The Unquiet Englishman
Page 15
Throughout this period, priests were regarded as enemies of the state. In April 1927, all the bishops were expelled, and in total 2500 priests, nuns, monks, bishops, and seminarians took refuge in the United States during the war,17 but others chose to stand their ground. The uprisings were rural, so priests who remained in Mexico were generally left alone as long as they stayed in the cities. For many years, it was believed that only about a hundred priests remained in the countryside by choice, of whom about forty-five were involved with the Cristeros, with the rest living as fugitives in the rural parishes. Recent research indicates that these numbers grossly underestimate those who kept up a clandestine ministry.
In the course of the rebellion ninety priests were executed,18 of whom the most famous was the Jesuit Miguel Pro, who figures in both of Greene’s books about Mexico, and in fact reminded him of the Elizabethan Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, the subject of a biography by Evelyn Waugh. Having ingeniously slipped out of several police traps, Padre Pro was even arrested and released without the police realizing whom they had in custody. Finally caught and identified, he was brought to a police station in Mexico City. In revenge for an assassination attempt on the president (in which he had no part) Pro and his brother were to be executed without trial. On 23 November 1927, Pro was called from his cell. Having refused a blindfold, he spread out his arms in the form of a cross and cried ‘¡Viva Cristo Rey!’ He was shot by the firing squad, then finished off by a single bullet at point-blank range. The government published photographs of the execution in the belief that they would discourage the Catholic opposition, but they had the opposite effect: Pro was seen as a martyr and an inspiration.19 He was eventually beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1988.
Greene’s arrangements to visit Mexico came together very quickly in January 1938. Leaving the children with Marion and Charles, he and Vivien boarded the ocean liner SS Normandie on the 29th and spent fifty-six straight hours in bed because of gales in the Atlantic. In New York, Vivien went on ‘an orgy of shopping’20 while Graham consulted representatives of the Mexican church in exile and obtained instructions and introductions. Mary Leonard threw a party for him and brought him to meet his new publishers at Viking Press. After nine days, the Greenes went on to Charlottesville and New Orleans, and from there Vivien headed home at the end of February.
Graham’s route took him, by train, to Texas. In San Antonio he visited the College of the Incarnate Word, which was the headquarters for Mexican clergy in Texas,21 and spoke with an old prelate who received him in a dressing gown. He can be identified as José de Jesús Manríquez y Zárate, the former Bishop of Huejutla who remained in exile until 1948 and was an activist among the emigrant communities.
This stubborn bishop wanted the Cristeros to keep fighting and was enraged by the attitude of the Vatican. He told Greene of another bishop’s remark that the pope was ‘infallible about faith & morals but not infallible about Mexico’. He even believed that Trotsky, then an exile in Mexico City, was behind everything, including President Cárdenas’s present policy of moderation.22 The sponsors of Greene’s visit favoured a degree of accommodation with the government and regarded Manríquez y Zárate as a troublemaker.
The city of San Antonio itself struck Greene as pleasant but symptomatic of America, in that its depths were no different from it surfaces: ‘Original sin under the spell of elegance has lost its meaning. Where, I thought, loitering on a bridge above the little tamed river, was there any sign of that “terrible aboriginal calamity” which Newman perceived everywhere.’23 America, for Greene, was the great spiritual deception – the heresy of well-being.
While in San Antonio, he attended a meeting of pecan workers, whose strike for higher wages had been largely led by a priest and an archbishop – it was an example of how Catholic social teaching rejected both capitalism and communism. As if in rebellion against the superficial rightness of American life, he went to a freak show featuring the preserved bodies of two gangsters, an entertainment meant ‘to satisfy some horrifying human need for ugliness’.24
Around 1 March 1938, Greene crossed into Mexico at Laredo.25 He would face some difficulty making himself understood from this point, as after twenty Berlitz lessons in Spanish he could still only manage the present tense.26 He presented himself at the border as a tourist and a student of antiquities. Once inside the country, he still needed to keep his wits about him as it was always possible to be ‘thirty-three’d’ – under Clause 33 of the constitution, undesirable foreigners could be expelled from the country on twenty-four hours’ notice.27
At the time of his visit, gringos were exceedingly unpopular. The international oil companies had just rejected Labour Board rulings on wages and labour practices, so President Cárdenas nationalized the industry.28 The British government would break off diplomatic ties with Mexico over the episode. Greene refers to the nationalization in The Lawless Roads, generally disapproving of the Mexican government’s action, but also of the British response – part of his reaction was based on Mexico’s subsequent export deals with Italy and Germany.29 Important as all this was, he was in the country to look at a massive violation of human rights. The oil dispute was not his brief.
Once across the border, he spent the night in a hotel while a thunderstorm rumbled about him. As he would often do while in Mexico, he tried to calm himself by reading Anthony Trollope: ‘There is no peace anywhere where there is human life, but there are, I told myself, quiet and active sectors of the line.’30 The following day, Ash Wednesday, he took a train to Monterrey. The cathedral was open and he was able to attend Mass and receive ashes. By 1938, the worst of the religious repression had ended, and some churches were functioning. Although his real intentions were hard to determine, Cárdenas had stated that the best way to end religion was by socialist education, and he had exiled his old mentor Plutarco Elías Calles. However, there was still a great deal of religious repression in Mexico, especially in the south, and that was where Greene was headed.
From Monterrey he went for a week into the state of San Luis Potosi31 to interview Saturnino Cedillo at his home in Las Palomas. A general under Calles, Cedillo had played an important role in having him deported, and then served for a time as Secretary of Agriculture, but was now thought of as the possible leader of a rebellion. Cedillo did not believe in religion, but, as the dominant figure in his state, was willing to respect the wishes of those who did. Moreover, he was disgusted by the treachery shown to the Cristeros after the peace of 1929, and allowed many survivors to take refuge in his state. Cedillo welcomed Greene but was evasive, submitting to the arranged interview reluctantly. As it turned out, he was about to go into rebellion himself and would be killed in the mountains in January 1939 – a development Greene had to work into his manuscript at the last minute.32
Greene went on to Mexico City, where, in a characteristic pairing, he made visits to a monastery and to a brothel. Also, he met with church leaders. In The Lawless Roads, Greene takes the position of the hierarchy even though the idea of witnessing a revolt, perhaps led by Cedillo, excited him. The Vatican did not wish the church to be represented by political parties, let alone armies. During the Cristero War, Rome had offered a very cautious endorsement of armed resistance until it decided that the Cristeros could not win: Catholic theories of the just war require a serious prospect of success. Rome instructed the Mexican church to adopt the methods of Catholic Action, a movement at work in various countries, including Nazi Germany. This meant focusing on education, catechesis, and spiritual formation, and the organization charged with implementing Catholic Action was the Secretariado Social Mexicano, whose leader, Miguel Darío Miranda, now a bishop himself, had originally encouraged Frank Sheed to organize a visit by Graham Greene.
Greene went to the headquarters of the Secretariado, but had the door slammed on him. He was finally let in by a young priest, whom he called ‘Father Q’ in The Lawless Roads but whose real name was Father Ernesto Gomez Tagle. Apart from his work as an
administrator with the Secretariado, this man ran a reading group for intellectuals in Mexico City and was involved with a labour federation. He gave Greene information on the Secretariado’s educational campaign, including an extremely successful programme that had trained young women in doctrine and prepared them to work as catechists. He was also the first to tell him about a fugitive priest who for ten years had pursued a clandestine ministry in Tabasco.33
Shortly after, Greene met the Bishop of Chiapas. A figure of some heft, this man had led a delegation to New York where they met with the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII), as he gathered information for a new encyclical published in March 1937, supporting the idea of Catholic Action in Mexico rather than armed struggle.34 Thirty-five years later, in The Honorary Consul, Greene would depict with sympathy a priest fighting in a guerrilla war. His position in Mexico was more cautious and in line with church authority. It is worth noting that Vatican policy on Mexico was largely decided by Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo,35 one of the main promoters of Catholic Action throughout the world and a theological conservative who would try to have The Power and the Glory suppressed in 1954 (see pp. 248–50).36
As the journey went on, Greene was himself experiencing, as never before in his life, a sense of religious fervour. Just north of Mexico City is the Shrine of Guadalupe, the most famous site of Catholic devotion in the New World. Kneeling before the image of the Virgin imprinted on a peasant’s serape, he considered how at the end of journeys it was customary to return and thank her, and he promised to do the same. Yet the fervour went hand in hand with a growing outrage. When his train brought him to Orizaba in Veracruz, he had a yearning to have his confession heard and was impressed by the serenity of his confessor: ‘He had lived through so much; what right had an English Catholic to bitterness or horror at human nature when this Mexican priest had none?’37
A year later he would find himself mystified at the anger recorded in his journal and offer various inadequate explanations, including the loss of his glasses: ‘ . . . strained eyes may have been one cause of my growing depression, the almost pathological hatred I began to feel for Mexico. Indeed, when I try to think back to those days, they lie under the entrancing light of chance encounters, small endurances, unfamiliarity, and I cannot remember why at the time they seemed so grim and helpless.’38 It is normal to be outraged by violence, but his reactions against Mexicans were extreme – afterwards he could not understand them himself, and he generally kept those reactions out of The Power and the Glory. It is not unreasonable to suppose that his mood disorder, as yet undiagnosed, had been triggered: excessive irritability is a common symptom of manic depression.39
Greene arrived in Veracruz on 20 March 1938 intending to stay for a few days, only to find that there was a vessel sailing for Tabasco the following evening. A humid and marshy state in the extreme south of the country, part of which borders on Guatemala, Tabasco was where the persecution was at its worst and Greene was anxious to see it. He spent forty-one fearful hours in a tiny, rolling boat on the Atlantic.40 Coming to port in Frontera, he made another boat trip, of ten hours, up the Grijalva River to Villahermosa, the capital, where he spent the next week.41
‘The Godless State’42 had been the preserve of the local dictator, Tomás Garrido y Canabal. A Marxist and an atheist, he required all priests to marry. Those who did not comply he killed, imprisoned, or drove into exile. He operated a group of ‘Red Shirt’ paramilitaries, who were guilty of many atrocities. In addition to stamping out the church in the state, he banned liquor and corsets,43 so Greene referred to him scathingly as an ‘incorruptible’ man.44 When Cárdenas became president in 1934, Garrido was appointed Secretary of Agriculture and brought his Red Shirts with him to Mexico City. Just after Christmas that year they killed five church-goers in the suburb of Coyoacan45 and frequently harassed Catholics with a connection to Tabasco. By June 1935, Cárdenas had had enough and replaced him with Saturnino Cedillo, to the relief of Catholics throughout the country. Garrido returned to Tabasco, where he was immediately responsible for the machine-gunning of student demonstrators. A popular uprising then drove him into exile in Costa Rica.46
Even with the dictator gone, Tabasco was a desolate place. The old policies continued and the surviving priests did not dare to return. There were no Masses and no absolutions, which led Greene to think of Rilke’s description of ‘a town where nothing is forgiven’,47 and he remained curious about the fugitive priest: he ‘existed for ten years in the forests and the swamps, venturing out only at night; his few letters, I was told, recorded an awful sense of impotence – to live in constant danger and yet to be able to do so little . . . ’ A doctor told Greene, ‘ “he was just what we call a whisky priest” ’. The doctor had taken one of his sons to him for baptism, and the drunken priest insisted on naming the boy Brigitta.48
A strange mixture of weakness and strength, this alcoholic priest, Father Macario Fernández Aguado, was born in Michoácan and by 1912 was ordained and living in Tabasco. Around 1919, he was assigned to a parish in the city of Jalpa, where he can hardly have been an effective pastor, and yet, when the persecution came, he continued his ministry even though all the other priests left the state. He did, of course, have help: people of the Chol, the Zoque, and especially the Chontal aboriginal communities kept him safe in a hiding place near the border of Chiapas, and he ventured out from there.
For a time there was a second notable fugitive, a Chontal catechist, Gabriel García, whose heroism was more straightforward. Advocating resistance by peaceful means, García had kept the faith alive in the mainly aboriginal town of San Carlos by preaching, singing, teaching, and even playing a gramophone record of the Mass. Garrido tolerated this influential catechist for political reasons until August 1929, when a ‘defanaticization’ fair ended in the slaughter of seventeen Catholics and one or two policemen. Soon there was an effort to blame Father Macario and Gabriel García for the killings.
García fled to Mexico City, then returned to Tabasco and hid in the mountains and swamps, eventually locating Father Macario, but at the end of September 1930 he was betrayed and caught. It is believed that Garrido’s henchmen followed their usual procedure of carving up the body and dumping it in a river to avoid identification. Father Macario continued his lonely work until 1935, when he too was captured. His supporters tried to rescue him but failed, and he was deported to Guatemala.49 Garrido was driven from power the same year, and this may explain the priest’s comparatively mild fate. Greene supposed that he was still at large, and was apparently unaware that a great many other priests had carried on clandestine ministries elsewhere in Mexico.
While in Villahermosa, Greene was afflicted with the company of an American dentist, who was married to Garrido’s niece and seemed always to be hiding from her. The falling peso trapped him in Mexico, so he spent his days moaning about family life and the state of his stomach. Homesick, Greene spent the evening of 28 March, his last in Villahermosa, in a hotel room crushing large beetles and reading Anthony Trollope. In the morning he walked to the airport past a pockmarked cemetery wall that Garrido’s firing squads had used for executions. From a six-seater plane, he looked down on ‘the landscape of a hunted man’s terror and captivity’, beyond which the mountains of Chiapas looked ‘like a prison wall’.50
The plane landed just beyond the state border, in the town of Salto de Agua. The situation in Chiapas was oppressive, but not like that in Tabasco. Greene wanted to travel to the village of Yajalón and then quickly on to the old state capital of San Cristóbal de las Casas, and so to start slowly back towards Mexico City. No guide was available, so he accepted an alternative – a long mule ride to see some Mayan ruins. During this side trip, Greene became exhausted and feverish, and was brought to a finca run by a brother and sister, Lutherans of German descent, where he rested, and even bathed in a stream among fish the size of sardines that tugged at his nipples. The siblings, with their odd mixture o
f tolerance and Protestant rectitude, would serve as models for characters in The Power and the Glory.51
Travelling by mule back to Salto, Greene stayed for a night as the guest of some indigenous people in a hut on the plain. Always terrified by birds, he was tormented by turkeys and chickens, as well as by the pigs. Lightning struck within a hundred yards of where he was sleeping, and he spent the night saying ‘Hail Marys’ and shivering. Back in Salto, he boarded another tiny plane and, flying between the mountains rather than above them, reached the village of Yajalón. There he met another Lutheran, a sorrowful Norwegian woman named Rasmussen who had lost both her husband and her eldest daughter. She had sent her sons to the United States for education and her two surviving daughters got their schooling by correspondence – they would later give Greene the idea for the Fellows family. One of the most memorable characters in the novel is the young Coral Fellows, who assists the priest and whose mysterious death occurs, Greene later explained, when she is accidentally shot by the gringo as he is trying to make his escape from the police.52