Читать книгу Mexico Set - Len Deighton - Страница 6

During the First World War the neutral Netherlands had been the arena in which the rival spy services brawled. In the Second World War it was Portugal that served that purpose. In the Cold War the arena eventually became Mexico. It was in safe houses in Mexico City where the officers of the GRU and those of the KGB clashed, reasoned or sometimes socialized with their Allied opposite numbers. For Moscow, Washington and London these contacts were vital, but for the personnel stationed there the job was a consignment to the promotional rubbish heap. No interesting memoirs were written by the men who spent the Cold War years in Mexico. No indiscreet revelations were spilled into the well-paid serializations that sold the newspapers of that time. Mexico City only came into the headlines as a stopover for Lee Harvey Oswald when the assassination of President John Kennedy was being investigated.

The very first time I visited Mexico I was staying at the YMCA in Los Angeles. I was a penniless art student; well, perhaps that overstates it: let’s say I was living from hand to mouth and being saved from starvation by the care and consideration given me by the mother of an American artist I knew in London. Left to my own devices on my last day I ate supper from a hot-dog stand. Los Angeles was not the gourmet’s paradise that it later became, and street food was America’s answer to the fugu fish. I spent the night groaning in the toilets and when daylight finally arrived I was feeling very ill. In my pocket I had a Greyhound Bus ticket that would take me a few hundred miles into a country I knew nothing about and, with that physical stamina and grim determination that is the currency of the young and foolish, I dragged myself down to the bus depot, threw myself across the back seat and closed my eyes. You may wish to note that the back seat of a Greyhound Bus is not the best place to be if you are alternately praying for help and wishing to die. The sort of buses that are built for Mexico are fitted with robust and unyielding suspensions. The rearmost part of the chassis takes an undue proportion of the punishment that comes with loose surface roads and pot-holes. I recall every jolt of that journey but towards the end of it I was sitting upright and looking out of the window trying to see through the grime and the dust. As always, the Greyhound Bus got me there. During the nineteen fifties I did so many thousands of miles on Grey Buses that they used me in their advertising.

I survived the journey. I climbed down from the bus into the sweaty noon of Mexico’s west coast, spotted a bench and a Coca Cola stand and I started writing some notes for my diary. I’m told that nowadays this region of Mexico is packed with luxury hotels, motor-yachts and marinas but back in the nineteen fifties it was just a succession of small villages punctuating empty stretches of bleak, cactus strewn landscape. But the traveller counting the pennies gets a far more authentic impression of a country than any luxury tour can provide. The Mexicans were kind and generous to me and, if the steady diet of beans and tortillas I ate became monotonous, I knew that was only because I wasn’t as hungry as those around me. I felt at home. From that time I have always enjoyed being with Mexicans, and nowadays I am delighted to have become a part of a kind and joyful Mexican family.

I have always contrived to visit places at their least attractive time. Ski resorts in high summer, Asia when the monsoons come, Algeria in the annual rainstorms and the French Riviera when the restaurants are shuttered and the casinos being renovated. It may sound perverse but I can only get under the skin of foreign destinations when the lipstick and powder has been set aside and the spots and pimples are there for all to see. So, when I researched Mexico Set I saw it in the stormy season when the steely thunderclouds reach down lower and lower upon the thirsty earth until torrential rain arrives to lash the streets with fury.

Mexico Set opens with Bernard Samson and Dicky Cruyer in Mexico City. For Bernard the problems are piling higher and higher. While Berlin Game saw Bernard battered by professional dilemmas we now see the complex uncertainties of his private life. In this book I am able to do a few of the things that made the whole nine-book project so worthwhile for me. Instead of going back to start all over again with a new story I could take my characters deeper and deeper into the lives that, while being so weird and wonderful, are burdened with the domestic everyday events that we all endure.

Every writer wants to maximize everything: intriguing characters, labyrinthine plot, humorous asides, unfolding landscape, crisp dialogue. But now I didn’t have to cram all that tightly together; having the space granted by the planned future books gave me a freedom to do something better than I had ever done before. Of course every story worth reading has all of the above. Berlin Game with its dénouement set the scene. After that Mexico Set used arguments, anger and confidences to reveal new sides of the characters and their shifting attitudes to each other. Many important characters arrive in subsequent volumes but by the end of this book all the stars are on the stage. Yet in this book – and I know this is going to sound corny – Mexico is the star. It is a wonderful country, its cruel landscape tormented by its amazing weather patterns. With the ever-present danger of ending up writing a travel guide dominated by weather reports, I have kept Mexico as a persistent backdrop to the story of Bernard Samson.

Are the stories based on real people? Scott Fitzgerald argued with Ernest Hemingway about the nature of fiction. Writing to a friend who was deeply offended by the way she was depicted in his book, Fitzgerald said: ‘In my theory, utterly opposite to Ernest’s, about fiction i.e. that it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character – in that theory, or rather in despite of it, I used you again and again in Tender [is the Night].’ And so it is that most writers take manners and gestures and other bits and pieces from the people they meet, they steal slices from the landscape, relive the pain and joy of their experience. In this way the writer pushes beyond reality in pursuit of some sort of truth.

Len Deighton, 2010