The Man Within My Head (19 page)

“Right,” she said. “Every time I read it, I cry.”

It looked to me as if she was close to tears now; she seemed to waver a little in the glossy atrium of the high-tech building where we were being served canapés. She had, as it turned out, been a professional call girl herself—that was what she wrote about—and now maintained a column on the intricacies of male-female relations, as seen from her unusual perspective. Perhaps she knew, I thought, about those men who wanted to be held as much as touched; perhaps someone like her could read a man like Greene in the dark.

O
ne day, almost by mistake, I stumbled upon a perfect description of Graham Greene—coming, curiously enough, from a daughter. “He never seems to like a steady diet of any one thing or person,” she had said, and “has an overwhelming horror of being bored.” Since he also had an “overpowering hatred of hurting people,” this meant that he was often in flight from society, afraid of being oppressed, and fell into what his biographer called an “extraordinary restlessness” as he tried to outrun the “deep, inner wound of his childhood.”

The only problem was that the person being described there was not Graham Greene, but P. G. Wodehouse.

Not much later, I came across the following: “His eyes were an intense blue. I thought that here was a man who had seen a lot of the world, who was experienced, and yet who seemed to have suffered … He had a gift for creating an atmosphere of such intimacy that I found myself talking freely to him. I was impressed by his beautiful manners.”

Yet the woman who delivered this, Eleanor Brewer, was
here talking, again, not of Greene, but of his famously traitorous friend and sometime colleague, Kim Philby, who had once said, after defecting to Moscow, that all he wanted in life was “Graham Greene on the other side of the table, and a bottle of wine between us.” Brewer was not completely unworldly; she was married to the chief Middle Eastern correspondent for
The New York Times
in Beirut at the time she fell under Philby’s spell and left her husband to become his third wife. But he’d gotten under her skin with the notes he’d written, sometimes several every day.

“Deeper in love than ever, my darling,” he wrote to Brewer, on pieces of paper taken from cigarette packs. “Deeper and deeper, my darling.”

S
o there I was again: the man I felt such closeness to was a type, and there were many others of his background who matched aspects of his type to the letter. Yet it was only Greene I saw when I looked into the mirror of what I’d written, and only his unholy book I found next to the Gideons’ Bible in a foreign hotel room, as if slipped there by some intruder. It liked to say, his gospel for the fallen, that all of us know what we’re supposed to do—trust in God, trust in ourselves, remember that “this too shall pass”—but that none of that helps us when we’re looking for consolation in the dark. It said that wisdom is wonderful on a mountaintop, but that in the world an unwise man might have more to offer us than any sage does. It said that what we don’t know is more likely to save us than what we do know.

The fugitive priest at the center of
The Power and the Glory
, a moth-eaten, unshaven man with the air of “somebody of no account who had been beaten up” is described, early on, as a “black question mark, ready to go, ready to stay, poised on his chair”: the archetypal Greene protagonist. But only twenty pages later, the ruthless lieutenant who is pursuing him is similarly described: “a little dark menacing question-mark in the sun.” The Captain, in Greene’s final novel, more than sixty years on, is “an eternal questionmark never to be answered, like the existence of God.” When Greene, one New Year’s night in Stockholm, picked out a fortune from a pool, it turned out to be a question mark. All his novels are unreliable gospels for those who can’t be sure of a thing.

I
was in Bogotá one grey day in July—the city Greene once sailed towards, with Henry James, in a dream—and church bells were ringing around the deserted business area in the north of the city where I was staying. As ever, the hills that encircle the place, thickly forested, were swathed in clouds, and it looked about to rain, about not to rain, at any moment. A long line of people from the poor parts of town and the countryside snaked around the base of Monserrate, waiting for a cable car to carry them up to the little church at the top of the mountain, above the clouds.

I decided to go out to the city’s suburbs with the young volunteer, Maria Paula, who had been deputed by a magazine editor to show me around her town. We traveled away from the broad boulevards and the green-glass skyscrapers of the
modern, hopeful area into a disorderly shambles, so rough that Maria Paula put a finger to her lips to remind me not to speak English and draw attention to my foreignness. We walked for ten minutes or more through a marketplace, much of Bogotá surging up the chill steep slopes on the midsummer Sunday morning, till we came to a little plaza where stood a modest red-brick building, and what looked to be a huge hotel beside it.

Inside, it was so crowded we could hardly move. People were pushing and crushing and being pushed into a little shrine where sat a Holy Infant, the protective treasure of the Iglesia 20 de Julio. Some were dressed in the heavy woolen ponchos of the interior and had wrinkled, pre-Colombian features; others were Indian women in bowler hats, as from the Andes; the young blades of Bogotá were here, with their gangsta ways and their girls, and lanky black guys, from the Caribbean coast, towering above the crowd. Colombia was more crisscrossed with factions and almost unimaginable brutality than any country in the Americas: the leftist guerrillas were fighting the government soldiers and groups of paramilitary vigilantes were trying to get the better of the guerrillas by cutting off tongues and quartering victims with chainsaws; the
narcotraficantes
had been responsible for cities like Medellín boasting the highest murder rate in the world; and two days after I visited the church, a daring government rescue mission would retrieve the former presidential candidate, Íngrid Betancourt, who had been held by guerrilla kidnappers, along with fourteen others, for more than six years.

But now, as far as I could see—and Maria Paula agreed—all the feuding groups were here, in the crowds swelling the aisles of the main church, clapping along as an acoustic guitar
was strummed softly, far away at the front, unseeably far, while a lone female voice struck up the sweet chorus.

“
¡No pasarán!
” said Maria Paula, speaking to me, but also joining in the refrain—a folk song that could have been serving as an international anthem—and when the priest spoke again, mothers held up babies, worn campesinos held up bottles, or copies of the day’s schedule, to try to receive blessings from the altar at the front.

I walked around amidst the faces of the country, not wanting to romanticize this tough and often menacing place, or see what wasn’t there; if I found innocence here, it was only because I couldn’t read the signs, or didn’t know what to look for. Young girls were snuggling up against their
novios
, who looked very much as if they were about to go to war (for the leftists or their enemies, I couldn’t tell). Beggars in their forties, with thin, uncared-for hair, put up their palms for blessings, closed their eyes to the strummed guitar. Families kept shuffling in and out of the interior—a perpetual commotion—as clapping rose from the overflow crowd next door.

“You won’t find this in the rich areas,” said Maria Paula, who belonged so staunchly to those areas that she had been worried about stepping outside them today, except that she remembered coming to the church with her grandmother. “The power of hope is great.”

“Prepaid” women, as she engagingly translated the term, stood by their mafiosi protectors, and hit men and soldiers and fighters who had lost limbs to the mafiosi joined in the song. The man next to me had a bleached spot on his cheek; others had scars all across their faces. Nobody looked very safe or happy for long.

I remembered the one previous time I’d come to the city, at
eighteen, with my friend from high school. We’d ended up in a completely unlit area—Colombians shivered as I described the scene for them now—where girls in hot pants and men with guns roamed up and down the barely paved lanes. Like innocents from Greene’s
Monsignor Quixote
(we anticipated the scene from that novel by just seven years), we were the only residents of the Hotel Picasso who never thought to wonder why all the other guests of the hotel were young, female and very scantily clad, much more ready to say hello to us than anyone else we’d met on our trip so far had been.

Maria Paula and I spent a long time in the church—it was the first time I’d felt at all close to the heart of Colombia—and then we walked (a finger to the lip again) back through the sloping streets where families were gathering in broken little cantinas for Sunday lunch and into the chaos of the marketplace, to find a taxi driver who would not grow too hungry or suspicious if we asked him to take us to the rich side of town.

“I wasn’t expecting much of this,” I said that night at a Mexican restaurant, talking with the only other writer from the United States who had defied a State Department warning to come here to speak on the state of the world. “Today, onstage, a woman started talking to me about V. S. Naipaul’s wounds and asked me what mine were.”

“What did you say?”

“Something about detachment. Not being good at settling down.”

“What about Greene? What do you think his wound was?”

I said nothing for a moment, untypically. “Doubt,” I came out with at last. “The fact that he could never give himself entirely to a person or a faith, even though his conscience was alive enough to know that not to do so was untenable.”

We fell silent then, and my mind went back to the little children, the dirty ponchos, the clapping that had greeted the end of the service that morning. Hoodlums coming in and out, bearing babies on their shoulders, drug dealers cupping their girls tenderly at the small of their backs, soldiers taking off their caps and then leading their grandmothers towards the Holy Infant.

I
t was the oddest thing, I thought as I walked around the streets of Bogotá the next day, not knowing who was who and what to make of them, but what Greene had really done, for me at least, was dismantle the entire notion of an “enemy.” Holy books, again, teach us about kindness and forgiveness and union; he, much too typically, taught us, as he liked to put it, about “hate.” We know, more or less, what to do with our friends; it’s our seeming enemies who pose problems—and therefore possibilities—at the core.

The adulterer Bendrix, in Greene’s most passionate novel,
The End of the Affair
, ends up not just moving in with the husband he’s cuckolded, but going on long walks with him, his hand protectively on his rival’s arm; they begin to seem like a couple brought together by the great love they have in common. Wormold, the shy lost father in Havana, finds himself at the climax of his story playing checkers with a notorious Cuban police officer who is said to carry a cigarette case made of human skin. But he learns, as the night goes on, that the case is not a sadist’s relic of some innocent the man has tortured; it’s a reminder of what was done to his father. All
Segura is doing, in effect, is carrying his father’s skin round with him.