Getting to Know the General (13 page)

Carter looked miserably unhappy. He made a banal little speech and was almost inaudible from five rows back in spite of all the microphones. But as a temporary Panamanian I felt proud of Omar Torrijos, who spoke in a voice very unlike Carter’s with an edge which cut the silence. To my relief he began the text as he had read it to me, abruptly, with no conventional ‘Mr President, Your Excellencies, etc.’ so that even the stars below the platform began to listen. It sounded for a moment as though he were attacking the very Treaty that he was about to sign.

‘The Treaty is very satisfactory, vastly advantageous to the United States, and we must confess not so advantageous. to Panama.’

A pause and the General added, ‘Secretary of State Hay, 1903.’

It was a good joke to play on the Senators who were there in force and were not amused, but it was a good deal more than a joke. Torrijos was signing the new Treaty with reluctance; as he had once said to me, it was only ‘to save the lives of forty thousand young Panamanians’. Two clauses of the Treaty particularly stuck in his gullet; the delay till the year 2000 for complete Panamanian control of the Canal and the clause which would allow the United States to intervene even after that date if the Canal’s neutrality were endangered. He would not, I thought, be entirely unhappy if the Senate refused to ratify the Treaty; he would be left then with the simple solution of violence which had often been in his mind, with desire and apprehension balanced as in a sexual encounter.

The United States was lucky to be dealing with Omar Torrijos, a patriot and an idealist who had no formal ideology, except a general preference for Left over Right and a scorn for bureaucrats. His position was a difficult one, for he was a solitary man without the base of a political party, and the old parties continued to exist in his shadow – the Christian Democrats consisting of the bourgeoisie who hated him, the Communists who gave him, if only for the moment, a tactical support, the extreme left groups who were all against the Treaty (ironically for much the same reason as the General). He could trust the younger officers of the National Guard, and he could depend on the Wild Pigs – that was about all. Of some senior officers of the Guard one had to speak with more caution. If the Treaty were not ratified Panama would need the General, and his position and his popularity would be secure. If the Treaty were ratified, the General’s future and Panama’s future would be far more dubious, and so it proved.

With ratification more than three hundred square miles of valuable real estate would be returned immediately to Panama – and a great deal of cash. Plenty of pockets were ready to be lined. Their owners were not interested in the General’s plan for free school meals and free milk for all children, for the elimination of the slums in Colon and Panama City, for an orphanage and a pleasure park for the poor who were now condemned to spend their leisure hours in such honifying districts as Hollywood. The landlords of Panama City – and they included a few high-ranking army officers – were likely to have other ideas. The General’s life if the Treaty were ratified would be a poor risk for an insurance company, for he was not a man who could be flown like a politician to Miami. It was little wonder that he dreamt a good deal of death and that his dreams were reflected in his eyes.

There were eight other generals of the southern hemisphere on the platform to watch Torrijos sign this treaty which he didn’t like, and I think many demonstrators in Washington confused them together – they were all generals, they were all in some way dictators, a protest against Pinochet was a protest against the whole lot. Omar was well aware of that danger. He had wanted, as I have written, only the more reputable leaders to be present, but Carter had insisted on his invitation to all the members of the Organization of American States. Carter’s insistence was a triumph for Pinochet and an embarrassment for Torrijos.

After the signing of the Treaty Carter and Torrijos set off down the platform in opposite directions to greet the heads of state. An embrace is the usual friendly greeting in Latin America, but I noticed how Torrijos embraced only the leaders of Colombia, Venezuela and Peru and confined himself to a formal handshake with Bolivia and Argentina as he worked down the row towards Pinochet. But Pinochet had noticed that too, and his eyes gleamed wickedly with amusement. When his turn came he grasped the hand of Torrijos and flung his arm around his shoulder. If any journalist’s camera clicked at that moment it would appear that Torrijos had embraced Pinochet.

Next day before catching the Concorde to Paris I spoke with Chuchu, as I thought yet again for the last time. He was unhappy about the Treaty. It wasn’t good enough and there was still the Senate . . . He spoke of resigning from the security guard and returning to the University.

‘Stay for six months,’ I pleaded with him. ‘The greatest danger to Omar will come when the Treaty is ratified. He needs you. There’s no one else he can trust.’ Chuchu did stay, but all the same it was not in his power to save Omar. As he had said to me in the motel, ‘A revolver is no defence.’

Flying home I said a final goodbye as I believed to this odd interlude in my life. For two years Omar had wanted a friendly observer while he fought for the Treaty. Now the Treaty had been signed and any use I might be to him was over. No more Omar, no more Chuchu, I told myself in the Concorde, and the discomfort of the Concorde matched my sad mood. The steward couldn’t even produce a bit of cheese as we pelted towards Paris faster than sound – ‘Only by special request.’

‘This is a special request.’

They dug up a small stale triangle of Camembert.

In my pocket in safety lay Camilo’s letter.

PART III

1978

1

I was far away in Antibes, reading only in newspapers of the civil war in Nicaragua. Hardly a day passed without a paragraph which reminded me of my Sandinista friends in Panama. Then suddenly one day Panama and Nicaragua came unexpectedly to Antibes in the person of the young mathematician Rogelio. He was ringing from the station at Nice and he was on his way to Italy. Apparently he needed a visa for Italy and he had none, but this didn’t worry him unduly. After all, he had an Italian wife. One could always arrange things like visas, he said over the telephone, but he would like to break his journey and have a talk with me.

I found him a room for the night and we dined together. I felt hungry for news. He told me that Camilo had at last seen action with a group of Sandinistas who had crossed the Costa Rican frontier. It had not been a successful foray, for they had been attacked from the air and they had no anti-aircraft guns. Now Rogelio was on a mission to raise money for arms. He gave me the name and number of an account in Panama City in case I knew of any rich sympathizers. There was no problem, he said, about small arms. They could capture enough of these from Somoza’s National Guard. It was anti-aircraft guns which were needed. Alas! I was of little use to him. I could only send off a small cheque of my own to Panama in the hope that it would buy a few bullets, one of which might put paid to Somoza.

2

A few more weeks passed and another familiar voice was speaking over the telephone late one evening in July.

‘Where are you, Chuchu?’

‘In Panama, of course. Where do you expect me to be? When are you arriving? The General wants to know. KLM have your ticket.’

I was very much surprised by the invitation, and I calculated with haste. ‘9.30 in the morning on 19 August. Will that do?’

But I very nearly missed the plane.

It was early morning on the eighteenth, and I was staying at the Ritz in London en route to Amsterdam – the hotel where in those days something always went wrong, which was one of the reasons why I liked it. Writing is for most of the time a lonely and unsatisfying occupation. One is tied to a table, a chair, a stack of paper. Only a strict discipline enabled me to carry on, so that I welcomed the unexpected which the Ritz seemed always ready to supply – smoked salmon, perhaps, served instead of eggs for breakfast, a bird flapping all day in the chimney, a window which could not be opened or else could not be closed, an Egyptian waiter, who was studying to play the drums and who tried to kiss the girl next door when he brought her breakfast. So it was in the good old days before Trafalgar House bought the hotel and hung hideous pictures in the corridors and made the service dully reliable. All the same, in the early morning of 18 August things seemed to be going just a bit too far.

I woke coughing heavily and turned on the light, but I couldn’t even see to the other end of my bedroom through an evil-smelling and throat-tickling smoke. I looked out of the window and then hastily, and with the usual great difficulty, closed it. A building which was under construction next door had been left covered in plastic and the plastic was on fire. Firemen could be seen down below carrying torches and wearing gas-masks. It was their shouts which had luckily woken me. I opened the door on to the passage to let the smoke escape and saw a receptionist with a fireman coming down the corridor. He offered to change my room, but as the smoke was clearing and I was all packed for Panama, I preferred to stay where I was, coughing. The cough was to stay with me all through the next two weeks until I returned to Europe.

Later that day I caught my plane bound, so I believed, for Amsterdam – it was the first time in my life that I had got on the wrong plane – with all the checking of tickets and boarding cards a difficult thing to do. I only discovered I was on the wrong plane when a steward announced that we were landing on time in Rotterdam. I think perhaps the smoke had got a little into my brain as well as into my throat, and I began to think that the Fates had decided against Panama. My plane from Amsterdam was due to leave in a little over an hour.

I rushed through immigration and customs and took a taxi, but I had no guilders. I explained my predicament only after we drove off. The driver took it well: ‘What currency have you got?’

‘French,’ I said, ‘some English and a few American dollars.’

He chose the dollars and I thought I would lose a lot on the exchange, but no – he rang up a currency exchange office on the car radio and found the correct rate.

The Fates ceased to be against me. I just caught my plane – no time to enjoy the Van Gogh lounge – and at nine in the morning Panama time (half an hour early) I was welcomed by Chuchu at the new international airport which I was seeing for the first time. Chuchu had left his car at the national airport and brought his own small plane (thirteen years old, he told me) to fly us back to his car. I had little confidence in a poet and professor as a pilot and wondered whether the Fates had yet another card to play. Bernard Diederich, Chuchu said, was at the hotel waiting for me and the General wanted us to be at Farallón, his house by the Pacific, next morning. ‘I will fly the two of you,’ Chuchu said. ‘There’s just room for two passengers in the plane.’

‘Couldn’t we go by road?’

‘Impossible. The General wants you there by nine.’

I don’t think Diederich next morning enjoyed the flight any more than I did. Panama weather is unpredictable and the rainy season was approaching. On the flight Chuchu was in a philosophical mood. ‘If shit was worth money,’ he reflected suddenly out of the blue, ‘the poor would be born without arses.’

Omar was in bed with a fever when we arrived, but he soon joined us. He was relaxed and talkative as he lay, as he always liked to do, in his hammock. I owe to Diederich the substance of his talk, for he recorded it.

After the signing of the Canal Treaty ex-President Arias had been allowed to return to his estates in Chiriquí near the Costa Rican border, and on his arrival two months ago in Panama City he had addressed a great gathering, who were drawn perhaps more by curiosity than by sympathy, in Santa Ana Park. He had attacked Torrijos with a venom which at least helped to prove that there was freedom of speech in Panama.

Watching Omar as he talked to me now from his hammock, I remembered the speech of Arias which I had read the previous evening on the plane. Arias had drawn a portrait of Omar as a tyrant who had flung his enemies out of aeroplanes and tortured prisoners. No names of these ‘disappeared’ victims had ever been published anywhere, no widows had paraded the streets of Panama City as they had in Buenos Aires, for of course the disappeared did not exist. A political dissident had only to cross from one side of the street in Panama to the other to find safety. Arias had based his picture of Torrijos’s Panama on reports of Videla’s Argentina and Pinochet’s Chile, while he sat in his safe home in Miami. In his speech he had spoken of Omar as a ‘psychopath who should be in an insane asylum’, and at that moment the ‘psychopath’ lay there in his hammock cheerfully discussing his future with us.

‘I’m going to give the politicians a big surprise. I’m designing a system – a political party – in order to get out. They think I am designing a system to stay in. The politicians are aiming their guns in the wrong direction. They will waste their ammunition and then they will say, “But the son of a bitch is unpredictable.”’ He gave a smile of mischief. ‘All I want is a house, rum and a girl.’