Getting to Know the General

GETTING TO KNOW THE GENERAL

Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on
The Times
. He established his reputation with his fourth novel,
Stamboul Train
. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in
Journey Without Maps
, and on his return was appointed film critic of the
Spectator
. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote
The Lawless Roads
and, later, his famous novel
The Power and the Glory
.
Brighton Rock
was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the
Spectator
. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel,
The Heart of the Matter
, set in West Africa.

As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography --
A Sort of Life
,
Ways of Escape
and
A World of My Own
(published posthumously)--two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections
Reflections
and
Mornings in the Dark
. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and
The Third Man
was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. Graham Greene died in April 1991.

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Epub ISBN: 9781409020226

Version 1.0

  

To the Friends of my Friend,
Omar Torrijos,
in Nicaragua, El Salvador
and Panama

CONTENTS

PART I

1976

1

In the winter of 1976 I was surprised and a little mystified to receive a telegram in Antibes from Panama signed by a certain Señor V – a name strange to me – telling me that I had been invited by General Omar Torrijos Herrera to visit Panama as his guest and that a ticket would be sent to me at the flight bureau of my choice.

To this day I don’t know what had been in the mind of the General when the invitation was dispatched, but I felt no hesitation in accepting. I had quite forgotten that General Torrijos who had so nearly involved John Sterling in a perilous enterprise, but I knew that Panama, more even than Spain, had persistently haunted my imagination. As a child I had watched a pageant play written by Stephen Phillips in which, on the big stage of Drury Lane, Drake was shown attacking a very realistic mule train as it passed by on the gold route from Panama City to Nombre de Dios and I knew much of Newbolt’s good-bad poem
Drake’s Drum
by heart.

What did it matter that Newbolt’s poem was inaccurate and that it was in Portobelo Bay, a few miles distant from Nombre de Dios, that Drake’s body was sunk into the sea?

For a child the glamour of piracy lay around Panama in the story of how Sir Henry Morgan attacked and destroyed Panama City, and when I was older I had read of the disastrous Scottish settlement on the edge of the deep jungles of Darién, which remain to this day for the greater part pathless and unchanged.

A time was to come when in the city of David I noticed that a black security guard of General Torrijos had the name Drake pinned on his shirt.

For amusement I asked him, ‘Are you a descendant of Sir Francis Drake?’

‘Perhaps, ma’an,’ he replied with a wide grin of pleasure, and I recited part of Newbolt’s poem to him.

‘I’ve done it at last,’ I thought at that moment, ‘I really am here in Panama.’

I had by this time seen what little was left of the gold route, and soon I would be visiting Nombre de Dios, now only an Indian village with no access by road even for a mule, and I already felt oddly at home in this small remote country of my dreams, as I had never felt in any country of Latin America before. Another year, and it would seem quite natural for me to be travelling to Washington carrying a Panamanian diplomatic passport as an accredited member of the Panamanian delegation for the signing of the Canal Treaty with the United States. One of the great qualities of General Torrijos was his sense of humour.

2

After sending my reply I consulted my friend Bernard Diederich, whom I had known in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He was now the
Time
correspondent for Central America. In his reply he advised a certain caution towards Señor V, who was apparently one of the General’s counsellors, and he proposed to come from Mexico City where he now lived with his Haitian wife and his children to meet me in Panama.

I chose to fly from Amsterdam direct to Panama in order to avoid changing planes in the United States, where I used to have visa trouble, and I little thought how familiar I would become with the long route of over fifteen hours – Amsterdam to Panama City with three halts between.

For the first time in many years, since I had been over-saturated by air travel to Africa, Malaya and Vietnam, I felt again a certain sense of adventure. Why otherwise would I have made trivial notes in a diary from the moment I arrived in Amsterdam?

The city was well enough known to me from the period in 1946 when I would go there frequently in my role as a publisher to repurchase English paper which had been exported from England where it was rationed, paper which we badly needed to print our bestsellers – the Bible and the novels of a certain American lady called Mrs Parkinson Keyes whose books I found quite unreadable. I would pay my hotel bill in those days, or at least a large part of it, in cigarettes which I passed to the barman at the Hotel Amstel. There were lavish dinners and a lot of Bols gin drunk with printers and their wives and I soon learnt that the comradely thing to do was to slap my hostess’s backside as she sat down.

Schiphol Airport is surely one of the most comfortable airports in the world. On the ground floor there seems to be a sofa for every passenger, and three competing diamond shops (one of them advertising itself in Japanese) add to the air of leisure and luxury. Thanks to General Torrijos I was travelling first class so that I had the use of the Van Gogh lounge with its deep armchairs and heavily laden buffet. Even several hours of waiting passed pleasantly in those surroundings, and by the time I got on the plane I felt unusually happy, especially as I prefer Bols to any other gin.

‘Young or old Bols?’ an air hostess asked me as soon as we had taken to the air.

‘Which is best?’

‘I don’t know, but my father – and he’s as old as you are – prefers the young.’

I tried both and I disagreed with her father. I stuck to the old Bols all the way to Panama.

The sense of excitement grew, and a sense of fun which I had never known when I flew out to the French war in Vietnam, to the Emergency in Malaya, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, a leper colony in the Congo. These had been serious journeys – this one was not. I thought of it as only a rather comic adventure, inspired by an invitation from a complete stronger which had come to me out of the blue.

Fear can be easily experienced, but fun is hard to come by in old age, so I already felt a sense of gratitude to General Omar Torrijos. His title in Panama, I learnt later, was Chief of the Revolution, and he was the real ruler of the country. The only privilege of the President, so far as I could make it out on that first voyage, was to have a reserved parking place for his car at the Hotel Panama.

The sense of fun, however, faded on arrival. Two polite strangers met me at the airport – the dubious Señor V, they told me, was for a day or two in New York, but his car was at my disposal. They took me to the Panama Hotel (the name, alas, is changed now to the Hilton) and left me in a bedroom sixty feet long (I paced it out). No Diederich was there to greet me and I felt very much alone as I had little Spanish with which to communicate. In Mexico nearly forty years before I had been able, after twenty Berlitz lessons, to manage the present tense, though the future and the past were beyond my powers, but now even the present tense was mostly forgotten. I was beginning to feel shy of the mysterious General who was my host and rather foolish in this enormous room.

I turned my watch back, and as it was only breakfast time in Panama and I had already lunched on the plane, I tried to sleep. Señor V’s chauffeur woke me – he didn’t speak a word of English and I asked him to come back at 2.30 Panama time, indicating the figures on my watch. Diederich, I had been informed at the airport, was due from Mexico at one. The chauffeur came promptly back at 2.30, but still there was no Diederich. I told the man to come back at ten the next day. I was feeling gloomy. All sense of adventure had gone and as for fun . . . I began to hate my enormous room.