armed strangers at the door: ‘A horse whistled, stirrup irons jangled; when the lightning flared I could see four horses, and a man dismounting. He felt his way across the verandah and knocked at the door – “Con amistad”. His belt drooped with the weight of his gun. He seemed to be the leader; the three others dismounted and unsaddled …’20

  Men were disturbed; the turkeys lumbered down from the tree hissing and squawking, candles were lit and coffee served. There was political and incomprehensible talk around the table – hammocks were slung. One stranger was asked by the owner of the hut to take off his gun belt: ‘The stranger laughed, took off his belt, and tossed it into his hammock; the bearded arrogant faces shone in the candlelight.’21

  Then a storm broke, the lightning striking the ground within a hundred yards. It was bitterly cold and the rain poured in under the verandah, wetting the hammock. Greene had left his mackintosh cape at Salto. Soaking and frightened by the storm, he said ‘Hail Mary’s’ to himself like a good Catholic, dozed till four, wakened his guide at four-thirty and was off, tired and stiff, for the last part of the journey. They reached Salto just before nine and crossed the river by canoe, the mules swimming as before, just their muzzles and eyes above the water, again like a pair of alligator heads.

  Lifeless and drab as Salto was, it felt like home. Greene found ticks wedged firmly into his arms and thighs and buttocks and swore he would never ride a mule again! ‘There is a kind of cattle tick you catch in Chiapas, which fastens its head in the flesh,’ he writes. ‘You have to burn it out, otherwise the head remains embedded and festers.’ Forty years later, Greene told Marie-Françoise Allain how they had burrowed into, and remained in, his backside.

  Writing to his mother from Las Casas, he gave a much played-down account of his experiences: ‘I … took a mule & guide to Palenque – unwisely I did it in one day – 13 hours of riding & by the time I’d done another 4 hours to the ruins & back, I was very knocked up. However, I stayed a couple of days on a finca owned by a German & that put me right & I made the return journey in two days.’22

  Again, his luck changed. Having vowed never to ride a mule aga
in he was saved from having to. His friend José Ortega, pilot of the little red plane, had landed at Salto and was to have taken off again for Yajalon the day before, but was grounded by low clouds. Greene had a quick lunch, walked down to the river bank and saw across the river the red plane and the pilot giving its propeller a twist. He ran for a canoe, sent for his suitcase and hurried across.

  Greene recalled that from the plane the river dropped away like a knife; a magnificent landscape opened up of rock and forest and sharp precipitous ridges. They climbed in that tiny red plane over 3,000 feet but still the mountains on both sides were above the propeller and the pilot flew, not over the mountains but between them, the world slanting up all round as if they were diving. Ortega, over the wind and clouds, shouted in Greene’s ear that they were through the mountains and close to Yajalon: ‘We bumped downwards towards a white church on a little plateau completely surrounded by mountains; we were like a billiard ball dropping into a pocket.’23

  *

  Yajalon held pleasant surprises. Through an open door, Greene came suddenly on a tall woman with hollow handsome features and a strange twisted mouth. The odd shape of her mouth was due to food poisoning which had paralysed her for eight months. He stayed in a lodging (it is there to this day) with Sr Lopez and was taken there by the daughters of the handsome lady. Her husband was dead and his grave was in the cemetery above the town. Greene calls her Fru R. She and her husband were Norwegian and her real name was Rasmussen. Greene makes especial reference to her two little blonde daughters, fourteen and eleven, ‘startlingly beautiful in a land where you grow weary of black and oily hair and brown sentimental eyes’. Greene believed that the elder girl disliked him on sight: ‘I was the stranger breaking their narrow familiar life with demands – for lodging, conversation, company.’