The Comedians

by Graham Greene

  ‘Mr Brown?’

  ‘Mr Schuyler Wilson?’

  He looked at me in a surly way. Perhaps I had pronounced his first name wrong. Perhaps he disliked my sports-car. He said grudgingly, ‘Have a coke,’ and gestured towards one of the lounging-chairs.

  ‘If you could spare a whisky?’

  He said without enthusiasm, ‘I’ll see what we can do,’ and walked into the great glass building leaving me alone. I felt I had chalked up a black mark. Perhaps only visiting directors or leading politicians got whisky. I was only a potential catering manager, seeking a job. However he brought the whisky, carrying a coke in his other hand like a reproach.

  ‘Mr Smith wrote to you about me,’ I said. I just stopped myself from saying the Presidential Candidate.

  ‘Yes. Where did you two meet?’

  ‘He stayed at my hotel in Port-au-Prince.’

  ‘That’s right.’ It was as though he were double-checking the facts to see if one of us had lied. ‘You’re not a vegetarian?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because the boys here like their steak and French fries.’ I drank a little of the whisky which was drowned in soda. Mr Schuyler Wilson watched me closely as though he begrudged me every drop. I felt more and more that the job would not come my way.

  ‘What’s your experience in catering?’

  ‘Well, I owned this hotel in Haiti until a month ago. I’ve worked too at the Trocadero in London –’ and I added the ancient lie, ‘Fouquet’s in Paris.’

  ‘Got any testimonials?’

  ‘I could hardly write my own, could I? I’ve been my own employer a good many years now.’

  ‘Your Mr Smith’s a bit of a crank, isn’t he?’

  ‘I like him.’

  ‘Did his wife tell you he ran for president once? On the vegetarian ticket.’ Mr Schuyler Wilson laughed. It was an angry laugh without amusement, like the menace of a hidden beast.

  ‘I suppose it was a form of propaganda.’

  ‘I don’t like propaganda. We’ve had leaflets here pushed under the wire. Trying to get at the men. We pay them well. We feed them well. What made you leave Haiti?’

  ‘Trouble with the authorities. I helped an Englishman to escape from Port-au-Prince. The Tontons Macoute were after him.’

  ‘What’s the Tontons Macoute?’

  We were less than three hundred kilometres from Port-au-Prince; it seemed strange he could ask me that, but I suppose there hadn’t been a story for a long time in any newspaper he read.

  ‘The secret police,’ I said.

  ‘How did you get out?’

  ‘His friends helped me across the border.’ It was a brief enough statement to cover two weeks of fatigue and frustration.

  ‘Who do you mean – his friends?’

  ‘The insurgents.’

  ‘You mean the Communists?’ He was cross-examining me as though I had applied for a job as agent in the C.I.A. and not as catering manager for a mining-company. I lost my temper a little. I said, ‘Insurgents are not always Communists until you make them so.’

  My irritation amused Mr Schuyler Wilson. He smiled for the first time; it was a smile of self-satisfaction as though he had uncovered by adroit questioning something I had wanted to keep secret.

  ‘You’re quite an expert,’ he said.

  ‘An expert?’

  ‘I mean owning your own hotel, working at that place you mentioned in Paris. I guess you wouldn’t be very happy here. Just plain American cooking is all we need.’ He got up to show me that the interview was over. I finished my whisky while he watched me with impatience, and then, ‘Glad to have met you,’ he said without shaking hands, ‘give up your badge at the second gate.’

  I drove away past the private landing-ground and the private port. I handed over my badge: I was reminded of the entry-permit you leave with immigration at Idlewild.

  II

  I drove to the Ambassador Hotel on the outskirts of Santo Domingo where Mr Smith was staying. It wasn’t the right setting for him, or so it seemed to me. I had become accustomed to the stooping figure, the mild and modest face and the wild white hair, in surroundings of poverty. In this wide glittering hall men sat wearing purses on their belts instead of revolver-holsters, and when they wore dark glasses it was only to save their eyes from the bright light. There was a continuous rattle from the one-armed bandits and you could hear the calls from the croupier in the casino. Everyone had money here, even Mr Smith. Poverty was out of sight, down in the city. A girl in a bikini wearing a gay bathrobe came in from the swimming-pool. She asked at the desk whether a Mr Hochstrudel, Junior, had arrived yet. ‘I mean Mr Wilbur K. Hochstrudel.’ The clerk said, ‘No, but Mr Hochstrudel is expected.’

  I sent a message to Mr Smith that I was below and found myself a seat. At the table nearest me the men were drinking rum punches and I thought of Joseph’s. He made better ones than they served here, and I missed him.

  I had stayed only twenty-four hours with Philipot. He was polite enough to me in a restrained way, but he was a changed man from the one I used to know. I had been a good audience in the past for his Baudelairian verses, but I was too old for war. It was Jones he needed now and Jones’s company which he sought. He had nine men with him in his hide-out and to hear him talking to Jones you would have imagined he commanded at least a battalion. Jones very wisely listened and didn’t speak much, but once I woke, during the night I spent with them, and heard Jones say, ‘You have to establish yourself. Near enough to the frontier for newspapermen to come over. Then you can demand recognition.’ Were they really, in this hole among the rocks (and they changed their hole, I learnt, each day) already thinking in terms of a provisional government? They had with them three old tommy-guns from the police station – which had probably seen service first in the days of Al Capone, a couple of first-war rifles, a shotgun, two revolvers, and one man had nothing better than his machete. Jones added like an old hand, ‘This kind of war is a bit like a confidence-trick. There was one way we deceived the Japs . . .’ He hadn’t found his golf-course, but I really believe he was happy. The men clustered close; they couldn’t understand a word he said, but it was as though a leader had come into the camp.

  Next day I was sent off with Joseph as my guide to try to cross the Dominican frontier. My car and the bodies had been long discovered by now, and there was no safety for me anywhere in Haiti. They could spare Joseph easily because of his damaged hip, and he could fulfil at the same time a second function. Philipot planned that I was to slip over the international road, which divided the two republics for about fifty kilometres north of Banica. It was true that, every few kilometres on either side of the road, there were Haitian and Dominican guard-posts, but it was said, with what truth he wanted to find out, that the posts on the Haitian side were deserted at night for fear of a guerrilla attack. All peasants had been expelled from the border, but there was said to be still that party of about thirty men operating in the mountains with which Philipot wanted to make contact. Joseph’s information would be of value if he got back, and he was more expendable than the others. I suppose, too, his lame walk was considered slow enough to enable a man of my age to keep up with him. The last words Jones said to me in private were, ‘I’m going to keep it up, old man.’

  ‘And the golf-club?’

  ‘The golf-club’s for old age. After we’ve taken Port-au-Prince.’

  The journey was slow, rough and tiring and took us eleven days, nine days of lying up, of sudden dashes from one point to another, of doubling on our tracks, and finally two last days of imprudence because of hunger. I was glad enough when we came in sight at dusk, from our grey eroded mountain where nothing grew, of the deep Dominican forest. You could see all the twists of the frontier by the contrast between our bare rocks and their vegetation. It was the same mountain range, but the trees never crossed into the poor dry land of Haiti. Half-way down the slope was a Haitian guard-post – a collection of decrepit huts – and across the track a hu
ndred yards from it was a castellated fort, like something from the Spanish Sahara. A little before dusk we saw the Haitian guards straggle out, leaving not one sentinel behind. We watched them go to God knows what hide-out (there were no roads or villages where they could escape the pitiless rock), then I said good-bye to Joseph, making some silly joke about rum punch, and scrambled down the track of a meagre stream on to the international road – a grand name for a track little better than the Great Southern Highway to Aux Cayes. Next morning the Dominicans put me on an army truck which came daily to the fort with supplies, and I landed in Santo Domingo in torn and dusty clothes, with a hundred unchangeable gourdes in my pocket and fifty American dollars comprised in a single note which I had sewn for safety into the lining of my pants. With the help of that note I took a room and a bath and cleaned myself up and slept for twelve hours before I went to beg for money at the British Consulate and for expatriation – to where?

  It was Mr Smith who saved me from that humiliation. He happened to be driving by in Mr Fernandez’s car and he saw me on the street as I tried to ask my way to the Consulate from a negro who only spoke Spanish. I wanted Mr Smith to drop me at the Consulate, but he would have none of it; all such matters, he said, could wait till after lunch, and when lunch was over he told me it was quite out of the question to borrow money from an unsympathetic consul since he, Mr Smith, was there with plenty of American Express dollars. ‘Think what I owe you,’ he said, but I could think of nothing that he owed me. He had paid his bill at the Hotel Trianon. He had even supplied his own Yeastrel. He appealed against me to Mr Fernandez and Mr Fernandez said, ‘Yes,’ and Mrs Smith remarked angrily that, if I thought her husband was the kind of man to let a friend down, then I should have been with them that day in Nashville . . . Waiting for him now, I thought what a continent of difference divided him from Mr Schuyler Wilson.

  He was alone when he joined me in the lounge of the Ambassador. He apologized for the absence of Mrs Smith who was taking her third lesson in Spanish from Mr Fernandez. ‘You should hear the two of them talking away together,’ he said. ‘Mrs Smith has a remarkable talent for languages.’

  I told him how I had been received by Mr Schuyler Wilson. ‘He assumed I was a Communist,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the Tontons were after me. Papa Doc, you remember, is a bulwark against Communism. And insurgent, of course, is a dirty word. I wonder how President Johnson would deal now with something like the French Resistance. That too was infiltrated (another dirty word) by the Communists. My mother was an insurgent – lucky I didn’t tell Mr Schuyler Wilson that.’

  ‘I don’t see what harm a Communist could do as a catering manager.’ Mr Smith looked at me with an expression of sadness. He said, ‘It’s not at all pleasant to feel ashamed of a fellow-countryman.’

  ‘You must have experienced it often enough in Nashville.’

  ‘That was different. There it was a disease, a fever. I could be sorry for them. In my state we still have a tradition of hospitality. When a man knocks on the door we don’t ask him about his politics.’

  ‘I’d hoped to be able to pay you back your loan.’

  ‘I’m not a poor man, Mr Brown. There’s plenty more where that came from. I suggest you take another thousand dollars now.’

  ‘How can I? I have no security to offer you.’

  ‘If that’s what’s worrying you, we’ll draw up a paper – quite fair and legal, and I’ll take a mortgage on your hotel. After all it’s a fine property.’

  ‘It’s not worth a nickel now, Mr Smith. The Government has probably taken it over.’

  ‘Things will change one day.’

  ‘I’ve heard of another job in the north. Near Monte Cristi. As canteen manager for a fruit company.’

  ‘You don’t have to fall as low as that, Mr Brown.’

  ‘I’ve fallen a lot lower than that in my time and less respectably. If you don’t mind my using your name again . . . This is an American company too.’

  ‘Mr Fernandez was telling me that he needs an Anglo-Saxon partner. It’s a fine prosperous little business he has here.’

  ‘I’ve never thought of becoming an undertaker.’

  ‘It’s a valuable social service, Mr Brown. And there’s security too. No business recessions.’

  ‘I’ll try the canteen first. I’ve more experience there. If that fails, who knows . . . ?’

  ‘Did you know Mrs Pineda was in town?’

  ‘Mrs Pineda?’

  ‘That charming lady who came up to the hotel. Surely you remember her?’

  For a moment I really hadn’t known whom he meant. ‘What’s she doing in Santo Domingo?’

  ‘Her husband has been transferred to Lima. She’s staying a few days here at her embassy with her little boy. I forget his name.’

  ‘Angel.’

  ‘That’s right. A fine boy. Mrs Smith and I are very fond of children. Perhaps because we never had any of our own. Mrs Pineda was glad to hear you’d come out of Haiti in one piece, but she was naturally anxious about Major Jones. I thought we might all have a little dinner together tomorrow night and you could tell her the story.’

  ‘I’m planning to go north tomorrow early,’ I said. ‘Jobs can’t wait. I’ve been hanging around here long enough. Tell her I’ll write to her all I know about Jones.’

  III

  I had a jeep to withstand the road on this occasion, arranged for me again at a cut-price by Mr Fernandez. Nevertheless I was not to reach Monte Cristi and the banana plantations, and I shall never know whether I would have proved acceptable as a canteen manager. I set off at six in the morning and reached San Juan by breakfast-time. There was a good road as far as Elias Pinas, but then along the frontier, perhaps because there was no traffic except the daily bus and a few military camions, the international road was more suitable for mules and cows. I had reached the military post of Pedro Santana when I was stopped – I didn’t understand why. The lieutenant, whom I knew by sight because I had met him a month ago when I came over the frontier, was busy talking to a fat man in city-clothes; he was being shown a lot of glittering junk-jewellery, necklaces, bracelets, watches, rings – the frontier was a happy hunting-ground for smugglers. Money changed hands and the lieutenant came to my jeep.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Wrong? Nothing is wrong.’ He spoke French as well as I did.

  ‘Your men won’t let me go on.’

  ‘It’s for your own safety. There’s a lot of firing on the other side of the international road. Wild firing. I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’

  ‘I came across the road a month ago.’

  ‘Yes. I remember now. I daresay we shall be seeing some more people like you presently.’

  ‘Do you often get refugees here?’

  ‘We had about twenty guerrillas over just after you came. They are in a camp now in Santo Domingo. I thought there were none left.’

  He must have meant the band which Philipot had wanted to contact. I remembered Jones and Philipot talking in the night, while the men listened, of the great plans for an established strongpoint, for a provisional government, for visiting journalists.

  ‘I want to get up to Monte Cristi before dark.’

  ‘You would do better to go back to Elias Pinas.’

  ‘No, I’ll wait around if you don’t mind.’

  ‘You are welcome.’

  I had a bottle of whisky in my car and I made myself more welcome. The man selling jewellery tried to interest me in some ear-rings which he said were sapphire and diamond. Presently he drove away in the direction of Elias Pinas. He had sold the lieutenant a watch and the sergeant two necklaces.

  ‘For the same woman?’ I asked the sergeant.

  ‘For my wife,’ he said and closed one eye.

  It was high noon. I sat on the steps of the guardroom in the shade and considered what I should do if the fruit company turned me down. There was always Mr Fernandez’ offer: I wondered
whether I would have to wear a black suit.

  Perhaps there is an advantage in being born in a city like Monte Carlo, without roots, for one accepts more easily what comes. The rootless have experienced, like all the others, the temptation of sharing the security of a religious creed or a political faith, and for some reason we have turned the temptation down. We are the faithless; we admire the dedicated, the Doctor Magiots and the Mr Smiths for their courage and their integrity, for their fidelity to a cause, but through timidity, or through lack of sufficient zest, we find ourselves the only ones truly committed – committed to the whole world of evil and of good, to the wise and to the foolish, to the indifferent and to the mistaken. We have chosen nothing except to go on living, ‘rolled round on Earth’s diurnal course, With rocks and stones and trees.’

  The argument interested me; I daresay it eased the never quiet conscience which had been injected into me without my consent, when I was too young to know, by the fathers of the Visitation. Then the sun came round on to the steps and drove me into the guardhouse with its bunks like stretchers, its pin-ups and relics of many homes, its heavy airless smell. There the lieutenant came to find me. He said, ‘You’ll be able to go on soon now. They are coming in.’

  Some Dominican soldiers were plodding up the road to the post, walking in single file so as to keep in the shade of the trees. They bore their rifles slung and carried in their hands the weapons of the men who had emerged from the Haitian hills and who walked a few paces behind them, limp with fatigue, wearing an abashed look on their faces like the expression of children who have broken something of value. I didn’t recognize any of the negroes, but nearly at the tail of the little column I saw Philipot. He was naked to the waist and he had used his shirt to tie his right arm to his side. When he saw me he said defiantly, ‘We had no ammunition left,’ but I don’t think he recognized me then – he saw only what he thought was an accusing white face. At the very end of the small column two men carried a stretcher. On it lay Joseph. His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see the foreign country into which they were carrying him.