The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  One time, at the Dragon, Turpin made a run for it, slipping out of Leviathan, or whichever room several of us were sharing then, and disappearing off into the dark. Rumors ran excitedly around School House: he had been seen making his way back to his parents’ house in Wales, he was heading in the other direction, across the wilds, like a character in Hardy. He had always seemed among the frailest, sniffling well into the second week of term, and now he had tried—simple folly—to take his destiny into his own hands (a scene that comes up again and again in Greene).

  Within a few days, though, he was gathered in again—there was talk of the Parable of the Lost Sheep—and back in one of the beds in our room, squandering the glamour of his escape by turning his back to us and sniffling away as he lay facing the wall. In my next school, the only African student—son of some bigwig in the Nigerian government—would do the same and soon the tabloids would be full of this boarding school boy who had set up a “love nest” in Chelsea with two blondes; it was always said that boys from the school ended up in record numbers in prison, as well as in 10 Downing Street, and sometimes professed not to see much difference between them. One of my friends would go on to become a shaman (though, as he wryly admitted, his license hanging on his wall, it was hard to find clients for soul retrieval); another would man the level-crossing gate on a rural railway line, watching it go up and then go down again. Eighteen Old Boys had gone on to become British prime minister and, as I write this, the nineteenth has just come to power, and the current Thai prime minister, as well as the two sons of the British Crown Prince, emerged from the same cloisters.

  Such schools were famously a training ground for Empire, so it was no surprise that British rule across the globe could be seen as a version of school, extended to a life sentence: it was never hard to see geopolitics (if you were Graham Greene, at least) as an unending competition between the bullies who’d become cabinet ministers and their painfully sensitive victims. When he was in West Africa, his protagonist would meet a man who blurts out “I love you” to a colleague’s wife he’s met just once, when in Sweden, a smooth charmer who hopes that his silky confidence will somehow obscure his shiftlessness. All across the world, from Brighton to Saigon, we meet in his books a small group of boys, tied in a kind of fellowship and living in spartan quarters, very simply, clinging to their worn-out innocence as if they were still in the room called Pterodactyl.

  You could say that he gained from school not just his schoolboy’s sense of adventure, his love of mischief, his uncertainty about what to do with the most foreign country of all (the other sex), but his almost superstitious revulsion from success. In the famous book Cyril Connolly had written about our school—his “autobiography of ideas”—he’d recalled being asked to write essays on themes like “Nothing fails like success” or “Nothing succeeds like failure.” Connolly’s classmate, who wrote under the name of George Orwell, would say, “Failure seemed to me the only true virtue,” and success a kind of bullying, or ugly imperialism. And British intelligence, of course, rose out of such hallways, which meant that it was doomed to failure, perhaps, and Greene could never take it seriously. The people we knew best, school ensured, were ones we were not related to, and the ones who knew us best, prey to our every waking secret through the formative years of our lives, might be people we’d never see again. But they lived inside our heads forever.

  Decades later, as the leaves were turning all around me on a radiant autumn morning in Japan, the sky a shocking blue, I saw the witch doctors I’d first met as a teenager in Bolivia, the meal I was taking in a fisherman’s hut along the Amazon, the chain-smoking ten-year-old who was leading me on horseback through the jungles of Colombia, only five months after I’d quit my cell in New Buildings, and seemingly the last part of its lifelong training.

  “School was what we had instead of family,” I heard myself telling Hiroko, and then looked up to see her startled face staring back at me.

  I was traveling alone through Sri Lanka in the summer of 2006, a time when the civil war, after three years of ceasefire, had started up again with new intensity; each day the newspapers were full of senseless killings. My first morning in the capital, as I was eating breakfast, the deputy chief of staff of the Sri Lankan army was assassinated by a suicide bomber as he drove to work a few miles away; five minutes from my hotel, the city’s main hospital was barricaded behind roadblocks and signs saying “HIGH SECURITY ZONE” because, just eight weeks before, a pregnant woman had walked into a heavily guarded compound and detonated a bomb hidden in her clothing, critically injuring the army chief of staff and leaving nine others dead (among them, of course, her baby and herself).

  Six sightseers in a national park had been killed, apparently by guerrillas, a few weeks earlier; a bus had passed over a mine, and sixty-four more innocents had died. After the assault on the deputy chief of staff, a rumor ran through the country that the next attack was going to be on a school. Parents, wild-eyed, raced into classrooms, brandishing swords and sticks, pulling their children out; it was said that explosives had been found inside a small boy’s slippers.

  I, as in a dark-framed farce, was visiting the island on the almost-comical pretext of seeing the places that Marco Polo had written about, briefly, more than seven hundred years before. I’d agreed to the assignment eight months earlier, when things were relatively peaceful, but by the time I arrived, the violence was so everywhere that the island’s hotels were empty. Bellboys clustered round me every time I left my room in the silent hotel, hungry for handouts, and when I walked out onto the beach, where children flew kites and couples unpacked picnics, it was to see twenty-one soldiers standing, guns raised, under the palm trees, while helicopters whirred and circled overhead. My first weekend in the country, a journalist was gunned down three miles from where I was sipping tea.

  To add to the unsought horror, it was Tamils, people with names such as Iyer and features such as mine, who were at the heart of the war, as they agitated for their independence from a Sri Lanka that saw itself as the Buddha’s chosen land. Everyone was jumpy, braced for the next explosion, and I was left counting the days till I could be gone; I watched little boys ride ponies on Galle Face Green and retreated in the evenings to the deserted bar in my hotel to see Britain play Portugal in the World Cup on TV.

  On the southern coast of the island, always quiet, and around the area where a tsunami less than two years before had carried away thirty-six thousand Sri Lankans to their deaths—the sleepy, palm-fringed, two-lane road by the ocean was lined with fresh white crosses—I was looking for who knows what (I’d discovered by now that in all likelihood Marco Polo had never been to “Zeilan” at the time he committed his eight paragraphs on it) when I noticed it was lunchtime. There was not an abundance of possibilities among these villages doubly empty since the storm, but my taxi driver assured me that he knew just the place. We turned off the narrow road, down an unmarked lane and, bumping through the jungle, suddenly ended up, absurdly, at a gorgeous modernist structure, all glass walls and reflecting pools, above an empty white-sand beach.

  I got out at the luxury hotel—glossy brochures told me I could rent a private villa for hundreds of dollars a night—and started walking through what might have been a cutting-edge, minimalist museum in Fort Worth. In front of me, though the place was almost empty, stood a very tall, lean figure, brown hair falling to his shoulders, in chic white cotton shirt and jeans, barefoot, hands tucked into his back pockets as he spoke to a trim Japanese in all-black designer clothes.

  He turned around. “I can’t believe it!” I said, almost in spite of myself. “I haven’t seen you since, it must be, 1974.”

  “You almost gave me a heart attack,” replied the French film star, as he’d seemed a second before, posing for a paparazzo shot in Paris Match. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  We’d shared Latin classes together under C. A. Impey in Berkshire thirty-five years before—was it Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the Punic Wars?
—and now François was manager of the super-luxe hotel, having served stints opening and running hotels in Haiti, Rajasthan, Siem Reap and Java. Neither of us was as amazed as he might have been, because such sightings of old classmates were part of how our system worked, exporting the values and even the fellow prisoners of school across the globe to the point where Greene, returning from a three-day jungle patrol in Malaya, ran into the very boy (in the Cold Storage Company in Kuala Lumpur, no less) who had marked him for life with the idea of betrayal, having turned on him in school thirty years before (now, inevitably, he looked like just another “customs and excise man,” fox-faced with a small mustache). Stationed in Freetown—the name itself seems to belong to allegory—working for British intelligence during the war, he had bumped into a district commissioner upcountry who proved (of course) to be an enemy of his from Oxford, unforgiving. In Nairobi, he stumbled into one of his closest friends from university, known for his dry irrationality.

  François and I decided to have lunch together, and over elegant Earl Grey and Sri Lankan curries we revisited old classmates now working as greeters or columnists or con men, some of them laid low forever by drugs. I remembered the boy who had sat near me as we trudged through regimental sentences and wrote long poems in dead languages, stylish and exotic even then (the only of our students to come from France), and wondered if all of us had been trained only to occupy temporary quarters such as this, on the edge of a jungle, unaffiliated. Then I got back in my car and went back into the war.

  For most of the days that followed I sat in my room, too distressed by the torpor and desperation all around to go out very much. I waited for the World Cup games in the evening. I read a novel about a man who had gone to Ecuador and come back in thrall to a drug that made him live in the realm of fantasy. The sea washed against the beach outside my window and the palm trees bent in the violent wind.

  My last day in Sri Lanka, I decided to contact Lasantha Wickrematunge, the local journalist who was Time’s man in Colombo and, as editor of the local Sunday Leader, was accustomed to briefing colleagues from abroad. He suggested we meet at the Taj—it offered a lavish buffet on Sundays—and, as we sat in the empty restaurant, waiters hovering around us, Lasantha, smiling, slightly round, in his late forties, told me about his three children, one of whom he’d named “Ahimsa,” meaning “nonviolence,” in direct tribute to his hero Gandhi. Armed men had attacked his home because of his truth telling, he told me; he’d been on Amnesty International’s “endangered list” for eight years now. But it was his duty to stay here and tell his countrymen what was really happening, especially since he had known most of the republic’s leaders so long that he might have been their brother.

  I could have been listening, I thought, to one of the characters in a Greene novel—The Comedians, say—who calls out for conscience and bold action with a sincerity that makes one fear for him; certainly our conversation was a contrast to the rather jaded world-traveler chat, and talk of murder in Sri Lankan villages, I’d had with François earlier in the week. Lasantha had even blown the whistle on his old friend the president, and his brother, he told me now, with a pained, embarrassed grin, and a massive scam they’d been involved in. One could imagine how angry the president had been.

  I was in no position to see what his own interests were in all of this, and what those who didn’t admire him might have said in turn, but it was hard not to be won over by such an earnest and devoted spirit; he made journalism sound like a holy calling. Two and a half years later, when I had to go back to Sri Lanka, I made a note to myself to contact Lasantha as soon as I arrived, to see how my new friend was doing.

  Sixteen days before I got to Colombo, I picked up a newspaper in Varanasi, and read that Lasantha Wickrematunge had been killed. The previous day four men on motorbikes had cut him off in his car as he drove to work and pumped him full of bullets. The president had promptly expressed his shock and called for an investigation; it wasn’t impossible that someone had committed the heinous act, he said, to put his government in a bad light.

  Three days after that, however, another article appeared, reprinted from Lasantha’s own paper (and quickly picked up in almost every country across the globe). It was an article Lasantha had written before his assassination, in which he wrote, calmly, about his impending death and laid it at the president’s door. “When finally I am killed,” he had written, “it will be the government that kills me.” At one point he had even addressed the president, his old friend, directly. “In the wake of my death I know you will make all the usual sanctimonious noises to call upon the police to hold a swift and timely inquiry. But like all inquiries you have held in the past, nothing will come of this one, too. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name.”

  The piece was called “And Then They Came for Me,” after a line by the German theologian Martin Niemöller, who had once been an admirer of Hitler’s but then had left the cause and seen its ministers of death gradually expand their net, coming first for the Jews, and then the Communists, and then the trade unionists and finally (because there was no one left to protect him) for him, taking him to the camps where he was incarcerated for eight years. Lasantha’s wife took over his newspaper, but within a few weeks she was driven out of the country, fearful for her life. Sri Lanka’s narrow country roads were crowded with billboards when I drove down them again, showing grinning soldiers brandishing guns and crying for “Victory” as the government launched its final attack on the guerrillas in the north, leaving up to forty thousand Tamil civilians dead and as many as three hundred thousand others dispossessed.

  “Greeneland perhaps,” as the man had written, rather wearily, of a world that some claimed existed merely in his imagination. “I can only say it is the land in which I have passed much of my life.”

  CHAPTER 16

  If you grow up between cultures, if you get accustomed to traveling, it’s easy to find yourself always on the outside of things, looking in. This can be ideal for a writer—or a spy; you’ve always got, analytically, a ticket out. You can see England through the questing, impatient eyes of California, see California as it might look to someone from England, dangerously up in the air, unformed, unformalized. You can be satirist or romantic and use what you see for any purpose at all. But if you’re honest with yourself—and my Greene was, to a humbling degree—you have to take the measure of what’s lost when you’re not committed.

  That’s why, over and over, the older male characters in his books find themselves alone, in a kind of vacuum; the young boys in his stories, by contrast, dream of becoming adventurers, taken up by dashing rogues, given a script of sorts, working in clear-cut terms for good or even mischief. That’s one thing the older men cannot forgive: there’s innocence in belief, however mistaken, and hopeful illusions are sometimes the only way we can make our peace with life.

  It wasn’t because of Greene that I began spending time in a Catholic monastery; if anything, it was in spite of him. No one had written more pitilessly of the hollowness of mere piety and the difference between a good act and a good man; no one had shown more sharply how rarely one leads to the other. And growing up in a house where so many were speaking of mystical transcendence had probably made me more skeptical than I might otherwise have been of what my deepest nature prompted me towards. If anything of real substance or value were to be found, I thought, it could come only in the middle of the very real world and a chaos like Colombo’s. Mere tolling bells and silent cloisters—men in gowns singing psalms—could not have much effect on someone who’s put in years in British boarding school.

  But a friend who taught at a high school in Santa Barbara told me that he took his classes to the monastery every term, and he was amazed to see how even sixteen-year-old Californian schoolboys were cleaned out and rendered silent by the days in silence. The terminology, the doctrine, the Catholic apparatus weren’t important, my (non-Catholic) friend said; but in a place of quiet yo
u could better see what you cared about and leave behind the self that usually smothered and entrapped you like a winter coat.

  I drove up through the mountains—my mother and I were staying in a temporary apartment as our house was slowly rebuilt after the fire the year before—and then along the sea, passing elephant seals sleeping on the beach and lonely lighthouses above the rocks, great empty meadows rolling down to the ocean. Then I turned right at a high wooden cross and started to wind around the curves of an even more twisty road. Along the way I saw benches, empty, set out around every turn to look out on the flat Pacific and the sun scintillant on the blue-green waters.

  When I got to the parking lot, a monk led me to a small room and I found a wide desk in front of a huge window, looking out on a small walled garden, a white chair in front of a splintered wooden fence. Beyond that was a slope, running down between coastal live oaks and eucalyptus trees, towards the ocean. It sat before me in the winter afternoon—not a ship or island to be seen—and I realized that, from where I sat, I could not see a single human habitation. Only a blue jay alighting on the fence outside, a rabbit scuttling into the undergrowth, the still blue plate of the sea far below.

  I sat down and began to write, though I had nothing to write about, I’d thought. Words poured out of me, in spite of me, pages of them, and I transcribed them as rapidly as if they were love letters aimed at nothing but the world around me. Bells tolled outside, and I guessed the white-hooded monks and their other nine visitors were gathering in the chapel. Bells tolled again, and I realized they were assembling in the rotunda for silent meditation. The sun began to disappear behind a ridge, and then colors, wild but more silent somehow than they would be in our own hillside home down the coast, began to line the sky.