I had begun to distrust the legend that Panamanians only drank at the weekend. Perhaps Chuchu had been corrupted in my company, but when after leaving the Montego Bay we went on to Omar’s second home, at the house of Rory González, dinner had not yet started and drinks were going the round with no thought of the weekend to come. Perhaps it was only the peasants who abided by the unwritten rule because of poverty. After dinner the hour was very late. Chuchu had unwisely moved from rum to whisky to wine. One of the General’s guards wanted to drive me back, but Chuchu refused to leave the wheel of his car and I felt morally bound to let him take me. Somebody must wisely have summoned his wife, for Silvana arrived suddenly beside the car. Chuchu had not yet grown accustomed to marriage, and he accused her of being wifely.
Sylvana remained beautifully unperturbed. She was twenty-four and he was forty-eight, and she knew that in the long run he was no match for her when it came to obstinacy. Yet he clung to the wheel for a long time and when at last he took his hands away he got out of the car without a word and went back into the house as though he couldn’t bear to see the result of his surrender. Silvana smiled as she drove. She knew her Chuchu and was quite sure of him. That too was perhaps an aggravation to Chuchu – that she could be sure of him.
As we drove to the hotel I was again thinking of the novel which was doomed never to be written, On the Way Back. I believed that I had discovered what was wrong with it, what was preventing its free growth in my mind. The setting was too closely fixed on Panama – I ought to make the scene an imaginary Central American state. After all, I had seen a little of Nicaragua, a little of Belize. The ‘way back’ should not bear only a reference to the woman’s journey with Chuchu and a way back which never happened – the phrase should have a political meaning too: the failure of a revolution. The villain of the piece must be based on Señor V, the man whom I was in the habit of calling Fish Face to the General – a relic of the Arias regime. I thought of the bourgeois diners in Managua and the surly waiters who were on the side of wealth. They too had small parts to play. Perhaps it ought not to be Chuchu who died at the end of the novel, but the General, who so often dreamed of death. Alas, how true that was to prove in fact!
5
Next day Chuchu had quite recovered when he came to fetch me for lunch with Omar, but he was in some distress because he had lost his dog. It was a singularly stupid dog, as he had often complained to me, and a savage one at that, and it was much hated by his neighbours. Now it had simply walked away and he had spent hours tramping the streets in search of it.
‘How I hate dogs,’ he said.
‘Then why do you keep one?’
‘It’s the only way to keep my hate within me.’
I told myself, ‘Surely this dog has a part to play in On the Way Back.’
At lunch that day with Omar I was aware more than ever of the affection which had grown up between us. He even compared the friendship he felt for me with the affection he had for Tito before his death. ‘Our relationship was a little the same,’ he said.
Tito and me – it seemed a strange comparison. I think he meant that his affection was based with both of us on a kind of trust. As I have already written, he always liked to compare his opinion of a character with mine. Poor Fish Face was one example – Omar even adopted my title when he spoke of him. Now he wanted to hear my opinion of Tomás Borge. I told him that at our first meeting in the bourgeois household I hadn’t much cared for him, but afterwards when he came out to the airport to speak to me next day my opinion of him had changed completely, perhaps because he was more relaxed. ‘Yes,’ Omar said, ‘for the first few minutes one dislikes him.’
We talked of Mrs Thatcher and her attitude to Belize, which seemed to imply a willingness to negotiate with Guatemala. He wanted me to have another meeting with George Price. The position of Belize was becoming more difficult in relation to its aggressive authoritarian neighbour. Colombia and Venezuela no longer supported her. Panama and Nicaragua were the only countries now on whom Price could rely in the Organization of American States. Price was at the moment in Miami where he was meeting the Foreign Minister of Guatemala – the first direct contact between the two countries. Omar had wanted Chuchu and me to go to Belize – now he wanted to invite Price to Panama and he told Chuchu to telephone him.
One remark of Omar’s stayed in my mind (was it perhaps a defence of Mrs Thatcher or a criticism of her?), ‘Ignorance can be good in politics. Carter and I agreed about the Canal Treaty because we were both ignorant of the problems it raised. If we hadn’t been ignorant the Treaty would never have been signed.’
Next morning Chuchu rang me up to say that he had spoken to Price on the telephone, but Chuchu admitted that he had been a little drunk at the time and he couldn’t remember what Price had said. I felt a little drunk myself later that day after three rum punches at the Montego Bay and three pisco sours at the Peruvian restaurant, from the door of which I saw a number of elephants walking through the rain in the centre of Panama City. First a tiger and now elephants. I am sure it was not the drink that saw them.
With the situation in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the menace to Belize from Guatemala, Panama seemed thicker than ever with political problems and personalities. That night in the house of a Communist there was a party for the Nicaraguan Ambassador, who was being transferred to Cuba. He sat glum and alone at this party in his honour and nobody spoke to him until I did.
Suddenly all our plans were changed. Price was not coming to Panama, nor were we going to Belize: Omar had agreed to my unwise wish: a visit to Bocas del Toro.
6
Chuchu and I took off next day in a small military plane. The weather was very bad – squalls and heavy rain which made visibility almost nil. I was glad Omar was not with us, for this was the kind of weather which he loved to fly in: he would have told the pilot to press on in spite of it. Without him our pilot could show a measure of prudence and we came down at David in the hope of the weather clearing before we took off over the mountains of Chiriqui for the Atlantic coast. While we waited, fear lent me arguments against going on. Why should Chuchu and I not take a car, I argued, and revisit that pretty mountain village of Boquete with its fresh air and its little hotel and the charming hostess who looked like Oona Chaplin? But the pilot had something of Omar’s spirit. The weather was a challenge which he had to accept, and after half an hour he decided that it had improved enough for us to fly on.
I could see little sign of improvement, though it was true that now occasionally when the clouds whirled apart we caught a glimpse of the mountain tops and then of the sea boiling below. We landed in a deluge of rain on a small island which seemed to be sinking back into the sea under the weight of the storm. This was the Bocas I had been so determined to visit.
We walked, ankle deep in water, to a little hotel called the Bahía opposite the jetty where the banana boats used to tie up. After one look at the place I was relieved to be told that there was no room available. Apparently in this benighted town an agricultural fair was in progress and there were even visitors who had been prepared to come from the other islands around. Now, I thought with relief, we will surely have to fly back whatever the weather, but while we stood and argued in a sodden group the proprietor returned – he had found one room for us, he said, and what a room it proved to be: two iron bedsteads and a chair were the only furniture. A bare electric globe dangled from the centre of the ceiling, there was no air-conditioning to relieve the damp heat, and no mosquito wire over the windows. I even envied the pilot who was going to return through the storm to Panama. He would fetch us, he told me, the next morning at 9.30. But suppose, I couldn’t help wondering, the weather turns even worse and we are stranded for days in this terrible spot . . . An awful lunch in an empty restaurant did nothing to cheer us: a thin soup with two bits of meat floating in it: a scrap of chicken, mainly skin: no rum – only a weak bottled beer.
Well, at least the rain had temporarily stopped, and not
hing was left for us to do but to visit the so-called fair in a field on the other side of the island. There was no drainage: the rain just collected where it fell, and to cross a street dry shod meant taking a flying leap.
The fair consisted of a double row of uninteresting stalls – uninteresting to us but obviously quite an event for the inhabitants of Bocas del Toro. They were mainly blacks of West Indian origin and in the medley of voices one could distinguish English, Spanish and Creole. Chuchu ran into a black acquaintance called Raúl who had once been a student of his and we went to a stall and drank bad rum.
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.’