The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  Sandinista Interior Minister Tomás Borge had introduced Graham to Lenin Cerna, the head of state security. Graham received the tour Lenin customarily gave the foreign media, some of whom were sceptical of Cerna’s display of lethal boobytrapped toys he accused the rebels of manufacturing for use against the civilian population. Graham accepted them as evidence of the purported barbarity of the Contras. The pièce de résistance was the child’s Mickey Mouse school lunch-box bomb. What Graham saw, and was shown, during his visit heightened his anger against President Reagan and what was becoming known as Reagan’s secret war.

  Graham confessed at Los Antojitos, when Chuchu went to use the telephone, that ‘it has been a strange trip. I don’t mind being used when it is for a good cause but I am a little mystified about our and Chuchu’s next stop, Havana. I am still not certain whether I am invited by Fidel or Casa de Las Americas [the Cuban cultural centre]. Frankly I am a little tired and it is time to go home.’

  When I thought how arduous and tense travelling around rural Nicaragua with the Sandinistas could be, stopping and starting and visually sweeping the road ahead for an ambush, I felt sympathy for Graham, who was about to turn eighty. It was the last time the three of us would be together in Central America.

  23 | A NIGHT IN HAVANA

  Gabriel García Márquez happened to be in Havana when Graham arrived. The two writers were now old friends, and it was Gabo who helped break the ice when Fidel Castro dropped in to visit Graham Greene.

  García Márquez’s original report of the meeting was reprinted in the Cuban newspaper Granma on 14 April 1991 after Graham’s death.

  Graham Greene stopped over in Havana for 20 hours, and the local correspondents of the foreign press read all kinds of things into it. Naturally. He arrived on an executive plane belonging to the government of Nicaragua and was accompanied by José de Jesús Martínez [Chuchu], a Panamanian poet and professor of mathematics who was one of the men closest to General Omar Torrijos. Moreover, they were met at the airport by protocol officials, and the meeting was wrapped in so much discretion that no journalist found out about the visit until it was over. They were taken to a house for visiting dignitaries that is usually reserved for heads of state of friendly countries, a black Mercedes Benz was placed at their disposal — the kind that was used only during the 6th Summit Meeting of Non-Aligned Countries, nine years ago. Actually, they didn’t need it, because they didn’t leave the house. Old Cuban friends of theirs came to see them — friends who knew they were there because the writer himself told them. Painter René Portocarrero who became Greene’s friend when the writer came to Havana to study the setting for Our Man in Havana, got the message too late, and, when he got there, the writer had already gone back. Greene ate only once during the 20 hours, nibbling at a lot of things like a wet bird, but he had a bottle of good Spanish red wine, and the two of them and their guests polished off six bottles of whisky.

  When Greene departed, he left the impression that not even he knew why he had come — a thing that could happen only to one of his characters in his novels, fomented by doubts about God.

  I went to his house two hours after he arrived because he phoned as soon as he heard I was in the city. This made me very happy, not only because I’ve admired him for a long time as a writer and as a human being but also because many years had gone by since we’d seen each other last.

  After so many years, I found a rejuvenated Graham Greene whose clear thinking continues to be his most surprising and unalterable virtue. As always, we talked about everything under the sun. What most caught my attention was the sense of humor with which he referred to the four trials in which he had to appear in various French courts, as a result of the accusatory pamphlet he published against the Mafia in Nice. For many familiar with the Côte d’Azur’s underworld, Greene’s revelations were nothing new. But we, his friends, feared for his life. He held to his course, however, and went ahead with his denunciation. ‘I’d rather die of a bullet in the head than a cancer of the prostate,’ he said. And I said then — I don’t remember where — that Graham Greene was playing literary Russian roulette, as he had done in his youth with a .32 Smith and Wesson, as reported in his memoirs. He remembered my statement during the visit and took it as a starting point for telling us the details of his four trials.

  At around 1.00 a.m. Fidel Castro dropped by to visit. He and Greene had first met shortly after the triumph of the Revolution, when Greene attended the filming of Our Man in Havana. They saw each other several times since then, during Greene’s periodic visits, but it seemed that they hadn’t gotten together the last two times, because, when they shook hands, Graham Greene, said, ‘We haven’t seen each other for 16 years.’ It seemed to me that they were both a little daunted, and it wasn’t easy for them to start talking. Therefore I asked Graham Greene how much truth there was in the episode of Russian roulette that he’d told about in his memoirs. His blue eyes, the clearest I’ve ever seen, lit up with the memory. ‘That was when I was 19,’ he said, ‘when I fell in love with my sister’s teacher.’ He said that, in fact, he had played a solitary game of Russian roulette with an old revolver belonging to an older brother and that he’d done so on four different occasions.

  ‘There was a week between the first and the second time, but the last two were just a few minutes apart.’ Fidel Castro, who couldn’t let a fact such as that go by without exploring it in depth, asked him how many bullets could fit in the cylinder of the revolver. ‘Six,’ Graham Greene replied. Then Fidel Castro closed his eyes and began to murmur multiplication figures. Finally, he looked at the writer in astonishment and said, ‘According to the calculation of probabilities, you should be dead.’ Graham Greene smiled with the serenity of all writers when they feel they are living an episode from one of their own books and said, ‘It’s a good thing I was always terrible at maths.’ Perhaps because they had been speaking about death, Fidel Castro quickly noted the writer’s youthful appearance and good health and asked him what exercises he did. It was a question that was bound to come up, because Fidel Castro considers physical culture to be one of the keys of life. He does several hours of exercise every day, in the same enormous proportions in which he does everything, and he urges his friends to do the same. His physical condition is exceptional for a man of his age, and he attributes his good mental health to this. Therefore he was taken back when Graham Greene replied that he’d never done any exercises at all, yet he felt very alert and had no health problems at 79. Moreover, he said that he didn’t have any special diet. That he slept between seven and eight hours a night — which was also surprising in an old man with sedentary habits — and that, at times, he drank up to a bottle of whisky a day and a liter of wine with each meal, yet he’d never become a slave to alcohol.

  For a moment, Fidel Castro seemed to doubt the efficacy of his regimen of health, but he quickly realized that Graham Greene was an admirable exception —admirable, but an exception. By the time we said goodbye, I was sure that, sooner or later, that meeting would be described in a book of memoirs by one of the three of us — or perhaps by all.

  When Graham returned to Antibes he wrote in a letter to me dated 2 February 1983, ‘It was an amusing meeting with Fidel in my twenty-four hours in Cuba. He looked to me much younger than he had done in 1966 and much more relaxed.’ An article reported by a colleague of mine had appeared in Time that had enraged Graham. He was so upset by this article and the treatment of the Sandinistas that he went on French television to excoriate it. He said he had promised to send a copy to Chuchu.

  In a letter two weeks later he said:

  I wrote to you after I returned but I was very tired and I don’t know what I told you! Did I tell you that we had had a visit from Marcial who was very friendly? I was very shocked by that piece in Time magazine so that I broke all my resolutions and went on television on the Third Regional to contradict the story of which I said I did not believe a word as I had spoken to many priests and American nuns in Ni
caragua who would certainly have had some knowledge of such things going on. [The Time story, ‘A Defector’s Firsthand Account of Massacres and Torture’, was full of allegations which the Sandinistas denied.] I have also written a long letter to The Tablet [the British edition of the Catholic newspaper] on the unreliability of Archbishop Obando y Bravo. I will send you a cutting when it appears. A crazy young documentary Australian film director Bradbury has sent me a student’s ticket to Managua and back because he wants me to help him in a film he is doing with Bianca Jagger. He is a good documentary man and on the right side and I expect he will be trying to look you up. Did I tell you that Fidel prophesied a guerrilla victory in San Salvador in a year’s time?

  Pope John Paul II descended on Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua less than two months after Graham departed. The Pope’s visit began with his humiliating Father Ernesto Cardenal, the Minister of Culture. As Father Cardenal knelt to kiss his papal ring the Pope withdrew his hand and wagged his papal finger in the priest’s face. The Pope was admonishing him and other Catholic clerics for taking an active role in the revolutionary government. Then the papal Mass turned into a free-for-all. Youthful Sandinistas in the huge throng baited nuns sitting before them in the stands who were trying to keep the youths quiet. Badgered by hecklers in the crowd, the Pope grew impatient and asked them to be silent. The agitators loved it. The Pope had suddenly lost his infallibility and descended to their level.

  John Paul II had angered many Sandinistas not only by his public scolding of Father Cardenal but by reaffirming his support for Nicaraguan Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo, a harsh critic of the Sandinistas. The comandantes sat through the Mass, making no effort to intervene to restore order.

  Following the Pope from Nicaragua to Port-au-Prince on his tour, I found it interesting that he faced a different kind of political drama in Haiti. Led by Bishop Willy Romulus of Jeremie, the liberal wing of the Haitian Catholic Church took heart when the Pope declared, ‘Things must change here.’ This papal declaration was pounced on by young oppositionists who used it as their battle cry against the Duvalier regime. The ensuing popular uprising succeeded, and Jean-Claude Duvalier ceased to be President-for-Life on the morning of 7 February 1986.

  Graham, who was already deeply concerned by the Polish Pope’s actions, wrote in a letter to me on 28 March 1983, ‘I haven’t a very high opinion of [Daniel] Ortega and I thought he behaved rather stupidly — but then so did the Pope. I am glad the rum punches are still good at the Oloffson. I have no summer plans for the time being, but I’ll let you know if I travel west.’

  In Nicaragua, three months after Salvadorean guerrilla leader Marcial had visited Graham in Managua, the commander of the strongest arm of the Salvadorean guerrilla force was dead. His end came days after his second-in-command, Mélida Anaya Montes, known by her nom de guerre Ana María, was brutally murdered in a safe house in a prestigious suburb of Managua. Her throat was slashed, and according to the Nicaraguan Interior Ministry her body revealed eighty stab wounds. Marcial was in Libya at the time and returned to Managua for the funeral. Reporters who saw him described Marcial as looking much older than his sixty-four years and wearing a sweater under a coat despite the intense summer heat. Six days later, on 12 April, Salvador Cayetano Carpio, ‘Marcial’, was found dead, reportedly by his own hand, of a bullet in the heart. His role in the killing of Anaya Montes had been established. In a letter dated 22 May Graham wrote:

  I haven’t yet any settled plans for the summer except that I hope to find time to get on a bit with the book I am writing about Omar. I was shocked by Marcial’s death. When I saw him in Nicaragua he was full of optimism for the future. The death of his woman deputy seems to have been a peculiarly brutal one. I am glad the men responsible have been arrested. Chuchu keeps on ringing up and the story of Cayetano’s death becomes more and more mysterious. Now they are blaming the murder of this woman on him.

  24 | MASTER OF CONTRADICTION

  ‘I have finished my book on Torrijos,’ Graham announced, ‘but I am not sure yet whether I will publish it. After four revisions I am not happy about it. Maybe I will let Chuchu make the final decision.’ But publish he did. Getting to Know the General hit the bookstores in January 1984. At the end of May 1983 Chuchu had descended on Antibes. Graham was happy to see him and wrote:

  Chuchu arrived safely and corrected many misspellings of mine. I would have liked you to have seen the book before publication but we are anxious to get it out before the American elections — Chuchu is especially anxious. He likes it better than I do. His character really overshadows Omar in the book and I feel it an uneasy falling between two stools of memoirs and autobiography. However I will follow Chuchu’s advice and publish.

  Graham later agreed that the tome was too dispersed, not clearly enough a memoir, an autobiography or a travel book. (Time’s reviewer, J.D. Reed, had asked, ‘How much of this strange biography — travel book, escapist yarn, memoir — is documentary? It is certain that in his 45th book Greene remains a master of contradiction.’)

  Following the publication of Getting to Know the General, Graham concluded a letter to me with a comment on the US elections.

  I have hope that [US Senator Gary] Hart will beat both Mondale and Reagan. I don’t feel it likely somehow that Reagan will go whole-hog on an invasion of Nicaragua. After all the Pentagon decided that it would need a hundred thousand troops to guard the Canal so I should imagine it would need close to half a million to do anything in Nicaragua.

  I begin to feel old and tired so though Chuchu brought me letters from Colonel Díaz, Noriega and [Panamanian President] Espriella who sent me a picture also I doubt whether I shall take off again for Central America. I shall probably go no further than Spain this year.

  When I received my copy of Getting to Know the General I realized that Graham was not simply being modest in saying that he was not satisfied with even the fourth version he had written. I thought he had given a faithful and truthful account of his peregrinations in Panama, but much was missing that could have been covered only in a novel. The book could have worked so much better as fiction. General Omar Torrijos was a complicated human being to whom Graham could have done justice only in fictional form. At the end of the book it also became apparent that Chuchu did more than correct spelling mistakes, that Graham had allowed him to exert editorial influence to make his (Chuchu’s) easy view of the Sandinistas appear to be shared by General Torrijos, when it was not. Omar had said more than once that the Sandinistas were ‘neither a model nor a menace’. He confessed that he did not like what he considered the Sandinistas’ dangerous growing dependency on the East when they were in the West.

  Getting to Know the General offered a revealing portrait of Graham’s inner thoughts. While being driven by Chuchu into the Panamanian mountains one day, Graham recounts, ‘to me it was like a return back to life after a long sickness — the malignant sickness of a writer’s block. My writing days, I thought, were not over after all.’ With the General’s death

  the idea came to me to write a short personal memoir, based on the diaries which I had kept over the last five years, as a tribute to a man whom during that time I had grown to love. But as soon as I had written the first sentence after the title, Getting to Know the General, I realized that it was not only about the General whom I had got to know over those five years … it was also about Chuchu, one of the few men in the National Guard whom the General trusted completely, and it was this bizarre and beautiful little country, split in two by the Canal and the American Zone, a country which had become, thanks to the General, of great practical importance in the struggle for liberation taking place in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

  Two outstanding foreign correspondents, the previously mentioned Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post (who had escaped injury during the mortar ambush in Nicaragua) and Alan Riding of the New York Times, were covering Panama and Central America at the time, and both reviewed Getting to Know the General.

  DeYoung t
hought the book should have been a novel rather than the non-fiction account that Graham had written. She noted that Graham had developed a close relationship with Torrijos and had kept a journal that he hoped to turn into a tale tentatively titled On the Way Back, but that all had changed with Torrijos’s death. She wrote:

  Some of Greene’s critics, and even fans, say his books are not political enough. For better or for worse, his novels often are considered too entertaining to be profound. But for this reader and fan, the moment when On the Way Back became Getting to Know the General was an unfortunate one. What could have been both good politics and good entertainment as fiction turns out to be a disappointment as real life … Omar Torrijos was a compelling, unique man who combined the Latin American caudillo tradition of military dictatorship with a curious kind of humanism and humanity, a ‘dictator with heart,’ as he used to call himself … By Latin standards, his rule was benign and relatively progressive. He dedicated himself to negotiating the return of US control of the Panama Canal and Canal Zone, and wrestled the long-languishing treaty negotiations to a political victory through will power and clever diplomacy … One longs for the larger-than-life complicated character that Greene could have made of a fictionalized Torrijos; for the sense of place and time, and even political meaning, that the Greene treatment could have evoked of Panama and Central America at a time when national pride and revolution were awakening.

  The best passages in the book are those about the process of creating characters and writing fiction, about On the Way Back before it was discarded in favor of a pale paean to the General. Only one small bit of it is preserved here, but it is worth comparing to real life. In Getting to Know the General, Greene describes his arrival for his first meeting with Torrijos. ‘It was a small insignificant suburban house, only made to look out of the ordinary by the number of men in camouflage uniform clustered around the entrance and by a small cement pad at the rear in place of a garden, smaller than a tennis court, on which a helicopter could land.’