When I came back to Havana in 1957 I looked for him in all the quarters where drivers congregated; I left messages for him without effect; I turned down many volunteers, for Castro’s nocturnal bombs were frightening away the tourists and there was much unemployment. The man I remembered might be a swindler, but he had been a good guide to the shadier parts of Havana, and I had no desire for a dull and honest man to be my daily companion on this long trip. One night, when I had decided to wait no longer, I went to the Shanghai Theatre. When I came out into the dingy street I saw a number of taxis drawn up. A driver advanced towards me. ‘I have to apologise humbly, señor. You had reason. It was boracic powder. Three years ago I was deceived too. The accursed newspaper seller. A swindler, señor. I trusted him. I give you back the five shillings…’ In the course of the tour which followed he made a better profit than he had lost. Every hotel, every restaurant, every cantina paid him his commission. I never saw him on my next two visits to the island. Perhaps he was able to retire on his gains.
There was one place in Cuba to which we were unable to drive – Santiago, the second city of the island. This was now the military headquarters in the operations against Fidel Castro who made periodic sorties from the mountains with his handful of men. It was the beginning of the heroic period. The Oriente Province, almost to the last man, woman and child (I say child advisedly), was on the side of Fidel. There were military roadblocks all round the capital of Oriente and every foreigner arriving by private car was suspect. An unofficial curfew began at nine p.m. dangerous to ignore, there were arbitrary arrests, and often when day broke a man’s body would be found hanging from a lamp-post. That was a lucky victim. One building had an unsavoury reputation because of the screams which could be heard in the street outside, and after Santiago had fallen to Fidel a cache of mutilated bodies was found in the country outside the city bounds.
Not long before, the United States Ambassador, who had the disagreeable task of supporting Batista, had visited Santiago to be received by the mayor. An impromptu demonstration by the women of Santiago was organised with the lightning speed that a regime of terror induces. There was no class differentiation. This was still the period of national revolt. Middle-class women and peasants joined in singing Cuban patriotic songs to the American Ambassador who watched from the balcony of the town hall. The military ordered the women to disperse. They refused. The officer in command had fire-hoses turned on them, and the Ambassador, to his honour, broke up the party. He was not going to stand there, he said, and watch women assaulted. For this he was later rebuked by John Foster Dulles: he had committed a breach of neutrality. There was to be no Bay of Pigs during Batista’s reign of terror. In the eyes of the United States Government terror was not terror unless it came from the left. Later at a diplomatic cocktail party in Havana I referred to the American Ambassador’s protest while I was talking to the Spanish Ambassador. ‘It was most undiplomatic,’ he said.
‘What would you have done?’
‘I would have turned my back.’
The only way to go to Santiago was by plane. The night before I left I was at a late party with some Cuban friends. They were all of the middle class and all supporters of Fidel (though at least one of them has now left Cuba). One young woman there had been arrested by Batista’s notorious police chief, Captain Ventura, and beaten. Another girl claimed that she was a courier for Fidel. She was going by the same plane as myself and she asked me to take in my suitcase a few sweaters and heavy socks badly needed by the men in the mountains. In Santiago the heat was tropical. There was a Customs examination at the airport, and it was easier for a foreigner to explain away the winter clothes. She was anxious for me to meet Fidel’s representatives in Santiago – the genuine ones, she said, for the place was full of Batista’s spies, especially the hotel where I would be staying.
Thus began a comedy of errors as absurd as anything I described later in Our Man in Havana. The next morning the correspondent of Time called on me. His paper had instructed him to accompany me to Santiago to give me any aid I wanted. I wanted no aid, but his paper obviously thought that I might supply a paragraph of news in one way or another. I had to get hold of the girl to warn her that I would not be alone. Unfortunately I did not know her name or her address, nor was my host of the previous night better informed. However he drove me to the airport and while I waited in the bar he watched by the entrance. Eventually he came back with the instruction that I was not to recognise her – she would telephone me in the morning at my hotel.
The hotel stood at the corner of the little main square of Santiago: on one side was the cathedral, its wall lined by shops. A couple of taxis and a horse-cab looked as if they had given up all hope of custom. Nobody came to Santiago now, except presumably the spies against whom I had been warned. The night was hot and humid; it was nearly the hour of the unofficial curfew, and the hotel clerk made no pretence of welcoming strangers. The taxis soon packed up and went, the square cleared of people, a squad of soldiers went by, a man in a dirty white drill suit rocked himself backwards and forwards in a chair in the hall, making a small draught in the mosquitoey evening. I was reminded of Villahermosa during the persecution in Tabasco. The smell of a police station lay over the city. I was back in what my critics imagine to be Greeneland.
While I was having breakfast next morning there was a knock on my door – it was the Time correspondent accompanied by a middle-aged man in a smart gabardine suit with a businessman’s smile. He was introduced as Castro’s public relations man in Santiago – he seemed a world away from the guerrillas in the mountains outside. I was embarrassed, for at any moment I expected the telephone to ring. I tried to persuade him to call a little later, when I was dressed. He went on talking. Then the telephone rang.
By this time I was so convinced of the danger of ‘spies’ that I asked Mr X and the correspondent of Time to leave my room while I answered the telephone. They went reluctantly. My caller was the girl, who asked me to come to a certain number in Calle San Francisco. Mr X returned to the room. He told me he was convinced I had been contacted by a Batista agent. None of his organisation would have been so reckless … He demanded to know what had been said to me on the telephone.
I was irritated. I had never asked to be involved. I indicated that so far as I was concerned he might himself be a Batista agent. It was an impasse, and he left.
Now my problem was to find the street. I felt afraid even to consult the hotel clerk. I went into the square and sat down in one of the two forlorn taxis. Before I had time to speak to the driver a Negro, flashily dressed, took the seat beside him. ‘I speak British. I show you where you want to go.’ If any man was a Batista informer, I thought, this was the one.
‘Oh,’ I said vaguely, ‘I want to see the city, the points of interest’ – and off we went, down the hill to the port, up the hill to the memorial to the American marines killed in the Spanish-American war, the town hall … I could see myself landed back at the hotel again, unless I found an excuse.
‘You have an old church, San Francisco?’ I asked. If such a church existed surely it would be in the street of that name.
The guess proved correct: there was an old church and it was in the street I wanted. I told my guide that I would find my own way back to the hotel – I wanted to pray. Soon my stroll in the cloisters was interrupted by a priest, unfriendly and suspicious: I could hardly explain to him that all I wanted was a little time for my taxi and my Negro to disappear from sight.
After that began a walk up Calle San Francisco in the hot noon sun. The street was as long as Oxford Street and the number I wanted was at the further end. I had only covered half the distance when a car drew up at my side. It was Mr X and the Time correspondent.
‘We have been searching for you everywhere,’ Mr X said reproachfully.
I tried to think of an explanation of why I should be walking up this interminable street in the hot sun.
‘It is OK,’ Mr X said. ‘Completely OK.
I find my own organisation has contacted you,’ so I finished the journey in comfort, in the car.
At the house, which was owned by a wealthy bourgeois family of Santiago, were the courier from Havana, her mother, a priest and a young man who was having his hair dyed by a barber. The young man was a lawyer called Armando Hart who later became Minister of Education in Castro’s Government and then the Second Secretary of the Communist Party in Cuba. A few days before he had made his escape from the Law Courts in Havana while he was being taken under military escort to trial. There was a long line of the accused – a soldier at each end. Hart knew the exact point beside the lavatory where the corridor turned and where momentarily he would be out of sight of the soldier in front and the soldier behind. He slipped into the lavatory and out of the window; his friends were waiting in the street outside. His absence was not noted until his name was read out in court.
His wife, now known to all Latin America as Haidée Santamaria, was with him in the house, a young haggard woman who looked in those days as if she had been battered into fanaticism by events outside her control. Before she married Hart she had been affianced to another young Fidelista. He was captured after the unsuccessful attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago in 1953 and she was taken to the prison to be shown his blinded and castrated corpse. (I remembered that story when the wife of the Spanish Ambassador spoke to me of Batista’s social charm.)
That was past history. All they were concerned with now were the jet planes which the British were preparing to sell to Batista – they were better informed than the British Government in this house in Calle San Francisco, for when, after my return to England, a Labour MP at my request asked a question on the subject, he was assured by the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, that no arms at all were being sold to Batista. Yet some months later, a week or two before Castro entered Havana, the Foreign Secretary admitted that an export licence for some out-of-date planes had been granted. At the time he had granted the licence he had no information – so he said – that a civil war was in progress in Cuba.
For one observer there was already in Santiago plenty of evidence of civil war. The night after my arrival three sisters, aged between eight and ten, were seized from their home by soldiers in the middle of the night. Their father had fled from Santiago and joined Castro in the mountains, so they were taken in their night clothes to the military barracks as hostages.
Next morning I saw the revolution of the children. The news had reached the schools. In the secondary schools the children made their own decision – they left their schools and went on the streets. The news spread. To the infants’ schools came the parents and took away their children. The streets were full of them. The shops began to put up their shutters in expectation of the worst. The army gave way and released the three little girls. They could not turn fire-hoses on the children in the streets as they had turned them on their mothers or hang them from lamp-posts as they would have hanged their fathers. What seemed strange to me was that no report of the children’s revolt ever appeared in Time – yet their correspondent was there in the city with me. But perhaps Henry Luce had not yet made up his mind between Castro and Batista.
And the British Government? The civil war was still invisible as far as the Foreign Office was concerned. But by the time of my next visit to Havana – the very time when the export licence for planes was granted – the civil war was sufficiently in evidence to confine me to Havana. Not even by plane could I visit Santiago. Indeed I was unable to travel more than a hundred kilometres from Havana – no taxi-driver would accept the risk of ambush, for not even the main roads were secure. By that time I had finished Our Man in Havana. I had no regrets. It seemed to me that either the Foreign Office or the Intelligence Service had amply merited a little ridicule.
Alas, the book did me little good with the new rulers in Havana. In poking fun at the British Secret Service, I had minimised the terror of Batista’s rule. I had not wanted too black a background for a light-hearted comedy, but those who had suffered during the years of dictatorship could hardly be expected to appreciate that my real subject was the absurdity of the British agent and not the justice of a revolution, nor did my aesthetic reasons for changing a savage Captain Ventura into a cynical Captain Segura appeal to them.
A postscript to history: Captain Ventura escaped from Cuba to the Dominican Republic by holding up his own President at the point of a gun. Batista intended to leave him behind like the last drop in a glass, a sacrifice to the gods. But Ventura arrived on the airfield at Havana and forced Batista to disgorge some of his baggage to make room for him. They must have made an uneasy couple, those two, in the hotel in Ciudad Trujillo, where Ventura spent long hours playing the fruit-machines.
Enough of Cuban politics. The British agent Wormold in Our Man in Havana has no origin that I can recognise, but the elegant Hawthorne owes a little, in his more imaginative flights, to an officer in the same service who was at one time my chief. C’s black monocle too was not imaginary, though his fashion of cooking from his bed by telephone belongs to his famous predecessor Admiral Sinclair. I was told the story by Sinclair’s niece who had to obey the phone.
Poor Doctor Hasselbacher, who suffers death by being Wormold’s notional recruit, came into my life on another island. Baron Schacht, a friend of Norman Douglas, had a tiny apartment above a restaurant in Capri. A big sad gentle man, he had lived there in poverty ever since the end of the First World War in which he served as an officer in the uhlans. He used to be tormented by the smell of cooking from the restaurant below, for he had an enormous appetite and no means to assuage it. He lived mainly on pasta and herbs gathered on Monte Solaro. In the early fifties the Adenauer Government suddenly recognised his existence and granted him a small pension. It was the end of him. He was a generous man and suddenly he found himself able to return hospitality. One August evening, after a long swim and too much wine, he suffered a stroke and was found dead at his bedside. I arrived on the island next day and joined the little procession which followed the coffin to the Protestant cemetery. The police wished to seal up his rooms with all their contents, but after some argument I obtained permission to put his pickelhaube helmet and his white uhlan gloves on the coffin. He had loved his uniform, and like Hasselbacher, every year on the Kaiser’s birthday he would put on his uniform and drink to the Emperor’s memory (I don’t know how he got into his breastplate, for the years had not dealt lightly with his figure). Like Hasselbacher too he had a photograph hanging in his tiny hall which showed the Kaiser on a white horse inspecting a troop of uhlans, and I remember Baron Schacht saying to me, years before Hasselbacher made the same comment: ‘It was all so peaceful.’
3
I went to the Belgian Congo in January 1959 with a new novel already beginning to form in my head by way of a situation – a stranger who turns up in a remote leper settlement for no apparent reason. I am not as a rule a note-taker, except in the case of travel books, but on this occasion I was bound to take notes so as to establish an authentic medical background. Even making notes day by day in the form of a journal I made mistakes which had to be corrected at a later stage by my friend Dr Lechat, the doctor of the settlement. As a journal had been forced on me I took advantage of the opportunity to talk aloud to myself, to record scraps of imaginary dialogue and incidents, some of which found their way into my novel, some of which were discarded. Anyway for better or worse this was how A Burnt-Out Case started, though it was four months after my return from the Congo before I set to work. Never had a novel proved more recalcitrant or more depressing. The reader had only to endure the company of the burnt-out character called in the novel Querry for a few hours’ reading, but the author had to live with him and in him for eighteen months.
The circumstances in which A Burnt-Out Case grew in the author’s mind are described fully enough in the extracts from the journal I kept, In Search of a Character, but I ask myself now, after the interval of many years, why should I have been searchi
ng for this particular character? I think the reasons go far back to the period which followed The Heart of the Matter.
Success is more dangerous than failure (the ripples break over a wider coastline), and The Heart of the Matter was a success in the great vulgar sense of that term. There must have been something corrupt there, for the book appealed too often to weak elements in its readers. Never had I received so many letters from strangers – perhaps the majority of them from women and priests. At a stroke I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe and America – the last title to which I had ever aspired. A young man wrote to me from West Berlin asking me to lead a crusade of young people into the Eastern Zone where we were to shed our blood for the Church. (How surprised he would have been to find The Heart of the Matter translated into Russian – the Marxist critic is often very perceptive.) To find a reply to his letter was difficult – I could hardly write that my commitments at the moment were too heavy to allow me to shed my blood. A young woman sent me a rather drunken letter of invitation from a Dutch fishing-boat enclosing a photograph, and another wrote from Switzerland suggesting I join her ‘where the snow can be our coverlet’ – a prospect which was even less attractive to me than martyrdom. A French priest pursued me first with letters of a kind which should only have been addressed to his confessor, and then in person: he even popped up unannounced and inopportunely, one evening in a narrow lane of Anacapri, as I was catching the bus to Capri with my mistress, trailing a smoke of dust from his long black soutane. Other priests would spend hours in my only armchair, while they described their difficulties, their perplexities, their desperation. An American woman began to telephone across the Atlantic in the early hours of the morning demanding my presence to help in her marriage difficulties; she wore down my resistance till I went accompanied by my greatest friend – the awful little New Jersey house with its too feminine furnishings and an insolent black maid still come vividly to mind. The mistress of the house lay in a drugged sleep at midday with the curtains closed and an eyeshade hiding the face and a pink silk nightdress the body. Our visit was as useless as we had anticipated; only death could save her, and save her it did a year later in London with the help of drink and drugs, abandoned by all but one of the Jesuits she had befriended.