Capote had become a familiar sight in Port-au-Prince, dressed in his Bermuda shorts and straw hat. (Haitians at the time were unaccustomed to knee-length attire and found the ensemble strange and funny.) And it was Capote and Brook who made the news the summer of 1954.
Haiti was at last reaping its share of the Caribbean tourist harvest. Dollars were rolling in. The country’s father figure was President ‘Papa’ Paul E. Magloire, an army general and a much more genial strongman than many of his predecessors. Moreover, he was basking in the floodlights of history, having himself appeared on the cover of Time magazine as ‘Bon Papa’. That year Haiti was observing its 150th anniversary as the hemisphere’s second independent nation (after the United States) in what was the world’s most successful slave revolt. President and Mamie Eisenhower had given President and Mrs Yola Magloire a full-dress official welcome to Washington, and they had slept in the White House, the first black Haitian President to be so honoured. (Playing on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre during Magloire’s January 1955 official visit to the city was the big hit, The House of Flowers. The State Department cancelled the President’s plan to see it, fearing it was too bordelloish. Magloire, his friends said, would have loved it.)
Back in those days Port-au-Prince was alive and vibrant. The population was less than 250,000. At night the seaside Harry S. Truman Boulevard was a lively scene, with the wealthy cruising back and forth to see and be seen. Automobiles were so few that their owners were easily identified. The centrepiece was the Bar Italia, offering fine espresso Haitian coffee and ice cream. Near by, chic young girls of the élite families enjoyed a moment’s freedom from their parents’ watchful eyes, cavorting around the ornate statues amid the sounds and flashing light show of a large musical fountain. Across the street was the statue of Christopher Columbus, on his knees, holding a cross, depicting how he discovered the island in 1492; here romantic couples made love in their cars. Haiti truly had a wonderfully magical and mysterious atmosphere, and visitors loved the ‘Pearl of the Antilles’.
The hurricane season had officially ended. There was a Brazilian circus in town with a ballet as well as a big elephant. Mrs Wilhelm Oloffson, who had founded the Grand Hotel Oloffson, had died that week at the age of seventy-nine. Students were permitted to demonstrate against Cuban President Batista’s bloody violation of the Haitian embassy in Havana in which Cuban police killed ten of their countrymen who had taken refuge there. Six of the dead Cubans had been granted asylum in the Haitian embassy and were awaiting safe conduct out of the country. The other four had only hours earlier entered the embassy seeking political asylum. (Also killed was Cuba’s national police chief, who had led the charge into the embassy.) At home Haitians were being encouraged to register to vote in what many hoped might be the country’s first attempt at universal suffrage.
However, the island republic’s golden era proved to be losing its glitter. General (Bon Papa) Magloire wanted to extend his rule past the constitutional deadline, but the general’s ‘iron pants’, his own metaphor for toughness, had rusted badly, and he no longer frightened his enemies. The old Haiti they had shared was soon to disappear for ever.
The day after Graham had departed Aubelin Jolicoeur burst into my office, gushing over the great stories I had missed. Jolicoeur never sat down. He had to gesticulate his story with his whole body. At the El Rancho he said, Truman Capote had asked him, ‘Jolicoeur, have you met the celebrated author of The Power and the Glory ? Greene left the bar,’ Jolicoeur asserted, ‘and crossed on to the El Rancho dance floor to come to meet me! He must have walked ten metres to greet me!’ Jolicoeur’s description of their meeting was uncharacteristic of both men. I had observed my friend Aubelin many times, gurgling with joy, declaring ‘Oh-la-la’ and flitting forward to greet a tourist like a oiseau-mouche, the tiny hummingbird with gyro-like wings that allow it to hover over a hibiscus flower, sip pollen and then dart on to the next flower at remarkable speed. Graham, by contrast, would (I then believed) appear reluctant to respond to the gesture and would detest the interruption, cringing at the public attention. As the capital’s society reporter, he had managed to crash Haiti’s tough caste and colour barriers by dint of his deft pen, writing the most exaggerated and outlandish prose conceivable in even his republic of hyperbole.
The following day when I arrived at the Bowen Field airport to pick up my copies of the Dominican and Puerto Rican newspapers from the Delta fight, I was startled to see Graham again. He had left Haiti the day before; now he stood on the tarmac arguing with the American manager of Delta Airlines. I was about to approach him but had second thoughts, and I joined a small group at the transit bar and gift shop facing the tarmac and listened to the argument. Embarrassed, I denied knowing him.
The Delta man kept insisting that Graham had to stay, that he had obtained a Haitian visa for him. He would have to wait until midweek for a flight to Jamaica, where he needed no visa as it was British territory. He could not proceed because he didn’t have a visa for Cuba, the plane’s next stop, or to New Orleans. We all heard Graham snap, ‘What?’ Then he made it definite. ‘I’m going on this plane!’ The Delta manager, a white American Southerner, was beside himself. ‘But you’re not going on my plane.’ I could see that Graham was being pushed too far. He appeared ready to explode.
The plane’s pilot joined them. Like a boxing referee, he raised a hand to separate them. With a dignified gesture the pilot invited Graham to board his plane. We heard the pilot tell the Delta man, ‘Thank you, I’m taking this gentleman on my plane.’
We watched as they took off for Havana. The Delta manager, crestfallen, kept repeating to himself, ‘I was just trying to help him.’ The spectators at the bar were sympathetic.
My weekly had a story. Graham was back on our front page (at the bottom, because it was a good news week). While later he loved to make light of his Puerto Rico ‘lark’, it had not seemed to be fun at the time. It had provided a glimpse of a man who didn’t take kindly to being pushed around.
At a diplomatic cocktail party the next night I learned further details of Graham’s adventure. US charge d’affaires Milton Barral told me that he had met Graham at a dinner party on the Friday night before his departure. Greene, he said, had decided to return to England the quickest way. Perversely, it became the longest route. The quickest way was via San Juan, Puerto Rico, and on to New York, and then across the Atlantic. However, Graham knew it would take days for the US Embassy to receive permission from Washington to issue him even a transit visa. Barral thought Graham might be able to swing it without a visa as he was only in transit to London. The worst scenario Barral envisaged — not quite accurately, as it turned out — was that Graham could be detained briefly between plane connections in Puerto Rico or New York. The embassy official said Graham had told him that on two recent occasions he had received special permission from the US Attorney-General to visit New York City, but each waiver had involved a lot of red tape and had taken three weeks. Detesting red tape and not prepared to wait in Port-au-Prince, he decided to take the risk of travelling as an in-transit passenger without a US visa.
We used the basic Reuters report, which Graham had himself scripted.
In 1925 at Oxford University, at age 19, as a prank to escape boredom, Greene and a friend had become probationer members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. They had teamed up to play a trick on the party. They paid two shillings [24 cents at the time] — actually four sixpenny stamps — as membership dues for the first month. Their original idea was to wangle a free trip to Moscow or at least Paris. When the scheme failed, they allowed their memberships to lapse, by which time the party hierarchy had seen through them.
Graham’s escapade certainly didn’t interfere with his later becoming a wartime member of the Secret Intelligence Service. (Graham informed me that he had got on the US blacklist by mentioning his collegiate prank ‘stupidly to an American fellow in Belgium who put it in a report’). I published the story in the Haiti Sun the
following Sunday, where we decided Graham’s writing deserved to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and we even noted he had won it in 1951 — or should have done.
When Graham won the verbal sparring match at the airport, which we had witnessed, I anticipated that he might have further trouble in Havana and envisaged him becoming a permanent fixture, flying back and forth around the Caribbean. However, this time Graham took the initiative. When he got to Havana he managed to leave the airport without going through the immigration formalities. (Strongman Batista, a one-time army sergeant, was still very much the boss in Cuba in 1954. Fidel Castro, his brother Raul and other survivors of the abortive 26 July attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba the year before were behind bars on the Isle of Pines. They would later be released and exiled to Mexico.) Graham had booked into the lovely old Hotel Inglaterra on Havana’s Parque Central and was about to enjoy a siesta when the phone rang. He had alerted Reuters, and now it was the British news agency alerting him. They had taken up ‘his’ story. This was a rare occasion on which I knew he had played his own publicist.
The Daily Telegraphs correspondent, New Zealand expatriate Ted Scott, and a friend, sent me an update from Havana. Scott, an ex-British spy, had found Graham and told him, ‘You know the police are searching for you. I’ve been inquiring about you at the airport, and they say you have come in without going through immigration, and they are looking for you.’
The British ambassador to Cuba sent Graham a message that he wouldn’t invite him to a meal because it might offend the Americans.
I realized years later that Graham had a habit of always registering at British embassies abroad, and he enjoyed being invited to them for dinner or even staying in the Ambassador’s residence. Rested up, he flew on to London, managing to escape any exit problems at the Cuban capital’s Rancho Boyeros International Airport.
There was some good in Graham’s lark: he had ridiculed the McCarran-Walters Act of 1952, which barred entry into the United States to anyone who might have had connections with the communists.
Two years later, in November 1956, I met a different Graham Greene. He was sitting with a woman bent over a Scrabble board near the pool at El Rancho. It was late morning, and the hotel was almost deserted. I approached, not wishing to disturb their game. I was holding a copy of the Haiti Sun that announced their arrival. His interest was in the lady who was beating him at Scrabble. I watched him as he reached down to consult a dictionary at his feet. I thought that was cheating. He gave off a series of ‘Oh yes, oh yes’ when he spotted me standing in the sun. His companion was cool and collected — and winning. She had a pleasant smile, and Graham invited me to sit with them. It was fun to see him wrestling with the spelling of a word. Graham Greene a poor speller? Catherine, as he introduced his handsome and lively female friend, was indeed the winner. Graham had to buy the rum punches.
Perhaps it had been Catherine who brought him to life and made him a much more open and entertaining person. He already sounded like an expert on Haiti. He explained it was a quiet time at the El Rancho as the other guests were on city and mountains tours, and he ticked off the sights: the Iron Market, mahogany factories and the marketplace at Kenscoff in the cool mountains; he confessed that he had become another victim of Haiti’s strange charm.
They were on a six-week Caribbean holiday, and he had decided to show Haiti to ‘Cafryn’, as he called his friend. I told them I would be only too pleased to show them around, whenever they wanted. I did not wish to intrude on their holiday. I did not take out my notebook and pen. I was in awe of the writer, and I decided against an interview, posing any questions or asking Catherine about herself. I had almost forgotten I was a reporter. But I did ask him if I could take a photograph. He confessed to hating having his picture taken and didn’t wish to be recognized by the tourists. I promised I would publish the photograph only after they departed. Catherine said, ‘Fair enough,’ and instructed him, laughing, to ‘stand up like a man and be shot’. She herself did not wish to be in the photograph and told me to stop calling Graham ‘Mr Greene’. He also preferred Graham. Snapping his picture was painlessly quick. In one frame I captured a youngish Graham Greene posing by the pool in a dark shirt and with his hands in the pockets of his linen trousers. The image appeared on the front page of the Haiti Sun on 2 December. The caption noted that three of author Greene’s greatest discoveries on this trip were: first, the ten-cent taxi, a communal automobile called la ligne, that dropped passengers anywhere within the city limits for that price; second, the taptap, a colourfully painted small pick-up truck with a specially designed passenger section, sporting brazen sayings and biblical messages to and from God that were designed to assure the rider that God cared, even if the fare was seven cents; and, third, another means of transport, the camionette, an unadorned estate car, also seven cents a ride, that plied the hill between the capital and Pétionville. The average tourist didn’t use these forms of transport. However, they appealed to Graham’s thrifty side, and, besides, he was not a typical tourist.
After their Scrabble game they invited me to lunch. I made suggestions, such as attending a show at the Centre d’Art. When we met again Graham asked whether we could visit a ‘house of flowers’. I agreed. Catherine also agreed. I had no idea who she was, only that she was outgoing and fun-loving with a saucy sense of humour with which she often baited him and brought him out from his shell. They seemed like old friends, and he was obviously very fond of her. Graham stipulated that we choose brothels staffed by Haitians girls not Dominicans. It was quite acceptable for visits to take the form of sitting, imbibing, dancing and watching the dancing. We sat and drank Barbancourt rum and soda at the large cafe-brothel opposite a private Thorland country club on the Carrefour road. The cafe portion was open-air and structurally not unlike a Voodoo peristyle (religious centre); it was painted the colour of the wicked red eyes of Erzulie Ge-Rouge, the religion’s love goddess who had a bad case of jealousy. The jukebox was blaring a rendition of Perez Prado’s ‘Mambo Number Five’. The clientele were obviously not the wealthy, who patronized the Dominican houses; in fact there were few customers.
The girls were dressed in tight clothes and bright colours. Some of them danced with each other. One customer was hunched over a plate of griot and fried plantains. The scent of the pork mixed with cheap cologne. Graham drew our attention to one Haitian Aphrodite and commented on her grace and beauty. ‘What an exquisite long neck! Look at that profile … She could be an African princess!’
Catherine, noting that he was quite taken with the girl’s natural beauty, feigned jealousy, as if Graham had found his choice for the evening. ‘Well,’ she announced loudly enough to command attention, ‘I think I’ll leave you boys to your wiles. Can I get a taptap back to the hotel?’ Graham smiled, ‘Fine’, as if to admit he was smitten. It was worth a chuckle to observe their games. But for a moment I thought she was serious, and I was about to call it quits for the evening.
We moved on to another bar, which was much the same. Catherine, smiling, turned to me during a lull of the loud meringue playing on the jukebox and said she thought writers were particularly interested in brothels. She nodded her head gaily towards Graham. ‘Of course as observers … they are attracted by the world’s oldest profession. It allows them to see,’ she went on coyly, ‘and sometimes feel humanity in the raw.’ She broke into laughter as Graham looked at her quizzically; she added, ‘You know it’s the male oppressor’s workplace!’
It was when he spoke of his personal aversion to the crowds of tourists that I suggested that they would be more at home at the Grand Hotel Oloffson. After introducing Graham and Catherine to Roger Coster and his wife Laura, they needed no more encouragement and agreed to spend the last two days of their stay there. ‘We sell a soul, not a bed,’ Coster had told them, rattling off his sales pitch. During their nineteen-year occupation of Haiti (1915—34) the US Marines had turned the hotel into a hospital and built a ten-room maternity w
ing for expectant Marine wives. Coster claimed that lots of babies had been born at the Oloffson during the Marine occupation, but more had been conceived there since the Marines left.
Both Graham and Catherine displayed keen interest in the primitive Haitian art movement. At the time most expatriate Americans living in Haiti attended the vernissages of new artists at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince run by an American, Dewitt Peters. (The 1954 painting by Rigaud Benoît, of a flood sweeping all before it as a priest and his flock kneel helplessly watching the lavalas, as Haitians called the flash floods, remained with Graham for the rest of his life. Along with other Haitian primitive paintings — such as the one by Phillippe-Auguste that he’d bought in 1963 with his winnings from a night in the nearly deserted Casino in Papa Doc’s haunted Port-au-Prince — he kept it hanging in his last apartment in Switzerland. He loved them. They reminded him of an exciting time in his life, according to Yvonne, with whom he last lived.)
One afternoon I drove Graham and Catherine out to La Galerie Brochette, an exhibition centre for a new colony of young Haitian artists situated in the village of Carrefour. They included the painters Gérard Dorcely and Luckner Lazard, whose work was not actually primitive but modernist. Catherine became enthusiastic and wanted to know whether the artists had ever exhibited abroad (most at that point had not) and whether they would consider exhibiting their works in London. Mais oui, madame! The artists were then struggling for recognition, and their responses to her were understandably enthusiastic. The group photograph I took shows a tanned and smiling couple, Graham and Catherine, with the artists at La Galerie Brochette. Another artist, Max Pinchinat, a member of the Galerie, later returned to work in Paris, and it was he, as things turned out, who played the Voodoo priest in the movie version of The Comedians. After long being repressed, Voodoo was now out of the closet. Each hotel had its night for a special folkloric show, and at the International Casino dancer Pierre Blain and his troupe performed an extravaganza entitled Invocation to Dambala. Many of the folk dancers were actually ounsis (women dressed all in white who assist in the ceremonies) or other practitioners of Voodoo, and their floor-show rituals followed closely the rituals in the temples. Drums were heard nightly not only in the open-air Theatre de Verdure, in the tourist hotels or the International Casino; they lulled one to sleep in most districts of the capital. After years of official persecution of Voodoo, it was the late Dumarsais Estime, President between 1946 and 1950, who had allowed Haiti’s folk religion to blossom once more, even though it was technically illegal.
The Seeds of Fiction Page 12
