To Greeneland, via Colombia
Curiously, my brief sojourn in Colombia has fuelled me up, for Cartagena is straight out of Greene. Black-hatted priests bent against the wind, striding two abreast beneath the sharp shadows of the un-sunny side of the street. Large tolling bells. A white stucco church, pantiled houses beyond with assorted ochres, yellows, and reds. Somewhere beneath it all, some unfathomable other.
In Cartagena it was the large black community, descended from slaves, living in shanty shacks beyond the well kempt stone city walls beside the sea.
I loved Greene’s descriptive power, his capacity to transport you to so vivid a place, yet one you had never seen for yourself. His reporting was vivid, his powers of observation acute. I loved his Catholicism, his guilt. I felt I met Greene on my very first trip to Latin America, to El Salvador in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, gunned down at his own high altar as he celebrated mass.
A shocking enough event even by Greene’s standards. There was a civil war in progress between the “muchachos” leftist guerrillas and the government (supported by Ronald Reagan’s America) and army, closely allied to right-wing death squads.
After the fall of Nicaragua to the revolutionary Sandinistas next door, El Salvador was Reagan’s line in the sand against the spread of communism. I found myself in the frontline town of Suchitoto. We had not been certain who held it. The red bandanas at the road block told us it was the muchachos.
We paid out “road tax” and ventured very slowly in on foot. That was my first encounter with a Graham Greene white stucco church. The hammer and bell would fly right out of the tower before clanging within the purple-shadowed interior of the belfry.
On the square below, the coffins of 14 guerrillas waiting to be buried, their bodies and heads so smashed that the traditional coffin, open from the waist up, had been eschewed. The coffins lay on worn green trestles in a straight line. Relatives wept and howled with grief.
In Colombia these days they are still burying the victims of violence. The spirit of Greene is still very much alive. I just have to work out how it affected my reporting life, by tonight. But I know I still have a deep affinity with him. I’ve just re-read The Quiet American, set in Vietnam and all about Iraq. If he had but known it.