The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  The battle over the marriage subjected Greene, tough-minded as he was, to unremitting strain for about seven years. It was a daily concern until well after his eightieth birthday in 1984, and it ground him down. Shirley Hazzard, never one to overdo compassion, recalled how court cases interrupted his usual pattern of visits to Capri: ‘When we did coincide on the island, he was exceptionally on edge, the need for an adversary not appeased by evils on what he called la Côte d’Ordure.’21

  Other people could also see the effects. Graham and Yvonne had maintained a pleasant friendship with Mercia Rhynier, Greene’s former lover who had trapped wild animals for zoos and later married Rex Harrison (see above, p. 247), but it came to an end when Mercia remarked to Yvonne that Graham looked awful and reproached her for having involved him in her daughter’s troubles.22 This was not entirely fair on Yvonne, as it was always in his personality to take sides, but it does indicate that the business turned Graham Greene, at last, into an old man.

  74

  I AM THE MESSAGE

  Chuchu was something of a nag. He had been on the phone urging Greene to come back to Panama, but the novelist did not want to go. Without the General, ‘it would be like going to see Hamlet played by an understudy’.1 Then Chuchu seems to have ratcheted up the pressure by giving Greene’s telephone number to Ernesto Cardenal, who invited Greene to Nicaragua on behalf of the junta. This was a more formal request, so Greene politely equivocated.

  In August 1982, Greene had ‘escaped’ from Antibes, where he felt besieged by mafiosi and avocats, to England for about ten days and begun a book to be called Getting to Know the General, chiefly about Torrijos and Chuchu. He wanted to pay tribute to his dead friend and to write about the troubles of the region. It was also to be an elegy for his failed novel, ‘On the Way Back’. By early October, he had about a quarter of it written.2 Going to Panama again would certainly help with the book.

  Finally, Chuchu got him to agree, but since he was still fighting three of the four lawsuits arising from J’Accuse he wanted to stay no more than two weeks. He wrote to Vivien that he was undertaking the journey, ‘to light a small fire under the fool Reagan’.3 As the plane entered Panamanian airspace on 3 January 1983, he felt a ‘depression, anxiety & sense of frustration’ at the thought of being in the country with Torrijos dead.4 He landed at an airport now named for the General, and was met by Chuchu, who had suggested Greene’s visit could be ‘of use’, though for what was unclear.5

  When Torrijos’s plane went down, so too did his cautious plans for a return to democracy. After a year of upheavals there was still a civilian president, Ricardo de la Espriella, but the real power lay with three military officers, General Rubén Darío Paredes, Colonel Manuel Noriega, and Colonel Roberto Díaz Herrera – these were the understudies to Torrijos. Greene thought none of them comparable to his old friend, least of all the very crass Paredes who gave him a gold Rolex watch, of a sort that Greene later saw selling in Paris for sixty-six thousand francs.6

  Torrijos had never encouraged him to get to know Noriega, even though they had met in passing. Greene found him pleasant enough on this visit, and they discussed whether Greene should accept an invitation to go to Cuba after his stay in Nicaragua. However, in his journal, he compared Noriega to Trujillo, the murderous former ruler of the Dominican Republic – so he evidently had his doubts about him.7 He was building a powerbase by consolidating intelligence, the police, and the National Guard. At the time of Greene’s visit, it was believed that Paredes, a right-winger, would be elected to the largely ceremonial post of president and that the two colonels would actually be in control, and so continue the policies of Torrijos. Of the three, Greene found Díaz, the chief of security and a cousin of Torrijos, the most appealing, as did Chuchu. By the end of the summer of 1983, Noriega had got rid of Paredes altogether and was running the country with Díaz as chief of staff, but Díaz too was eventually sidelined and exiled.8 Greene later condemned Noriega but remarked, ‘if I have to choose between a drug dealer and United States imperialism I prefer the drug dealer’.9

  He went in a helicopter with Chuchu and Omar’s daughter to see the crash site, something Chuchu, for all his certainty about a bomb, had not done before.10 The helicopter was bucketing in high winds and Greene wondered if they might be killed in exactly the spot where Omar had met his end.11 Chuchu wanted to fly him around Panama and Nicaragua in his little Cessna, but Díaz and Paredes put a stop to that.

  At a reception on 6 January 1983, President de la Espriella presented Greene with the Grand Cross of the Order of Vasco Núñez de Balboa. The novelist felt embarrassed as he got tangled in the ribbon and the stars: ‘I felt like a Christmas tree in process of being hung with presents.’ He was glad to be associated with Panama in such a way, but he was certain that he did not deserve the honour and thought that the ceremony might be chiefly a signal to the Nicaraguans that he could be trusted as a messenger.12

  Greene’s visit to Managua seems to have been symbolic: the colonels were sending a famous friend of Torrijos as a sign that they honoured the General’s legacy, including his friendly attitude towards the Sandinistas, who were now facing a war with the American-backed Contras, many of whom had once fought for Somoza. More narrowly, Díaz and Noriega wanted to send a message that they would not be pulled to the right, even if Paredes became president. Greene later reflected on whether the Panamanians were using him, and remarked: ‘I have never hesitated to be “used” in a cause I believed in, even if my choice might be only for a lesser evil. We can never foresee the future with any accuracy.’13

  Joined by Diederich in Managua, he met Ernesto Cardenal, Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo, Tomás Borge, and Humberto Ortega. From both Humberto Ortega and Borge he heard very sharp criticisms of Noriega, whom they seemed to regard as the rising man in Panama but tainted by association with Paredes. Greene attended a party for the novelist Carlos Fuentes at the Mexican embassy and noted in his journal that the man’s last book was ‘unreadable’. There was a plan for Fuentes to go that day to the Honduran frontier, where the Contras were making their incursions, ‘but he was scared. So am I, but I’ll have to go.’14 He did that on 9 January 1983, and came within 300 metres of the frontier, in an area where indiscriminate mortar fire killed two or three people per day and the actual raids were more deadly still. In this sector, he watched very old and very young people training for the militia, and his escorts were on constant lookout for an ambush. Greene felt that the Land Rover he was in resembled a coffin: if attacked it would be impossible to get out.15

  Back in Managua, he met Lenin Cerna, the chief of security, who showed him various booby-trapped devices that the Contras were supposedly planting in the countryside. Greene was especially outraged by a child’s lunchbox featuring Mickey Mouse but containing an explosive. Diederich noted that not everyone who saw Cerna’s displays was certain of their authenticity.16 Greene had no doubt and often spoke of the Mickey Mouse bombs as a sign of the wickedness of the Contra war.17

  For all his talk about lesser evils, he did see some things that he regarded as absolutely good. Above all, he was impressed by two Maryknoll nuns from the United States living in poverty in Ciudad Sandino, a community of sixty thousand on the outskirts of Managua. Their home was a tin-roofed hut with water supplied by a standpipe in the yard. One of them had lived like this for ten years and seen the whole war with Somoza; she had recently observed a great improvement in medical care for the local people. Also, those people now had secure possession of their homes, whereas in the past they could be thrown out at any time by landlords.18

  He spoke with the nuns about the Miskito indigenous people from the Río Coco area bordering Honduras. Since the Contras were recruiting among this group, the Sandinistas forcibly removed 8500 of them to inland camps; another ten thousand fled to Honduras; and seven thousand were moved to coffee plantations.19 There were reliable reports of Sandinista soldiers killing or torturing Miskito people to find out about the Contras or t
o force resettlement.20 The Reagan administration characterized this as genocide. Greene raised the matter with Borge, who admitted that the soldiers had behaved ‘clumsily’ and failed to explain to the people that they were being moved from a war zone.

  One of the Maryknoll nuns had visited the camps and found the people there had good food and housing, and better medical care than had previously been available to them.21 What she could not have seen was the manner of their removal from traditional lands, which was certainly repressive. Nonetheless, Greene quoted her, for example in a letter to The Times on 15 October 1983, disputing claims made by Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, about the ‘most brutal maltreatment’ of the Miskitos. In 1987, the Sandinista government reversed its policy towards the Miskito people, allowed them to return, and, in a bold move, granted indigenous peoples autonomy in areas amounting to about half the country.22 Sadly, even this was not enough to repair all the injustices concerning land. Thirty years later, the Miskito people near the Río Coco are still caught in a cycle of violence. Murders are commonplace, as other ethnic groups, notably mestizos, seek to settle near the lush rainforest,23 and Miskito control of their traditional homeland remains, at best, a theory.

  While in Managua, Greene had another meeting with Salvador Cayetano, the rebel leader responsible for the abduction of Ambassador Dunn. This time the novelist was struck by his age rather than by an air of cruelty; he seemed much older than his reported sixty-three years and now wore a wispy ‘Ho Chi Minh’ beard.24 He greeted Greene with something like affection, and seemed ‘full of optimism’ about a quick victory.25 Unfolding a large map on the floor, he began, like a schoolmaster, to explain the military position in El Salvador. He gave Greene a book he had written under his own name but inscribed it with his codename ‘Marcial’ – the novelist judged from this that his security arrangements were looser now.26 That was the last Greene would see of him. About three months later, his second-in-command was killed at a Managua safe house; she was stabbed eighty times and her throat cut. Cayetano was in Libya at the time, but was implicated in her killing. Some days later, he died of a bullet to the heart, said to be self-inflicted.27 Both deaths remain a mystery.

  Greene had no interest in going to Cuba unless he could see Castro again. He certainly did not want to go as the guest of a cultural agency. While in Managua, he received confirmation that the invitation was indeed from Fidel himself, so on 11 January 1983 he made his last visit to Havana aboard a small jet formerly used by Somoza; the pilot was amused to see him choose the very seat that the dictator had always preferred. Greene was lodged in a new hotel in a quarter he was not acquainted with, so could not revisit the places he knew from the past.28

  The meeting with Fidel was to take place in the evening. Gabriel García Márquez was visiting at the same time, and was glad to see Greene as the two were by now friends. They spoke about Greene’s war in Nice, and the Englishman said plainly, ‘I’d rather die of a bullet in the head than a cancer of the prostate’.29 Ever the night owl, Fidel appeared at 1 a.m., and Greene thought that he looked far more relaxed than at their meeting sixteen years earlier.

  Fidel was amused by the novelist’s greeting: ‘I am not a messenger. I am the message.’ Of course, Greene was an emissary from the two colonels, and his role was to signal that, regardless of the right-wing General Paredes, Panama would stay the course set by Omar Torrijos. It turned out that Castro was not enthusiastic about the plan for Paredes to run for the presidency, as the conservatives might defeat him and send him back to the army, in which case both the presidency and the army would be under conservative control; this was Greene’s view of the matter too. They went on to talk about El Salvador, with Fidel expressing optimism, much as Cayetano had, that the war would be short. In fact, it went on for years, as Colonel Díaz had predicted.

  Once the serious talk was over, Gabo thought to spur conversation by asking Greene whether it was true that he had once played Russian roulette. Greene said he had and named the occasions. Fidel was impressed, closed his eyes, did some multiplication of the odds, and told him he ought not to be alive. Indeed, his not being dead took on some interest for him, and he asked what regime of exercise and diet he followed. Greene answered, ‘No régime. I eat what I like and drink what I like.’30 He sensed that his answer rather shocked Fidel, a true believer in health and fitness – that is, apart from the cigars. At some point they discussed books: Fidel had read about a third of Monsignor Quixote and wanted to talk about Spanish wine and to hear about Greene’s travels in Spain. Their talk went on until the early morning, and it seems that Fidel was thinking through the implications of this odd visit from a pair of novelists. As they said goodbye, he sent a message of support for Díaz, and said, ‘Tell them that I have received the message.’31

  75

  BETTER A BAD MAN

  ‘The one good thing about this horrible 80th birthday is the amount of liquor with which my cellars begin to be stacked!’1 Greene was writing to Pierre Joannon, who had sent a bottle of twelve-year-old Jameson Irish whiskey on 2 October 1984. Joannon had founded the Jameson Irish Club in Juan-les-Pins and whenever Greene was in Antibes he made a point of attending, so Joannon made sure that Greene received a bottle of Jameson every couple of months.2 Whatever Fidel might think, liquor seemed to contribute to his longevity.

  And perhaps he needed a drink, as his birthday saw the release of a book that disappointed him. He had finished Getting to Know the General in February, and left the decision as to whether it should be published at all to Chuchu: the Panamanian army paid his way to Antibes so that he could scour the manuscript for errors, but all he found were misspellings of Spanish words. ‘He liked the book better than I did and he didn’t at all interfere with my picture of himself which is not very complimentary. Or not what the ordinary reader would say was complimentary.’3 Half the book’s Spanish royalties were to go to the FMLN rebels in El Salvador and the other half to the Monastery of Oseira, which Greene visited annually with Father Durán. They hurried to get the book ready for publication before the US election that November, hoping that it might stir up even a few votes against Ronald Reagan; at the time, Greene supported Gary Hart, who eventually lost the Democratic nomination to Walter Mondale, who in turn lost to Reagan.

  Greene could see the book ‘falling between two stools’:4 it was not exactly a memoir of Torrijos, nor was it an autobiography. The character of Chuchu seemed to take over at times. Of course, the fundamental problem was that he needed to write a novel about Panama and had failed. He was worried again that he did not have another novel in him. When he began Monsignor Quixote, he did not really believe that he would ever finish it. For him to complete yet another novel seemed beyond hope.

  By the mid-1980s, he was searching his ‘rag and bone shop’ for the makings of a new novel, and decided, instead, to finish one he had begun and laid aside. Long before, he had written on the short manuscript: ‘Picked this up again in Antibes by a curious coincidence on 16 December 1978 when I despaired of ever writing again. I prayed last night without conviction that I could work again. For the first time in months I woke without melancholy. I attributed it to a dream I had of the new Pope and his kindness to me . . . In a folder marked Ideas I found a manuscript which I thought I might sell for the Tablet fund. However I decided to read it through first and suddenly I saw – anyway part of the road ahead. I sat down and added 400 words – I was working again. Only afterwards I looked at the date and saw that I had begun the book at the same table exactly four years before. Whatever happens now it has given me a happy day . . . ’5

  In 1980, he submitted the opening sentences under a pseudonym to a competition in the Spectator (12 April 1980), which asked for an extract of up to 150 words from an imaginary Graham Greene novel – it lost. From time to time he wrote more pages, remarking in June 1985, ‘The story won’t lie down.’ One of his main struggles was with the first-person narration: Jim Baxter, perhaps to be under
stood as ‘the enemy’, narrates events apart from in the last few pages, which shift to the third person. On 22 November 1987, he completed a first draft.6

  The story is a very strange one; Father Durán thought it was structured as a dream and that may be so.7 The events proceed from one another mysteriously. It begins at a school modelled on Berkhamsted; on a number of earlier occasions, Greene had tried to write fictionally about his school years, with scant success. It follows one of his characteristic plotlines, in which the main character betrays a very flawed mentor or dominant friend, and so it resembles The Man Within, The Third Man, ‘The Basement Room’, and the unfinished ‘Lucius’. The book begins with the boy Jim Baxter being taken away from school by a man referred to as ‘the Captain’, who has, according to extraordinary opening paragraph, won him from his father in a game of backgammon. The novel proceeds as an exploration of the extreme unreliability of memory, narration, and the language of love.

  When Greene began the story, he had not yet visited Panama and had no idea that the novel would end there. Indeed, one of its peculiarities is the tension between the settings of 1950s Britain in the first part and 1970s Panama in the second. The boy is left with a woman the Captain loves, while he disappears in pursuit of fortune; a modern buccaneer, the Captain makes money transporting drugs and at the end is flying arms to Nicaraguan rebels.