The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  Sometimes my father sent folders downstairs to me through his students: did I want to see this essay about the Golden Ratio he’d just unearthed, and would I look at and edit this lecture of his that had been transcribed? There was this new version of the Gospel according to Thomas he was putting together, and he’d got caught up in the issues of Antigone again. He had books on public speaking beside his eccentric cigarillos (though when he died, a member of Parliament, writing in London’s Independent, would call him “the most eloquent, and erudite, student debater of the decade in the 1950s—or, perhaps, any other decade”); the TLS arrived in our mailbox even in the coyote-haunted hills of California and annual dues streamed in from the Reform Club (where Jim in Greene’s last novel goes to meet his wandering father). He was a Gandhian and a vocal socialist, but he had never fully managed to wash from his head all the golden visions of England he’d been given as a boy.

  He’d been generous enough to send his only son through a British educational system that would ensure—though perhaps he hadn’t seen this fully in advance—that the son would have no interest in staying in Britain and no particular interest in getting ahead or having a life of settledness or public success. I’m not sure he realized quite how much the British system trains its subjects in going their own unlikely way and learning how to stand out mostly inwardly. He was delighted when Louis came to visit during the holidays, but less so, I suspected, to see his own son, as British school had taught, leaving a seemingly secure job in midtown Manhattan to live in a rented two-room cell in an anonymous Japanese suburb, with no printer or car or fast Internet connection, and only a sense of time and space that could feel like deepest freedom.

  One winter day, when I was barely thirty, he said to me, “There’s one problem with California.” I wasn’t eager to listen, but the sentence had a promising beginning. “It has no understanding of evil.” Did he mean that it was too innocent, unready for the world? Or only that it didn’t know what to do with the dark? Certainly it had exiled history and chosen to ground itself in the future perfect, the born-again optimism of a place convinced, as even the Christian evangelists here said, that “The Future is your Friend.” But when it came to ancient words or unburied spirits, to the self-delighting chicanery of an Iago, or Milton’s Satan, it seemed painfully undefended, at least as those from older cultures tend to assume quiet Americans might be.

  He pointed out a student of his—I’ll call him Simon—who did in truth seem the very incarnation of all the boyishness and openness that so revived us in California, Billy Budd reborn. Simon would do anything my father asked: go across town to buy him a plate of chile rellenos, drive two hundred miles to collect a classmate from Los Angeles Airport. When the sleepless professor needed someone to talk to at 1:00 a.m., there would be Simon, on our doorstep. I thought of him, with his politeness, his eagerness to please, his unqualified belief in a better world and his trust in father figures, as the kind of ingenue we’d have remorselessly teased at school.

  I went to Japan for a year, to get away from everything associated with a twenty-fifth-floor office and an embossed business card, living according to someone else’s idea of happiness, and almost the day I came back, I was faced with a drama: Simon had gone off the rails. He’d grown tired of running errands for his professor and now he claimed he was being used as an unpaid servant. More than that, he was almost possessed in his rage; it was as if his savagery now was in direct proportion to his sweetness before. Disenchantment was common in California in those days, if only because enchantment had been so strong a few years earlier. Reality seemed so paltry next to castles—dungeons—in the air.

  It was a fearful scene, and I never had time to ask my father if he thought now that California was too innocent; hearing how the loud American, Granger, he’s always mocked, is in fact praying for his ill son, seeing how recklessly he’s meddled in Pyle’s fate, the Englishman in The Quiet American realizes how much he is like them, ultimately, in his inability to see things as they are. My father decided it was better to defuse the situation through absenting himself and in the months that followed, I saw him less and less often, and many times he was away for months on end.

  I kept up with my life, commuting as I had done as a boy between a very young “Golden State” that offered freshness and conviction, if not wisdom, and a much more veiled, reticent, older culture (not England now but Japan) where people found their pleasure in curious hobbies, little fantasies, precisely because they assumed that the larger terms of life were given, fixed. Sometimes—often—I thought back on the Darwinian hothouse of my school days, strikingly similar in its sense of hierarchy, of stoicism and endurance, of military self-discipline, to what was around me in structured, small-scale Japan; I recalled how well it had been preparing me, effectively, for a monastery. All those Marcus Aurelius sentences we’d had to read and memorize, all the lines from Hecuba we’d had to recite in Greek were telling us that it wasn’t the world and its trials and sufferings that made us, but our response to them. The fault was never in our stars, or even in our fathers.

  The second volume of Sherry’s biography came out, and as I reflected on Greene’s habit of always giving his enemies the last and most convincing word, I thought he might be offering a kind of practice that anyone could learn from. We’re so eager to think of enemies, I wrote—was I thinking of myself? Or, more likely, of my father? Or even Simon?—simply because we know, deep down, that the only real enemy is the one who keeps us closest company with every breath. It wasn’t the country, the girl, the teacher who let us down; it was our judgment, and whatever led us to expect too much of the country, the girl or the teacher in the first place. That was why it became harder and harder to condemn anyone: wouldn’t God himself, faced with a wounded murderer, feel somewhat at a loss?

  I called my piece “Sleeping with the Enemy” and wrote about how Greene’s special grace—his curse—was to see “the folly and frailty of everyone around him.” It’s never external devils that undo us, I suggested, but rather the ones that rise up in ourselves and those people who have the power to awaken them within us. Greene was “never a truer Christian,” I concluded, “than when forgiving even his un-Christian enemies.”

  A few weeks later, the piece appeared on the back page of Time magazine, as most of my pieces had been appearing for the last nine years. I went to Japan again, and then came back, bringing my seventy-three-year-old future father-in-law for a trip through California, his first visit to the country that had opposed him as a soldier in the war and wiped out his hometown of Hiroshima. I returned to my desk and started working on another piece, on Los Angeles’s airport, and the way the empires of old had been usurped. Then, coming upstairs in the rebuilt house, I noticed the red light flashing on my phone.

  I pushed the PLAY button to pick up the message and heard a voice I couldn’t quite place, and then a kind of choking sound, then many long seconds of silence, before the receiver at the other end was put down. I pressed the button again, and this time I realized it was my father’s voice. He almost never rang me up and, when he did, it was usually to talk about some book he’d recently discovered—The Honourable Schoolboy or the autobiography of Marlon Brando. This time, though—I could only just make out—he was saying something about having seen my essay on Graham Greene, “Sleeping with the Enemy,” and how … and then his voice gave out and he began to sob.

  I couldn’t ever remember hearing him sob before, least of all over an answering machine. It was a shocking thing, to hear a man famous for his fluency and authority lose all words. Something had obviously touched him, or devastated him in the Greenian theme of being unable to look anywhere but to oneself for blame. The sound of his racking sobs continued, and then there was that silence—I couldn’t guess what was happening—and the phone put down.

  I met him and my mother a few weeks later, on a bright, warm day in late May—was it pain I saw in his eyes, the sense of something he could never put behind him?—and
then I flew back to my new home in Japan. On one of my first days there, a call came in the dead of night: my father was in the critical care unit, with pneumonia, and things didn’t look good. I flew back the next day and saw him in his bed, stirring, but not obviously conscious, his feet sticking up in just the odd way mine did. Ten days later, he was dead, at sixty-five, and the last real time I’d heard from him was the gasping call about Graham Greene.

  I couldn’t quite explain to Hiroko, as I was finishing this book, which man within my head I was addressing. “You’re writing about your father?” she said, with genuine, alert curiosity one morning as the sun came up above a thick late-autumn mist. “Well, not exactly. There’s too much I don’t know—or could never say—about him.” “But Graham Greene. You like him?” “Yes.” I couldn’t quite convey even to her how difficult it was at times to read The Quiet American: I’d pick up my worn orange copy with the pages beginning to separate from their binding, and I’d see a brash American reaching out for support, or Fowler calling the man he’s more or less condemned to death his “friend” (perhaps his only friend), or see him trying to petition his wife for a divorce and realizing, at the very end, that, as Teresa of Avila had it, more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered, and I couldn’t say why it struck me with such force. “There are no bad guys in his books,” I told her. “But no one’s entirely good either. There can’t be final resolutions, least of all happy ones; yet people are moving, even heroic, precisely because they don’t always live down to our fears for them. It’s like what you learn in your Buddhism: that if you see how even the guy you think you dislike is suffering, it becomes harder to think so badly of him. But harder, too, sometimes, to hope for clarity or permanence.”

  Then I looked up, to see the tiny, characterless apartment, in this deeply impenetrable land, the woman whose language was so different from my own—Phuong never answers Fowler’s questions, so he has to learn to read her silences (or, more often, strategically not to do so)—and the masks from various old countries on the wall, and thought of one other person who could settle down here, for a time, and find diversion in the very foreignness.

  It was New Year’s again, and Louis and I were in the little town of Sucre in southern Bolivia, where squat men with squarish faces were smearing their giggling children with confetti, and girls in their best pink dresses were glancing nervously at boys on the second floor of a bar above the town square (“No, Louis,” I said, “you’re too old”). We’d just had a long candlelit dinner in a courtyard among the brightly colored colonial buildings, catching up after a few years apart, and he was telling me about some of the places he’d visited recently (Romania, Albania, Mozambique) and I was seeing between the lines the emergency rations of food, or at least support, he was taking to people in these stricken worlds. I’d invited him to come and spend a few days together in Bolivia because it seemed to me the hidden jewel of the Americas, the most primal, intriguingly spooky place I’d found in my thirty years of crisscrossing the continent. Miners were said to worship the devil in the nearby towns, and at festivals, I’d read, the true spirit of the country came out from behind the impassive exterior.

  “Tomorrow Potosí!” I said, and he said, “Sure.” The highest town in the world, at thirteen thousand feet, was only three hours away by car, and it was said to be a spectacular road, winding over high mountains and then passing across areas so remote that not even much Spanish was spoken there (only a version of the Indian language Quechua). There was a terrible aspect to the situation—the UN had found rural poverty in Bolivia the worst on the planet (ninety-seven percent of people in parts living below the poverty line)—but it was in places of privation, I knew, that Louis felt the greatest capacity to serve; Belgravia had less need of what he had to offer.

  “Eight o’clock breakfast?” I said, as we walked down the narrow cobbled street to our small hotel, our footsteps echoing behind us as we left the revelry of the main square behind.

  “Sounds good. I’ll bring my backgammon set. Some tapes.”

  “You reserved the car?”

  “Twice. The girl at the front desk said it would be there at nine o’clock.”

  I’d already called Hiroko in Japan, in the middle of a lavish New Year’s festival, and my mother in California; as ever, they’d see me in the next week or two, when my assignment was over. “It’s magical,” I told Hiroko, when she asked me why I’d go back to a place where my passport had been confiscated the previous time I’d come here, to write about it again. “It’s like traveling into a medieval world where the old forms are very strong. Undiluted. Raw.”

  We finished breakfast quickly the next morning and talked about the celebrations of the night before. They had been as simple, as unpretentious, as full of innocent humanity as Bolivia often seemed to be; most of the people around us, I imagined, were now sleeping off the late night, the drink, the dancing, perhaps the coca leaves they’d been chewing to stay awake.

  A man plodded up to us, a smiling, quiet man from the hotel who had taken us to our broken rooms the day before.

  “Potosí?” he said, and we nodded, and he led us outside.

  At that moment, a car came screeching down the narrow, silent street and a boy jumped out. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen, but in his tomato-red T-shirt, his wraparound shades, the borrowed accent he affected, he looked like the face of the new Bolivia.

  “Hi, guys,” he said in English, not a language much spoken in these parts. “I’m taking you to Potosí.”

  “No,” said the older man, and a dispute broke out.

  “Look,” said the kid, and handed us a voucher. Clearly the woman at the desk had made the reservation twice, but the boy spoke English and had a voucher, and perhaps the older man would be glad of the chance to spend New Year’s Day with his family, even if he missed out on the payment.

  We got into the car, and Louis handed over an ancient cassette of the Jefferson Airplane.

  “Hey, Woodstock!” said the boy, turning round to grin and give us the thumbs-up sign. “Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young! Jimi Hendrix!”

  He jammed the cassette in—we were a long way now from the broken Toyota in Ethiopia—and Grace Slick began wailing about how one pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small. He reversed at high speed down the block and then started gunning the car around the cobbled, ancient streets.

  “You speak English,” I said, incisively, as “Feed your head” screamed around us.

  “Why not?” He turned around as he drove and smiled enormously again. His tangled mass of dark curls shook with the cacophonous music.

  Very soon—the tires squealed as the boy rounded turns—we were in the countryside, and within minutes, so it seemed, the town was behind us, as were most signs of civilization. Then we were high up in the mountains—more than twelve thousand feet above sea level—and on one side was a sheer drop that fell what looked to be eleven thousand of those feet.

  “Lucky we didn’t choose ‘the most dangerous road in the world,’ ” I said. The Lonely Planet guide had described, with some relish, a mountain road not far away on which an average of twenty-six vehicles a year veered over the edge, to fall three thousand feet to a valley floor. Modern vehicles in a largely undeveloped place like Bolivia are always an uncertain proposition, and even the road we drove along now was lined with the small white crosses and simple memorials, sometimes draped in fresh flowers, that remembered inattentive drivers or unlucky passengers.

  “Did I tell you about my friend Harri?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “You met him almost thirty years ago, the first time you came to Santa Barbara. One of the nicest guys I ever knew in California. We used to play tennis together—for years—and he was the ideal partner: he never wanted to win, and we were always at exactly the same level. We’d start playing again after years apart, and every set would end in a tiebreaker. I played the piano—Bach—when he got married in our house, thirty-five yea
rs ago. As the sun came up. Not long before we did ‘The Rape of the Lock’ with Meredith.”

  “Really?” I could tell my friend was more interested, understandably, in Grace Slick.

  We came to slightly flatter land, and the car began to bump, then to rattle as it bounced along a track just off the side of the road, next to a ditch.

  “You okay?” I shouted.

  The driver swiveled round. “No problem!”

  We continued on our way and then, out of nowhere, he pulled up at a gas station.

  “One moment,” he said, and disappeared.

  “He’s strange,” I said to Louis.

  “More than strange.”

  “Sinister almost.”

  “More than sinister.”

  It only hit me now that the boy probably hadn’t slept much on New Year’s Eve; for all we knew, he might still have some drink, or coca, in his system. But going back would be as dangerous as going forwards, and we hadn’t wanted to bother the older man.

  “You sure you’re okay?” I said, as he came back. He hadn’t filled up the car or done anything with it at all.

  He gave the thumbs-up sign again and turned the volume on the Airplane way up.

  We started to climb once more—another pass—and every now and then the car bumped off the tarmac, to the side, or seemed to waver around the central line. Luckily, few other cars were visible in rural Bolivia at 10:00 a.m. on New Year’s Day.

  “Anyway, Harri, whom I was just telling you about, got killed in a car crash, four months ago. It was the strangest thing; I mean, he was the one who’d taught me how to drive. He’d been driving—everywhere—for forty years. But he had a new wife, from Russia, and she was at the wheel, on a freeway in Utah, and somehow she rolled the car. He was thrown out and killed. She was almost fine, though she wasn’t wearing a seat belt either. And ever since …”