Getting to Know the General (7 page)

I had told the General about our first visit, and he remembered 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 known 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.

The party quickly cheered up. The leading Communist in Panama proved very friendly. He told me how his party supported the General’s policy of ‘prudence’. A young black architect agreed with me about the stupidity of high-rise apartments in the poor quarter of El Chorillo – even the slum houses of Hollywood were to be preferred, he said. I was confused by his reference to Hollywood which I associated with film stars rather than with slums. ‘The people in Hollywood are attached to their houses,’ he told me. ‘The conditions are terrible, but all the same they are homes.’ I realized tardily that Hollywood must be the name given to a very poor part of the city.

Chuchu nudged me. ‘There’s Koster.’

The novelist – or CIA agent – was circulating assiduously, drawing ever nearer, except when he made a sideways dash to refill his glass. The National Guard had done us well and I was feeling a little tipsy myself by this time. Koster reached me and held out his hand.

‘Koster,’ he said.

‘The old goat,’ I introduced myself.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Chuchu told me that you wanted to know what the old goat was doing here.’

‘I never said such a thing.’

He moved quickly away to hide himself among the other guests and according to Chuchu he spread a rather strange story that I was a well-known homosexual. Are goats homosexual?

Ten o’clock was long past: the drinks were inexhaustible: and at midnight guests were still arriving. Feeling a discourteous host, I slunk away with Chuchu and his companion, the somewhat haggard woman whom Chuchu fancied, the refugee from Argentina and the dictatorship of Videla. There were many such refugees in Panama City and there was a special flat for their use, known locally as the Pigeon House, for when they had found work or entry into another country they flew away. Chuchu supported them out of the General’s private account.

Chuchu had confided to me over the drinks that the only wife he had ever really loved (she was a legal wife, too) was arriving next day from the States where she lived with her new husband, a professor, to see her mother and she was bringing with her Chuchu’s two children whom he had not seen for seven years. Her husband was following her in a few days, but I could tell that Chuchu all the same had hopes, and it was obvious that the Argentinian woman was of little importance to him for the time being.

The day after the party one of my ambitions was fulfilled. Chuchu took me to Portobelo. It wasn’t Nombre de Dios, which I was not to see for another two years, but it was in Portobelo Bay that Drake’s body was buried. An American officer was aiding the Panamanians in what proved an unsuccessful search there for his coffin.

Portobelo is fantastically beautiful. Little seems altered since Drake’s day when the town stood at the end of the gold route from Panama City. Here is still the treasure house where the gold awaited shipment to Spain, the three forts guarding the town, the ramparts which are lined now with vultures: vultures too were sitting on and around the cross of the cathedral. From the door of the cathedral one could see nothing of the village, only the jungle descending like a curtain, dark and impenetrable, to within fifty yards of the door. There seemed little room among the stone ruins even for the small population of two thousand. The statue of a black Christ presided over the altar. It had been shipwrecked on the way to the Viceroy of Peru and salvaged by the Indians.

Back in Panama City I lay down for a siesta, but it was not to be. Chuchu woke me to say that the General wanted us to come over to Rory González’s house – Mr Bunker and the Americans had left after only a few days on Contadora island and the General was celebrating.