The Seeds of Fiction (30 page)

On 4 December 1976 my flight to Panama City from Mexico City was terribly late. I worried about Graham. If things went wrong I would feel responsible. I hoped someone would be at Panama City's Tocumen airport to meet him. Omar's evanescent public relations man Velarde did not answer my frantic telephone calls from the Mexico City airport. I had visions of Graham stranded, alone at the airport, waiting. Velarde was notorious for operating on Latin time, which assumes delayed arrivals for every event.

When I finally reached the El Panama Hotel after a three-hour flight Graham had already checked in. He had been met by Velarde after all. He brushed aside my apologies and said he was relieved that I had arrived safe and sound. He had aged well. He was still as lean as an athlete, with plenty of bounce in his step. It had been nearly twelve years since we had last seen each other, after I bade him goodbye in Santo Domingo. His letters in the interim had made it seem like yesterday. He was a wonderful pen pal, never failing to answer correspondence. Like travel, he said, letter-writing was a form of therapy.

As we chatted I realized something else. He had mellowed; he was much more talkative, open and humorous than he had been in the 1950s and 1960s. But he was still shy with strangers, and he could still be finicky. His driver
spoke no English, and Graham, who spoke virtually no Spanish, didn't think he could get along with him. Nor was Graham too happy with Mr Velarde. (Graham's opinion of Velarde was shared by many foreign correspondents who covered Panama.)

Travel seemed to energize him, and he dismissed the idea of jet lag. He was anxious about the chances for a new Canal agreement. The Panamanians were on tenterhooks because the newly elected US President Jimmy Carter had said during his campaign that he would never give up US control of the Canal Zone. None the less, signals out of Washington suggested that the ‘never' had only been campaign rhetoric.

Meanwhile Torrijos had just returned from a non-aligned nations' conference in Sri Lanka to find troubling headlines at home. Students had rioted over an increase in the price of milk and rice. A Zonian policeman — a tall, skinny American named William Drummond, one of the more vocal opponents of a new treaty — had filed a civil suit in the Zone's US district court to block Canal negotiations. Three days later a series of bombs exploded in the Zone. The first partially demolished Drummond's car. Some Americans pointed the finger at the Panamanian National Guard, saying it was an effort to intimidate Drummond, while Omar's inner circle suspected it was all part of a
gringo
plot to destabilize his government. Washington believed that the National Guard had had a hand in the bombings in an attempt to speed up negotiations. Omar, angry at the suggestion that his Guardia was involved, ordered his spy chief, Colonel Manuel Noriega, to go to Washington and talk to the CIA chief, George H.W. Bush, to assure him it wasn't so. ‘It seems like a good time to visit,' Graham chuckled. ‘I'm looking forward to meeting the General. He must have his hands full.'

Next morning Graham was up early and already in the hotel lobby when I came down to meet him. We had been instructed to wait for a driver. Appointments, I warned Graham, had a habit of changing in Panama at the last moment, and the General was notorious for altering his itinerary without warning. We would be playing it by ear. Smelling adventure, Graham was in high spirits — cheerful at breakfast and cheerful while waiting for the driver. We sank into the comfortable chairs on the El Panama's open veranda, enjoying the delicious tropical morning and watching the cars come and go.

After a while a man approached. ‘Greene?' he asked.

‘Yes,' we both said at the same time.

The man motioned to us, and we followed him to a Jeep Cherokee. He said nothing more and we got in the vehicle and started off. I played tour guide, pointing out places of interest to Graham as we drove through the city. ‘This is the old Panama City,' I explained, waving towards some ruins. ‘It was set on fire and destroyed by the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan. He sacked Panama
City in the seventeenth century. Afterwards the city was moved to where it is today.'

Suddenly I realized that something was amiss. ‘Wait a minute,' I interrupted the driver. ‘I thought the General said we were going to Contadora.' We were driving in the wrong direction.

The driver made a sharp U-turn and sped back to the hotel. The driver had picked up the wrong Greene. He left us with a flurry of embarrassed apologies and went in search of the other Greene.

Graham and I laughed. We could imagine the headlines: ‘Author Graham Greene and Journalist Abducted from Panama Hotel Lobby.' Normally I was careful to take only
bona fide
taxis at Latin American airports because kidnapping was becoming a growth industry with leftist guerrillas seeking funds for their respective war chests. Graham found the whole strange episode hilarious. Gazing after the driver as he disappeared into the hotel, he said, ‘I wonder if I should follow him and meet the other Greene. You know there is another Graham Greene, an impersonator, and I have been unable to catch up with him.'

We sat back on the hotel's veranda. Graham rubbed his hands and intertwined his long thin fingers. ‘The day is starting out well.'

Later, when we obtained a Panama Canal Company telephone directory, we found half a dozen Greenes listed in the Panama Canal Zone. Graham commented that they could be the West Indian branch of his family.

Another driver arrived, dressed in the uniform of Panama's Guardia Nacional. He was short with a lined, leathery Mayan face. His hair was closely cropped, military-style, and tinged with grey, and he wore a sergeant's stripes.

‘Sergeant José Jesús Martínez,' he said in excellent English. ‘At your service.' He turned out to be the correct driver. He drove us the relatively short distance to the house of Torrijos's friend Rory Gonzalez on Calle Cincuenta. He ushered us to the door, saluted and departed.

It was as if we had entered a wax museum. The two figures in the over-furnished sitting room sat motionless. They appeared to have struggled out of bed and collapsed into the easy chairs. One of the figures, Rory Gonzalez, broke the silence. ‘Good morning.' He spoke in perfect English. The other was wearing a bathrobe with a towel hanging from his shoulders. He was dishevelled and clearly suffering the devil's hangover. This was General Torrijos.

There were no introductions. We sat, and I leaned my head towards the General to let Graham know this was Torrijos, the Maximum Leader of the Revolution. Graham was making his own deductions. After a while the General got to his feet, nodded towards us and left the room. We were served coffee, and about fifteen minutes later Omar returned. He had showered and was wearing sports clothes. With a wave, he gave the order for us all to head for the small Paitilla airport.

Waiting in the small terminal for a propeller plane of Panama's internal Perlas airline to be readied, Torrijos puffed on a cigar, obviously lost in thought, or still struggling with his hangover. He had said barely a word to Graham and me. Instead, we chatted with Rory.

A small boy suddenly ran up and wrapped his arms around the General. Taken by surprise, Omar pretended to be angry. ‘You don't know me!'

The lad laughed and pointed a finger at him. ‘You are Omar Torrijos.'

Such was Torrijos's relationship with his people. The General asked the boy where he was going, and when he said ‘To Contadora' Omar invited the child and his family to accompany us in the plane. The boy cheered, and his parents thanked the General and accepted the ride.

When we arrived on Contadora the businessman Gabriel Lewis Galindo, who was developing the island, welcomed us. We sat under a young coconut tree outside the Galleon seafood restaurant and drank rum punches. I could tell Omar and Graham were sizing each other up. The General spoke no English, so the job of translator fell to me.

The General told Graham of his aversion to intellectuals. Graham declared he was not an intellectual, putting emphasis on the word ‘not', and adding, ‘I do not aspire to being an intellectual.' I figured they were both on safe ground. They had discovered a mutual dislike.

Suddenly, Torrijos stopped talking in mid-sentence. We followed his stare to a lithesome Latin beauty with the figure of a model who had stepped out of the restaurant, removed her sandals and was wriggling her toes in the sand. She gave out a little squeal of pleasure at the contact with the hot sand. Then she slowly climbed the hill, her hips swaying invitingly, towards Gabriel Lewis's bungalow. We all sat transfixed. Then, as if hypnotized, the General rose to his feet and without a word or a glance marched up the hill after her.

Graham looked at me and chuckled.

‘She is a Colombian singer,' Roy explained. ‘He listened to her sing last night in Panama City. She's hot stuff.'

We ordered another round of rum punches and drank to the General's health.

We heard the drone of the little plane returning to the island from a trip to the mainland. A short while later Jorge Carrasco showed up. Carrasco, a heavy-set and well-known presenter of television evening news, was also Omar's official translator. His obesity was a topic of jest among his Panamanian viewers, but he knew how to keep his mouth shut off-camera. He had had the task of translating for the Panamanian negotiators of the Canal Treaty.

Graham didn't like Carrasco's arrival. The four of us — Graham, Omar, Rory and I — had been getting on fine. None the less we made small talk with Carrasco. About half an hour later the General returned; beads of sweat
glistened on his forehead. He picked up the conversation where he had left off. I could see that Graham was impressed. He later told me it was like his meeting with the Mexican rebel, General Saturnino Cedillo, at his ranch in San Luis Potosí nearly forty years earlier, which Graham recounted in
The Lawless Roads.
There was the same unhurriedness about both generals.

Torrijos himself led Graham on a tour of Contadora. The conversation turned to the newly elected US President Carter. ‘What kind of man is this man, the farmer from Georgia?' the General wanted to know.

‘We will have to wait and see,' Graham replied cautiously. ‘He does appear to be much more sympathetic than his predecessor.'

When the waiter at the Galleon came to check on us, I declined another round of rum punches.

‘Absolute rubbish!' Graham snapped.

‘The sun is too high,' I said, and explained how the strong rum punches in the tropics can glaze the eyes and cloud the brain of even a dedicated drinker.

Graham disagreed, and the General agreed with Graham.

I must concede that even after several rounds Graham remained fresh and alert. He never required a siesta, even after our lobster lunch accompanied by a bottle of wine. In many respects he defied all the usual medical advice and expressed horror at the idea of engaging in any special physical exercise. He was healthy, and his loping gait kept comfortably apace with Omar's long strides.

Walking us to the plane, Torrijos was obviously gratified. He and Graham had hit it off, and the small isthmus country's economic woes and the seemingly never-ending Canal negotiations had been momentarily forgotten.

Graham was excited. Back in Panama City he said he liked the General and believed his political compass was pointed in the right direction. I had taken a number of black-and-white photographs, one of which was eventually to become the cover of his book
Getting to Know the General.
I telexed a brief news item to
Time
the following day, and air-expressed the pictures to the magazine in New York. The item appeared in the 20 December 1976 issue in the ‘People' section:

It was like a scene out of a Graham Greene novel: a Central-American strongman and an Oxford-educated Briton sat beneath a coconut tree on a tropical beach philosophizing. The strongman, Panamanian Dictator Omar Torrijos, noted that both their fathers had been teachers, and that he had left his family at 17. The Briton, author Greene himself, mused between sips of rum punch: ‘You should thank God you did escape from home, because if you hadn't you might be an intellectual today.' Greene quickly added: ‘I am not, because to be an intellectual is rather academic. A creative writer seems to me to
be
emotionally involved, and that is not being an intellectual. They are people who regard from
a distance and don't involve themselves. When an intellectual like Kissinger gets involved in events, it's a disaster.' ‘Intellectuals,' added Omar, ‘are like fine glass, crystal glass, which can be cracked by a sound. Panama is rock and earth!'

Before setting out to show Graham Panama City I suggested Mass at the Church of Christ the Redeemer, built in the
barrio
of San Miguelito by a group of progressive Chicago priests. Their
misa tipica
(folklore Mass) with guitars and bongo drums was one of the first to be celebrated in the hemisphere. When I finished quoting the pastor, Father Mahon, as saying that ‘the old Roman Catholic service had lost its spiritual appeal and reflected the monastic mentality of the Renaissance', Graham's expression told me I had forgotten his preference for the Tridentine rite said in Latin. So we skipped Mass and instead visited Panama's ancient Cathedral of San José in the old section of the city. While on the topic of religion, the subject of the priest in
The Honorary Consul
came up. Graham said, ‘My priest is not, as some have suggested, modelled after Father Camilo Torres.' (Camilo Torres was a Colombian priest who died fighting as a guerrilla in 1966.) ‘As a revolutionary Camilo is on par with Che Guevara, and they are much more romantic than my priest, for whom I invented a little personal theology.'

Graham was like a schoolboy on a journey of discovery. The days were far too short for him. I couldn't believe a man who had travelled as much as he had could still be so enthusiastic about new surroundings. His curiosity and enthusiasm were unabated by Panama's heavy humidity and heat. He seemed to want to see everything, including Colon, the city on the Atlantic side of the isthmus.