Graham Greene Read online

  The stranger said suddenly: How long will she take to Vera Cruz?

  Who?

  The boat.

  Mr. Tench said gloomily: Forty hours from now and we'd be there. The Diligencia. A good hotel. Dance places too. A gay town.

  It makes it seem close, the stranger said. And a ticket, how much would that be?

  You'd have to ask Lopez, Mr. Tench said. He's the agent.

  But Lopez ...

  Oh, yes, I forgot. They shot him.

  Somebody knocked on the door. The stranger slipped the attaché case under his chair, and Mr. Tench went cautiously up towards the window. Can't be too careful, he said. Any dentist who's worth the name has enemies.

  A faint voice implored them: A friend, and Mr. Tench opened up. Immediately the sun came in like a white-hot bar.

  A child stood in the doorway asking for a doctor. He wore a big hat and had stupid brown eyes. Beyond him two mules stamped and whistled on the hot beaten road. Mr. Tench said he was not a doctor: he was a dentist. Looking round he saw the stranger crouched in the rocking-chair, gazing with an effect of prayer, entreaty. ... The child said there was a new doctor [12] in town: the old one had fever and wouldn't stir. It was his mother who was sick.

  A vague memory stirred in Mr. Tench's brain. He said with an air of discovery: Why, you're a doctor, aren't you?

  No, no. I've got to catch that boat.

  I thought you said ...

  I've changed my mind.

  Oh, well, it won't leave for hours yet, Mr. Tench said. They're never on time. He asked the child how far. The child said it was six leagues away.

  Too far, Mr. Tench said. Go away. Find someone else. He said to the stranger: How things get around. Everyone must know you are in town.

  I could do no good, the stranger said anxiously: he seemed to be asking Mr. Tench's opinion, humbly.

  Go away, Mr. Tench said. The child did not stir. He stood in the hard sunlight looking in with infinite patience. He said his mother was dying. The brown eyes expressed no emotion: it was a fact. You were born, your parents died, you grew old, you died yourself.

  If she's dying, Mr. Tench said, there's no point in a doctor seeing her.

  But the stranger had got up: unwillingly he had been sum­moned to an occasion he couldn't pass by. He said sadly: It always seems to happen. Like this.

  You'll have a job not to miss the boat.

  I shall miss it, he said. I am meant to miss it. He was shaken by a tiny rage. Give me my brandy. He took a long pull at it, with his eyes on the impassive child, the baked street, the buzzards moving in the sky like indigestion spots.

  But if she's dying ... Mr. Tench said.

  I know these people. She will be no more dying than I am.

  You can do no good.

  The child watched them as if he didn't care. The argument in a foreign language going on in there was something abstract: he wasn't concerned. He would just wait here till the doctor came.

  You know nothing, the stranger said fiercely. That is what everyone all the time says-you do no good. The brandy [13] had affected him. He said with monstrous bitterness: I can hear them saying it all over the world.

  Anyway, Mr. Tench said, there'll be another boat. In a fortnight. Or three weeks. You are lucky. You can get out. You haven't got your capital here. He thought of his capital: the Japanese drill, the dentist's chair, the spirit-lamp and the pliers and the little oven for the gold fillings: a stake in the country.

  Vamos, the man said to the child. He turned back to Mr. Tench and told him that he was grateful for the rest out of the sun. He had the kind of dwarfed dignity Mr. Tench was accustomed to-the dignity of people afraid of a little pain and yet sitting down with some firmness in his chair. Perhaps he didn't care for mule travel. He said with an effect of old­-fashioned ways: I will pray for you.

  You were welcome, Mr. Tench said. The man got up onto the mule, and the child led the way, very slowly under the bright glare, towards the swamp, the interior. It was from there the man had emerged this morning to take a look at the General Obregon: now he was going back. He swayed very slightly in his saddle from the effect of the brandy. He became a minute disappointed figure at the end of the street.

  It had been good to talk to a stranger, Mr. Tench thought, going back into his room, locking the door behind him (one never knew). Loneliness faced him there, vacancy. But he was as accustomed to both as to his own face in the glass. He sat down in the rocking-chair and moved up and down, creating a faint breeze in the heavy air. A narrow column of ants moved across the room to the little patch on the floor where the stranger had spilt some brandy: they milled in it, then moved on in an orderly line to the opposite wall and disappeared. Down in the river the General Obregon whistled twice, he didn't know why.

  The stranger had left his book behind. It lay under his rocking-chair: a woman in Edwardian dress crouched sobbing upon a rug embracing a man's brown polished pointed shoes. He stood above her disdainfully with a little waxed moustache. The book was called La Eterna Martyr. After a time Mr. Tench picked it up. When he opened it he was taken aback-what was printed inside didn't seem to belong; it was Latin. Mr. [14] Tench grew thoughtful: he picked the book up and carried it into his workroom. You couldn't burn a book, but it might be as well to hide it if you were not sure--sure, that is, of what it was all about. He put it inside the little oven for gold alloy. Then he stood by the carpenter's bench, his mouth hanging open: he had remembered what had taken him to the quay-­the ether cylinder which should have come down-river in the General Obregon. Again the whistle blew from the river, and Mr. Tench ran without his hat into the sun. He had said the boat would not go before morning, but you could never trust those people not to keep to time-table, and sure enough, when he came out onto the bank between the customs and the ware­house, the General Obregon was already ten feet off in the sluggish river, making for the sea. He bellowed after it, but it wasn't any good: there was no sign of a cylinder anywhere on the quay. He shouted once again, and then didn't trouble any more. It didn't matter so much after all: a little additional pain was hardly noticeable in the huge abandonment.

  On the General Obregon a faint breeze began to blow: banana plantations on either side, a few wireless aerials on a point, the port slipped behind. When you looked back you could not have told that it had ever existed at all. The wide Atlantic opened up: the great grey cylindrical waves lifted the bows, and the hobbled turkeys shifted on the deck. The captain stood in the tiny deck-house with a toothpick in his hair. The land went backward at a slow even roll, and the dark came quite suddenly, with a sky of low and brilliant stars. One oil-­lamp was lit in the bows, and the girl whom Mr. Tench had spotted from the bank began to sing gently-a melancholy, sentimental, and contented song about a rose which had been stained with true love's blood. There was an enormous sense of freedom and air upon the gulf, with the low tropical shore-line buried in darkness as deeply as any mummy in a tomb. I am happy, the young girl said to herself without considering why, I am happy.

  Far back inside the darkness the mules plodded on. The effect of the brandy had long ago worn off, and the man bore in his brain along the marshy tract-which, when the rains came, would be quite impassable-the sound of the General Obregon's siren. He knew what it meant: the ship had kept [15] to time-table: he was abandoned. He felt an unwilling hatred of the child ahead of him and the sick woman-he was un­worthy of what he carried. A smell of damp came up all round him; it was as if this part of the world had never been dried in the flame when the world was sent spinning off into space: it had absorbed only the mist and cloud of those awful spaces. He began to pray, bouncing up and down to the lurching, slithering mules stride, with his brandied tongue: Let me be caught soon ... Let me be caught. He had tried to escape, but he was like the King of a West African tribe, the slave of his people, who may not even lie down in case the winds should fail.

  Chapter Two

  THE SQUAD of police made their way back to the sta
tion: they walked raggedly with rifles slung anyhow: ends of cotton where buttons should have been: a puttee slipping down over the ankle: small men with black secret Indian eyes. The small plaza on the hill-top was lighted with globes strung together in threes and joined by trailing overhead wires. The Treasury, the Presidencia, a dentist's, the prison-a low white colonnaded building which dated back three hundred years, and then the steep street down-the back wall of a ruined church: whichever way you went you came ultimately to water and to river. Pink classical façades peeled off and showed the mud beneath, and the mud slowly reverted to mud. Round the plaza the evening parade went on: women in one direction, men in the other: young men in red shirts milled boisterously round the gaseosa stalls.

  The lieutenant walked in front of his men with an air of bitter distaste. He might have been chained to them unwillingly: perhaps the scar on his jaw was the relic of an escape. His gaiters were polished, and his pistol-holster: his buttons were all sewn on. He had a sharp crooked nose jutting out of a lean dancer's face: his neatness gave an effect of inordinate ambition in the shabby city. A sour smell came up to the plaza from the [16] river and the vultures were bedded on the roofs, under the tent of their rough black wings. Sometimes a little moron head peered out and down and a claw shifted. At nine-thirty exactly, all the lights in the plaza went out.

  A policeman clumsily presented arms and the squad marched into barracks; they waited for no order, hanging up their rifles by the officers' room, lurching on into the courtyard, to their hammocks, or the excusado. Some of them kicked off their boots and lay down. Plaster was peeling off the mud walls: a generation of policemen had scrawled messages on the white­wash. A few peasants waited on a bench, hands between their knees. Nobody paid them any attention. Two men were fight­ing in the lavatory.

  Where is the jefe? the lieutenant asked. No one knew: they thought he was playing billiards somewhere in the town. The lieutenant sat down with dapper irritation at the chief's table: behind his head two hearts were entwined in pencil on the whitewash. All right, he said, what are you waiting for? Bring me the prisoners. They came in bowing, hat in hand, one behind the other. So-and-so. Drunk and disorderly. Fined five pesos. But I can't pay, your Excellency. Let him clean out the lavatory and the cells then. So-and-so. Defaced an election poster. Fined five pesos. So-and-so. Found wearing a holy medal under his shirt. Fined five pesos. The duty drew to a close: there was nothing of importance. Through the open door the mosquitoes came whirring in.

  Outside, the sentry could be heard presenting arms: it was the Chief of Police. He came breezily in, a stout man with a pink fat face, dressed in white flannels with a wide-awake hat and a cartridge-belt and a big pistol dapping his thigh. He held a handkerchief to his mouth: he was in distress. Tooth­ache again, he said, toothache.

  Nothing to report, the lieutenant said with contempt.

  The Governor was at me again today, the chief complained.

  Liquor?

  No, a priest.

  The last was shot weeks ago.

  He doesn't think so.

  The devil of it is, the lieutenant said, we haven't [17] photographs. He glanced along the wall to the picture of James Calver, wanted in the United States for bank robbery and homicide: a tough uneven face taken at two angles: description circulated to every station in Central America: the low forehead and the fanatic bent-on-one-thing eyes. He looked at it with regret: there was so little chance that he would ever get south: he would be picked up in some dive at the border-in Juarez or Piedras Negras or Nogales.

  He says we have, the chief complained. My tooth, oh, my tooth! He tried to find something in his hip-pocket, but the holster got in the way. The lieutenant tapped his polished boot impatiently. There, the chief said. A large number of people sat round a table: young girls in white muslin: older women with untidy hair and harassed expressions: a few men peered shyly and solicitously out of the background. All the faces were made up of small dots: it was a newspaper photo­graph of a first communion party taken years ago: a youngish man in a Roman collar sat among the women. You could imagine him petted with small delicacies, preserved for their use in the stifling atmosphere of intimacy and respect. He sat there, plump, with protuberant eyes, bubbling with harmless feminine jokes. It was taken years ago.

  He looks like all the rest, the lieutenant said. It was obscure, but you could read into the smudgy photograph a well­-shaved, well-powdered jowl much too developed for his age. The good things of life had come to him too early-the respect of his contemporaries, a safe livelihood. The trite religious word upon the tongue, the joke to ease the way, the ready acceptance of other peoples homage ... a happy man. A natural hatred as between dog and dog stirred in the lieu­tenant's bowels. We've shot him half a dozen times, he said.

  The Governor has had a report ... he tried to get away last week to Vera Cruz.

  What are the Red Shirts doing that he comes to us?

  Oh, they missed him, of course. It was just luck that he didn't catch the boat.

  What happened to him?

  They found his mule. The Governor says he must have him this month. Before the rains come.

  [18] Where was his parish?

  Concepcion and the villages round. But he left there years ago.

  Is anything known?

  He can pass as a gringo. He spent six years at some Ameri­can seminary. I don't know what else. He was born in Carmen-the son of a storekeeper. Not that that helps.

  They all look alike to me, the lieutenant said. Something you could almost have called horror moved him when he looked at the white muslin dresses-he remembered the smell of incense in the churches of his boyhood, the candles and the laciness and the self-esteem, the immense demands made from the altar steps by men who didn't know the meaning of sacri­fice. The old peasants knelt there before the holy images with their arms held out in the attitude of the cross: tired by the long day's labour in the plantations, they squeezed out a further mortification. And the priest came round with the collecting-bag taking their centavos, abusing them for their small comforting sins, and sacrificing nothing at all in return-except a little sexual indulgence. And that was easy, the lieutenant thought. He himself felt no need of women. He said: We will catch him. It is only a question of time.

  My tooth, the chief wailed again. He said: It poisons the whole of life. Today my biggest break was twenty-five.

  You will have to change your dentist.

  They are all the same.

  The lieutenant took the photograph and pinned it on the wall. James Calver, bank robber and homicide, stared in harsh profile towards the first communion party. He is a man at any rate, the lieutenant said, with approval.

  Who?

  The gringo.

  The chief said: You heard what he did in Houston. Got away with ten thousand dollars. Two C-men were shot.

  G-men.

  It's an honour-in a way-to deal with such people. He slapped furiously out at a mosquito.

  A man like that, the lieutenant said, does no real harm. A few men dead. We all have to die. The money-somebody has to spend it. We do more good when we catch one of [19] these. He had the dignity of an idea, standing in the little whitewashed room in his polished boots and his venom. There was something disinterested in his ambition: a kind of virtue in his desire to catch the sleek respected guest of the first communion party.

  The chief said mournfully: He must be devilishly cunning if he's been going on for years.

  Anybody could do it, the lieutenant said. We haven't really troubled about them-unless they put themselves in our hands. Why, I could guarantee to fetch this man in, inside a month if …

  If what?

  If I had the power.

  It's easy to talk, the chief said. What would you do?

  This is a small state. Mountains on the north, the sea on the south. I'd beat it as you beat a street, house by house.

  Oh, it sounds easy, the chief wailed indistinctly with his handkerchief against his m
outh.

  The lieutenant said suddenly: I will tell you what I'd do. I would take a man from every village in the state as a hostage. If the villagers didn't report the man when he came, the hostages would be shot-and then we'd take more.

  A lot of them would die, of course.

  Wouldn't it be worth it? the lieutenant said with a kind of exultation. To be rid of those people for ever.

  You know, the chief said, you've got something there.

  The lieutenant walked home through the shuttered town. All his life had lain here: the Syndicate of Workers and Peasants had once been a school. He had helped to wipe out that un­happy memory. The whole town was changed: the cement playground up the hill near the cemetery where iron swings stood like gallows in the moony darkness was the site of the cathedral. The new children would have new memories: nothing would ever be as it was. There was something of a priest in his intent observant walk- a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again.

  He reached his own lodging. The houses were all one­-storied, whitewashed, built round small patios, with a well and a few flowers. The windows on the street were barred. Inside [20] the lieutenant's room there was a bed made of old packing-cases with a straw mat laid on top, a cushion and a sheet. There was a picture of the President on the wall, a calendar, and on the tiled floor a table and a rocking-chair. In the light of a candle it looked as comfortless as a prison or a monastic cell.

  The lieutenant sat down upon his bed and began to take off his boots. It was the hour of prayer. Black beetles exploded against the walls like crackers. More than a dozen crawled over the tiles with injured wings. It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experi­enced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy-a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.