Our Man In Havana Read Free

applies the rack or the thumbscrew out of any exalted conviction. (Indeed, we later learn that Segura has been hoarding money in case he has to make a sudden opportunistic dash for Miami.) So perhaps banality and evil are not as much separated as all that …
    In the novel, Greene makes his creation Wormold behave in a manner that is absurdly out of character. (It is plainly outside the bounds of credibility, given his aching feelings for his vulnerable daughter, that he would permit her to continue an association with a policeman whose cigarette-case is upholstered with human skin.) However, Wormold himself proves to be a man who can confect fictional personalities more or less at will. Having initially invented them in order to bluff his superiors, he finds that they have taken on an existence of their own:
    It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness – he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action … Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge … There were moments when Wormold thought it might have been easier if he had recruited real agents.
    However, this second ontological interlude – if I may so phrase it – comes to an abrupt end when the universe of rugged reality decides to claim Wormold for its own. His flesh-and-blood assistant Beatrice is a woman of unsettling keen intuition. ‘You talk like a novelist,’ she observes – while still bamboozled – when he muses on the fate of one of his ‘agents’. ‘You’ve been writing his elegy like a bad novelist preparing an effect,’ she adds, in a line that is altogether too improbable and self-referential. It is she, who has been cheerfully paying part of the price of Wormold’s irresponsibility, who signals the very harsh new tone and turn of events at just the moment when he himself is under pressure and about to ‘revert’ to sheer puerility and denial. (To be exact, he is playing with a children’s cereal box after breakfast.) ‘I don’t want you murdered,’ she sternly announces. ‘You see,
you are real
. You aren’t
Boy’s Own Paper
’ (italics mine). It is the palpable womanhood of Beatrice, combined with the increasing and alarming grown-upness of his beloved Milly, that compels Wormold to play the ‘real man’ at last. In earlier and easier and happier scenes, the big weapons have been conjured from his imagination, and the small-bore weapon has been a soda-siphon in a hotel garden, aimed playfully at Captain Segura but easily laughed off with the excuse that it was directed at a ‘Dimpled Haig’ Scotch. On that occasion, Captain Segura had resorted to an abrupt vernacular obscenity (all the indecent expressions in this novel are rendered in Spanish) and ‘squeezed out a smile. It seemed to come from the wrong place like toothpaste when the tube splits.’ Greene’s gift for the sinister implication, and for the recurring analogy to booze, is further illustrated by the sentence: ‘You could not estimate his danger from his size any more than you could a hard drink.’ And it is clear that the silly splash from the soda-siphon has by no means diluted the Captain, or his venom. But by the time Segura takes off his gun-belt and lays it to one side, in preparation for the climactic whisky-dominated game of checkers (or ‘draughts’ if you prefer) it is as plain as the old maxim of Chekhov that a gun once displayed in plain sight will not be re-holstered until it has been fired in anger. The ‘Wormold’, in other words, has turned. The meek little shopkeeper is ready to commit murder. This is to be death
from
a salesman.
    His thirst to kill is supplied by a hideous, stuttering, impotent double-agent named (Greene takes a full revenge on his cruel boarding-school nemesis) Carter. If this odious and parodic Englishman had not offered Wormold poisoned