The Seeds of Fiction (34 page)

Graham's Panama fever had become perennial. ‘So far, apart from two weeks in Spain, my summer remains open to any wind that blows,' he said in a letter dated 15 May 1978. ‘I would be quite happy if one blew me back to Panama, so do keep me informed of the situation there.' Then on 3 July he wrote, ‘With a certain unwillingness I am drifting with the tide and going back to Panama in mid-August. I can't give you the exact date yet but it will be somewhere around August 12 I imagine. I would feel very much happier about a third return if you were going to be there for at least some of my stay. I fear I may be rather bored this time.' Eight days later Graham announced that he was booked on a KLM flight ‘arriving in Panama at 9.00 or so on the morning of August 15. What a pleasure it would be to find you there to have you join me. What about an interview with ex-President Arias for
Time?
And all the other leaders of the opposition? Something I would find difficult to do because of my relationship to Torrijos.' The wind was favourable, and it blew us both back to Panama in August 1978.

A plebiscite giving the Canal Treaty overwhelming popular approval had been held in Panama in October 1977. The hard sell was in Washington where, under the US Constitution, any foreign treaty must be ratified by the US Senate. Some senators were discussing the possibility of amending the treaty before ratification, in effect gutting it. Such an action would in all probability force Torrijos to reject the agreement. Like snowbirds migrating south to flee the winter, US Senators flocked to Panama. Their squawking drove Omar close to the edge. He had become the treaty's chief salesman for visiting US congressional delegations. It was not an easy task.

Omar said he had grown tired of constantly being lectured by
yanqui
congressmen on how to run Panama. To limit what he called their ‘cajoling' he
took the wind out of their sails by trotting them through rural Panama. They ‘perspired buckets' in the hot, humid jungle and acquired, Torrijos said, ‘a good taste for our village dust'. He introduced them to his poorest constituents. It was a far cry from the well-groomed antiseptic Canal Zone and Panama City restaurants. However, most of the congressional visits ended amicably with Omar handing out cigars bearing his personal cigar band. The Cohibas, he said, were supplied personally by Fidel Castro. They were also illegal in the United States.

Omar pledged to aid the congressmen, if they supported ratification, by allowing political parties to function again in Panama and permitting exiles to return. Freedom of speech would be guaranteed. But he warned one group of US senators he was escorting, hopping around the country in his twin-engine Otto plane, ‘You are our friends. We know you are our friends. Please do not carry out justice with a shotgun.'

In Washington during the spring of 1978 it was touch and go. Anti-treaty senators took delight in insulting Torrijos and exaggerating labour disturbances in Panama. Kansas' Republican Robert Dole, perennially cast by much of the media as a ‘hatchet man', led an attack on the treaty and tried unsuccessfully to sabotage ratification by dragging drugs into the debate, which, as
Time
pointed out, ‘was a bust'. US narcotics agents found no evidence to support Dole's assertion that Torrijos was soft on drugs.

Torrijos, for his part, was losing his patience. Opposition by the anti-treaty bloc in the US Congress was having its effect. US intelligence sources reported that Torrijos was seriously considering sabotaging the Canal if ratification were lost and that he had imported a team of Israeli demolition experts to do the job. He later hinted to both Graham and me that it was no idle threat. Finally on 18 April, with sixty-eight for ratification and thirty-two against, one of the most emotional and controversial treaties to go before the US Senate managed to squeak through with all the help it could get from the Carter White House. To the treaty's foes Jimmy Carter went down in history as the man who ‘gave away the Canal'.

Exhausted and smarting from all the insults from Washington, Omar retired to Coclesito. On 16 June he returned to Panama City to join President Carter in officially signing the treaty in the crowded colosseum. The public ceremony during which Carter and Torrijos spoke drew a record crowd of more than two hundred thousand to Plaza Cinco de Mayo and adjacent streets. Carter spoke in Spanish, telling the jubilant Panamanians, ‘This day marks the beginning of a new partnership between Panama and the United States.' It was still not over. Implementing legislation had to be voted into law, and the political battle in Washington was to continue until 27 September 1979.

Across the Caribbean, in the Dominican Republic, the generals had halted the vote count in the presidential election on 16 May 1978 when it appeared that their candidate, Joaquín Balaguer, was losing. The count resumed only after Venezuela threatened to cut off petroleum shipments and President Carter threatened to cut off US aid. The durable old Balaguer's monopoly on the presidency had been broken (temporarily, as later history turned out). Opposition candidate Antonio Guzmán's victory was recognized. In case the generals hadn't got the message, Carter sent an impressive 27-member delegation to President Guzmán's inauguration. The delegation was headed by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and included UN Ambassador Andrew Young and Lieutenant-General Dennis McAuliffe, commander of the US Southern Command based in the Panama Canal Zone. Also prominent among the invited guests: Panama's Omar Torrijos. He was there as a show of support for his friends in the Socialist International, the victorious Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD).

Carter's policy was a radical departure from that of his predecessor, President Lyndon Johnson, who thirteen years earlier had sent in US Marines and the 82nd Airborne Division to halt a popular uprising demanding the restoration of the PRD's ousted President Juan Bosch as the country's constitutionally elected leader. Johnson feared ‘another Cuba'. Carter supported the PRD's triumph at the polls, fearing the loss of democracy. The United States was not the only one to have changed. Panama's Torrijos was on his best behaviour
vis-à-vis
Uncle Sam and in good humour. The irony of the situation was not lost on him since he himself had ousted a constitutionally elected civilian president from power a decade earlier. I had been covering the Dominican election and transfer of power, and Omar invited me to accompany him back to Panama. We would arrive before Graham.

Omar's bodyguards had been engrossed in reading the Spanish translation of my book on the 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. ‘Either they are reading it to learn how to protect me or to kill me,' Omar joked. I asked him whether he felt safer now that the US Congress had placed a ban on CIA-sponsored assassinations. The ban followed Senator Frank Church's investigation into the agency's involvement in past ‘eliminations with extreme prejudice'. Omar chuckled and said that an article in
Newsweek
on 11 June 1973 had reported that according to President Nixon's White House counsel, John Dean III, the infamous Watergate ‘plumbers' had been given a contract to assassinate him in 1971. Dean said Torrijos had an uncooperative attitude towards the Panama Canal Treaty negotiations. The plan was said to have been aborted before the assassination team reached Panama.

Graham arrived in Panama on a KLM flight on 19 August, the day after the General and I returned from Santo Domingo. Graham was happy to be back, even though, like the General, he had a cough. There had been a goodly
supply of Bols gin during the fifteen-hour flight from Amsterdam, Graham said, but he was in need of one of good-looking and friendly barmaid Flor's rum punches. Chuchu drove him from the airport to the Señorial Bar on a quiet tree-shaded downtown street in Panama City, where I met them. Holding high his first planter's punch and saluting Flor, Graham pronounced it a ‘marvellous laxative after such a long flight'.

At the bar Flor looked on sympathetically as Graham regaled us with his adventures in trying to reach Panama. The origin of his cough, he explained, was the London Ritz Hotel. Pausing to savour the punch and to receive our undivided attention, Graham declared that things had a habit of going wrong at the Ritz, and for that reason he liked to stay there. During the night he had awakened coughing to find his hotel room filled with a most unpleasant acrid smoke. After a struggle, he said, he had managed to open the window, noting, ‘Of course it is the wrong thing to do in a fire.' A plastic tarpaulin covering a neighbouring building under construction had caught on fire. It was, he continued, ‘an awful morning'.'Sautéed by the fumes and particles of the burning plastic, I boarded the wrong plane at Heathrow Airport, and ended up in Rotterdam instead of Amsterdam.' He finally made his airline connection by taking a taxi to Amsterdam. Having not a guilder in his pocket, he convinced the Dutch cab driver to settle for his fare in American dollars. Then on arrival in Panama he had had to wait endlessly for Chuchu.

‘But, Graham,' Chuchu protested, ‘your goddamn Dutch plane arrived an hour early! The crazy Dutch have the only airline in the world that can arrive so far ahead of schedule.'

‘I want to live until Christmas,' Graham further declared enigmatically in the dimly lit Señorial. It seemed a simple enough request, and he had our full attention as we sipped our second rum punch. ‘I have a play, a new play. It's a bit of a farce, but I like it. I don't know whether it will go over …' he went on seriously. Graham was now looking directly at Chuchu, waving his arms about like the wings of a plane.

Chuchu got the message and was profusely reassuring. ‘Don't worry, Graham. My plane is OK. I am the best pilot. Yes, Graham, yes, you'll live until Christmas — and for many more Christmases, I guarantee you.'

Graham went on to confess that he wished he had begun writing plays earlier in life. They seemed to be his new passion.

Chuchu talked of his success with his play
La Guerra del Banano.
Then he abruptly asked Graham about the title of his 1957 play
The Potting Shed.
‘What the hell is a potting shed, Graham? Is it a toilet?'

When the laughter died down Graham explained: ‘It is a little shed in which the gardener keeps his implements, bulbs and that sort of thing … They don't have them in America. They are a very old English tradition, and when we
were children they were a place of mystery and romance.' He added archly, ‘The play got rather good reviews in New York.'

When Graham registered at the El Panama Hotel he drew our attention to his departure date, which he had written down as 3 September. ‘This is the official end of the summer holidays in Europe, and the tourists go home,' he explained with glee. He added that during the off-season his friend Yvonne could reach his place in Antibes in just five minutes from her home in Juan-les-Pins, but in the summer the crush of traffic was such that it took twenty minutes or more.

‘Do you drive?' Chuchu asked.

‘No, no, I don't own a car. Yvonne has a car and is a very good driver.'

That evening we dined under the stars at the seaside Panamar restaurant. There was hardly a ripple in the Pacific Ocean, which occasionally came alive with dancing phosphorescence that rolled in with the wake of returning fishing boats. Relaxed and happy, Graham extolled the beauty of a balmy Panama night.

Chuchu, however, was not his usual bouncy, expansive self. He admitted he was preoccupied. In fact, he was deeply concerned about the General's ideological compass, which Chuchu claimed had literally gone out of whack. Torrijos, he feared, was opting for social democracy.

Graham fussed with the waiter, making sure the bottle of white Chilean wine he had ordered was not post-Allende. Each time he ordered wine he took pleasure in announcing his boycott. ‘I don't give any money to General Pinochet!'

Returning to our conversation, he suggested jokingly that Chuchu had fallen down on his job of proselytizing. ‘You've lost the General to the opposition,' Graham chided.

Chuchu, ever the loyal Marxist, took it as a serious reprimand and launched into a tirade against what he claimed were the many wicked weaknesses of the social democrats. Graham, enjoying baiting Chuchu, said he thought the General had made a wise choice and that he himself was beginning to believe social democracy was the best political choice.

Stunned, Chuchu kept repeating, ‘But, Graham, Graham, you've got to
know
those corrupt goddamned social democrats!'

It was a long, agitated evening for Chuchu, but it ended on a happy note as he announced that the General had instructed him to fly us up to Torrijos's beach house at Farallon the next day. The General was recuperating from a cold he caught in Santo Domingo. Graham looked at me and shook his head, once again pretending that we had more confidence in Chuchu's poetry than his piloting.

Chuchu protested, ‘Graham, I promised to keep you alive till Christmas.' Then he asked, ‘What is the name of your new play?'