The Seeds of Fiction (45 page)

The news hit me hard. It was like a death in the family. I had lost a good friend. That fateful Saturday I telephoned Graham to break the news. There was no answer at his Antibes flat. I finally reached him on Sunday. By then he had heard the reports of Torrijos's tragic end. We talked a long time about Omar. I could hear, in Graham's voice and the way he spoke, that Omar's death had affected him, too.

Three years later, on the eve of Graham's eightieth birthday, he told the author Martin Amis about it. Amis recounted it in a magazine article entitled ‘Encounter in Paris'. ‘One is shocked when a bit of one's life disappears. I felt that with Omar Torrijos. I think that's why, in the case of Torrijos, I embarked on what I hoped would be a memoir but what turned into a rather unsatisfactory blend of things. I felt that a whole segment of my life had been cut out.'

I was not able to attend the funeral. But afterwards I talked by telephone with Chuchu. ‘Why didn't Graham come to the General's funeral?' he asked with a hint of reproach in his voice.

I explained as best I could that the General's death had affected us all but that we each mourn in different ways and funerals were only part of the mourning process. One didn't have to fly to Panama to attend the very public mourning in order to pay one's respects. I also reminded Chuchu that Omar himself would have hated his own state funeral, so filled with the pomp and protocol he detested. Likewise absent, along with Graham, was García Márquez, who said simply, ‘I never had the heart to bury friends.' But thousands of other mourners were there. The public outpouring of grief throughout Panama when word came of Omar's death was something the country had never witnessed.

‘I imagine when we were trying to telephone Chuchu he was off identifying the bodies,' Graham wrote in a letter dated 26 August. ‘I very much feel the loss of Omar. It seems to have brought an end to my Central American life, though I received a telegram of invitation from George Price to the independence celebration in Belize. However things here are difficult and I won't be able to get away there. I suspect that the celebrations may be a bit riotous … ?'

‘It was a bomb,' Chuchu said with finality when I talked to him again on the phone. Farmers in the region, he said, had heard the General's plane and then an explosion. No one would dissuade him: in his adamant judgement, it had to be the work of the CIA. Who else would want to kill the General? Chuchu would not entertain any other suspects although
bolas
(rumours) in Panama encompassed a long list of potential perpetrators, including Chuchu's own friends within the ranks of the Sandinistas. There was concern in Managua that Omar was about to lend support to Edén Pastora, who earlier that month had quit his post in Managua and driven across the border to Costa Rica and then all the way to Panama. It was known that Pastora and his wartime fighting friend, Panama's Dr Hugo Spadafora, were spending a great deal of time at Farallon and Coclesito with the General, happily discussing a grand plan to bring social democracy to Central America. There was speculation that Pastora was supposed to have been on the plane along with Omar but had been late for his rendezvous. (Indeed, Pastora himself narrowly escape a bomb on 30 May 1984 when he had mounted his own offensive against the Sandinistas from the border with Costa Rica. Seven people were killed and twenty-eight wounded along with Pastora.) In fact Pastora was with Spadafora, in his Panama City apartment, when they heard the first news of Omar's disappearance. Fearing it might be a night of the long knives, they sped to Farallon believing it was the safest place to be until the situation cleared. Spadafora later claimed that spy chief Noriega had kept them for days as ‘virtual prisoners' at the Farallon compound. Others suspected that the placing of a bomb on Omar's aircraft could only have been Noriega's handiwork. Thus there was no shortage of suspects or motives. But there was not a shred of evidence to support any of the plethora of stories.

Rory Gonzalez said he didn't believe the bomb theory at first, but after what happened in the years following he had to wonder. There had already been infighting in the Panamanian National Guard, and Torrijos had sent Gonzalez to tell Noriega and Rubén Darío Paredes to stop their power plays. The two were positioning themselves to be Omar's successor even before the fateful day.

Few among Panama's political establishment listened when an expert for the Canadian manufacturer of the General's plane examined the wreckage and
concluded that a combination of bad weather and pilot error was responsible for the crash. There was, the expert declared, no evidence of a bomb explosion. Still, Chuchu stubbornly held to his theory that it was the work of the CIA, even though such a view flew in the face of the evidence. Not only had a 1977 Act of the US Congress placed a ban on the CIA's participation in the assassination of foreign leaders; there was seemingly little reason for the CIA to target Torrijos at this juncture. The Panama Canal treaties were a
fait accompli
and the General was doing his best to bring peace to Central America. He had moved to the political centre himself, and it should have been obvious to even the greenest Washington spook that Omar's death would touch off a dangerous power struggle within the Panamanian National Guard — which in fact occurred.

In
Getting to Know the General
Graham wrote that he had been struck by Torrijos's aura of near despair. ‘You and I have something in common,' the General told Graham. ‘We are both self-destructive.'

Graham once asked Omar what he dreamed about most, and the reply was almost predictable:
‘La muerte.'
An awareness of death ran through many of the General's conversations with Graham, so when death finally came, Graham wrote in
Getting to Know the General,
‘it was not so much a shock that I felt as a long-expected sadness for what has seemed to me over the years an inevitable end'.

Particularly ironic to me was the fact that one of the first and last groups of exiles Omar sought to help were Haitians. Shortly before he died, the General had given his blessing to a ‘Continental Solidarity Conference with Haiti', an effort to unite the fragmented Haitian opposition to the regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Among the members of the conference's International Committee were Graham Greene, Gabriel García Márquez, the widow of Chilean President Salvador Allende and former Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez.

Now there would be no more such humanitarian gestures from the General. The charismatic populist who had dreamed and talked so often of death had finally met death at fifty-two. In his thirteenth year as Panama's strongman, the young officer from Santiago de Veraguas had changed the face of his country. To be sure, he himself was a dictator whose regime suffered from some of the trappings of a Latin American dictatorship. His failings are perhaps best described by author John Dinges in his book
The Underside of the Torrijos Legacy.
Dinges wrote of

a National Guard that was unchecked and unmonitored, that was run for the personal benefit of those who comprised its upper echelons. In sweeping away the old-style cronyism of the Union Club, Torrijos had left
the country in political adolescence. By repression and exile, he had emasculated the political parties, rendering them incapable of governing or even mounting an effective campaign for honest government. It may not have occurred to Torrijos to challenge Panama's ingrained tradition of influence peddling and payoffs — the idea that the time of rule is a time of enrichment. Common parlance in Panama lacked even the terminology to express such concepts as conflict of interest and ethics in government.

Instead, Torrijos attempted to channel the fruits of corruption to promote his revolution, to serve both his selfish and his enlightened purposes. The system was disarmingly simple: Torrijos bought or gained control of businesses and arranged for them to have a monopoly or to receive other kinds of preferential treatment. The companies provided second salaries for National Guard officers and their profits were available for special projects not covered in the national budget.

Nevertheless, Torrijos, above all, wanted his people to take pride in their small but strategic country — to see it no longer as just an international crossroads serving the world's shipping but as a nation with its own culture and interests. He had broken the upper-class
rabiblancos'
monopoly on power and by so doing pre-empted the Marxists.

As Dinges also writes:

As if by accident, without the oratorical or ideological flourishes of a Fidel Castro, his military revolution had wrought enormous social, racial, even psychological changes in the lives of the vast majority of Panamanians. More than the reforms in land distribution, health care, education, the essence of ‘Torrijismo' was the inchoate national pride he instilled in a people who had been more servants than slaves, more bought-out than downtrodden. By peaceful settling of Panama's historic score with the United States, he gave concrete reality to Panama as a country; by imposing a government that flaunted its middle-class, multiracial character, he had halted social polarization and short-circuited the appeal of Marxist radicalism.

With such achievements the General became a hero not only in his own country but also to others. In Nicaragua a group of poor people in the city of Estelí rechristened their
barrio
‘Omar Torrijos'.

After our last meeting with the General, Graham had mused about his failed Panama novel
On the Way Back.
He said it featured the failure of a revolution,
which would be the book's main
raison d'être.
But while he had a villain he couldn't handle Chuchu. The problem, as I saw it — and it was the only time I offered my opinion on the subject — was that there was no room for the exuberant Chuchu in Graham's subconscious because Chuchu already so resembled a fictional character. I had observed Graham crafting characters from real life into
The Comedians,
but Chuchu seemed far too much for Graham's creative imagination to handle in a novel. Moreover, at times it seemed as if Chuchu was trying to micro-manage Graham's novel. I knew all about the futility of this because I had tried the same tactic with Graham and
The Comedians.
In writing, as in many other areas, Graham marched to his own drum.

Chuchu had other irritating qualities. He had a propensity for uttering fatuous phrases, some hyperbolic, others simply nonsensical. ‘I believe in the Devil, I don't believe in God,' he used to say, as if such a sacrilegious declaration would shock the world about him. He was unabashedly excited about the prospect of being a fictional character in ‘Greeneland', a name-place that Graham had grown to detest thoroughly. On their first trip together into the Panamanian hinterland Graham had made the mistake of revealing that he was thinking of a new novel. For Chuchu this was like an open door, and he stepped right in. When Graham asked him whether he would mind being killed off in the book Chuchu accepted the offer of literary martyrdom with pleasure but then warned, ‘I am never going to die.'

In a letter to me after returning to Antibes from that first visit to Panama Graham wrote on 30 December 1976, ‘I even got an idea for a novel when I was in the country with Chuchu and, if it does seem to take root, I shall go back to Panama in July.' Three weeks later he wrote, ‘I really believe a novel is emerging into my self-conscious as the result of Panama with Chuchu as the main character.'

The book he had been carrying around for all those years was ultimately published in 1978 as
The Human Factor.
It was to bring Graham's career as a novelist full circle. Despite his own misgivings
The Human Factor
was one of his best novels and the last of the best ones, a masterful work. Graham had revealed to me earlier in Panama that the novel dealt with a British double agent, Maurice Castle, who married a black South African (Sarah). Graham had feared that critics might believe he was writing about Kim Philby because Castle, like Philby, ends up marooned in Moscow — a sorry finale — but does not receive the numerous perquisites provided by his Soviet handlers that Philby enjoyed. (Philby actually objected to Graham's portrayal of Moscow's bleakness — at least as experienced by the fictitious Castle.) His double agent Castle, Graham assured me, was in no manner or form based on Philby.

He had let the novel languish, without even a working title, for all those years. When he finally published
The Human Factor
he sent a copy to Philby. I read the book with anticipation and was not disappointed. I later told Graham that I agreed that no one familiar with Kim could possibly confuse Graham's character Maurice Castle with Philby, that Castle was the antithesis of Philby.

The title,
The Human Factor,
is well chosen. Again Graham treats the phenomena of betrayal, espionage, conspiracy and clandestine behaviour. There are also love, pain and anguish as well as a marked tenderness and compassion. The protagonist, Castle, who is the loneliest of spies and double agents, has a moral debt to pay to those who helped him spirit his black wife Sarah out of apartheid South Africa, which ultimately places him alone in the stark isolation of Moscow pining for the ones he loved.

(In
Ways of Escape
Graham had written: ‘Perhaps the hypocrisy of our relations with South Africa nagged me on to work too. It was obvious that, however much opposed the governments of the West Alliance might pretend to be to apartheid, however much our leaders talked of its immorality, they simply could not let South Africa succumb to Black Power and Communism. If Operation Uncle Remus [a top-secret contingency plan for the defence of South Africa by the Western alliance that Castle learns about] did not exist, it would certainly come into existence before long. It was less an invitation than a prediction.')

As a book
The Human Factor
was a success, but, Graham reported, unfortunately Otto Preminger's film was not. Preminger, Graham added, had had problems financing the production and he was forced to do it ‘on the cheap'.