Graham and Yvonne met again in August 1959 at the hotel La Voile d’Or in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. ‘I first lived here in Antibes at the Royal Hotel,’ Graham said. He enjoyed walking and had his own route along the quieter streets of Antibes after a stroll along the ramparts of the port. ‘Then I got a small one-room flat on the sixth floor of the Floride. My next and last move was to this flat’, and he pointed in the direction of Avenue Pasteur and his apartment, La Residence des Fleurs. ‘Finally in June 1966 I bought it.’
I was glad it was dark. Graham rarely discussed such private matters, and I felt rather uncomfortable. He said Yvonne was no bother, no hindrance; in fact she was a great help to him. As a married man and a Catholic I wondered about Yvonne’s husband.
Obviously the sin of adultery didn’t bother Graham. He must have guessed what I was thinking and said, ‘We [he, Yvonne and Jacques] have an understanding, an agreement. She is on the left, you know.’ He was obviously very proud of her ideological leanings and intellect. It was only during this conversation that I learned Yvonne’s last name, Cloetta. For years, during our travels, Graham had referred to her only as Yvonne and said how she had come along at the right moment in his life.
We went back to his flat for a nightcap and gazed down at the ancient Fort Carré and the lights of the beautiful yachts berthed in the marina below his flat. Graham shook his head. ‘It is the most lavish exhibition of wealth, these multimillion-dollar yachts of the rich and famous. The yacht belonging to Fuad II, the last Egyptian king.’ He pointed in the direction of the pier. ‘It had its own helicopter.’ Graham said he had first visited Antibes when he was invited to go sailing by his friend the famous movie-maker Sir Alexander Korda on Korda’s yacht. Graham described how the Antibes harbour had been reclaimed and rebuilt and its ancient ramparts that served as a seawall were moved out further to allow even more yachts to anchor in the marina.
Graham said he was preparing to visit the Jesuit-run Georgetown University in Washington, DC. ‘We are going to Washington next month, on October 5th, then to Charleston, West Virginia, and to New York. I don’t care for New York. It’s a dirty city, but Yvonne wants to see it, and this gives her a chance to see it. I’m writing to young Korda [Michael, Sir Alexander’s nephew]. He’ll help find a hotel there. I hope the students bring up politics. I will not, as it’s supposed to be a literary meeting. But the rector sends students to pick coffee in Nicaragua.’
He also confessed he was back in the good graces of the Russians and that they were going to publish Getting to Know the General. Once more he found it necessary to comment, ‘It is not a good book. There was too much Chuchu, but it was the best I could do.’
I told him he had paid off a debt to his friend Omar.
During our conversations I was reminded that Graham’s shyness in personal encounters did not extend to letter writing. With the pen he could be outspoken and furious. With the pen he was in full control. He had an old-fashioned attachment to the post office and the tradition of letter writing and complained, ‘The post in Antibes is terrible. There is only one person selling stamps.’ Whenever he found something in a newspaper or magazine with which he disagreed he was apt to fire off a letter to the editor. He was always shockingly frank in his opinions.
As we reminisced about Haiti and Central America he said he had contributed half of the Spanish and Latin American royalties from Monsignor Quixote to the Salvadorean guerrillas. He was prompted in part, he said, by the viciousness of the Salvadorean military and the country’s right-wing death squads. The rape and killing of the two American nuns in El Salvador in December 1980 and the assassination of Archbishop Romero had upset Graham a great deal. The other half of the Spanish royalties, Graham said, had gone to a Trappist monastery in Osera, Spain. He had visited the Trappists with his priest friend and had been happy to see them.
On my return to Florida I received a letter from Graham dated 4 October 1985. ‘Can you put me in the picture about this Panama President scandal and the murder of Dr Hugo Spadafora plus the deposition of President Barletta. Noriega seems to be involved. I can’t expect Chuchu to put me straight about this over the telephone.’
Then on the 24th he thanked me for updating him.
The position in Panama seems to be pretty complex and nasty. Chuchu should be ringing me up in the last week of October, but I wonder whether he may not have retired from the scene as Colonel Díaz Herrera seems to be in trouble. Yvonne and I had a good time in Washington … but a pretty tiring one. I saw far more of the city than I had done on my previous two visits and I thought the Madison was one of the best hotels I have ever stayed in. Unlike the Hilton at Charlottesville where we spent one night before flying home.
On the 30th he wrote:
I am sure I wrote to you to thank you for the newspaper clips which were of great interest to me. I find too very interesting the quotation from your brief file. I look forward to getting the book you mention [the book in question is no longer on record]. I certainly won’t throw it away. I begin to be nervous for poor old Chuchu, the friend of Díaz. I liked Díaz much better than I liked Noriega and I really believe him an honest man. It’s all very puzzling and I don’t feel inclined to return to Panama!
Nevertheless, a three-line note arrived from Graham’s sister and secretary, Elisabeth Dennys, dated 22 November 1985, informing me that Graham has asked her to send me ‘a hasty note to say that he is arriving in Panama on 30th November’.
While Panama’s political machinations hadn’t yet attracted international attention, the media was beginning to focus on Haiti. My photographer son, Jean-Bernard, and I had flown to Haiti, which was on the brink of a popular explosion against the Duvalier dynasty after the killing of three students in the town of Gonaïves at the end of November. During an Independence Day Mass at the Port-au-Prince Cathedral on 2 January 1986 we were arrested by Uzi-armed plain-clothes government agents.We knew the curtain was coming down on President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier, and on 7 February Baby Doc and his wife and children flew into exile in France courtesy of the US Air Force.
Mail from Graham brought me up to date on Panama and Nicaragua. On 17 December 1985 he wrote:
We missed you this time in Panama. I have sent your two cuttings to Chuchu as they may interest him. I had a more interesting time in Nicaragua than before. Tomás Borge very cordial and close. Met Marcial’s successor as Commander of the Salvadorean guerrillas. Daniel Ortega much improved and very friendly and open. I definitely don’t like Noriega and Colonel Díaz seems to me to be getting rather feeble. The Cubans wanted me to go over but I felt tired and made for home. I said I might go for a real visit next year.
In Nicaragua Graham had granted an interview to a Reuters correspondent, and the story, datelined Managua, had been distributed on 12 December:
In the lush, volcanic terrain of Nicaragua Graham Greene samples tropical revolution and searches for an idea that will put paid to more than 10 years’ work. The idea has to be a good one, one which will allow him to ditch his present novel, a non-political work with the projected title of The Captain and the Enemy. He has given it up twice already. ‘I have no confidence in it,’ he said. ‘I’m doing it very, very slowly and hoping that a real idea will come and I’ll be able to abandon it for the third time.’
No idea came along, and he was still struck with The Captain and the Enemy. It was Nicaragua that now preoccupied Graham.
When I was in Managua the other day I met Marcial’s successor as military leader of the FMLN and he gave me a number of very amusing photographs of the happy daughter of [El Salvador’s President Napoleón] Duarte in her so-called captivity [having been kidnapped by the leftist guerrillas]. Obviously not in any way faked. Would they be of interest to Time magazine? Some of them I got published the other day in Le Matin. P.S. If the answer is yes I am afraid there will be a little delay as I am off on the 9th to the Caribbean for a fortnight.
Then on the 27th he wrote again, thanking me for a copy
of an article I had reported from Cuba about Castro’s thoughts on religion. It ran in Time as ‘Fidel and the Friar’.
I suppose they [Time] slanted it a little more than you would have done against Fidel. The Cuban Ambassador came to see me in Managua and asked me to go over even if it was for only one day and night to Cuba, but I was feeling desperately tired and refused to alter my arrangements. However I said I wanted to go next time for a week or so in order to ride about the country a bit. He gave me Fidel’s book on Liberation theology but it was in Spanish and I shall wait to read it until the English translation appears. I was not very contented with Panama this time. Colonel Díaz whom I like very much of course was still there, but I felt that he was a rather weak man. Noriega greeted me with all his staff very warmly, but I didn’t feel any great trust in him. I was glad to get away and spend quite a lot of time with Tomás Borge [in Nicaragua] whom I like more and more. What I plan to do next time is perhaps to take Aeroflot from London which goes direct to Havana and afterwards to Managua leaving out Panama except for perhaps a fleeting visit. Chuchu rather agrees with the idea.
I wrote to Graham suggesting he make a trip to Haiti. It had been unusually quiet, and general elections had been scheduled for the end of the year. There was still hope for the country. But he wrote back telling me of his plans and was almost apologetic:
I have just got back from Italy and am off to Russia at the beginning of September. Chuchu was on the telephone yesterday and I have half promised to go to Nicaragua and Cuba with him in October. I wish I could join you in the Caribbean, but I am afraid it is impossible. Yvonne and I had a very interesting and amusing two weeks in the USSR and they wanted me to go back in this February but I don’t intend to go. Yes, like three-quarters of the world I imagine, I am enjoying the Reagan affair [Irangate]. I don’t think I want to go back to Haiti and the past.
Politics in Panama had been seemingly infected by sorcery and insanity. Graham wrote on 28 July 1987 that he had ‘managed to get in touch with Chuchu about two weeks ago and he thought himself quite safe. I said I would go out to him if he were in danger. Díaz has gone completely off his head and he put Chuchu in handcuffs and he was a prisoner in Díaz’s house for some hours. Diaz also accused Chuchu of having a homosexual relationship with me!’ (In his book Divorcing the Dictator: America’s Bungled Affair with Noriega Frederick Kempe writes, ‘Yet the crazier Díaz Herrera acted, the less Noriega worried about him. Noriega knew his plot was working when he heard that Chuchu, long a friend of Díaz Herrera, alleged that he had been chained like a dog in Díaz Herrera’s basement and made to bark.’)
‘I met Díaz twice in April,’ Graham continued,
when I was in Panama going to and coming from Nicaragua. On the first occasion I thought he had gone off his head as he talked for hours some meaningless metaphysical language which he had learnt from a medium in Panama City. On the second occasion I saw him at the National Guard and he seemed more sensible and told us how he had forged the elections and how necessary it was. Without forging them Arias would have returned and all Omar’s work would have been wiped out. He didn’t mention Noriega … I don’t like Noriega but at least he is against the United States. I wonder now whether I shall ever return.
(That same year a grand jury in Miami had handed down eleven counts of drug trafficking against Noriega.)
In April 1987 Graham did return to Nicaragua with Chuchu. At this time the Sandinistas were in dire need of friends, and Chuchu didn’t shrink from aiding them, nor did Graham. The Sandinistas were at war. The Guardian, on 24 April, published a dispatch from its correspondent, Maurice Walsh, in Managua:
Nicaraguans are the first defenders in a war between civilization and barbarism, Graham Greene yesterday told poets, writers and statesmen gathered here to present him their premier cultural award in recognition of his contribution to world literature and support for the Third World. In a ceremony of some pomp but even more good humour, the author had the Order of Rubén Darío pinned to his shirt by President Daniel Ortega, himself a poet, while those watching included the novelist and vice-president, Mr Sergio Ramírez, the Interior Minister Tomás Borge, also a poet in his time, and President Ortega’s wife Rosario Murillo, another poet.
Before the formal presentation, Mr Greene was treated to a discursive biography of his work by another poet, Carlos Martínez Rivas, who turned to the author at various points to ask: ‘Am I right?’ The citation said the award was in recognition of Mr Greene’s ‘fundamental contribution to contemporary literature which is recognized by all of humanity and also for his struggle against imperialist domination’.
In a short but emotional speech delivered through his interpreter, Mr Greene said he was touched by the award but also felt a certain feeling of shame that it was being presented to an Englishman. ‘I am well aware that England, like France, has done very little for Nicaragua in her difficulties, therefore I don’t feel as an Englishman that I deserve this decoration. I had known a bit about Central America before I came for the first time in 1980 but my real knowledge of your situation came in a mysterious telegram in 1976 signed by General Omar Torrijos inviting me to Panama. Then in the next years, until his death, I came each year to Panama and he was my tutor, my teacher about Central American affairs. But I see Nicaragua not only as a small country fighting a bully in the north. I see you even more as being in the front line of the trenches in a worldwide conflict … I am proud to be here, and I thank you with all my heart and I pray for your victory.’
Meanwhile in Haiti, in spite of a night of terror designed to keep voters away from the polls, determined citizens turned out in droves on the morning of 29 November 1987 to cast their ballots; it was the first time they had exercised that right. So ruthless were the Haitian army and its Macoute thugs in attempting to abort the voting that men and women at one polling station were gunned down and hacked to death as they waited patiently to cast their ballots. My son, Jean-Bernard, who was working as a photographer for Time, was wounded in the hand while escaping the site of the massacre. A Dominican cameraman was shot dead beside him. For a harrowing time Jean-Bernard had been reported killed. He appeared a while later and was airlifted out of Haiti with a wounded ABC News camera crew.
In March 1988 Jean-Bernard went to cover events in Panama. I put him in contact with Chuchu, who greeted him warmly and drove him in his dinky Russian-made Lada Gigoli to the modest Vera Cruz Hotel in downtown Panama City. Jean-Bernard said he noted a sadness about Chuchu, as if time had passed him by. He was still the extrovert, playing his part as a living Greene character whom the media sought out for interviews, but politically he was non-committal. He did not appear to have any influence or entree with Noriega or his newly designed Panama Defence Force (PDF) high command.
While Jean-Bernard travelled around Panama photographing Noriega as he faced off against the Bush administration, Chuchu kept his distance. At the end of March, when the DINA — Noriega’s secret police — chased the opposition Civilistas into Panama City’s Marriott Hotel and began beating up journalists, Jean-Bernard ran to the aid of a sound man being battered by DINA agents. He was arrested, stripped of his cameras and packed off to a soccer stadium where the detained were placed in makeshift cells, fingerprinted and photographed before they were finally released. The members of the media who had been arrested were told their equipment would be returned to the hotel. It never was. Even Noriega couldn’t return it. His secret agents had already reaped a tidy profit from selling the expensive equipment. Jean-Bernard called Chuchu to tell him what had happened, but Chuchu just hung up the phone. His political involvement, Jean-Bernard concluded, was over.
Graham had stated in a letter in April:
Chuchu has still been ringing up at intervals and claims that he is in no danger. Noriega has now become a patriot in his eyes and I must admit that if I have to choose between a drug dealer and United States imperialism I prefer the drug dealer. I never much cared for him but Omar at least would have
appreciated the way he is hanging on … I don’t feel much like returning to Panama at the moment. It would be so easy for the CIA to bump me off and blame it on Noriega, and vice versa, though I doubt if Noriega would do it. I seem to spend a lot of my time now going to and fro to Russia. I have been there four times in the last two years and we are probably going again towards the end of May. Yvonne and I had a very agreeable trip to Siberia. Tomsk, which for some reason is closed to foreigners, proved unclosed to us, and it’s a most beautiful city. I never liked to ask why it was closed to foreigners. Of course I would always be delighted to see your son. If possible let him give me not too long a notice because I find it very difficult to plan very far ahead.
Graham had given a quote to the author of a book on Haiti, but the book turned out to contain regrettable inaccuracies. ‘I am not up-to-date in the affairs of Haiti,’ he wrote to me, ‘but I hadn’t realized how inaccurate the account was.’ He rang up the American publisher to ask him to withdraw the quote, to no avail. ‘It seems I have been made a fool of, but it was impossible for me to judge that moment. Tant pis. I shall now put it [the book] in the wastepaper basket.’
The Seeds of Fiction Page 38