The Man Within My Head (2 page)

Morality is a free-and-easy thing on the island, with none of the hard edges he’s hoped to bring to it; his main business is making sure his happy-go-lucky brother-in-law doesn’t get into more trouble than he might. When a foreign woman approaches him, to complain that the boy has tried to trick her into an unwanted closeness, it is this unorthodox priest’s job to talk her down, by speaking with scrupulous vagueness of the Holy Spirit and its relation to the stone heads all around. His years of theological training have led only, it seems, to a shady (but invaluable) gift for using the unknown to protect the friendly souls around him from themselves.

It wasn’t a story I’d taken consciously—or unconsciously—from anyone; it was inspired by this unworldly island. But if I’d shown it to my mother, she’d have said, “This renegade priest with his young girl and tropical lifestyle: isn’t this just a version of Graham Greene?”

G
raham Greene—his first name was, in fact, Henry—was born in 1904, in the unremarkable English Home Counties town of Berkhamsted. In later years, quite typically, he would recall an inn in the town called the “Crooked Billet” and claim that faces in his birthplace wore “a slyness about the eyes, an unsuccessful cunning.” He would remember the rambling house of his uncle Graham, one of the founders of Naval Intelligence, in which he spent summer holidays, a house “very suited to games of hide and seek.” Most of all he recalled the many terrors of his boyhood—of darkness, of strangers’ footsteps, of houses burning down.

The fourth of six children—and third son—of a schoolmaster, he spent his early days on the grounds of the all-boys school where his father would later become headmaster; thus the Byzantine rules and shifting insurgencies of school shaped—and haunted—him more than they might any other boy. He would have gotten bullied anyway, no doubt, as a shy, painfully sensitive teenager who was bad at games and loved to hide out with his books, but as the son of the head man he was trapped whichever way he turned: if he went along with his classmates and their games of rebellion, he’d be betraying his father (and his upstanding elder brother, who became head boy); but if he walked through the green baize door in the corridor that led to his parents’ quarters, he’d be turning his back on his peers and ensuring for himself a traitor’s fate. He emerged from school, not surprisingly, with uneasy feelings about authority (on both sides of the door) and the overanxious tremors of one able to see both sides of any question, though likely to commit himself to neither.

His mother, also a Greene, was first cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson, and her father was an Anglican clergyman who suffered
from an excess of guilt and defrocked himself in a field; his father’s father was a manic-depressive who was buried in St. Kitts, where the man’s brother was said to have fathered thirteen children before his death at nineteen. At the age of sixteen, and apparently on the recommendation of his elder brother, a medical student, Greene, having tried and failed to run away from school, was allowed—remarkably for his time and class—to go to live with a therapist in London, Kenneth Richmond, and the man’s unsettlingly attractive wife, Zoë. While his classmates were dutifully reciting the Pater Noster and thronging around one another with details of the Hundred Years’ War, Greene’s only duty was to read history, and to describe his dreams every morning to the Jungian, probing his hidden selves as he told the shadow father, not without apprehension, how he had dreamed of the glamorous Zoë the night before.

Decades later, in a memoir, he would describe his six months in this alternative home—twice—as “the happiest period of my life.” Again and again, in his fiction, a young male protagonist is spirited away from home and from school, to disappear into a half-lit underground world, guarded by a kind of unofficial father and his moll. Greene’s training at the hands of the unorthodox spiritualist seems to have recalled to him how much in the world extends beyond our grasp, even if we long for certainty and conviction.

His peers at Berkhamsted were learning strength and how to go out and administer Empire, already in its first stages of dissolution. Greene, meanwhile, was learning the opposite: how to take power apart, how to do justice to its victims, on both sides of the fence, how to make a home in his life for pain and even fear. As classmates set about making the official
history of their people, he began picking at its secret life, its tremblings, its wounds.

He often dreamed, he would later recall, of his father, “shut away in hospital, out of touch with his wife and children.” Sometimes, in the recurring boyhood dreams, his father came home on a visit, “a silent solitary man, not really cured, who would have to go back again into exile.” And yet, he wrote in the same book, it was only in dreams, much later, that “his bruised love and sorrow for his dead father sometimes came to him.” In later years, his companion Yvonne would write, Greene’s own life would start, eerily, to resemble his early dreams of his father.

T
he high, thin light was turning the shacks and shanties on the hills to gold as I put my thoughts of Greene behind me; La Paz was an ironist’s delight with its defiance of all reason. The poor had the best views here, overlooking the bowl-shaped valley of light, while the rich cowered below, not far from the wild rock formations of the Valley of the Moon. Just down the street from me, at the main church, the decorations on its façade, fashioned by Indians pressed into service by their Catholic overlords, swarmed with indigenous runes and subversive symbols; even now, during the twelve days of Christmas, the faithful were walking past the church entrance, up the steep slopes, to where they could buy llama fetuses from witch doctors and aphrodisiacs to win the hearts of obstinate strangers.

The previous day, I’d traveled out to the town’s main cemetery,
under a ridge of huts, and seen a monkey in a cage, with a coat on, handing out pieces of folded white paper—fortunes, I assumed—to members of the crowd that had gathered round him. Inside the city of the dead, a middle-aged man was patiently washing the windows of a drawer-like compartment in one of the multistory cabinets in which the departed lay, a red rose in front of most of their openings. Lovers stretched out on the grass next to huge sepulchres, enjoying the one spot in the city where their whispers would not be drowned out by the roar of passing buses. From somewhere along the long rows of cabinets, where Indian women rented out blue ladders for those whose loved ones were on higher floors, I could just make out a scratchy transistor radio: “Silent night, holy night …”

And suddenly something in the poignant scene—a boy was pushing his toy car down long avenues of the dead—put me back in another life. I had come to Bolivia before, twenty-six years before, as a teenager, just released from high school, with a classmate; for three months we had bumped across Central and South America on buses, taking in the tough and unaccountable world that school had trained us for. When, a quarter of a century later, the trip came back to me, it was only Bolivia, of all the nine countries we’d visited, that kept bobbing up: the bowler-hatted women laboring up the steep streets near the cathedral, unsold goods slung over their shoulders; the billowing, snow-white clouds that looked fantastical in skies as sharp as those of Lhasa; the square-headed statues in the Altiplano, barely excavated in centuries.

Around me in the crystal, breathless air, which gave to everything a sense of excitement, I’d seen sorcerers with many-colored woolen earflaps, muttering incantations as they
sat on the ground outside the cathedral; others were waving sticks at the villagers who came to them in search of charms and spells. This was the country that sat in the
Guinness Book of World Records
for the most changes of government (in other words, coups d’état) per annum; this was the city where Cervantes himself, father of Quixote and a former convict, had once applied to become mayor (and failed).

I always loved being alone—I had grown up commuting on planes between my parents’ home in California and my schools in England—and so long as I was loose in the world, uncompanioned, I was never bored or at a loss. Freed from my usual routine and small talk, I was away from the sense that I had to play a role, or to choose one self over another; I could find what lay at the heart of me, my core, and so bring back something clearer and more rounded to the people I loved. Home, I began to feel, was the half-formed beliefs you fashioned in the middle of all you didn’t and couldn’t understand, a tent on a wide, empty plain.

Now, as I got ready to step out of the Plaza Hotel, to go to Titicaca, I called up my mother, in India with family for the holidays, and my sweetheart of fourteen years, Hiroko, celebrating the New Year in Japan, to wish them a good year; I’d see them both in a few days, as soon as my immersion in this other world was over. I looked to the street, where soldiers were pointing out the Three Wise Men—on llamas—to their toddlers, and then headed out myself, up the Prado, towards the area of magicians, to find a travel agency that could convey me across the Altiplano.

Taxis with “Droopy” on the top juddered past on the Himalayan slopes, and before long I was stepping into a bus to travel across the Andean plateau. The Altiplano is as desolate and
humbling an area as I have seen; figures in the distance are reduced to specks and all that is really visible are the huge shadows the sun casts across the mountains. It’s not hard to feel as if you’re entering the realm of parable, with humans just disposable tokens in a much grander drama of changelessness and change.

As the bus, groaning and faltering, began to sputter out of town, the other great presence of my life came back to me again. It had been a mild October day—I was at college—and my girlfriend of the time had seen my father unexpectedly walking across the courtyard to our room. As in some bedroom farce, Kristin had slithered out of a back window—she was the incarnation, we both knew, of every parent’s worst fears—while I prepared myself for the sudden visitation. My college had been my father’s college, too, and I guessed he had just flown over from California to England, on his way to an annual Club of Rome meeting to discuss the future of mankind.

As soon as I heard his knock, I opened up, to see him in his regular gear: black corduroy jacket, dark slacks, an overcoat against the early autumn chill and a blazing yellow shirt. What he saw—it struck me now—would be a skinny teenager with hair made (the boy hoped) for a lead guitarist, and lots of high-toned European novels more made to impress than really to enlighten.

As he walked into the room, my father might have been walking into his own vanished youth, twenty-six years before; when the college authorities, thoughtfully, assigned a warm room in a modern building to the boy from Bombay, unused to English winters, he had requested quarters in the ancient cloisters, so he could be in the center of this stony history. Now, as he looked at me, my father started talking about the French poet Jean Cocteau.

On his first official day, at college, he told me, my father had met another newcomer, a boy called “Jell,” who found himself next to him in the alphabetical line. Jell was a student of French literature and obsessed with the sometime opium addict and suicide’s son Cocteau. He wrote him letters, he sent him invitations, he seemed to live for and through the difficult writer’s words. One day, after years of silence, suddenly the poet responded, with a letter.

But the letter, uncannily, though written in regular French, could—at a certain angle, when seen from a distance—be taken to represent a human face. And not any face, but a harrowed, almost demonic face, twisted up in pain.

As soon as the letter arrived, Jell put his prize trophy up on his wall. But night after night he was unable to sleep, the devil on the wall laughing down at him. Was this a savage trick the notoriously perverse Cocteau was playing? Was it only Jell’s overactive imagination that turned the letter into a face? In either case, the message that came from the poor boy’s hero became his undoing, and not so many years later he took his own life.