Getting to Know the General (6 page)

Chuchu had already told me of the unusual drinking habits in Panama, habits followed usually even by the General. ‘We are drunkards,’ Chuchu said. ‘On Sundays we drink in order to get drunk, but we don’t drink during the week. You in Europe are alcoholics. You drink all the time.’ I’m glad that during our days together he chose to follow the European custom.

Our peasant, however, proved to be quite sober. He brought two chairs out into the yard of his hut and began work watched by eleven children and a pregnant girl. At first he soaked the leather and then modelled it around the foot and cut it. Suddenly there were cries of ‘Uahu’, followed by what sounded like the barking of dogs. Two neighbours arrived on the scene. They wore funny little hats with round rims which seemed to balance on their protuberant ears. They had been celebrating Sunday ever since their morning Mass. At first they just continued to bark (the General later corrected me – this was traditional peasant singing). Then one of them attached himself to me, sitting on the ground beside me holding my hand. He said he was only interested in
Religión
, and he wanted to talk about it. Was I a
gringo
? No, I wasn’t a
gringo
. I was English. Was I
Católico
? Yes, I was
Católico
. Then we must talk about
Religión.

I asked my friend what his priest was like. ‘Too materialist,’ he replied.

I tried to turn the conversation away from religion towards politics and the Canal, but no one was interested in either.

‘And the General?’ I asked. ‘Do you like the General?’

‘Half good and half bad.’

‘What is the bad half?’

‘He doesn’t like the
gringos
.’

‘Why do you like the
gringos
?’

Four hundred men of the Peace Corps, whom Kennedy had sent to Panama, had been expelled by the General, but at least in this poor area near Las Minas one of them had made converts. ‘He was a good man. He taught us things, and he drank with us always on Sundays.’ I seemed to be in another country, very distant from the slum dwellers of El Chorillo and their belligerent cries or the song of the Wild Pigs.

It must have taken nearly two hours to have our sandals made. They were not very good sandals and I abandoned mine next day, leaving them behind in a bad hotel where there were too many large cockroaches in the dull town of Chitré. Chuchu was disappointed in me, the sandals were genuine home-made Panamanian (he might have been talking of shoes by Lobb of St James’s), but I noticed that he didn’t wear his own for very long either.

9

On our way to Panama City we stopped at Rio Hato where the Wild Pigs had their cantonment and the General was staying in his modest house close by on the Pacific. General Torrijos had with him that day Aquilino Boyd, the Foreign Secretary, and the members of his military staff who had gathered there because the American delegation and Mr Bunker were due to arrive next day. A little to my embarrassment because of what I had told him of Colonel Flores, the General insisted on introducing me to the members of his staff, beginning with the Colonel, who was chewing gum as he had done at El Chorillo. In the hand which he reluctantly offered I thought I could detect his dislike and his disdain. For what reason, I could feel him demanding, could he, the Chief of Staff, be expected to greet a civilian and foreigner as an equal? But in the handshake of the intelligence officer I thought I detected a sympathy and a kind of connivance – an interesting contrast.

Chuchu and I bathed in the clean, clear, quiet water of the Pacific while the staff met, and afterwards we lunched very badly in the mess of the Wild Pigs, lingering there until the General had got rid of his military guests. Apparently he wanted to talk to me. The visit of the Americans seemed to weigh heavily on his mind, perhaps the thought of the endless haggling for a fair treaty which seemed never to reach a conclusion, and yet an open confrontation was denied him if he was to follow Castro’s advice. He made an odd comparison which to this day I don’t understand: ‘You and I have something in common. We are both self-destructive.’ He added quickly, ‘Of course I don’t mean suicidal.’ It was as though at that moment he had opened for me a crack in the door of a secret room, a door which he would never quite close again.

He continued to talk of the confrontation which he had in mind with the United States, and I remembered how on Contadora he had said that 1977 was the year when his patience would be exhausted. Confrontation meant war – a war between a tiny republic with less than 2,000,000 inhabitants and the United States with more than 200,000,000.

Torrijos, I had begun to realize, was a romantic, but in most Panamanians I was soon to find that romanticism was balanced by a streak of cynical wisdom which you can detect in their popular songs – they are far less sentimental than ours – for example, ‘Your love is a yesterday’s newspaper’, and you can read cynicism even in some of the slogans on the beautifully painted buses – ‘Don’t go and get dressed up, because you are not going with me.’ The General may have felt self-destructive, but he had estimated his chances realistically.

‘We could hold Panama City for forty-eight hours,’ he told me. ‘As for the Canal, it is easy to sabotage. Blow a hole in the Gatún Dam and the Canal will drain into the Atlantic. It would take only a few days to mend the dam, but it would take three years of rain to fill the Canal. During that time it would be guerrilla war; the central
cordilleras
rise to 3,000 metres and extend to the Costa Rican frontier on one side of the Zone and the dense Darién jungle, almost as unknown as in the days of Balboa, stretches on the other side to the Colombian border, crossed only by smugglers’ paths. Here we could hold out for two years – long enough to rouse the conscience of the world and public opinion in the States. And don’t forget – for the first time since the Civil War American civilians would be in the firing line. There are 40,000 of them in the Zone, apart from the 10,000 troops.’

There were areas of jungle in the Zone itself where the Americans were training their own special troops, as well as troops from other Latin American states, in guerrilla warfare, but he regarded this training, from personal experience, with some contempt. Recently when the Americans were holding jungle manoeuvres inside the Zone they were surprised to encounter a patrol of the Wild Pigs who had penetrated the Zone unobserved because, as their officer explained with courtesy, something had gone wrong with his compass. The General added, ‘I know the Pentagon advised Carter that they would need 100,000 men, not 10,000, to defend the Canal properly.’

Our conversation was interrupted by the noise of the General’s small jet plane arriving from Venezuela. He had sent it off that morning with a letter to the President and it was returning with the President’s reply. (The only support on which the General could count in South America during his negotiations with the United States was from Venezuela, Colombia and Peru.) Communications were much as they had been in the seventeenth century – by messenger; a jet plane had taken the place of a horse. As the American Zone was packed with electronic equipment any telephone call could be tapped and a telegraphic code could be broken in a matter of hours.

General Torrijos read the letter from the President of Venezuela and afterwards the conversation took a completely different turn. I had the impression that what came now was the real reason why he wanted me to stay – not me in particular perhaps, but any listener who would understand his emotion. He said, ‘Yesterday a most important thing happened.’

I wondered, ‘Is he going to disclose some secret message from old Mr Bunker – or from those international characters whom Mr Drummond’s supporters called Gerry and Henry?’

He went on, ‘Yesterday I had been married twenty-five years, but when I married – I was only a young lieutenant – my father-in-law, who is a Jewish business man living in New York, swore that he would never speak to his daughter again. It has been very hard for my wife all these years, for she loves her father dearly. A few days ago I asked General Dayan to intercede for me in New York. My father-in-law wouldn’t even listen to Dayan. Panama had voted at the United Nations in support of Israel over the Entebbe affair. We were the only state in Latin America to do so, and afterwards the Israelis were grateful and they offered me all sorts of help, but I told them that I had asked Dayan for the only thing I needed and he couldn’t help me. Then suddenly, yesterday, my father-in-law telephoned from New York and asked to speak to my wife. Today she has gone off to see him – after twenty-five years. I said to the old man on the telephone that he had a wonderful daughter and that I owed everything to her.’

What he had told me was the more moving because he would have known that by this time I would be aware he was not the kind of man to be sexually faithful to one woman. But he was a man who had a deep loyalty to the past, and was faithful above all to friendship.

10

Chuchu and I had planned to fly off to the island of Taboga for a rest after our travels, but it was not to be. The General wanted me back at Rio Hato the next day to go with him to a meeting of farmers and rural representatives. It was to be an example for me of how his type of democracy worked.

We took a small military plane and flew out to sea, making a wide sweep before returning to the coast. The General said, ‘You can tell today that we have a young pilot – inexperienced – because he is flying over the sea. The older ones hug the land. Because it’s safer in a small plane. By reason of the sharks down there. Sometimes when I know that my pilot will refuse to take me by some route because of the weather, I ask for a young one who won’t know better.’

It was obvious that he was enjoying the slight risk involved of the descent into a shark-ridden sea. Had he demanded a young pilot on the day of his death, I wonder five years later?

I asked him on the plane, I don’t know for what reason, when it was during the day that he was liable to feel the most discouraged (he seemed to like such personal questions as though he felt in them the approach of a nearer friendship). He replied immediately, ‘At night when I go to bed. But when the sun rises I feel cheerful.’

If I was getting to know the General a little more at every meeting it was by his own wish. It was as though he had become bored and haunted by his public image and he wanted above all to be a private person who could talk to a friend, saying this and that without any forethought.

It was a group of yucca farmers whom we were now going to meet and listen to their complaints. After we landed, on the road to the village, he told me that he had decided to grant their demand for a rise from one dollar twenty-five cents to one dollar seventy-five cents a box. ‘This yucca centre has been a mistake – our mistake, not theirs. Anyway, I want to redistribute money, more to the country and less to the towns.’ All the same, he added, he would keep the peasants guessing for a while – for his amusement and theirs.

The meeting was in the open and before me I saw arranged the same faces, in the same funny hats, with the same protruding pie-dog ears, as the friends of the sandal-maker. Indeed, I am convinced that one of them was a peasant whom I had met that day at Ocú because he continually caught my eye and winked at me. Many of them had gold teeth and quite a number gold rings – Columbus perhaps would have taken it for a sign that Eldorado was not far away. They all tried to talk at once and to look fierce and determined, and the General, I could see, was thoroughly enjoying himself.

He began, ‘We’ll take the easy points first and we’ll leave the difficult yucca question to the last.’ It was a clever way of getting through things rapidly, for the peasants were only interested in the yucca, so that there was no disputing his other decisions. There was to be a new canal bridge, he promised, to ease the traffic across the Zone on the Bridge of the Americas; the location of a lime processing plant was left for later consideration; the plan for a mixed enterprise (sixty per cent private) for raising cattle was also left for another occasion. His audience were all glad to leave everything for another occasion except the yucca, including a question of salt refining and the use of salt in road construction.

Finally, with a stir of excited interest, came the price of yucca. The government, the General said, had been too ambitious in the encouragement of yucca. There had been many errors. All the same he doubted whether it was possible for him to raise the price. Who was going to provide the money? It would have to come out of the pocket of somebody.

The government engineer tried to speak. The General interrupted, saying it was the farmers he had come to hear.

He spoke again about the difficulties in putting up the price – exports mustn’t be endangered. Perhaps a rise of twenty cents . . . ? And he began to haggle over the cents. All the same there was amusement in his eyes. He was teasing them.

The peasants soon began to see what he was up to, and now they argued with half smiles and disputed with cracks of humour, till suddenly the General gave way. Then there was laughter and clapping. They had got the price which they had asked for. This was important, but above all the rest they had had a lot of fun. The meeting broke up gaily.

What followed was not so amusing – a dull lunch at a landowner’s house with a lot of boring women who clustered around the General where he lay in his inevitable hammock and we were served with almost uneatable pieces of pork and quite uneatable yucca (which I now realized was what I called cassava) with only a choice of water or Pepsi to drink. Oh, for a whisky or a glass of rum, but this was not a Sunday. Even the General drank water. I was at my wits’ end until Chuchu, who was standing guard at the door, caught my eye and winked. I went outside. He had found me a drink in a room out of sight of the party.

After the plane had deposited the General at Rio Hato Chuchu and I drove back to Panama. We stopped at the Haunted House and had a drink in the bar next door, for Chuchu seemed in my company to be developing the European habit of drinking all days of the week.