The Seeds of Fiction (47 page)

Almost as embarrassing was Paredes's present to Graham of an expensive
Rolex watch with the inscription ‘To an English brother of General Omar Torrijos from General Paredes.' On his return to Antibes Graham wrote, on 15 April 1983, ‘General Paredes embarrassed me by presenting me at lunch with an inscribed gold Rolex watch which I noticed in the Faubourg in Paris was sold at 66,000 frs! I couldn't very well refuse it but I am having it demolished for its gold bracelet … so that it becomes possible to wear!'

Encouraging Graham to go to Nicaragua was the fact that he now felt only sympathy for the plight of the Sandinista revolution, partly because all of his prophecies had come to pass. Reagan was determined to oust the Sandinistas and was secretly funding and training their foes, who had become known as the Contras. He had written from France:

I am doing what I can here but it is very little. The Nicaraguan ambassador rang me up and asked me to sign a letter proposed by [Sergio] Ramirez of the [Sandinista]
junta
— quite a ferocious letter which García Márquez and author Carlos Fuentes are also signing. I have also signed a telegram to the Nicaraguan Press Agency here, which they are sending out to all chiefs of state. The Mickey Mouse bomb [a reference to a booby trap Contra bomb placed in a child's lunch box] has also been useful and I have publicized it to the best of my ability. Just off to London now for my surgical check-up.

Much later Graham revealed to me that his earlier operation on his ‘gut' had been identified as cancer. During his check-up he had received the heartening news that his cancer had not reappeared.

Before he had left Panama for Nicaragua, President de la Espriella, in a ceremony at Panama City's Palace of Herons, and in the presence of Omar's two strapping sons, the National Guard high command and a beaming Chuchu, presented Graham with the country's Grand Cross of the Order of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. While Graham said he was embarrassed by the award, he was none the less moved. ‘I had done nothing to justify such a decoration,' he protested to Espriella. He was later to write in
Getting to Know the General,
‘My sense of embarrassment increased when I became tangled up in the ribbon and the stars. I felt like a Christmas tree in the process of being hung with presents.' (He was not the only Brit to be honoured. His friend, the ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, had also received the decoration.) Another moving moment occurred when he flew over Cerro Marta, the crash site of Omar's plane, in a bucking helicopter along with Torrijos's eldest daughter Carmen Alicia and Chuchu. It was the first time that Chuchu, for all his certainty about a bomb, had gone near the crash site.

In January 1983 I met up with Graham and Chuchu in Managua while
reporting an article headlined ‘Rising Tides of War in Central America' for
Time.
The story appeared in the 14 February 1983 issue of the magazine in which the cover story was ‘The KGB Today: Andropov's Eyes on the World'. Interestingly Graham had expounded a pet theory to Omar that the KGB could well be the vehicle for change in the Soviet Union. Graham really believed that the USSR's Communist Party chief Yuri Andropov — a former head of the KGB — was a dove. In Nicaragua, meanwhile, the clashes between the US-backed counter-revolutionaries and Sandinista military forces were becoming more frequent.

Graham was impressed by the Church people, both Catholic and Protestant. Most were outspoken critics of Reagan's policy of aiding the Contras. Graham met with nuns in Ciudad Sandino and was taken on a tour of the war zone near Nicaragua's border with Honduras. On his return he asked me whether he had been shown a quiet sector of the Contra war. I assured him that there was no peaceful area near that border.

On Graham's last night in Nicaragua, at dinner at an outdoor Mexican restaurant, Los Antojitos, across the street from Managua's InterContinental Hotel, he appeared tired and somewhat bewildered. He was staying in what he described as ‘a posh, well-guarded residence of a wealthy Sandinista'. However, his overall mood was good for having survived the war zone trip. ‘An ambush would have made it a little more exciting,' he chuckled.

The Sandinista Land-Rover jeeps were, he commented, the closest he had been to a coffin. In an ambush he felt there would be no way of getting out the back of the vehicle. (Three months after Graham's trip
Time's
chief of correspondents Richard Duncan, along with two editors from the magazine and veteran foreign correspondent Karen DeYoung of the
Washington Post,
were ambushed although unharmed by Contra rebels while travelling in a Sandinista military convoy. They were moving down the road from the little town of Jalapa, near the Honduran border, to an airfield to return to Managua when the mortar attack occurred. Five government soldiers guarding the journalists were killed and six wounded.)

Sandinista Interior Minister Tomás Borge had introduced Graham to Lenin Cerna, the head of state security. Graham received the tour Lenin customarily gave the foreign media, some of whom were sceptical of Cerna's display of lethal boobytrapped toys he accused the rebels of manufacturing for use against the civilian population. Graham accepted them as evidence of the purported barbarity of the Contras. The
pièce de résistance
was the child's Mickey Mouse school lunch-box bomb. What Graham saw, and was shown, during his visit heightened his anger against President Reagan and what was becoming known as Reagan's secret war.

Graham confessed at Los Antojitos, when Chuchu went to use the telephone,
that ‘it has been a strange trip. I don't mind being used when it is for a good cause but I am a little mystified about our and Chuchu's next stop, Havana. I am still not certain whether I am invited by Fidel or Casa de Las Americas [the Cuban cultural centre]. Frankly I am a little tired and it is time to go home.'

When I thought how arduous and tense travelling around rural Nicaragua with the Sandinistas could be, stopping and starting and visually sweeping the road ahead for an ambush, I felt sympathy for Graham, who was about to turn eighty. It was the last time the three of us would be together in Central America.

Gabriel García Márquez happened to be in Havana when Graham arrived. The two writers were now old friends, and it was Gabo who helped break the ice when Fidel Castro dropped in to visit Graham Greene.

García Márquez's original report of the meeting was reprinted in the Cuban newspaper
Granma
on 14 April 1991 after Graham's death.

Graham Greene stopped over in Havana for 20 hours, and the local correspondents of the foreign press read all kinds of things into it. Naturally. He arrived on an executive plane belonging to the government of Nicaragua and was accompanied by José de Jesús Martínez [Chuchu], a Panamanian poet and professor of mathematics who was one of the men closest to General Omar Torrijos. Moreover, they were met at the airport by protocol officials, and the meeting was wrapped in so much discretion that no journalist found out about the visit until it was over. They were taken to a house for visiting dignitaries that is usually reserved for heads of state of friendly countries, a black Mercedes Benz was placed at their disposal — the kind that was used only during the 6th Summit Meeting of Non-Aligned Countries, nine years ago. Actually, they didn't need it, because they didn't leave the house. Old Cuban friends of theirs came to see them — friends who knew they were there because the writer himself told them. Painter René Portocarrero who became Greene's friend when the writer came to Havana to study the setting for
Our Man in Havana,
got the message too late, and, when he got there, the writer had already gone back. Greene ate only once during the 20 hours, nibbling at a lot of things like a wet bird, but he had a bottle of good Spanish red wine, and the two of them and their guests polished off six bottles of whisky.

When Greene departed, he left the impression that not even he knew why he had come — a thing that could happen only to one of his characters in his novels, fomented by doubts about God.

I went to his house two hours after he arrived because he phoned as soon as he heard I was in the city. This made me very happy, not only because I've admired him for a long time as a writer and as a human
being but also because many years had gone by since we'd seen each other last.

After so many years, I found a rejuvenated Graham Greene whose clear thinking continues to be his most surprising and unalterable virtue. As always, we talked about everything under the sun. What most caught my attention was the sense of humor with which he referred to the four trials in which he had to appear in various French courts, as a result of the accusatory pamphlet he published against the Mafia in Nice. For many familiar with the Côte d'Azur's underworld, Greene's revelations were nothing new. But we, his friends, feared for his life. He held to his course, however, and went ahead with his denunciation. ‘I'd rather die of a bullet in the head than a cancer of the prostate,' he said. And I said then — I don't remember where — that Graham Greene was playing literary Russian roulette, as he had done in his youth with a .32 Smith and Wesson, as reported in his memoirs. He remembered my statement during the visit and took it as a starting point for telling us the details of his four trials.

At around 1.00 a.m. Fidel Castro dropped by to visit. He and Greene had first met shortly after the triumph of the Revolution, when Greene attended the filming of
Our Man in Havana.
They saw each other several times since then, during Greene's periodic visits, but it seemed that they hadn't gotten together the last two times, because, when they shook hands, Graham Greene, said, ‘We haven't seen each other for 16 years.' It seemed to me that they were both a little daunted, and it wasn't easy for them to start talking. Therefore I asked Graham Greene how much truth there was in the episode of Russian roulette that he'd told about in his memoirs. His blue eyes, the clearest I've ever seen, lit up with the memory. ‘That was when I was 19,' he said, ‘when I fell in love with my sister's teacher.' He said that, in fact, he had played a solitary game of Russian roulette with an old revolver belonging to an older brother and that he'd done so on four different occasions.

‘There was a week between the first and the second time, but the last two were just a few minutes apart.' Fidel Castro, who couldn't let a fact such as that go by without exploring it in depth, asked him how many bullets could fit in the cylinder of the revolver. ‘Six,' Graham Greene replied. Then Fidel Castro closed his eyes and began to murmur multiplication figures. Finally, he looked at the writer in astonishment and said, ‘According to the calculation of probabilities, you should be dead.' Graham Greene smiled with the serenity of all writers when they feel they are living an episode from one of their own books and said, ‘It's a good thing I was always terrible at maths.' Perhaps because
they had been speaking about death, Fidel Castro quickly noted the writer's youthful appearance and good health and asked him what exercises he did. It was a question that was bound to come up, because Fidel Castro considers physical culture to be one of the keys of life. He does several hours of exercise every day, in the same enormous proportions in which he does everything, and he urges his friends to do the same. His physical condition is exceptional for a man of his age, and he attributes his good mental health to this. Therefore he was taken back when Graham Greene replied that he'd never done any exercises at all, yet he felt very alert and had no health problems at 79. Moreover, he said that he didn't have any special diet. That he slept between seven and eight hours a night — which was also surprising in an old man with sedentary habits — and that, at times, he drank up to a bottle of whisky a day and a liter of wine with each meal, yet he'd never become a slave to alcohol.

For a moment, Fidel Castro seemed to doubt the efficacy of his regimen of health, but he quickly realized that Graham Greene was an admirable exception —admirable, but an exception. By the time we said goodbye, I was sure that, sooner or later, that meeting would be described in a book of memoirs by one of the three of us — or perhaps by all.

When Graham returned to Antibes he wrote in a letter to me dated 2 February 1983, ‘It was an amusing meeting with Fidel in my twenty-four hours in Cuba. He looked to me much younger than he had done in 1966 and much more relaxed.' An article reported by a colleague of mine had appeared in
Time
that had enraged Graham. He was so upset by this article and the treatment of the Sandinistas that he went on French television to excoriate it. He said he had promised to send a copy to Chuchu.

In a letter two weeks later he said:

I wrote to you after I returned but I was very tired and I don't know what I told you! Did I tell you that we had had a visit from Marcial who was very friendly? I was very shocked by that piece in
Time
magazine so that I broke all my resolutions and went on television on the Third Regional to contradict the story of which I said I did not believe a word as I had spoken to many priests and American nuns in Nicaragua who would certainly have had some knowledge of such things going on. [The
Time
story, ‘A Defector's Firsthand Account of Massacres and Torture', was full of allegations which the Sandinistas denied.] I have also written a long letter to
The Tablet
[the British edition of the Catholic newspaper] on the
unreliability of Archbishop Obando y Bravo. I will send you a cutting when it appears. A crazy young documentary Australian film director Bradbury has sent me a student's ticket to Managua and back because he wants me to help him in a film he is doing with Bianca Jagger. He is a good documentary man and on the right side and I expect he will be trying to look you up. Did I tell you that Fidel prophesied a guerrilla victory in San Salvador in a year's time?