Getting to Know the General (10 page)

‘Three o’clock.’

‘OK.’

‘But I guarantee nothing.’

We felt sure that he had no intention of being there on Sunday so we planned to turn up unexpectedly at five the next day.

In the city Chuchu and I went to the Señorial where we got excellent rum punches from Flor whose honesty and intelligence still scared Chuchu.

Chuchu’s sex life was not going well. His girl friend – but which one I couldn’t make out even at the time – was pregnant with only about three weeks to go. ‘Now she begins to hate me,’ he said. I suggested it was perhaps a bit too late in the pregnancy for love-making, but that was an idea he would not accept. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘She’s very clever and she manages very well.’ I had so far only met two of his children. I believed there were at least two others by an earlier marriage – and, of course, there was the child by the poet who owned the refrigerator and this new arrival. But I was never to know the exact origins of Chuchu’s family or the number of his children, nor was he himself quite sure. To a friend who questioned him he said, ‘About twelve, I think.’

Before dinner we picked up a Chilean couple whom Chuchu described as ultra-left. The man had the kind of drooping, well-meaning moustache which seems often a mark of the left wing just as a short military-style moustache belongs to the right. Chuchu had rescued the man on an occasion when he had been falsely framed for assault, or so he claimed, by the G-2 (the security police) along with a Christian Democrat leader. He went into hiding and Chuchu had taken his case to the General. The General gave a judgement worthy of Solomon. The man could either leave the country for Costa Rica, in the General’s own car for safety, or he could surrender to the police in the company of Chuchu to ensure that he would suffer no ill-treatment. He decided to surrender and was condemned to a month’s imprisonment, not in gaol but in the comfortable refugee apartment run by Chuchu, the Pigeon House. His wife insisted to me over dinner at the Marisco that they were not really Ultras. They had escaped from Chile at the time of Pinochet’s coup.

By a curious coincidence the head of the G-2 was dining at the Marisco that night in a private room and Chuchu wanted to introduce me to him, but the idea frightened the couple. ‘Another time,’ the man with the weak moustache implored. ‘Not when you are with us.’

That evening Chuchu described a daylight mugging which he had witnessed in the city. Two tourists were being beaten up in a street of the old town as he drove by. He stopped his car and intended to fire a shot in the air, but the men fled when they saw his revolver. ‘Why didn’t you fire at their legs?’ I asked.

‘Why should I have hurt them? They were only after money. They were poor.’

This was Panama.

To Punta Chane next day – an extraordinary non-functioning project backed by the Bank of Boston. An elaborate road system had been laid down with electric light standards and roundabouts, posters showed the future situation of hotels and banks, and yet not even a foundation stone had been laid – the road and the roundabouts led only to one or two shacks by the sea and there was no sign of work in progress. Then we drove into the hills to El Valle where in my
South American Handbook
I had read that there were trees with square trunks and golden frogs, a beautiful ride ending in disappointment – no square trees to be found and no golden frogs.

I had seen little of Omar so far on this visit. I had the impression that deliberately he was leaving me alone to see what I wanted to see, to get to know Panama in my own way, uninfluenced by him, to make my own contacts with the Sandinistas and the other refugees who had come to Panama for safety.

After my return from El Valle I had my first encounter with the Sandinistas. A young Nicaraguan doctor, Camilo, whose brother had been killed by Somoza, invited Chuchu and me to dinner. His brother had been the guerilla leader, Commandant Cero, a title which passed to his successor. Chuchu had told me before we went to the house that Somoza had sworn that he would drink Cero’s blood, and Camilo was now living with his brother’s Panamanian girlfriend, María Isabel. I promised not to show any knowledge of their relationship. He said I would see a photograph of the dead brother on the wall.

The photo was there all right, but there was no secrecy about their relationship. The girl was beautiful and intelligent, yet for some reason there was antagonism between her and Chuchu. Perhaps Chuchu was a little jealous of her closeness to the young Sandinista. Moreover, Chuchu had been born in Nicaragua, and the girl’s grandfather had been a president of Panama, and perhaps his Mayan blood was suspicious of pure Spanish blood. He had no reason to distrust her loyalty to the Sandinista cause, but he may well have had cause to distrust her prudence. At dinner with us there was another young Sandinista, Rogelia, a mathematician like Chuchu. He was married to an Italian girl, Lidia, and Chuchu’s friendship with them was to complicate still further his sexual life, for he was to marry Lidia’s sister Silvana and start yet another family.

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.