Getting to Know the General (19 page)

Raúl, it appeared, intended to stand as an independent candidate in the elections which were to be held in 1981 and which would be open to political parties as a result of the Canal Treaty. His two opponents represented the Communist Party and the new Government Party founded by Omar. He had a grievance – his constituency consisted of several islands and unlike his rivals he hadn’t got the money to hire a boat to visit them: he hadn’t even the money to buy the T-shirts which he judged were essential for a successful campaign. We were joined by another man whom Raúl introduced as his manager, but I couldn’t understand a word of his English.

The bad rum was working in my bladder, and I went to a smelly little shed to urinate against the wall. A black came in to pee beside me and at once he began to talk. He told me that he was an engineer and that in a few years he was going to retire with a pension and look after his father’s big cocoa farm.

We buttoned up side by side, but he made no attempt to leave the shed or stop talking. I said, ‘You’ll be a rich man then.’

‘Not rich, ma’an, but wealthy.’

He went on to tell me that his grandfather had been an Oxford professor. ‘You’ve heard of Oxford, ma’an?’

‘Yes.’

Another man came in to pee. He wanted to sell me an old sword. I explained that if I took it on a plane with me I would be arrested as a hijacker. Then the grandson of the Oxford professor cadged the price of a glass of rum from me and I was able to rejoin my friend. Raúl recognized the man when I described him. He said he was known all over Bocas del Toro as the Greatest Liar. He once had the whole police force searching for a crashed plane in the wrong place.

I couldn’t drink any more bad rum, so I said I would go back to the hotel. The island seemed to be sinking further into the water and it was beginning to rain again.

A white man with an American accent greeted me on my way out of the fair. He wanted me to have a drink, but I told him I was going to take a siesta. He said he had a house which was painted blue on the jetty nearly opposite the hotel. ‘You can’t miss it. Come and have a drink whenever you like,’ he said. I began to walk back, but a police car stopped beside me and offered me a lift. ‘It would be safer for you,’ a policeman explained, and I remembered the police van in Colón.

At the hotel I found that the bare globe in the bedroom didn’t work – when the dark came there would be only a reflected light from the bathroom. I lay down and tried in vain to interest myself in Doctorow’s
Ragtime
till dusk came and reading was impossible. So was sleep. I lay for an hour on my back and felt an awful nostalgia for my home and my friends in Antibes. In spite of my affection for Omar and Chuchu, Antibes was where my real loyalties lay. I had left my friends to face alone their enemies in Nice. No telegram from them, if they needed help, could reach me in Bocas. I had booked my plane home to leave Panama in a few days’ time, but I had a sense of doom in Bocas – a feeling that I would never get away. It was my own fault. I had wanted to see the point where Columbus had turned back. I had wanted to see the place where no tourist went. I had tried twice before and failed. I should have taken the hint which Providence had provided.

Finally in desperation I got up and dressed and crossed the street to the house of the friendly Yankee. ‘My name is Eugene,’ he greeted me, ‘but most people call me Pete.’ He had put a skull on either side of the door to frighten away thieves.

After he had poured out two generous whiskies my spirits picked up. He told me he Was a pilot on Braniff Airlines and during the war he had been a pilot for the OSS, the American secret service. He had bought sixty-seven acres on the island, plus another house on a beach, for six thousand dollars, and he planned to retire there in two years and keep the acres as a bird and animal sanctuary. His happiness on Bocas astonished me and I looked at him with a new respect. He had no wife or family, but he was soon joined by two lively local women with whom he planned to have a ‘riotous evening’ at the fair. He invited me to join them, but Chuchu had sent word that he was waiting for me.

We had been invited to dinner, it seemed by Raúl, the parliamentary candidate, at the house of his mother, Veronica, a dynamic woman who spoke perfect English and matched me glass for glass with whisky to which she added coconut milk, as the water at Bocas was not to be trusted. Like George Price, her favourite novelist was Thomas Mann, and we talked of Mann all through an excellent meal of turtle meat.

I returned to the hotel at 10.30 alone. Chuchu wanted to go and look for the ‘riotous evening’ at the fair. After I had turned out the light in the bathroom and felt my way to the bed, gnawing rat noises began, and cats outside made very vocal love. I wondered how long it would take for the rat to bite through the wooden wall. Chuchu returned, disappointed by the fair – there had been no sign of a ‘riotous evening’. As soon as the bathroom light was out the cats again made love and the rat started again to gnaw.

I had a bad night, but I woke with a sense of exhilaration. I thought, wrongly as it proved, that my writer’s block was over. The novel was moving through my head. Now that I had decided that it should be laid in an imaginary country and not in Panama, the characters, I felt, might be able to detach themselves from their originals. Chuchu would no longer be Chuchu and Omar would cease to be Omar. Bocas would be there at the end of the road and Chuchu suggested a very suitable name for the place – Cuno del Toro. Chuchu would not be blown up in his car – he would simply disappear for ever in search of his hated dog and Fish Face would be sent by the General to bring the girl back.

I dressed in a state of unreal happiness to find the sun shining and Bocas very nearly transformed. The rain had somehow drained away and the little houses on stilts with their balconies reminded me of Freetown in Sierra Leone, a town I had loved. The military plane arrived punctually at 9.15 to fetch us, and instead of the two and a half hours our journey to Bocas had taken, we returned in an hour and a quarter. The sky was cloudless and we could see dozens of islands scattered below us like a jig-saw puzzle: it was possible to see how each piece had once fitted into another. We gave Raúl a lift, for he hoped to find some support for his campaign in Panama City.

7

After lunch Silvana met us with the news that the beastly dog had returned home. Chuchu and I went to see Omar. He was very cheerful and relaxed, and when he heard of Raúl’s sad plight, he at once told Chuchu to give him a thousand dollars for his expenses – ‘But say it’s a gift from Graham. It wouldn’t do for my party to know that I am helping an opponent to fight us.’ (In fact I learnt a year later that Raúl by splitting the vote had helped the Communists to win in Bocas against Omar’s candidate.)

Omar asked me questions about my writing, how characters evolved. I told him that the hopeful moment in writing a novel was when a character took possession of the writer, spoke words that the writer had not anticipated and behaved in an unpredicted way.

We spoke too of Russia and of a favourite theory of mine that one day the KGB would be in control and it would prove more easy to deal with pragmatists than ideologists. The KGB recruited the brightest students from the universities, they learnt foreign languages, they saw the outer world, Marx meant little to them. They could be instruments of a measure of reform at home.

Omar told me, ‘What you say interests me. I was visited not long ago by a KGB officer from South America, a young man, very cultivated. He spoke excellent Spanish. I was very cautious with him, for I feared a trap. He told me that there could be no change in Russia as long as the old men in the Kremlin were still alive. He said that he would be coming.to see me again.’

Did he come? He must have known of Omar’s friendship with Carter. Was he planning to pass some signal to Carter through the General before the American elections which Reagan was to win? I shall never know the answer to those questions.

As for the elections, Omar remarked, ‘Of course I want Carter to win, but if Reagan wins it may be more fun.’ He was still hoping against hope for a confrontation.

Chuchu came to me next morning and told me he had a message from the General. Omar wanted me to go down at once to his house at Farallón. ‘He says he’s going to treat you as if he was one of your characters and take charge of you.’

We drove down and found a large party going on, with wives and children, and so we made an excuse for not staying to lunch, and after a while the General led the way to a quiet room and there he repeated what he had said to Chuchu. ‘I am one of your characters now, Graham, and I am going to take you in charge.’

Joint manoeuvres, he told me, had begun between the American and Panamanian forces. Five hundred American troops had been parachuted into their base in what had been the Canal Zone, and five hundred of the National Guard (probably our old friends the Wild Pigs) had been dropped on Fort Bragg in North Carolina. It was his intention to fly to Fort Bragg on 1 September in order to see how his men were getting on. Well, as one of my characters, he intended to take me under his control. I was to come with him as a Panamanian officer in National Guard uniform (‘We’ll give you the rank of captain or major or what you like’).

It was for a moment a very tempting proposal. I had been a Panamanian delegate with a Panamanian diplomatic passport in Washington. Now to play the part of a Panamanian officer at Fort Bragg . . . it was at least an amusing idea . . . I said, ‘But I’m booked to leave for France on 1 September.’

‘Stay a few days longer.’

‘I’m worried about what’s happening there.’

Chuchu had already told him about my problem with the undesirable character in Nice, who had been married to my friend’s daughter and now threatened her with the
milieu
. Omar spoke sharply, ‘I won’t have a friend of mine worried in this way. I’ll send a man to France to teach a lesson to this fellow who’s troubling you.’

‘No. I don’t think that’s wise.’

‘Well, send the young woman over here with her children.’

I spoke of her work which she would have to abandon.

‘We’ll give her work here.’

‘She would be very lonely. She would miss her parents.’

‘Then we’d send her back to France with a new name and a Panamanian passport.’

He could see that I was not convinced, and he added, ‘It would be much simpler to deal with the man who is threatening her. Are fruit machines legal in France?’

‘No, I don’t think so. In Monte Carlo . . .’

‘There’s a certain American here whom I have helped. Go and see him with one of my G-2 officers. I am sure he could arrange to have the man dealt with. He owes me a debt of gratitude.’

I pretended that I would think the matter over.

‘Now for Fort Bragg.’

‘It wouldn’t work, Omar. You would be messing with the American general. I would be in the junior officers’ mess. What would they think of an old Panamanian captain with practically no Spanish who spoke English with an English accent?’

I am sorry to this day that at the last meeting we ever had together I disappointed him – not only over Fort Bragg but over the violent solution to all my problems. I have never lost as good a friend as Omar Torrijos.

Time was running out rapidly – rum punches at Montego Bay, dinner at their flat with Chuchu and Silvana and the hateful dog, who resented my presence as though he knew he had become a character in my novel, a last meal at the Peruvian restaurant with Chuchu and Flor, the rum punch girl, whom we had at last tracked down. Luck was with me. At the airport I won enough at the fruit machines to pay for a bottle of duty-free whisky and two cartons of cigarettes.

There was no sadness this time when I caught the plane, for I knew that I would be returning the next year. The telephone in Antibes would ring and Chuchu’s voice would come on the line telling me that my ticket awaited me at KLM. I would choose a date in August during the judicial holidays when nothing much could happen over our private war, I would drink again in the Van Gogh lounge in Amsterdam and I would arrive at 9.30 in the morning. Chuchu would be there to meet me and I could already hear him telling me, ‘The General wants us down at Farallón for lunch. We’ll go in my little plane.’ Or perhaps – to my satisfaction, for I was a little uneasy in his plane: ‘I have my car here.’

EPILOGUE

1983

1

I found myself sitting in a small military helicopter flying over the mountains and jungle of Panama. Beside me was Omar’s daughter Carmen, and her eyes reminded me of her father’s; they were honest and give-away. Chuchu of course was with us. The pilot pointed out the area of forest between two mountains where Omar and his companions had crashed to their death. The weather was almost bad enough to have pleased Omar; we bucketed up and down and to and fro in the rain squalls. I think all three of us had in our minds how strange it would be if we came to the same end in the same place where the man we loved had died.