The Comedians by Graham Greene

Something padded through the dark, and when I turned on my torch I saw a thin starved dog poised by the diving-board. It looked at me with dripping eyes and wagged a hopeless tail, as though it were asking my permission to jump down and lick the blood. I shooed it away. A few years ago I had employed three gardeners, two cooks, Joseph, an extra barman, four boys, two girls, a chauffeur, and in the season – it was not yet the end of the season – I would have taken on extra help. Tonight by the pool there would have been a cabaret, and in the intervals of the music I would have heard the perpetual murmur of the distant streets, like a busy hive. Now, even though the curfew had been lifted, there was not a sound, and without a moon not even a dog barked. It was as though my success had gone out of earshot too. I had not known it for very long, but I could hardly complain. There were two guests in the Hotel Trianon, I had found my mistress again, and unlike Monsieur le Ministre I was still alive. I settled myself as comfortably as I could on the edge of the pool and began my long wait for Doctor Magiot.

CHAPTER 3
    I
    F ROM time to time in my life I had found it necessary to provide a curriculum vitae . It usually began something like this. Born 1906 at Monte Carlo of British parents. Educated at the Jesuit College of the Visitation. Many prizes for Latin verse and Latin prose composition. Embarked early on a business career . . . Of course I varied the details of that career according to the recipient of the curriculum.
    What a lot too was left out or was of doubtful truth in even those opening statements. My mother was certainly not British, and to this day I am uncertain whether she was French – perhaps she was a rare Monegasque. The man she had chosen for my father left Monte Carlo before my birth. Perhaps his name was Brown. There is a ring of truth in the name Brown – she wasn’t usually so modest in her choice. The last time I saw her, when she was dying in Port-au-Prince, she bore the name of the Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers. She had left Monte Carlo (and incidentally her son) hurriedly, soon after the Armistice of 1918, with my bills at the college unsettled. But the Society of Jesus is used to unsettled bills; it works assiduously on the fringe of the aristocracy where returned cheques are almost as common as adulteries, and so the college continued to support me. I was a prize pupil, and it was half expected that I would prove in time to have a vocation. I even believed it myself; the sense of vocation hung around me like the grippe , a miasma of unreality, at a temperature below normal in the cool rational morning but a fever-heat at night. As other boys fought with the demon of masturbation, I fought with faith. I find it strange to think now of my Latin verses and compositions – all that knowledge has vanished as completely as my father. Only one line has obstinately stuck in my head – a memory of the old dreams and ambitions: ‘ Exegi monumentum aere perennius  . . .’ I said it to myself nearly forty years later when I stood, on the day of my mother’s death, by the bathing-pool of the Hotel Trianon in Pétionville and looked up at the fantastic tracery of woodwork against the palms and the inky storm-clouds blowing over Kenscoff. I more than half-owned the place and knew that soon I would own it all. I was already in possession, a man of property. I remember thinking, ‘I am going to make this the most popular tourist hotel in the Caribbean,’ and perhaps I might have succeeded if a mad doctor had not come to power and filled our nights with the discords of violence instead of jazz.
    The career of an hôtelier was not, as I have indicated, the one which the Jesuits had expected me to follow. That had been finally wrecked by a college performance of Romeo and Juliet in its very staid French translation. I was given the part of the aged Friar