Getting to Know the General (18 page)

The days in Nicaragua equalled the days in Panama for frustrations and delays. We had planned to return to Panama on a certain day, and it was lucky that we checked and found that María Isabel had somehow managed to book us on a flight which didn’t exist – we were not to be much luckier with the flight to which she changed us. In order to pass the time we drove to León, a less beautiful city than Granada, and up to the fort above the city where Somoza’s men had been besieged, and we visited a small tradesman’s house where a Sandinista supporter showed us where he had successfully kept arms concealed from the National Guard under the false floor of a wardrobe.

Back in Managua, we chose badly for dinner – at a restaurant called Los Ranchos which served poor and expensive food with a false elegance. Here my sympathies for the Sandinistas became strengthened, for I felt myself surrounded by their opponents, men in ties and waistcoats who had dressed up in spite of the heat for an evening out and who regarded our open shirts with a suspicion shared by the waiters who deliberately delayed our meals. Here we were on enemy territory, and I was glad to get away as soon as the bill could be prepared.

We were up early next day because we were uncertain of our seats on a Panamanian plane since María Isabel had performed a second difficult feat of getting us tickets but no reservations. The plane was there all right, but there was an indefinite and unexplained delay in boarding. Tomás Borge arrived with an armed escort to say goodbye and he wanted photographs of the occasion, but my camera had been stolen from my hotel room (a great relief to me, for it rid me of the responsibility of taking photographs, though I regretted the loss of some rather good pictures of vultures in Panama City). However, Tomás Borge had the necessary authority to borrow a camera from a duty free shop, so that I have a record of our affectionate farewell.

Finally we succeeded in getting on the plane, the plane began to move down the tarmac, and suddenly there was nothing to be seen through the windows but smoke. The plane stopped abruptly and we got out. We were told, as it proved untruly, that the plane would not leave that day. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The only other plane was Salvadorean and would not leave until six in the evening. We transferred our reservations to it. I went on a half-hearted search for my camera (luckily unsuccessful), and after lunch at the hotel we drove up to the volcano which dominates Managua, into which Somoza is said to have dropped the bodies of some of his opponents. A thin trail of smoke like that from a crematorium coiled up towards us from the crater and down below in the heart of the crater itself dozens of parakeets flew here and there like coloured kites manoeuvred by an unseen hand. I was sad to leave them to return to the airport, where nothing seemed to go right. It was 4.30. The Panamanian flight after all had left at three, and the Salvador plane, it was said, would be forty minutes late. That proved to be an optimistic reckoning – later it was announced that the plane had not even left Miami and might not arrive at all.

Politics can be a distraction from boredom, and politics entered the lounge now in the person of a distinguished black in a Mao suit who was followed by a wife – or secretary or mistress? – and a retainer. He took his seat firmly beside us, leaving his companions on two less comfortable chairs behind him, and silence descended after an initial greeting. I felt we were suspect – perhaps because I was an Englishman, an ex-colonialist. For how long, I wondered, were we to be condemned to this aggressive silence?

I remembered the bottle of whisky which I always carried in my handbag, and I suggested that since we had an indefinite wait ahead of us, we might ask for some water and broach the bottle. The stranger accepted for himself, though he refused for his companions, and the whisky had an immediate effect. Volubility succeeded silence. He had been visiting Nicaragua as the representative of Mr Bishop and the Grenada government. A stream of Marxist clichés came pouring out of him with his life story. He was a lawyer and he had taken his law degree in Dublin (it was hard to picture him walking on the banks of the Liffey or sitting in an Irish pub). Afterwards he was called to the Bar in London. He asked my name and said that he had been made to read some of my books at school. After a second whisky he invited me to come as a guest of his government to Grenada, and I asked for a rain check. I described him later to Omar. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I know the man. He’s to the right of the President, and a good deal to the left of me.’

In the end the plane did turn up from Miami and it contained the Canadian Archbishop of Panama. ‘For God’s sake, let’s avoid him,’ I said to Chuchu, but there was no danger of his seeing us. Immediately on landing the Archbishop dived into the duty free liquor store, open to arriving passengers as well as departing, while we preserved our thirst for a little shabby Jamaican restaurant to which we had become attached, the Montego Bay, kept by an old jovial black, whose rum punches were almost as good as Flor’s. Drinking them, I had the usual thought: ‘Well, I’ve seen a little of Nicaragua, thanks to Omar – a first and a last visit,’ and again as always in Central America I was to be proved wrong.

I had begun to distrust the legend that Panamanians only drank at the weekend. Perhaps Chuchu had been corrupted in my company, but when after leaving the Montego Bay we went on to Omar’s second home, at the house of Rory González, dinner had not yet started and drinks were going the round with no thought of the weekend to come. Perhaps it was only the peasants who abided by the unwritten rule because of poverty. After dinner the hour was very late. Chuchu had unwisely moved from rum to whisky to wine. One of the General’s guards wanted to drive me back, but Chuchu refused to leave the wheel of his car and I felt morally bound to let him take me. Somebody must wisely have summoned his wife, for Silvana arrived suddenly beside the car. Chuchu had not yet grown accustomed to marriage, and he accused her of being wifely.

Sylvana remained beautifully unperturbed. She was twenty-four and he was forty-eight, and she knew that in the long run he was no match for her when it came to obstinacy. Yet he clung to the wheel for a long time and when at last he took his hands away he got out of the car without a word and went back into the house as though he couldn’t bear to see the result of his surrender. Silvana smiled as she drove. She knew her Chuchu and was quite sure of him. That too was perhaps an aggravation to Chuchu – that she could be sure of him.

As we drove to the hotel I was again thinking of the novel which was doomed never to be written,
On the Way Back.
I believed that I had discovered what was wrong with it, what was preventing its free growth in my mind. The setting was too closely fixed on Panama – I ought to make the scene an imaginary Central American state. After all, I had seen a little of Nicaragua, a little of Belize. The ‘way back’ should not bear only a reference to the woman’s journey with Chuchu and a way back which never happened – the phrase should have a political meaning too: the failure of a revolution. The villain of the piece must be based on Señor V, the man whom I was in the habit of calling Fish Face to the General – a relic of the Arias regime. I thought of the bourgeois diners in Managua and the surly waiters who were on the side of wealth. They too had small parts to play. Perhaps it ought not to be Chuchu who died at the end of the novel, but the General, who so often dreamed of death. Alas, how true that was to prove in fact!

5

Next day Chuchu had quite recovered when he came to fetch me for lunch with Omar, but he was in some distress because he had lost his dog. It was a singularly stupid dog, as he had often complained to me, and a savage one at that, and it was much hated by his neighbours. Now it had simply walked away and he had spent hours tramping the streets in search of it.

‘How I hate dogs,’ he said.

‘Then why do you keep one?’

‘It’s the only way to keep my hate within me.’

I told myself, ‘Surely this dog has a part to play in
On the Way Back.
’

At lunch that day with Omar I was aware more than ever of the affection which had grown up between us. He even compared the friendship he felt for me with the affection he had for Tito before his death. ‘Our relationship was a little the same,’ he said.

Tito and me – it seemed a strange comparison. I think he meant that his affection was based with both of us on a kind of trust. As I have already written, he always liked to compare his opinion of a character with mine. Poor Fish Face was one example – Omar even adopted my title when he spoke of him. Now he wanted to hear my opinion of Tomás Borge. I told him that at our first meeting in the bourgeois household I hadn’t much cared for him, but afterwards when he came out to the airport to speak to me next day my opinion of him had changed completely, perhaps because he was more relaxed. ‘Yes,’ Omar said, ‘for the first few minutes one dislikes him.’

We talked of Mrs Thatcher and her attitude to Belize, which seemed to imply a willingness to negotiate with Guatemala. He wanted me to have another meeting with George Price. The position of Belize was becoming more difficult in relation to its aggressive authoritarian neighbour. Colombia and Venezuela no longer supported her. Panama and Nicaragua were the only countries now on whom Price could rely in the Organization of American States. Price was at the moment in Miami where he was meeting the Foreign Minister of Guatemala – the first direct contact between the two countries. Omar had wanted Chuchu and me to go to Belize – now he wanted to invite Price to Panama and he told Chuchu to telephone him.

One remark of Omar’s stayed in my mind (was it perhaps a defence of Mrs Thatcher or a criticism of her?), ‘Ignorance can be good in politics. Carter and I agreed about the Canal Treaty because we were both ignorant of the problems it raised. If we hadn’t been ignorant the Treaty would never have been signed.’

Next morning Chuchu rang me up to say that he had spoken to Price on the telephone, but Chuchu admitted that he had been a little drunk at the time and he couldn’t remember what Price had said. I felt a little drunk myself later that day after three rum punches at the Montego Bay and three pisco sours at the Peruvian restaurant, from the door of which I saw a number of elephants walking through the rain in the centre of Panama City. First a tiger and now elephants. I am sure it was not the drink that saw them.

With the situation in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the menace to Belize from Guatemala, Panama seemed thicker than ever with political problems and personalities. That night in the house of a Communist there was a party for the Nicaraguan Ambassador, who was being transferred to Cuba. He sat glum and alone at this party in his honour and nobody spoke to him until I did.

Suddenly all our plans were changed. Price was not coming to Panama, nor were we going to Belize: Omar had agreed to my unwise wish: a visit to Bocas del Toro.

6

Chuchu and I took off next day in a small military plane. The weather was very bad – squalls and heavy rain which made visibility almost nil. I was glad Omar was not with us, for this was the kind of weather which he loved to fly in: he would have told the pilot to press on in spite of it. Without him our pilot could show a measure of prudence and we came down at David in the hope of the weather clearing before we took off over the mountains of Chiriqui for the Atlantic coast. While we waited, fear lent me arguments against going on. Why should Chuchu and I not take a car, I argued, and revisit that pretty mountain village of Boquete with its fresh air and its little hotel and the charming hostess who looked like Oona Chaplin? But the pilot had something of Omar’s spirit. The weather was a challenge which he had to accept, and after half an hour he decided that it had improved enough for us to fly on.

I could see little sign of improvement, though it was true that now occasionally when the clouds whirled apart we caught a glimpse of the mountain tops and then of the sea boiling below. We landed in a deluge of rain on a small island which seemed to be sinking back into the sea under the weight of the storm. This was the Bocas I had been so determined to visit.

We walked, ankle deep in water, to a little hotel called the Bahía opposite the jetty where the banana boats used to tie up. After one look at the place I was relieved to be told that there was no room available. Apparently in this benighted town an agricultural fair was in progress and there were even visitors who had been prepared to come from the other islands around. Now, I thought with relief, we will surely have to fly back whatever the weather, but while we stood and argued in a sodden group the proprietor returned – he had found one room for us, he said, and what a room it proved to be: two iron bedsteads and a chair were the only furniture. A bare electric globe dangled from the centre of the ceiling, there was no air-conditioning to relieve the damp heat, and no mosquito wire over the windows. I even envied the pilot who was going to return through the storm to Panama. He would fetch us, he told me, the next morning at 9.30. But suppose, I couldn’t help wondering, the weather turns even worse and we are stranded for days in this terrible spot . . . An awful lunch in an empty restaurant did nothing to cheer us: a thin soup with two bits of meat floating in it: a scrap of chicken, mainly skin: no rum – only a weak bottled beer.

Well, at least the rain had temporarily stopped, and nothing was left for us to do but to visit the so-called fair in a field on the other side of the island. There was no drainage: the rain just collected where it fell, and to cross a street dry shod meant taking a flying leap.

The fair consisted of a double row of uninteresting stalls – uninteresting to us but obviously quite an event for the inhabitants of Bocas del Toro. They were mainly blacks of West Indian origin and in the medley of voices one could distinguish English, Spanish and Creole. Chuchu ran into a black acquaintance called Raúl who had once been a student of his and we went to a stall and drank bad rum.