The Seeds of Fiction (52 page)

Of special interest to me, of course, were Graham's dreams about Haiti. Predictably, many were nightmares in which Papa Doc figured prominently. Thus, in one surrealistic episode, ‘Out in the yard [of the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince] there were a number of cars. An old lady stood by a car … I had seen her before in the streets of Port-au-Prince. “I believe that's Papa Doc's wife,” I said, and, sure enough, the President himself joined her and they rode away. I tried to hide my face with my hands, and I was very afraid.'

Graham was in good humour. The spirit in which he laughingly described his nightmare gave no sense of the terror that François Duvalier could inflict on a person when he was still alive.

I had my own Papa Doc nightmares, which plagued me for many years after I was freed from the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince. Graham and I compared nightmares. In Graham's dream, Duvalier is about to strike him. Like me, Graham is back in Port-au-Prince and trying to escape from Papa Doc. ‘I am in Haiti and I feel something is going to happen to me at any moment,' he recounted to Jean-Bernard and me. ‘I get into a car and go to the British Embassy or I try to get there, and when I get there I find the Embassy is no longer there …' The deafening roar of Antibes' ubiquitous motorbikes below his fifth-storey apartment window drowned out the rest of his story.

I noted to Graham that at least in one version of his bad dream he had had the advantage of a car. In my nightmare, which was realistic enough to wreck my sleep for years after my imprisonment, I find myself outside the penitentiary, naked and on foot. My main preoccupation, besides trying to
get away while hiding my nakedness, is to disguise myself since most of Duvalier's top Tontons Macoutes know me. An old lady tending her open-air kitchen is frying
griot
(seasoned pork) while other
marchands
(market women) are walking down the street balancing baskets of produce on their heads. They are zombie-like and don't notice me. I usually woke up when the Macoutes arrived.

It was ironic that we were talking about Papa Doc when his son lived only twelve minutes away by car. Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife Michele and their two children were living in a house loaned to them by a son of the international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. The house was situated in a hollow near the main highway to Nice and opposite a lettuce farm. When Jean-Bernard and I drove by the place, a farmer on a tractor ploughing his field in preparation for planting sent clouds of dust on to the former dictator's front lawn.

Graham confessed that when he and Yvonne drove into the hills for dinner they gave wide berth to restaurants Baby Doc was known to frequent.

‘And our friend, the exiled Haitian priest,' Graham asked, ‘whatever happened to him?' Bajeux's own faith had slowly died. There had been no dramatic rupture with the Church. Instead, he felt abandoned by it. He quit the priesthood in the wake of the reformist Second Vatican Council, at the time when thousands of other priests were choosing to free themselves from ecclesiastical discipline and return to secular life. Materially speaking, Bajeux was better off than many clerical colleagues who had abandoned the cloth. He taught at the University of Puerto Rico and later at Princeton University. He was a poet and literary critic, and he wrote a book on three outstanding Caribbean poets: Jamaican-born Claude McKay, Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos and Aimé Césaire of Martinique. But he never stopped working to free his country from dictatorship.

After the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986 Bajeux didn't wait to be issued a Haitian passport and a re-entry visa to Haiti. Waving a blue-and-red Haitian flag, the original colours that Duvalier had changed to red and black, in front of startled immigration officials and saying, ‘This is my visa,' he was eventually allowed into the country. He went on to open what he christened the Ecumenical Centre for Human Rights in February 1987 and helped lead-fund Haiti's largest post-Duvalier democratic political organization, Konakom (the Creole acronym for National Congress of Democratic Movements). Konakom brought together in its congress some 315 peasant and grassroots organizations from throughout Haiti and later become a political party.

In 1990 Bajeux threw his support behind Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who won a historic victory. However, by October 1993, after Haiti's military had once again seized control, Bajeux was back in exile in Puerto Rico after escaping
assassination by neo-Duvalierists who sacked the house where he was living in Port-au-Prince. The beasts born of dictatorship are not easily tamed.

The intercom system buzzed. ‘Confounded thing,' Graham said as he got up to answer it.

All we heard was a long ‘Yes.'

‘Sorry,' he said when he returned, and he lifted both hands in exasperation. ‘It was a Dutchman who wanted me to autograph a book. I asked him whether I knew him. I only autograph books for my friends.'

The talk of autographs reminded him of an event during his latest birthday celebration that he felt was perhaps the most fun. The Greene King Brewery, founded by his great-grandfather in England in 1799, had issued one hundred thousand bottles of an especially strong Graham Greene birthday ale from St Edmunds, with Graham's signature on the label. He lamented that he didn't have a bottle for us but gave us the address of a London pub that might still have a bottle or two.

With surprising receptiveness he acceded to Jean-Bernard's request for a photo session. He stood and walked to the little balcony. ‘They usually like a photo here.' The backdrop was the marina and white-capped sea beyond.

‘I would rather, if you don't mind, just do your thing. Don't take notice of me,' Jean-Bernard said.

‘Oh,' Graham laughed, ‘it is going to be painless, is it?'

Later he sat at his table and read out snippets of the unfinished dream manuscript while Jean-Bernard photographed his hands.

Yvonne drove us to Chez Félix au Port for lunch, and while Graham left us at the table to cross the street to purchase
The Times
Jean-Bernard snapped several more photographs of him. ‘Please,' Graham said, ‘don't take any more photos outside. It attracts unwanted attention.'

In Florida a colleague of mine who had covered the Vietnam War had asked me whether I might ask Graham if the character Pyle in
The Quiet American
was in fact Colonel Edward G. Landsdale of the USAF, an American army officer who had won fame as a guerrilla expert, helping Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay beat the Hukbalahap guerrillas and who later become Chief of the CIA's Military Mission in Saigon.

Graham laughed. ‘I should get angry,' he said. ‘I've been asked that question so many times, and no one seems to take any notice when I say no.' He leaned forward and shouted, ‘No!' Then he added that Landsdale had not yet arrived in Vietnam when he was there. (Colonel Lansdale had been assigned to South Vietnam in June 1954. Graham had left four months earlier.) Besides, he didn't even know the man. Pyle, he added, was a very different character from the gung-ho Colonel Lansdale.

‘They confuse
The Ugly American
with
The Quiet American,
he said and
pleaded jokingly that we should not spoil such a pleasant day discussing
The Quiet American.
Graham had not forgiven Joseph Mankiewicz for his film version of the book, which Graham declared was a travesty.

Graham decided against staying up for the bicentennial celebrations and retired early. In the morning he told us he had slept well but had briefly awoken.

‘I heard a big bang!' he said.

We assured him it must have been fireworks.

He spoke of his trips to Russia and how he was happy to have seen Kim Philby before he died. Graham spoke of Philby as one would speak of a dear friend. Philby died in his sleep on 11 May 1988 and was buried in Moscow's Kuntsevo Cemetery. (Much later, Philby's Russian widow, who said she lived on the rouble equivalent of $53 a month, which the Russian government paid her, put some of Philby's possessions up for sale at Sotheby's. Included in the collection, which sold for nearly $50,000, were eleven letters from Graham.)

As was typically the case, there was nothing sad about bidding goodbye to Graham. It was always assumed that we would meet again, and we made plans to do so. Travel had a rejuvenating effect on him. He appeared as indestructible as ever. With Yvonne's help he had succeeded in reducing life's tedious trivial chores to a minimum.

We embraced as he saw us off. It was the last time I saw him.

On our return to Miami I sent him a copy of a
Newsweek
magazine article about dreams. He replied on 26 August saying thanks but that he was ‘astonished that they didn't quote the ideas of J.W. Dunne in an experiment with time where he claims that dreams take their images from the future as well as from the past. It's a very convincing book and in my own experience a true one.' He concluded his letter with ‘Yvonne and I both enjoyed your visit very much and I am glad that in spite of the awful hot weather J-B liked Antibes.'

Five months later, in November 1989, Graham returned unwell from a trip to Ireland where he had presided over a literary prize committee. He thought it was his heart, but his doctor in Antibes found nothing wrong. A month later, visiting his daughter Caroline at her home in Switzerland, he fainted. Blood tests revealed a lack of red blood cells, and his doctor ordered blood transfusions. His peregrinations were now limited to his dreams. Yet he made no mention of the seriousness of his illness in his letters.

Meanwhile our old haunt, Panama, had exploded and was making the world news. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, DC, had been given President George Bush's approval for Operation Blue Spoon, and the world witnessed one of the United States' most bizarre geopolitical interventions. It was also the largest such action since the Vietnam War.

The principal announced goal of the Bush administration's invasion of Panama was to get their man — General Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami on charges of violating US drug laws. It was an enormously costly operation to catch Noriega, the one-time CIA asset who later was to claim he collected more than $10 million from the agency, even though government records show payments of only about $800,000. The action also called for neutralizing Noriega's Panama Defence Force (PDF) which by early 1988 had been listed by the US military as ‘unfriendly'.

Shortly after midnight on 20 December 1989 Operation Blue Spoon shattered the Panama night, and once it was under way Washington changed its name to the more palatable Operation Just Cause. The Torrijos—Carter treaties had placed a ban on the United States intervening legally in Panama's internal affairs, hence the invasion.

No clear picture of the scope of the fighting was to emerge because of the tight control that American officials placed on news coverage. Yet in spite of the latest state-of-the art high-technology weaponry, such as laser-guided missiles, it is known that the US troops were surprised by the tough resistance put up by elements of the PDF, especially at its Comandancia (headquarters) and at Panama City's small Paitilla airport. The bearded black-shirted Machos del Monte battalion with their skull-and-crossbones emblem and tapir mascot had been moved from their Río Hato military base to the Comandancia weeks earlier. PDF troops at Río Hato were quickly overwhelmed by superior US airborne forces. American troops blew off the front door of Omar's Farallon beach house near by, only to find the aged maid huddling in fright in the kitchen and an old watchman hiding in the carport. Like circling black buzzards, US Delta Force helicopters searched in vain for the wanted man. Some say the midnight invasion caught Noriega literally with his pants down, that they couldn't find him because he was wandering around disrobed in an alcoholic stupor. The Navy Seals detailed to capture the Paitilla airport and decommission Noriega's Learjet encountered stiff resistance and took casualties. Four Seals lost their lives. But Noriega no longer had his private jet available, and Chuchu no longer had his Cessna.

The ramshackle, weathered two-storey tenements of El Chorrillo across from the Comandancia went up in flames. The hall in which Graham and I had watched Omar listen to ‘the people' was obliterated. The sixteen-storey high-rise apartment building that Graham had so disliked was utilized as an effective sniper position by the PDF. There was some fighting at Fort Amador in the Canal Zone, which had reverted to Panama after the signing of the Torrijos—Carter treaties in 1978. Noriega had an office there. However, the American officer commanding troops manning 105-millimetre howitzer
artillery and 50-cal machine-guns instructed his men to avoid hitting Omar Torrijos's granite mausoleum located near Fort Amador barracks where some members of the PDF were still holding out. (Some Panamanians believed Arnulfistas had stolen Omar's body after the invasion. In fact Omar's body had been so badly torn apart in the crash that his family had decided on cremation. The urn with the ashes was stolen after the invasion from its resting-place in a church and was eventually returned to the family.)

Across the Atlantic, Graham seethed. He told Reuters: ‘Whatever he [Noriega] may have done cannot be half as bad as what the United States did in El Salvador, giving arms to those people who killed six Jesuit priests.'

I tried calling Chuchu repeatedly but got no answer. Philip Bennett, a correspondent of the
Boston Globe,
found him and reported that he had ‘sneaked around the bars and back streets of post-invasion Panama, steps ahead of US troops and with an idea for a children's book forming inside his head'.

‘It's a book for the Panamanian children of the next century,' Chuchu told Bennett, sitting with his back to the wall of an obscure Chinese restaurant. ‘What's happening today, nobody's going to want to believe in the future.'

Bennett described Chuchu as