Грэм Грин - The Comedians

We had already met three times in the Syrian room which contained a brass bed under a mauve silk counterpane and four hard upright chairs lined along the wall and a number of hand-tinted photographs of family groups. I think it was the guestroom, kept immaculate for some important visitor from Lebanon who never came and never would come now. The fourth time I waited for two hours and Martha did not appear at all. I went out through the store and the Syrian spoke to me discreetly. 'You have missed Madame Pineda,' he said. 'She was here with her little boy.'

'Her little boy?'

'They bought a miniature car and a box of bourbon biscuits.'

Later that evening she rang me up. She sounded breathless and afraid and she spoke very rapidly. 'I am at the Post Office,' she said, 'I've left Angel in the car.'

'Eating bourbon biscuits?'

'Bourbon biscuits? How did you know? Darling, I couldn't come to you. When I got to the shop I found Angel there with his nurse. I had to pretend I'd come to buy him something as a reward for being good.'

'Has he been good?'

'Not particularly. His nurse said they saw me come out last week — it was a good thing we never leave together — and he wanted to see where I'd been and that's how he discovered the biscuits he liked.'

'The bourbon biscuits.'

'Yes. Oh, he's coming into the Post Office now to find me.Tonight. Same place.' The telephone went dead.

So we met again by the Columbus statue in the Peugeot car. That time we didn't make love. We quarrelled. I told her Angel was a spoilt child, and she admitted it, but when I said that he spied on her, she was angry, and when I said he was getting as fat as his father, she tried to slap my face. I caught her wrist and she accused me of striking her. Then we laughed nervously, but the quarrel simmered on, like stock for tomorrow's soup.

I said very reasonably, 'You would do better to make a break one way or the other. This kind of life can't go on indefinitely.'

'Do you want me to leave you then?'

'Of course not.'

'But I can't live without Angel. It's not his fault if I've spoilt him. He needs me. I can't ruin his happiness.'

'In ten years he won't need you at all. He'll be slinking off to Mиre Catherine or sleeping with one of your maids. Except that you won't be here — you'll be in Brussels or Luxembourg, but there are brothels for him there too.'

'Ten years is a long time.'

'And you'll be middle-aged and I'll be old — too old to care. You'll live on with two fat men … And a g6od conscience, of course. You'll have salvaged that.'

'And you? Don't tell me you won't have been comforted by all sorts of women in all sorts of ways.'

Our voices rose higher and higher in the darkness under the statue. Like all such quarrels it led to nothing except a wound which easily heals. There are places for so many different wounds before we find ourselves breaking an old scab. I got out of her car and walked across to mine. I sat down at the wheel and began to back the car. I told myself it was the end — the game wasn't worth the candle — let her stay with the beastly child — there were many more attractive women to be found at Mиre Catherine's — she was a German anyway. I called, 'Good-bye, Frau Pineda' viciously out of the window as I came parallel to her car, and then I saw her bent over the wheel crying. I suppose it was necessary to say good-bye to her once before I realized that I could not do without her.

When I got back beside her, she was already in control. 'It's no good,' she said, 'tonight.'

'No.'

'Shall we see each other tomorrow?'

'Of course.'

'Here. As usual?'

'Yes.'

She said, 'There is something I meant to tell you. A surprise for you. Something you badly want.'

For a moment I thought she was going to surrender to me and promise to leave her husband and her child. I put my arm round her to support her in the great decision and she said, 'You need a good cook, don't you?'

'Oh — yes. Yes. I suppose I do.'

'We've got a wonderful cook and he's leaving us. I engineered a row on purpose and sacked him. He's yours if you want him.' I think she was hurt again by my silence. 'Now don't you believe I love you? My husband will be furious. He said that Andrй was the only cook in Port-au-Prince who could make a proper soufflй.' I stopped myself just in time from saying, 'And Angel? He likes his food too.'

'You've made my fortune,' I said instead. And what I said was nearly true — the Trianon soufflй au Grand Marnier was famous for a time, until the terror started and the American Mission left, and the British Ambassador was expelled, and the Nuncio never returned from Rome, and the curfew put a barrier between us worse than any quarrel, until at last I too flew out on the last Delta plane to New Orleans. Joseph had only just escaped with his life from his interrogation by the Tontons Macoute and I was scared. They were after me, I felt certain. Perhaps Fat Gracia, the head of the Tontons, wanted my hotel. Even Petit Pierre no longer looked in for a free drink. For weeks I was alone with the injured Joseph, the cook, the maid and the gardener. The hotel had need of paint and repairs, but what good was there in spending the labour without the hope of guests? Only the John Barrymore suite I kept in good order like a grave.

There was little in our love-affair now to balance the fear and the boredom. The telephone had ceased to work: it stood there on my desk like a relic of better times. With the curfew it was no longer possible for us to meet at night, while in the day there was always Angel. I thought I was escaping from love as well as politics when at last I received my exit visa at the police station after ten hours' wait, with the heavy smell of urine in the air and policemen returning with a smile of satisfaction from the cells. I remember a priest who sat all day in a white soutane and his stony attitude of long and undisturbed patience as he read his breviary. His name was never called. Pinned behind his head on the liver-coloured wall were the snapshots of Barbot, the dead defector and his broken companions who had been machine-gunned in a hut on the edge of the capital a month before. When the police sergeant gave me my visa at last, shoving it across the counter like a crust of bread to a beggar, someone told the priest that the police station was closed for the night. I suppose he came back next day. It was as good a place as any other for him to read his breviary, for none of the transients dared to speak to him, now that the Archbishop was in exile and the President excommunicated.

What a wonderful place the city had been to leave, as I looked down at it through the free and lucid air, the plane pitching in the thunderstorm which loomed as usual over Kenscoff. The port seemed tiny compared with the vast wrinkled wasteland behind, the dry uninhabited mountains, like the broken backbone of an ancient beast excavated from the clay, stretching into the haze towards Cap Haпtien and the Dominican border. I would find some gambler, I told myself, to buy my hotel, and I would then be as unencumbered as on the day I drove up to Pйtionville and found my mother stretched in her great brothelly bed. I was happy to leave. I whispered it to the black mountain wheeling round below, I showed it in my smile to the trim American stewardess bringing me a highball of bourbon and to the pilot who came to report progress. It was four weeks before I woke to misery in my air-conditioned New York room in West 44th Street after dreaming of a tangle of limbs in a Peugeot car and a statue staring at the sea. I knew then that sooner or later I would return, when my obstinacy was exhausted, my business deal written off, and half a loaf eaten in fear would seem so much better than no bread.