The Seeds of Fiction (35 page)

'For Whom the Bell Chimes,'
Graham replied.

Chuchu laughed. Then he learned it was no joke but the real name of Graham's play.

At breakfast the following day Graham announced with a certain dignity the good news that Flor's punch had been grandly successful. Only Englishmen, it appears, find the subject of bowel movements agreeable news to share over breakfast.

At the little Paitilla airport Chuchu showed off his little Cessna with pride. It was painted Panama's national colours of red, blue and white with the country's flag embossed on its tail. ‘I've done thirteen hours in it since it was fixed up. I gave it a good overhaul,' he said proudly, patting the wings. I insisted on taking some colour photographs of Graham and Chuchu with the little plane, noting that the pictures could be for our families, just in case.

Graham shrugged. ‘You can only die once.'

We flew the seventy drowsy miles along the Pacific coast to Farallon, Chuchu at the controls, Graham sitting next to him while I sat behind them. The baking sun streamed in through the side window, making it difficult to stay awake even in the noisy cockpit. Years later Graham would marvel at the fact that Chuchu had managed to transport weapons and ammunition in this small plane to his Sandinista and Salvadorean rebel friends.

With Graham's arrival Omar's cold seemed to improve. Torrijos turned his back abruptly on members of his government team, including the vice-president, with whom he was meeting on the terrace, and ushered us into the interior of his house. It was as if he really wished to turn his back on politics. We watched through a window as the government officials gathered up their papers and quietly departed. Once the terrace was vacated Omar suggested the sea air was better for his cold. He relaxed in his hammock on the terrace and appeared happy to see Graham again. With the birth of the new Canal Treaty, after such a long pregnancy, Torrijos said, he was ‘suffering the blues'.

Chuchu identified his illness as ‘postpartum psychosis'. We all laughed.

Omar confessed to a feeling of emptiness.

‘It's not a fatal illness,' Graham assured him. ‘It is the same after completing a book.'

We had lunch on the terrace, and the conversation turned to Panamanian politics. Omar allowed me to record it on my tape-recorder. I later furnished Graham with a translated transcript, and he faithfully recounted extracts of the conversation in
Getting to Know the General.
‘I'm going to give the politicians a big surprise,' Omar said. ‘I'm designing a system — a political party — in order to get out. They think I am designing a system to stay in. The politicians are aiming their guns in the wrong direction. They will waste their ammunition
and then they will say, “but the son of a bitch is unpredictable”.' Then he looked at Graham, as if for approval, and added, ‘All I want is a house, rum and a girl.' Chuchu couldn't have agreed more.

Graham saw the down side to such a withdrawal into self. ‘You would soon get fed up with such a boring existence, as well as the girl,' he predicted. Graham didn't believe in the archetypal dream of getting away from it all. To him boredom was a cause of depression. The way Graham explained it, he needed stimulus, at least his creativity did, and travel helped. Graham had to recharge his batteries and rejuvenate his senses in order to write.

Chuchu said he recharged his batteries by going out with women.

As Graham talked, I realized that the General seemed to be growing old before our very eyes. He was much more contemplative and nostalgic than in the past. ‘I haven't even decided whether I have done good or bad,' he muttered. ‘It's like going to the petrol station. You pay and the pump returns to zero. Every time I wake up I'm back to zero.'

Graham and I could not understand the General's pessimism. In addition to negotiating the Panama Canal Treaty, Torrijos could take credit for some impressive infrastructure projects — a hydroelectric dam, schools, health clinics. He had lifted his people up more than any other Panamanian leader and was prepared now to give them participatory democracy.

Chuchu, sensing that the discussion was leading towards a philosophy with which he completely disagreed, stood up and transformed himself back into Sergeant Martínez. ‘General,' he said, ‘permission to check the aircraft.'

Torrijos nodded and gave him a military salute. Then he smiled as Chuchu disappeared in the direction of Hato Rey airfield. ‘To fill the political void,' he said — referring to a void he had helped create with his 1968 coup, and the outlawing of what he termed the corrupt, parasitic political parties — ‘we are forming a new kind of political party.'

After a pause he climbed back into his colourful blue, white and red hammock. He could have been Colonel Aureliano Buendía in Gabriel García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude
returning to Macondo from his wars. Omar made no secret of his distaste for what he described as the ‘ridiculous ritualistic rules' and ‘pompous and pedantic protocol' that went with governing a country. He preferred the isolation of his rustic ranch house at Coclesito, his Macondo. Farallon, he told us, was far too ostentatious.

There were indeed similarities between Coclesito and García Márquez's mythical village in
One Hundred Years ofSolitude.
The General had found Coclesito by accident, dropping down from the sky one day in his helicopter and being shocked by the poverty of the area's subsistence farmers, who were isolated by mountains and ignored and neglected by their government. Coclesito's river flooded regularly. To help the forgotten community the
General built his rustic home and a small airstrip and had helped launch a cooperative to import water buffaloes that could thrive in the region's wet climate. The idea of a pineapple plantation was understandable to Graham and me, but a water buffalo cooperative was a puzzle. Neither of us got a satisfactory explanation about the water buffaloes. For the General, Coclesito was the closest place to heaven. He often dragooned his visitors there and led them on rugged hikes into the hills.

As his soul-searching continued, Omar's words came slowly with each gentle sway of the hammock. Panama was now a much more mature nation, he asserted. An anomaly among nations, it had been born as little more than a simple crossing path from one ocean to another. Now the possibilities for Panama were enormous, he declared. After a long pause he stirred again. ‘We must organize a political party for elections …' The party would be officially founded in October, the tenth anniversary of the coup that brought the General to power.

‘I'm too old to talk about the future,' he said. ‘The future belongs to the youth, to our young technocrats. A political party, democracy, is necessary.' He said the country had been in great need of change, and he believed that he had brought about that change and pre-empted the ultra-left, and ‘stolen the ammunition they needed for a revolution. We are too small to have a bloody revolution — and for what? Panamanians need to own their land, have pride in their country, their own national identity, and not be simply a fresh water and vegetable market for foreign vessels transiting the Canal, or servants of the
gringos
and the
rabiblancos
(upper-class Establishment) of the Union Club.'

As for himself, it was evident that Omar was experiencing political exhaustion. ‘When people find a leader,' he said, ‘they work him to death like a peasant works a good ox to death. The peasants speak to me frankly, and the peasant knows when you have to limp even when you may be curled up in a hammock.'

Omar knew that Chuchu would be taking us to meet his Nicaraguan-exile friends, and he asked us not to mention that we had met him. Father Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan poet-priest, Torrijos explained, had been asking to meet with him. None the less, as we left Omar said in an aside to me, ‘They [the Sandinista rebels] will get up steam.'

I had asked him what he thought might happen in Nicaragua, since a new offensive proclaimed by the Sandinistas against President Anastasio Somoza appeared to be stalled.

‘The guerrilla offensive is like a locomotive,' he said. ‘To get up speed you must first build up steam.'

Graham, Chuchu and I flew back to Panama City in Chuchu's Cessna through a harrowing electrical storm. Upon arriving safely Graham noted dryly
that he had never considered meeting death by electrocution.
Time
reduced my story on Graham's meeting with Omar to an item in the People section in the issue of 4 September 1978. It was illustrated with a colour photograph, snapped by me, of the General lolling in his hammock conversing with Graham.

The night of 21 August was hot and humid. Graham and I were led by Chuchu into the small Panama City apartment of Dr Ramiro (Camilo) Contreras, brother of dead Nicaraguan rebel Eduardo Contreras Escobar. As we arrived Chuchu told us that we had been invited to help celebrate the thirty-seventh birthday of another famous anti-Somoza Nicaraguan guerrilla, El Danto. Chuchu hugged and kissed the female guerrillas who were present, obviously thriving on close-quarters combat. Graham, on the other hand, detested such parties. I could see it on his face. He told me he was feeling awkward and pronounced himself allergic to organized social gatherings and the singing of Happy Birthday, or
Las Mananitas,
no matter where they took place.

Graham implemented various defensive tactics to keep Father Ernesto Cardenal at bay. The priest, Graham felt, was ‘just a little ridiculous; a caricature with his flowing white beard and hair under a black beret'. Once he got to know him Graham would change his opinion about the revolutionary cleric-poet, considering him sincere and committed. (Many of Graham's early critical appraisals of the Nicaraguan guerrillas' leaders were later modified as he became better acquainted with them. For example, at first he didn't like Daniel Ortega, who was to become president of Nicaragua, or Tomás Borge, the powerful interior minister, but once Graham got to know them his views of these men changed. It was unusual because Graham's snap judgements of people often proved to be quite accurate.)

Father Cardenal succeeded in cornering Graham between toasts and the ceremonial slicing of the birthday cake. The rebel priest was persistent. He kept telling Graham that he should visit Nicaragua and witness the war. It was an invitation that Chuchu and I did not encourage, as the logistics of joining the guerrillas in the mountains of Nicaragua would be difficult and risky. The rebels at the party emphasized that they were revolutionaries who were simply recharging their energies with some rest and relaxation, and were in no way refugees or exiles. Some of the women guerrillas were in Panama to see their gynaecologists.

We found El Danto, whose real name was Germán Pomares Ordoñez, seated with his back to a wall wearing a black beret. Guerrillas can be deceptive-looking, but there was nothing deceptive about the swarthy physically powerful Pomares whose birthday we were celebrating. He had been one
of the founders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1962. He was a weapons expert and considered the FSLN's top combat commander. As a child he had toiled in cotton fields, and he had moved up the leftist ranks through youth and union organizations. Only recently he had been taken prisoner in Honduras by the Honduran army, but when the Honduran authorities threatened to return him to Nicaragua sympathetic Honduran students took to the streets of Tegucigalpa in protest. The Honduran military finally handed Pomares over to Panama, where he had been granted political asylum.

At our guerrilla party, Pomares, never once removing his black beret, talked quietly of their coming battles. It was difficult to hear him above the din of the dance music and impossible for me to translate his words for Graham. Nevertheless, by cocking an ear closely I could absorb Pomares's message. El Danto described his great fear of a coup d'état that would rob the Sandinistas of their ultimate victory, leaving
‘Somocismo sin Somoza'
(Somozaism without Somoza) intact in Nicaragua. ‘The whole rotten, corrupt system must be eradicated, not just the removal of one man,' Pomares declared. Radical change, he was convinced, could come only with a people's war.

I told him we had nearly met once before. He had been the FSLN military commander of a notorious guerrilla operation in 1974 and I was one of the newsmen covering that story. He smiled and said it had been a successful operation. Shortly before 11 p.m. on 27 December 1974 Sandinista commandos with guns blazing crashed a fashionable post-Christmas party in Managua. The party host, Managua businessman José Maríneza Castillo Quant, was shot to death when he tried to resist. The Sandinistas held hostage a number of relatives of Somoza and other influential friends of the regime. They were eventually exchanged for fourteen imprisoned Sandinistas. Among the latter, freed after seven years in prison, was Daniel Ortega. He flew off to Havana on 30 December with thirteen ex-prisoner companions and the thirteen commandos.

During our conversation at the Panama party Pomares conceded that the Sandinistas had suffered serious setbacks since then. Eduardo Contreras Escobar, the handsome Comandante Zero (Sandinistas always code-named the leader of an operation
‘Cero'
or ‘Zero' and the second-in-command as ‘Number One'), who had led the Christmas party raid in Managua, had been killed on 7 November 1976 in a shoot-out with one of Somoza's special anti-terrorist patrols. Two days later the Sandinistas lost their leader, Carlos Fonseca Amador, who was killed in action in the Nicaraguan mountains.

However, much else of what El Danto said was lost to the music as his comrades and several
compañeras
in the last stages of pregnancy danced determinedly to a Panamanian
tamborito.
He declined to predict how long their struggle would take.

Irritated at not being able to talk with Pomares and deafened by the loud music, Graham said he'd had enough.