Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement

  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.

  I had told the General about our first visit, and he remembe
red having heard of the ghost even as a child. It was said to be that of a headless white woman. The owner must be nearly eighty by now, so when the haunting began he was a man in his thirties. I became convinced that he had killed the woman in his house, her screams had been heard, and so the story of the haunting was invented. She was probably buried under the floor. I suggested to the General that he hold an exercise by the Wild Pigs. They would break into the house after a notional siege and perhaps do a bit of digging. But the General didn’t approve the idea. Any search, he said, would have to be legal.

  Chuchu and I took another prowl around. We asked the barman if he had seen the owner. Oh yes, he had mentioned our visit, but there was nothing to be done without speaking to him. He was always there on a Sunday. Well, we would return the next Sunday, we said.

  In Panama City Chuchu suggested that he ask for dinner ‘the rich woman’ (so it was that he always described her to distinguish her from all the others, but I don’t think she was very wealthy). He had planned to spend the night with her anyway – in a hotel because of the child. She would have to get up at six to go home. What about the girl he was living with at the moment, I asked?

  Oh, she was all right. She made no demands on him. Women, Chuchu admitted, seemed to like him. ‘You are a good lover?’ Oh, it wasn’t exactly that, he said. He wasn’t concerned with sexual positions and that sort of nonsense, nor did he think that women were really interested in such unimportant details. What they liked in him, he believed, was the tenderness which he always showed them after making love. This particular ‘wife’, as he called her, was beautiful.

  We each drank three rum punches at the excellent bar of the Señorial and they were made for us by an attractive young woman called Flor. She was obviously fond of Chuchu, but he was strangely reluctant to court her (‘She’s a good woman. The affair might turn too serious’). Afterwards we went off to meet the poet. Chuchu was already a little drunk.

  He became a good deal more drunk over dinner, continually demanding that I admire the beauty of his friend. She was certainly a good-looking and intelligent woman in her late forties or early fifties, but it was difficult to carry on a conversation when every few moments Chuchu would say, ‘Look at her, Graham, look at her, isn’t she lovely?’ She showed, I thought, great patience. He drove me rather erratically back to the hotel, and then they went away together. It seemed to me that his chances of a satisfactory night with her were small.

  How wrong I was. He turned up next day to meet me, very happy and still a little drunk. (He had had half a bottle of wine for his breakfast before she left him at six.) It was a ‘wonderful night’, he said. I told him that I was surprised after the way he had treated her at dinner.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You kept on telling me to look at her and see how beautiful she was. It was the only thing you did say.’

  ‘You don’t understand, Graham,’ he replied. ‘She has reached the age when she needs reassurance.’

  He was indeed something better than a professor of Marxist philosophy and of mathematics and a sergeant in the security guard – he was a good and a kind man with a human wisdom much greater than my own. I think my deep affection for him began that day, when he was too drunk to drive with safety. He broke through the lights and ran into a parked car before we landed at a bookshop kept by a Greek war hero. ‘We have to invite him to your party on Friday,’ he said.

  ‘My party?’

  It appeared that the General and Chuchu had decided between them that I was to be the host at a party. The drinks would be provided by the National Guard, and the party would be held at the house of an old Panamanian writer, Rogelio Sinan. The General wouldn’t be able to attend as he was busy with the Refrigerator, old Mr Bunker, and his American delegation. ‘We’ll invite the Cubans,’ Chuchu said (he had quite forgiven them for the defective Russian pistol), ‘but we will not invite Señor V.’ There was an American, he warned me, who would certainly turn up whether he was invited or not – a writer called Koster who lived in Panama City and was supposed to be a CIA agent. He had asked Chuchu about me. ‘What’s the old goat doing here?’ he had enquired. I looked forward to meeting him.

  11

  The next day the General lent us an army helicopter which landed us after lunch on the beach of Taboga in front of the little hotel there. They would come to fetch us again for the party in Panama City two days later. The island was very small, but included a village and a jungle. Somewhere buried in the jungle – but we couldn’t find the path – was an English cemetery; its inhabitants could now be regarded as buried twice over. Years ago, about the time when Panama had joined Colombia to become a nation, there had been a British commercial establishment on the island, perhaps in connexion with de Lesseps’s Canal project. Gauguin had visited the island twice, but was disappointed on his second visit because he found the peace had been disturbed by a branch of the Canal company. Now peace had returned again.

  Chuchu and I bathed with caution in the surf, for there were sharks, though we were assured that for some mysterious reason they confined themselves to the waters around the next island, visible only too clearly about a mile away. We had sandwiches and beer and walked in the village. In the evening the one sea bus arrived carrying the islanders who worked on the mainland. The peace of the place without cars was so deep that it was like a tune running in the head. In the passage outside my room there was a polite notice with an English translation: ‘If you expect visits of the opposite sex, please receive them in the public areas.’ It seemed an oddly puritanical request for Panama. Chuchu and I had a pin-table tournament, but I don’t remember which of us won. Then I went to bed and dreamt – in reaction from all this peace – that I received a disquieting telegram from home.

  Next day I woke from my dream to the same tune of peace, peace, peace, and we did exactly the same things. We bathed, we breakfasted, we walked in the village, we bathed again. It was as though we had been living for many quiet months on the island. But one false note was struck. Chuchu was called out of the sea by a telephone call from Señor V. He wasn’t, thank God, joining us as I feared, but he had taken over all the arrangements for the party to which we had not intended even to invite him. That evening, I remember, the light was particularly beautiful – we could forget Señor V. The white hazy towers of Panama City shimmering ten miles away across the sea were like an engraving of paradise by John Martin.

  In bed I reread Heart of Darkness as I had done last in 1958 in the Congo. My novel, so I believed, was taking form in my head, hope was reborn, and I thought that I had found in Conrad an epigraph for On the Way Back. But now when I reopen Conrad’s story at the page which I had marked, the sentences seem more suitable to the book I am writing now:

  It seems I am trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream’s sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment and a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible . . .

  In the peace of Taboga I felt captivated by Panama, by the struggle with the United States, by the peasants barking like dogs, by Chuchu’s strange wisdom and complicated sex life, by the drumbeats in the slums of El Chorillo, by the General’s dreams of death, and as for revolt, I was to feel that too at moments in the years that followed – the desire to be back in Europe with the personal, understandable problems there.

  Next morning I began trying to compose in my diary the first sentences of the novel, describing how a young French woman journalist was engaged by a fashionable Paris left-wing editor to go to Panama to interview the General. They proved in fact not to be the first sentences in the chapter which I was finally to write and then abandon:

  He was tall and lean and he would have had an air of almost overpowering distinction if his grey hair had not been quite so well waved over his ears, which were again of the right masculine size. She would perhaps have taken him for a diplomat if she had not know
n him to be the editor of a very distinguished weekly which she seldom read, being out of sympathy with its modish tendency towards left-wing politics. Many men come alive only in their eyes: his eyes were dead, and it was only in the gestures of his elegant carcase that he lived.

  I admit that I had a certain editor in mind whom I had only met once in a Lisbon bar, and, for the first time as a novelist, I was trying mistakenly to use real characters – the General, Chuchu, even this editor – in my fiction. They had emerged from life and not from the unconscious and for that reason they stood motionless like statues in my mind – they couldn’t develop, they were incapable of the unexpected word or action – they were real people and they could have no life independent of me in the imagination.

  12

  The helicopter landed with military punctuality on the beach to fetch us and back in Panama City I took a long siesta to prepare for this odd party of which I was to be the host, host to a lot of strangers chosen by Chuchu and Señor V. The Greek bookseller was the only one I would even know by sight.

  On the invitation cards the party was timed for eight till ten. Chuchu and I arrived punctually and so did many of the guests, but not the drinks. Time passed very slowly without them. The party stagnated. A lot of photographs were taken of disconsolate groups. Chuchu was looking tired. He told me he had spent the afternoon with a prostitute. The party grew larger and larger, but there were still no drinks, and the hypocrisy of such parties came bitterly home to me. Nobody goes to a party to meet anyone: everybody is there for free drinks. There were no drinks and I was supposed to be the host.

  I took a strong dislike to the Cuban Attaché for Political Affairs who seemed to regard me with deep suspicion after I told him that I had been three times to Cuba since the revolution and had known the country in the days of Batista. Luckily I was saved from him by a very nice young Cuban press officer. Chuchu slipped away (in search of the drinks, he had explained to me), and after what seemed a long time he returned triumphantly with a lorry load of them. Apparently he had given the wrong address to the National Guard.