Graham Greene - Our Man in Havana
‘That nigger going down the street,’ said Dr Hasselbacher standing in the Wonder Bar, ‘he reminds me of you, Mr Wormold.’ It was typical of Dr Hasselbacher that after fifteen years of friendship he still used the prefix Mr friendship proceeded with the slowness and assurance of a careful diagnosis. On Wormold’s deathbed, when Dr Hasselbacher came to feel his failing pulse, he would perhaps become Jim.
The Negro was blind in one eye and one leg was shorter than the other; he wore an ancient felt hat and his ribs showed through his torn shirt like a ship’s under demolition. He walked at the edge of the pavement, beyond the yellow and pink pillars of a colonnade, in the hot January sun, and he counted every step as he went. As he passed the Wonder Bar, going up Virdudes, he had reached ‘1,369’. He had to move slowly to give time for so long a numeral. ‘One thousand three hundred and seventy.’ He was a familiar figure near the National Square, where he would sometimes linger and stop his counting long enough to sell a packet of pornographic photographs to a tourist. Then he would take up his count where he had left it. At the end of the day, like an energetic passenger on a trans-Atlantic liner, he must have known to a yard how far he had walked.
‘Joe?’ Wormold asked. ‘I don’t see any resemblance. Except the limp, of course,’ but instinctively he took a quick look at himself in the mirror marked Cerveza Tropical, as though he might really have been so broken down and darkened during his walk from the store in the old town. But the face which looked back at him was only a little discoloured by the dust from the harbour-works; it was still the same, anxious and crisscrossed and fortyish: much younger than Dr Hasselbacher’s, yet a stranger might have felt certain it would be extinguished sooner the shadow was there already, the anxieties which are beyond the reach of a tranquillizer. The Negro limped out of sight, round the corner of the Paseo. The day was full of bootblacks. ‘I didn’t mean the limp. You don’t see the likeness?’
‘No.’
‘He’s got two ideas in his head,’ Dr Hasselbacher explained, ‘to do his job and to keep count. And, of course, he’s British.’
‘I still don’t see…’ Wormold cooled his mouth with his morning daiquiri. Seven minutes to get to the Wonder Bar: seven minutes back to the store: six minutes for companionship. He looked at his watch. He remembered that it was one minute slow.
‘He’s reliable, you can depend on him, that’s all I meant,’ said Dr Hasselbacher with impatience. ‘How’s Milly?’
‘Wonderful,’ Wormold said. It was his invariable answer, but he meant it.
‘Seventeen on the seventeenth, eh?’
‘That’s right.’ He looked quickly over his shoulder as though somebody were hunting him and then at his watch again. ‘You’ll be coming to split a bottle with us?’
‘I’ve never failed yet, Mr Wormold. Who else will be there?’
‘Well, I thought just the three of us. You see, Cooper’s gone home, and poor Marlowe’s in hospital still, and Milly doesn’t seem to care for any of this new crowd at the Consulate. So I thought we’d keep it quiet, in the family.’ ‘I’m honoured to be one of the family, Mr Wormold.’
‘Perhaps a table at the Nacional or would you say that wasn’t quite well, suitable?’
‘This isn’t England or Germany, Mr Wormold. Girls grow up quickly in the tropics.’
A shutter across the way creaked open and then regularly blew to in the slight breeze from the sea, click clack like an ancient clock. Wormold said, ‘I must be off.’
‘Phastkleaners will get on without you, Mr Wormold.’ It was a day of uncomfortable truths. ‘Like my patients,’ Dr Hasselbacher added with kindliness. ‘People have to get ill, they don’t have to buy vacuum cleaners.’
‘But you charge them more.’
‘And get only twenty per cent for myself. One can’t save much on twenty per cent.’
‘This is not an age for saving, Mr Wormold.’
‘I must for Milly. If something happened tome…’
‘We none of us have a great expectation of life nowadays, so why worry?’ ‘All these disturbances are very bad for trade. What’s the good of a vacuum cleaner if the power’s cut off?’
‘I could manage a small loan, Mr Wormold.’
‘No, no. It’s not like that. My worry isn’t this year’s or even next year’s, it’s a long-term worry.’
‘Then it’s not worth calling a worry. We live in an atomic age, Mr Wormold. Push a button piff bang where are we? Another Scotch, please.’ ‘And that’s another thing. You know what the firm has done now? They’ve sent me an Atomic Pile Cleaner.’
‘Really? I didn’t know science had got that far.’
‘Oh, of course, there’s nothing atomic about it it’s only a name. Last year there was the Turbo Jet; this year it’s the Atomic. It works off the light-plug just the same as the other.’
‘Then why worry?’ Dr Hasselbacher repeated like a theme tune, leaning into his whisky.
‘They don’t realize that sort of name may go down in the States, but not here, where the clergy are preaching all the time against the misuse of science. Milly and I went to the Cathedral last Sunday -you know how she is about Mass, thinks she’ll convert me, I wouldn’t wonder. Well, Father Mendez spent half an hour describing the effect of a hydrogen bomb. Those who believe in heaven on earth, he said, are creating a hell he made it sound that way too -it was very lucid. How do you think I liked it on Monday morning when I had to make a window display of the new Atomic Pile Suction Cleaner? It wouldn’t have surprised me if one of the wild boys around here had broken the window. Catholic Action, Christ the King, all that stuff. I don’t know what to do about it, Hasselbacher.’ ‘Sell one to Father Mendez for the Bishop’s palace.’
‘But he’s satisfied with the Turbo. It was a good machine. Of course this one is too. Improved suction for bookcases. You know I wouldn’t sell anyone a machine that wasn’t good.’
‘I know, Mr Wormold. Can’t you just change the name?’ ‘They won’t let me. They are proud of it. They think it’s the best phrase anyone has thought up since “It beats as it sweeps as it cleans.” You know they had something called a purifying pad with the Turbo. Nobody minded -it was a good gadget, but yesterday a woman came in and looked at the Atomic Pile and she asked whether a pad that size could really absorb all the radio-activity. And what about Strontium 90? she asked.’ ‘I could give you a medical certificate,’ said Dr Hasselbacher.
‘Do you never worry about anything?’
‘I have a secret defence, Mr Wormold. I am interested in life.’
‘So am I, but…’
‘You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us I’m sorry; I wasn’t referring to your wife. But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of the cheese. You don’t do crosswords, do you, Mr Wormold? I do, and they are like people: one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerned with the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion although of course one dreams that perhaps a time might come… One day I must show you my laboratory.’
‘I must be going, Hasselbacher.’
‘You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.’
When Wormold arrived at his store in Lamparilla Street, Milly had not yet returned from her American convent school, and in spite of the two figures he could see through the door, the shop seemed to him empty. How empty! And so it would remain until Milly came back. He was aware whenever he entered the shop of a vacuum that had nothing to do with his cleaners. No customer could fill it, particularly not the one who stood there now looking too spruce for Havana and reading a leaflet in English on the Atomic Pile, pointedly neglecting Wormold’s assistant. Lopez was an impatient man who did not like to waste his time away from the Spanish edition of Confidential. He was glaring at the stranger and making no attempt to win him over.