Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement Read online

  An important complaint emerged. A number of high-rise flats had been built with the inevitable sabotage of lifts and windows that we have experienced in England and France. High-rise flats are for the rich who can escape to theatres and restaurants and parties, not for the poor who are condemned to live in isolation. Moreover, the charge for these flats was beyond the tenants’ means, so that they were in debt. The General told his Minister of Housing to reply and a very bad job he made of it. The General asked for more information. A girl spoke up with anger, a woman had hysterics, the drums beat.

  There were complaints next about the health service – the Minister of Health indignantly defended his doctors. He made a better impression than the Minister of Housing. A young magistrate demanded better security in the streets. The hours passed.

  The General took his turn to speak, but not from the podium. He balanced on the giddy edge of the platform, a glass of water in his hand, a swim of faces dose below him – not much security there. An officer of the National Guard sat immobile on the platform chewing gum like an American colonel.

  The untrustworthy journalist who had joined us on the island elbowed his way to my side, and I asked him, ‘Who is that officer?’

  ‘He is Colonel Flores, the Chief of Staff. A very loyal man like his father before him. He too was very loyal.’

  But loyal to whom, I wondered? Loyal to President Arias?

  It was the General’s first meeting in the slums of El Chorillo and El Chorillo was going to have its say. The faces might appear fierce and fanatical and angry but they were friendly. ‘We know you very well, here, General. We see you driving by every week to buy your lottery ticket.’ Laughter and the drums laughed too.

  Afterwards a rumour was spread, by one who had attended the meeting and knew it was a lie, that the General was drunk with vodka (not his choice of drink) and had fallen off the platform. One chooses one’s enemies . . .

  That night I dined with Chuchu and one of his refugees – an Argentinian woman who had fled from the regime of Videla to the security of Panama. We had a not very good dinner (good meals were not common in Panama) beside the Pacific under a sky of stars with a bottle of Chilean wine. ‘It has to be of the years before Pinochet, an Allende year,’ Chuchu demanded of the waiter, and I felt happy and at home, and my happiness was only a little diminished by the thought of how brief my stay was to be. I little thought that I would be returning and returning and returning . . .

  Next evening it was a very different demonstration which I attended in the Canal Zone.

  The long negotiations which were trying the patience of Torrijos were proving not nearly slow enough to satisfy the inhabitants of the Zone. To them any negotiation at all was treasonable.

  Panama is not the Canal, and the Zone was a whole world away from Panama. You could tell the difference the moment you entered the Zone from the neat well-built unimaginative houses and the trim lawns. There seemed to be innumerable golf courses and you felt the jungle had been thrown back by a battalion of lawn mowers.

  And the wind shall say: here were decent godless people:

  Their only monument the asphalt road

  And a thousand lost golf balls.

  Not quite godless, however. In the telephone book of the Zone I counted more than fifty churches – some of them of Christian sects quite unknown to me before. Perhaps as sects multiply, belief diminishes. I also read in the telephone book very reassuring information of what to do in the event of a nuclear attack without warning.

  Your first warning of an attack might be the flash of a nuclear explosion. If outdoors, take cover instantly in any building, or behind a wall, or in a ditch or culvert, or even under an automobile. By getting inside or under something (within seconds) you might avoid serious burns or injury from the heat or blast waves.

  If no cover is available lie down on your side, curl up, cover your head with your arms and hands. Never look at the flash or the fire-ball.

  If indoors go to the strongest part of the building (usually in the central area, first floor, protected by inner walls) and keep low.

  Move to an approved fall-out shelter as soon as the heat blast ends for protection from radio-active fall-out which will arrive later.

  The same curious lack of any sense of reality marked the demonstration in the Zone.

  The demonstration was held in a large stadium only a few hundred yards away from the hall in El Chorillo where the drums had played. The American police officer, Mr Drummond, was intended to be the star. He had personally issued a writ on constitutional grounds against President Ford and Kissinger for holding talks on a new treaty without first getting the approval of Congress. Then his car had been destroyed by a bomb, so he claimed, in mysterious circumstances. This had given me the impression of a highly dangerous man whose life was at risk, an impression not borne out by the demonstration. Mr Drummond had the thinnest legs, bandaged in tight brown trousers, of any man I have ever seen. When he stood up to speak – very uninspiringly – to a rather small and highly respectable audience, one leg seemed to lean against the other for support, or perhaps to make music like a grasshopper.

  Isolated by the arc lights, he was supported in the middle of the stadium by a little group of men and women who looked like a committee elected to arrange a Christmas entertainment. They spoke in turn, throwing back at El Chorillo their slogans, but unaided by drumbeats the voices seemed to get lost in the night air before they reached the meagre audience. Only one blue-haired old lady, like a Universal Aunt, got some energy into her phrases – ‘God and country . . .’ ‘Eighth wonder of the world . . .’ ‘We left our country and our home life . . .’ ‘No desire to live under a repressive form of government . . .’ ‘The Canal can’t be worked without a US Zone and US laws . . .’ ‘The Zone’s got to be incorporated into the Union like the Virgin Islands.’ The audience cheered occasionally but not very often, usually when a speaker attacked a member of his own government. Christian names were used like pejoratives, as though there had been treachery in the family. ‘Gerry’ was a traitor, ‘Henry’ was a traitor. ‘In 1975 a secret agreement was made between Henry and Torrijos.’ They could find no term bad enough to describe the State Department, perhaps because it hadn’t got a Christian name.

  The protesters looked very lost and lonely in the vast stadium and the hot and humid night, and one felt a little sorry for them. God and Country would almost certainly let them down just as surely as Gerry and Henry had done. A young woman asked the audience to send letters and ‘clippings’ to members of Congress. ‘I can supply you with their telephone numbers.’ She wasn’t as impressive as the Negro in El Chorillo. Buckets stood around for contributions to help Mr Drummond’s suit against Henry and Gerry, and the audience was asked to go into the arena to sign a petition, but not many went.

  These people too looked on 1977 as a critical year, but confrontation in their eyes was a simple affair of flying in reinforcements from Fort Bragg in North Carolina to aid the 10,000 troops already in the Zone. They had been encouraged by the mildness of some riots the previous October which perhaps had been provoked in order to prove to Henry and Gerry that Panama was ungovernable. They didn’t know that the General had received fifteen days’ advance warning of what was planned from a CIA agent who squealed. As a result forty students were lodged for the day in prison where the General lectured them on the true nature of political and economic problems, and then they were released.

  6

  The next day my friend Diederich left for his home in Mexico, and Chuchu and I began to plan a journey together through the interior of Panama. I suspected that a rumour of our project would reach Señor V. When I went to see the General at the house of Rory González (Torrijos wanted to know my reactions to the meeting in El Chorillo and I gave them as frankly as I have written them here – even to the doubts about his Chief of Staff), our conversation was interrupted by Señor V on the telephone. He demanded to know what my travel plans were. I was evasive.
My intentions, I said, altered every hour – I wanted to drift with the wind. He insisted that I should dine with him that night and together we would work out a programme. A programme was essential. I would of course take his car . . .

  ‘I have Chuchu’s car.’

  ‘But his car has been bombed.’

  That was true – Chuchu had told me the car had blown up outside his house when his son turned on the engine, though luckily only the car suffered injury.

  ‘The General has lent him one of his.’

  It did occur to me several times on our journey that the General’s car might well prove a more enticing target.

  I told the General what was happening: I told him how much I disliked making a programme with Señor V. Torrijos was in a very good humour (perhaps because he was flying off next day to his rendezvous at Bogotá airport). He agreed at once that any programme was detestable. I should go off with Chuchu where I wanted and forget all about Señor V. ‘If he proposes anything,’ he said, ‘do the opposite.’

  Chuchu and I had lunch at the Marisco. The proprietor, a Basque, was a friend of his and yet another refugee – a veteran refugee this time, from Franco. I was still thirsty in the heat and the humidity and I longed for a rum punch, but the Basque didn’t even know what a rum punch was and when his barman was consulted he couldn’t make one, he said, because he had no milk. Milk?

  Later driving through the streets of old Panama, Chuchu stopped to speak to a black on the pavement. ‘He was one of my pupils,’ he said, ‘when I was a Marxist professor.’ Perhaps to show what a good professor he had been he asked the man, ‘Who was Aristotle?’

  ‘The first Venezuelan philosopher,’ the black replied without hesitation. For a while after that Chuchu drove in thoughtful silence.

  I had that night dinner with Señor V at a restaurant called Sarti’s – an elegant one by Panama standards – but it was an uncomfortable situation and not helped at all by the barman’s non-alcoholic idea of what a rum punch should be. I admitted that Chuchu and I intended to drive up to David, the second largest town on the Pacific side. ‘I will join you in David,’ Señor V said.

  ‘Or perhaps we may go instead to Taboga,’ I added hastily. ‘We haven’t decided yet.’

  Taboga is a small island in the Pacific where no cars are allowed – it sounded to me an ideal place to work.

  ‘I’ll join you there then,’ he said.

  He went on to demand that I warn him in advance whenever I had an appointment to see the General. He wanted to be present, he said, in order to study the growth of our relationship, and he told me that he intended to issue to the press some photographs taken on Contadora of the two of us, but here I was firm. ‘You can’t do that. The General has said that they are not to be released until after I leave.’

  ‘If you go to David,’ he said, ‘you must tell Chuchu to report at every guard post on the way. I want to be kept informed of where you are.’

  7

  So much that happened in Panama during the next four years proved as unexpected as the events in a dream. The Republic was to me an unknown land, and my voyage there was a voyage of discovery, and the first discovery was the Haunted House. Chuchu and I had driven over the Bridge of the Americas where we could see the ships lined up to take their turn to enter the Canal and pass towards the Atlantic; we had driven through the American Zone and re-entered Panama. There were no frontier posts to distinguish one from another, but the Haunted House was undeniably in Panama. Nothing could have been less American than the bar next door, decorated with cabalistic signs and bearing a name in Spanish meaning The Bewitched. The barman told us that the adjoining house had not been occupied for forty years. The owner of the house and bar was an old man who lived in Panama City. He would neither sell the house nor let it. Yes, the barman agreed, the superstitious believed it to be haunted.

  ‘By a ghost?’

  ‘By a woman screaming.’

  ‘Can we look round the house?’

  There was nothing to be seen, the barman assured us. The house was quite empty and anyway we would have to get permission from the owner.

  When could we see him?

  If we came back to the bar on a Sunday we would certainly find him. He came always on a Sunday.

  ‘Tell him,’ Chuchu said with the authority of his sergeant’s strìpes, ‘that we will be back next Sunday.’

  We left the bar and took a closer look at the house: an ugly square building with no character but its secrecy and its security. There were steel shutters on the already heavy doors and the windows were barred as well as shuttered. Only a hole, the size of a half-crown, in one of the doors gave us a view within. The house was certainly not completely empty – I could just make out in the obscurity two pictures and a cupboard. To me the house smelt of an old crime. A woman’s scream? ‘We have to see inside,’ I told Chuchu.

  ‘On the way back,’ he said, but a year was to pass before I had my way. It proved easier getting to know the General than the interior of the Haunted House.

  We drove on towards Santiago with the intention of stopping for a while at a small town called Antón where Chuchu said there was a miraculous image of Christ. Not that Chuchu believed in the Christian God – he was too good a Marxist for that – though he believed in the Devil. ‘Haven’t you noticed,’ he said, ‘when you try to open a swing door, you always begin by pushing it the wrong way? That’s the Devil.’ He was proud of his Mayan blood and he half believed in the Mayan gods. He told me that once in a museum he had talked to a Mayan idol and he knew he was understood. It was just a question of catching the right note. As he drove he gave an imitation of the note, which startled me. It was more like a shriek than a prayer. He had a small Mayan idol in his house and he was anxious to give it me so that there would always, he said, be a radiation of Maya in my home.

  I much preferred it when he recited Rilke in German, or one of the Spanish poets whom he admired, and I tried to respond with a few lines of Hardy and with Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage; he preferred the French to the English in spite of my accent. English, he said, was not a poetic language, and Shakespeare was much inferior to Calderón. However, he approved of Newbolt’s poem Drake’s Drum. ‘Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay . . .’ He promised to take me to Nombre de Dios. It was impossible to go by road – there was no road: we would have to borrow an army plane – no, a plane couldn’t land there – a helicopter. The General would certainly lend us one.

  It was later on this trip that I discovered a poem which he could really appreciate and one of the few which I knew by heart, Yeats’s An Irish Airman Foresees his Death. Chuchu had a small second-hand aeroplane which at the moment was under-going repairs and there were lines in the poem he made me repeat more than once.

  I know that I shall meet my fate

  Somewhere among the clouds above.

  A lonely impulse of delight

  Drove to this tumult in the clouds.

  As a Marxist he approved of:

  My country is Kiltartan Cross,

  My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.

  Once in a Panama bar he made me put the lines on to tape.

  We passed several National Guard posts on our way to Antón, but he made no telephone calls to Señor V. He said, ‘If he comes to David to find us, we will have gone. We won’t spend a night there.’

  At Antón we couldn’t get into the church to see the miraculous Christ. The church was locked and no one seemed to know where the priest was. ‘Never mind,’ said Chuchu. ‘On the way back.’ It was the second time he had used the phrase and suddenly in my mind it became the title of a novel which, alas, I was never to write.

  As he drove I began to learn a little about Chuchu’s family life. He had a rather vague number of children by several women and he supported nearly all of them, though a boy and a girl were with their mother, his divorced wife, in the States. This wife had left him for an American professor and he spoke of her always with regre
t. I never knew what had happened to an earlier wife – the mother of the boy in the bombed car. He had a girl living with him now. She was only a poor thing, he said, and he sheltered her out of pity. He couldn’t turn her out as ‘the rich woman’ wanted. He would like to be rid of ‘the poor thing’ all the same . . .

  It was the first I had heard of the rich woman. By the rich woman, he told me, he had had a baby girl. The mother was a fellow poet. ‘If I go and see her we always sleep together, but she says I only come because of the food in her fridge.’

  We stopped at the cantonment of the Wild Pigs, near the General’s small house on the Pacific. Chuchu had nostalgic memories of his training there and we encountered the first friend he had made in the days when he was a middle-aged recruit. They must have been difficult days – being a professor among the Wild Pigs. He was even hit on the head once for reading a book. But this man had come up to him and said, ‘Come and shit with me,’ which was the greatest mark of friendship it was possible to offer.

  Now Chuchu had become a great man in their eyes, even among the officers, for he was known to be the trusted companion of the General. There had been a colonel here, Sanjur, who started a rebellion in ’69 after the General had exiled his fellow colonel and seized power. The General was at the time on a visit to Mexico, but he immediately took a plane back to David, to the consternation of the conspirators who thought that he would be content to follow President Arias and Colonel Martínez without fuss to Miami. From David he set off towards the capital and the rebellion collapsed. The junior officers were forgiven, Colonel Sanjur was imprisoned, but the CIA arranged his escape by bribery and took him to the Canal Zone.

  Another Wild Pig buttonholed us in the camp. He needed money badly and for long he had day-dreamed of an occasion when the General would visit the camp and speak to him and he would find the courage to tell the General of his trouble. He had three children – well, he admitted to us, not three, it was really only two, but three sounded a lot better, he thought, and he was in genuine need of three hundred dollars. Three hundred? Well, of course, two hundred would satisfy him, but it was always well to ask for more than you actually needed.