Fresh Air Fiend (53 page)

I was lucky in the people I met. The Panama Canal was in the news: President Carter had convened a conference to hand the canal back to the Panamanians. The Zonians—delightful name—were furious at what they took to be Carter's treachery. I found a reasonable man to discuss these matters and more—Mr. Reiss, the head mortician in the Gorgas Mortuary. There were others: the woman in Veracruz looking for her lover, Mr. Thornberry, in Costa Rica; the Irish priest who had started a family in Ecuador; Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires. (Borges told me that he was working on a story about a man called Thorpe. Years later, I found that character in the Borges story "Shakespeare's Memory.") I tried to make portraits of the towns and cities as well. That can be seen in, for example, the description that begins, "Guatemala City, an extremely horizontal place, is like a city on its back." I looked closely, listened hard, sniffed around, and wrote everything down.

My friend Bruce Chatwin had told me that he wrote
In Patagonia
afterheread
The Great Railway Bazaar.
I had always wondered how he had traveled to Patagonia—he had left that out. He had written about being there, but I wanted to write about getting there. This thought was always in my mind, and it made me meticulous about my own trip. I knew that as soon as I got to Patagonia I would just look around and then go home. Mine was to be the ultimate book about getting there.

In spite of myself, I was distracted by what I saw. I am a novelist and could not ignore the possibilities that were being offered to me in the form of suggestive characters and dramatic landscapes, and yet I knew I had to put them in my travel book. Once they were there, they were fixed forever; I could not haul them out again and give them fictional form.

What struck me was how dense the jungle was, so near the United States. I had just been in wintry New England, and now, a few weeks later, I was in a place that looked like a ragged version of paradise—no roads, no factories, no houses, no missionaries even. A person could come here and start all over again, build his own town, make his own world. I felt this strongly in Costa Rica.

 

We were at the shore and traveling alongside a palmy beach. This was the Mosquito Coast, which extends from Puerto Barrios in Guatemala to Colon in Panama. It is wild and looks the perfect setting for the story of castaways. What few villages and ports lie along it are derelict; they declined when shipping did, and returned to jungle. Massive waves were rolling towards us, the white foam vivid in the twilight; they broke just below the coconut palms near the track. At this time of day, nightfall, the sea is the last thing to darken; it seems to hold the light that is slipping from the sky; and the trees are black. So in the light of this luminous sea and the pale still-blue eastern sky, and to the splashings of the breakers, the train racketed on towards Limón.

 

I imagined these castaways to be a family fleeing the United States, and I associated them with various missionaries and priests I kept meeting. The defrocked priest in Ecuador was an ideal model, a sort of spiritual castaway living a secret life far from home. But I had vowed that I would be truthful in my travel book, and include everything and everyone who was interesting; once I wrote about the priest, I knew I could not return to him and re-create him in fiction. Yet I also knew that when I had finished this book I would begin to think seriously about a novel of castaways on the Mosquito Coast.

I reached Patagonia, then returned to London and wrote the book. I regretted not visiting Nicaragua—I was advised not to, because of the guerrilla war that had overwhelmed the country; I regretted that I had to fly from Panama to Baranquilla, and from Guayaquil to Lima. I dislike planes, and whenever I am in one—suffering the deafening drone and the chilly airlessness that is peculiar to planes—I always suspect that the land we are overflying is rich and wonderful and that I am missing it all. Air travel is very simple and annoying and a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist's; even the chairs are like dentist's chairs. Overland travel is slow and a great deal more trouble, but it is uncomfortable in a way that is completely human and often reassuring. I also regretted missing out on Brazil. That is another book.

The mood of
The Old Patagonian Express,
which is at times somber, was the result of my knowing Spanish. It was easy for me to be light-hearted when I traveled to write
Railway Bazaar.
I had little idea of what people were saying in Japanese and Hindi. But speaking to people in their own language—hearing their timid turns of phrase, or the violence of their anger, or the idioms of their hopelessness—could be distressing. I was to have a similar experience eight years later, traveling in China and hearing people worrying in Chinese.

A book like this—or any book I have written—is not a problem for a reader to study and annotate. It is something I wrote to give pleasure, something to enjoy. As you read it, you should be able to see the people and places, to hear them and smell them. Of course, some of it is painful, but travel—its very motion—ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travelers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere. A travel book ought to reflect that same optimism.

When I was done with
The Old Patagonian Express,
I began making notes for my next novel,
The Mosquito Coast.
Before I began, however, I returned to Central America, traveling through the hinterland of Honduras. I made notes, but I carefully avoided using them in an article or a story. They become a repository of everything I knew about that distant shore of Mosquitia. It became the landscape of my novel, and writing that book was not glorified reportage but an almost indescribable transformation, which is what fiction is.

W
HEN I BEGAN
my novel
The Mosquito Coast,
I thought it was about the son, Charlie Fox, who is the narrator and sufferer of his father's adventure. But after a while—and like Charlie—I became possessed by the father, Allie, who was always yapping, bursting with ideas, the greatest of which was to create a brilliant ice-making society in the Honduran jungle. He was a good inspiration. I often heard him thinking out loud. I knew his opinions, his reactions to most things. He was the sort of Yankee I had known my whole life, someone who says, "If you can't find it on the beach and it's not in the Sears catalogue, you probably don't need it." I wrote the book in an Allie Fox mood. After he died, the story was over. I had planned more: a long voyage of the remaining members of the family in Part Five. But it was not possible with the man gone. Part Five is only two pages long. When I picked up the novel after it was published, I felt somewhat detached from it. It was an affectionate detachment: a book goes its own way, and if it is a good book, it is indestructible.

Readers still write to me to say that Allie was like their father, their uncle, or especially their husband. I have received hundreds of husband letters, always from ex-wives who last saw the crazy bastard swinging an ax in some wilderness: he was wacko, he had this thing about fresh air, he wouldn't stop talking; there were times when I wanted to kill him, but you had to admire the guy.

The effect that
The Mosquito Coast
had on me when I was writing it seemed to be repeated in other people. What one might call the Allie Factor is strong among those who are supporters of the book. Just the other day, a local man asked me about my new novel
O-Zone
and said, "Is it as good as
The Mosquito Coast?
" I thought,
What a question to ask me!
Then he started talking admiringly about Allie Fox and sort of bullying me in an Allie-like way. It was another reminder that as soon as the book appeared, it ceased to belong to me.

Shortly after the book was published in the United States, in 1982, the Allie Factor became evident again. The film rights were sold, not as an option or a development deal, but as an outright sale, Jerome Hellman putting all his money down, the way Allie bought Jeronimo. Soon Hellman (the producer of
Midnight Cowboy
and
Coming Home
) began to exhibit Allie characteristics: he raved a little, became very stubborn and embattled. When it was suggested by a studio that the movie might be made in Mexico or Jamaica, Hellman insisted that it had to be shot, no matter what the cost, on the actual Mosquito Coast. Off his own bat, Hellman hired Paul Schrader to write the script. It was the most faithful script I had ever read—and I thought that was its weakness. When I made a few suggestions, declaring my reluctance to influence him, Schrader said in an Allie-like way, "I'm not influenceable." I said, Isn't the whole point of a good movie that it takes liberties? No movie can be very faithful to the meandering complexities of a long novel, and so it must be good on its own terms—a movie has to be true to itself.

Peter Weir, who had been hired as director, agreed with me, and he rewrote the script, indefatigably tinkering. That was one of his Allie qualities. He assumed others. He was inventive and self-assured, and in a quiet way his hot-eyed concentration indicated that he had fire in his belly. I had let go of the book, but it kept reappearing: it stiffened the resolve of these people, and it was constantly being quoted at me. Peter Weir's copy of the novel was so heavily annotated you would have thought he was preparing the Norton Lectures at Harvard.

Meanwhile, the Allie Factor was animating Jerry Hellman. He flew from country to country, raising money. He kept saying, "We're going to do it right. We're going to make this picture without cutting any corners." He went to Belize and found the right spot in the jungle, and observers saw him bushwhacking and gesturing hopefully. Several deals collapsed at the eleventh hour, however, forcing Hellman to look elsewhere for money and allowing Peter Weir to make
Witness,
starring Harrison Ford. But they kept
The Mosquito Coast
alive, and there was never any question of their abandoning it. When backers promised millions for them to turn Allie into a kind of Dr. Do little, they laughed and walked away. To change Allie into someone, shall we say, less Promethean was not merely bad judgment, it was to them a personal insult.

Two and a half years passed. I continued to speak to Hellman and Weir, sometimes to clarify lines, sometimes to listen to their interpretations. Meanwhile, I had moved on to other things—another novel, a script for Nicholas Roeg. For me, Allie was gone. But they had a firm grasp of
The Mosquito Coast;
they had Allie's single-mindedness. They often reminded me of things I had forgotten: "But Allie says here..." Hellman had hired a graduate student to anthologize the observations and opinions of Allie, and this resulted in a fifty-two-page pamphlet of Selected Thoughts: what Allie thought of God, America, inventions, sleep, junk food, war, ice, jungles, and so forth.

"How much money are you looking for?" I asked Hellman one day.

"Not that much. Listen, the average car-chase picture costs twenty million! Isn't that disgusting? Doesn't that turn your stomach?"

I kept myself from saying, Yes, Allie.

When the 1985 Oscars were awarded, and
Amadeus
won eight of them, the producer Saul Zaentz began exhibiting Allie Fox symptoms. He too became a man with a mission. He said he would bankroll the movie and make it soon. Many actors had been mentioned for the part of Allie, notably Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, but it was Zaentz's idea to cast Harrison Ford.

It was not merely that Ford had proven himself in
Witness
to be a fine and subtle actor; it was also the fact that to play Allie in the jungles of Belize would take physical and emotional strength. Harrison Ford had it all, even the quietly smoldering gaze and the serious grin. Notably, he had started out as a carpenter and builder ("Carpenter to the Stars" had been the slogan on his business card when he had remodeled houses in Hollywood). If things slackened on the set, he could while away his time countersinking screws. He was Allie to his fingertips.

 

Belize was hot, buggy, poverty-stricken, and down on its luck. Perfect, as Allie would say.

Peter Weir and Harrison Ford had gone down to look at the jungle, and Ford himself had ended up clearing a piece of land with a huge machete, leading a work gang of Belizeans. It was a good start, and everyone connected with the film was enthusiastic about the location. But when I saw it, I found it hard to believe that anyone unused to jungle conditions would willingly live there for the six or seven months it would take to shoot the picture. Everything that made it perfect for the setting also made it impractical.

And then it seemed to me that you had to become the man Allie himself in order to make the movie.

Hellman had been first, then Schrader and Weir, and then Saul Zaentz. Harrison Ford was the latest incarnation. The crew also had a spirited and visionary look. It was a movie set without any tensions. From the point of view of handiwork, it was more like imperialism, Allie Fox style, than moviemaking. The construction crew built roads and bridges, they built houses and a pair of villages, they had boats, and they had their own water supply. It seemed that the movie had swallowed the country and become its sole industry. What the burnoose is to a Bedouin, the T-shirt is to a Belizean, and every T-shirt in Belize was lettered
Mosquito Coast.

"What you doing in Belize?" the customs man said at the airport outside Belize City.

"
Mosquito Coast,
" I began.

"The magic words," the man said, and waved me through.

The fictional Jeronimo had become a real place, an entire settlement in which there were crops and houses and water wheels, all the necessities of life. People lived there; it had been built to last. After the picture was finished, some of these buildings became community centers and others were taken over by homeless people.