The Seeds of Fiction (48 page)

Pope John Paul II descended on Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua less than two months after Graham departed. The Pope's visit began with his humiliating Father Ernesto Cardenal, the Minister of Culture. As Father Cardenal knelt to kiss his papal ring the Pope withdrew his hand and wagged his papal finger in the priest's face. The Pope was admonishing him and other Catholic clerics for taking an active role in the revolutionary government. Then the papal Mass turned into a free-for-all. Youthful Sandinistas in the huge throng baited nuns sitting before them in the stands who were trying to keep the youths quiet. Badgered by hecklers in the crowd, the Pope grew impatient and asked them to be silent. The agitators loved it. The Pope had suddenly lost his infallibility and descended to their level.

John Paul II had angered many Sandinistas not only by his public scolding of Father Cardenal but by reaffirming his support for Nicaraguan Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo, a harsh critic of the Sandinistas. The
comandantes
sat through the Mass, making no effort to intervene to restore order.

Following the Pope from Nicaragua to Port-au-Prince on his tour, I found it interesting that he faced a different kind of political drama in Haiti. Led by Bishop Willy Romulus of Jeremie, the liberal wing of the Haitian Catholic Church took heart when the Pope declared, ‘Things must change here.' This papal declaration was pounced on by young oppositionists who used it as their battle cry against the Duvalier regime. The ensuing popular uprising succeeded, and Jean-Claude Duvalier ceased to be President-for-Life on the morning of 7 February 1986.

Graham, who was already deeply concerned by the Polish Pope's actions, wrote in a letter to me on 28 March 1983, ‘I haven't a very high opinion of [Daniel] Ortega and I thought he behaved rather stupidly — but then so did the Pope. I am glad the rum punches are still good at the Oloffson. I have no summer plans for the time being, but I'll let you know if I travel west.'

In Nicaragua, three months after Salvadorean guerrilla leader Marcial had visited Graham in Managua, the commander of the strongest arm of the Salvadorean guerrilla force was dead. His end came days after his second-in-command, Mélida Anaya Montes, known by her
nom de guerre
Ana María, was brutally murdered in a safe house in a prestigious suburb of Managua. Her
throat was slashed, and according to the Nicaraguan Interior Ministry her body revealed eighty stab wounds. Marcial was in Libya at the time and returned to Managua for the funeral. Reporters who saw him described Marcial as looking much older than his sixty-four years and wearing a sweater under a coat despite the intense summer heat. Six days later, on 12 April, Salvador Cayetano Carpio, ‘Marcial', was found dead, reportedly by his own hand, of a bullet in the heart. His role in the killing of Anaya Montes had been established. In a letter dated 22 May Graham wrote:

I haven't yet any settled plans for the summer except that I hope to find time to get on a bit with the book I am writing about Omar. I was shocked by Marcial's death. When I saw him in Nicaragua he was full of optimism for the future. The death of his woman deputy seems to have been a peculiarly brutal one. I am glad the men responsible have been arrested. Chuchu keeps on ringing up and the story of Cayetano's death becomes more and more mysterious. Now they are blaming the murder of this woman on him.

‘I have finished my book on Torrijos,' Graham announced, ‘but I am not sure yet whether I will publish it. After four revisions I am not happy about it. Maybe I will let Chuchu make the final decision.' But publish he did.
Getting to Know the General
hit the bookstores in January 1984. At the end of May 1983 Chuchu had descended on Antibes. Graham was happy to see him and wrote:

Chuchu arrived safely and corrected many misspellings of mine. I would have liked you to have seen the book before publication but we are anxious to get it out before the American elections — Chuchu is especially anxious. He likes it better than I do. His character really overshadows Omar in the book and I feel it an uneasy falling between two stools of memoirs and autobiography. However I will follow Chuchu's advice and publish.

Graham later agreed that the tome was too dispersed, not clearly enough a memoir, an autobiography or a travel book.
(Time's
reviewer, J.D. Reed, had asked, ‘How much of this strange biography — travel book, escapist yarn, memoir — is documentary? It is certain that in his 45th book Greene remains a master of contradiction.')

Following the publication of
Getting to Know the General,
Graham concluded a letter to me with a comment on the US elections.

I have hope that [US Senator Gary] Hart will beat both Mondale and Reagan. I don't feel it likely somehow that Reagan will go whole-hog on an invasion of Nicaragua. After all the Pentagon decided that it would need a hundred thousand troops to guard the Canal so I should imagine it would need close to half a million to do anything in Nicaragua.

I begin to feel old and tired so though Chuchu brought me letters from Colonel Díaz, Noriega and [Panamanian President] Espriella who sent me a picture also I doubt whether I shall take off again for Central America. I shall probably go no further than Spain this year.

When I received my copy of
Getting to Know the General
I realized that Graham was not simply being modest in saying that he was not satisfied with even the fourth version he had written. I thought he had given a faithful and truthful account of his peregrinations in Panama, but much was missing that could have been covered only in a novel. The book could have worked so much better as fiction. General Omar Torrijos was a complicated human being to whom Graham could have done justice only in fictional form. At the end of the book it also became apparent that Chuchu did more than correct spelling mistakes, that Graham had allowed him to exert editorial influence to make his (Chuchu's) easy view of the Sandinistas appear to be shared by General Torrijos, when it was not. Omar had said more than once that the Sandinistas were ‘neither a model nor a menace'. He confessed that he did not like what he considered the Sandinistas' dangerous growing dependency on the East when they were in the West.

Getting to Know the General
offered a revealing portrait of Graham's inner thoughts. While being driven by Chuchu into the Panamanian mountains one day, Graham recounts, ‘to me it was like a return back to life after a long sickness — the malignant sickness of a writer's block. My writing days, I thought, were not over after all.' With the General's death

the idea came to me to write a short personal memoir, based on the diaries which I had kept over the last five years, as a tribute to a man whom during that time I had grown to love. But as soon as I had written the first sentence after the title,
Getting to Know the General,
I realized that it was not only about the General whom I had got to know over those five years … it was also about Chuchu, one of the few men in the National Guard whom the General trusted completely, and it was this bizarre and beautiful little country, split in two by the Canal and the American Zone, a country which had become, thanks to the General, of great practical importance in the struggle for liberation taking place in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Two outstanding foreign correspondents, the previously mentioned Karen DeYoung of the
Washington Post
(who had escaped injury during the mortar ambush in Nicaragua) and Alan Riding of the
New York Times,
were covering Panama and Central America at the time, and both reviewed
Getting to Know the General.

DeYoung thought the book should have been a novel rather than the non-fiction account that Graham had written. She noted that Graham had developed a close relationship with Torrijos and had kept a journal that he hoped to turn into a tale tentatively titled
On the Way Back,
but that all had changed with Torrijos's death. She wrote:

Some of Greene's critics, and even fans, say his books are not political enough. For better or for worse, his novels often are considered too entertaining to be profound. But for this reader and fan, the moment when
On the Way Back
became
Getting to Know the General
was an unfortunate one. What could have been both good politics and good entertainment as fiction turns out to be a disappointment as real life … Omar Torrijos was a compelling, unique man who combined the Latin American
caudillo
tradition of military dictatorship with a curious kind of humanism and humanity, a ‘dictator with heart,' as he used to call himself … By Latin standards, his rule was benign and relatively progressive. He dedicated himself to negotiating the return of US control of the Panama Canal and Canal Zone, and wrestled the long-languishing treaty negotiations to a political victory through will power and clever diplomacy … One longs for the larger-than-life complicated character that Greene could have made of a fictionalized Torrijos; for the sense of place and time, and even political meaning, that the Greene treatment could have evoked of Panama and Central America at a time when national pride and revolution were awakening.

The best passages in the book are those about the process of creating characters and writing fiction, about
On the Way Back
before it was discarded in favor of a pale paean to the General. Only one small bit of it is preserved here, but it is worth comparing to real life. In
Getting to Know the General,
Greene describes his arrival for his first meeting with Torrijos. ‘It was a small insignificant suburban house, only made to look out of the ordinary by the number of men in camouflage uniform clustered around the entrance and by a small cement pad at the rear in place of a garden, smaller than a tennis court, on which a helicopter could land.'

Much later in the book, as Greene recounts his efforts back at home in France to begin the subsequently aborted novel,
On the Way Back,
the scene is transformed. The fictional protagonist, a journalist named Marie-Claire, arrives at the same suburban house to interview the as yet unknown General. ‘She found herself surrounded in the small courtyard of a white suburban villa with half-Indian faces. The men all carried revolvers on their belts and one had a walkie-talkie which he kept pressed closely to his ear as though he were waiting with the intensity of a priest for one of his Indian gods to proclaim something. The men are as strange to me, she thought, as the Indians must have seemed to Columbus five centuries ago. The camouflage of their uniforms was like painted designs on naked skin.'

DeYoung's fellow foreign correspondent Alan Riding concluded his review in the 4 November 1984
New York Times:

On Greene's last trip to Panama, in 1983, some of Torrijos's followers were eager to use him as a symbol that the general's political ideas were still alive. Greene didn't mind. ‘I have never hesitated to be “used” in a cause I believe in,' he noted. And he headed off in a Panamanian Government plane, first to Nicaragua, where he met top Sandinista leaders, and then to Cuba for the same reason, where he greeted Fidel Castro with the words, ‘I am not a messenger. I am the message.'

Greene omits the detailed analysis required to support his case, but it remains valid — the death of Torrijos removed a vital force for moderation from the Central American scene. At his death, he was somewhat disillusioned with both the Sandinistas and Fidel Castro, but he kept his lines open to the left, just as he did to the United States. And his death, Greene concludes, ‘was not only the end of his dream of moderate socialism but perhaps the end of any hope of a reasonable peace in Central America.' Coming out shortly after Graham Greene's 80th birthday,
Getting to Know the General
reassures us that the writer's dreams and hopes have not died. From a literary point of view, this book is perhaps not among his most memorable — he has conceded he found it difficult to write. But from a human point of view, it is compellingly compassionate.

‘I am glad you found something you liked in
The General,
Graham wrote to me on 2 January 1984. He was responding to my favourable comment.

I was disappointed in the book myself. It seemed to fall between too many stools, but it was the best I could do. Of course I haven't seen much of the American press, but I was surprised by the number of good reviews that I did see — including the
New York Times, Time
itself, and
Newsweek,
and there were others … I do hope we meet again in not so long a time in Central America or elsewhere.

Graham ended a long letter with ‘Forgive a hasty line, but this bloody 80th birthday is filling all my time and my post box.'

For all his eight decades of life, Graham's correspondence — and mind — seemed as sharp as ever. He wrote on 29 September 1984:

I am sorry you are out of Central America for the moment, but I suspect after the election you will be well in again. I don't see any chance
of joining you in the Caribbean for our war [a reference to Yvonne's domestic tribulations] is still continuing and I don't feel able to get away for any length of time. I have been invited to Bulgaria and to Russia — Bulgaria in October and Russia in the spring — but I am very doubtful of getting to either of them … I went back to Spain for a little more than a week in August but I plan no real travels … Let me know if you come to Paris.

Back in New Zealand my eldest sister, a Catholic nun and a great admirer of Graham Greene, had been diagnosed with cancer and had been given only a few weeks to live. I had made an urgent journey to visit her. On my return to Miami I received a letter from Graham, dated 27 June 1985, saying he was sorry to hear the news.

As one grows older there seem to be many more deaths than births to record. I don't know exactly what I shall be doing this summer except I hope that I escape from the Côte a bit. The affair [Yvonne's problems] is still a bit of a bother but not so much as it used to be. Chuchu rings up from time to time and it's just possible that I might go to Panama and Nicaragua in late July, but I find it difficult to make up my mind. I shall certainly let you know if I do go. Reagan is a real nightmare. Russia and the USA seem to be the same face looking at each other in the same glass and there are times when I certainly prefer the Russian face to the American face similar though they both are. I miss Omar more and more and I haven't the same confidence in Noriega … Anyway let's keep in touch.