Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement Page 6

  The party quickly cheered up. The leading Communist in Panama proved very friendly. He told me how his party supported the General’s policy of ‘prudence’. A young black architect agreed with me about the stupidity of high-rise apartments in the poor quarter of El Chorillo – even the slum houses of Hollywood were to be preferred, he said. I was confused by his reference to Hollywood which I associated with film stars rather than with slums. ‘The people in Hollywood are attached to their houses,’ he told me. ‘The conditions are terrible, but all the same they are homes.’ I realized tardily that Hollywood must be the name given to a very poor part of the city.

  Chuchu nudged me. ‘There’s Koster.’

  The novelist – or CIA agent – was circulating assiduously, drawing ever nearer, except when he made a sideways dash to refill his glass. The National Guard had done us well and I was feeling a little tipsy myself by this time. Koster reached me and held out his hand.

  ‘Koster,’ he said.

  ‘The old goat,’ I introduced myself.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Chuchu told me that you wanted to know what the old goat was doing here.’

  ‘I never said such a thing.’

  He moved quickly away to hide himself among the other guests and according to Chuchu he spread a rather strange story that I was a well-known homosexual. Are goats homosexual?

  Ten o’clock was long past: the drinks were inexhaustible: and at midnight guests were still arriving. Feeling a discourteous host, I slunk away with Chuchu and his companion, the somewhat haggard woman whom Chuchu fancied, the refugee from Argentina and the dictatorship of Videla. There were many such refugees in Panama City and there was a special flat for their use, known locally as the Pigeon House, for when they had found work or entry into another country they flew away. Chuchu supported them out of the General’s private account.

  Chuchu had confided to me over the drinks that the only wife he had ever really loved (she was a legal wife, too) was arriving next day from the States where she lived with her new husband, a professor, to see her mother and she was bringing with her Chuchu’s two children whom he had not seen for seven years. Her husband was following her in a few days, but I could tell that Chuchu all the same had hopes, and it was obvious that the Argentinian woman was of little importance to him for the time being.

  The day after the party one of my ambitions was fulfilled. Chuchu took me to Portobelo. It wasn’t Nombre de Dios, which I was not to see for another two years, but it was in Portobelo Bay that Drake’s body was buried. An American officer was aiding the Panamanians in what proved an unsuccessful search there for his coffin.

  Portobelo is fantastically beautiful. Little seems altered since Drake’s day when the town stood at the end of the gold route from Panama City. Here is still the treasure house where the gold awaited shipment to Spain, the three forts guarding the town, the ramparts which are lined now with vultures: vultures too were sitting on and around the cross of the cathedral. From the door of the cathedral one could see nothing of the village, only the jungle descending like a curtain, dark and impenetrable, to within fifty yards of the door. There seemed little room among the stone ruins even for the small population of two thousand. The statue of a black Christ presided over the altar. It had been shipwrecked on the way to the Viceroy of Peru and salvaged by the Indians.

  Back in Panama City I lay down for a siesta, but it was not to be. Chuchu woke me to say that the General wanted us to come over to Rory González’s house – Mr Bunker and the Americans had left after only a few days on Contadora island and the General was celebrating.

  It was the first time that we had a real drinking party together. At lunch he would drink water, and only when he had realized my European desire for a real drink did he concede me a glass of rum. This evening Black Label was already flowing when I arrived with Chuchu at five and it continued to flow till ten when I left. Señor V was there. He was already on his way to being well stoned, so that he was no menace now to my independence and it proved to be the last time I saw the poor man alive. The young Panamanian Ambassador to the United States was there too, and of course Rory González.

  The General, relieved from the tedium of negotiations, was happy and confiding. He showed me photographs of his wife with the father whom she had recovered. They looked as happy as the General. He joked about the beautiful Colombian singer he had flown to Bogotá to see. ‘You saw her,’ he said, ‘but I measured her.’ All the same he told me, perhaps from chivalry for he was a chivalrous man, that he had been disappointed, nothing had happened, she wouldn’t even get into his plane.

  ‘We are celebrating the end of Panama’s number one bachelor,’ he told me. ‘Rory’s getting married on December twenty-seven.’ He himself had been married when he was twenty-three. He regretted nothing, he said, though there had been troubles. His young wife had discovered a cache of his love letters. ‘She wasn’t hysterical,’ he said, ‘she was historical.’ He had found himself virtually imprisoned in his home and had to appeal to Rory to come and rescue him.

  Black Label made the hours spin past. It was nearly nine o’clock and Chuchu whispered urgently to me. He must be off to the airport to meet his ex-wife and his children. ‘Please come with me, Graham,’ he pleaded. But I was happy and I wouldn’t go.

  ‘Then please lend me your dark glasses.’

  ‘Whatever for? It’s pitch black outside.’

  ‘To hide my tears,’ he said.

  The General spoke of the banana war some years back between the United Fruit Company and the banana-producing states. One by one they had made terms with the company until only Panama held out. ‘The company said they were prepared to offer me three million dollars. If they had offered me two Miss Universes, who knows . . .’

  At ten I could drink no more and the General had disappeared. Rory said he would send me home in his car, since Chuchu had not returned. I asked him to thank the General for me. He said, ‘I think he’s with a girl.’ Señor V was tipped into the rear seat. He was completely sozzled and I couldn’t understand a word he said on his way to the hotel.

  My sense of happiness stayed with me all the way to bed. Panama had not yet got a currency of its own – dollars were the only tender, but soon the General had promised a Panama coinage . . . when once the Canal situation had been solved . . . Drowsing in my bed, I thought of a design for the future Panama coin. Might it not be suitably stamped on one side with the image of the General and on the other with the image of Chuchu, the images of two romantics who trusted each other more than they did any woman or politician or intellectual?

  13

  Chuchu turned up at my hotel with the two attractive and intelligent children he had made with the woman he most loved. On a later occasion, after yet another marriage and another child, he remarked to me of her with regret, ‘Ah, she wasn’t a clean woman.’ I think he meant only that she had not been fussy about order and propriety. She had not been ‘wifely’.

  Once again we tried to get a plane to Bocas del Toro, the island which had become an obsession with me almost as strong as the village of Nombre de Dios, and once again luckily we failed. So instead we drove the children along the interrupted Inter-American highway towards Colombia, towards the great empty space coloured green on the map which marks the thick uncleared jungle of Darién, the reserve of uncountable Indians. There were those (among them Japanese engineers) who wanted to build a new canal through the jungle which would be cleared with the help of nuclear devices, but the General was firmly opposed to the idea. ‘We don’t know how many thousands of Indians would be killed or displaced.’

  On the edge of this great reserve the Bayano Dam had been constructed with the help of the Yugoslavs. We reached it after having lunched at an army post for recruits – it was Sunday and a visiting day for their families and I was reminded of my English school on Founder’s Day with proud mothers and embarrassed boys.

  The dam had caused the displacement of at leas
t one Indian village, which now lay below the water. We went up to see the new village which had taken its place and in the assembly hut we were greeted by the chief, an old man of immense dignity who wore two feathers in his hat and a length of green material slung over one shoulder. A number of villagers sat on the floor and listened in silence while an interpreter voiced the chief’s complaints against the government. They were not going to let the opportunity of our visit pass them by.

  The government had not kept its promises, we were told – the payment which had been guaranteed them for their resettlement was three months in arrears; they had been moved to the new village too late for planting: they were short of sugar and grain: the wild animals which used to provide them with food had been driven away by the work on the dam and all the fish in the river had been killed. If they were to appeal to the General, the appeal would have to be co-ordinated through all the Indian chiefs, and the man who was likely to be chosen as their representative was a bad one who did nothing at all to help his people. We promised the chief that we would speak directly to the General and he believed us – though perhaps with a certain scepticism.

  Chuchu’s children listened with great gravity. It must have seemed to them a very long way from their home in the United States and from their stepfather on the campus. Chuchu was a professor too, but in his army uniform and his sergeant’s stripes he must have seemed very different from the professors whom they were accustomed to meet in the United States. Chuchu cleverly brought his son out. ‘Tell me a thought,’ he would say to him, and again, ‘Give me a thought about that,’ and his son promptly responded with little aphorisms.

  Later back in Panama City Chuchu and I went unwillingly to the Holiday Inn because it happened to be close by in order to drink three rum punches each – which as we feared proved to be poor ones – and discuss plans for the next day. We would take an army helicopter to one of the San Bias Islands in the Atlantic where the lobsters were good, according to Chuchu, and the Cuna Indians lived an independent life. Then we went on to the Marisco for dinner and Chuchu found that he had forgotten his spectacles and went to find them – he had in fact forgotten more than his spectacles, for he returned with ‘the little girl’ whom he hadn’t the heart to leave. She was charming and not nearly so simple as he made out.

  14

  In Panama City nothing ever happened as we had planned. Instead of taking the helicopter to the San Bias Islands we went shopping because the General wanted us to sit with him at Rory’s while he scrambled through his lunch (he hated to be alone while he ate). I thought I would try to change his taste in whisky. I bought a bottle of Irish whiskey (I wanted to teach him how to make Irish coffee and I had learned that he did not even know that Ireland produced whiskey) and a bottle of Glenfiddich to challenge his favourite Black Label. I also gave him one of the treasures which I kept in my pocket book – a fake dollar note with the reverse printed with propaganda against the Vietnam war. This pleased him more than the whisky, for he continued to be faithful to Black Label till the end. They were to be farewell presents, for next day my KLM plane would be taking off for Amsterdam.

  We told him of the Indian complaints at Bayano and he promised that they would be attended to and he gave Chuchu’s notes to his secretary. Then we talked at random while the simple meal seemed to be swallowed almost untasted with the help of water – Sunday was over. We talked of dreams – he seldom remembered them and those he remembered were disturbing like that of his dead father – of women (‘When one is young one eats anything but now one distinguishes’), of premonitions, from which he often suffered. His premonitions were usually of his own death by violence. I told him how appalling I found the Walt Disney figures on the roads of the Republic to which the names of villages and towns were attached. ‘Next time the students want to demonstrate against the States, can’t you tell them to burn all those Donald Ducks?’ Alas, my suggestion was never taken up. They are still there.

  As we talked, the solitary budgerigar watched us from its cage. ‘It will never sing,’ I said to Torrijos, ‘without a companion.’

  ‘Oh yes, it will,’ he said. He went into the next room and fetched a little cassette. He had recorded the song of a budgerigar and he played it to the solitary bird which burst into song in reply. How could one fail, I thought, to like this man?

  That evening Chuchu and I went to the open-air restaurant, the Panama, where the Pacific lay like a dark lawn in front and the stars seemed brighter and nearer than they ever were at home. We were to meet his ex-wife and their children, and Chuchu, while we waited, described her to me as the most beautiful woman I had probably ever seen. He knew he would feel so sad at parting from her when dinner was over that he had arranged for his comfort a rendezvous at half-past ten with a prostitute at a certain street corner – ‘the little girl’ at home would be quite incapable of soothing his unhappiness.

  Chuchu’s ex-wife arrived. She was good-looking, intelligent, and certainly a very nice woman, but I found her hardly the equal of Chuchu’s dream. She had brought with her (I think it may have been as a barrier against Chuchu’s attentions) a pretty young woman doctor who bristled with suspicion. Chuchu had put on his best uniform: he had combed his unruly hair and now he set out to seduce his thirteen-year-old daughter. Like Chuchu she was a romantic – in a few years’ time a friend of mine met her in Nicaragua, wearing khaki with a revolver on her hip.

  All through dinner Chuchu talked of his loneliness here in Panama: quite forgotten were the rich woman and his baby, ‘the little girl’ waiting at home, the prostitute by this time on her way to the rendezvous. ‘When you go back to the States,’ he implored his ex-wife, ‘at least leave me my daughter.’ His daughter held his hand and wept for the lonely man at her side – he wasn’t the professor that night, he was a soldier. Her young brother was of tougher material and he proudly produced a ‘thought’ as his father had taught him. ‘He can’t be lonely with the whole world in his mind.’ The doctor watched Chuchu’s performance cynically and the girl cried and cried.

  I was furious with Chuchu and I berated him as he drove me back to the hotel. ‘You had no right,’ I told him, ‘to upset your daughter like that with stories of your loneliness. Loneliness! What sort of loneliness?’

  ‘But I am lonely,’ he said. He stopped the car at a corner and looked up and down the road. ‘She’s gone,’ he said, ‘we are nearly an hour late.’

  Next day I had my last meal with Chuchu at the Marisco – a farewell to Panama – a meal given us free by the Basque owner. It was very light and elegant, consisting only of the cheeks of fish in oil and a Chilean wine chosen from a non-Pinochet year.

  I never thought I would see Chuchu or the General or Panama again, but I was haunted still by the novel I was never to write and in the months that followed I wrote down snatches of dialogue – though not the dialogue I had heard spoken.

  ‘You judge us,’ the General was saying not to me but to the woman reporter of On the Way Back. ‘You call us Latin Americans because you won’t look deep enough inside yourselves – where you would find us too.

  ‘Who was the first Latin American? Cortés – not Columbus. Columbus stayed on his boat in Portobelo Bay and wouldn’t land. He was old, like Europe.’

  But there was one genuine line of the General’s dialogue which haunted me still by its mystery. What had he meant when he said, ‘You and I are both self-destructive’? It was like a friend speaking who knew me better than I knew myself.

  PART II

  1977

  1

  The novel On the Way Back nagged at me night and day on my return to France. Those characters which I had so mistakenly drawn from life wouldn’t let me rest. I would constantly remember Chuchu’s boast, ‘I’m never going to die’; his complex theology – ‘I believe in the Devil. I don’t believe in God,’ and the way that he would prove the existence of the Devil by pushing at a swing door in the wrong direction. The General and Chuchu went on living, far away in
Panama, and they refused to become characters in my novel. And Panama – so much of the little country had still been left unseen and it seemed highly unlikely that I would ever be able to return for a second visit. I hadn’t got as far as Columbus to the undesirable island of Bocas del Toro; Nombre de Dios was a name only in a pageant and a poem; we had failed to penetrate the Haunted House. News came to me, I think from my friend Diederich, that Señor V, poor man, was dead of a heart attack. Had that last Black Label party been too much for him? In the novel, which I began to despair of ever writing, it was essential that he should remain alive, for his role was an important one. After Chuchu’s death in his bombed car – at David? – the General had to send Señor V to fetch the girl back by helicopter to Panama City, and it was in his unsympathetic company that she would find herself being flown over all the places which she and Chuchu had planned to visit ‘on the way back’.

  I put the first two pages of the doomed book down on paper in the months that followed. Marie-Claire, the French journalist, arrived as I had done on that first occasion to see the General.

  She found herself surrounded in the small courtyard of a white suburban villa with half-Indian faces. The men all carried revolvers on their belts and one had a walkie-talkie which he kept pressed closely to his ear as though he were waiting with the intensity of a priest for one of his Indian gods to proclaim something. The men are as strange to me, she thought, as the Indians must have seemed to Columbus five centuries ago. The camouflage of their uniforms was like painted designs on naked skin.