The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Fru Rasmussen was a tragic figure, left alone in the mountains with her two young daughters after her husband’s death, trying to carry on her husband’s coffee farm, all their savings stolen by her god-parent (a spiritual relationship regarded in Mexico as a close one) while her husband was dying. She was to be a saviour to Greene, the second kind Lutheran family he had met on his journey.

  Greene hoped to stay in Yajalon for only three days, when a plane was expected to arrive to take him to Las Casas, that town which had been praised by the German living at the finca as ‘a very moral town’, in Yajalon as that ‘moral’ city, that ‘very Catholic’ town; and Greene was longing to reach it during Holy Week to see how Catholics might practise their religion under severe restrictions, where, though the churches might well be open, no priest would be allowed to enter or offer the sacraments. In Yajalon, in the great square, the church was shuttered, weeds growing out of the bell towers.

  Meanwhile Greene visited Fru Rasmussen at tea-time. She always had coffee and cake ready for him, and he looked forward to his daily visit as the days went by and still no plane had arrived; he felt it impossible to repay her kindness adequately. But he did repay her in his next novel with his portrait, not of the tragic Norwegian woman herself, but of the elder daughter. She is the model for Coral Fellows in The Power and the Glory.

  On the first night he walked back to the hotel in the dark – there was no street lighting – and met his fellow lodgers. They were eating at a table under the verandah by the light of an oil-lamp: ‘a stout, white-toothed mestizo school teacher with an air of monotonous cheeriness (and one obscene English word which he repeated, with huge amusement, day after day), his pregnant wife, and his small son of a year and a half … And there were others who dropped in for meals only – a few grizzled, friendly men, a young married couple with their baby, and a clerk I grew to loathe, a mestizo with curly sideburns and two yellow fangs at either end of his mouth.’24

  The town was so small that Greene saw these faces whenever he walked out – ‘the mestizo looking up from his typewriter in the Presidencia and showing his fangs as I went by, a grizzled man waving a hand from a doorway, the schoolmaster’s rich, powerful voice sounding all across the little plaza from his schoolroom, and the young married man pulling up his horse outside the cantina. It gave one the sensation of being under observation all the time.’25 He did not like the Mexicans he met there. But he did not feel a forceful current of enmity towards himself until he reached Las Casas. The schoolmaster the night before had made an impassioned speech at a fiesta on the oil expropriations and urged people to ‘Get rid of the gringoes’. There were, in any case, only three gringoes in Yajalon – Fru Rasmussen, a German photographer, and Greene.

  Most of the schoolmasters had taken over the functions once filled by priests, but unlike the priests they could not speak the Indian dialects, and Greene recalls that the schoolmaster told him how the Spaniards had oppressed the Indians, making them into ‘mere beasts of burden’, but as he spoke, Greene could not help but notice the sad, patient procession of Indians bowed double under enormous crates supported by a leather belt across the forehead, plodding by.

  The lodging house was infested with rats – at night he could hear them chasing one another in the sala. Rats terrified him. One evening he borrowed an Elizabeth Bowen novel from Fru Rasmussen. Sitting in the sala he saw a rat, small, black and elongated, run up the wall and in through the open door of his bedroom. He went to his plank bed and shut his door – better one rat than a family of them – and spent ‘an awful and absurd night’, candle stuck in wax on his chair, with the brandy he’d bought in Veracruz, reading Elizabeth Bowen. The plane did not appear; the weather worsened; the rains were coming and soon the roads would be impassable.

  After lunch, the schoolteacher played the guitar, singing, among other songs, ‘Have I a Rose in My Field?’ Greene felt a growing claustrophobia in this small place wedged in among the mountains round its locked decaying church. To his mother he wrote: ‘I got stuck at Yajalon a week – I’d sworn never to go on a mule again, and they said there’d be an aeroplane tomorrow & tomorrow, but it never came & I got desperate with boredom & rats in my room.’26

  Greene sought out his previous guide to Palenque. He implored young Gomez to find him mules and offered him an exorbitant sum if he could start next morning early. A promise was made to have mules ready at six. He hardly slept, not only because of the rats but because of hope. Next morning the rain was pouring down and no mules came. Everyone, including Gomez, said that it was impossible to travel in the mountains in this rain. At Lopez’s the schoolmaster argued that Greene did not realise how bad the road was; it was precipitous, dreadful. He stressed that he would never go that way himself, the paths were so narrow (and he showed Greene with his hands just how narrow and precipitous they could be). Greene almost became resigned but then:

  rather terrifyingly everything altered. Fru R.’s little blonde daughter stood in the dripping rain with a stranger, a small scrubby-bearded man. He would go with me in spite of the rain and for ten pesos less than Gomez’s muleteer.27

  The muleteer went off into the rain to find his mules to return at midday. Greene played a last game of chess and the schoolmaster checkmated him in six moves. Greene was distracted by the German photographer’sfn2 comments about how crazy it was even to dream of travelling in this weather. The mountains would be impassable and the guide did not know the way to Las Casas (which turned out to be true).

  Then the strange muleteer returned. Fru Rasmussen packed him a rucksack, with a kind of home-made advocaat, two sausage sandwiches, some candles, cheese, a serape and ‘a great lump, the size of a doll’s head’, of brown sugar. This huge sugar lump was not forgotten and later appeared in The Power and the Glory.

  *

  There were three mules, one for each rider and one for Greene’s suitcase. For two hours they proceeded slowly, step by step, through drenching rain while the scrubby-bearded little muleteer lashed and dragged and lashed, calling out in a high hysterical voice, ‘Mula. O Mula.’

  That journey to Las Casas equalled in difficulty the journey to Palenque. Moreover, it took three days, each day on the mule increasing in length, until they reached the ‘Holy City’. There were no roads. ‘People said the paths would be impossible after two days of rain’, he afterwards wrote to his mother, ‘but we got out of the storm area & after three days riding reached here [Las Casas] the first day 1.p.m. to 7; the 2nd day 6 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. & 3rd, 6.45 to 9 p.m. Palenque had toughened me, & I was no more than very tired.’

  It was a remarkable journey and it says something for Greene’s strength and health that he could, even after a recent fever, do such a journey and be only ‘very tired’. Parts of the journey were stored in his memory, and later used in his novel.

  They climbed in long spirals, up into the mountains. A thousand feet above Yajalon, the mule with the suitcase ran off. The guide, having dismounted to adjust his load, lost his head and set off on foot (instead of on his mule) chasing after the disappearing mule ‘crying and praying hysterically to the Mother of God down the mountainside’. It was comic but also disturbing. Greene last caught sight of the mule climbing up the opposite slope with the muleteer 50 yards behind – the mule in the distance a toy animal, the muleteer a toy man.

  Darkness fell; the opposite slope ‘dropped into obscurity, untenanted’. Greene was left trying to push the spare mule; it dug its heels in, while his own mule went forward. Greene felt himself being dragged backwards out of the saddle, which was dangerous because of the narrow path and the second mule which he could not handle. But then his guide returned. He had obviously taken his revenge on the mule for there was a big bleeding gash in the mule’s neck – prompt punishment, indeed.

  They lost their way to a finca where they had hoped to stay and went on and on, climbing and descending, the mules slipping on tree-roots. About 7 p.m. they came upon four mud-and-wattle huts ‘black and silent
in the moonless dark’. An old man tended them. He was on the edge of starvation, living in a hut with rats, welcoming the strangers without a word about payment, gossiping gently in the dark: ‘I felt myself’, writes Greene movingly, ‘back with the population of heaven.’28 The old man was also to be remembered.

  They started again for 13½ hours on muleback to Cancuc – an incredible feat for an unseasoned gringo. At 11 a.m. they reached a village and ate dry strips of bacon and tortillas. They were climbing, but for every 1,000 feet they rose, they also had to drop down 600. The landscape was spell-binding – huge gorges covered with forest, sheer walls of rock, trees grasping a foothold in the cracks. To reach Las Casas they had to climb at least 7,000 feet. There were no more villages before Cancuc and only occasional Indian settlements perched on the rocky plateau above the path. One of these was to be used later as an important meeting place and crisis in The Power and the Glory: ‘One with a little wattle watch-tower from which an Indian stared down at us as we climbed wearily upwards.’

  After eleven hours Cancuc could be seen in the distance and especially what looked from afar ‘a great white cathedral’ flashing in the late sun. Greene was touched by faint feelings of romance. Years ago, he could not doubt that this would have seemed romance to him, to be riding slowly at evening through the mountains, going south towards he did not know what in an unfamiliar land, the crack and pad of the mules’ feet on stone and turf, and the immense serrated waste of almost uninhabited country, only an Indian watch-tower leagues away.29

  That day they must have climbed 3,000 feet and the night was bitterly cold and windy. Keeping on, they suddenly came round the rock to the ‘great cathedral’ which turned out to be a small square white-washed church. He was desperately tired. It was an uncomfortable night, also remembered and later used. They rode on. Almost the only light came from fireflies, and then outside the cantina a huge bonfire. The cantina was an unwalled shelter filled with men, beds raised on stakes from the ground and covered with serapes, not an inch of space for more bodies.

  Finally, they were put in the mayor’s office, though the beds there were already occupied. Greene chose a bench to sleep on, putting on more clothing – a vest, two shirts, two pairs of pants, his leather jacket. He drank admirable coffee, had bacon and fried eggs eaten with the fingers. Again he fell asleep and again came the romantic surprising fist beating on the barred door – the password ‘Con amistad’ softening men’s fears. It was the mayor himself, not the least disturbed that four strangers were sleeping in his office. Greene heard his horse whinnying in the dark.

  The guide woke at 3 a.m. They had a mere thirty odd miles to travel to Las Casas, yet in those hills and in those conditions, it was to be a long day, the more so because they discovered that the mules had disappeared – they did not start until after 6 a.m.: ‘The muleteer went wailing through the darkness with my torch; I could see it flash across the bone-white church; he was praying and close to tears, as he had been that first day when the mule ran away. Poor man, he was highly wrought; he wasn’t cut out for a muleteer. There was nothing to do but wait for daylight on the mayor’s bench. The next time I got up, the stars were still out, but a great fire was blowing beside the eating hut, playing on the white-washed ghost of a church.’30

  Then they were off winding round huge hairpin bends along the edge of the barranca, a path cut in rock. After two terrible hours, Cancuc was still just opposite them. Greene grew desperately weary:

  Just weariness shot through occasionally with flashes – not exactly of beauty, but of consciousness, consciousness of something simple and strange and uncomplicated, a way of life we have hopelessly lost but can never quite forget. There was a moment at a little brown pebbly river when the guide took a bowl from his saddlebag and filled it with water from the stream and made himself a kind of gruel with a ball of corn – the mules drank and I stood on a stone and washed my face and hands and the shadow played on the stream, and it was like peace and natural happiness.31

  Towards evening they came out of the forest on to a plateau, meeting up with a curious Indian cemetery which keenly impressed Greene (also remembered). He was struck by the magic of it, the magic element of Christianity.

  After almost twelve hours on the road, Las Casas came into view:

  Suddenly we came out of the forest on to the mountain edge, and there below us were the lights of the town – the long lines of streets laid out electrically. It was extraordinarily dramatic to come on a city like this, eight thousand feet up, at the end of a mule track, a city of fourteen thousand inhabitants with a score of churches, after the hairpin bends round the mountainside, after the precipices and the foot-wide tracks, the climbs and the descents. It was like an adventure of Rider Haggard – coming so unexpectedly out of the forest above this city, once the capital of Chiapas and the home of Las Casas.32

  ‘Extraordinarily dramatic’, the very words used in The Lawless Roads but which he had used in a letter to his mother on the day he arrived at Las Casas and the Hotel Español: ‘It was extraordinarily dramatic arriving at a place of this size at the end of a mule track in a cup of the mountains – and only a road out the other side to Tuxla [and the coast and home]. One came down to it, as it stands over 8,000 feet up.’

  They had ridden for almost fourteen hours; they went down a seemingly endless cobbled street and finally they rode into the little flowery patio of the hotel:

  A room with a bed and sheets, a beautifully cooked meal, steak and greens and sweet bread, a bottle of beer, and the radio playing: I was drunk and dazed with happiness. The neighbours sat round the radio listening to news of Spain, picking out the ravaged villages on a map hung on the wall, marking with enthusiasm Franco’s advance. Somebody said, ‘Turn on the news from London,’ and ‘This is London,’ they said to me. It was still a Spanish voice speaking in Spanish, but it came from London. It welled out of that solid and complacent building in Portland Place, over the Queen’s Hall and Oxford Circus, over the curve of the world, the Atlantic and the Gulf and the Tropic of Capricorn, over the cemetery with ‘SILENCIO’ in black letters and the wall where Garrido shot his prisoners, over the swamps and rivers, the mountains and the forests, where the old man slept with the rats beside his corn and the flames beat against the front of the locked-up church. ‘This is London,’ they assured me again because I doubted it.33

  He fulfilled his ambition to spend Holy Week in Las Casas. Mass was held in an anonymous house in a side street – ‘a closed door, nothing to mark the presence of God … the priest … his face hideously disfigured with mauve patches’ and Mass without the sanctus bell. On Holy Thursday, after early morning Mass, it was like an invasion, ‘The Indians were pouring in from the mountains, down the long cobbled streets from Guadalupe … they came in thousands to see the crucified Christ.’34

  *

  He went on, completing his arduous and dangerous journey of five weeks, ill with dysentery. He travelled by bus, and at the village of San Lorenzo, when they stopped, he had to go into a stony field to relieve himself and be sick. The journey was an interminable winding descent to the tropics and Tuxtla, then an old plane to Oaxaca and a final train journey to Puebla, where he visited a hidden convent which had been discovered by the government and was now run as an anti-God museum, and the final run by bus to Mexico City.

  He had looked forward to that goal throughout his journey – there his troubles would be at an end – it would be ‘so fine, easy, and luxurious, all brandy cocktails and bourbon and Coca Cola’. But it wasn’t. The cares, irritations and responsibilities he had left were waiting for him. The American proofs of Brighton Rock had not arrived but there were newspaper clippings about the Shirley Temple libel case. He was worried that he might be arrested on his return to England. He lay in bed that night in the Hotel Canada, reading again what counsel and Judge had said, and on the floor below ‘a hysterical woman screamed and sobbed and a man spoke every way in vain … God knows what relationship was breaking
up so publicly in the hotel room.’35 He had come full circle and returned to what he had temporarily escaped from.

  He left by liner from Veracruz, still full of loathing for Mexico, but in London he wondered what he had come back to: the A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions) posters were new and ominous.

  fn1 Without colour because of worms. In Yajalon, Chiapas, Greene met and was befriended by a Norwegian lady who had two young blonde children. One is the source for the wonderful child Coral Fellows in The Power and the Glory. Her mother once purged her of twenty worms, some of them a foot and a half long. They seldom evacuated more than half a dozen worms at a time: Greene writes: ‘It was like the grave, the earth taking over before its day.’10

  fn2 The German photographer was still in his store forty years after Greene’s visit, and still, ‘The wooden wall of his … shack was covered with innocent pictures of naked girls and Plaisirs de Paris torn off the covers of magazines; among them, rigidly, the face of Hitler’ – though the face of Hitler had gone. But Greene also looked at films, badly washed, of weddings, funerals and fiestas which the German store-keeper expected him to buy at an exorbitant price. When I was there, I bought some of those badly washed photographs. The price was exorbitant.

  42

  The Power and the Glory

  I must lie down where all the ladders start,

  In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.