Picture Palace Read Online Free

and mistook light for fact. I got Ché on a good day. Luck, nothing more.
    â€œPagan saints,” I said. “That’s what I used to specialize in. They seemed right for the age, the best kind of hero, the embattled loser. The angel with the human smell, the innocent, the do-gooder, the outsider, the perfect stranger. I was a great underdogger. They saw things no one else did, or at least I thought so then.”
    Greene said, “Only the outsider sees. You have to be a stranger to write about any situation.”
    â€œDebs,” I said.
    â€œDebs?” He frowned. “I didn’t think that was your line at all.”
    â€œEugene V. Debs, the reformer,” I said. “I did him.”
    â€œThat’s right,” said Greene, but he had begun to smile. “Ernesto wasn’t a grumbler,” I said. “That’s what I liked about him. Raúl was something else.”
    â€œWhen were you in Cuba?”
    â€œWas it ’fifty-nine? I forget. I know it was August. I had wanted to go ever since Walker Evans took his sleazy pictures of those rotting houses. I mentioned this in an interview and the next thing I know I’m awarded the José Marti Scholarship to study God-knows-what at Havana U. Naturally I turned it down.”
    â€œBut you went.”
    â€œWith bells on. I had a grand time. I did Ernesto and I don’t know how many tractors, and the Joe Palooka of American literature, Mister Hemingway.”
    â€œI met Fidel,” said Greene. There was just a hint of boasting in it.
    I said, “I owe him a letter.”
    â€œInteresting chap.”
    â€œI did him, too, but he wasn’t terribly pleased with it. He wanted me to do him with his arms Outstretched, like Christ of the Andes, puffing a two-dollar cigar. No thank you. The one I did of him at Harvard is the best of the bunch—the hairy messiah bellowing at all those fresh-faced kids. Available light, lots of Old Testament drama.”
    Greene started to laugh. He had a splendid shoulder-shaking laugh, very infectious. It made his face redder, and he touched the back of his hand to his lips when he did it, like a small boy sneaking a giggle. Then he signaled to the waiter and said, “The same again.”
    â€œIsn’t that Cuban jungle something?” I said.
    â€œYes, I liked traveling in Cuba,” he said. “It could be rough, but not as rough as Africa.” He put his hand to his lips again and laughed. “Do you know Jacqueline Bisset?”
    â€œI don’t think I’ve done her, no.”
    â€œAn actress, very pretty. François Truffaut brought her down to Antibes last year. I gave them dinner and afterwards I began talking about Africa. She was interested that I’d been all over Liberia. ‘But you stayed in good hotels?’ she said. I explained that there weren’t any hotels in the Liberian jungle. ‘But you found restaurants?’ she said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘no restaurants at all.’ This threw her a bit, but then she pressed me quite hard on everything else—the drinking water, the people, the weather, the wild animals and whatnot. Finally, she asked me about my car. I told her I didn’t have a car. A bus, maybe? No, I said, no bus. She looked at me, then said, “Ah, I see how you are traveling—auto-stop!’”
    â€œPardon?”
    â€œHitchhiking.”
    â€œBumming rides?”
    â€œThat’s it—she thought I was hitchhiking through the Liberian jungle in 1935!” He laughed again. “I had to tell her there weren’t any roads. She was astonished.”
    â€œSay no more. I know the type.”
    â€œBut very pretty. You ought really to do her sometime.”
    â€œI did a series of pretty faces,” I said. “My idea was to go to out of the way places and get shots of raving beauties, who didn’t know they were pretty. I did hundreds—farm girls, cashiers,