How Graham Greene spoilt my tropical rapture
On the patio of my hotel in Havana… No, begin again. It isn’t really a hotel, it’s a
Casa Particular — someone’s home. Delia’s home: a modest ground- floor apartment in an externally shabby old stone tenement on a neglected side street near the waterfront of Old Havana.
Casas Particulares are a tropical adaptation of the B& B: a result of the partial liberalisation of the island’s economy, allowing ordinary Cuban families with a spare room to take a paying tourist or two into their homes. You enter Casa Delia by way of the massive, shabby wooden door that’s the common entrance to the block, but once you’re through her internal steel- gated front door you’re in her family’s little world: a spick- and- span apartment with much- loved pictures on the walls, favourite knick- knacks on the polished furniture, and a small kitchen where you take your delicious breakfast of fruit, ham, cheese, slices of deep red tomato, toast, honey and strong dark coffee. You pay about $ 30 a night, which may not seem much to you but ( says Delia) is roughly the monthly wage of the average Cuban.
Delia’s Spanish is marvellous: slow, simple, every word enunciated, like a beginners’ language tape. She used to work for the tourist office, she explains, as she takes you emphatically and somewhat too theatrically through the don’ts and dos of exploring the Old City at night. “Cellphone, passport: no! Thieves!”
Your room at Casa Delia has surely the highest ceiling in Christendom, a slow- turning fan — oh blessed device! — a clean ensuite where everything works but the water pressure offers more a dribble than a shower, a comfortable bed, and a window which it’s safe to leave open because, Delia says proudly, “Outside is mine.”
We’ll call it her patio, but it isn’t really, being about a yard wide and 10 yards long, its walls the sides of buildings so high that you are at the bottom of a tiny canyon, open only to her kitchen door and a panel of intense blue sky five storeys above. Into this private outdoors Delia has managed to fit a white cast- iron table and three chairs; and along the sides she grows flowering plants in tin and plastic pots, carefully watered every morning by her sweet, diligent daughter. There’s a pet turtle in a bucket, too, fed by her son. Her husband, who works in computers, is managing to keep their 1982 car on the road: the most lovingly maintained Moskvitch I’ve ever seen, for which they have ( and prize) a garage. Life is not easy, says Delia, and the tax she has to pay regardless of her takings is high; but her business stays afloat.
It was in this patio that I sat not many days ago after breakfast, my laptop open, wondering how best to describe to you the scene. The thing is, and I struggle to explain this, I was experiencing a sort of rapture.
This state comes upon us — does it not? — suddenly, unexplained, and at the oddest moments. We’re lifted for 10, 20, 30 spine– tingling minutes, on to a different plane: a kind of transfiguration. Everyone, surely, has experienced this?
All I can do is set the scene. This is what I jotted into my notebook: “blue sky like window above — blood- red tomato slices sweet/ salty on toast — strong coffee/ tiny cup — old iron table — hot, not uncomfortable, gusts of air — billowing washing — peeling walls — tangle of overhead wires — dog barks incessantly — someone is practising trumpet!! Good musician…”
I think it was the trumpet that did it. A phrase constantly repeated without fault; the acid sound slicing a gaggle of sensations, keying them together so that all at once everything — the light, the heat, the breeze, the humanity — locked into focus, and I felt tears of ecsta- sy pricking my eyes. I’m afraid I wrote: “Wondrousness of mankind, and the world.”
And then, I’m afraid: “Graham Greene — awful old fraud.” You see I’d just been re- reading The Power
and the Glory, my O- level set text, whose story unfolds in a hot, humid, Spanish- speaking Central American country. I’d chanced upon my battered schoolboy copy while packing, and thrown it into the suitcase. I wanted to see whether a journey to Latin America would alter my adolescent impatience with what, nearly 50 years ago at school, had struck me as morbidly self- pitying stuff. I thought then that the author was wallowing in religious guilt and a type of whimpering reproachfulness: determined to be disappointed; determined that his characters, walking though they were in a wonderful tropical world in which there was kindness, beauty and human devotion all around them, should keep letting themselves, each other, and God, down.
And on re- reading I had found I agreed with every irritated marginal note from 1964 — inked in a fountain- pen scrawl that felt weirdly familiar yet not quite mine. In fact I’m more confident than that schoolboy dared be that Greene’s a fraud: experience gained as a writer shows me what a consummate stylist he is, and how clever a scene- setter, and how deft at capturing betrayal and failure in words, and shunting everyone and everything into attitudes of indignity and disgrace. He’s a bully: a clever wordsmith with nothing but a kind of sour piety to put across. Within half a century Greene will be of interest only to religious historians.
So I blame the old fraud for breaking the passing ecstasy. I rose, manoeuvred my way past the iron table, and back inside; and went for a morning walk. The tourists and the promenaders, the hustlers and the peddlers, were out in great numbers, ambling, resting or haggling, under the trees along the Prado.
To one side of the avenue, parked by the broken kerb, was a 1953 Morris Oxford, the model without the scooped bonnet, exactly the model that was my family’s first car in Cyprus, and my father’s pride and joy. With a thrill of recognition I whipped out my iPhone ( sorry, Delia) and took its picture. “I can show Dad,” I thought. “He’ll love this.” And then I remembered that Dad is dead. How very Graham Greene. Except that it wasn’t sad, just moving.