The Man Within My Head (13 page)

“You tell me.”

“But isn’t that your job?”

“No,” she said. “It’s nothing mystical. Just look.”

She was right. The first name was so much larger than the second in my signature that it looked as if I was trying to define myself by myself, and not by my family. Even though, of course, both came from exactly the same place.

A
s I fell deeper—and deeper—into my Greene thoughts, in a Greene shade, I noticed Hiroko looking at me strangely. She has a wonderful, bracing lack of interest in all the things complicated men dream up at their desks and a complete indifference to—an innocence of—the stuff that people chatter about in the literary circles of London or New York. When I heard critics drone on about how Phuong in
The Quiet American
was “objectified,” or two-dimensional, the product of a man’s boyish fantasy, I wondered how they could speak so coldly about the mysteries of human kindness and affection. A companion is someone who refuses to take the things we fret about too seriously—starting with ourselves—even though she cares for us entirely. Phuong offers the unquiet Englishman exactly the sense of peace and acceptance he longs for—and cannot find—in church.

“You really want to spend all this time with Graham Greene?” Hiroko asked.

“I suppose so. It’s a way of working things out, as I couldn’t otherwise.”

“
Otonoashii Amerikajin
?” she asked, incredulous; I’d foisted
The Quiet American
in Japanese on her years before.

“Well, not only that.”

My life at my desk, my silly scribbles, were as strange to her as her job, selling clothes, was to me.

“You’re going to write about his life?”

“Not exactly. About my life. Or how we project onto others …”

And then I stopped, because she deserved something better.

“Like His Holiness?”

“Well, a little bit like the Dalai Lama. He does teach me about kindness.”

“You need hope in a book,” she said, as she went out. “You won’t forget toilet paper from the supermarket?”

A
s soon as I met Carlos, on the streets of Havana, I could tell that he was a hustler of sorts. “Interesting,” he said, as he saw me looking at a Space Age building along La Rampa, and I turned around; what was most interesting to me was that he spoke English, as few people did in Cuba in 1987. He had crinkly, strangely Chinese eyes and an ambiguous smile; his white shirt hung out from his trousers, and he might have been the kind of dissident who sidled up to foreigners on the streets of Prague or even Madrid. That I was a foreigner was evident from the fascination with which I was staring at a construction that must have looked like the future many years before; the only people who were transfixed by Cuba’s future were the ones with the freedom to fly away from it.

“Come,” he said, “I’ll show you something more interesting,” and he led me into a bus and downtown, to a dusty, high-ceilinged apartment, up a creaking, sweeping staircase, which might have belonged to Miss Havisham if she’d gone to serve her country in the tropics. There was a large, smiling black boy there, whom Carlos introduced, implausibly, as his brother; there were two girls, bubbly and unguarded, hanging their underwear to dry on the balcony. Though I’d arrived on the island only the night before, already I could feel the charm and sadness that lay in the “slow erosion” that Greene had described so hauntingly in Havana twenty-nine years before.

“So,” Carlos said, as we left the others behind and went to a shiny (by Cuban standards) restaurant, where only foreigners (and their guests) could eat, and took our place in the long, long line gathered under the sun in the street. “How about you give me your passport? I fly to the Estados Unidos. You go to the American Interests Section on the Malecón and get a new one. I go to New York. I help you when I get there. You win. I win.”

“I see the logic of it,” I said, “but let’s wait a bit.” I’d known the man only two hours and I could tell already that need was so advanced in Cuba that it infected every transaction.

“
O-ka
,” he said, and for the next week Carlos was as good as his word. He never mentioned any such exchange again, and he took me everywhere I could want to see, offering a wry and literate and warm unofficial narration to what was not acknowledged in the huge billboards shouting “
Venceremos
!” or “
Patria o Muerte
.” He invited me to stay in his apartment, if I liked, where kids were catching the AM stations from Miami, while a rooster clucked around and out onto the adjacent rooftop (the bird was called “Reagan,” Carlos said, because
he never stopped squawking). He pulled out books from his shelves—Spinoza, Saroyan—and asked me what I thought of them. He slipped me into nightclubs that were open only to those who knew how to knock on the door in the right way; he offered me girls, cigars, anything I might need.

“My dream,” he said, “when I get out, is to make a library. In New York City. Where people can drink coffee and read books.”

“A library?”

“No, sorry. A ‘bookstore.’ A bookstore café where people can talk about anything. In freedom.”

When I flew back to California and asked him what I could send him—anything at all—he asked only for an American flag and a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

I’d met Carlos many times already in my twenty-nine years; the previous fall, in the little town of León, in Nicaragua, I’d passed a friendly young woman on the street and she’d caught my eye and smiled. Within five minutes, she’d asked me (then and there, on the street) if I’d marry her. I smiled, but she was serious; she wanted to escape, and if I could give her what she wanted, she could give me something, too.

In Burma, two years before, I’d met a sweet-natured young character who hung around the fanciest hotel, the then-derelict Strand, and who remembered having met me there two years earlier; he became my shadow guide to the city, telling me what his closed country was like under the surface as I told him what America and Britain were like, beyond the rumors that he’d heard of them. In difficult or impoverished countries, the leap of faith becomes instantly human, and very personal, as in every Greene novel I’d loved: How much do you trust this stranger who seems so ready to be your friend? How much does he—or should he—trust you?

Like many who had been to the island, among them Greene, of course (and the Greenian Trappist, Thomas Merton), I fell quickly in love with the complications of Cuba, and the day after I returned to California following my first trip, I went to a travel agent and bought a ticket to go back, three months later. I had never seen a place so stirring in its passions and so constant in its doubts and rumors; Cuba was like a furious, never-ending debate on whom and what to believe, which words to trust, whether to enjoy the warm wind coming off the water along the seaside road, with its fading, rainbow-colored buildings—or the desperate kids gathered on the rocks below, trying to slip away.

I’d never met such resilient, spirited, often irresistible people, but the result was that the whole country seemed a kind of hotheaded family that had been cooped up in the same quarters for much too long.

The strict father bolted the doors, his daughter tried to slip out through a second-floor window, his son shouted constant imprecations at him and the tearful, desperate mother sobbed and clutched at the elbows of all the other three, asking them to settle down, while she took silent notes to report on her loved ones to her sister.

W
hen I flew back for my second trip—to coincide with the celebrations for the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Revolution and Carnival—Carlos was waiting for me at the airport, ready to take me to Santiago or Artemisa or the home of Lourdes, who had so liked me, he said, when we met before (but to whom, I knew, I could never give the freedom and
escape that she needed). “The man I remembered might have been a swindler,” I recalled having read in Greene’s account of Cuba in his memoirs, “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.” I knew Carlos had something to gain from me—almost the only foreigners to be seen in Havana in 1987, other than Russians, were pasty-faced Bulgarians, emptying the tinned peaches in the breakfast rooms of ghostly hotels, and North Koreans walking in pairs, with a small badge depicting the “Great Leader” next to their hearts.

But I had something to gain from him, too, and we’d have become friends in any circumstances. He was quick-witted, deeply cultured, kind; his hunger to learn about the United States, the place where he might be able to make a new life, seemed perfectly to match my hunger to learn about how the Revolution really felt to its so-called beneficiaries, at some level deeper than mere politics. Some people who’d never been to Cuba called it a socialist paradise; the U.S. government, under Reagan, was convinced it was a totalitarian hell. Neither began to correspond to the quicksilver, open, ardent and suspicious place I saw, which reminded me daily, as Greene would have said, that in matters of love and family, there are no easy answers or unmixed emotions.

After I got home from my second trip, Carlos kept on sending me letters, reporting on the many ways he was trying to make his escape: he had “married,” he said, a woman he’d been married to before, because her father had fought with Fidel and might look out for him. He was going now to the Peruvian embassy to seek amnesty, and he was hoping to use thousands of dollars to get a fake passport from the Dominican
Republic. He’d been in prison once, so there was a chance he could come out legally, as a political refugee; he needed my help with the authorities in Washington.

I’d been through versions of the same story time and again—it sometimes seemed the story of my life—but never had I felt so close to the situation that is at the center of most Greene books: two men come together in the dark and open their hearts as they can, perhaps, only with strangers, forming a bond, even as they know little of each other. It’s often the closest thing to faith as exists in the work. It wasn’t just trivial correspondences, I was coming to see, that made me feel close to the English novelist, the way we’d met similar people, or both found an air of bungled secrecy and cruel misunderstandings on the backstreets of Santiago; it was that he was giving me a searchlight to understand how Carlos, in his life of rumor and drama, was leading an existence that I could hardly imagine, and how my life of relative peace seemed fantasy to him. The comedian, as Greene would have it, always gets implicated in the end.

A
t last word came through that Carlos had indeed gotten out, as a former inmate of Castro’s prisons, and now I began to receive calls from him, in his temporary home in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. I happened to be flying back to the city a little later, and we met in Times Square, the place he’d dreamed of all his life, and went for a celebratory meal at Victor’s, the Cuban restaurant on Fifty-second Street.

“We’re only a few blocks away from the office where I first
wrote about you,” I told him, gesturing at the Time-Life Building, on Fiftieth. He toasted us and ordered more roast pork and declared that now, for the first time ever, his future could be what he wanted.