We putt-putted back towards the border feeling physically and spiritually refreshed. As we bounced along, searching for the road, we could see in the distance behind the rounded hills the darkened region of navy-blue mountains that awaited us. This was to be our longest and most harrowing day on the border.
It was slow going as we crept up the mountains. It appeared as if no one had navigated this stretch of road in a long time in any kind of vehicle. As we progressed, we had to pause more and more as our path was strewn with fallen trees and boulders. Graham had written about priests and their weaknesses, helplessness and human fragility, but here he had to join forces with a priest to remove obstacles from our common path.
When he was brushing off the dirt from his road work, I asked him whether he would prefer to drive.
‘No, no, I am quite content not to,’ he replied.
This section of the border needed no international markers. The Haitian side was an ecological disaster. It was all rock. Haitian peasants in the mountain regions are lucky to grow a few strands of corn on the steepest peaks where some soil may remain, but, largely because of deforestation, when the rains come tons of remaining topsoil cascade down the mountains into the sea. A brown ring encircles Haiti’s shores, the unsightly stain of eroded earth that is too thick to filter easily into the turquoise Caribbean. Haiti was literally bleeding to death.
As we approached the misty summit we came to a forest called Angel Felix, where we encountered a group of woodcutters. I slowed the car and headed towards them, but they quickly disappeared into the dense tree line. The mountain forest, which looked as if it still had virgin timber, was in stark contrast to the eroded Haitian landscape next door.
‘I can see some trees at the bottom,’ Graham said and stuck his neck dangerously out of the window. ‘If we fall we will not fall into Haiti.’
‘Why?’ At that moment I was not particularly concerned about where we would land on our fatal plunge.
‘Because the Haitian side no longer has any trees.’ He laughed as if I’d flunked his riddle. He was enjoying every minute of our plight. Adversity seemed to animate him.
We made a pit stop (each chose a tree to pee against) in the forest’s cathedrallike interior, beneath the tall pine trees, taking in the incense-like scent of a smoking charcoal pit, a choir of songbirds and the shrill buzz of cicadas.
Further on, the scenery was breathtaking. The mountains were steep and the clouds covered the mountains below us. But this was no carnival ride. I felt responsible for Graham’s and Bajeux’s safety, and as we climbed the precarious road the possibility of our toppling over the side grew. Graham had been a good travelling companion. He had a youthful curiosity and exuberance, but he could be obstinate. Every time I asked him and Bajeux to get out of the car so I could manoeuvre it alone over the seemingly impossible landslide that might confront us, he refused. I tried explaining that the car needed less weight, but Graham ignored me, refusing to get out — although Bajeux had — saying it reminded him of his mule trip to San Cristóbal de las Casas where he had faced many such deep ravines.
We must have had all the prayers of the American Redemptionist mission with us because every time that it appeared the path would end and we would have to backtrack we found a way to move on. Graham was the determined one. Nevertheless, we were now in trouble. We reached a place where a landslide had buried the road completely. There was no other way around the mountain. Our trip was only halfway through. Still, Graham insisted we continue. He was not about to turn back. And slowly, inch by inch, with Graham sitting stolidly next to me, I edged the Beetle forward in first gear. If the tyres slipped we would topple over the edge and drop into a deep ravine.
Later, after we’d passed the landslide, we joked that if we’d gone over the edge the death notice in Time magazine’s ‘Milestones’ section would be: ‘Died: English author Graham Greene, 61, in an auto accident on the remote Dominican—Haitian border.’ The British newspapers by contrast, in line with their tradition, would run a lengthy obituary. The Fleet Street dailies would be a lot more prolix and a lot less kind, questioning what Graham was doing in such an isolated setting and blaming the death of the famous author on Papa Doc Duvalier.
We had a good laugh over it, and I explained to Graham that Trujillo’s favourite method of ridding himself of someone was to arrange for them to have an ‘accident’ by diving into a cliff or ravine in their car. We thanked God the Generalisimo had been assassinated in 1961. We had no such worries about Papa Doc. Although he had a propensity for revenge, he never bothered to cover up his crimes.
As we came around the side of another mountain the view was spectacular. Far below in the smoky, bluish haze was a huge valley and Lake Enriquillo, simmering in the scorching heat of this sunken region’s eternal summer. At 160 feet deep and with a surface some seventy feet below sea level, the lake occupies the lowest inland topographical point in the Caribbean and its water is three times as salty as ocean water. Indian carvings on large rocks surrounding Enriquillo are the only visible reminder of the indigenous communities that once lived beside the lake. It was still home to pink flamingos, and, years earlier, it had not been uncommon to see a caiman sunning itself along the 33 -mile shoreline. Beyond the lake was another range of mountains that we would have to cross. This had been the theatre of war for Fred Baptiste’s guerrillas prior to their internment in the old lunatic asylum near Santo Domingo.
As our trip grew more difficult Graham became more affable. He showed no sign of exhaustion. He was excited at the prospect of the unexpected. The ordeal actually seemed to energize him, a reflection perhaps on his stubborn resilience. The only thing that seemed to bother him was the vultures. He admitted to being spooked by vultures since his days in Africa. He said the repulsive birds were signs of death and evil. But the large birds we had sighted gliding overhead and which had drawn Graham’s worried attention were actually red-tailed hawks — Buteo Jamaicensis — which had been christened Mal Fini (‘Badly Finished’) by Haiti’s French colonizers because of the species’ habit of leaving its prey, mostly chickens, in a sorry state. An old Haitian saying holds that if a Mal Fini spits in your eye you lose your sight.
Suddenly, as we came around the bend on the way down the mountain, a young dark-skinned Haitian — or Dominican — appeared on the side of the road. He was miles from nowhere. As we slowed to a stop he approached us and got into the back seat of the car next to Bajeux without a word. We were apprehensive, but the youth didn’t appear threatening. Bajeux and I attempted to question him in Creole and Spanish, but he remained silent. We drove on, came out of the mountain and continued across the plain to the town of Jiman’ at the mouth of a valley that opens up into Haiti. Then, just before we reached the town, our hitchhiker tapped me lightly on the shoulder to stop. When I did, he got out and simply walked away, disappearing into the dust.
‘Perhaps he was deaf and dumb,’ Graham suggested as we watched him go.
Bajeux and I didn’t believe so, yet we couldn’t explain the youth’s strange behaviour. The incident remained one of those ineffable Caribbean mysteries. In Haiti the mysterious stranger would have been considered a zombie. Nevertheless I suggested to my two sharp-eyed companions that they relax their Macoute watch’, as Graham called our constant paranoia.
Jiman’, the main Dominican border town through which Dominican forces were expected to storm into Haiti during the 1963 crisis when the two countries nearly went to war, was fast asleep. It was siesta time. We were hungry and thirsty. The government hotel was closed for repairs, and the old woman who ran the local eating house was asleep. Her young maid was terror-stricken when we suggested she wake her up, so we went into a colmado and purchased three tins of miniature sausages, several stale bread rolls, a box of toothpicks and room-temperature soft drinks.
‘There must be a brothel where we at least can get a cold drink,’ Graham said, unhappy about our lunch arrangement.
‘Dominican brothels close down for siesta,’ I said. I was not about to go racing around the stifling hot, awful little border town in the middle of the day in search of a whorehouse.
Graham glanced at me. I could tell he was sceptical, but he said nothing.
My main concern was getting over our final mountain range before nightfall. The prospect of this last section of the border made me nervous. Anything could happen. We sat under a thorny bayonde tree that offered a few speckles of shade and opened the first can of sausages. A horrible smell rose up and invaded the still air. Bajeux plucked out one of the little morsels with a toothpick and offered it to Graham. He reacted to the taste with revulsion. None the less our hunger drove us on; we held our breath and devoured the saucissons until the little cans were empty.
‘And to think,’ said Graham, still grimacing and chewing on a piece of bread to rid himself of the pungent taste of the sausages, ‘in a few days I’ll be dining at the Tour d’Argent in Paris.’
His comment angered me, but I said nothing. It took Graham out of our world. His thoughts were of eating at the pricey Parisian restaurant while our concern was providing survival food for the Kamoken and other Haitian refugees. For the past three months I had been transporting sacks of grain, flour and tins of oil from the Catholic Relief and CARE to keep them alive. I was reminded that Graham didn’t belong to these surroundings after all.
We washed our meal down with the warm drinks and returned to the car under the scorching sun.
‘We could be at the Oloffson in an hour if the border guards let us cross,’ I said trying to make light of lunch. ‘I’m ready for one of Caesar’s rum punches.’
‘It would be your last,’ Bajeux said.
‘Indeed,’ Graham muttered.
The joke went down like a deflated balloon.
Past the salt flats, just across the border from the town and glued to the foot of a mountain, was the Haitian military post of Malpasse. In the late 1950s I had begun to cover the Dominican Republic from Haiti. During those last years of Trujillo’s thirty-year reign I was one of the few travellers returning to Haiti to cross the border at Jiman’. It was only a fast hour’s ride to Port-au-Prince, road and politics permitting. Once, when I was returning from the Dominican Republic, I slept in the little Malpasse jail after the Haitian army chief ordered the sergeant in charge not to allow me and my car to re-enter Haiti. I was returning to Haiti in my Volkswagen. At Malpasse a new sergeant took my passport, and, expecting a short wait, I kept the engine running — that is, until this bright sergeant showed me my passport and told me it was no good as my visa to travel back and forth to the Dominican Republic did not have the police stamp. (All such visas were difficult to get and a friendly pastor working in the passport division who read my newspaper had issued it, but I knew I would not get a police stamp.) No one had noticed. The sergeant did. The officer in charge was an old friend, but he could do nothing but wait until evening to contact headquarters. The reply came back: Don’t let the blan pass. I chose my bed in the empty prison and kept the door open even after the officer tried to close it to make sure I didn’t take off to Port-au-Prince. In the dark I noticed the door closing slowly and pushed it back open and sent the officer tumbling down the embankment in his underwear.
In the morning I raced back to Santo Domingo full of mosquito bites and the memory of a nightmare about Trujillo’s 1937 massacre of poor Haitians along the border. I caught the noon plane to Port-au-Prince and breezed through immigration. In the days that followed I had my car driven to the Dominican side and asked my the sergeant friend to drive me across the border. I invited him to toast my Beetle with several cold Presidente beers.
The saline flats are a no man’s land between the two countries. It’s the devil’s oven. In December 1958 Duvalier signed a ‘peace pact’ with Trujillo — having kept him waiting for more than an hour in the steaming heat. While photographing El Benefactor as he sat in the 38-degree heat in a three-piece business suit waiting for Papa Doc, I noted rivulets of perspiration eroding his pancake makeup. The droplets trickled down his flabby jowls. When Papa Doc eventually arrived, he and El Jefe exchanged saccharine smiles. It was the first and last time the two tyrants of the island met. Each promised to refuse safe haven to the other’s enemies. Trujillo vowed in particular to protect Duvalier if the bearded rebel leader in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra across the Windward Passage from Haiti should come to power. A month later the bearded one, Fidel Castro, was in Havana and the Cuban dictator, General Fulgencio Batista, was in exile in Ciudad Trujillo.
With the Dominican sausages growling in our digestive tracts, we began the climb up the last mountain range. As we came to round the first leg of the road the back of our little Volkswagen sank into the gravel. I raced the engine, but the Beetle refused to budge. A huge thorn had punctured a tyre through to the inner tube. It was a miracle we’d managed to get this far without car trouble. We replaced the flat tyre with the spare, but since it would have been foolhardy to try to climb the mountain range without another tyre we backtracked to a construction camp where, with the help of workmen, we patched the punctured tyre and tube.
As we toiled up into the cool Sierra de Bahoruco, it became familiar ground for Bajeux and me. He pointed out a steep hillside where the thatched hut that Fred Baptiste’s Kamoken had used as a shelter and rendezvous for incursions into Haiti stood. It remained there, abandoned like some arcane symbol of defeat. From there the road branched off to El Aguacate, but we decided not to tempt fate further and avoided the Dominican army post there despite Graham’s wish to see it. Bajeux and I knew members of the garrison might recognize us and be hostile.
At the summit we were greeted by fog and an afternoon drizzle. Graham surveyed the rugged landscape as Bajeux sat transfixed, gazing at the Haitian side of the frontier. This section of our narrow route was paved with large shiny rocks. It was more like a washboard than a road and was slippery in the rain. We met a group of scowling soldiers manning a small Dominican army post. Bajeux stepped out of the car and got to work. He asked the suspicious troops whether they had any Haitian ‘guests’. They didn’t answer, but when Bajeux identified himself as a priest — he was dressed as we were — the soldiers allowed him to enter the post. The single cell at the post was empty.
It was a jolting, sliding, bumpy ride down to Pedernales. Closer to the lowlands giant trucks, their tyres taller than our car, rumbled along their own red-dirt roadway parallel to the one we were travelling on. They were transporting bauxite, the red earth and raw material for aluminium, from the mines to the Alcoa docks at Cabo Rojo for export to the United States. Our rough little road eventually led into the wide well-graded bauxite-transporting road.
We arrived in Pedernales at dusk. At our request, Dominican army officers gave us a gratifyingly comprehensive tour of the city’s prison facilities. We spoke with several jailed Haitians, but the charges against them were non-political; none was one of the missing Kamoken.
The few hotels in Pedernales didn’t look inviting, so I suggested that we go to Cabo Rojo, to the big Alcoa bauxite complex where I knew the manager, an American named Pat Hughson, who had often extended an invitation to visit when I met him socially in Santo Domingo. Graham and Bajeux thought it was a splendid idea: the prospect of a drink, dinner, a shower and a good bed at Cabo Rojo appealed to them. Hughson, I explained, had once been either a pilot or an aviation mechanic who had been brought down from the United States by Trujillo to work with the Dominican air force. He married a Dominican and was now employed by Alcoa. He had seemed a friendly, hospitable and affable enough fellow.
It was dark when we arrived. The Beetle’s lights lit up the sturdy high chain-link fence, and we followed it until we came upon a padlocked gate. The enclosure looked forbidding. It was situated in the remote extreme south-west corner of the Dominican Republic; we had travelled from ocean to ocean. A man in uniform stepped out of the guardhouse with a flashlight and asked us to state our business. He made no move to open the gate. I identified myself as a good amigo of the boss. I needed to talk with him.
He took my name and told us to wait, then he disappeared inside the guardhouse. We could hear his muffled voice as he made a call. There was a long silence. We waited. Graham looked at me, his eyebrows arched quizzically.
‘Do you see a water tap?’ Father Bajeux said. We were all terribly thirsty. I felt uncomfortable. I called to the guard. He told me again to wait. Finally he came back to the gate, beckoned to me, unlocked it and opened it just enough for me to slide through. He pointed to the guardhouse phone, the receiver resting on the side of the table.
I took the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘Yes?’ It was Patrick Hughson, and there was nothing friendly in his voice. I thought perhaps we had interrupted his dinner.
‘Hello, Pat. Could you put us up for the night? There are three of us.’
‘This isn’t a hotel. You can find a hotel in town,’ he said.
So much for the jovial Hughson I’d met on the Santo Domingo cocktail circuit. Still, I explained that we’d been out in the boondocks all day travelling from San Juan de la Maguana, adding, ‘I thought you had said to drop in and visit if …’ If I hadn’t been with Graham and Bajeux, both of whom deserved a good night’s sleep, I would have told Hughson to go to hell and gone for any of the decrepit lodging places in Pedernales — even the prison.
Finally Hughson relented. ‘Put the guard on,’ he said. I handed the phone to the guard, who received his orders. He unlocked the gate again, and we drove into the compound. But once more we were told to wait. The additional delay was infuriating. Finally an unarmed guard on a motorcycle wearing a shiny silver hard hat arrived. We were issued visitors’ badges and ordered to follow the bike.
A mountain of red earth loomed next to the adjacent Caribbean Sea. A long low-slung bauxite cargo ship was berthed at the dock. ‘This is right out of Dr No!’ exclaimed Graham. ‘Dr who?’ Bajeux and I chorused. Neither of us was familiar at the time with the James Bond thriller set in Jamaica at a bauxite port much like this.
‘And this is obviously Dr No himself,’ Graham laughed when we drove up to the main house where Hughson, a large heavy-set man with a rotund girth, awaited us on his spacious open veranda.
I apologized to Hughson for not calling in advance, explaining that we hadn’t known we would make it over the mountains, but he did not appear to be in a forgiving mood. He gave us a cool reception, making us feel like intruders, suspicious at our sudden night-time arrival. I could see that Graham was equally dubious of Hughson and his inhospitable manner. I introduced my two companions, mumbling their names, but Hughson was not interested in who they were.
‘You missed dinner,’ Hughson said, sounding almost pleased.
‘We’ve been travelling all day from San Juan de la Maguana. It’s been a long tough trip,’ I explained, but he was not impressed.
He sent orders to prepare cold sandwiches for us. Later Coca-Colas arrived. Graham was mortified. ‘You wouldn’t have a whisky?’ he asked. Graham was never shy when it came to asking for a drink. Hughson must have seen the plea in Graham’s pale blue eyes. Three whiskies arrived, a single drink each. Graham drained his with such obvious relish that any reasonable host would have quickly ordered a refill — but not Hughson.
When the dry ham-and-cheese sandwiches arrived, without condiments, we wolfed them down. As we ate Hughson sat back, seeming to find us a little disgusting. There was a little small talk. With no whisky refill in the offing, we thanked him and said goodnight.
Again we were taken under escort and were deposited at the junior executives’ billet where we would spend the night.
‘What a bloody awful fellow!’ Graham exploded. ‘The man has no humanity. Dreadful chap.’
But even Graham’s latent anti-Americanism, which Pat Hughson had caused to flare up like a fever, was soon lost in the sheer comic relief of the moment. Graham and I had to share a room. Despite our long day on the road neither of us was ready for sleep. Like two English schoolboys we sat up talking and laughing as long as our dry vocal chords would permit about this strange encounter and Graham’s imaginary comparison with Dr No. Graham thought up all kinds of sinister plots that could be going on around us at Cabo Rojo. He told me about his stay at Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye residence on Jamaica’s north coast. He hadn’t liked the housekeeper, Vivian, whom he accused of putting the ‘evil eye’ on him. I realized much later the depth of Graham’s superstitious nature. Fleming, he said, had offered to loan him Goldeneye rent-free if he would do the foreword to an omnibus of his James Bond books. ‘I told him I’d rather pay the rent than write the foreword.’
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.
The day after Graham had departed Aubelin Jolicoeur burst into my office, gushing over the great stories I had missed. Jolicoeur never sat down. He had to gesticulate his story with his whole body. At the El Rancho he said, Truman Capote had asked him, ‘Jolicoeur, have you met the celebrated author of The Power and the Glory ? Greene left the bar,’ Jolicoeur asserted, ‘and crossed on to the El Rancho dance floor to come to meet me! He must have walked ten metres to greet me!’ Jolicoeur’s description of their meeting was uncharacteristic of both men. I had observed my friend Aubelin many times, gurgling with joy, declaring ‘Oh-la-la’ and flitting forward to greet a tourist like a oiseau-mouche, the tiny hummingbird with gyro-like wings that allow it to hover over a hibiscus flower, sip pollen and then dart on to the next flower at remarkable speed. Graham, by contrast, would (I then believed) appear reluctant to respond to the gesture and would detest the interruption, cringing at the public attention. As the capital’s society reporter, he had managed to crash Haiti’s tough caste and colour barriers by dint of his deft pen, writing the most exaggerated and outlandish prose conceivable in even his republic of hyperbole.
The following day when I arrived at the Bowen Field airport to pick up my copies of the Dominican and Puerto Rican newspapers from the Delta fight, I was startled to see Graham again. He had left Haiti the day before; now he stood on the tarmac arguing with the American manager of Delta Airlines. I was about to approach him but had second thoughts, and I joined a small group at the transit bar and gift shop facing the tarmac and listened to the argument. Embarrassed, I denied knowing him.
The Delta man kept insisting that Graham had to stay, that he had obtained a Haitian visa for him. He would have to wait until midweek for a flight to Jamaica, where he needed no visa as it was British territory. He could not proceed because he didn’t have a visa for Cuba, the plane’s next stop, or to New Orleans. We all heard Graham snap, ‘What?’ Then he made it definite. ‘I’m going on this plane!’ The Delta manager, a white American Southerner, was beside himself. ‘But you’re not going on my plane.’ I could see that Graham was being pushed too far. He appeared ready to explode.
The plane’s pilot joined them. Like a boxing referee, he raised a hand to separate them. With a dignified gesture the pilot invited Graham to board his plane. We heard the pilot tell the Delta man, ‘Thank you, I’m taking this gentleman on my plane.’
We watched as they took off for Havana. The Delta manager, crestfallen, kept repeating to himself, ‘I was just trying to help him.’ The spectators at the bar were sympathetic.
My weekly had a story. Graham was back on our front page (at the bottom, because it was a good news week). While later he loved to make light of his Puerto Rico ‘lark’, it had not seemed to be fun at the time. It had provided a glimpse of a man who didn’t take kindly to being pushed around.
At a diplomatic cocktail party the next night I learned further details of Graham’s adventure. US charge d’affaires Milton Barral told me that he had met Graham at a dinner party on the Friday night before his departure. Greene, he said, had decided to return to England the quickest way. Perversely, it became the longest route. The quickest way was via San Juan, Puerto Rico, and on to New York, and then across the Atlantic. However, Graham knew it would take days for the US Embassy to receive permission from Washington to issue him even a transit visa. Barral thought Graham might be able to swing it without a visa as he was only in transit to London. The worst scenario Barral envisaged — not quite accurately, as it turned out — was that Graham could be detained briefly between plane connections in Puerto Rico or New York. The embassy official said Graham had told him that on two recent occasions he had received special permission from the US Attorney-General to visit New York City, but each waiver had involved a lot of red tape and had taken three weeks. Detesting red tape and not prepared to wait in Port-au-Prince, he decided to take the risk of travelling as an in-transit passenger without a US visa.
We used the basic Reuters report, which Graham had himself scripted.
In 1925 at Oxford University, at age 19, as a prank to escape boredom, Greene and a friend had become probationer members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. They had teamed up to play a trick on the party. They paid two shillings [24 cents at the time] — actually four sixpenny stamps — as membership dues for the first month. Their original idea was to wangle a free trip to Moscow or at least Paris. When the scheme failed, they allowed their memberships to lapse, by which time the party hierarchy had seen through them.
Graham’s escapade certainly didn’t interfere with his later becoming a wartime member of the Secret Intelligence Service. (Graham informed me that he had got on the US blacklist by mentioning his collegiate prank ‘stupidly to an American fellow in Belgium who put it in a report’). I published the story in the Haiti Sun the following Sunday, where we decided Graham’s writing deserved to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and we even noted he had won it in 1951 — or should have done.
When Graham won the verbal sparring match at the airport, which we had witnessed, I anticipated that he might have further trouble in Havana and envisaged him becoming a permanent fixture, flying back and forth around the Caribbean. However, this time Graham took the initiative. When he got to Havana he managed to leave the airport without going through the immigration formalities. (Strongman Batista, a one-time army sergeant, was still very much the boss in Cuba in 1954. Fidel Castro, his brother Raul and other survivors of the abortive 26 July attack on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago de Cuba the year before were behind bars on the Isle of Pines. They would later be released and exiled to Mexico.) Graham had booked into the lovely old Hotel Inglaterra on Havana’s Parque Central and was about to enjoy a siesta when the phone rang. He had alerted Reuters, and now it was the British news agency alerting him. They had taken up ‘his’ story. This was a rare occasion on which I knew he had played his own publicist.
The Daily Telegraphs correspondent, New Zealand expatriate Ted Scott, and a friend, sent me an update from Havana. Scott, an ex-British spy, had found Graham and told him, ‘You know the police are searching for you. I’ve been inquiring about you at the airport, and they say you have come in without going through immigration, and they are looking for you.’
The British ambassador to Cuba sent Graham a message that he wouldn’t invite him to a meal because it might offend the Americans.
I realized years later that Graham had a habit of always registering at British embassies abroad, and he enjoyed being invited to them for dinner or even staying in the Ambassador’s residence. Rested up, he flew on to London, managing to escape any exit problems at the Cuban capital’s Rancho Boyeros International Airport.
There was some good in Graham’s lark: he had ridiculed the McCarran-Walters Act of 1952, which barred entry into the United States to anyone who might have had connections with the communists.
Two years later, in November 1956, I met a different Graham Greene. He was sitting with a woman bent over a Scrabble board near the pool at El Rancho. It was late morning, and the hotel was almost deserted. I approached, not wishing to disturb their game. I was holding a copy of the Haiti Sun that announced their arrival. His interest was in the lady who was beating him at Scrabble. I watched him as he reached down to consult a dictionary at his feet. I thought that was cheating. He gave off a series of ‘Oh yes, oh yes’ when he spotted me standing in the sun. His companion was cool and collected — and winning. She had a pleasant smile, and Graham invited me to sit with them. It was fun to see him wrestling with the spelling of a word. Graham Greene a poor speller? Catherine, as he introduced his handsome and lively female friend, was indeed the winner. Graham had to buy the rum punches.
Perhaps it had been Catherine who brought him to life and made him a much more open and entertaining person. He already sounded like an expert on Haiti. He explained it was a quiet time at the El Rancho as the other guests were on city and mountains tours, and he ticked off the sights: the Iron Market, mahogany factories and the marketplace at Kenscoff in the cool mountains; he confessed that he had become another victim of Haiti’s strange charm.
They were on a six-week Caribbean holiday, and he had decided to show Haiti to ‘Cafryn’, as he called his friend. I told them I would be only too pleased to show them around, whenever they wanted. I did not wish to intrude on their holiday. I did not take out my notebook and pen. I was in awe of the writer, and I decided against an interview, posing any questions or asking Catherine about herself. I had almost forgotten I was a reporter. But I did ask him if I could take a photograph. He confessed to hating having his picture taken and didn’t wish to be recognized by the tourists. I promised I would publish the photograph only after they departed. Catherine said, ‘Fair enough,’ and instructed him, laughing, to ‘stand up like a man and be shot’. She herself did not wish to be in the photograph and told me to stop calling Graham ‘Mr Greene’. He also preferred Graham. Snapping his picture was painlessly quick. In one frame I captured a youngish Graham Greene posing by the pool in a dark shirt and with his hands in the pockets of his linen trousers. The image appeared on the front page of the Haiti Sun on 2 December. The caption noted that three of author Greene’s greatest discoveries on this trip were: first, the ten-cent taxi, a communal automobile called la ligne, that dropped passengers anywhere within the city limits for that price; second, the taptap, a colourfully painted small pick-up truck with a specially designed passenger section, sporting brazen sayings and biblical messages to and from God that were designed to assure the rider that God cared, even if the fare was seven cents; and, third, another means of transport, the camionette, an unadorned estate car, also seven cents a ride, that plied the hill between the capital and Pétionville. The average tourist didn’t use these forms of transport. However, they appealed to Graham’s thrifty side, and, besides, he was not a typical tourist.
After their Scrabble game they invited me to lunch. I made suggestions, such as attending a show at the Centre d’Art. When we met again Graham asked whether we could visit a ‘house of flowers’. I agreed. Catherine also agreed. I had no idea who she was, only that she was outgoing and fun-loving with a saucy sense of humour with which she often baited him and brought him out from his shell. They seemed like old friends, and he was obviously very fond of her. Graham stipulated that we choose brothels staffed by Haitians girls not Dominicans. It was quite acceptable for visits to take the form of sitting, imbibing, dancing and watching the dancing. We sat and drank Barbancourt rum and soda at the large cafe-brothel opposite a private Thorland country club on the Carrefour road. The cafe portion was open-air and structurally not unlike a Voodoo peristyle (religious centre); it was painted the colour of the wicked red eyes of Erzulie Ge-Rouge, the religion’s love goddess who had a bad case of jealousy. The jukebox was blaring a rendition of Perez Prado’s ‘Mambo Number Five’. The clientele were obviously not the wealthy, who patronized the Dominican houses; in fact there were few customers.
The girls were dressed in tight clothes and bright colours. Some of them danced with each other. One customer was hunched over a plate of griot and fried plantains. The scent of the pork mixed with cheap cologne. Graham drew our attention to one Haitian Aphrodite and commented on her grace and beauty. ‘What an exquisite long neck! Look at that profile … She could be an African princess!’
Catherine, noting that he was quite taken with the girl’s natural beauty, feigned jealousy, as if Graham had found his choice for the evening. ‘Well,’ she announced loudly enough to command attention, ‘I think I’ll leave you boys to your wiles. Can I get a taptap back to the hotel?’ Graham smiled, ‘Fine’, as if to admit he was smitten. It was worth a chuckle to observe their games. But for a moment I thought she was serious, and I was about to call it quits for the evening.
We moved on to another bar, which was much the same. Catherine, smiling, turned to me during a lull of the loud meringue playing on the jukebox and said she thought writers were particularly interested in brothels. She nodded her head gaily towards Graham. ‘Of course as observers … they are attracted by the world’s oldest profession. It allows them to see,’ she went on coyly, ‘and sometimes feel humanity in the raw.’ She broke into laughter as Graham looked at her quizzically; she added, ‘You know it’s the male oppressor’s workplace!’
It was when he spoke of his personal aversion to the crowds of tourists that I suggested that they would be more at home at the Grand Hotel Oloffson. After introducing Graham and Catherine to Roger Coster and his wife Laura, they needed no more encouragement and agreed to spend the last two days of their stay there. ‘We sell a soul, not a bed,’ Coster had told them, rattling off his sales pitch. During their nineteen-year occupation of Haiti (1915—34) the US Marines had turned the hotel into a hospital and built a ten-room maternity wing for expectant Marine wives. Coster claimed that lots of babies had been born at the Oloffson during the Marine occupation, but more had been conceived there since the Marines left.
Both Graham and Catherine displayed keen interest in the primitive Haitian art movement. At the time most expatriate Americans living in Haiti attended the vernissages of new artists at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince run by an American, Dewitt Peters. (The 1954 painting by Rigaud Benoît, of a flood sweeping all before it as a priest and his flock kneel helplessly watching the lavalas, as Haitians called the flash floods, remained with Graham for the rest of his life. Along with other Haitian primitive paintings — such as the one by Phillippe-Auguste that he’d bought in 1963 with his winnings from a night in the nearly deserted Casino in Papa Doc’s haunted Port-au-Prince — he kept it hanging in his last apartment in Switzerland. He loved them. They reminded him of an exciting time in his life, according to Yvonne, with whom he last lived.)
One afternoon I drove Graham and Catherine out to La Galerie Brochette, an exhibition centre for a new colony of young Haitian artists situated in the village of Carrefour. They included the painters Gérard Dorcely and Luckner Lazard, whose work was not actually primitive but modernist. Catherine became enthusiastic and wanted to know whether the artists had ever exhibited abroad (most at that point had not) and whether they would consider exhibiting their works in London. Mais oui, madame! The artists were then struggling for recognition, and their responses to her were understandably enthusiastic. The group photograph I took shows a tanned and smiling couple, Graham and Catherine, with the artists at La Galerie Brochette. Another artist, Max Pinchinat, a member of the Galerie, later returned to work in Paris, and it was he, as things turned out, who played the Voodoo priest in the movie version of The Comedians. After long being repressed, Voodoo was now out of the closet. Each hotel had its night for a special folkloric show, and at the International Casino dancer Pierre Blain and his troupe performed an extravaganza entitled Invocation to Dambala. Many of the folk dancers were actually ounsis (women dressed all in white who assist in the ceremonies) or other practitioners of Voodoo, and their floor-show rituals followed closely the rituals in the temples. Drums were heard nightly not only in the open-air Theatre de Verdure, in the tourist hotels or the International Casino; they lulled one to sleep in most districts of the capital. After years of official persecution of Voodoo, it was the late Dumarsais Estime, President between 1946 and 1950, who had allowed Haiti’s folk religion to blossom once more, even though it was technically illegal.
Graham’s anti-tourist bias and his thrift drove him away from pricey tourist guides and chauffeurs and into the crowded backs of the taptapbuses. He and Catherine squeezed in with the chickens and produce and wares of the marchands (market women). Catherine was resourceful in avoiding the throngs of vacationers in other ways. Both had about them a spirit of mischievous glee that summer.
Years later, in search of the perfect rum punch in Panama or Central America, Graham often spoke with fondness of the diminutive Oloffson bartender Caesar’s superb rum punches, which he served with an ear-to-ear smile just visible above the hotel’s huge mahogany bar. The Oloffson’s long, wide veranda served as an elevated dining-room.
One afternoon, as a soft reddish glow illuminated the veranda while the sun dipped into La Gonave Bay, Graham began to ruminate about his family’s having had a Caribbean connection. As he had never mentioned his family before, I credited Caesar’s punch with exerting special powers, as if the hotel’s playful bartender had planted some Voodoo powder in the drink. I was intrigued by Graham’s surprising airing of his ancestral linen.
‘According to Greene family lore,’ he said, ‘the Greenes have roots in the Caribbean.’ As he told the story of his family link to this tropical sea I felt it might explain why he was so at ease with Caribbean people. A branch of the Greenes, he continued, had had sugar plantations on the island of St Kitts in the last century; Great Uncle Charles had died there at age of nineteen of yellow fever. (It could have been cholera.) But he had accomplished what most men don’t do in an entire lifetime. He had fathered, said Graham after a brief pause, ‘thirteen children’. The siring, he went on, savouring his rum punch, took place after the emancipation of the slaves on St Kitts. (Graham gave no details of the mothers of the thirteen children, leaving that to the imagination.) Two years before Charlie died of the fever, Graham’s grandfather, William Greene, then only fourteen years old, sailed across the Atlantic to help his brother Charles run the plantations. Grandfather William went back to England after Charlie’s death but later returned to St Kitts, where he, too, died and was buried on the island near his brother. Graham clearly relished telling the story of his forebear’s sexual exploits. (He had at one time mentioned the fact that he was a distant cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson, whom he obviously admired, but it was Uncle Charlie he respected.) He told the latter story matter-of-factly but with a certain amount of irreverent humour. Catherine had heard the tale before and was talking with an artist at another table down the long veranda. She looked towards us and smiled as Graham delivered his punchline about the thirteen offspring.
During Graham and Catherine’s last evening in Haiti, the Centre d’Art’s founder and director, Dewitt Peters, held a farewell cocktail party for them. The next morning I drove them from the Oloffson to the airport. They took the Delta flight, this time non-stop to Havana.
Graham had two paintings that the Haitian artists had given him and four bottles of five-star Rhum Barbancourt, my gift to them both. (He would try unsuccessfully to reproduce Caesar’s rum punch in England with the recipe the little Oloffson barman had confided to him.) I remarked that Haiti was a quiet place, ideal for him to write, and suggested he return. He showed interest in the idea but worried about how to finance a much longer stay. He made no promises but asked about renting a house and the cost of living. As he drained his last rum punch at the Bowen Field airport bar, gripping his battered leather briefcase in one hand and his paintings in the other, I knew he would be back.
However, instead of returning to Haiti in the late 1950s Graham went to Cuba, which had a rebellion of its own. Fidel Castro had been released from jail, gone into exile in Mexico, and on 2 December 1956 had returned at the head of an invasion force of eighty-two men. Their arrival was anticipated by the regime, and they were almost wiped out by Batista’s army. With a dozen survivors Fidel reached the rugged Sierra Maestra, the brooding mountain chain in eastern Cuba visible on a clear day from north-west Haiti. From there he launched his guerrilla war. It turned out that the book manuscript Graham had been carrying in his battered briefcase during his 1956 visit to Haiti was one spoofing the British Secret Service. He ultimately adapted it to Cuba. Our Man in Havana was published in 1958, a few months before Castro came to power, and made into a film in 1959 starring Alec Guinness, Noel Coward and Ernie Kovacs. The Cuban revolutionaries were not amused. It was not comedy hour in Havana — nor was it in Haiti.