The Man Within My Head (4 page)

B
ut there he is, in spite of everything. Not a hero or a counselor or the kind of person I would otherwise want to claim as kin. I see the gangly, long-legged figure graciously receiving a visitor in his room and keeping the intruder at bay with an offer of a drink, folding his awkward limbs around himself on the sofa; I see the high color in his cheeks, and the pale, unearthly blue eyes that speak to everyone of the troubled depths he’s both concealing and perceiving in the world. He talks in a slightly strangled English voice, surprisingly thin
and reedy, and, when amused, he breaks into an unhardened, high-pitched giggle, suddenly, that equally abruptly stops, as if he’s been caught out, the mischievous boy escaping, for a moment, from the sharp-eyed keeper of his own counsel. “A precocious schoolboy,” his friend Lady Read noted once, “with tremendous depths … and these are the depths one doesn’t enquire into.”

I remember walking into a long-distance telephone parlor in the sleepy Mexican town of Mérida one hot August afternoon. I was with Hiroko, sharing with her the pyramids nearby, and we needed to make a call back to Japan. In 1996 telephones weren’t easy to come by in such places, and we knew a call from our hotel room would deliver us instantly into static, or possible bankruptcy at the same time.

We wandered down the main street after lunch, away from the main plaza, strolling along the side of the road where there was shade, past cafés and little tourist shops, brightly colored piñatas and swinging donkeys, and came at last upon a little travel agency that advertised “International Calls.” Just like the places in California where Mexicans call back home, though here it was we who were the petitioners, and the ones who could barely speak the language. We went in and saw three little wooden booths—confessionals, in effect—and, in front of them, a counter and a young Mexican woman.

In fumbled Spanish I told her that we wanted to place a call to Japan and, nodding, she began completing, very slowly, a request form on a pad of paper. As she did so, a man came out from the back—the boss—and, to my surprise, I saw that he was from India, surely the only person of Indian descent other than myself in this provincial Yucatán town. Perhaps he had seen me through a spyhole and wanted to satisfy his curiosity,
as now I did mine? Perhaps he was simply eager, as I was, to find someone to speak English to? In either case, I might, at some level, have been looking at a reflection of myself, in this unlikely soul, in his thirties, alert and clearly inquisitive, who had chosen to live in a forgotten foreign place far from the obvious sustenance of home.

How had he gotten here? How long had he been here? Who else was with him? My questions began to multiply and he, perhaps grateful for some company, began to ask me similar questions in return. I didn’t quite elucidate that I lived in a tiny neighborhood in rural Japan, with Hiroko, thousands of miles from the nearest relative, in a land where officials were inclined to strip-search me every other time I entered, so improbable did my presence seem. I didn’t quite say that a physical location is unimportant so long as you live among values and assumptions that strike you as your own—or the ones you’d like to learn. I didn’t even go so far as to assert that home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down. I noticed him putting a hand on the girl’s arm, and so another question was answered, and a life began to form behind the counter.

Why Mexico? Why not the Gulf States or East Africa, or even Kobe, in Japan, where there would be other Indians like himself to share the burden of displacement? My ancestral people are an itinerant lot, given to putting themselves in faraway places where the law of supply and demand will sustain them even if that of cause and effect does not; in the battered Alaskan town of Skagway, a few years later, I’d run into a man from Bombay, with his wife and daughter, draping gold necklaces and pendants over the hands of cruise-ship passengers, in a tiny Gold Rush settlement that for seven months
of every year saw no visitors at all. In Alice Springs sixteen months on, the man who checked me in to my hotel during a sudden downpour in the desert was a friendly émigré from Bombay, another Bombay exile smiling behind the counter of the next hotel down the street.

But this man was alone, in terms of obvious kin, and I wondered about his nights, whom he turned to in the dark. Hiroko and I walked back to our hotel in the hot afternoon—knowing we’d be away tomorrow, in the next town of exiles—and yet I never really left the man behind. When I got back to Japan, I wrote a story imagining his life and now, more than fifteen years later, I’m still thinking about him, much more than I think about the ruins at Palenque or the see-through green waters running along the beach at Cancún.

Other writers had offered me a version of the man, in similar places, but no one had found him so persistently in every corner of the globe as Greene had. I remembered, long after returning from Mérida, that Greene, in his nonfictional account of a trip across Mexico in 1937,
The Lawless Roads
, had, everywhere he turned, found Germans curiously settled in the middle of a forbidding landscape, solitary Americans riding the trains, people who ended up in an alien and sometimes terrifying country as if in some haunted place within themselves. “I wondered what odd whim of Providence had landed him here,” he had written of a German, “a teacher of languages in a Mexican mining town.” I didn’t remember then—or know—that Greene had written once about a stranger from India he came across when he was twenty-one. “He stayed in my mind—a symbol of the shabby, the inefficient and possibly the illegal.” I might, again, have been walking through a plot he’d dreamed up years before.

I
t is often night in Greene’s fiction, and the scene usually turns around those two men together. They’re in a foreign place and circumstances are treacherous. They’ve nurtured all kinds of unflattering impressions of each other and, in a simpler world, they’d always remain apart, safe in their sense of enmity.

But—in
The Quiet American
, say—Fowler and Pyle find themselves in a lonely watchtower above the rice paddies of the Vietnamese countryside after night has fallen, and two young local soldiers cower in the same space. Mines and gunfire explode outside as the evening deepens and somehow, brought closer by their sense of danger and the need for companionship, the two foreigners begin to talk of God and death, the women they have and haven’t loved. Each ministers to the other, just by listening, and honesty and intensity rise quickly as neither knows if he’ll make it through the night.

The scenes rarely turn around a man and a woman and, in any case, men and women are seldom able to understand each other fully in Greene; they don’t share the same anxieties or fears. And there are seldom group scenes in Greene, rarely more than three or four people in a room. You realize quickly that friendship is his theme, more than romance; he became famous for traveling with loyal friends—the priest Leopoldo Duran, the journalist Bernard Diederich, the Hollywood producer Alexander Korda (whose movies he’d savaged as a critic)—and friendship seemed a kind of sacrament for him because with friends (unlike with loves) we don’t have agendas
or designs. You can’t read the books in terms of ideologies, because both circumstances and the heart are so contradictory that no one who is honest can ever settle to anything for long; even the man of faith—maybe especially he—lives most of the time with doubt. You can’t read the books in terms of “gender issues” or colonialism, because in the dark all distinctions disappear, and we’re reduced to something essential and often scared.

Greene seldom even tried to portray a native of the countries he described (let alone a young female character); his theme was foreignness, displacedness. And he kept on coming back to innocence, chivalry, as if he could not forgive them for so often leading to disenchantment in the end. Yet every assumption he sets up in us is overturned by each new twist in his painfully intricate plots.

At the end of
The Quiet American
, Fowler, already jittery, runs into the loud journalist who was “an emblematic statue of all I thought I hated in America.” Throughout the book Granger has seemed coarse, cynical and domineering (and we can tell that Greene thought of himself as a journalist because journalists are almost the only group he treats dismissively in his fiction). When he sees this loud American coming up to him, the Englishman braces for a fight. But the man he likes to look down upon addresses him directly. I need to talk to you, Granger says; it’s my son’s eighth birthday, and he has polio, and things are looking bad. You don’t like me and “you think you know everything,” but you’re the only one I have to talk to here.

Fowler tries to help—he learns that Granger has been praying, though he doesn’t really have faith—but now he is less able than ever to settle to anything. The man isn’t a buffoon,
he sees; just a soul in pain. “Perhaps in Paradise,” Greene wrote in a private notebook, “we are given the power to help the living. I picture Paradise as a place of activity.” In Greene it’s rarely our actions that get us into trouble, only our uncertain thoughts.

I
was in Saigon one autumn, and had just checked in to the Hotel Majestic, along the Saigon River. It was midnight—which meant ten in the morning in California, where I’d woken up—and the day (for me) was just beginning. I walked along Dong Khoi Street (formerly Tu Do, or “Freedom,” Street) towards the Hotel Continental, a central site in
The Quiet American
. As I did so, I wondered how much places, or people, ever really change. They adopt new fashions with the seasons, lose hair or see crows’ feet gather around their eyes; yet the girl who was once nine years old is still visible in the grandmother of eighty-four.

Dong Khoi (or “Simultaneous Uprising”) Street was alive with the somewhat illicit energy I recalled from an earlier trip, thirteen years before. The sound of “Layla” drifted up from an underground bar, and when I looked in on another ’60s-themed place—the Jefferson Airplane were playing “White Rabbit”—I saw Japanese couples shyly sipping at “Lynchburg Lemonades” and “Girls Scout Cookies.” Men in the shadows whispered promises of exotic pleasures and
cyclo
drivers pedaled slowly past, sometimes with a young woman in their throne, sometimes stopping to ask me if I wanted a friend for the night.

As I made my way down the street—“Massage, massage,” murmured the men who were standing around—a young woman on a motorbike suddenly veered in front of me, stopped and, taking off her helmet, shook free her long hair.

“We go my room?” she asked.

The French war, the American war, the war against the Khmer Rouge had all come and gone, yet Saigon seemed not so different from what Greene had seen in 1951. Alive with adrenaline energy and the excitement of arrival—free at last after twenty hours in a plane—I stepped into an Internet café to try to catch the scene while it was still alive within me.

“It’s eerie,” I wrote to a friend who had grown up in the same neighborhood when I was six years old (his father had been a colleague of my own, teaching political philosophy at Oxford). “Phuong and Fowler, out from their room on the Rue Catinat, are all around me. I can almost imagine Greene, raincoat buttoned tightly around his throat, slipping around the next corner. It’s like stepping into his Vietnam novel.”

My friend, like so many of the boys I’d grown up with, had become a traveler and a novelist in a deeply Greenian mode, spinning out stories of Englishmen of the middle classes, far from home and being tugged away from their lives by foreign affairs, uneasy questions, the streets of Panama. These stories, of lonely and displaced civil servants, or outsiders caught up in civil wars, might almost have constituted an entire genre, post-Greene; I sometimes thought that that was what school trained us for—Empire in the post-imperial age, toughing it out abroad and living in spartan places by ourselves, learning to observe, to read the world, to play at being unofficial spies. I recalled how, on my last trip here, when I’d gone to the “Continental Shelf” in search of local intelligence, I’d met a former
colleague of sorts from
Time
magazine who had revealed, at war’s end, that he had been a North Vietnamese colonel all along, one of the “enemy’s” best sources of information. Now he sat among returning reporters, asking wistful questions about California.