Getting to Know the General (2 page)

At 3.30 I went downstairs and ordered what I thought was to be a rum punch under a slowly revolving fan, but there was no alcohol in it at all. On the Pacific side of Panama they are not accustomed to rum punches, and in any case I discovered later I had used the wrong term. Only the planter’s punch contained something stronger than a flavour. At four o’clock there was still no Diederich, and I tried in vain to sleep. Why had I left my home in Antibes and my friends and come to Panama where the hours moved so slowly, even though they no longer moved backwards?

Around five everything changed for the better. Diederich arrived. It was more than ten years since we had driven together along the frontier track (only maps called it an international road) between Papa Doc’s Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which I needed to know in order to finish my novel
The Comedians.
Together too we had visited the Haitian guerrillas lodged in the abandoned lunatic asylum lent them by the Dominican government.

The years had not changed him. We drank whisky and gossiped, and although he could shed no light on the reason behind the General’s invitation at least he could diminish the extent of my ignorance. Señor V, he told me, was an old Arias man and he didn’t trust him. When the two young colonels of the National Guard ended over half a century of Arias family rule by putting the President on a plane to Miami, Señor V had remained behind and even after the right-wing Colonel Martinez had been dispatched to the same ‘Valley of the Fallen’ he still survived. There were, of course, other survivors. Torrijos, it seemed, was not a man to make a clean sweep. He was not ideologically fettered. For example, there was one journalist whom it was well to treat with extreme caution as he was another Arias man. Diederich gave a clear physical description of the man, short and stout, with a false bonhomie who laughed without cause, so that I easily recognized him next day when sure enough he didn’t fail to turn up.

We turned to the political situation. ‘And the negotiations for the return of the Canal Zone? How are they going?’

‘Oh, they are dragging on as usual. The General’s getting impatient. For that matter so are the Americans in the Zone.’ The leading American agitator in the Zone, a policeman called Drummond, claimed that his car had been blown up by a bomb, and he was to lead a demonstration against any negotiation in three nights’ time.

The telephone rang. It was one of the two men who had met me at the airport. The voice told me that the General was planning to visit some place in the interior the next day. Would I like to go with him? I asked if I could bring my friend Diederich. The speaker obviously knew the name, and he sounded doubtful, as though he distrusted the
Time
correspondent. However, he said he would inquire. A few minutes later he rang back. The General had replied, ‘Señor Greene is our guest. He can bring whom he likes.’ A car would fetch us next morning at ten.

3

Next day there was a small misunderstanding. A driver came to the hotel promptly at ten and asked for Señor Greene. Diederich and I drove off with him. After about ten minutes I became (I don’t know why) suspicious of the route we were taking. I was right. It was the wrong car and I was the wrong Mr Greene. We had been, so it appeared, on the way to a new copper mine in the interior. Back to the hotel and the right car and the right chauffeur, very much the right chauffeur, for he became my guide, philosopher and friend and remains so to this hour. Professor José de Jesús Martínez, better known to all Panama as Chuchu, was sergeant in the General’s security guard. He was a poet and a linguist who spoke English, French, Italian and German as well as Spanish. But to us then he was only an unknown sergeant, driving us to a house in the suburbs where the General preferred to stay, rather than in his own home, partly perhaps for security reasons, with his great friend Rory González, the director of the copper mine, who many years ago had befriended the young Lieutenant Torrijos of the National Guard when he was on duty up-country.

It was a small insignificant suburban house, only made to look out of the ordinary by the number of men in camouflage uniforms clustered around the entrance and by a small cement pad at the rear in place of a garden, smaller than a tennis court, on which a helicopter could land. Admitted to the house, we passed a life-sized china dog and sat down to wait for our host. A budgerigar hopped in silence to and fro in a cage, seeming to measure out time like an ingenious Swiss clock.

Two men presently joined us. They wore dressing-gowns and underpants, one had bare feet and one was in bedroom slippers, and I was doubtful which to address as General. They were both men in their forties, but one was plump with a youthful and untroubled face which I felt would last a lifetime, the other was lean and good-looking with a forelock of hair which fell over his forehead and give-away eyes (he was the one with bare feet). At this encounter what the eye gave away was a sense of caution, even of suspicion, as though he felt that he might be encountering a new species in the human race. I decided correctly that this was the General.

Through the next four years I got to know those eyes well; they came to express sometimes an almost manic humour, an affection, an inscrutable inward thought, and more than all other moods, a sense of doom, so that when the news of his death in a crashed plane came to me in France, with my bags packed for yet another flight to Panama – accident? bomb? – it was not so much a shock that I felt as a long-expected sadness for what had seemed to me over the years an inevitable end. I remember how I had once asked him what was his most recurring dream and without hesitation he had answered,
‘La muerte.
’

For a while there was desultory conversation, translated by Chuchu, polite and guarded conversation through which somehow a few facts emerged – that he was, like myself, the son of a schoolmaster and that he had run away from home at seventeen and gone to a military academy in El Salvador. Perhaps he was painting a self-portrait to the stranger whom he had been rash enough to invite to his country – for what reason he may well have been wondering now himself – as a plain simple man of action, which was very far from the truth. With a sidelong look at me he attacked intellectuals. ‘Intellectuals,’ he remarked, ‘are like fine glass, crystal glass, which can be cracked by a sound. Panama is made of rock and earth.’

I won the first smile out of him when I said that he had probably only saved himself from being an intellectual by running away from school in time.

We passed on then to the subject of the Caribbean. He seemed to know that I had been to Cuba, Haiti, Martinique, St Kitts, Grenada, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica. Why, he asked, this interest?

It was, I said, in a way a family interest, and I told him the story of my grandfather and my great-uncle, how my grandfather was sent out at fifteen to join his brother in the management of the family sugar plantation in St Kitts, how his brother died a few months after his arrival of yellow fever at the age of nineteen and was said to have left thirteen children behind him.

It was as though I had opened a door to the General’s confidence. His whole manner eased. No one with a great-uncle like that could possibly be an intellectual.

My grandfather, after he had returned home to Bedfordshire, I went on, never shook off his memories of St Kitts and finally in old age he left his wife and children to return there and die. I described the two graves side by side which I had visited and the church which resembled an old English parish church.

Perhaps the General was thinking of my story when later that afternoon he remarked to me of his own country, ‘When you find grass uncut in a village cemetery you know it is a bad village. If they don’t look after the dead, they won’t look after the living.’ I think it was the nearest he ever came to a religious statement, unless one counts the dream he told me two years later. ‘I dreamt I saw my father on the other side of the street. I called out to him, “Father, what is death like?” and he started to cross the street in spite of the traffic and I shouted to warn him and then I woke up.’

The whole atmosphere had indeed changed. When I told the General that Señor V’s chauffeur could speak no English he at once appointed Chuchu as my guide. ‘He will take you anywhere you want. Forget Señor V.’ And so during the next four years Chuchu was always there at the airport to meet me, and we did indeed literally go wherever I wanted, whether in Panama, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, whether the trips entailed a plane, a helicopter or a car.

That morning, however, Torrijos made the choice. He wanted to spend some hours in Contadora, one of the Pearl Islands, where the Shah of Iran was later to be held in a kind of house arrest with Chuchu as his guard before he was dispatched to Egypt and his death. At the airport we had to wait while the General’s plane was prepared and two small children insisted on playing with Torrijos. I was to notice later that he had an odd attraction for children. They were going with their mother on the commercial flight, but, perhaps because she was a pretty young woman, Torrijos invited the three of them to join our party.

At the hotel where we were to lunch the General left us for a rendezvous, which I suspected, perhaps wrongly, to be an amorous one. After eating we drove round the island, of which a large part was still virgin forest, and presently Torrijos rejoined us. He seemed relaxed and I felt reasonably sure that I detected in his face ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’. He was no longer on his guard against intellectuals. He even expressed his admiration for the novels of García Márquez and the poems of a certain romantic, but in Chuchu’s eyes inferior, Spanish poet.

At that moment a beautiful Colombian tourist came up and spoke to him, telling him that she was a singer, and she acted on him like a glass of his favourite whisky, which I was to learn was Johnnie Walker’s Black Label. I was not surprised when he told me a few days later that he had taken his plane to Colombia for a date with her at the airport at Bogotá.

After she left yet another child came up and thrust his father’s visiting card into the General’s pocket and demanded one of his in return and the General let him have his way, just as he allowed a fat journalist, whom I recognized from Diederich’s description as the suspect survivor from the days of Arias, to intrude on our party. I could see the dislike on Chuchu’s face, but the General continued to talk frankly, as though there were no potential spy present, of the negotiations with the United States. ‘If the French had built the Canal as planned,’ he said, ‘de Gaulle would have returned it. If Carter does not restart the negotiations promptly, measures must be taken. The year 1977 is the year when our patience and their excuses will be exhausted.’ He spoke as though Panama and the United States were equal powers, and in a way he believed it.

The General had good reason for impatience. He referred to the riots of 1964 when the National Guard stayed in their barracks and left the students in charge. The young officer Torrijos had watched the guards’ inaction with a sense of shame. ‘It is a good thing,’ he said, ‘that Vance is Carter’s Secretary of State. He was in Panama City when the rioting began and we had to smuggle him out of his hotel into the Zone, so he knows what a Panama riot can be like. He was a very frightened man.’ He added, ‘If the students break into the Zone again I have only the alternative of crushing them or leading them. I will not crush them.’ Then he made a remark which he was fond of repeating: ‘I don’t want to enter into history. I want to enter into the Canal Zone.’ Well, he did enter it, though on terms not as satisfactory as he had hoped, and it is possible that he paid for his success with his life.

We are too apt to class together the generals of South and Central America. Torrijos was a lone wolf. In his diplomatic struggle with the USA he had no support from Videla of the Argentine, Pinochet of Chile, Banzer of Bolivia – the authoritarian generals who held their power with the aid of the United States, and who only existed at all because in the eyes of the Americans they represented anti-Communism. Torrijos was no Communist, but he was a friend and admirer of Tito and he was on good personal terms with Fidel Castro who kept him supplied with excellent Havana cigars, the bands printed with his name, and gave him advice to be prudent, unwelcome advice which he followed with reluctance. His country had become a haven of safety for refugees from Argentina, Nicaragua and El Salvador, and his dream, as I was to learn in the years that followed, was of a social democratic Central America which would be no menace to the United States, but completely independent. However, the nearer he came to success, the nearer he came to death.

That sunny afternoon on Contadora, after the rendezvous in the hotel, he was happy and reckless in his conversation. It was only later that I thought I could read the premonition of death in his eyes – a death which was not only the end of his dream of moderate socialism but perhaps the end of any hope of a reasonable peace in Central America.

It was here on the island of Contadora that negotiations with the United States had for years dragged along their slow length. Once again a delegation was about to arrive for talks, as usual led by old Mr Elsworth Bunker, a former ambassador in South Vietnam: they were to stay for a week on this pleasant tourist island, where it had become a habit to hold the parleys, and then they would go home for another year. Not much was expected of them. Gloria Emerson in her admirable book on Vietnam wrote of Bunker, ‘For seven years he had never faltered in supporting and augmenting American policy in Vietnam. He was thought of – in the kindest terms – as a fierce, cold, stubborn man. To the Vietnamese he was known as “the Refrigerator”.’

4

Next day Diederich and I took the train which joins Panama City to Colón on the Atlantic side. The gold rush in the Forties to California had created the railway, which was built at the cost of thousands of lives.