Getting to Know the General (9 page)

I put the first two pages of the doomed book down on paper in the months that followed. Marie-Claire, the French journalist, arrived as I had done on that first occasion to see the General.

She found herself surrounded in the small courtyard of a white suburban villa with half-Indian faces. The men all carried revolvers on their belts and one had a walkie-talkie which he kept pressed closely to his ear as though he were waiting with the intensity of a priest for one of his Indian gods to proclaim something. The men are as strange to me, she thought, as the Indians must have seemed to Columbus five centuries ago. The camouflage of their uniforms was like painted designs on naked skin.

I had not got much further with the book when one night at bedtime my telephone rang in Antibes. It was the voice of Chuchu speaking from Panama. ‘When are you coming?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The General wants to know when you are coming.’

‘But . . .’

‘Your ticket is waiting for you at KLM.’

So after all, I thought with a certain happiness, I am going to see Panama once more.

On this occasion I flew from Paris to Amsterdam, so as to catch the KLM flight, and next morning I was drinking Bols once again over the Caribbean. In my diary I noted: ‘21 August. Towering cloud formations above Trinidad. Lovely mountainous coast of Colombia and then the dense Darién jungle. Chuchu met me at airport.’

It was as though I had never been away. Life without any difficulty began to change to the Panama rhythm. A siesta, bad planter’s punches with Chuchu at the Holiday Inn, back for my whisky at the hotel, a good dinner from the Basque
patron
at the Marisco. However, there were some important changes and Chuchu brought me up to date. His own life had not stood still. Chuchu’s beloved ex-wife had left her American husband, but she had written to Chuchu saying she wouldn’t return to him (rather, I think, to his relief) because when she was with him she didn’t feel free. He said, ‘She’s trying to be a hundred per cent something, when what she really wants is to be fifty per cent – half-free, half-intelligent, half . . .’ He was still consorting with the Argentinian refugee, but now she would sometimes hit him out of jealousy.

And the General? How was the General? He was unhappy, Chuchu told me, about the terms of the Canal Treaty to which he had finally agreed, he was sleeping badly and he was not even drinking at weekends – a bad sign. Chuchu was very much in favour of getting the students to demonstrate against the Zone before the American Senate could meet to consider the Treaty, just to show them that Panama was not ready to accept any changes which they might choose to make. But the big question in his mind was whether the General was not moving perhaps a little towards the right.

I had published an article in the
New York Review of Books
on ‘The Country with Five Frontiers’ in which I had written that some of the senior officers in the National Guard had special privileges, in the way of housing for example, because, as the General had said to me, ‘If I don’t pay them, the CIA will,’ and I had described Colonel Flores as he sat chewing his gum at the meeting in El Chorillo. Chuchu had translated my article for a Panamanian paper, and he had asked the General whether he perhaps should leave out my reference to the National Guard officers. ‘No. You don’t alter a word of his,’ the General had replied. So much then for my future relationship with the Chief of Staff. I hoped that there would be no
coup d’état
while I was in Panama.

Chuchu put the problem to me in this way: ‘Of course there is corruption among a few of the senior officers. You know the story of the man who was trying to clean his lavatory with one of those rubber squeegees and it didn’t work. A man said to him, “You’ll never clear it that way. You have to put your hands in the shit and pull it out.” The General has got to put his hands in the shit.’

The next day the General sent his plane to fetch the two of us to his house at Farallón on the Pacific coast for lunch. ‘Pack a handbag,’ Chuchu warned me. ‘I have an idea we won’t be returning to the city today.’

Chuchu was right. A helicopter was waiting by the house and we left our bags in it.

I was surprised, after what Chuchu had told me, to find how relaxed, young, and even happy Torrijos seemed – he greeted me by my Christian name and an embrace, so that I followed suit, and he became Omar to me from that moment on. He told me that he had liked my article. He said, ‘You describe me as a real person and not a computer.’ It was true, he went on, that the negotiations over the Treaty had been very hard and exhausting. The Americans had begun them with the idea of not surrendering anything. Now the final words had been spoken and the issue lay in the lap of the gods – or of the Senate. Some nights ago he had had a very vivid dream. The guerrilla war, which in a way he desired, had begun. He was in the jungle and he found himself without his boots. He felt an awful humiliation, for he would be captured right at the start of a war only because he had no boots.

After lunch the helicopter’s engine was turned on, but the General led the way to a car and took the wheel. The helicopter was left empty except for our bags. The last-minute change was for security – a measure against some violent end, which I think now was always in his mind. There were five of us in the car, the General, myself, Chuchu, the General’s secretary and a young girl friend with a pretty face which contained a hint of Chinese blood. She seemed at that first meeting a little pretentious and a would-be intellectual – she was studying sociology in the States, a subject which thrives on banalities and abstract jargon – but I was quite wrong about her. She had intelligence and courage, tenderness and loyalty, and she was good for Omar.

Apparently we were going to Santiago for the night and next day the helicopter would join us and take us to David and then to a Panamanian banana plantation – the only one of any size owned by the Republic. It was surrounded by American-owned plantations.

Santiago was the General’s birthplace. He told me as he drove how at sixteen he tried to run away from home with a girl and he had stolen his elder brother’s car. ‘I was lucky,’ he said. ‘The police stopped me as we were leaving Santiago. I sometimes see the girl now in the street. She is a woman who has become enormously fat.’

At the edge of Santiago we halted at the house of a lorry owner, an old friend of Omar’s. The man had recently discovered some magnificent gold necklaces in a tomb which he had secretly excavated. He claimed that they were four thousand years old, and the General advised him to keep them hidden until he could arrange for the government to pay him a fair price. Then we drove on into Santiago, and he pointed out the little wooden house of his father, the school-teacher, and of his grandfather. He felt happy and at ease in this small home town. There was no sense of ‘showing off’.

We went to the house of a garage mechanic with whom he had been at school, and we sat outside in rocking chairs while neighbours gathered and rocked with us and drank whisky which Omar had unobtrusively provided. Before we arrived he told me how on a former visit he had abused this friend for drunkenness and the man replied, ‘It’s because I wouldn’t meet you at the airport. I’m no arse licker, and which of us two is happier? I can drink all day if I want to and nobody cares.’ At one moment, when his friend was out of earshot, Omar remarked to me, ‘If I had stayed here, my horizon would have been no wider than this porch,’ but there was a note of apology in his voice, as if he had a sense of guilt because of his escape.

After the gossip about the past, the conversation turned inevitably to the Treaty. The General’s disappointment with the terms was not shared by his friend the garage mechanic.

Presently a schoolmistress arrived with some of her senior girls, and the General talked to them, not down to them. I noted in my diary that night:

I’ve never known him to talk down to anyone – even to a child of five. With peasants he jokes coarsely, but so he sometimes does with us. I asked the oldest schoolgirl, a tall girl of around seventeen, what should be done if the Treaty were not ratified and she said without hesitation, ‘Anything is better than blood again in the streets.’

We talked of more frivolous things after dinner. Omar showed no signs of having given up drink, although it was a Monday and not a weekend. The conversation became sexual. I don’t remember now what aspect of a woman’s feelings or preferences I touched on, but I remember how strongly Omar disagreed with me. His young mistress came to my support and the General complained with a smile, ‘You are upsetting my domestic peace.’ It was a happy, tipsy evening untroubled by doubts of the Treaty.

2

After breakfast the General received two visitors from the town, a young man and his mother. He listened with kindness and patience to their long-drawn-out story. It was of a sad and common kind; the woman’s husband had recently died and the boy was unemployed. It proved easier to solve their problems than those of Mr Bunker. Omar wrote them two notes – one to the municipality telling them to lower the mother’s rent and one to the manager of a sugar-cane factory ordering him to give the boy employment. To me it seemed that the General was practising a direct form of democracy, though the General’s enemies would have called him a populist, a word which is now commonly misemployed and used as a sneer. (My Oxford Dictionary published in 1969 defines it in two senses: ‘Adherent of US political party aiming at public control of railways etc.,’ or ‘Adherent of Russian political party advocating collectivism.’)

By this time the helicopter had arrived with our bags and we left the car behind and flew on to David, and then after a short stop we went in search of the very elusive banana plantation. Surrounded as it was by the plantations owned by United Brands (a title by which the United Fruit Company has tried to escape from its unsavoury past), it was difficult to distinguish one from another at a thousand feet, with the result that we made two landings on American plantations.

At the first Omar pretended that he had landed there on purpose and demanded the way to the school, where he was greeted with some awe by the master and with excitement by the pupils. He talked a little to the children and looked at their schoolbooks. Peasants gathered in the doorway. I asked one of them what should be done if the Treaty were not ratified. ‘Fight, of course,’ he said and his companion grunted approval. Apparently in this village on an American estate the people had struggled for a long time in vain to get a school established. Anyone who agitated for the school was regarded by the American company as a Communist and many were sent to prison in the States quite illegally, for the plantation was not in the Zone. Once a captain of police was ordered to beat up the villagers, but he refused. They had their school now, but the spirit of belligerence remained.

Here some intelligent questions were asked the General about the future, when, by the terms of the Treaty, a large part of the American Zone would be returned immediately to Panama, with the exception of the military bases. No private building would be allowed, the General assured them. That part of the Zone which adjoined the poorest quarter of Panama City, known satirically as Hollywood, would become a public park. He had plans too for an orphanage . . . He said, ‘We are not going to exchange white landlords for coffee-coloured ones.’ He welcomed direct questions from his own people. It was only from journalists he resented them. I remembered his reply to a journalist who asked him if he were a Marxist: ‘An interview is not a confessional. I don’t have to tell you my thoughts. Shall I ask you if you are a pederast?’ Well, if he was a populist, I thought, I would prefer populism in Panama to Marxism or conservatism or liberalism.

Back we went to the helicopter and down again on to another plantation, which proved again to be American. This time the General despaired of finding the way by helicopter and he telephoned for a car. It was very hot and we waited a long time and when the car came Chuchu was knocked down by the swarm of children rushing at the General, determined to talk to him and touch his arms.

At the Panamanian plantation we walked and walked through the banana aisles in the heat. I remembered how once in Jamaica a manager had told me that banana growing had a strange, very special fascination, but I was feeling too tired to discern it. Afterwards at a buffet lunch with only water to drink a black school-teacher reminded the General of how at fourteen, after someone had stolen his bicycle, he went and saw Omar, who was then only a young major in the National Guard, and Omar had told him that there were a lot of unclaimed bicycles in the police station and he gave him a note to the police so that he was allowed to choose the best bicycle. The school-teacher finished his story, ‘Now I have a chance to say thank you.’ Was the young Major Torrijos already a populist or simply a kind man who liked children?

We went back to David by helicopter – all of us silent and tired, even Omar. He went to the private apartment he had there in a high-rise block and Chuchu and I to a hotel. We decided we had had enough of programming. Next day we would get off by car on our own.

It was an opportunity to revisit the Haunted House on our way back to Panama City, and even though the day was not Sunday the old man turned up while we were drinking in the bar. He was very bent with one drooping eye which looked only at the ground. He said that he couldn’t let us look inside the Haunted House because he hadn’t got the keys. Anyway, there was nothing to see there. A ghost? People always invented such stories about an empty house.

I ought to have asked him, ‘Why has it remained empty for forty years?’ but I still hoped he would let us in.

‘All the same we want to take a look inside,’ I said. ‘When can we?’

‘When will you be passing here next?’

‘We can come any time you say. What about Sunday?’

‘Well . . .’

‘What time on Sunday?’