The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  Similarly, at the end of The Power and the Glory, the whisky priest is accepted as a martyr by the woman, pieces of a handkerchief soaked in his blood being sold, her young son carrying on the Catholic tradition by spitting on the police lieutenant and admitting another priest in hiding to their home.

  If, however, Greene is accurate in his account of his experience of Tabasco in The Lawless Roads, it would seem that he came there with some foreknowledge of a fugitive priest, the one he refers to when he spends his first night in Villahermosa: ‘one felt the excitement of this state where the hunted priest had worked for so many years, hidden in the swamps and forest’; and it is likely that he picked up this information in Mexico City where he met the young man who was imprisoned for three days for wearing a cross. What follows would seem to be an extension of the young man’s account of Tabasco: ‘Every priest was hunted down or shot, except one who existed for ten years in the forests and the swamps, venturing out only at night; his few letters, I was told, recorded an awful sense of impotence – to live in constant danger and yet be able to do so little, it hardly seemed worth the horror.29

  Then, in Villahermosa, he asked Dr Fitzpatrick about the priest in Chiapas who had fled: ‘“Oh,” he said, “he was just what we call a whisky priest.” He had taken one of his sons to be baptised, but the priest was drunk and would insist on naming him Brigitta. He was little loss, poor man … but who can judge what terror and hardship and isolation may have excused him in the eyes of God?’30

  There would seem to be enough here, given Greene’s imaginative flair, for the creation of his whisky priest, a man forced into fear and hardship developing the ‘private and discreet virtue’ of true glory in solitariness. He must also have heard other rumours of such a priest. One possible source is Father Parsons in Washington to whom Greene had a letter of introduction. In the unpublished account of his life, Parsons denies giving Greene information, but after the publication of the novel, because there were in Parsons’s view two unworthy priests in the novel, he was troubled that it might be thought that he had told Greene about the hunted priest. He asserted that he did not ‘tell Mr Greene that there actually was a priest at that very time in Tabasco. He was a Belgian and had heroically volunteered his services to work for the people and guaranteed that he would not marry any woman.’ He goes on: ‘What became of him I never knew, but he did, as I know from Archbishop Diaz, perform a number, a large number, of heroic acts during his ministry in that State. I do not know if he was ever caught or if he is still alive.’ Perhaps all we can conclude from this is that there was indeed one priest working in secret and that his reputation was vouched for.

  In Mexico forty years after Greene’s trek I asked many Tabascans and Chiapans about that single hunted priest and heard a number of stories. There was one such priest, but he was Mexican not Belgian. He was an alcoholic and his name was Father Macario; for safety’s sake he would often work near the border of Tabasco so that he could slip over into Chiapas and therefore, in a sense, he belonged more to the state of Chiapas. He certainly fits Dr Fitzpatrick’s priest in that he drank. My source told me: ‘He was a real drunk. He drank the best and the cheapest. He was a bad priest because he was a drunk.’ At the same time there was another priest called Isidro González. He was not a drunk but he had women. It might be that Graham Greene, when developing the priest in his novel, given his character’s attachment to alcohol and his illegitimate child, had simply combined Isidro and Macario.

  Instinct told me that the hunted priest was Macario and that in the short unnamed descriptions Greene gives in The Lawless Roads, he has Macario in mind. Parsons was probably mistaken when, in old age, he thought the hunted priest was Belgian (for in his taped autobiography there are numerous lapses of memory). Parsons may never have learnt what happened to the hunted priest – ‘I do not know if he was ever caught or if he is still alive’ – but recently, in reading the diary of an uneducated but devout Indian, Gabriel, (who was finally killed by Garrido’s men because he refused to give up his religion),fn5 I came across a short reference to our hunted man – ‘only one of them, Father Macario Fernandez Aguado, remained one jump ahead for fear of punishment, always in the swamps or in the jungle helping within its desolate loneliness those Catholics who still had the courage to confess their faith.’31 It cannot be that two priests with the same name, Father Macario, could have been operating in the jungles of Tabasco.

  What happened to Macario Aguado? Did he live on or was he brought to account by Garrido Canabal’s government? The diary is vague. One entry is critical of Archbishop Díaz, saying that ‘he [Father Macario] laid before him all his complaints and he did not have the dignity to pay attention to him.’ It then goes on to relate how, at one time, he was on the point of falling into the hands of the Governor in the town of Atasta, but that by Divine Providence, the guard, instead of coming to the house where he was, stopped at a house near by, thereby saving him, and that this took place on 4 March 1930. This is followed by the all too brief account of his death in the same year: ‘He and the people from La Argentina in the State of Chiapas witnessed his apprehension and death and that was on the 1st of October 1930 and they can give exact information.’

  From this account, the source for the protagonist in The Power and the Glory was not brought to the capital to be executed, but was despatched, probably with machetes, by Garrido’s killers, the Red Shirts. It has been said by Garrido Canabal’s Catholic enemies outside his state that he had Catholics killed and then fed the corpses to pigs so that no trace of them was left behind. Mexicans in Las Casas have told of bodies of dead Catholics floating in the rivers. Either method of disposal could account for the lack of any known grave for Father Macario Fernandez Aguado.

  *

  Greene’s priest suffers his greatest degradation in jail and this episode owes a good deal to Greene’s experiences in Villahermosa, though in the geography of the novel it could not have been Villahermosa. The priest goes to the town in search of wine for the Mass and is also, illegally, sold a bottle of Veracruz brandy (the same brand of brandy Greene carried with him) by a cousin of the Governor (in the same hotel, with its electric dynamo and wide stairs leading to the first floor, in which Greene stayed). Just as Greene did in The Lawless Roads, so the priest saw the young men and women promenading in two concentric circles. The priest and the Governor’s cousin get drunk on the brandy and wine, joined by the chief of police, who suffers from toothache throughout the novel and who is based on the corrupt chief of police Greene met (and his assessment of him was sound). He was corrupt, jovial, drank and played billiards in life as in the novel. His name was Carlos Jordán and his nickname was Mito, Spanish for myth, because his famed generosity was a myth.

  The priest is picked up by the Red Shirts and the police lieutenant who – even though his picture is on the prison wall – does not recognise him and jails him for a night for being drunk. This provides a key scene in the novel. He is pushed into an open cell, treading on a hand, an arm: ‘An appalling smell lay on the air and somebody in the absolute darkness wept’; and he hears a woman’s ‘muffled painless cries’. He realises with horror that pleasure was going on even in this crowded darkness: ‘This place was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven.’32 The priest is moved by an enormous and irrational affection for the inhabitants of the prison: ‘He was just one criminal among a herd of criminals … he had a sense of companionship which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove.’33 His compassion grows during his evening in the dark jail, but another prisoner, a pious woman, in contrast hates the sounds of ‘hooded and cramped pleasure’. When she learns he is a priest, she demands: ‘Why won’t they stop it? The brutes, the animals? … Stop them. It’s a scandal’, and as the priest finds further compassion, she threatens she will write to his bishop: ‘You sympathize with these animals,’ she ends. ‘The sooner you are dead the better�
�, and the priest thinks:

  He had always been worried by the fate of pious women: as much as politicians, they fed on illusion: he was frightened for them. They came to death so often in a state of invincible complacency, full of uncharity.34

  He couldn’t see her in the darkness, but there were plenty of faces he could remember from the old days which fitted the voice. When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity … that was a quality God’s image carried with it … when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.35

  Next morning, his suit fouled by the cell floor, he is forced to take out and empty the pails of excrement and clean up the vomit.

  The realism of this scene did not derive from Greene’s personal experience, though he had spent some time in the courtyard of Villahermosa prison while waiting for the chief of police, and the priest’s view through the grille of the hammocks outside is part of that experience: ‘The dirty whitewashed walls, the greasy hammocks, and the animal faces of the men [police] – it wasn’t like law and order so much as banditry.’36 The source of his information about the inside of the prison is surely to be found in the Epilogue to The Lawless Roads.

  Greene travelled back to England from Veracruz on the German liner, Orinoco. He met on that ship a German whom he calls Kruger, and perhaps this is his name since he calls him ‘K’ in the Spectator in which this section of the travel book was first printed.37

  Kruger had had an unusually painful experience in Mexico. He could hardly have failed to interest Greene, who is a collector – not of pictures, or stamps, or fine porcelain – but of acquaintances. Kruger had spent three months in a Mexican prison in an open cell. His story was that he had strolled into Tapechula in Chiapas to listen to the marimbas, had sat down in the plaza, and two plain-clothes men came and put revolvers to his head. His papers had been stolen, so he was put in jail and was in an open cell for three months, for the first eight days of which he was given no food or water; the floor crawled with worms, and what Greene described as ‘other things’, presumably urine and excrement. A man jailed for being drunk, on his release, took out a letter from Kruger to the German consul, who brought him money for food, but could not arrange his release since he had no papers. Kruger lived in semi-starvation among thieves and murderers until he managed to smuggle a letter out to the Mexican Government who sent an agent down, and Kruger was taken to Veracruz where he served another two months of imprisonment before being put on board the German liner.

  Greene was struck by Kruger’s gentleness, ‘his quiet gentle way, playing with the children’ on board the ship; his amazing gratitude for life; and the extraordinary sense of goodness surrounding him. Kruger longed to settle on the Amazon and tried to persuade Greene to return with him: ‘You will never want to go home, never. You can get another wife there.’

  Greene probably made no substantial use of Kruger as a character, yet something of the growing gentleness of the hunted priest might derive from him, but it must have been from Kruger that Greene learned details of the sordid conditions of an open cell in a Mexican jail.

  *

  The impression made on Greene by the Chamula Indians’ version of Christianity became part of his priest’s experience. Greene’s contact with it began on the way to Las Casas when he and his guide came at evening out of a forest, ‘on what seemed to be at last the top of the world nine thousand feet up’, upon ‘a great plateau of yellow grass’, lit by the ‘last pale golden light’ of a sun dropping over the ridge, ‘as if over the world’s edge, so that you thought of the light going on and on through quiet, peaceful, uninhabited space’. It was ‘like a scene from the past before the human race had bred its millions’. And ‘a grove of tall black crosses stood at all angles like wind-blown trees against the blackened sky.’ ‘This was the Indian religion – a dark, tormented, magic cult’38 – as it certainly was. It led Greene to consider that Christians were too apt to minimise the magic element in Christianity: ‘the man raised from the dead, the devils cast out, the water turned into wine. The great crosses leaned there in their black and windy solitude, safe from the pistoleros and the politicians, and one thought of the spittle mixed with the clay to heal the blind man, the resurrection of the body, the religion of the earth.’39 Magic might be ‘a short cut to the dark and magical heart of the faith’.

  This is, perhaps, a romanticised view of the primitive, inspired by the atmosphere and unexpected vision of a place. In fact, after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the Chamula Indians had accepted only part of the Christian faith – the saints, the rosary, medals, incense, banners and processions, but the rituals were adapted to their own beliefs. Each saint became an individual god: the Virgin Mary was to them the Goddess of the Sun, and their wooden, plaster or clay images have their hands cut off (so that they would be safe from theft) and wear mirrors on their chests to ward off evil spirits. The graves of their dead in their cemetery, at the foot of the 20-ft-high crosses, have boards placed on top of them through which the spirits have exit and entrance – they are not evil spirits but everyone is afraid of them. The Chamulas have no understanding of the Stations of the Cross, but on 2 November they come to the cemetery to celebrate the Catholic day of the dead, bringing food for the dead, renewing the graves and cutting down huge pine trees (always pine as pine needles are a sacred offering) and tying them to the crosses. But alcohol has become an unfortunate part of such observances – on Saints’ Days it is poured on the candles and there is drinking, smoking and chanting to the point of collapse: and on the day of the dead there is a fiesta, drinking and eating all day.

  The atmosphere of that cemetery was the same when I visited it in 1978fn6. In Yajalon, a Catholic priest who knew the Indians told me that three policemen had been killed only days before by Chamula Indians in the mountains and that we should stay away from that sacred place with its 20-ft-high crosses. But we did visit it to photograph those giant crosses leaning at different angles, as night fell. It was a deeply moving and religious experience, but not a Christian one. The silence at that height was eerie and there was a strong sense of being watched.

  Greene made good use of his brief experiences of the Indian cemetery in The Power and the Glory in a scene which combined Christian and pagan and a leavening of realism. The priest is followed by an Indian woman carrying her dying baby – it had been shot during an exchange of fire between the police and the American gunman. The woman, recognising the word ‘priest’, follows him in the direction of the mountains and the border, the dead child strapped to her back. They walk on and on and for the last thirty hours they have only had sugar to eat, ‘large brown lumps of it the size of a baby’s skull’. They travel by the sun until the black wooded bar of mountain tells them where to go: ‘They might have been the only survivors of a world which was dying out – they carried the visible marks of the dying with them.’

  There were no visible boundaries and: ‘There seemed to be so little progress: the path would rise steeply, perhaps five hundred feet, and fall again, clogged with mud. Once it took an enormous hairpin bend, so that after three hours they had returned to a point opposite their starting-place, less than a hundred yards away.’40

  This was Greene’s experience in setting out from Cancuc on the last track to Las Casas, and it leads to an Indian cemetery.

  At sunset on the second day they came out on to a wide plateau covered with short grass: an odd grove of crosses stood up blackly against the sky, leaning at different angles – some as high as twenty feet, some not much more than eight. They were like trees that had been left to seed. The priest stopped and stared at them: they were the first Christian symbols he had seen for more than five years publicly exposed … No priest could have been concerned in the strange rough group; it was the work of Indians and had nothing in common with the tidy vestments of the Mass and the elaborately worked out symbols of the
liturgy. It was like a short cut to the dark and magical heart of the faith – to the night when the graves opened and the dead walked.41

  Now the priest observes the Indian woman and dead child:

  The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? and if she did, why should it not be granted her, the priest wondered? Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith – faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle began to eat, and the child lay quietly at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?42

  There is no miracle; the priest and the Indian woman part; the child is left alone beside the cross. It is raining; the priest feels fever – conscience-stricken that he has left the Indian woman alone – and climbs in his soaked condition back up to the top of the plateau. Only the dead child is there and a huge lump of sugar. Guilty, but desperately hungry, the priest eats the sugar (like that given to Greene by Fru Ramussen). It sticks in his throat. He feels an appalling thirst and sucks at his soaked trousers. The child lies under the streaming rain like a dark heap of cattle dung. He walks away. He has the sense that he is moving across a blank white sheet, going deeper every moment into the abandoned land. The journey becomes more terrible for him. He feels himself to be in a mine shaft, going down into the earth to bury himself. He meets a man with a gun who asks him who he is, and the priest gives his name to a stranger for the first time in ten years. He expects doom. He tries to run away and comes to the edge of the forest and a whitewashed building (which Greene in his original travels thought from a distance was a cathedral and which the priest in his fever thinks is a barracks). ‘Father, it is our church,’ says the man with the gun. The priest runs his hands over the wall like a blind man and suddenly sits down on the rain-drenched grass and falls asleep in absolute exhaustion with ‘home behind his shoulder-blades’.