The Seeds of Fiction (15 page)

We discussed the day's events, and I apologized about the Dominican sausages.

‘No, no. Not at all. It happens sometimes. You had the best of intentions,' he said. ‘It was quite fun.'

I told him I had obviously misjudged Hughson and apologized for the Alcoa man's inhospitality. ‘We should have stayed in town,' I said.

‘No, no, on the contrary, this is interesting,' Graham insisted as he laid out his toilet gear. He carefully folded his clothes over a chair. ‘Shame about the whisky, but I would enjoy a pipe about now.'

I thought he meant tobacco, but then he added, ‘Opium gives you a good sleep. I often had a pipe in Indochina during the war. I set myself a limit far, far below that of the habitual pipe smoker.'

I looked around the room. ‘If Dr No has our room bugged he'll hand us over to the police in the morning.'

Graham laughed. ‘I am sure the awful fellow would.'

We lay in bed, and Graham recounted that while completing
A Burnt-Out Case
in Tahiti in 1959 he was walking along a street in Papeete when he got the feeling that someone was watching him. ‘I turned,' he said, ‘and there in the doorway of a little shop was an elderly Chinese man staring at me. We looked at each other, then he invited me in, and I followed him to the back of the shop. He asked me whether I had been in Indochina. I told him I had, and he offered me a pipe. He had his own little South Pacific fumerie. When I was back in London some time later I received a lumpy letter postmarked Papeete. It was a plug of opium sent courtesy of the French and Her Majesty's Royal Mail from the old Chinaman in Tahiti.'

I came to understand that, despite my reaction to his remark under the
bayonde
tree, he didn't really aspire to luxury living
per se,
but he did enjoy good food and wine, crisp vodka martinis and smooth Scotch whisky. And he confessed to Bajeux and me that what he missed most about living abroad were bangers and mash washed down with good ale. I admitted that I would die for a pork pie at my favourite Fleet Street pub. We were all human, I reflected, and maybe Graham had a date planned at the famous Parisian restaurant.

He was not completely opposed to nightmares; he admitted to being in favour of dreaming. It seemed that at an early age he had put his night-time subconscious to work for him. Whereas I was often plagued with dreams involving journalistic anxiety — such as losing my portable typewriter or my copy or missing the big story — Graham described his dreams as being much more creative, producing results that aided him in his writing. He talked about Freud's interpretation of dreams, that a dream is an opening to the unconscious through which one can examine a disguised version one's anxieties and problems. ‘Your brain works continually,' Graham believed, adding, ‘Dreams also give you rest.'

Next morning we were escorted out of the American company's compound. We returned our badges at the gate and didn't wait for breakfast. We never saw Hughson again. Outside our bedrooms before departing (Bajeux was lodged in the adjacent room) we found a Coca-Cola machine to slake our thirst. Graham was still laughing. I didn't know it then, but he had found his ugly American.

After departing the Alcoa plant the three of us made good time over the
saline flats. Even dodging the squat, thorny
bayonde
trees was fun. When we reached the coastal road close to the cliff, during a short pit stop, we stood watching the sea angrily pounding a beach piled high with flotsam and jetsam. Among the timber on that wild and desolate coast were uprooted trees, their trunks worn white by the surf and sun, yet too big to be buried entirely by the sand. The scene must have stirred some memory of Joseph Conrad's writing about the sea, because Graham began talking of Conrad and how he often reread his favourite Conrad books. It was a pleasant change of subject. I feared we had over-marinated Papa Doc. Graham said that it is important for a writer to experience at first hand what he is writing about and that he thoroughly enjoyed the legwork for his novels. I noticed his blue eyes had become bloodshot, but when I made a comment about it he shrugged it off, saying, ‘It is all that dust.'

We now left the border behind. The main trip was over. Waving fields of sugar-cane welcomed us to Barahona. The town's hotel was open, and we chose to sit on the terrace at the water's edge. I knew what to order. The fare at La Tour d'Argent or any other overrated Parisian restaurant could never match it: deliciously grilled, freshly caught lobster and ice-cold Cerveza Presidente.

Graham agreed that the succulent lobster more than made up for all our lost meals and was worth the wait. Our conversation returned to our border odyssey. I recalled the warning by an old Haitian named Moy who had survived the 1937 massacre and for years tended gardens at Frères outside Port-au-Prince. Fortified with
clairin,
he cautioned that the frontier was an ‘evil place, abandoned by the
Iwas
and where you ‘never hear drums'. ‘He was right,' Graham remarked. ‘We didn't hear any drums.'

We felt relaxed for the first time in three days. Graham leaned back on his chair, and we reminisced about when we first met in 1956. I had really met him for the first time in 1954, but it was a fleeting moment he did not remember.

That first time Graham had been invited to Haiti while staying in Jamaica by Peter Brook, the stage director who was turning Truman Capote's short story, ‘House of Flowers', set in a Port-au-Prince bordello, into a Broadway musical. Graham explored Haiti in his own way with Mrs Brook, enjoying its culture and people. The circumstances then were recorded in my weekly newspaper: ‘Celebrated English writer Graham Greene arrived Saturday [21 August 1954] at [Port-au-Prince] Bowen Field airport. Author of such works as
Epitaph of a Spy [sic,
and incorrectly included, as
Epitaph for a Spy
is actually by Eric Ambler],
The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair,
Mr Greene has won many honors in the literary field including the Nobel Prize for Literature. On hand to welcome him was Mr André Supplice of the Tourist Office, who escorted Mr Greene to the El Rancho Hotel where he will spend
three weeks.' The item appeared on the front page of the
Haiti Sun
on 29 August. Brook and his wife played host to Haitian newsmen at an El Rancho lunch during which, to allay officials' fear that a musical set in a brothel would be terrible publicity for the country, he declared, ‘It will be the best publicity Haiti ever received. It will be produced in the great theatrical capitals of the world: London, New York, Paris and so on.'

At the time I had just returned from Ireland, visiting relatives with my mother, to find my staff had not bothered to seek out the famous author and write him up as ‘Personality of the Week'. At least they had honoured him with the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature, whereas the Swedish Nobel Committee had not. Rather than interview the famous American playwright Capote and the British-born artistic stage director Brook, they had translated a story from President Magloire's daily,
Le National.

Even Mark Twain would have objected to our journalism — because of technical problems the
Haiti Sun
broadcast Graham's arrival after he had departed on Monday 27 August. As to my meeting with Graham, it turned out disastrously brief.

It was the afternoon before his departure that a waiter at El Rancho pointed to a man alone with his long legs wrapped around a tall stool at the hotel's huge mahogany outdoor circular bar. Graham was clad in tropical tan trousers and open-neck shirt, and his glass was empty. I had time to feel his shield of intimidating aloofness, and it threw me off guard. When he stood up, I noted he was about my own height, six feet two inches. As he stretched his legs I had the feeling he was prepared to make a run for it.

‘Good afternoon,' I said.

‘Hello,' he said.

And then he was gone, swallowed up by Brook's and Capote's group, who arrived in haste. I noticed his distinctive manner of speech as he greeted his friends and bounded out of El Rancho, leaving me with the impression that he was a starchy Englishman.

My friend Albert Silvera said he liked Graham and described him as ‘an English gentleman'. The famous writer and Mr Brook's wife, Natasha, he commented, had a wonderful time together and had driven to Cap Hai'tien and climbed up to see the Citadel (King Henry Christophe's famous mountain fortress). Using his own hand signals, Silvera indicated that Graham and Natasha were just good friends and that there had been no monkey business. Silvera was a womanizer, so he would know. After Mrs Brook left Haiti Graham continued playing tourist. That routine included visits to the hilltop village of Kenscoff, a Voodoo ceremony in a dingy sector of the capital and a reef in the middle of the bay off Port-au-Prince where marine life could be observed from a glass-bottomed boat.

Silvera joined me at the bar, which had evidently been Graham's command post. The handsome hotelier was the son of one of Haiti's wealthiest Sephardic Jews. Debonair and Paris educated, Albert delighted in playing host to famous people. In conspiratorial tones he quickly unburdened himself of his worries about the
House of Flowers
musical. We were alone. The barman was busy preparing for the cocktail hour. Haitian officials, he said, were very uneasy about the Broadway version of the ‘House of Flowers' story — written by Truman Capote following a 1947 visit to Haiti — as it was set in the red-light district along the bay, south of Port-au-Prince. ‘Will it be good for us?' the image-sensitive Silvera asked me. While supporting the musical as a ‘great boost for Haitian tourism', he wondered whether the musical might attract ‘the wrong kind of people'. ‘We cannot afford to have our image tarnished so early,' he warned with finely honed distinction.

The story is about a brothel madam (played in the Broadway version by Pearl Bailey) who takes in a ravishing beauty from the Dominican Republic, the picture of innocence and who has no idea of her new profession. Madame Pearl is determined to trick her out of her innocence and put her to work. On the point of losing her innocence, the beauty meets a young man at a
gaguerre
(cockfight) and falls in love. It's wedding bells, and they dance from the
House of Flowers
to the wonderful music of Haitian carnival.

It was easy to sympathize with Silvera. Many brothels were spread along the Carrefour road south of the city in old gingerbread houses, once the property of the rich before they moved up to the coolness of hillside living. The exteriors of the bordellos were covered with flowers, bright red and white bougainvillaeas. At night hundreds of colourful Christmas lights competed with neon signs, such as for the Paradise Bar. Some of the houses were staffed by Dominicans while others featured Haitian hostesses.

Capote had become a familiar sight in Port-au-Prince, dressed in his Bermuda shorts and straw hat. (Haitians at the time were unaccustomed to knee-length attire and found the ensemble strange and funny.) And it was Capote and Brook who made the news the summer of 1954.

Haiti was at last reaping its share of the Caribbean tourist harvest. Dollars were rolling in. The country's father figure was President ‘Papa' Paul E. Magloire, an army general and a much more genial strongman than many of his predecessors. Moreover, he was basking in the floodlights of history, having himself appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine as ‘Bon Papa'. That year Haiti was observing its 150th anniversary as the hemisphere's second independent nation (after the United States) in what was the world's most successful slave revolt. President and Mamie Eisenhower had given President and Mrs Yola Magloire a full-dress official welcome to Washington, and they had slept in the White House, the first black Haitian President to be so honoured. (Playing
on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre during Magloire's January 1955 official visit to the city was the big hit,
The House of Flowers.
The State Department cancelled the President's plan to see it, fearing it was too bordelloish. Magloire, his friends said, would have loved it.)

Back in those days Port-au-Prince was alive and vibrant. The population was less than 250,000. At night the seaside Harry S. Truman Boulevard was a lively scene, with the wealthy cruising back and forth to see and be seen. Automobiles were so few that their owners were easily identified. The centrepiece was the Bar Italia, offering fine espresso Haitian coffee and ice cream. Near by, chic young girls of the élite families enjoyed a moment's freedom from their parents' watchful eyes, cavorting around the ornate statues amid the sounds and flashing light show of a large musical fountain. Across the street was the statue of Christopher Columbus, on his knees, holding a cross, depicting how he discovered the island in 1492; here romantic couples made love in their cars. Haiti truly had a wonderfully magical and mysterious atmosphere, and visitors loved the ‘Pearl of the Antilles'.

The hurricane season had officially ended. There was a Brazilian circus in town with a ballet as well as a big elephant. Mrs Wilhelm Oloffson, who had founded the Grand Hotel Oloffson, had died that week at the age of seventy-nine. Students were permitted to demonstrate against Cuban President Batista's bloody violation of the Haitian embassy in Havana in which Cuban police killed ten of their countrymen who had taken refuge there. Six of the dead Cubans had been granted asylum in the Haitian embassy and were awaiting safe conduct out of the country. The other four had only hours earlier entered the embassy seeking political asylum. (Also killed was Cuba's national police chief, who had led the charge into the embassy.) At home Haitians were being encouraged to register to vote in what many hoped might be the country's first attempt at universal suffrage.

However, the island republic's golden era proved to be losing its glitter. General (Bon Papa) Magloire wanted to extend his rule past the constitutional deadline, but the general's ‘iron pants', his own metaphor for toughness, had rusted badly, and he no longer frightened his enemies. The old Haiti they had shared was soon to disappear for ever.