Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement

  These young Sandinistas were not refugees from the guerilla war – they were part of the guerrilla war. Already a Sandinista foreign service was in existence. The young doctor would suddenly dress up in a new suit and tie and be off to Mexico on mysterious errands. When once I ran into him at the Panama airport and teased him about his smartness he told me with great seriousness, ‘If you look well dressed they don’t look closely at your passport.’

  After his meeting with Camilo and his girl I had the impression of being taken over by the Sandinistas. Even Chuchu sank into the background. Indeed, for a day or two he disappeared entirely from the scene and I find from my diary that I began to feel resentment at always seeing the same faces – Camilo and María Isabel, the mathematician and his wife, Lidia, even the Ultras turned up again and again. Where Chuchu was I had no idea. For all I knew he was in Nicaragua or on the Costa Rican border, unloading arms from his small private plane. It was as though I were being nudged towards a frontier which I had no wish to cross on behalf of a cause which I was too ignorant to espouse. Even Omar had warned me against crossing that frontier. It would be too easy for Somoza to blame the Sandinistas for my death.

  Yet I had reason to be grateful to them, for it was with María Isabel that I actually found the golden frogs in El Valle and even a square tree, after a long scramble in the forest where I was badly bitten, but more important to me she got me into the Haunted House. It was a Sunday and we had intended to fly to the San Bias Islands, but instead we drove to the bar beside the Haunted House and found it open. Within a few minutes the old man drove up.

  ‘Let me speak to him,’ María Isabel said. He had the keys in his hand, so he couldn’t deny having them. His alibi was gone and María Isabel was a beautiful woman. She told him that I was an English medium who had stopped off in Panama while returning from a spiritualist conference in Australia. Rumours about his house had come to my ears.

  ‘A lot of nonsense.’

  ‘All the same . . .’

  Grudgingly he consented to show us ‘part of the house’.

  He threw back a steel shutter and unlocked the heavy steel door, and we were in the living-room of the house in almost total darkness. There was no lamp and we could only see what was there with the aid of a cigarette lighter. There might be no ghost, but the house was certainly haunted by memories. Glass cases stood against the walls filled with china. Victorian pictures of women in transparent muslin robes, like reproductions of Leighton, hung between the cases. I looked through an open door into a little room which contained one steel bed, the sheets jumbled about as if the occupant had only just risen from sleep, and a bat flew out.

  The old man pointed to the floor of the living-room and asked me, ‘Do you know what’s there?’

  I hadn’t the social courage to answer, ‘The skeleton of a woman.’

  The old man became more affable when we were again safely outside. He said there were many ghosts around, for we were standing on the gold route to Portobelo. The Spaniards had buried much gold here, and buried with the gold were the Indians who had carried it. Their spirits fought against anyone who tried to dig it up.

  On parting I gave him what I thought might be taken for a Masonic sign with my fingers and he responded by calling me his brother. ‘I too am a medium,’ he said. ‘I am a conscious one, you are inconciente.’ I thought at first he was accusing me of being a medium without a conscience; but María Isabel explained. He meant that he could remember what had happened when he came out of a trance, while I could not.

  Suddenly he realized that he had left the steel door ajar, and he scuttled back to close and double-lock it.

  In the absence of Chuchu it was the Sandinistas who arranged for me to visit Hollywood, the slum lying on the edge of the American Zone. A visit, they told me, was unsafe without the escort of an inhabitant, but one of their number knew of one who would ensure our safety.

  Hollywood proved to be a horrifying huddle of wooden houses sunk in rain water like scuttled boats and of communal lavatories which stank to heaven and leaked into the water around. At a sheltered corner an old woman sat selling marijuana, and we were followed step by wet step by a smoker who was half-senseless with the drug and who asked us questions which we didn’t answer and wanted to lead us where our guide and protector had no wish to go.

  I thought with wonder of the neat lawns, and the golf courses, and the fifty-three churches half a mile away beyond the unmarked frontier. Omar had thought of razing Hollywood to the ground and building flats (indeed, there was at least one high-rise block of flats with unlit corridors and walls streaming with moisture through which we walked with a quicker, more nervous step, seeing no one about at all), but he gave the idea up. The inhabitants of Hollywood were attached to their leaking houses which were their own, where their parents and grandparents had been born, so now he talked of ‘improvements’ if one day the Treaty were signed – with sanitation, running water, electric light. I couldn’t believe in the possibility – touch one wall of a house, try to mend a roof and the building would surely collapse into the water at the door.

  I think it may have been Hollywood which gave me a guilt-ridden night during which I dreamt that I had quarrelled with the woman I loved, and afterwards I found myself travelling by underground to the old offices of The Times in Queen Victoria Street in order to resign from the staff, but what right had I to resign, for hadn’t I been absent for months, if not for years, on full pay?

  3

  Next day I returned to Colón with the young Sandinista doctor, who wanted to visit the hospital there. He too had been troubled that night by an unhappy dream – a dream of his brother who had been killed by Somoza’s men. In the dream his brother had disapproved of what Camilo was doing now. I suppose he too was suffering from a sense of guilt no more rational than mine, because he was in safety while the civil war was being savagely fought in Nicaragua, but he was working under orders for his cause.

  He told me a little about his brother, who had been younger than himself. His brother had been training as an engineer with Siemens in Managua, and when he was seventeen he went off on a scholarship flight to Germany. His parents never saw him again until years later the Nicaraguan police brought them from their home to identify the dead body of Commandant Cero. They had no idea that their son was the famous Cero who had struck the first serious blow against Somoza’s tyranny by kidnapping in one coup a number of ambassadors and government ministers as they left a party and thus obtained the release of fourteen political prisoners who were all flown safely to Cuba.

  My new friend Camilo knew nothing for years of what was happening to his brother after he had seen him leave for Germany as a boy. Then quite accidentally he encountered him in Mexico City and his brother had recruited him into the propaganda side of the Sandinista movement. He heard of his death on the radio in Panama.

  I was glad to find when we returned to the city that Chuchu was safely back, though from where I never learnt. ‘The trouble about Chuchu,’ Camilo said to me, ‘is that he mixes up politics with sex.’ True or not, he now seemed to have a new girl friend, the wife of a gangster who was lying in hospital after a shooting affray, a rather dangerous relationship one would have thought, and in a confusing party with our Sandinista friends a pregnant girl – was it Chuchu’s girl? – made her appearance, but she didn’t seem to be connected with anyone there. Jokes were made about who was the father of the child.

  He was killed in Vietnam, she said.

  ‘Then you’ve been two years pregnant.’

  ‘I meant in Korea.’

  ‘That’s even longer.’

  She pointed at the young mathematician Rogelio.

  ‘Well,’ he said, laughing, ‘who knows? It might be.’

  I urged Chuchu that evening to stay sober. ‘Of course I’ll be sober,’ he said, and he added, ‘I never mix up politics with alcohol or sex.’

  4

  The San Bias Islands – three hundred and sixty-five
of them – lie in the Atlantic off the Darién coast. The only inhabitants are Cuna Indians who live a virtually independent life. They pay no taxes. They send representatives to the National Assembly and have even negotiated their own trade treaty with Colombia. Tourists are allowed to spend a night on two of the islands. On the other three hundred and sixty-three strangers can only pass the hours of day. The San Bias lobsters are regarded very highly in Panama, yet, fresh as it was from the sea, I found mine tough and tasteless.

  Far more interesting than the lobsters were the women. What interest and greed they would have aroused in the conquistadores, for in every nose and ear hung a gold ring. No one could tell me from whence the gold had come, for there are no gold mines in Panama. Even in the Spanish days, when the gold caravans took the trail from Panama City to Portobelo, the gold had first to be brought down the Pacific coast from Peru.

  The women, quite apart from the wealth of their rings and their fashion of dressing in a rather similar style to Ancient Egyptians, were interesting to watch. The long-haired girls were unmarried: those with hair cut short were married. A distinction was made between them, even in the use of musical instruments. When they danced for us, at a fixed and very moderate fee, the unmarried rattled gourds and the married played on little bundles of pipes. They contribute to the Cuna economy by embroidering squares of material called molas for use as blouse fronts. That day I was with Camilo and Lidia, the wife of Rogelio. It was her birthday and she chose a mola for me to give her, but this was to be stolen from her a few days later under odd circumstances typical of life in Panama City.

  In the evening Chuchu came to see me. He told me that Omar wanted me to go with the Panamanian delegation to Washington in five days’ time for the signing of the Canal Treaty, the terms of which had at last after all these years been agreed. The Miami Herald that morning claimed that it was no different from the draft treaty of 1967, proposed before the General took power, but this was completely false – perhaps it was an attempt by the Americans to stir up internal trouble against Torrijos. The new Treaty would transfer immediately fifty times more territory to Panama than the old draft had done. The American military bases, it was true, were to remain until the year 2000 and only then would the Canal become entirely the property of Panama. However, the Zone, apart from these bases, would immediately cease to exist.

  I felt unwilling to go to Washington. I had booked my return flight, and it was time I returned to France and to my proper work. I told Chuchu that I had no visa for the States, a white lie for it was no longer true. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘you will have a diplomatic passport, a Panamanian one.’

  ‘I don’t want to come back all the way here to catch my plane to Amsterdam.’

  ‘You won’t have to. The General will book you on the Concorde direct from Washington to Paris.’ He said the General was already being attacked because the Treaty was not as good as people had hoped. He had made a speech to the students, saying, ‘I am making what progress I can, but if I don’t have the support of progressives, what can I do more?’

  I gave in. ‘If the General really wants me to go,’ I said.

  ‘He really wants it.’

  That evening I went to the temporary home of a Nicaraguan woman writer who had been tortured by Somoza’s Guardia. Only the day before she had successfully had a baby. She would say little for fear of the repercussions on her family, and one could tell from her tormented face how much she wanted to forget the past. But there were others in the room who had also suffered and were ready to talk. An Argentinian woman described the electric torture which she had endured. Another Argentinian told of a bayonet thrust up her vagina. A Peruvian told of his expulsion, a Nicaraguan of his escape from a police ambush. For how many people, from how many countries in Latin America – Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador – Panama had become a haven of escape, thanks to the General. It had not been like this in the days of the Arias family.

  5

  I was suffering the result of my search in the woods of El Valle for a square tree. An irritation in my ankles kept me awake every night, so on Chuchu’s advice I went to see a young black doctor at the barracks of the National Guard. He gave me a wash, a cream and some tablets and told me I had been bitten by a tiny insect called a chitra only too familiar to the Wild Pigs. Afterwards we went to the airport to meet a Mexican film producer who was trying to arrange the co-production of an anti-military film. He had been offered support in Mexico, Colombia, France and Cuba, but Panama was the only country which was prepared to lend him troops.

  I think Chuchu’s exuberance puzzled him. He had not been accustomed to deal with a security guard who was also a poet and a professor. He looked bewildered and innocent.

  Camilo too was at the airport. He was smartly dressed and looked very much the young doctor, and he was off on a mysterious Sandinista errand to Mexico City. He had entrusted me some days before with a letter to an address in Paris which he wanted me to post on my return to France, but now that he knew I was going by way of Washington he was very worried about its security. ‘You mustn’t leave it in your luggage,’ he told me. ‘They are sure to search your luggage in Washington. Promise me that you’ll always keep it on you, even at night.’ I promised.

  A man came to fetch the Mexican film producer, who had been listening with growing bewilderment to my conversation with Camilo. The ‘someone’ was accompanied by a quite hideous woman, a Venezuelan with dyed red hair, who seemed to me obviously in pursuit of Chuchu.

  We escaped on that occasion, but nobody in Panama City only turns up once. Like a play with a small cast the same actors were always reappearing in different roles. In the course of that muddled evening I had been supposed to meet a Peruvian refugee, but the meeting was cancelled at the last moment, so I suggested to Chuchu that we should take Camilo’s wife to dinner as she might be feeling lonely without him. But for some reason Chuchu couldn’t find Camilo’s house, though we had been there several times together, and for a yet more impenetrable reason he was convinced that María Isabel would be telephoning us at the house of Panama’s ambassador to Venezuela – or was it the other way round, Venezuela’s ambassador to Panama? – and the ambassador, he was sure, would give us a typical Venezuelan dinner, whatever that might signify. Of course, María Isabel didn’t telephone us, it was the hideous Venezuelan woman who turned up (had Chuchu foreseen that?) and the ambassador never asked us to dinner. Indeed, I don’t think he could understand what we were doing at his house. So we left, passing on the doorstep the Mexican film producer, who appeared more bewildered than ever at seeing us, and Chuchu and I had some chicken soup together at my hotel.

  These last days in Panama unwound more and more quickly and confusingly. I hadn’t seen Omar for some days – it was as though in the past he had been directing events and now the disorder, which involved a Mexican film producer and a Venezuelan woman and Chuchu’s lapse of memory, arose from his absence. I had to get up very early the next morning because Omar wanted me to fly to a collective buffalo farm (an odd thing to find in Panama) in the mountain village of Coclesito. The farm had been started by Omar, who had built himself a small house nearby, after he had had made a forced landing in Coclesito in a helicopter and seen the hopeless isolation and poverty of the inhabitants. Their smallholdings had been washed out by a flood in which the chief’s son had been drowned. What gave the General the idea of a buffalo farm I never learnt. I was fetched by María Isabel, who complained bitterly that Chuchu had made a muddle the night before over my rendezvous with the Peruvian refugee. And why on earth had we gone to the Venezuelan ambassador’s house? Was it possible, I wondered, that it was because Chuchu wanted to see the hideous woman again?

  Chuchu was waiting at the airport for the military plane which he had ordered and with him were a number of students from Guatemala, Ecuador and Costa Rica accompanied by their professors. Our journey to see the buffaloes was obviously meant to be an educational one, but we waited
and waited and no plane arrived. Apparently the pilot, an air force officer, resented having been given orders by a mere sergeant. After two hours we sent a message to the General’s secretary that it was too late now for the buffaloes and we all trooped off to the Ministry of Culture where we were joined by the two Ultras and the Sandinista mathematician, Rogelio, and we had to sit through a long and boring videotape film of Panama folk dancing. I have always detested folk dancing since I was a boy when I had watched men morris-dancing in braces. (The dances appealed particularly for some mysterious reason to their wives, who wore shot-silk dresses bought at Liberty’s.)

  In the middle of the film Chuchu was called away on an urgent errand. A Guatemalan professor recommended by the Dean of Guatemala University (the one who had been so drunk with Chuchu at David) had apparently been imprisoned some days before by the G-2 and charged with trying to pass forged dollar bills at the Continental Hotel.

  María Isabel, the Ultras and I were invited after the film to lunch by Señor Ingram, the Minister of Culture, and while we were drinking our cocktails Chuchu arrived with the Rector of Panama University and the Guatemalan professor straight from the prison, a tall, red-haired, good-looking man of Yankee and German origin who naturally seemed a little confused about what was happening to him. He had not expected this sudden transfer from his prison cell to drink cocktails and eat a good lunch at Panama’s best restaurant. Nor could he understand what an English writer was doing there, for appparently he had read some of my books and distrusted me. He told us that he had been threatened with violence by the G-2 officers, and he had shared his cell with seven other men, including two rapists – one had killed the girl whom he had raped – and one patricide. All of them, however, had proved very sympathetic and with their professional knowledge they had helped him to smuggle a message out of prison – a message which contained the recommendation from the Dean of Guatemala University. The General, when he received it, decided that the whole affair was probably a plot by the Guatemalan police against a professor who was known to be left-wing, so he at once ordered his release, but a discreet one by means of Chuchu, and he thought it wiser all the same for the professor to return after a few days of relaxation to Guatemala. What we saw of the professor later made me doubt whether he was quite as innocent as he had claimed.