Our Man in Havana

by Graham Greene

his ribs showed through his torn shirt like a ship’s under demolition.

My worry isn’t this year’s or even next year’s, it’s a long-term worry.’ ‘Then it’s not worth calling a worry. We live in an atomic age, Mr Wormold. Push a button – piff bang – where are we? Another Scotch, please.’

I am interested in the blueness of the cheese. You don’t do crosswords, do you, Mr Wormold? I do, and they are like people: one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerned with the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion – although of course one dreams that perhaps a time might come

‘You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.’

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

It was as if he had come with her a little way on a journey that she would finish alone. The separating years approached them both, like a station down the line, all gain for her and all loss for him.

It always seemed strange to Wormold that he continued to exist for others when he was not there.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?’