The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  As we toiled up into the cool Sierra de Bahoruco, it became familiar ground for Bajeux and me. He pointed out a steep hillside where the thatched hut that Fred Baptiste’s Kamoken had used as a shelter and rendezvous for incursions into Haiti stood. It remained there, abandoned like some arcane symbol of defeat. From there the road branched off to El Aguacate, but we decided not to tempt fate further and avoided the Dominican army post there despite Graham’s wish to see it. Bajeux and I knew members of the garrison might recognize us and be hostile.

  At the summit we were greeted by fog and an afternoon drizzle. Graham surveyed the rugged landscape as Bajeux sat transfixed, gazing at the Haitian side of the frontier. This section of our narrow route was paved with large shiny rocks. It was more like a washboard than a road and was slippery in the rain. We met a group of scowling soldiers manning a small Dominican army post. Bajeux stepped out of the car and got to work. He asked the suspicious troops whether they had any Haitian ‘guests’. They didn’t answer, but when Bajeux identified himself as a priest — he was dressed as we were — the soldiers allowed him to enter the post. The single cell at the post was empty.

  It was a jolting, sliding, bumpy ride down to Pedernales. Closer to the lowlands giant trucks, their tyres taller than our car, rumbled along their own red-dirt roadway parallel to the one we were travelling on. They were transporting bauxite, the red earth and raw material for aluminium, from the mines to the Alcoa docks at Cabo Rojo for export to the United States. Our rough little road eventually led into the wide well-graded bauxite-transporting road.

  We arrived in Pedernales at dusk. At our request, Dominican army officers gave us a gratifyingly comprehensive tour of the city’s prison facilities. We spoke with several jailed Haitians, but the charges against them were non-political; none was one of the missing Kamoken.

  The few hotels in Pedernales didn’t look inviting, so I suggested that we go to Cabo Rojo, to the big Alcoa bauxite complex where I knew the manager, an American named Pat Hughson, who had often extended an invitation to visit when I met him socially in Santo Domingo. Graham and Bajeux thought it was a splendid idea: the prospect of a drink, dinner, a shower and a good bed at Cabo Rojo appealed to them. Hughson, I explained, had once been either a pilot or an aviation mechanic who had been brought down from the United States by Trujillo to work with the Dominican air force. He married a Dominican and was now employed by Alcoa. He had seemed a friendly, hospitable and affable enough fellow.

  It was dark when we arrived. The Beetle’s lights lit up the sturdy high chain-link fence, and we followed it until we came upon a padlocked gate. The enclosure looked forbidding. It was situated in the remote extreme south-west corner of the Dominican Republic; we had travelled from ocean to ocean. A man in uniform stepped out of the guardhouse with a flashlight and asked us to state our business. He made no move to open the gate. I identified myself as a good amigo of the boss. I needed to talk with him.

  He took my name and told us to wait, then he disappeared inside the guardhouse. We could hear his muffled voice as he made a call. There was a long silence. We waited. Graham looked at me, his eyebrows arched quizzically.

  ‘Do you see a water tap?’ Father Bajeux said. We were all terribly thirsty. I felt uncomfortable. I called to the guard. He told me again to wait. Finally he came back to the gate, beckoned to me, unlocked it and opened it just enough for me to slide through. He pointed to the guardhouse phone, the receiver resting on the side of the table.

  I took the phone. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Yes?’ It was Patrick Hughson, and there was nothing friendly in his voice. I thought perhaps we had interrupted his dinner.

  ‘Hello, Pat. Could you put us up for the night? There are three of us.’

  ‘This isn’t a hotel. You can find a hotel in town,’ he said.

  So much for the jovial Hughson I’d met on the Santo Domingo cocktail circuit. Still, I explained that we’d been out in the boondocks all day travelling from San Juan de la Maguana, adding, ‘I thought you had said to drop in and visit if …’ If I hadn’t been with Graham and Bajeux, both of whom deserved a good night’s sleep, I would have told Hughson to go to hell and gone for any of the decrepit lodging places in Pedernales — even the prison.

  Finally Hughson relented. ‘Put the guard on,’ he said. I handed the phone to the guard, who received his orders. He unlocked the gate again, and we drove into the compound. But once more we were told to wait. The additional delay was infuriating. Finally an unarmed guard on a motorcycle wearing a shiny silver hard hat arrived. We were issued visitors’ badges and ordered to follow the bike.

  A mountain of red earth loomed next to the adjacent Caribbean Sea. A long low-slung bauxite cargo ship was berthed at the dock. ‘This is right out of Dr No!’ exclaimed Graham. ‘Dr who?’ Bajeux and I chorused. Neither of us was familiar at the time with the James Bond thriller set in Jamaica at a bauxite port much like this.

  ‘And this is obviously Dr No himself,’ Graham laughed when we drove up to the main house where Hughson, a large heavy-set man with a rotund girth, awaited us on his spacious open veranda.

  I apologized to Hughson for not calling in advance, explaining that we hadn’t known we would make it over the mountains, but he did not appear to be in a forgiving mood. He gave us a cool reception, making us feel like intruders, suspicious at our sudden night-time arrival. I could see that Graham was equally dubious of Hughson and his inhospitable manner. I introduced my two companions, mumbling their names, but Hughson was not interested in who they were.

  ‘You missed dinner,’ Hughson said, sounding almost pleased.

  ‘We’ve been travelling all day from San Juan de la Maguana. It’s been a long tough trip,’ I explained, but he was not impressed.

  He sent orders to prepare cold sandwiches for us. Later Coca-Colas arrived. Graham was mortified. ‘You wouldn’t have a whisky?’ he asked. Graham was never shy when it came to asking for a drink. Hughson must have seen the plea in Graham’s pale blue eyes. Three whiskies arrived, a single drink each. Graham drained his with such obvious relish that any reasonable host would have quickly ordered a refill — but not Hughson.

  When the dry ham-and-cheese sandwiches arrived, without condiments, we wolfed them down. As we ate Hughson sat back, seeming to find us a little disgusting. There was a little small talk. With no whisky refill in the offing, we thanked him and said goodnight.

  Again we were taken under escort and were deposited at the junior executives’ billet where we would spend the night.

  ‘What a bloody awful fellow!’ Graham exploded. ‘The man has no humanity. Dreadful chap.’

  But even Graham’s latent anti-Americanism, which Pat Hughson had caused to flare up like a fever, was soon lost in the sheer comic relief of the moment. Graham and I had to share a room. Despite our long day on the road neither of us was ready for sleep. Like two English schoolboys we sat up talking and laughing as long as our dry vocal chords would permit about this strange encounter and Graham’s imaginary comparison with Dr No. Graham thought up all kinds of sinister plots that could be going on around us at Cabo Rojo. He told me about his stay at Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye residence on Jamaica’s north coast. He hadn’t liked the housekeeper, Vivian, whom he accused of putting the ‘evil eye’ on him. I realized much later the depth of Graham’s superstitious nature. Fleming, he said, had offered to loan him Goldeneye rent-free if he would do the foreword to an omnibus of his James Bond books. ‘I told him I’d rather pay the rent than write the foreword.’

  We discussed the day’s events, and I apologized about the Dominican sausages.

  ‘No, no. Not at all. It happens sometimes. You had the best of intentions,’ he said. ‘It was quite fun.’

  I told him I had obviously misjudged Hughson and apologized for the Alcoa man’s inhospitality. ‘We should have stayed in town,’ I said.

  ‘No, no, on the contrary, this is interesting,’ Graham insisted as he laid out his toilet gear. He carefully fo
lded his clothes over a chair. ‘Shame about the whisky, but I would enjoy a pipe about now.’

  I thought he meant tobacco, but then he added, ‘Opium gives you a good sleep. I often had a pipe in Indochina during the war. I set myself a limit far, far below that of the habitual pipe smoker.’

  I looked around the room. ‘If Dr No has our room bugged he’ll hand us over to the police in the morning.’

  Graham laughed. ‘I am sure the awful fellow would.’

  We lay in bed, and Graham recounted that while completing A Burnt-Out Case in Tahiti in 1959 he was walking along a street in Papeete when he got the feeling that someone was watching him. ‘I turned,’ he said, ‘and there in the doorway of a little shop was an elderly Chinese man staring at me. We looked at each other, then he invited me in, and I followed him to the back of the shop. He asked me whether I had been in Indochina. I told him I had, and he offered me a pipe. He had his own little South Pacific fumerie. When I was back in London some time later I received a lumpy letter postmarked Papeete. It was a plug of opium sent courtesy of the French and Her Majesty’s Royal Mail from the old Chinaman in Tahiti.’

  I came to understand that, despite my reaction to his remark under the bayonde tree, he didn’t really aspire to luxury living per se, but he did enjoy good food and wine, crisp vodka martinis and smooth Scotch whisky. And he confessed to Bajeux and me that what he missed most about living abroad were bangers and mash washed down with good ale. I admitted that I would die for a pork pie at my favourite Fleet Street pub. We were all human, I reflected, and maybe Graham had a date planned at the famous Parisian restaurant.

  He was not completely opposed to nightmares; he admitted to being in favour of dreaming. It seemed that at an early age he had put his night-time subconscious to work for him. Whereas I was often plagued with dreams involving journalistic anxiety — such as losing my portable typewriter or my copy or missing the big story — Graham described his dreams as being much more creative, producing results that aided him in his writing. He talked about Freud’s interpretation of dreams, that a dream is an opening to the unconscious through which one can examine a disguised version one’s anxieties and problems. ‘Your brain works continually,’ Graham believed, adding, ‘Dreams also give you rest.’

  Next morning we were escorted out of the American company’s compound. We returned our badges at the gate and didn’t wait for breakfast. We never saw Hughson again. Outside our bedrooms before departing (Bajeux was lodged in the adjacent room) we found a Coca-Cola machine to slake our thirst. Graham was still laughing. I didn’t know it then, but he had found his ugly American.

  After departing the Alcoa plant the three of us made good time over the saline flats. Even dodging the squat, thorny bayonde trees was fun. When we reached the coastal road close to the cliff, during a short pit stop, we stood watching the sea angrily pounding a beach piled high with flotsam and jetsam. Among the timber on that wild and desolate coast were uprooted trees, their trunks worn white by the surf and sun, yet too big to be buried entirely by the sand. The scene must have stirred some memory of Joseph Conrad’s writing about the sea, because Graham began talking of Conrad and how he often reread his favourite Conrad books. It was a pleasant change of subject. I feared we had over-marinated Papa Doc. Graham said that it is important for a writer to experience at first hand what he is writing about and that he thoroughly enjoyed the legwork for his novels. I noticed his blue eyes had become bloodshot, but when I made a comment about it he shrugged it off, saying, ‘It is all that dust.’

  We now left the border behind. The main trip was over. Waving fields of sugar-cane welcomed us to Barahona. The town’s hotel was open, and we chose to sit on the terrace at the water’s edge. I knew what to order. The fare at La Tour d’Argent or any other overrated Parisian restaurant could never match it: deliciously grilled, freshly caught lobster and ice-cold Cerveza Presidente.

  Graham agreed that the succulent lobster more than made up for all our lost meals and was worth the wait. Our conversation returned to our border odyssey. I recalled the warning by an old Haitian named Moy who had survived the 1937 massacre and for years tended gardens at Frères outside Port-au-Prince. Fortified with clairin, he cautioned that the frontier was an ‘evil place, abandoned by the Iwas and where you ‘never hear drums’. ‘He was right,’ Graham remarked. ‘We didn’t hear any drums.’

  We felt relaxed for the first time in three days. Graham leaned back on his chair, and we reminisced about when we first met in 1956. I had really met him for the first time in 1954, but it was a fleeting moment he did not remember.

  That first time Graham had been invited to Haiti while staying in Jamaica by Peter Brook, the stage director who was turning Truman Capote’s short story, ‘House of Flowers’, set in a Port-au-Prince bordello, into a Broadway musical. Graham explored Haiti in his own way with Mrs Brook, enjoying its culture and people. The circumstances then were recorded in my weekly newspaper: ‘Celebrated English writer Graham Greene arrived Saturday [21 August 1954] at [Port-au-Prince] Bowen Field airport. Author of such works as Epitaph of a Spy [sic, and incorrectly included, as Epitaph for a Spy is actually by Eric Ambler], The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, Mr Greene has won many honors in the literary field including the Nobel Prize for Literature. On hand to welcome him was Mr André Supplice of the Tourist Office, who escorted Mr Greene to the El Rancho Hotel where he will spend three weeks.’ The item appeared on the front page of the Haiti Sun on 29 August. Brook and his wife played host to Haitian newsmen at an El Rancho lunch during which, to allay officials’ fear that a musical set in a brothel would be terrible publicity for the country, he declared, ‘It will be the best publicity Haiti ever received. It will be produced in the great theatrical capitals of the world: London, New York, Paris and so on.’

  At the time I had just returned from Ireland, visiting relatives with my mother, to find my staff had not bothered to seek out the famous author and write him up as ‘Personality of the Week’. At least they had honoured him with the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature, whereas the Swedish Nobel Committee had not. Rather than interview the famous American playwright Capote and the British-born artistic stage director Brook, they had translated a story from President Magloire’s daily, Le National.

  Even Mark Twain would have objected to our journalism — because of technical problems the Haiti Sun broadcast Graham’s arrival after he had departed on Monday 27 August. As to my meeting with Graham, it turned out disastrously brief.

  It was the afternoon before his departure that a waiter at El Rancho pointed to a man alone with his long legs wrapped around a tall stool at the hotel’s huge mahogany outdoor circular bar. Graham was clad in tropical tan trousers and open-neck shirt, and his glass was empty. I had time to feel his shield of intimidating aloofness, and it threw me off guard. When he stood up, I noted he was about my own height, six feet two inches. As he stretched his legs I had the feeling he was prepared to make a run for it.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ I said.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  And then he was gone, swallowed up by Brook’s and Capote’s group, who arrived in haste. I noticed his distinctive manner of speech as he greeted his friends and bounded out of El Rancho, leaving me with the impression that he was a starchy Englishman.

  My friend Albert Silvera said he liked Graham and described him as ‘an English gentleman’. The famous writer and Mr Brook’s wife, Natasha, he commented, had a wonderful time together and had driven to Cap Hai’tien and climbed up to see the Citadel (King Henry Christophe’s famous mountain fortress). Using his own hand signals, Silvera indicated that Graham and Natasha were just good friends and that there had been no monkey business. Silvera was a womanizer, so he would know. After Mrs Brook left Haiti Graham continued playing tourist. That routine included visits to the hilltop village of Kenscoff, a Voodoo ceremony in a dingy sector of the capital and a reef in the middle of the bay off Port-au-Prince where marine life could be
observed from a glass-bottomed boat.

  Silvera joined me at the bar, which had evidently been Graham’s command post. The handsome hotelier was the son of one of Haiti’s wealthiest Sephardic Jews. Debonair and Paris educated, Albert delighted in playing host to famous people. In conspiratorial tones he quickly unburdened himself of his worries about the House of Flowers musical. We were alone. The barman was busy preparing for the cocktail hour. Haitian officials, he said, were very uneasy about the Broadway version of the ‘House of Flowers’ story — written by Truman Capote following a 1947 visit to Haiti — as it was set in the red-light district along the bay, south of Port-au-Prince. ‘Will it be good for us?’ the image-sensitive Silvera asked me. While supporting the musical as a ‘great boost for Haitian tourism’, he wondered whether the musical might attract ‘the wrong kind of people’. ‘We cannot afford to have our image tarnished so early,’ he warned with finely honed distinction.

  The story is about a brothel madam (played in the Broadway version by Pearl Bailey) who takes in a ravishing beauty from the Dominican Republic, the picture of innocence and who has no idea of her new profession. Madame Pearl is determined to trick her out of her innocence and put her to work. On the point of losing her innocence, the beauty meets a young man at a gaguerre (cockfight) and falls in love. It’s wedding bells, and they dance from the House of Flowers to the wonderful music of Haitian carnival.

  It was easy to sympathize with Silvera. Many brothels were spread along the Carrefour road south of the city in old gingerbread houses, once the property of the rich before they moved up to the coolness of hillside living. The exteriors of the bordellos were covered with flowers, bright red and white bougainvillaeas. At night hundreds of colourful Christmas lights competed with neon signs, such as for the Paradise Bar. Some of the houses were staffed by Dominicans while others featured Haitian hostesses.