‘He wrote a book about Haiti,’ I said, ‘called The Comedians.’ I went on to explain what Graham meant by comedians.
Mambo Lolotte understood. She exhibited surprising sophistication. As she left to prepare her yams for market she stood for a moment in the doorway of the little hut and looked at me. ‘We are les Komedyens, she said, using the Creole word. ‘We Haitians are all actors. We must be to survive.’
Unlike Catholicism, Voodoo has no heaven or hell. Graham’s soul would be free to wander. Perhaps he would even return to Haiti.
After Lolotte left I remained for a long time reflecting inside the cool Voodoo sanctuary. Just as had happened at Graham’s memorial Mass in Westminster Cathedral, memories of the man flooded back to me. Paradoxical as he often was, I believed Graham would have been more at home with this simple Voodoo tribute in Lolotte’s hounfor than at high Mass at Westminster. The Voodoo priestess’s prayer would have been less embarrassing for him. He was easily embarrassed.
I left the offering of Stolichnaya to repose in Lolotte’s bagui and then wondered if I should have bought a larger bottle. The Voodoo gods liked to be abundantly pleased. When I walked out the light was fading. I said goodbye to Mambo Lolotte and noticed the irony that her peristyle was a neighbour to Pont Beudet, Haiti’s ancient but still functioning insane asylum.
Not far down the road was what remained of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s ranch. As I passed it on my return to Port-au-Prince I noticed the entrance gate to the property was broken and hanging on its hinges. The unmanned rusty guard turrets and high concrete wall were all that was left standing of the once-elaborate country retreat. Vegetation rotted in the swimming pool and cows and goats grazed in the garden. Peasants in the area said that the army had looted the ranch and then set it alight, blaming the local people. Even the mounds of lead from spent bullets on Jean-Claude’s private shooting range had been collected for scrap.
Four years later, on Friday 26 May 1995, there was a rare official homage to Graham Greene in Port-au-Prince. The tribute was being offered by grateful Haitians who believed that with The Comedians Graham had managed to lift the shroud and expose Duvalier’s tyranny to the world. The white walls of the newly established non-governmental Info-Service lecture hall, located in an old, renovated Port-au-Prince gingerbread mansion, were covered with posters (provided by the British Council) illustrating Graham’s long and productive life. While carrying out his book research at the height of Papa Doc’s terror in August 1963, Graham, travelling by taxi, often passed this house on Avenue Charles Sumner in Turgeau, a residential section of the capital, as he returned from the Hotel Sans Souci to the venerable Grand Hotel Oloffson. Now, thirty-two years later, Graham’s niece Louise Dennys was present as a guest to represent the Greene family.
The republic’s new Minister of Culture, Jean-Claude Bajeux — the former exiled priest who had accompanied Graham and me on our 1965 border trip — lectured on ‘La Metaphysique du Mal Chez Graham Greene’ (‘The Metaphysics of Evil as Seen by Graham Greene’). The young university students in the audience craned forward in their seats. They shared an eagerness for knowledge of the lost decades in which the dictatorship had turned their country into an intellectual wasteland. They were all too familiar with the metaphysics of evil, their country having only just emerged from three bloody years of post-Duvalierist military repression during which many of these same students were forced to flee for their lives in boats or seek refuge in rural Haiti, becoming exiles in their own country. Many of their fellow students had been killed.
In his ninety-minute lecture Bajeux outlined Graham’s literary form, emphasizing the author’s belief in human value and purpose. He defined at length Graham’s treatment of good and evil and stressed that through his anti-heroes such as the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory and Pinkie the murderer in Brighton Rock he showed that good and evil coexist within all of us. ‘It is a lesson to all of us,’ Bajeux said, ‘to be reminded that good and evil coexist in our own souls, and that is where we have to look, not outside ourselves.’
Bajeux explained that when Graham stated that he had found evil (hell) in Duvalier’s Haiti, what the author meant was that he had found some evil characters in Haiti — whom he later portrayed in The Comedians. The lecture ended with a discussion among professors attending the hommage on the origins of violence in Haiti, without reaching any conclusion. Nevertheless Bajeux made reference to the suggestion that a Macoute lies in all of us.
Haiti was no longer Graham’s nightmare republic. Haitians were enjoying — at least for the moment — hope of a better future. A force of twenty-two thousand American troops had made a soft landing in Haiti in September 1994 and restored democratically elected President Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power after he had spent three years in exile. On 31 March 1995 President Bill Clinton, from a reviewing stand in front of the National Palace, watched the change of command from US to UN peacekeepers. It was a historic sight: an American President seated on a reviewing stand on the steps of what was once a palace of terror. As the bagpipes of a battalion of peacekeepers from Bangladesh wailed, the regimental colours and country flags of the various foreign troops and nations involved in the peacekeeping mission fluttered like colourful Voodoo flags (beaded Voodoo flags carry images of their gods in many colours) on the palace lawn.
Of Haiti and The Comedians Graham had written:
I would have liked to return yet a fourth time before completing my novel, but I had written in the English press a description of Doctor Duvalier’s dictatorship, and the best I could do in January 1965 was to make a trip down the Dominican and Haitian border — the scene of my last chapter [of The Comedians] — in the company of two exiles from Haiti. At least, without Doctor Duvalier’s leave, we were able to pass along the edge of the country we loved and to exchange hopes of a happier future.
On the Monday following the lecture, Louise Dennys, her husband Ric, our friend Father Alberto Huerta, a Jesuit professor of literature from the University of San Francisco who had corresponded with Graham over his religious beliefs, and I were escorted to the Palace by Bajeux. I couldn’t help thinking how pleased Graham would have been — a Greene in Papa Doc’s palace! Graham’s request for an interview with Dr Duvalier in 1963 had been refused. The closest he had come to the Palace was the Casernes Dr François Duvalier.
There were no military sentries at the Palace gate that Monday. In fact, Haiti no longer had an army. President Aristide had dissolved the armed forces upon his return from exile. The Palace itself had undergone several transformations since the hurried departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier nearly a decade earlier. One short-lived military-backed president had even called in a Voodoo priest to exorcise the place of Duvalier evil.
At our meeting with Aristide he talked amicably and enthusiastically to Ms Dennys about his hopes for a literacy campaign. A self-described voracious reader, Aristide said he had read The Comedians while studying at a seminary in La Vega, in the neighbouring Dominican Republic. (When I presented him with a first-edition copy of The Comedians while he was in exile in Washington, DC, he promised to read it.)
When Aristide, himself an author, learned that Ms Dennys once had her own publishing business and currently represented a prominent American publishing firm in Canada, the president invited us into his adjoining workroom to show off his books and to present her with a beautiful painted box — a modest but simple tribute to Graham. ‘There is nothing inside the decorative box,’ Aristide said, ‘just the air of Haitian freedom.’
Later, as we sat relaxing on the balcony of the Grand Hotel Oloffson, I mentioned how I had left Graham’s favourite midday aperitif, a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka, at Mambo Lolotte’s hounfor. Louise loved the idea and asked if I could take them to meet Lolotte, so the following day we drove out from Port-au-Prince to the Cul de Sac plain. When we arrived the priestess was officiating with a group of faithful at prayers. We were given chairs, and we waited until the prayers ended. Mambo Lolot
te greeted us and graciously agreed to open her bagui with its offerings. To my pleasant surprise, Graham’s bottle of Stolichnaya had been elevated to repose on a red cushion on a miniature rocking-chair. Father Huerta asked the priestess whether he could say a prayer, to which she readily acceded. The four of us stood before the small altar with the Mambo, and Father Huerta led us in a silent prayer. It was the ultimate ecumenical act.
Graham would have understood.
| AFTERWORD
On 5 August 2011 Jean-Claude Bajeux’s infinite weariness from his fight for a better Haiti ended with his death. He fought and had never surrendered. His Calvary had ended. His soul was finally at peace, and his wishes for no religious service were respected. His body was cremated, and a small informal service was held at a funeral home in Port-au-Prince. He had helped many, having devoted his life to human rights in the human sense. His struggle for justice, transparency and an end to impunity never faulted — no one gave so much to fight for a new Haiti as he sought to extirpate the vile beast of despotism and its moral corruption from the country. All I could think of on the morning of his service was that he, for those who were privileged to know him, would live on for ever. I loved a dear friend.
| INDEX
Adams, David, 299
Allen, Larry, 30
Allende, Salvador, 160, 252
Amador, Carlos Fonseca, 200–1
Ambler, Eric, Epitaph for a Spy, 84
Amis, Martin, 250
Amory, Mark, The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, 218, 222
Anaya Montes, Mélida, 268–9
Andropov, Yuri, 263
Argentina, 160, 163, 180, 210
Arias, Arnulfo, 158, 177, 180, 191
Arias, Harmodio, 228
Arias, Roberto E., 228
Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 148, 298–9, 303
Aspinwall, William Henry, 173
Augustus, Emperor, 138
Baboun, Rudy, 133
Bahamas, 33
Bailey, Pearl, 86
Bajeux, Albert, 69
Bajeux, Anne-Marie, 69
Bajeux, Jean-Claude, 47, 58, 61, 62, 63, 65–70, 71, 73, 76, 77–81, 83, 96, 110, 112, 121, 139–40, 149, 292, 302–5
Bajeux, Maxim, 69
Bajeux, Micheline, 69
Balaguer, Joaquín, 44, 65, 98, 101, 120, 133, 193
Bancroft, Anne, 21, 26
Banville, John, 12
Baptiste, Fred, 38, 42, 43–4, 45, 46, 69, 77, 80, 99, 100, 111, 120, 133, 140, 141–5, 147, 278
Baptiste, Renel, 99, 120, 140, 141–5, 147
Barbot, Clément, 25, 28, 52, 61
Barbot, Harry, 25
Barletta, Nicolás, 281
Barral, Milton, 88–9
Batista, Fulgencio, 46, 79, 87, 89, 94
Baudelaire, Charles, 103
Bazalais, Laurent, General, 53, 98
Beauvoir, Daniel, Captain, 35
Belize, 187, 207–8, 209, 227–8, 251, 297
Bennett, Michèle, 147
Bennett, Philip, 296
Benoît, Clément, 33, 52
Benoît, François, Lieutenant, 52, 159
Benoît, Rigaud, 92
Blackmun, Harry A., 148
Blain, Pierre, 93
Blanchet, Paul, 114, 143
Blocker, Vince, 40
Borge, Tomás, 16, 199, 233, 235, 237, 239–40, 241, 243, 263, 282–3, 285
Borges, Jorge Luis, 160
Bosch, Juan, 44, 49, 52, 60, 72, 98, 193, 297–8
Boss Justin, 49
Boss Paint, 49
Boston Globe, 296–7
Bourget, Caroline, 22, 175, 215, 300
Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 56
Bradbury, David, 268
Bragg, Melvyn, Rich: The Life of Richard Burton, 120
Brando, Marlon, 21
Brazil, 165, 190
Brezhnev, Leonid, 227
Brook, Natasha, 84–5
Brook, Peter, 84–5, 86
Bunker, Ellsworth, 164, 165, 182
Burt, Al, 98, 100–1
Burton, Richard, 16, 119, 127, 129, 132
Bush, George H.W., 169, 294–5
Caamano Deno, Francisco, Colonel, 100
Cambronne, Luckner, 141
Cantave, Leon, General, 24, 31, 43, 57–8
Capote, Truman, 21, 85, 87
House of Flowers, 84, 86, 87
Carazo, Rodrigo, 235
Cardenal, Ernesto, 16, 198, 199, 242, 260, 268
Carrasco, Jorge, 171
Carter, Jimmy, 145–6, 166–7, 169, 172, 188–9, 192, 193, 212–13, 220, 238, 241, 250, 295
Castillo Quant, José María, 200
Castro, Fidel, 16, 31, 36, 39, 40, 46, 79, 89, 94, 108, 145, 156, 158, 184–5, 192, 209, 226, 228, 231, 237, 242, 253, 260, 264, 265–8, 273, 278, 283
Castro, Raúl, 89
Catalogne, Gérard de, 117, 138
Catholic World, 128
Cayetano Carpio, Salvador
‘Marcial’, 220–4, 244, 260, 267–9, 282, 299
Kidnapping and Hoods, 223
Cerna, Lenin, 263
Césaire, Aimé, 292
Chalmers, René, 24, 41, 117, 119, 121, 133
Chamberlain, Greg, 142
Chamorro, Pedro Joaquín, 239, 243, 299
Chamorro, Sonia, 239
Chamorro, Violeta de, 299
Chamorro, Xavier, 237, 239–40
Chile, 160, 165, 166, 180, 218
Christophe, Henri, Emperor of Haiti, 29, 85
Church, Frank, 193, 225
Church on the March, 67
Claude, Breton, General, 140, 141
Clinton, Bill, 303
Cloetta, Yvonne, 17, 92, 175, 178, 195, 211, 213, 228, 243, 257, 259, 274, 275, 276, 277, 279–81, 284, 287, 288, 289, 290, 292, 293, 294, 297, 299, 300
Clos, Max, 24, 30
Colliers Magazine, 59
Colombia, 211
Columbus, Christopher, 56, 61, 87
The Comedians (film), 118–37, 144, 278
Conrad, Joseph, 84, 174–5
Heart of Darkness, 15
Contreras, Ramiro, Dr, 199–200, 201
Corley-Smith, G.T., 124
Costa Rica, 159, 208, 235, 238, 243, 251
Coster, Laura, 25, 92
Coster, Roger, 25, 92
Couto, Maria, 300
Coward, Noël, 95, 103
Cuba, 11, 16, 108, 142, 158, 231, 236, 238, 264–9, 273, 283, 287, 297
Daily Express, 298
Daily Telegraph, 23, 90, 145, 166, 236
Damas, 37
Daniel, Guy, 257
Daumec, Gérard, 114, 116, 118, 130, 131
Dayan, Moshe, 184
Dean, John, III, 193
Decae, Henri, 127
Déjoie, Louis, 23, 27, 29, 38, 39, 48
Delva, Zacharie, 62
Dennys, Elisabeth, 184, 216, 234, 276, 281–2, 287
Dennys, Louise, 12, 234, 302, 304
Dennys, Ric, 304
D’Escoto, Miguel, 243
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 53, 56
DeYoung, Karen, 263, 271–3, 290
Díaz Herrera, Roberto, Colonel, 248, 261, 270, 281–4
Diederich, Bernard, 11–13, 15–17,
Passim
Somoza and the Legacy of US
Involvement in Central America, 17
Diederich, Ginette, 21, 31, 98, 140, 160, 247, 297
Diederich, Jean-Bernard, 286, 288, 293, 297–8
Diederich, Phillippe, 96
Dinges, John, The Underside of the Torrijos Legacy, 252–3
Dole, Robert, 192
Dominican Republic, 23, 28, 39, 193, 232–3, 297–8
Dominique, Max, 136, 138
Dominique, Philippe, 32–4, 35
Donovan, Hedley, 164–5
Dorcely, Gérard, 93
Dostoevsky, Fydor, The Brothers Karamazov, 215
Drake, Francis, Sir, 15, 202–3, 204–5, 208
Drummond, William, 169, 178
Duarte, Juan Pablo
, 56
Duarte, Napoleón, 283
Duarte, Rosa, 24
Duncan, Dick, 99, 263
Dunn, Archibald Gardner, 216, 217, 218, 221, 222–4, 243–4
Dunne, J.W., 294
Dutton, E.P., 239, 246
Duvalier, François ‘Papa Doc’, 11, 15–16, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 43, 46, 47–51, 52–3, 55, 58, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 76, 79, 84, 92, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104–6, 109, 110, 113, 116–17, 119, 120, 123, 124–5, 130, 132, 134, 137, 138, 139, 143, 159, 189, 210, 282, 290–2, 303, 304
Duvalier, Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’, 51, 114, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 146, 147, 252, 260, 268, 282, 288, 292, 302
Duvalier, Marie-Denise, 130, 138
Duvalier, Simone, 51
Eder, Richard, 30, 258–9
Edward VII, 208
L’Effort Camerounais, 67
Egypt, 213
Eisenhower, Dwight D. ‘Ike’, 86
Eisenhower, Mamie, 86
El Salvador, 11, 180, 212, 216–17, 218, 220–3, 224, 238, 244, 259, 271, 281, 299
Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain 133
Emerson, Gloria, 12
Escobar, Eduardo Contreras, 199
de la Espriella, Ricardo, 261–2, 270
Estimé, Dumarsais, 93
Evening Post, 229
FARH (Haitian Revolutionary Armed Forces), 38–9
Faulkner, William, 215
Le Figaro, 24
Fignolé, Daniel, 48
Firebird, 256
Fleming, Ian, 82, 123
Florez, Florencio, Colonel, 261
Fonteyn, Margot, Dame, 228, 262
Ford, Gerald, 166–7, 178
Franco, Francisco, Generalísimo, 133
Frere, A.S., 102
Freud, Sigmund, 83
Friedman, Manny, 41
Fuad II, King of Egypt, 280
Fuentes, Carlos, 262
Galindo, Gabriel Lewis, 171, 213
de Gaulle, Charles, 135
Georges, Jean-Baptiste, 39, 40, 96
Gielgud, John, 26, 118
Glenville, Peter, 26, 116, 117, 118, 127, 144
Gonzalez, Rory, 157, 162, 170, 178, 219, 251
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 287
Granma, 221, 244, 265, 297
Greece, 165
Greene, Charles, 94
The Seeds of Fiction Page 41