At the ford over the New River a peasant stopped us to explain that he had a bad reception on his radio and Price took a note. He took many such notes, and in between we returned to the subject of Hans Küng on infallibility and Thomas Mann’s treatment of Goethe.
That night in Belize City Chuchu and I had a bad dinner of shrimps in a small café over the waterfront and we listened to the angry shouts of a black speaker in the street below. We thought at first that it was a political meeting of the Conservative opposition – we had seen them driving around town in jeeps decorated with Union Jacks – but we were wrong. This was a religious meeting and the speaker was declaiming his views on family morality and how errant husbands were the curse of Belize. He seemed a continent away from the sophistication of Panama.
But next day in the local pages of the press the world broke in – there had been an attempted coup in Nicaragua, twelve officers of the National Guard had been arrested and more than a hundred civilians. Somoza was threatening to shoot strikers, and the Reporter, the opposition paper of Belize, wrote of a ‘so-called writer called Green’ who had been sent by the Communist Torrijos to see his fellow-Communist Price for reasons which were unknown and certainly sinister.
Chuchu and I read the account of our mission after returning from Corozal, a little town in the north near the Mexican frontier. Price had told me how Doctor Owen, then the British Foreign Secretary, and the British High Commissioner in Belize were anxious to negotiate a settlement with Guatemala by offering the surrender of a slice of land leading to the sea. ‘How can a small country of 140,000 inhabitants “negotiate”?’ he demanded. ‘We can only fight or surrender.’ If they let Guatemala have a piece of the cake Mexico would certainly demand a share too, there at Corozal, and little would be left of Belize. Rumours, often without foundation, of off-shore oil only increased the danger.
The day after Chuchu and I were due to leave for Costa Rica, where Chuchu had a rendezvous with a leading Sandinista. Before we left we sat in at the Prime Minister’s weekly clinic in Belize City and heard him deal with the problems of his constituents. An old peasant woman complained bitterly of a leaking house which was beyond repair, and a policeman was called in who supported her story. Price promised her immediate redress and she clapped her hands and said she would hold a party in the new house to celebrate.
Before going to the airport we had a typical Belize lunch – no choice except that between shrimps and hamburgers – and it was carelessness or Chuchu’s Devil, not the alcohol, that led us, for the second time in my life, to take the wrong plane, so that we found ourselves grounded in San Salvador with hours to wait for a connection. We waited with what particular patience we could muster – nothing would have induced us to leave the safety of the airport, and I prayed that Chuchu’s face was strange to those around us and his connection with the Sandinista rebels unknown.
Chuchu despised Costa Rica, the only Central American state without an army, though it was very conveniently situated for his clandestine activities, and he had several times delivered arms to the Sandinistas on its border with Nicaragua with the help of his second-hand plane. He was even irritated, I think, by the ease and safety of his operations. All the same he had been anxious for a long time to show me Costa Rica, in order that I might understand and share his contempt.
I certainly found San José a dreary city under the soaking rain and I was impatient with one of Chuchu’s dubious contacts who insisted on leading us away from our hotel to a small restaurant of his choice on the other side of the city where we sat down wet through to a meal quite as bad as any in Belize. The Switzerland of Central America, Costa Rica has often been called – a libel on Switzerland.
Next morning Chuchu made his contact in a café with a tall, dark, serious man, who arrived with a very attractive girl whom I seemed to remember having encountered the year before in the Pigeon House with other refugees. The girl and I made small talk at a table far enough away from Chuchu and his companion for me not to catch any word of their discussion. I was to meet them again more than four years later in Managua – Comandante Daniel Ortega, the leading member of the Nicaraguan Junta, and his wife, Rosario.
That afternoon we went back to Panama and two days later, after reporting to Omar on our visit to Belize, there was another last farewell to Chuchu at the airport before I took the KLM plane to Amsterdam. In the last meeting with the General there had been nothing really to report – except my liking for Price and my dislike of his Conservative enemies with their wild accusations, their violent opposition to independence and their fake Union Jack loyalty.
One of the endearing qualities of Omar was his desire to hear what others thought of the characters with whom he dealt. He was not offended by my suspicion of his Chief of Staff, Colonel Flores – he simply took it into account. Indeed, he had an exaggerated respect for that instinct for human character which is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer, and he was reassured when García Márquez or myself liked the same man or woman whom he liked. ‘What do you think of so and so?’ was a question which came easily to his lips. He was loyal to his friends – to Tito whom he regarded as a father figure, to Fidel Castro who had fought the sort of war he had longed to fight himself – and his opinion would not be altered by anything we might say, but he was happy if our opinion coincided with his own. So he was happy that I liked George Price, and perhaps it was the only reason that he had sent us to Belize – in order that one friend might meet another.
PART IV
1979 and 1980
1
In 1979 the civil war in Nicaragua drew to an end, Somoza was defeated and fled the country, and the Sandinistas were at last in power. There was no reason why the telephone should ever sound again with a call summoning me to Panama.
However much I felt the loss of my friendship for Omar and Chuchu, there were good reasons for me to stay at home in France: in March I was in hospital having part of my intestines removed, and almost simultaneously events broke out in the private life of myself and my friends that led eventually to my writing a pamphlet called J’Accuse.
The battlefield for me was now in France, not in Central America; the fight was on behalf of a young mother, the daughter of my greatest friend, and her two small children. Violence was on my own doorstep and not far away across a frontier, and I had no time to worry about the politics of Central America. For months too after my operation I was a tired man who had to ration what strength he had, and I couldn’t have faced the long flight to Panama.
All the same if one takes a side, one takes a side, come what may. I wasn’t to escape my involvement as easily as that. I couldn’t go to Panama, but it was Panama which came again to me. At one o’clock in the morning on the last day of April, the telephone woke me from sleep, and it was Chuchu’s voice which spoke to me. ‘Graham, I thought you were not there.’
‘I was fast asleep, Chuchu. Where are you?’
‘In Panama, of course. I have a message for you from the General. He is sending someone to see you. He will arrive in Antibes during the next few days. The General very much wants you to talk to him.’
‘Which day will he arrive?’
‘I don’t know that. He has left Panama. Now he is in Mexico, I think. Yesterday the General asked when you were coming to Panama.’
‘I can’t, Chuchu. Not this year. I have been ill, and I have troubles here. I can’t get away.’
‘But you’ll see the messenger?’
‘Of course.’
Two days later, as I was preparing for bed, the telephone rang again. A voice told me that the speaker had a message for me from the General, and I made an appointment with him for the next morning. When he arrived, I recognized him as a young man whom I had seen once before in Omar’s company. He asked me whether I had read in the papers a month or so back of the kidnapping of two English bankers by the guerrillas in El Salvador.
‘Yes. I remember.’
‘The General is afraid they are in
danger of death. The bank seems to have lost all contact with the guerrillas. He wants you to talk to their head office in London and tell them that the guerrillas are prepared to drop two of their conditions – the first that six of their number must be released from prison. They are sure now that the men are dead. The second condition they are ready to drop too. About a communiqué to be published in the local and the world press. Only the third is left – a matter of money. You mustn’t tell the bank the source of your information.’
‘But which bank?’
‘The Bank of London.’
I had heard of the Bank of England but not of the Bank of London. ‘Are you sure of the name?’
‘Yes, yes. The matter is very urgent.’
I had never been more thankful for my copy of Whitaker’s Almanack. With its help I identified the bank he referred to as the Bank of London and Montreal, a branch of Lloyds International, with headquarters in Nassau. All the same I felt myself out of depth in this world of banking.
‘Will you come back at 6.30 and dine with me?’
I remembered that my nephew Graham, the Managing Director of Jonathan Cape, belonged to the banking branch of the Guinness family and on his advice I found myself talking to a Mr W, who was dealing with the kidnapping affair. It was an embarrassing and hesitant conversation.
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I have a very reliable source, but I am not allowed to give you his name.’
The silence on the line seemed charged with very reasonable suspicion. My home in Antibes and my profession as a novelist must have seemed to Mr W strangely remote from an affair of kidnapping in El Salvador.
I tried to sound more convincing. ‘You see, during the last three years I have been spending quite a lot of time in Central America. I have had a good many contacts.’
‘Why do you think they are dropping these conditions?’
‘I think perhaps they don’t want to kill the men.’
The rather dry voice of Mr W replied, ‘That has been our impression, too.’
‘I understand that you have lost contact with the guerrillas?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have been given a telephone number in Mexico City. If you will ring it . . .’
When the young man returned that evening I told him what had passed. He raised both hands in the air and said with satisfaction, ‘Mission accomplie.’
‘Would you like to telephone Panama?’
‘No, but if you don’t mind I will telephone Mexico.’
A few moments later he dropped the receiver and said, ‘The bank has already made contact.’
At dinner I suggested that we should meet next morning before he took his plane home and I would show him the old town of Antibes. He agreed, but he never turned up. I rang his hotel, but he was already on his way back to Central America, and a few weeks later the bankers were released. For some while I nursed a greedy hope that I might perhaps receive in return for the mysterious telephone number at least a case of whisky from Lloyds International, but the hope soon faded. Probably the directors thought I had received from the guerrillas a commission on the five-million-dollar ransom which I believe they paid.
I don’t know how or when I happened to learn the name of the contact in Mexico City – it was that of my friend Gabriel García Márquez. García Márquez, it seemed, was trying to organize a Central American equivalent to Amnesty International.
I was busy all that year with my private war and I was finishing with difficulty a short novel, Doctor Fischer of Geneva, so when the summer came and Chuchu was again on the telephone asking me when I would be arriving (‘The General wants to know’), I could only answer, ‘Not this year. I told you it’s impossible. Of course I want to come. Perhaps next year . . .’
2
It was in January 1980, again as I was preparing for bed, that the telephone rang and a woman’s voice said, ‘Mr Shearer wants to speak to you.’ I was sleepy and I thought the name resembled that of a film producer whom I had once known, but it was a stranger’s voice which came on the line.
‘Mr Greene?’
‘Yes, but excuse me – who are you, Mr Shearer?’
‘I am the South African Chargé d’Affaires in Paris. We thought you might be able to help us.’
‘Help you?’
‘Perhaps you have read in the newspapers that our Ambassador, Mr Dunne, was kidnapped in El Salvador some months ago. We haven’t been able to contact the kidnappers. We thought perhaps that you might be able to help us.’
‘Help you?’ I repeated. It almost seemed at that moment as though Antibes had become a small island anchored off the coast of central America and involved in all the problems there.
I said, ‘There is a telephone number in Mexico City, but I haven’t got it any more. I destroyed it. Perhaps if you could speak to Mr W at Lloyds International . . . I once gave him the number and he may have kept it.’ Half an hour later Mr Shearer rang again and provided the number, so that further action on my part was required.
It was some days before I was able to get García Márquez on the telephone. He said, ‘A South African Ambassador? That’s a bit more of a problem.’
‘This is a human question not a political one. I understand he’s a sick man and his wife is dying of cancer.’ (I had been talking again to Mr Shearer.)
‘We have to find out first which of five guerrilla groups hold him.’
More days passed and Márquez was again on the line. ‘It seems to be the FPL. But it would be much better if the family made the contact – not the South African Government. For obvious reasons.’
I passed the news to Mr Shearer who said that he would pass it on to Pretoria. ‘But there are difficulties,’ he told me. ‘The wife is dying, the son is a bit of a hippy, there’s only the daughter and she’s a young girl.’
‘Can’t someone pretend to be one of the family?’
I heard no more for a long while, but on 18 August (I had given way to Chuchu’s pressure) I set off yet again for Panama at 10.30 in the evening after spending eight hours in the Van Gogh lounge at Amsterdam airport, a lounge in which I had begun to feel very much at home. Before I left I had written to Mr Shearer, asking him whether I could be of any further use to him when I was in Panama, but he had replied that the affair was now in the hands of Washington. Contact had been made with the guerrillas, and it would be better for me not to cross lines.
3
Chuchu was there next morning at the Panama airport. He had grown a beard, but was otherwise unchanged in the two years which had passed, and he bubbled over with news. The General, it seemed, wanted me to go to Nicaragua in two days’ time, and this suited Chuchu well, for the two of his children whom I had already encountered were now in Nicaragua, deposited by their mother. The girl was at school and anxious to join the army and her young brother had become a guard to Tomás Borge and had shot himself accidentally in the leg.
As usual in Panama our plans were soon upset by the innumerable telephone conversations that took place between our rum punches, which as usual were badly made and expensive. The Señorial to our distress had been turned into yet another bank and we searched in vain for the young woman Flor on whose rum punches we had always been able to rely. Banks in Panama City grew as quickly as weeds in a garden. There were now about a hundred and thirty of them, a rather strange situation in a country under a social democratic leader. My visit to Nicaragua in any case would have to be postponed because the FPL guerrilla leader, Salvador Cayetano, who went under the code-name of Marcial, was in Panama City and wanted to see me.
There was other more personal news – Chuchu had got married yet again, this time to the sister of Lidia, the wife of Rogelio the Sandinista, and he had had a baby. The General too had a new baby – with the girl whom I had met two years back. After the birth he had told Chuchu that he should also make a baby, and Chuchu, the faithful bodyguard, promptly obeyed.
Chuchu was less happy about another of the Gen
eral’s romantic notions – to rescue Señora Perón from her house arrest in Argentina. He introduced me to her lawyer from Buenos Aires whom Chuchu didn’t trust at all, and we went together to see the Vice-President, Ricardo de la Espriella, who promptly wrote out a cheque for $20,000 which Chuchu cashed at a bank and handed the cash to the lawyer. ‘That’s the last we’ll see of him,’ he said. The General’s idea was that the money would go to bribe her guards to look the other way while she escaped to an airport where a Panamanian plane would be awaiting her. Months later she was released by the Argentinian Junta in quite a normal fashion and set off to Madrid, so perhaps the money ended up as Chuchu had foreseen.
Bernard Diederich was back in Panama, and as Chuchu was fully occupied sitting beside the telephone as he waited for the General to call, we took his car and drove into what three years ago had been the Canal Zone. There was little sign of any change except that now the Panamanian flag flew over Ancón Hill and the offices of the Canal Company. We drank good rum punches and ate a terrible Irish stew at the American Legion Club with a New Zealand friend of Diederich – a very enigmatic man who avoided answering any direct questions. I was not sure whether he was afraid of the correspondent of Time or of me.
That night I had supper with the General. His girl was there and Omar introduced his baby with pride – a daughter. ‘When I can communicate with her,’ he joked to his girl, ‘I won’t need you.’ There was some heavy drinking. Boyd, the former Foreign Minister, was there, and a poet whose name I never caught. Never before had I felt so strong an impression of Omar as a lonely man, a man genuinely affectionate, who grasped at friendship as greedily as he grasped at books, as though there were too little time left for him to catch up on either. At one moment he rebuked me with anger when I slipped into formality because of a stranger’s presence, ‘I don’t like it when you call me General and not Omar.’ He asked me how I had liked the Vice-President. ‘Very much,’ I said and he looked relieved. I think perhaps he was remembering my reaction to Colonel Flores.