The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

  As his corse to the rampart we hurried;

  Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot

  O’er the grave where our hero we buried.20

  Greene and Durán then entered Basque country, the only time they did so in their many journeys. They crossed Asturias and stayed overnight in Vitoria, the chief city in what after 1978 would be known under the Spanish constitution as the Basque Autonomous Community, an act of devolution intended to put a stop to separatism. It was only with some reluctance that the priest revealed their identities to a young hotel desk clerk, who then asked for the novelist to autograph her copies of his books. By this stage in his life, Greene could not stay incognito for long.

  According to Durán, Greene had visited Vitoria before and was very fond of it. The north-eastern limit of their first journey was San Sebastián, on the seashore not far from Biarritz, and this was not a place Greene liked – all those bodies on the beach slowly roasting.21

  They returned to Madrid and then to the walled city of Avila, where at the Convent of the Incarnation they saw the preserved right index finger of St Teresa, from the hand with which she wrote her books22 – an object which Franco had kept in his possession. Despite this unsavoury association, Greene was a great enthusiast for St Teresa, with her exalted visions of God, her boundless energy, and her common sense. He was an even greater admirer of her contemporary, the poet St John of the Cross. Fundamentally, Greene trusted mystics far more than he did theologians: they were on the side of faith, whereas theologians stood for mere belief.

  In July 1977 – that is, a year later – Greene came back and this time, after their visit to the Abbey of Oseira, they made the long drive to Sintra in Portugal to see Maria Newall. Eighty-five now, she was still a formidable figure, even though she relied on walking sticks and soon a wheelchair. Her house was filled with books and flowers, and surrounded by a large garden. The travellers stayed with her for three days. As a young woman she had had trouble in her marriages and in a failed love affair, and was grieved by exclusion from the church. In old age, she was very fervent, and she was knowledgeable about theology – enough to engage her visitors in debate. But piety did not diminish her sense of humour. She and Greene started spouting wild heresies which Durán tried in vain to correct, and he grew increasingly angry until he realized that they were teasing him.

  Sintra became a regular destination for the priest and the novelist; Newall was glad to see them, and their stays lengthened to about a week. Although a forceful character, she was fragile, suffering a heart attack in 1978, and broken bones owing to osteoporosis. Greene played draughts with her and treated her very solicitously. Durán, who seemed to have a crush on her, remarked on her beauty and sanctity, and said Mass in her drawing room. She died in the early summer of 1984, just before Greene and Durán were to make one of their visits.23

  After their first visit to Newall in 1977, Greene and Durán went on to Cuenca in central Spain, a city famous for its cathedral and its hanging houses perched on stony outcrops – Greene thought it ‘spectacular’. They went also to El Taboso, the supposed home town of Don Quixote, which Greene had thought fictional until he read about it in Unamuno. There, as he reported to Newall, they visited a small museum which featured copies of Don Quixote signed by national leaders, including Ramsay MacDonald and Hitler; the one signed by Stalin had vanished.24

  As they drove, Greene had an idea for a new story. He remarked: ‘So it’s agreed: I’m Sancho, you’re the Monsignor.’25 He described what they had seen and done in a letter to Newell and added: ‘Father Durán was delighted by the story I started writing in my head – asking for his aid in technical matters – of a book to be called Monsignor Don Quixote. We added to the adventures of the Monsignor as we went along the road.’ By this time, Greene was also working on a novel about Panama, featuring a character based on the head of state’s bodyguard who happened to be a professor of mathematics, but Father Quixote had now seized centre stage: ‘Chuchu in Panama is going to be worried as I have now got another character to play with.’26

  By the spring of 1978, Greene had an opening chapter to show Durán.27 In November he contacted Tom Burns at The Tablet, the progressive Catholic magazine of which Greene was a trustee, offering him, for no charge, ‘the first chapter of a novel which probably will never be completed’. That excerpt, ‘How Father Quixote Became a Monsignor’, appeared in that year’s Christmas issue, and later sections in those of 1980 and 1981.28 The writing of this short novel was not easy, and at one point he believed he had the ending wrong – that the mayor should die rather than the priest, who, excommunicated, would then live out his years at the Abbey of Oseira, saying Masses in private for the souls of Sancho and Karl Marx.29 He reverted to the original plan, but all this took time, and it was not until December 1981 that he could tell Father Leopoldo that he had completed a draft.30

  As their friendship grew closer Greene spoke with the priest about his experience of writing a novel, how at times he could only shut down the urge to write by taking sleeping pills.31 He also described the sheer intuitiveness of his work:

  A novel is a work in which characters interrelate. It doesn’t need a plot. The novelist’s own intervention must be very limited. What happens to the author of a novel is rather like the pilot of a plane. The pilot needs to get the plane off the ground. It takes off with the help of the pilot. Once it is in the air, the pilot does virtually nothing. Once everything has started working, the characters begin to impose themselves on the author, who no longer controls them. They have a life of their own. The author has to go on writing. Sometimes he writes things which appear to have no raison d’être. Only at the end is the reason apparent. The author intervenes to allow the plane to land. It is time for the novel to end.32

  Monsignor Quixote touched down in mid-September 1982. William Trevor wrote: ‘Father Quixote benefits greatly from his travels but his companion benefits more, and we most of all. Mr Greene, who has travelled long and far himself, has rarely done so as remarkably as in this profound and funny novel’.33 American reviewers tended to express similar opinions: a few felt that Greene had overdone the parallels with Cervantes, but most applauded an almost hypnotically attractive book. As Frederick Busch put it: ‘He is at his best in this novel, and he knows it.’34

  69

  THE DIPLOMATIC PASSPORT

  ‘I thought that I had lost for ever the excitement of a long plane journey to an unknown place . . . Now after the drinks the old sense of adventure returns.’1 It was 3 December 1976, that is, about five months after the first of his Quixotic journeys in Spain and Portugal, and now Greene was flying towards Panama in the first of five visits. This would prove the last great international ‘involvement’ of his long life, and would form the basis of some major articles, a memoir, an abandoned novel, and a completed one. It would also gain for him, however briefly, a diplomatic passport.

  The tiny country of Panama, through which much of the world’s shipping passes, was created by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 out of what had been a province of Colombia. He fomented a secession movement there, and set up a new country, in the middle of which was the Panama Canal Zone, fifty miles long and ten wide controlled by the United States as if it were a sovereign territory. Possession of the Zone was governed by a treaty signed by the United States and France, but not by Panama. The Americans bought out French interest in a failed project to build a canal and brought it to completion in 1914.

  The Americans paid almost nothing to the new republic – a pittance in shipping tolls – for what amounted to a colony, and relations between the two countries were never easy. Indeed, when American forces overthrew the regime of Manuel Noriega in December 1989 it was actually their twentieth military intervention in Panama since 1856. Over the years, the Zone assumed aspects of American life, including a ‘Jim Crow’ segregation of the majority of black workers from whites. American stewardship of
the Zone was poor; construction damaged the environment, as did secret testing of chemical weapons and storage of depleted uranium.2 The Canal Zone was also home to the School of the Americas, which taught advanced anti-insurgency techniques to soldiers from some of the most repressive regimes in Latin America.

  Possession of the canal offered obvious mercantile and strategic advantages to the United States, which they were loath to surrender, and Americans living in the Zone took a particularly hard line against negotiations. Meanwhile, it became a point of national pride among Panamanians to reclaim the Zone, and on 9 January 1964 university students tried to raise the Panamanian flag there. Riots broke out, and American forces killed twenty-one people and wounded more than five hundred.3 The Johnson administration could see that a new treaty was required that would maintain American control of the canal and satisfy the nationalist strivings of Panamanians – a difficult objective. Nonetheless, agreements were drafted with the Panamanian government led by President Marco Robles; while abrogating the 1903 treaty with its perpetuity clause, they established the neutrality of the canal but allowed for American forces to remain on the isthmus and for the Panamanians to take a hand in management of the canal. Nationalists did not like these terms, and Johnson faced opposition in the Senate, so the agreements withered on the vine.4

  Meanwhile, Panama was about to produce an extraordinary, if flawed, leader. Political leadership was generally restricted to a small number of rich families. In October 1968, the conservative Arnulfo Arias Madrid, belonging to such a clan, managed to manoeuvre himself into the presidency of Panama, and while few doubted that he was a crook, his accession was more or less constitutional.

  A warhorse of Panamanian politics who in his youth had supported Mussolini and Hitler,5 he had held the post twice before, and immediately tried to solidify his position. Within days of taking office he sought to purge the National Guard, which the Americans had supported and equipped as a guarantor of stability in country. The National Guard had interfered in politics in the past and its officers tended to be nepotistic and greedy for kickbacks.6 Arias was promptly overthrown in a coup led by the right-wing Colonel Boris Martínez and the pragmatist Colonel Omar Torrijos. Soon after, Martínez was exiled and Torrijos took charge.

  In late 1969, Torrijos was visiting Mexico when a counter-coup took place at home, and it was assumed that he would remain abroad. Not for the last time, he defied expectations. He boarded a plane and headed home. A military commander in Chiriquí Province near the border with Costa Rica took the risky step of permitting him to land in the city of David – that commander was Manuel Noriega.7 Joined by other loyalists, Torrijos began a celebratory motorcade down the isthmus to the capital, and in a surge of popular support took back power. Those who had attempted the coup were imprisoned, but escaped to the Canal Zone. Torrijos went on to consolidate a broad coalition that included the military, student groups, and many rural workers; he brought about impressive reforms in healthcare and education, and embarked on an ambitious programme of public works. He was also responsible for the growth of international banking in the country,8 and as the Panama Papers scandal of 2016 demonstrated, the country became a good place to hide money.

  In 1971, Torrijos put Noriega in charge of G-2, the country’s intelligence service. In the following year or so some branches of American intelligence decided that Noriega was very trustworthy, just as they dropped plans to kill or overthrow Torrijos and to have his brother Moisés Torrijos prosecuted for drug trafficking.9 Despite their earlier support for the counter-coup, the CIA decided that Torrijos, for all his revolutionary rhetoric, was actually a force for stability. The KGB courted him especially from 1977, referring to him by the codename RODOM. He accepted the presents they gave him, such as a hunting rifle and a selection of vodkas, but he seems to have done almost nothing for the Soviets apart from complain about Americans. He was using the contacts, which he took little trouble to conceal, to scare the Carter administration into concluding a new treaty.10

  Panama had a far better human rights record than most Latin American countries at the time, but there was repression, and it was typically carried out by G-2. An international commission determined that by 1977 thirty-four murders were attributable to the regime, mostly in its turbulent first four years, and that torture had sometimes been employed against its enemies.11 As the ‘chief of the revolution’, Torrijos was ultimately responsible for this, and it is a scar on his record. Moreover, his manner of taking power and holding it was illegitimate. He did permit elections to a weak assembly, but banned political parties and hand-picked government ministers. Although a maverick with notable accomplishments, he was very much a strongman or caudillo.

  Bernard Diederich, Greene’s old friend from Haiti, was now based in Mexico City as Time magazine’s Central American correspondent. On 11 October 1971, the third anniversary of the Panamanian revolution, he attended what was possibly the largest demonstration ever held in the country. Never comfortable at a podium or indeed in his formal white uniform, Torrijos still lit a fire with his speech, declaring that his country would not go down on its knees: ‘What people can bear the humiliation of seeing a foreign flag planted in the very heart of its nation?’ While the elites generally dismissed him as uneducated and unsophisticated, the handsome and charismatic Torrijos was clearly loved by the ordinary people, and he had stirred them up, just hinting at an armed seizure of the canal. He had, however, shrewdly forestalled any repetition of the 1964 riots by posting guards to turn back the crowds from the Zone.12 Over the years, he observed, even as it went against his temperament, the advice of Fidel Castro to remain moderate in his confrontations with the United States.13

  No one was killed that day, so Diederich’s story on this pivotal demonstration was spiked, but he could see that Torrijos was a new kind of leader. He soon wrote a letter to Greene endorsing Torrijos’s stand with regard to the canal,14 and the novelist began to study the history and politics of the country, with a view to going there. At a meeting with Diederich, Torrijos spoke of his love of the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, so the journalist mentioned Graham Greene, whom the General had not heard of, as a leading writer who would be sympathetic to his cause. He described how The Comedians had damaged Papa Doc far more than if he had faced an army of exiles. Torrijos was intrigued to hear of Greene’s encounters with Salvador Allende, and decided he wanted to meet this ‘Viejo Ingles’.15

  As early as March 1973, Greene asked Diederich to help him arrange a visit,16 but it took three years for it to happen, by which time Ronald Reagan’s tough talk about Panama in the Republican primaries had put the country in the headlines. Long after, Greene wrote that he had been ‘mystified’ by the invitation he received in 1976. This was not actually true: he had asked Diederich to help him organize a visit, but the two agreed that Greene should not write about his efforts as Diederich did not want to be seen as part of the stories that he had to cover as a journalist.17

  Now seventy-two, Greene relied a good deal on Bernard Diederich. The jet-lagged novelist arrived first in Panama, and was ‘gloomy’ until his friend arrived at the hotel: ‘Why had I left my home in Antibes and my friends and come to Panama where the hours moved so slowly, even though they no longer moved backward.’18 It had been about a decade since he had seen Diederich; Greene wrote in his journal, ‘We drank whisky & gossiped. The years seemed to have changed neither of us.’19 Diederich was fluent in Spanish, and knew all the people Greene would need to meet. When Greene was invited to go to the interior of the country with Torrijos, he insisted that Diederich accompany him – Torrijos overruled his subordinates, especially a PR man named Fabian Velarde, who wanted to control how his visit was reported: ‘Señor Greene is our guest. He can bring whom he likes.’20 The General later told him to do the opposite of whatever Velarde wanted. Already ill, this PR man died of a heart attack almost immediately after Greene’s departure, causing the novelist to muse on whether his visit had been too much for him.
21

  The next day, a driver picked them up, assuming he was some other man named Greene – always there was that ‘other’. Once returned to the hotel, Greene and Diederich were fetched by the right car to see the General. Their driver was a hot-headed polymath who in a novel – and Greene did try to put him in one – might seem improbable. Sergeant José de Jesús Martínez, generally known as ‘Chuchu’ (a diminutive for Jesús), was born in Nicaragua, had studied at the Sorbonne, and was a professor of mathematics and philosophy, as well as a poet and playwright. A Marxist and an atheist who claimed to believe in the devil, he spoke five languages, and had joined the military after being greatly moved by hearing recruits singing patriotic songs. Against the odds, he got through his training, and became a member of Torrijos’s security detail while continuing to teach part time.22 His rank was only that of sergeant because he preferred it that way; some years later he accepted promotion.

  Torrijos liked to surround himself with advisers representing the whole political spectrum, and Chuchu acted, in Diederich’s phrase, as his ‘left-hand man’.23 He undertook many delicate tasks for Torrijos, and operated a ‘pigeon house’, a refuge for political exiles from other Latin American countries that would have been unthinkable in the days of Arias. On this occasion, Chuchu served as Greene’s chauffeur and, when Diederich was absent, translator. Often drunk and frequently disappearing in pursuit of estranged wives and mistresses – and, on one occasion, a lost dog – he endeared himself to the novelist, who found him lovable, exasperating, and altogether brilliant.