Getting to Know the General (15 page)

‘The General will be disappointed. He wants you very much to go to Belize.’

‘All right. Then we’ll go on a commercial flight, but it’s too late today, and I have to meet García Márquez at the airport.’

We took García Márquez to the Señorial to taste Flor’s rum punches, and Márquez telephoned to the Cuban Ambassador who invited all three of us to lunch with him at the Pez de Oro – it seemed a rather unsuitable restaurant for a Communist ambassador to choose, and in fact he never turned up. We waited for more than an hour and then García Márquez and I tossed up to see who would pay for lunch and I won. Meanwhile Chuchu had telephoned the General – sometimes I thought of Panama City as one vast tangle of telephone lines and a medley of contradicting voices. The General, Chuchu told me, had said that Price had been expecting us that day in Belize.

‘What about that woman, the ex-consul?’

‘He said nothing about her. Anyway, it’s too late to do anything today.’

On the way home I saw a soldier leading a tiger – or was it a leopard? – on a chain. A mascot of the Tigers?

We didn’t get away next day either, because I was supposed to be meeting some opposition students in a café, but they, like the Cuban Ambassador, never turned up. They probably distrusted me as they knew I was a friend of Omar’s. Only the Ultra with the drooping moustache called Juan arrived unexpectedly with his nice wife, and Chuchu presently joined us. I learnt that Juan, like Rogelio and Chuchu, was a mathematics professor. I seemed surrounded by mathematicians. We had a bad lunch at a Chinese restaurant after bad rum punches at the Holiday Inn where an American naval officer was celebrating all by himself the fact that he had become a great-grandfather. The flight to Belize, Chuchu told me, was settled, but we had to leave very early, and remembering our failure to catch the army plane to Managua I made the Ultra’s wife promise to wake Chuchu.

She didn’t fail me. At 5.15 she drove me and Chuchu to the airport. It proved a slow trek to Belize, with halts at Managua, San José and San Salvador, where the tarmac seemed chock-a-block with fighter planes. I was a little uneasy, as Chuchu had discovered just before we got on the plane that his passport was two years out of date and he had no visa for Belize. However, we were on a mission from the General, and so all was well.

We were met and driven into the city which, poor as it is, had an odd beguiling charm, with wooden houses standing on piles seven feet high above the wet streets and mangrove swamps all around. Perhaps the charm comes from a sense of the temporary, of the precarious, of living on the edge of destruction. The threat is not only from Guatemala, the threat too is from the sea, which seems to be steadily, quietly seeping in, like some guerrilla force which one day will take over the city as it nearly did in 1961 when Hurricane Hattie struck with a tidal wave ten feet high.

The hurricane season was approaching and there were posters on the walls reminiscent of the Blitz days in London and of Kurt Weill’s opera,
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
.

Hurricane Precautions, 1978

ADVICE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC

PHASE I

1 Red Flag –
Preliminary warning

PHASE II (Red I)

PHASE III (Red II)

PHASE IV

A long list of names was given for the hurricane season, most of them oddly unattractive – who chooses them, I wonder? For this season there were Amelia, Bess, Cora, Debra, Ella, Flossie, Greta, Hope, Irma, Juliet, Kendra, Louise, Martha, Noreen, Ora, Paula, Rosalie, Susan, Tanya, Vanessa, Wanda. I felt glad that my stay was a very short one. Only Amelia could possibly concern me: I wouldn’t have to wait until Vanessa and Wanda had passed safely by.

I began to understand, or so I thought, the reason for Omar’s affection for George Price and his menaced city. It was as though Belize formed an essential part of the world Omar Torrijos had chosen to live in, a world of confrontation with superior powers, of the dangers and uncertainties of what the next day would bring: in the case of Belize an invasion from Guatemala or a hurricane from the Atlantic. The sole certainty from one day to another was what we had for lunch – a shrimp salad, the only edible form of food we were able to find in Belize.

After the shrimps were finished we were driven out to Belmopan, the new administrative capital which had been built outside the hurricane zone. It reminded me of a tiny Brasilia, and like Brasilia doomed one day to be as dead as Washington without the beauty.

In his office Price seemed to me a shy, reserved man with the touch of uneasy humility one often finds in priests, as though they are always questioning the reality of their own sincerity, but on the long drive which followed in an old Land Rover – his only car – he began to talk obsessively, like a man who has been starved of self-expression for a long time, of theology, literature, his own life. He shared my interest in the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, who had been silenced by our Church, and Hans Kung, and my admiration for Thomas Mann. We even shared our preference for
Lotte in Weimar
above
The Magic Mountain
.

He drove us towards the Guatemalan frontier, past the Mennonite farms, where we saw stern, closed German faces, no freedom of women there, no intermarriages, and we stopped at the great Mayan ruins of Xunantunich, where Chuchu tried, but this time vainly, to communicate with his ancestors. We left him alone for a while, throwing strange noises against the great unresponsive stones.

Price said, ‘I wrote to you once some years ago.’

I tried to remember for what possible reason the Prime Minister of Belize could have communicated with me, but my memory was as silent as the Mayan temples.

‘I asked you what was in
The Over-night Bag
.’

The Over-night Bag
was the title of a short story which I had written many years before. I was ashamed to think of how many such letters I had dropped into the waste-paper basket unanswered, so that I was relieved when Price said, ‘I was so pleased to get a reply.’

‘What did I say?’

‘You wrote that there was nothing in the bag.’

I supposed it was the exotic address of Belize which had induced me to reply, for the name George Price could have meant nothing to me then. More than ten years had to pass before I found myself involved by Omar in Central American politics. It was strange to think how a trivial reply like that had won me a friend, for in the course of that drive to the Guatemalan frontier and back I felt I had gained his friendship.

I value that friendship, for he is one of the most interesting political leaders in the world today, governing a parish of about 140,000 inhabitants, made up of Creoles, Germans, Mayan Indians, Black Caribs, Arabs, Chinese and Spanish-speaking refugees from Guatemala.

I write ‘a parish’, for it is thus, I believe, that George Price thinks of Belize. Price is a Roman Catholic in religion and a socialist in politics – which he never meant to enter. It was his ambition to be a priest. After school he entered a seminary and only abandoned his studies there because his father died and left a large family for whom he had to provide. He still lives as a priest might live, celibate, in one of the small houses set on piles in Belize City. He returns there from Belmopan every evening and goes to bed around nine at latest, for he rises early at 5.30 in the morning for Mass and his daily Communion, and at 8.30 he is back at his desk in the new capital. He told me of the same dream which he had earlier recounted to V. S. Naipaul when Naipaul visited Belize: how in his sleep he had watched with envy and indignation a priest whom he knew to be an old reprobate saying the Mass and consecrating the Host – a rite which was forbidden to him.

As we drove across Belize I was reminded again and again of the priest who lived in the heart of Price. His handwave closely resembled a blessing and he would stop the old Land Rover whenever he was asked for a lift by an Indian or a black. He was the very opposite of the Mennonite farmers who watched us go by with a glum disapproval of our infidel ways.

At the frontier one defiant sign in Spanish of Belize independence – ‘
Belice Soberano Independiente
’ – faced another Guatemalan sign in English, ‘Belize is Guatemala.’ It amused Price to walk over the frontier with me into the Guatemalan custom house and have a chat with the officials who welcomed him like an old friend.

On the way home we passed by Orange Walk Town, little more than a village, but it possesses a cinema and more than one hotel and Price was planning an international film festival to take place there because it was safely out of the hurricane belt. He told me that he intended to invite world-famous film stars to attend, but I doubt whether this dream of his ever became a reality. I found myself picturing the stars as they sat grandly down to a shrimp meal before attending the cinema which perhaps had seats for two hundred.

At the ford over the New River a peasant stopped us to explain that he had a bad reception on his radio and Price took a note. He took many such notes, and in between we returned to the subject of Hans Küng on infallibility and Thomas Mann’s treatment of Goethe.

That night in Belize City Chuchu and I had a bad dinner of shrimps in a small café over the waterfront and we listened to the angry shouts of a black speaker in the street below. We thought at first that it was a political meeting of the Conservative opposition – we had seen them driving around town in jeeps decorated with Union Jacks – but we were wrong. This was a religious meeting and the speaker was declaiming his views on family morality and how errant husbands were the curse of Belize. He seemed a continent away from the sophistication of Panama.

But next day in the local pages of the press the world broke in – there had been an attempted
coup
in Nicaragua, twelve officers of the National Guard had been arrested and more than a hundred civilians. Somoza was threatening to shoot strikers, and the
Reporter
, the opposition paper of Belize, wrote of a ‘so-called writer called Green’ who had been sent by the Communist Torrijos to see his fellow-Communist Price for reasons which were unknown and certainly sinister.

Chuchu and I read the account of our mission after returning from Corozal, a little town in the north near the Mexican frontier. Price had told me how Doctor Owen, then the British Foreign Secretary, and the British High Commissioner in Belize were anxious to negotiate a settlement with Guatemala by offering the surrender of a slice of land leading to the sea. ‘How can a small country of 140,000 inhabitants “negotiate”?’ he demanded. ‘We can only fight or surrender.’ If they let Guatemala have a piece of the cake Mexico would certainly demand a share too, there at Corozal, and little would be left of Belize. Rumours, often without foundation, of off-shore oil only increased the danger.

The day after Chuchu and I were due to leave for Costa Rica, where Chuchu had a rendezvous with a leading Sandinista. Before we left we sat in at the Prime Minister’s weekly clinic in Belize City and heard him deal with the problems of his constituents. An old peasant woman complained bitterly of a leaking house which was beyond repair, and a policeman was called in who supported her story. Price promised her immediate redress and she clapped her hands and said she would hold a party in the new house to celebrate.

Before going to the airport we had a typical Belize lunch – no choice except that between shrimps and hamburgers – and it was carelessness or Chuchu’s Devil, not the alcohol, that led us, for the second time in my life, to take the wrong plane, so that we found ourselves grounded in San Salvador with hours to wait for a connection. We waited with what particular patience we could muster – nothing would have induced us to leave the safety of the airport, and I prayed that Chuchu’s face was strange to those around us and his connection with the Sandinista rebels unknown.

Chuchu despised Costa Rica, the only Central American state without an army, though it was very conveniently situated for his clandestine activities, and he had several times delivered arms to the Sandinistas on its border with Nicaragua with the help of his second-hand plane. He was even irritated, I think, by the ease and safety of his operations. All the same he had been anxious for a long time to show me Costa Rica, in order that I might understand and share his contempt.

I certainly found San José a dreary city under the soaking rain and I was impatient with one of Chuchu’s dubious contacts who insisted on leading us away from our hotel to a small restaurant of his choice on the other side of the city where we sat down wet through to a meal quite as bad as any in Belize. The Switzerland of Central America, Costa Rica has often been called – a libel on Switzerland.