A Mexican journey
Graham Greene
This is a new introduction to Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads, an account of Mexico first published in 1939 and to be reissued by Bodley Head on 16 November.
It is a curious experience to read an account of one's own past written by _ whom? Surely not by myself. The self of nearly forty. years ago is not the self of today and I read tn. yown book as a stranger would. So many incidents in my story have been buried completely in my subconscious: so man Y i now recall only faintly like moments n a novel which I once read when I was young. And yet The Lawless Roads is not a novel. These are all facts, I tell myself. These things really happened to me -or at least to that long-dead man who bore the same names on his passport as I do. Mexico too has changed, though perhaps not in essentials -not in the cruelties, unu s lices and violen i te. I wouldn't recognise, if! went back, the road to Palenque which can be reached now by car. (It took me thirteen hours across country on the back of a mule from Salto.) Today's Villahermosa is very different from mine, and I wouldn't have to take that old tub across the Gulf from Veracruz by way of Frontera. Today I could fly to Las Casas instead of riding for three days through the mountains of Chiapas, and I could hear Mass in a church instead of in a secret room, but I expect the pistoleros would still be there, leaning over balconies and strutting in the plaza.
i All successful revolutions, however idealistic, probably betray themselves n time, but the Mexican revolution was Phoney from the start. I went back to Mexico City some dozen years ago on my way to Havana and drove around the new suburb built on lava for the rich the most expensive house of all belonged to the Chief of Pollee. That was a Mexico I could recognise, as I could recognise the extreme poverty a few streets away from the American hotels and the tourist shops. The Mexican Government made a hypocritical pretence of snPporting Cuba by allowing a Cubana service ice between Mexico City and Havana, but It was a one-way service. If you went out it was ver y hard indeed to get a transit visa to return. This was one method used to reduce the number of American students illegally visiting Cuba to return to the States they vv.ould have to make an expensive round trip Via Madrid. There was another inducement not to go. As one passed Immigration a camera flashed the photograph of every Passenger travelling to Havana ended on the CIA or FBI files. With difficulty and Much argument I obtained from the Mexican Embassy in Havana a tourist visa for my return through Mexico City, but it was valid only for forty-eight hours. The plane contained only about twenty-four pas sengers, but it took me three hours to get through Customs and Immigration. (The Customs Officer made a very diligent search between the leaves of David Copper field.) This was how the Mexican revolutionary government made a pretence of supporting Castro with one hand and helped the United States authorities with the other. During my brief stay a Mexican friend told me, over an evening drink, 'There is nothing you need to change in your book. All is the same.' I had not meant to write more than this one book, on the religious persecution, which had been commissioned by a publisher. I had no idea even after I had returned home that a novel, The Power and the Glory, would emerge from my experiences. I had corrected the proofs of Brighton Rock while I was away and that occupied my thoughts, and perhaps the Franco volunteers on the German ship to Europe began a train of ideas which ended in The Confidential Agent. Now, of course, when I reread The Lawless Roads, I can easily detect most of the characters in The Power and the Glory. The old Scotsman, Dr Roberto Fitzpatrick of Villahermosa, with his cherished scorpion in a little glass bottle, was the kind of treasure trove that falls to the lucky traveller. In recounting the story of his own life he told me of the kindly disreputable Padre Rey of Panama with his wife and daughter and the mice not a scorpion which he kept in a glass lamp. So it was that the Doctor put me on the track of Father Jose in my novel; perhaps he even showed me the road to Panama which I was to post pone visiting for nearly forty years and then was amply rewarded. Above all he presented me with my subject: the protagonist of The Power and the Glory. 'I asked about the priest in Chiapas who had fled. "Oh," he said, "he was just what we call a whisky priest." He had taken one of his sons to be baptised, but the priest was drunk and would insist on naming the child Brigitta. He was little loss, poor man.' But long before the drunken priest another character had come on board my awful boat at Frontera the dentist I called Mr Tench, who made his living with gold fillings even in that abandoned little port. His character needed no 'touching up'. He was as complete in The Lawless Roads as he was in The Power and the Glory, and as I read on I encounter more and more characters whom I had forgotten, who beckon to me from the pages and say ironically, 'And did you really believe you had invented me?' Here is the amiable corrupt Chief of Police in Villahermosa, and in the village of Yajalon I encountered 'a mestizo with curly side-burns and two yellow fangs at either end of his mouth. He had an awful hilarity and an inane laugh which showed the empty gums. He wore a white tennis shirt open at the front and he scratched himself underneath it.' After a week of his company I would find it impossible to abandon him for ever, and so he became the Judas of my story. And the Lchrs the kindly Lutheran couple they didn't belong to my imagination, for here they are giving shelter to a tired traveller in the same fashion as they did to the whisky priest.
Of invented characters how very few seem to remain when I came to write, I was only handing out alternative destinies to real people whom I had encountered on my journey. True, Mr P.nd Mrs Fellows, the banana planters, will not be found in The Lawless Roads, but their young daughter? Surely there is more than a hint of her in Fru R's little blonde girl in Yajalon who suffered badly from worms and whom Fru R was educating with the help of lessons received by post from America. The child had learned to recite The Charge of the Light Brigade in the novel it was Lord Ullin's Daughter and in another year by Mexican standards she would be marriageable, a thought which weighed constantly on this poor Norwegian lady washed up in a Mexican village. There was certainly nothing of my selfish hysterical Mrs Fellows in Fru R.
The Power and the Glory was the first novel I wrote with a non-European background. My critics have sometimes complained that I write only of far exotic places (Perhaps they feel they cannot check the truth of scenes laid in Latin America, Africa or the Far East), but in fact, of the twentythree novels which I have written so far, thirteen have predominantly European backgrounds and eight are set entirely in England, which is the scene too of all five of my Plays and the majority of my short stories,
© Graham Greene
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