Грэм Грин - The Comedians

The captain was a thin unapproachable Hollander scrubbed clean like a piece of his own brass rail who only appeared once at table, and in contrast the purser was untidy and ebulliently gay with a great liking for Bols gin and Haitian rum. On the second day at sea he invited us to drink with him in his cabin. We all squashed in except for the traveller in pharmaceutical products who said that he must always be in bed by nine. Even the gentleman from Santo Domingo joined us and answered, 'No,' when the purser asked him how he found the weather.

The purser had a jovial habit of exaggerating everything, and his natural gaiety was only a little damped when the Smiths demanded bitter lemon and, when that was unavailable, Coca-Cola. 'You're drinking your own deaths,' he told them and began to explain his own theory of how the secret ingredients were manufactured. The Smiths were unimpressed and drank the Coca-Cola with evident pleasure. 'You will need something stronger than that where you are going,' the purser said.

'My husband and I have never taken anything stronger,' Mrs Smith replied.

'The water is not to be trusted, and you will find no Coca-Cola now that the Americans have moved out. At night when you hear the shooting in the streets you will think perhaps that a strong glass of rum …'

'Not rum,' Mrs. Smith said.

'Shooting?' Mr Smith inquired. 'Is there shooting?' He looked at his wife where she sat crouched under the travelling-rug (she was not warm enough even in the stuffy cabin) with a trace of anxiety. 'Why shooting?'

'Ask Mr Brown. He lives there.'

I said, 'I've not often heard shooting. They act more silently as a rule.'

'Who are they?' Mr Smith asked.

'The Tontons Macoute,' the purser broke in with wicked glee. 'The President's bogey-men. They wear dark glasses and they call on their victims after dark.'

Mr Smith laid his hand on his wife's knee. 'The gentleman is trying to scare us, my dear,' he said. 'They told us nothing about this at the tourist bureau.'

'He little knows,' Mrs Smith said, 'that we don't scare easily', and somehow I believed her.

'You understand what we're talking about, Mr Fernandez?' the purser called across the cabin in the high voice some people employ towards anyone of an alien race.

Mr Fernandez had the glazed look of a man approaching sleep. 'Yes,' he said, but I think it had been an equal chance whether he replied yes or no. Jones, who had been sitting on the edge of the purser's bunk, nursing a glass of rum, spoke for the first time. 'Give me fifty commandos,' he said, 'and I'd go through the country like a dose of salts.'

'Were you in the commandos?' I asked with some surprise.

He said ambiguously, 'A different branch of the same outfit.'

The Presidential Candidate said, 'We have a personal introduction to the Minister for Social Welfare.'

'Minister for what?' the purser said. 'Welfare? You won't find any Welfare. You should see the rats, big as terriers …'

'I was told at the tourist bureau that there were some very good hotels.'

'I own one,' I said. I took out my pocket-book and showed him three postcards. Although printed in bright vulgar colours they had the dignity of history, for they were relics of an epoch over for ever. On one a blue tiled bathing-pool was crowded with girls in bikinis: on the second a drummer famous throughout the Caribbean was playing under the thatched roof of the Creole bar, and on the third — a general view of the hotel — there were gables and balconies and towers, the fantastic nineteenth-century architecture of Port-au-Prince. They at least had not changed.

'We had thought of something a little quieter,' Mr Smith said.

'We are quiet enough now.'

'It would certainly be pleasant, wouldn't it, dear, to be with a friend? If you have a room vacant with a bath or a shower.'

'Every room has a bath. Don't be afraid of noise. The drummer's fled to New York, and all the bikini girls stay in Miami now. You'll probably be the only guests I have.'

These two clients, it had occurred to me, might be worth a good deal more than the money they paid. A presidential candidate surely had status; he would be under the protection of his embassy or what was left of it. (When I had left Port-au-Prince the embassy staff had already been reduced to a chargй, a secretary, and two Marine guards, who were all that remained of the military mission.) Perhaps the same thought occurred to Jones. 'I might join you too,' he said, 'if no other arrangements have been made for me. It would be a bit like staying on shipboard if we stuck together.'

'Safety in numbers,' the purser agreed.

'With three guests I shall be the most envied hфtelier in Port-au-Prince.'

'It's not very safe to be envied,' the purser said. 'You would do much better, all three of you, if you continued with us. Myself I don't care to go fifty yards from the water-front. There is a fine hotel in Santo Domingo. A luxurious hotel. I can show you picture-postcards as good as his.' He opened the drawer and I caught a brief glimpse of a dozen little square packets — French letters which he would sell at a profit to the crew when they went on shore to Mиre Catherine's or one of the cheaper establishments. (His sales talk, I felt certain, would consist of some grisly statistics.) 'What have I done with them?' he demanded uselessly of Mr Fernandez, who smiled and said, 'Yes,' and he began to search the desk littered with printed forms and paper-clips and bottles of red, green and blue ink, and some old-fashioned wooden pen-holders and nibs, before he discovered a few limp postcards of a bathing-pool exactly like mine and a Creole bar which was only distinguishable because it had a different drummer.

'My husband is not on a vacation,' Mrs Smith said with disdain.

'I'd like to keep one if you don't mind,' Jones said, choosing the bathing-pool and the bikinis, 'one never knows …' That phrase represented, I think, his deepest research into the meaning of life.

3

Next day I sat in a deck-chair on the sheltered starboard side and let myself roll languidly in and out of the sun with the motions of the mauve-green sea. I tried to read a novel, but the heavy foreseeable progress of its characters down the uninteresting corridors of power made me drowsy, and when the book fell upon the deck, I did not bother to retrieve it. My eyes opened only when the traveller in pharmaceutical products passed by; he clung to the rail with two hands and seemed to climb along it as though it were a ladder. He was panting heavily and he had an expression of desperate purpose as though he knew to what the climb led and knew that it was worth his effort, but knew too that he would never have the strength to reach the end. Again I drowsed and found myself alone in a blacked-out room and someone touched.me with a cold hand. I woke and it was Mr Fernandez who had, I suppose, been surprised by the steep roll of the boat and had steadied himself against me. I had the impression of a shower of gold dropping from a black sky as his spectacles caught the fitful sun. 'Yes,' he said, 'yes,' smiling an apology as he lurched upon his way.

It seemed as though a sudden desire for exercise had struck everyone except myself on the second day out. For next it was Mr Jones — I still couldn't bring myself to call him Major — who passed steadily up the centre of the deck adjusting his gait to the movement of the ship. 'Squally,' he called to me as he went by, and again I had the impression that English was a language he had learnt from books — perhaps on this occasion from the work of Dickens. Then, unexpectedly, back came Mr Fernandez, skidding in a wild way, and after him, painfully, the pharmacist on his laborious climb. He had lost his place, but he stuck the race out stubbornly. I began to wonder when the Presidential Candidate would appear, he must have had a heavy handicap, and at that moment he emerged from the saloon beside me. He was alone and looked unnaturally detached like one of the figures in a weather-house without the other. 'Breezy,' he said, as though he were correcting Mr Jones's English style and sat down in the next chair.