God's Favorite (20 page)

A foreboding atmosphere of dread and uncertainty hangs over the country. Some days the government declares a state of emergency, other days it rescinds the emergency and tries to carry on as usual. The constant vacillation keeps everyone on edge, waiting for the General to make his next move. One expects that it will come soon.

Until then I remain

Very sincerely yours,

H.-A. Morette

T
HE WEIRDNESS
of the scene was beginning to take a toll on Father Jorge. For the past week he had been sleeping at Roberto's house, along with a handful of other priests and nuns who were offering themselves as a human shield for the dwindling number of sympathizers, reporters, and hangers-on who made up the shrinking resistance movement. There were still perhaps two hundred people in and out of the mansion, however, and some nights they made enough noise that General Noriega was said to be disturbed in his own house, a couple of blocks away.

Nearly everyone here laid claim to some particular spiritual genius. There was an abundance of psychics and astrologers and, for some reason, chiropractors, who were making free spinal adjustments as their contribution to the revolution. Posters of a giggling Sai Baba were taped to the walls. Somewhat to his embarrassment, Father Jorge had been persuaded to give up his shoes and wander about barefoot like everyone else. Roberto had convinced them that only in this way could they keep in tune with the harmony of the earth. Although he recognized the absurdity of the scene, he had to admit that these people were
standing up for their beliefs—unlike most of the conventional religious leaders in the country. Perhaps the revolution required a bit of lunacy to keep itself going. But who was he in this affair? He felt dismayingly sane and ineffectual.

One night, about two in the morning, everyone was suddenly summoned to look at the moon. To Father Jorge's eyes, it was a perfectly normal gibbous moon, and yet nearly twenty people claimed to be able to see the number seven inscribed on it. “Look to the right side, Father, among the shadows. It's very clear. Perhaps you need glasses.” Roberto then brought out the Bible and began to quote from the Book of Revelation, in which Saint John spoke of the seven stars and seven golden candlesticks, and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, and the book with the seven seals, and so on. By the time the group had finished its discussion of numerology and apocalypse, the sun had come up.

Father Jorge had undertaken to have the weapons removed from the house so that the government would not have the excuse to use military force. He filled a station wagon with pistols and automatic weapons and even a bazooka that a PDF defector had smuggled into the house, and he made sure that the press was there to record it when the weapons were taken away to a neutral spot. He wanted the world to know that the occupants were defenseless and did not intend to resist with force.

Therefore he was dismayed to discover Roberto wandering around the kitchen at five in the morning, wearing his robes and carrying an AK-47.

“I thought we had an understanding,” said Father Jorge.

“Yes, we do, of course,” Roberto replied, completely unabashed. “But last night I arrested my personal bodyguards and confiscated their arms.”

“Why would you do that?”

“They were PDF. They could not be totally trusted. I let them go. We are now completely without protection. Only a few weapons remain, enough perhaps to defend the inner perimeter, if it should come to that.”

The kitchen stank of leftover pizza. Father Jorge rummaged through the dirty dishes looking for the coffeepot. “Shall I make you a cup?” he asked Roberto.

“I'm only allowed juice.” Roberto was now so thin he looked completely starved.

“You make me grateful that my vows are limited to poverty and chastity,” said Father Jorge. “If I had to give up coffee as well, I'd never have made a priest.”

Roberto pushed an empty pizza box onto the floor and sat down. “Last night we had a secret council. We assembled some very interesting intelligence on General Noriega.”

“Ah.”

“As you know, he has always kept the details of his background classified.”

“But we do know about his illegitimacy and the godmother who raised him and such things.”

“Of course. But the really useful information he has kept to himself. He would hate for it to fall into the hands of people who know what to do with it.”

“What sort of information are you speaking of?”

Roberto leaned forward and said in a quiet and meaningful tone, “His birth date, for instance.”

“His birth date?”

“A state secret.”

“I didn't realize.”

“Fortunately, because I have my own contacts in intelligence, we have been able to learn some interesting things. The General is an Aquarius.”

“Really?”

“It makes sense, doesn't it? Smart, nervous, a quick but unstable mind, a modernist who thrives on change.”

“So you know the date of his birth?”

“Not only the day. This is important, but it is not everything. We have managed to work it out so that we are within several hours of the exact
moment
of his birth. We deduced that Scorpio
must be his ascendant star—he being an extremist in all things. Scorpio is also associated with strong psychic powers, which is why he is so interested in espionage. He was born to be either a great mystic or a great criminal.”

Father Jorge watched the coffeemaker as it sputtered and spewed.

“I'm sure this is a breakthrough,” Roberto said after a moment. “If Tony knew we had this information . . .” Then he laughed gleefully. “Oh, man, if he knew!”

T
ONY SOAKED IN
the hot, sulfurous vat, mud dripping from his hair. The hut in the jungle was dark, but light broke through the cracks in the palm-thatch walls, and he could see little Indian children peeking through, trying to catch a glimpse of their naked leader.

The old bare-breasted Indian crone who was bathing him roughly slapped yellow branches of a guayacan tree across his shoulders. Tony grunted. “Enough,” he said in the language of his mother's people.

“Wait,” the woman commanded. “Takes time. The water makes you powerful.” Her torso was painted in geometric designs and her breasts drooped down to her navel.

“And for sex, it's good, eh?”

The crone laughed, a weird pagan whinny. Tony imitated her, which caused her to laugh louder, and then the children outside began laughing as well, like donkeys braying.

“Tony, the presentation was supposed to be at two,” said Dr. Demos, who sat in the corner of the hut, mopping perspiration from his face. His shirt was completely soaked through. A small fire flickered in the hearth, where the woman heated more water for Tony's therapeutic bath. “It's almost four. We've been here for three hours.”

“She said it takes time,” Tony said. In fact, he could feel the healing power of the minerals seeping into his throbbing bones.
Outside, his bodyguards chased away the children with hisses and a few boots in the kidneys.

“This is my village, you know,” said Tony.

The doctor nodded sleepily and fanned himself.

For some reason Tony had felt the need to return to his birthplace, and so he had accepted the invitation to speak at the dedication of a new postal station. As he had helicoptered over the rain forest, it had seemed that the entire jungle was aflame. Lent began the traditional time of burning and clearing, and plumes of smoke reached all the way to the clouds. Through the haze he could see the narrow, rotting Pan-American Highway turning to gravel and then to mud and finally expiring in the swamps and the overwhelming complexity of the jungle. From the top of Canada to the tip of South America, the only gap in the highway was here, in Darién Province. Modernity, what was left of it, stopped at his little home village of Yaviza, where the Chico and Chucunaque Rivers flowed into the broad and turbulent Río Tuira. Beyond Yaviza there were no roads and few houses other than the palm huts of the naked Chocos, who still hunted with arrows and spears. It was a paradise for monkeys, mosquitoes, and anthropologists.

“Whenever I feel lost, when I need to make a spiritual connection, I return here to my roots,” said Tony. “I don't know, for some reason it relaxes me.”

“You should take the Valium I offered you,” said the doctor. “You're tense, your blood pressure is high. These folk remedies can only do so much, Tony.”

Out of the murk, an old man stepped forward with his hat in his hand. His face was a wrinkled work of nature, like a jagged piece of driftwood on a beach, where the elements have had leisure to work their influence. “General, we are very honored,” the old man began.

“What do you want, Uncle?”

“The children of the village have no schoolbooks. Many times we have asked the government for assistance—”

“Take a note, Doctor,” Tony said to Demos. “ ‘Schoolbooks for Yaviza.' There, it's done. All Panamanian children should be educated. This is Tony Noriega's dream. So, what else do you want, Uncle?”

“That is all,” said the relieved old man, who was already bowing and backing out of the hut.

“No offense, Uncle, but you ask for too little. You don't realize that you are already very rich. Everyone in this village is wealthy beyond their dreams.”

The old man looked dumbfounded.

“Water!” Tony explained, splashing the rotten liquid. “Healing water! You can
sell
this, Uncle! Have you never heard of Lourdes? People will come here to be cured. You will build motels, restaurants, casinos. You know about Club Med?”

The old man shook his head no.

“Club Med! Club Med! Right here, Club Med Panama! Why not? Why not
Disneyland
? In the jungle. Here!”

The old man bowed again and backed out of the hut. He looked at the dirt roads and the chickens pecking at the ground and the Indians sitting on their haunches in the shade. They looked questioningly at the old man.

“He says Walt Disney is coming,” the dazed old man said.

Tony's camera crew was waiting to record this visit for his weekly television show,
Everything for My Country,
which he co-hosted with Felicidad. When the General finally appeared, rinsed and dressed, a bit sapped from the bath, the crew began shooting video of him walking among the Indians toward the tiny town square, which was opposite a falling-down Catholic church. “This is still the frontier,” said Tony into the camera. “It's a trading town. Over here”—he pointed to the mud-colored river—“the Indians arrive in their wooden canoes, carrying yams and plantains. Cargo ships travel upriver from the Gulf of San Miguel. Now that we have completed the Pan-American Highway to this point, you see lorries arriving with goods from the city. Yaviza is entering the modern world. One day soon we will
complete the highway across the swamp, and then the Americas will finally be joined.”

“Is it okay to show their tits on TV, General?” the soundman asked.

About twenty Choco maidens were waiting under a tent for the ceremony to begin. They wore colorful wraparound skirts, but they were naked above the waist. They had painted their bodies with the black juice of the jagua plant. The patterns were mostly geometric—rows of equilateral triangles across their torsos, complicated bands of interlocking
V
s twining around their arms, and bull's-eye circles around their nipples.

“Because they are Indians, yes, it's okay,” Tony said, making up the rule for the occasion.

Tony sat in one of the aluminum lawn chairs that had been set up for the dignitaries. Next to him was the village cacique, Pericles García, dressed in a red loincloth and army boots. Tony had known him when they were boys here and used to swim together in the Río Tuira. They ate a feast of catfish soup and fried iguanas with rice, washed down with chicha, the Indian moonshine, which gave Tony an instant headache.

In addition to the Indians, Yaviza was populated by black shopkeepers who were descendants of escaped slaves, a few white missionaries, the odd American scholar or drug agent or rain-forest environmentalist, and an abundance of end-of-the-road riffraff. It was the kind of place where people went to get lost. Colombian guerrillas routinely sneaked across the border to hide out. There were still a few prospectors looking for gold, and some rubber tappers, and a delegation of government agriculture inspectors who were slaughtering all the pigs in the province because of hoof-and-mouth disease.

The new postal station was little more than a cinder-block depository where the mailman would come once a week to collect letters. Pericles made a brief speech, then the girls danced. As they swayed back and forth, a shaman chanted and waved carved batons containing the spirits of the forest, which he beseeched
to protect the mail. At the end, a delegation of schoolchildren came forward with letters to send. Tony patted them on their heads and dumped the letters in the mail slot.

“Great stuff, General,” the producer said. She was a brittle woman who never took off her sunglasses. “The whole country will feel good about this.”

“Tony, have you got a few minutes?” the cacique said when the ceremony was over. The two old friends walked down to the wharf where they used to swim, followed discreetly by Tony's bodyguards. Beside the river were the vine-covered ruins of a sixteenth-century fortress built by the conquistadors.

“Remember when we used to climb those walls?” Tony said. He rarely felt nostalgic about old times, but many years had passed since he had returned to his village, and he wondered at the passage of time and at the distance he had traveled. He was also feeling a little woozy from the chicha.

“Many ghosts live here,” Pericles said. “They come here to rest. Some say Balboa visits this place. One day, maybe your spirit will be here, too.”