The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  As was typically the case, there was nothing sad about bidding goodbye to Graham. It was always assumed that we would meet again, and we made plans to do so. Travel had a rejuvenating effect on him. He appeared as indestructible as ever. With Yvonne’s help he had succeeded in reducing life’s tedious trivial chores to a minimum.

  We embraced as he saw us off. It was the last time I saw him.

  On our return to Miami I sent him a copy of a Newsweek magazine article about dreams. He replied on 26 August saying thanks but that he was ‘astonished that they didn’t quote the ideas of J.W. Dunne in an experiment with time where he claims that dreams take their images from the future as well as from the past. It’s a very convincing book and in my own experience a true one.’ He concluded his letter with ‘Yvonne and I both enjoyed your visit very much and I am glad that in spite of the awful hot weather J-B liked Antibes.’

  Five months later, in November 1989, Graham returned unwell from a trip to Ireland where he had presided over a literary prize committee. He thought it was his heart, but his doctor in Antibes found nothing wrong. A month later, visiting his daughter Caroline at her home in Switzerland, he fainted. Blood tests revealed a lack of red blood cells, and his doctor ordered blood transfusions. His peregrinations were now limited to his dreams. Yet he made no mention of the seriousness of his illness in his letters.

  Meanwhile our old haunt, Panama, had exploded and was making the world news. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, DC, had been given President George Bush’s approval for Operation Blue Spoon, and the world witnessed one of the United States’ most bizarre geopolitical interventions. It was also the largest such action since the Vietnam War.

  The principal announced goal of the Bush administration’s invasion of Panama was to get their man — General Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami on charges of violating US drug laws. It was an enormously costly operation to catch Noriega, the one-time CIA asset who later was to claim he collected more than $10 million from the agency, even though government records show payments of only about $800,000. The action also called for neutralizing Noriega’s Panama Defence Force (PDF) which by early 1988 had been listed by the US military as ‘unfriendly’.

  Shortly after midnight on 20 December 1989 Operation Blue Spoon shattered the Panama night, and once it was under way Washington changed its name to the more palatable Operation Just Cause. The Torrijos—Carter treaties had placed a ban on the United States intervening legally in Panama’s internal affairs, hence the invasion.

  No clear picture of the scope of the fighting was to emerge because of the tight control that American officials placed on news coverage. Yet in spite of the latest state-of-the art high-technology weaponry, such as laser-guided missiles, it is known that the US troops were surprised by the tough resistance put up by elements of the PDF, especially at its Comandancia (headquarters) and at Panama City’s small Paitilla airport. The bearded black-shirted Machos del Monte battalion with their skull-and-crossbones emblem and tapir mascot had been moved from their Río Hato military base to the Comandancia weeks earlier. PDF troops at Río Hato were quickly overwhelmed by superior US airborne forces. American troops blew off the front door of Omar’s Farallon beach house near by, only to find the aged maid huddling in fright in the kitchen and an old watchman hiding in the carport. Like circling black buzzards, US Delta Force helicopters searched in vain for the wanted man. Some say the midnight invasion caught Noriega literally with his pants down, that they couldn’t find him because he was wandering around disrobed in an alcoholic stupor. The Navy Seals detailed to capture the Paitilla airport and decommission Noriega’s Learjet encountered stiff resistance and took casualties. Four Seals lost their lives. But Noriega no longer had his private jet available, and Chuchu no longer had his Cessna.

  The ramshackle, weathered two-storey tenements of El Chorrillo across from the Comandancia went up in flames. The hall in which Graham and I had watched Omar listen to ‘the people’ was obliterated. The sixteen-storey high-rise apartment building that Graham had so disliked was utilized as an effective sniper position by the PDF. There was some fighting at Fort Amador in the Canal Zone, which had reverted to Panama after the signing of the Torrijos—Carter treaties in 1978. Noriega had an office there. However, the American officer commanding troops manning 105-millimetre howitzer artillery and 50-cal machine-guns instructed his men to avoid hitting Omar Torrijos’s granite mausoleum located near Fort Amador barracks where some members of the PDF were still holding out. (Some Panamanians believed Arnulfistas had stolen Omar’s body after the invasion. In fact Omar’s body had been so badly torn apart in the crash that his family had decided on cremation. The urn with the ashes was stolen after the invasion from its resting-place in a church and was eventually returned to the family.)

  Across the Atlantic, Graham seethed. He told Reuters: ‘Whatever he [Noriega] may have done cannot be half as bad as what the United States did in El Salvador, giving arms to those people who killed six Jesuit priests.’

  I tried calling Chuchu repeatedly but got no answer. Philip Bennett, a correspondent of the Boston Globe, found him and reported that he had ‘sneaked around the bars and back streets of post-invasion Panama, steps ahead of US troops and with an idea for a children’s book forming inside his head’.

  ‘It’s a book for the Panamanian children of the next century,’ Chuchu told Bennett, sitting with his back to the wall of an obscure Chinese restaurant. ‘What’s happening today, nobody’s going to want to believe in the future.’

  Bennett described Chuchu as

  perhaps the saddest man in the country generally happy to have been invaded. A 61-year-old lieutenant in the dissolved Panamanian Defense Force, he is famous as the muse of Gen. Omar Torrijos, the military leader whose attempt to build nationalism in Panama through populism, force and charm was cut short by a plane crash in 1981. For Chuchu, the US invasion of December 20 was the catastrophic finale of a tragedy sealed by Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, whose cruel and corrupted rule did as much as the Americans to destroy Torrijos’s legacy. At the end, poor Panamanians waved American flags in gratitude from the rubble of their bombed homes.

  ‘We haven’t lost very much because we didn’t have anything,’ he said. ‘Nothing remains of Torrijos. There is nothing to defend. I’m more pessimistic than ever.’ Despite his enmity towards Noriega, Martínez is one of the few remaining officers in the Defense Force who has not surrendered himself to US Forces. Instead, his wife, who is Italian, and two children have left the country under diplomatic protection, leaving him semi-clandestine, writing articles and giving interviews in homes of friends.

  Chuchu admitted to the reporter that he didn’t fire a shot during the US invasion.

  At home when the fighting started, he attempted to drive to his assigned barracks but was turned back by roadblocks. He spent two days at a state office before returning home to find his 9-year-old daughter cowering from gunfire in the neighborhood. He bitterly condemned the US bombing of the slum near Noriega headquarters, which killed a number of Panamanians and left more than 10,000 homeless. He said a seismograph at the National University registered 417 explosions during the first hours of the invasion. ‘I could never hate the Yankees, but now we all see how cruel imperialism is.’

  A denunciation of the invasion by Chuchu appeared in Cuba’s Communist daily, Granma. It was vintage Chuchu. ‘Panama,’ he wrote, ‘is only a trench. The war is against all of Latin America, whether or not Latin America wants it, whether or not they dare to realize it or admit it and assume their responsibilities.’ He omitted any mention of Noriega and set out demands for indemnities for all the material damage the United States had caused in the country.

  In a letter dated 3 April 1990, Graham complained:

  The posts are terrible at the moment. Forgive a very hurried note and thank you too for the Boston Globe piece about Chuchu, but I have been very unwell since Christmas — twice in hospital a
nd bearing up with blood transfusions, vitamin injections and four different lots of pills! Yvonne thank goodness is well. Chuchu has been on the telephone to me several times and always sounds cheerful. I was very touched too to get a letter from [Vaclav] Hável asking after my health! Incidentally that’s very bad and travel is impossible.

  Then on 14 May he wrote:

  My sickness is not a painful one only boring because one sees no end to it. I do hope you will get back to Haiti for the Pope’s visit. I was astonished to read that Fidel had sent him an invitation! Yvonne and I send our love to you and Ginette and Jean-Bernard and I look forward to his photographs.

  On 6 June he wrote:

  It’s good to have news of you. I’m glad too to have the message from George Price [of Belize] whom I like very much. I would have loved to have seen Bosch back as President [of the Dominican Republic] if only as a smack in the eye for the United States who drove him out the first time. I am glad you are writing again on Haiti and look forward to reading it.

  In a letter to Jean-Bernard dated 23 May Graham thanked him for

  two very pretty photographs, which I will share with Yvonne. I’m getting on all right but all these transfusions and injections are a bit of a bore. I think your father was paying a visit to Haiti when I last heard from him. I hope this silence in the newspapers means their woman president is doing better than the man.

  On 5 October I received a letter that made me realize this was not a passing illness.

  It was good hearing from you but I wish we were seeing you closer. I was amused to read the other day that a priest had been kept for twenty-four hours at Haiti airport because his name happened to be Greene. I much look forward to your new Haiti book. Alas I’m not in very good health and I am unable to travel, but I do hope that one day you can come down here.

  The last letter I received from Graham was dated 20 November 1990, not from Antibes but from his new residence in Corseaux, Switzerland. He thanked me for my most recent letter and said:

  The Daily Express, as you could assume, have got things entirely wrong. Yvonne and I have taken this flat to escape from the noise and dirt that has developed in Antibes. I haven’t given up Antibes and I am not living with my daughter. I expect to spend most of the year here except perhaps a month or two in the winter when we will go back to Antibes. I sold my house in Capri to pay for the flat which is a very nice one with a beautiful view. [He had said earlier that he had purchased the Anacapri house with proceeds from The Third Man and that it was the only house he ever owned. He had also forgotten he had a Haitian publisher for The Comedians.] I never knew that I had a Haitian publisher! Do send me a copy of the book if it comes out. I had no idea that Father Aristide was putting himself up for the Presidency. It would be wonderful if he got in, though I doubt whether he would survive long.

  He sounded much better in this letter, if not a little forgetful. For some reason I believed he was indestructible and would recover. Perhaps that was because of his irrepressible zest for life. I promised I would visit him soon. However, I was busy covering Haiti. Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide had indeed made history by winning a landslide election victory on 16 December 1990. Aristide’s platform was a simple one: he promised change, and above all justice and transparency. The vast majority of the people saw in Father Aristide a messiah, a non-politician, although for a priest he had a strange Caligula-like enthusiasm for street justice. Graham was among the foreign dignitaries invited to President-elect Aristide’s inauguration on 7 February 1991. Yvonne herself sent a cable from Switzerland explaining that because of ill health he would not be able to accept the invitation.

  On 29 January 1991, a year after the US invasion, Chuchu, aged sixty-one, died of a heart attack after his usual morning jog in Panama City. ‘Chuchu Martínez murio de dolor y de rabia, declared the headline in Seminario Universidad, and it was quite possible that he had indeed died of pain and anger. Even international fame, which had come to him as a living Graham Greene character, was no longer gratifying. It did ensure, however, an obituary in England as well as in the New York Times. In the Independent David Adams reported, ‘Despite the current political climate of Panama, where all references to militarism have been eradicated, it is a tribute to Martínez that his political enemies joined his friends this week in lamenting the loss of one of the country’s most talented and colourful figures in recent history.’ The Independent quoted Graham as commenting, ‘Chuchu remained faithful to Marxism, but his first fidelity was always to Torrijos in spite of the general’s belief in social democracy which to Chuchu must have seemed like a cup of very lukewarm tea.’

  Chuchu’s world and dreams had come crashing down around him. The Cold War was over. Noriega, after a ten-day stand-off at the Papal Nunciature, surrendered to US forces and was dragged off to Miami to face US justice as Federal Prisoner 41586.

  Chuchu didn’t live to witness Noriega’s long and expensive trial, at the end of which he was sentenced to forty years in a US prison.

  In Nicaragua Chuchu’s friends, the Sandinistas, had been voted out of office on 25 February 1990, and Violeta de Chamorro, the widow of the slain publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, had won the presidency. In El Salvador the UN had helped negotiate a peace accord after the loss of seventy-five thousand lives, and Marcial’s vaunted guerrillas had reorganized themselves into a political party.

  Graham had outlived both the General and Chuchu. There would be no more telephone calls in the middle of the night from Panama.

  On 3 April 1991 Graham died in his flat in Corseaux. His long search for the definition of good and evil finally ended. The grand adventure was over, or, as he liked to say, another was just beginning. He had always said his preferred manner of death was a bullet, not a lingering infirmity. It was not to be.

  Yvonne, who had been his constant companion during the last years of his life, described how he worried about his correspondence up until the very end. As reserved as he was about his private life, friendship meant a lot to him and the mail was an important part of his life. He made a habit of answering every letter, especially if it came from a friend. Ultimately, tired and feeble from his blood transfusions, he found it impossible to cope with his letter writing.

  ‘Two weeks before he died,’ Yvonne told me, ‘he was in despair. One morning Caroline was in the flat. Suddenly he asked us to send a message to Amanda, who was then his secretary. It said, “Could you give a call to one of the English papers saying that Mr Greene is too tired and ill to reply to any letters. Would all his friends excuse him for not getting any answers.” Useless to say how puzzled we were by the idea, but we didn’t say anything. Caroline left a message on Amanda’s answering machine. In the evening she called from her home in England. She was upset. “But, Yvonne,” she said, “this will be a disaster for Graham. All the journalists and what not will be after him if they read that. Try to persuade him that this is the last thing to do.” It didn’t take me a long time to convince him that this was not the right thing to do, and he abandoned the project to our great relief.’

  For those who knew this warm self-deprecating man, whose boyish exuberance followed him into old age, there was no doubting the sincerity of his concern about the human condition. His politics were driven by simple sympathy for the underdog. He was often more welcome in the Third World than the First. And, while he liked to use the cover of boredom for his travels, as the Indian author Maríneza Couto writes, many of his biographers ‘fail to comprehend Greene’s need for experience outside of himself to illuminate the tragic sense of his art’.

  In a letter dated 9 May 1991 Amanda Saunders introduced herself to me.

  I am Graham Greene’s secretary and also his niece. As an old and close friend of Graham’s I felt sure you would like to have the enclosed information about the memorial service, which is being held for him. I would also like to ask for your help in advising me if there are any friends of Graham in Haiti or Central America who would like to be contacted about t
he memorial service. I was in Switzerland with Yvonne when Graham died and even though he had been ill for some time it still came as a shock — we somehow expected him to go on forever. We will miss him terribly.

  | EPILOGUE

  One afternoon in 1991 I drove out to see the Voodoo Mambo Lolotte in the Cul de Sac plain a few miles outside of Port-au-Prince. Lolette and the other women of her family were sorting freshly harvested yams in her peristyle (the central part of the temple). I told her I wanted to leave a bottle at a Voodoo temple in the Voodoo manner for the departed. ‘It is for a good friend, a bon blan [good white man], who died recently,’ I explained. She interrupted her labours and unlocked the door to a small thatched hut, the callie mystéres, home of the lwas — the spirits. It seemed like the natural thing to do. I told her the bottle was for the spirit of a writer who did what he could to help Haiti.

  The priestess’s muscular arms and legs were caked with mud from harvesting yams. She was a strong and handsome woman who did not live off her Voodoo but instead worked the land and never failed to pay dues to her gods, in the form of a rich ceremony to them. She traditionally celebrated the manger-yam Voodoo ceremony in her sanctuary, and it appeared to pay off. Most years she had a bumper crop. I think Graham would have liked her.

  As she opened the door of the hut enough sunlight seeped in to guide me to the altar dedicated to the lwas. I chose a little space between the dust-laden bottles of liqueurs, wines and spirits, discernible only by their shapes, in which to place Graham’s bottle of Stolichnaya. It would, I was confident, remain there and gather its own coat of dust from the neighbouring fields.

  There was no need for a bottle of vermouth. Graham used just a drop when mixing a martini. Lolotte did not ask any questions. She murmured a prayer and called upon ‘Bon Dieu’ to look after Graham’s spirit.