The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  Ideologically, Graham said he felt more comfortable being pink than white. Black, he reminded us, could be even more beautiful. Father Bajeux, although he was a very light-skinned mulatto, listed his colour on the registration card as ‘morado’ (purple). I wondered if he harboured the ambition of one day wearing the purple colours of a cardinal.

  I inscribed my own colour as black, deciding it would probably be the first time in the Dominican Republic that anyone had registered under that pigmentation.

  After we checked in we strolled around town until we found a quiet bar. We sat outside at a table by the street, sharing a bottle of straight rum. Graham showed no signs of being tired and was in no hurry to retire for the night. He was also in an uncharacteristically talkative mood and told us how he had loathed the tedious Bible-reading at the Sunday services of his former Anglican faith.

  ‘I had a grandfather who was an Anglican clergyman and ended up in a mental institution,’ he said. ‘I converted to Catholicism in 1926 because a priest who offered me instruction finally won me over. But I read a lot of theology, too.’

  As for Father Bajeux, his faith was taken for granted by Graham and me. Nor did our Haitian priest-companion offer any startling revelations. His mind was miles away. His struggle with God was very personal.

  When we returned to the hotel the desk clerk handed Graham his registration card. For a moment I thought our little prank of writing different colours on the card had got us in trouble. But the clerk pointed to the back of the card and said, ‘You had visitors.’

  Graham turned the card over. There was a handwritten verse on the back, which ended with, ‘What a rainbow of colour in Room Sixteen.’ It was signed by an American nun of the Dominican Order who was working in the local hospital. She had heard of Graham’s presence in town — those Catholics did have their grapevine after all — and had paid a visit to our hotel, hoping to meet Graham, of whom she was an avid fan. She invited us to breakfast, but we had already made arrangements to drive back to the mission house for Mass and breakfast with Father McSwigan (who later told me he had been the one who advised the sisters of Graham’s arrival in town).

  For a while Graham’s adopted religion remained on our minds as he discussed his favourite Pope, John XXIII, for whom he had a ‘lot of affection’. None the less, he was not optimistic about reforming the Church. The age-old alliance between the army, Church and oligarchy in Latin America would not be broken by wishful thinking, he predicted. Yet he agreed with the view of Father Bajeux and myself that the leading advocates of change in the Church were in Latin America. Papa Doc’s persecution of the conservative Church hierarchy in the name of Haitianizing it was a masquerade, because he could no more stand a Haitian priest than a French priest, unless the cleric agreed to be a Macoute-priest. It was all about control.

  The following morning there was no struggle to rise before dawn; Graham was an organized traveller and lost no time in bathing and dressing. On the way to Mass he confessed that he didn’t like being called a Catholic writer and declared that he was adamant about this matter. ‘I just happen to be a writer who is a Catholic.’

  It was evidently a sensitive subject for him. Travelling with him in Central America years later I heard Graham explain time and again his status as a writer who happened to be a Catholic. At the mission chapel we heard two Masses. Father McSwigan said his regular 6.30 a.m. Mass while at a side altar dedicated to Our Lady of Altagracia, patron saint of the Dominican Republic, Father Bajeux said Mass in Latin. Graham acknowledged that he had enjoyed the ritual and that he especially preferred Latin. Not comfortable with the Mass being said in the vernacular, he stressed that the Second Vatican Council had not outlawed Latin. The Tridentine Mass was always in Latin.

  It was still early, and the mission cook had not yet arrived. We were in a hurry to resume our trip, so instead of the typical Dominican breakfast of boiled and mashed green plantains with eggs (mangu) the Mission Superior went to the stove and cooked up an all-American breakfast of bacon and eggs.

  ‘For years,’ Father McSwigan said, ‘one of the most important events in my life will be that I can say I prepared breakfast for Graham Greene!’

  He served us a cup of strong coffee. ‘How do you like it?’ He wasn’t referring to the breakfast but the fact that in the church the altar had been turned around so the priest now faced the congregation during Mass.

  ‘It looks like the priest is having a good meal up there,’ Graham replied, because it was now possible to see the priest symbolically consecrate and consume the body and blood of Christ. Father McSwigan laughed heartily and was still laughing when he said goodbye.

  6 | A MATTER OF POLICY

  We putt-putted back towards the border feeling physically and spiritually refreshed. As we bounced along, searching for the road, we could see in the distance behind the rounded hills the darkened region of navy-blue mountains that awaited us. This was to be our longest and most harrowing day on the border.

  It was slow going as we crept up the mountains. It appeared as if no one had navigated this stretch of road in a long time in any kind of vehicle. As we progressed, we had to pause more and more as our path was strewn with fallen trees and boulders. Graham had written about priests and their weaknesses, helplessness and human fragility, but here he had to join forces with a priest to remove obstacles from our common path.

  When he was brushing off the dirt from his road work, I asked him whether he would prefer to drive.

  ‘No, no, I am quite content not to,’ he replied.

  This section of the border needed no international markers. The Haitian side was an ecological disaster. It was all rock. Haitian peasants in the mountain regions are lucky to grow a few strands of corn on the steepest peaks where some soil may remain, but, largely because of deforestation, when the rains come tons of remaining topsoil cascade down the mountains into the sea. A brown ring encircles Haiti’s shores, the unsightly stain of eroded earth that is too thick to filter easily into the turquoise Caribbean. Haiti was literally bleeding to death.

  As we approached the misty summit we came to a forest called Angel Felix, where we encountered a group of woodcutters. I slowed the car and headed towards them, but they quickly disappeared into the dense tree line. The mountain forest, which looked as if it still had virgin timber, was in stark contrast to the eroded Haitian landscape next door.

  ‘I can see some trees at the bottom,’ Graham said and stuck his neck dangerously out of the window. ‘If we fall we will not fall into Haiti.’

  ‘Why?’ At that moment I was not particularly concerned about where we would land on our fatal plunge.

  ‘Because the Haitian side no longer has any trees.’ He laughed as if I’d flunked his riddle. He was enjoying every minute of our plight. Adversity seemed to animate him.

  We made a pit stop (each chose a tree to pee against) in the forest’s cathedrallike interior, beneath the tall pine trees, taking in the incense-like scent of a smoking charcoal pit, a choir of songbirds and the shrill buzz of cicadas.

  Further on, the scenery was breathtaking. The mountains were steep and the clouds covered the mountains below us. But this was no carnival ride. I felt responsible for Graham’s and Bajeux’s safety, and as we climbed the precarious road the possibility of our toppling over the side grew. Graham had been a good travelling companion. He had a youthful curiosity and exuberance, but he could be obstinate. Every time I asked him and Bajeux to get out of the car so I could manoeuvre it alone over the seemingly impossible landslide that might confront us, he refused. I tried explaining that the car needed less weight, but Graham ignored me, refusing to get out — although Bajeux had — saying it reminded him of his mule trip to San Cristóbal de las Casas where he had faced many such deep ravines.

  We must have had all the prayers of the American Redemptionist mission with us because every time that it appeared the path would end and we would have to backtrack we found a way to move on. Graham was the determined one
. Nevertheless, we were now in trouble. We reached a place where a landslide had buried the road completely. There was no other way around the mountain. Our trip was only halfway through. Still, Graham insisted we continue. He was not about to turn back. And slowly, inch by inch, with Graham sitting stolidly next to me, I edged the Beetle forward in first gear. If the tyres slipped we would topple over the edge and drop into a deep ravine.

  Later, after we’d passed the landslide, we joked that if we’d gone over the edge the death notice in Time magazine’s ‘Milestones’ section would be: ‘Died: English author Graham Greene, 61, in an auto accident on the remote Dominican—Haitian border.’ The British newspapers by contrast, in line with their tradition, would run a lengthy obituary. The Fleet Street dailies would be a lot more prolix and a lot less kind, questioning what Graham was doing in such an isolated setting and blaming the death of the famous author on Papa Doc Duvalier.

  We had a good laugh over it, and I explained to Graham that Trujillo’s favourite method of ridding himself of someone was to arrange for them to have an ‘accident’ by diving into a cliff or ravine in their car. We thanked God the Generalisimo had been assassinated in 1961. We had no such worries about Papa Doc. Although he had a propensity for revenge, he never bothered to cover up his crimes.

  As we came around the side of another mountain the view was spectacular. Far below in the smoky, bluish haze was a huge valley and Lake Enriquillo, simmering in the scorching heat of this sunken region’s eternal summer. At 160 feet deep and with a surface some seventy feet below sea level, the lake occupies the lowest inland topographical point in the Caribbean and its water is three times as salty as ocean water. Indian carvings on large rocks surrounding Enriquillo are the only visible reminder of the indigenous communities that once lived beside the lake. It was still home to pink flamingos, and, years earlier, it had not been uncommon to see a caiman sunning itself along the 33 -mile shoreline. Beyond the lake was another range of mountains that we would have to cross. This had been the theatre of war for Fred Baptiste’s guerrillas prior to their internment in the old lunatic asylum near Santo Domingo.

  As our trip grew more difficult Graham became more affable. He showed no sign of exhaustion. He was excited at the prospect of the unexpected. The ordeal actually seemed to energize him, a reflection perhaps on his stubborn resilience. The only thing that seemed to bother him was the vultures. He admitted to being spooked by vultures since his days in Africa. He said the repulsive birds were signs of death and evil. But the large birds we had sighted gliding overhead and which had drawn Graham’s worried attention were actually red-tailed hawks — Buteo Jamaicensis — which had been christened Mal Fini (‘Badly Finished’) by Haiti’s French colonizers because of the species’ habit of leaving its prey, mostly chickens, in a sorry state. An old Haitian saying holds that if a Mal Fini spits in your eye you lose your sight.

  Suddenly, as we came around the bend on the way down the mountain, a young dark-skinned Haitian — or Dominican — appeared on the side of the road. He was miles from nowhere. As we slowed to a stop he approached us and got into the back seat of the car next to Bajeux without a word. We were apprehensive, but the youth didn’t appear threatening. Bajeux and I attempted to question him in Creole and Spanish, but he remained silent. We drove on, came out of the mountain and continued across the plain to the town of Jiman’ at the mouth of a valley that opens up into Haiti. Then, just before we reached the town, our hitchhiker tapped me lightly on the shoulder to stop. When I did, he got out and simply walked away, disappearing into the dust.

  ‘Perhaps he was deaf and dumb,’ Graham suggested as we watched him go.

  Bajeux and I didn’t believe so, yet we couldn’t explain the youth’s strange behaviour. The incident remained one of those ineffable Caribbean mysteries. In Haiti the mysterious stranger would have been considered a zombie. Nevertheless I suggested to my two sharp-eyed companions that they relax their Macoute watch’, as Graham called our constant paranoia.

  Jiman’, the main Dominican border town through which Dominican forces were expected to storm into Haiti during the 1963 crisis when the two countries nearly went to war, was fast asleep. It was siesta time. We were hungry and thirsty. The government hotel was closed for repairs, and the old woman who ran the local eating house was asleep. Her young maid was terror-stricken when we suggested she wake her up, so we went into a colmado and purchased three tins of miniature sausages, several stale bread rolls, a box of toothpicks and room-temperature soft drinks.

  ‘There must be a brothel where we at least can get a cold drink,’ Graham said, unhappy about our lunch arrangement.

  ‘Dominican brothels close down for siesta,’ I said. I was not about to go racing around the stifling hot, awful little border town in the middle of the day in search of a whorehouse.

  Graham glanced at me. I could tell he was sceptical, but he said nothing.

  My main concern was getting over our final mountain range before nightfall. The prospect of this last section of the border made me nervous. Anything could happen. We sat under a thorny bayonde tree that offered a few speckles of shade and opened the first can of sausages. A horrible smell rose up and invaded the still air. Bajeux plucked out one of the little morsels with a toothpick and offered it to Graham. He reacted to the taste with revulsion. None the less our hunger drove us on; we held our breath and devoured the saucissons until the little cans were empty.

  ‘And to think,’ said Graham, still grimacing and chewing on a piece of bread to rid himself of the pungent taste of the sausages, ‘in a few days I’ll be dining at the Tour d’Argent in Paris.’

  His comment angered me, but I said nothing. It took Graham out of our world. His thoughts were of eating at the pricey Parisian restaurant while our concern was providing survival food for the Kamoken and other Haitian refugees. For the past three months I had been transporting sacks of grain, flour and tins of oil from the Catholic Relief and CARE to keep them alive. I was reminded that Graham didn’t belong to these surroundings after all.

  We washed our meal down with the warm drinks and returned to the car under the scorching sun.

  ‘We could be at the Oloffson in an hour if the border guards let us cross,’ I said trying to make light of lunch. ‘I’m ready for one of Caesar’s rum punches.’

  ‘It would be your last,’ Bajeux said.

  ‘Indeed,’ Graham muttered.

  The joke went down like a deflated balloon.

  Past the salt flats, just across the border from the town and glued to the foot of a mountain, was the Haitian military post of Malpasse. In the late 1950s I had begun to cover the Dominican Republic from Haiti. During those last years of Trujillo’s thirty-year reign I was one of the few travellers returning to Haiti to cross the border at Jiman’. It was only a fast hour’s ride to Port-au-Prince, road and politics permitting. Once, when I was returning from the Dominican Republic, I slept in the little Malpasse jail after the Haitian army chief ordered the sergeant in charge not to allow me and my car to re-enter Haiti. I was returning to Haiti in my Volkswagen. At Malpasse a new sergeant took my passport, and, expecting a short wait, I kept the engine running — that is, until this bright sergeant showed me my passport and told me it was no good as my visa to travel back and forth to the Dominican Republic did not have the police stamp. (All such visas were difficult to get and a friendly pastor working in the passport division who read my newspaper had issued it, but I knew I would not get a police stamp.) No one had noticed. The sergeant did. The officer in charge was an old friend, but he could do nothing but wait until evening to contact headquarters. The reply came back: Don’t let the blan pass. I chose my bed in the empty prison and kept the door open even after the officer tried to close it to make sure I didn’t take off to Port-au-Prince. In the dark I noticed the door closing slowly and pushed it back open and sent the officer tumbling down the embankment in his underwear.

  In the morning I raced back to Santo Domingo full of mos
quito bites and the memory of a nightmare about Trujillo’s 1937 massacre of poor Haitians along the border. I caught the noon plane to Port-au-Prince and breezed through immigration. In the days that followed I had my car driven to the Dominican side and asked my the sergeant friend to drive me across the border. I invited him to toast my Beetle with several cold Presidente beers.

  The saline flats are a no man’s land between the two countries. It’s the devil’s oven. In December 1958 Duvalier signed a ‘peace pact’ with Trujillo — having kept him waiting for more than an hour in the steaming heat. While photographing El Benefactor as he sat in the 38-degree heat in a three-piece business suit waiting for Papa Doc, I noted rivulets of perspiration eroding his pancake makeup. The droplets trickled down his flabby jowls. When Papa Doc eventually arrived, he and El Jefe exchanged saccharine smiles. It was the first and last time the two tyrants of the island met. Each promised to refuse safe haven to the other’s enemies. Trujillo vowed in particular to protect Duvalier if the bearded rebel leader in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra across the Windward Passage from Haiti should come to power. A month later the bearded one, Fidel Castro, was in Havana and the Cuban dictator, General Fulgencio Batista, was in exile in Ciudad Trujillo.

  With the Dominican sausages growling in our digestive tracts, we began the climb up the last mountain range. As we came to round the first leg of the road the back of our little Volkswagen sank into the gravel. I raced the engine, but the Beetle refused to budge. A huge thorn had punctured a tyre through to the inner tube. It was a miracle we’d managed to get this far without car trouble. We replaced the flat tyre with the spare, but since it would have been foolhardy to try to climb the mountain range without another tyre we backtracked to a construction camp where, with the help of workmen, we patched the punctured tyre and tube.