The Seeds of Fiction (33 page)

I was finally able to assure Graham that his
New York Review
article, entitled ‘The Country with Five Frontiers', which I had taken with me to Panama, was a hit not only with Chuchu and the General but among Panamanians who read Chuchu's published Spanish translation. The article was impressively accurate and generous, the General said. And I had watched Chuchu waxing ecstatic after reading the piece. Graham need not have been concerned. Indeed his essay on Panama was remarkably free of mistakes, as was the picture he drew of the General and his struggle
vis-a-vis
the United States:

Panama is not an insignificant banana republic with politicians and presidents for sale, nor is General Torrijos in any way a typical military dictator. Panama is dangerous and so is Torrijos, a man fighting to exercise prudence as Fidel Castro advised him, but a man bored with prudence — you can see it in the lines of weariness around the eyes, the sudden wicked smile which greets a phrase that pleases him. ‘You can choose your enemies, but you can't choose your friends.'

General Torrijos in seven years has given Panama a national pride. It would be a tragedy for Latin America if he fell a victim to the impatience of the left or the chicanery of the right. A guerrilla war is less to be feared than the sudden limited violence which kills one man and solves nothing … As Chuchu said, as he regretfully laid the revolver, which he always carried in his pocket on our travels, down on his bedside table, ‘A revolver is no defence.'

Later that year I wrote to Graham and informed him I was setting out on a reporting trip to the Southern Cone of South America.
Time
had offered me the Buenos Aires bureau (and I could move it to Rio de Janeiro if I wished). Graham wrote that he was

envious … What a trip you are having! I only spent an unhappy ten days in Rio once with a Pen Congress and decided never to go to another. I and Alan Pryce-Jones bathed alone on the Copacabana beach with nobody in sight and only a flag which we realized after a little meant that bathing was dangerous! I have always wanted to see Manaus, but your account of the tourists puts me off. I see that Air France runs a direct flight there now. Brasilia I hated but I suppose it's changed a lot since those days in the sixties. Paraguay I loved, but I don't think [then dictator Alfredo] Stroessner was pleased with my presence there.

I've finished my novel [
The Human Factor
] which I don't like but which has met with the approval of others who are perhaps better judges. I am now free to contemplate the Panama book and a lot depends on whether I decide to go ahead with that. If I do decide then I must go back. The French refused to publish my article although it's been published twice in America, in England, in Sweden, in Brazil, and in Spain and I think Holland. In the meantime I have been conquering a month's cough and am only beginning to return to life.

In a letter on 13 June 1977 Graham announced:

I'm off to Anacapri [Capri] on the 16th and I expect to come back to Antibes around July 5. Then it's likely that I shall be off to Spain for a trip with my nice Father Duran [a Spanish priest friend] for about ten days beginning on the 12th July. August therefore would be free for Panama, but I am doubtful. It partly depends on how I get on in Anacapri with the novel if I begin it. I'm not certain that I want to go back yet. It was such a vivid and amusing trip that I am afraid of a kind
of anti-climax with my return. All the more so perhaps if everything is quiet again and a treaty to please everyone signed. I might even then be a slight embarrassment to the General as belonging to the earlier period. Anyway if you do go back to Panama I'd very much like to hear your reaction to the situation there. Curiously enough I dreamt of the General last night and your letter arrived this morning. It's the only time I have ever dreamt of him.

In a letter the following day he thanked me for my letter in which I told him I had decided to remain in Mexico City as I felt there was more news at this end of the hemisphere than in the Southern Cone. He agreed. He again gave me his travel plans and said he was still undecided about Panama.

I am in two minds about returning to Panama. At least returning to Panama in the immediate future. If there is trouble I would like to go back, but I am wondering whether the novel won't go ahead in its preliminary stages better because of the vivid memories of my first visit. As for
The Quiet American
I can always go back later to check up. This is if the novel gets off at all and that depends on how I see it when I am in Capri. Anyway I don't want to foist myself on the General again unless invited. If negotiations with America are going on in a satisfactory way I think the General might well feel that my presence was an embarrassment. If things go badly then he might like a return visit, but I think I should leave it to him rather than force myself there again. Chuchu of course would always welcome me I am sure, but I wouldn't want to go back if it was an embarrassment to the negotiations. Perhaps you can find out a bit about that if you are going back in June.

What a time the General must have had with 20 women. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your keeping me in the picture.

The women Graham referred to were members of an
ad hoc
Mexico City newswomen's association denominated ‘Twenty Women and One Man' -the one man being their chosen interviewee, or victim as they liked to say. The organization was made up principally of female Mexican journalists. In the summer of 1977 they had flown to Panama for a scheduled hour-long interview with the General. He figuratively swept them off their feet. They descended on his house and the interview ended up lasting three days. While several of the ladies were concerned about their journalistic reputations — they had been flown around the country and lodged in Torrijos's seaside home at Farallon — the more focused reporters among them came away with scoops, revealing that a breakthrough in the Canal negotiations was imminent (which
it was). Moreover Torrijos's comments to the ladies accusing Guatemala of preparing to seize its small neighbour Belize the moment the latter gained independence from Great Britain triggered a break in diplomatic relations between Panama and Guatemala.

Finally in a letter of 9 July Graham announced that he had received a telegram from the General inviting him back to Panama.

As a matter of fact I didn't particularly want to go this summer. I started the novel in Capri and wrote 6,000 words but I am doubtful whether it will work. However I always believe in going with Providence [he was always interested in what might happen next, so I see that he was wagering that his adventures might be given him by God] and so I accepted the invitation. Perhaps the General anticipates a crisis this summer as I can't believe Congress will approve any agreement that old [Ambassador] Bunker makes. Are you going to be around those parts? I plan to go somewhere around August 20.

P.S. I wonder if it was your visit which made the General send me the telegram. Do you believe that Congress will ever pass the new treaty?

I had chided Chuchu, telling him of Graham's wish for a return invitation and the General was happily surprised when he heard that Graham would like to return.

Graham returned to Panama on 21 August 1977 and was soon involved in a caper close to his prankish heart that gave him a ringside seat at the historic signing of the Canal treaties. If he had entertained any doubt about the favourable impact of his article on his new friends in Panama, their warm welcome reassured him. He was now considered a
compadre
of the General.

As Graham was arriving from Europe on his second trip to the isthmus I was departing Panama City after reporting for
Time
's cover story on Panama and the treaties. My departure was necessitated by an opportunity I couldn't afford to miss: I finally had a chance, if only briefly, to return to Haiti. Meanwhile Graham's visit to Panama turned into high drama — exceeded only by high irony. It included nothing less than a trip by Graham Greene — who had once been barred from entering US territory in Puerto Rico — to Washington, DC, as a member of the Panamanian delegation equipped with an official Panamanian passport.

Torrijos's delegation also included the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez who recalled:

Some journalists speculated at that time that the invitation had been one of Torrijos's manoeuvres to jazz up his delegation with the names of two famous writers who had nothing to do with the occasion. In fact, both of us had worked on the treaty's negotiations much more than the press suspected, but that wasn't why General Torrijos invited us to accompany him to Washington. The real reason was that he couldn't resist playing a friendly joke on his friend President Jimmy Carter. Both Graham Greene and I (like so many other writers and artists) had been denied entry to the United States for many years for reasons that not even the presidents have ever been able to explain, and General Torrijos had decided to solve the problem for us. He raised the matter with many of the high-ranking officials who visited him at that time, and finally he took it up with President Carter, who was surprised that the problem existed and promised to solve it as soon as possible. However, his term ran out before he could give us his reply.

When Torrijos was deciding on who should form part of the delegation going to Washington, it occurred to him to smuggle Graham Greene and me into the United States, and the idea quickly became an obsession. Shortly before that, he had suggested that Greene disguise himself as a colonel of the National Guard and go to Washington on a special mission to President Carter as a joke. But Graham Greene, who is more serious than may appear from some of his books, didn't want to lend his glorious body to some shenanigans that, doubtless, would have been one of the most entertaining episodes in his memoirs. Nevertheless, when General Torrijos suggested that we attend the treaty signing ceremony, under our own names but with official Panamanian passports and as members of the delegation from that country, both of us accepted with childish glee.

That is how we arrived at Andréws Air Force base together, both of us in jeans and denim shirts, in a delegation of Caribbeans [sic] dressed in black and bewildered by the 21-gun salute and the martial notes of the US national anthem, which seemed to be all part of the joke. Aware of the literary significance of the moment, Graham Greene whispered to me as we descended the plane's ramp, ‘My God, the things that happen to the United States!' Carter himself had to laugh, flashing his television-ad teeth, when General Torrijos told him what he'd done.

Graham described the scene in a letter to me:

Washington was amusing. I was pleased to find that I got under Stroessner's skin as I got under Duvalier's. At the huge reception at the Organization of American States a girl introduced me to one of his [Stroessner's] ministers who directly he heard my name froze, said ‘You once passed through Paraguay,' and turned on his heel without a handshake. At that moment too I was in spitting distance of Stroessner. The General's [Torrijos's] speech at the signing was much better than Carter's and Carter was practically inaudible although I was only in the fifth row of the audience.

Graham later delighted in telling me how he had squeezed close to Paraguay's General-President Stroessner, prepared to say something nasty but that the South American dictator was hidden by a circle of flunkies. (Alfredo Stroessner, known as a ruthless army officer, came to power in Paraguay in 1954 and lasted a remarkable thirty-five years in power, until 1989. El Excelentísimo, as he preferred to be called, was noted for his statement that strongman rule was ‘the price of peace'. He was overthrown in 1989 and died
in exile in Brazil in 2006 at the age of ninety-three. He also renamed a town ‘Puerto Stroessner'. His Colorado Party was required membership, and he was known to torture his victims. El Excelentísimo had welcomed Anastasio Somoza Debayle following his overthrow in Nicaragua in 1979. Shortly after getting settled in Somoza was ambushed and killed in Asunción. Among others, Stroessner gave haven to was the infamous Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the Angel of Death.)

As for Chilean strongman General Augusto Pinochet, Graham likened him to a Boris Karloff who ‘didn't even need to grunt'. I asked Graham why did he not go with García Márquez when the latter joined a group demonstrating against Pinochet before the White House. ‘I didn't think the Americans could make any distinction between the generals,' he replied. I thought it a rather lame excuse for someone who touted his own personal Chilean-wine boycott against the Chilean strongman. Graham did add, when I teased him for turning down the chance to demonstrate before the White House, that he didn't wish to embarrass Omar as he was an official member of the Panamanian delegation. García Márquez had felt no such constraints. Prior to their departure for Washington Graham said he had been consulted by Torrijos on the Panamanian leader's speech; he added modestly that his help was not really needed, but it did testify to Graham's commitment to Panama's cause.

In another letter following Graham's visit to the US capital and dated 20 September he expressed additional concern regarding the landmark Canal Treaty endeavour:

My fear in Panama is slightly different to yours. I am rather afraid of what may happen if the Senate do ratify the treaty. 300 square miles and more of real estate plus a lot of money will be a big temptation to the [Panamanian] bourgeoisie. They won't like the idea of the General spending it on school meals, free milk and pleasure grounds for children. I think the General's life might well be in danger if the Senate ratify.

‘I wonder what will happen next [in Panama]. I shall trust you to tell me,' Graham wrote in early 1978, adding, ‘I am sorry to hear that Chuchu has mended his little plane. I am terrified at the thought of one day having to fly in it.' He wasn't really terrified of flying or fearful of Chuchu's little plane. In fact Graham enjoyed it. His correspondence could be misleading to anyone who didn't know his little private jokes. He loved teasing Chuchu about his secondhand Cessna.