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

  The real object of Chuchu’s visit to the camp was to get ammunition for a new acquisition of which he was very proud. He already had quite an arsenal at his home ready for confrontation next year with the Yanquis if it came to street fighting, but this was something special – a Russian repeating pistol which could be adjusted to fire from the shoulder. He had obtained it from a friend in the Cuban Embassy in exchange for a Belgian revolver. There was obviously magic to him in the mere word Russian. We would try it out, he promised, when we got to David.

  When we reached Santiago we had a very bad meal at what appeared to be the only restaurant – a Chinese one. I was encouraged by the sight of a Gordon’s bottle behind the bar and I ordered a gin, but whatever the bottle contained it wasn’t gin. I said so and the Chinaman smiled and smiled. We chose for safety a very European dish, chop-suey, and I asked for some pimento sauce to cheer it up. The bottle certainly had the right label, but what it held was only coloured water, and when I complained the Chinaman smiled and smiled and smiled. The restaurant formed part of an hotel, but we thought it better to look elsewhere.

  We found a motel and asked for two rooms. ‘But where are the girls?’ the proprietor asked with astonishment and suspicion.

  Chuchu took off his revolver belt and laid his revolver on his bedside table with the safety catch raised. ‘A precaution?’ I asked and often later back in France I had reason to recall the aphorism with which he replied, ‘A revolver is no defence.’ He was indeed a wise man. Even the motel’s doors proved, as he had said, that the Devil existed.

  On the road to David Chuchu was in high spirits, casting a glance back from time to time as though his sight could penetrate the boot where the beloved Russian pistol rested. He told me a bizarre story of one of his last visits to David. The Dean of Guatemala University, an honoured guest of Panama, was with him – also a bottle of whisky which the Dean had emptied while Chuchu drove. The Dean was quite drunk by the time they arrived and for some reason all the hotels were full, so they went to the police station to beg a cell for the night, but the cells were full too. There remained the little square with its stone benches, but the benches were all occupied by fourteen homosexuals. Luckily Chuchu was in uniform. He ordered a guardia to summon the homosexuals before him and after giving them a long reproving address he dismissed them to their homes. Then he and the Dean were able to sleep on the benches in the empty square.

  In David we went to the barracks of the National Guard, so that Chuchu could leave the General’s car in safety for the night, for he remembered the bomb which had damaged his own. There we found Captain Wong. Captain Wong was much interested in the Russian weapon. He took his own American model and led us to a rifle range. The American repeater worked perfectly. The Russian spluttered out a few bullets and stuck. Another try. No trouble with the American weapon and the Russian stuck again. Chuchu was furious, injured, humiliated. It was almost as if he had been betrayed by a woman he loved. To think that he had given a good Belgian revolver in exchange for the Russian gun at the Cuban Embassy . . . It was as though the prophet Marx himself had failed him.

  I heard Chuchu tell Captain Wong that we should see him again ‘on the way back’ – Captain Wong, the miraculous Christ, the Haunted House, all were promised on the way back and my projected novel with that title again emerged from the shadows. In my book the promised return would never be fulfilled – there would be no going back for my chief character.

  Chuchu was silent and sad as we drove up next day into the mountains towards a village called Boquete, for he was brooding on his Russian repeater, but to me it was like a return to life after a long sickness – the malignant sickness of a writer’s block. I was coming to the end of The Human Factor, an abandoned novel which I had picked up again in desperation to escape just such a block. Five years had passed after the previous novel and I was beginning to feel already the menace of another long block when The Human Factor too would be gone and leave my mind empty.

  But with On the Way Back everything seemed to be possible: my writing days, I thought, were not over after all. The main elements of the story and the characters were already assembling – the dangerous situation between Panama and the States: Chuchu himself: the bomb in his car: the expression he had used in the motel – ‘A revolver is no defence’: his proof of the Devil’s existence: the Dean of Guatemala University and the fourteen homosexuals: impressions were clustering like bees round a queen on this journey we were taking together. It was for that reason I found myself happy all the way to Boquete, a charming little town nearly three thousand feet up the slopes of a volcano. The streets were full of the sound of rushing water, and the air was as fresh as the air in a Swiss village, even the small hotel was pretty, and so was the hostess who had the grace and the looks of a young Oona Chaplin.

  8

  Next day we visited the great copper mine, managed by Rory González, the General’s friend. It was a new State acquisition and believed then to be the great hope for Panama’s future, which otherwise depended on banking, flags of convenience, sugar, coffee and yucca, apart from the wretchedly small income received by the terms of the old treaty for the use of the Canal which was already incapable of taking the largest boats – the oil tankers and the aircraft carriers. The concession for working the mine had been bought from a Canadian interest: the mine was not expected to be in production for another four years, and it was to prove a very chancy gamble.

  The mine, I was told, was the largest in the world, larger even than the great mine in Chile at Chuquicamata which I had visited when Allende was President, but the copper had value for its quantity rather than its quality. A Canadian who belonged to the former management was naturally pessimistic about the chances – he didn’t want to be proved wrong – he wanted failure. He didn’t believe that the mine could be in full production before 1986 to ’88, and what would be the price of copper then? An assessment of the copper prices was no more reliable than a newspaper horoscope. Japan had formed big reserves of copper when her balance of payments was favourable and she might sell off these reserves at any time.

  We penetrated as far as the tunnelling into the mine had gone, we had lunch in the canteen, and a young Englishman made a mysterious remark to me, ‘To be superstitious brings bad luck.’ (Had I tossed some salt over my shoulder?) I noted in my diary for an unknown reason the presence of ‘a tired American’, but he has left no memory behind him. Then we were back on the road to Boquete again.

  Chuchu’s melancholy had quite gone. He sang and he recited poems and he quoted a cynical Panamanian phrase one could use to a girl, which stuck, I don’t know why, in my mind – ‘Come with me to be alone.’ It is odd what you remember and what you forget. There were unfamiliar birds and unfamiliar butterflies, and by the wayside the Indian faces of a tribe which might be threatened by the copper mine, for if it were a success it would change the whole pattern of the tribe’s life. A horseman rode by carrying a cock on his hand in the way a waiter carries a tray.

  When I went to bed I entered in my diary a note for the new novel, little thinking that it would never be written: ‘Start novel with a girl from a French left-wing weekly interviewing the General. She’s escaping the pain of an unsatisfactory marriage in Paris and wants to avoid further pain. In the end she goes back to her pain and not to happiness.’

  Next day we returned to David in order to catch a plane to the island of Bocas del Toro, a depressed banana port (just how depressed I was to find out only several years later). I had become attracted to it because it was the furthest point west that Columbus reached off the coast of Panama, and perhaps because the South American Handbook stated with its habitual frankness, ‘No tourist ever goes there.’

  As we drove I told Chuchu of the novel which I was planning, and perhaps that is the reason why it never came to be written beyond the first chapter. To tell a story is much the same as to write it – it is a substitute for the writing. ‘You and the Frenchwoman journalist are the m
ain characters,’ I told him. ‘The General puts you in charge of her to show her the country. He lends you one of his cars, and you go off together, just as we have done. Always there are things you can’t see – like the miraculous Christ and the Haunted House. “On the way back,” you repeat, and that will be the title of the book. But the irony is that neither of you will take the road back.’

  ‘We make love together?’ Chuchu demanded with a certain eagerness.

  ‘Oh, the idea grows in your head, but she’s not like the other women you have known. You have fears and scruples. All the same by the time you reach David or some town still further off, you both know that it’s going to happen. You stop outside a hotel, and by mutual consent, without a word being said between you, you take one room. She wants to wash off the dust of the road and brush her hair. You tell her you must leave the General’s car with the National Guard for safety and then you will return . . . and make love of course, but both of you know that without speaking of it. She washes and does her hair. She’s happy at the thought that all the hesitations are at last over. The decision has been made. But you don’t come back. She waits for you in vain. During the few moments you were with her in the room someone has planted a bomb in the car which goes off. She hears the explosion while she brushes her hair, but she thinks it is only your car backfiring . . .’

  ‘Am I killed?’ Chuchu asked with excitement, and I remembered how he had told me earlier that day, ‘I am never going to die.’

  ‘Yes. Do you mind being killed in a novel?’

  ‘Mind?’ He bared his arm. His skin had risen in lumps. ‘You must write it. Promise you’ll write it.’

  ‘I’ll try.’ But the book was never written, and it was the General and not Chuchu who died.

  We missed our plane to Bocas at David, but Chuchu showed no sign of disappointment. ‘When you come back,’ he said – it was a variant of ‘on the way back’ and a variant which I didn’t believe, for I saw no reason why I should ever return to Panama.

  We called again on Captain Wong and drove with him to the outskirts of the town where a car had been abandoned by thieves to rust away. Captain Wong had decided on some more firing practice, with revolvers this time. (The Russian pistol was left in the boot.) The target chosen was the number plate of a car which contained the letters O and I.

  ‘We aim for the centre of the O,’ Captain Wong decided. Unfortunately after firing three shots each they had not even touched the number plate. Perhaps my eyes showed a trace of amusement for Chuchu held out his revolver and said, ‘All right. You try.’

  ‘I’m no good. I won’t even hit the car. Why waste good ammunition?’

  ‘No, no. Try.’

  I fired. I didn’t get into the O but by an odd fluke I dotted the I. We got back into the car in silence.

  Chuchu and I left David and started on our road towards Panama City. At Antón we did at least succeed in seeing the miraculous image. The wooden Christ was covered in gold ornaments which had apparently led some thieves to steal it, but as they were carrying it out of the church the weight of the ornaments miraculously increased, so that they were forced to abandon the statue.

  Perhaps because I was travelling with an imaginary woman as well as Chuchu and I needed to watch them together, I felt unwilling to return yet to Panama City. It was Sunday. I reminded him that we had a date at the Haunted House. But mysteriously the bar was closed, an incomprehensible event to the neighbours, for on a Sunday all the bars are open everywhere. I became more determined than ever to return one day and see inside. Was the old man afraid of the inquisitive stranger in uniform?

  Disappointed, we turned towards Ocú, a little town famous according to Chuchu for its leather sandals. In Ocú Chuchu bought enough leather for two pairs and we asked a peasant to whom we had given a lift where we could have the sandals made. He assured us he was as good as any sandal-maker in the region and he guided us to his hut.

  Chuchu had already told me of the unusual drinking habits in Panama, habits followed usually even by the General. ‘We are drunkards,’ Chuchu said. ‘On Sundays we drink in order to get drunk, but we don’t drink during the week. You in Europe are alcoholics. You drink all the time.’ I’m glad that during our days together he chose to follow the European custom.

  Our peasant, however, proved to be quite sober. He brought two chairs out into the yard of his hut and began work watched by eleven children and a pregnant girl. At first he soaked the leather and then modelled it around the foot and cut it. Suddenly there were cries of ‘Uahu’, followed by what sounded like the barking of dogs. Two neighbours arrived on the scene. They wore funny little hats with round rims which seemed to balance on their protuberant ears. They had been celebrating Sunday ever since their morning Mass. At first they just continued to bark (the General later corrected me – this was traditional peasant singing). Then one of them attached himself to me, sitting on the ground beside me holding my hand. He said he was only interested in Religión, and he wanted to talk about it. Was I a gringo? No, I wasn’t a gringo. I was English. Was I Católico? Yes, I was Católico. Then we must talk about Religión.

  I asked my friend what his priest was like. ‘Too materialist,’ he replied.

  I tried to turn the conversation away from religion towards politics and the Canal, but no one was interested in either.

  ‘And the General?’ I asked. ‘Do you like the General?’

  ‘Half good and half bad.’

  ‘What is the bad half?’

  ‘He doesn’t like the gringos.’

  ‘Why do you like the gringos?’

  Four hundred men of the Peace Corps, whom Kennedy had sent to Panama, had been expelled by the General, but at least in this poor area near Las Minas one of them had made converts. ‘He was a good man. He taught us things, and he drank with us always on Sundays.’ I seemed to be in another country, very distant from the slum dwellers of El Chorillo and their belligerent cries or the song of the Wild Pigs.

  It must have taken nearly two hours to have our sandals made. They were not very good sandals and I abandoned mine next day, leaving them behind in a bad hotel where there were too many large cockroaches in the dull town of Chitré. Chuchu was disappointed in me, the sandals were genuine home-made Panamanian (he might have been talking of shoes by Lobb of St James’s), but I noticed that he didn’t wear his own for very long either.

  9

  On our way to Panama City we stopped at Rio Hato where the Wild Pigs had their cantonment and the General was staying in his modest house close by on the Pacific. General Torrijos had with him that day Aquilino Boyd, the Foreign Secretary, and the members of his military staff who had gathered there because the American delegation and Mr Bunker were due to arrive next day. A little to my embarrassment because of what I had told him of Colonel Flores, the General insisted on introducing me to the members of his staff, beginning with the Colonel, who was chewing gum as he had done at El Chorillo. In the hand which he reluctantly offered I thought I could detect his dislike and his disdain. For what reason, I could feel him demanding, could he, the Chief of Staff, be expected to greet a civilian and foreigner as an equal? But in the handshake of the intelligence officer I thought I detected a sympathy and a kind of connivance – an interesting contrast.

  Chuchu and I bathed in the clean, clear, quiet water of the Pacific while the staff met, and afterwards we lunched very badly in the mess of the Wild Pigs, lingering there until the General had got rid of his military guests. Apparently he wanted to talk to me. The visit of the Americans seemed to weigh heavily on his mind, perhaps the thought of the endless haggling for a fair treaty which seemed never to reach a conclusion, and yet an open confrontation was denied him if he was to follow Castro’s advice. He made an odd comparison which to this day I don’t understand: ‘You and I have something in common. We are both self-destructive.’ He added quickly, ‘Of course I don’t mean suicidal.’ It was as though at that moment he had opened for me a crack in the door o
f a secret room, a door which he would never quite close again.

  He continued to talk of the confrontation which he had in mind with the United States, and I remembered how on Contadora he had said that 1977 was the year when his patience would be exhausted. Confrontation meant war – a war between a tiny republic with less than 2,000,000 inhabitants and the United States with more than 200,000,000.

  Torrijos, I had begun to realize, was a romantic, but in most Panamanians I was soon to find that romanticism was balanced by a streak of cynical wisdom which you can detect in their popular songs – they are far less sentimental than ours – for example, ‘Your love is a yesterday’s newspaper’, and you can read cynicism even in some of the slogans on the beautifully painted buses – ‘Don’t go and get dressed up, because you are not going with me.’ The General may have felt self-destructive, but he had estimated his chances realistically.

  ‘We could hold Panama City for forty-eight hours,’ he told me. ‘As for the Canal, it is easy to sabotage. Blow a hole in the Gatún Dam and the Canal will drain into the Atlantic. It would take only a few days to mend the dam, but it would take three years of rain to fill the Canal. During that time it would be guerrilla war; the central cordilleras rise to 3,000 metres and extend to the Costa Rican frontier on one side of the Zone and the dense Darién jungle, almost as unknown as in the days of Balboa, stretches on the other side to the Colombian border, crossed only by smugglers’ paths. Here we could hold out for two years – long enough to rouse the conscience of the world and public opinion in the States. And don’t forget – for the first time since the Civil War American civilians would be in the firing line. There are 40,000 of them in the Zone, apart from the 10,000 troops.’