The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  After a while a man approached. ‘Greene?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ we both said at the same time.

  The man motioned to us, and we followed him to a Jeep Cherokee. He said nothing more and we got in the vehicle and started off. I played tour guide, pointing out places of interest to Graham as we drove through the city. ‘This is the old Panama City,’ I explained, waving towards some ruins. ‘It was set on fire and destroyed by the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan. He sacked Panama City in the seventeenth century. Afterwards the city was moved to where it is today.’

  Suddenly I realized that something was amiss. ‘Wait a minute,’ I interrupted the driver. ‘I thought the General said we were going to Contadora.’ We were driving in the wrong direction.

  The driver made a sharp U-turn and sped back to the hotel. The driver had picked up the wrong Greene. He left us with a flurry of embarrassed apologies and went in search of the other Greene.

  Graham and I laughed. We could imagine the headlines: ‘Author Graham Greene and Journalist Abducted from Panama Hotel Lobby.’ Normally I was careful to take only bona fide taxis at Latin American airports because kidnapping was becoming a growth industry with leftist guerrillas seeking funds for their respective war chests. Graham found the whole strange episode hilarious. Gazing after the driver as he disappeared into the hotel, he said, ‘I wonder if I should follow him and meet the other Greene. You know there is another Graham Greene, an impersonator, and I have been unable to catch up with him.’

  We sat back on the hotel’s veranda. Graham rubbed his hands and intertwined his long thin fingers. ‘The day is starting out well.’

  Later, when we obtained a Panama Canal Company telephone directory, we found half a dozen Greenes listed in the Panama Canal Zone. Graham commented that they could be the West Indian branch of his family.

  Another driver arrived, dressed in the uniform of Panama’s Guardia Nacional. He was short with a lined, leathery Mayan face. His hair was closely cropped, military-style, and tinged with grey, and he wore a sergeant’s stripes.

  ‘Sergeant José Jesús Martínez,’ he said in excellent English. ‘At your service.’ He turned out to be the correct driver. He drove us the relatively short distance to the house of Torrijos’s friend Rory Gonzalez on Calle Cincuenta. He ushered us to the door, saluted and departed.

  It was as if we had entered a wax museum. The two figures in the over-furnished sitting room sat motionless. They appeared to have struggled out of bed and collapsed into the easy chairs. One of the figures, Rory Gonzalez, broke the silence. ‘Good morning.’ He spoke in perfect English. The other was wearing a bathrobe with a towel hanging from his shoulders. He was dishevelled and clearly suffering the devil’s hangover. This was General Torrijos.

  There were no introductions. We sat, and I leaned my head towards the General to let Graham know this was Torrijos, the Maximum Leader of the Revolution. Graham was making his own deductions. After a while the General got to his feet, nodded towards us and left the room. We were served coffee, and about fifteen minutes later Omar returned. He had showered and was wearing sports clothes. With a wave, he gave the order for us all to head for the small Paitilla airport.

  Waiting in the small terminal for a propeller plane of Panama’s internal Perlas airline to be readied, Torrijos puffed on a cigar, obviously lost in thought, or still struggling with his hangover. He had said barely a word to Graham and me. Instead, we chatted with Rory.

  A small boy suddenly ran up and wrapped his arms around the General. Taken by surprise, Omar pretended to be angry. ‘You don’t know me!’

  The lad laughed and pointed a finger at him. ‘You are Omar Torrijos.’

  Such was Torrijos’s relationship with his people. The General asked the boy where he was going, and when he said ‘To Contadora’ Omar invited the child and his family to accompany us in the plane. The boy cheered, and his parents thanked the General and accepted the ride.

  When we arrived on Contadora the businessman Gabriel Lewis Galindo, who was developing the island, welcomed us. We sat under a young coconut tree outside the Galleon seafood restaurant and drank rum punches. I could tell Omar and Graham were sizing each other up. The General spoke no English, so the job of translator fell to me.

  The General told Graham of his aversion to intellectuals. Graham declared he was not an intellectual, putting emphasis on the word ‘not’, and adding, ‘I do not aspire to being an intellectual.’ I figured they were both on safe ground. They had discovered a mutual dislike.

  Suddenly, Torrijos stopped talking in mid-sentence. We followed his stare to a lithesome Latin beauty with the figure of a model who had stepped out of the restaurant, removed her sandals and was wriggling her toes in the sand. She gave out a little squeal of pleasure at the contact with the hot sand. Then she slowly climbed the hill, her hips swaying invitingly, towards Gabriel Lewis’s bungalow. We all sat transfixed. Then, as if hypnotized, the General rose to his feet and without a word or a glance marched up the hill after her.

  Graham looked at me and chuckled.

  ‘She is a Colombian singer,’ Roy explained. ‘He listened to her sing last night in Panama City. She’s hot stuff.’

  We ordered another round of rum punches and drank to the General’s health.

  We heard the drone of the little plane returning to the island from a trip to the mainland. A short while later Jorge Carrasco showed up. Carrasco, a heavy-set and well-known presenter of television evening news, was also Omar’s official translator. His obesity was a topic of jest among his Panamanian viewers, but he knew how to keep his mouth shut off-camera. He had had the task of translating for the Panamanian negotiators of the Canal Treaty.

  Graham didn’t like Carrasco’s arrival. The four of us — Graham, Omar, Rory and I — had been getting on fine. None the less we made small talk with Carrasco. About half an hour later the General returned; beads of sweat glistened on his forehead. He picked up the conversation where he had left off. I could see that Graham was impressed. He later told me it was like his meeting with the Mexican rebel, General Saturnino Cedillo, at his ranch in San Luis Potosí nearly forty years earlier, which Graham recounted in The Lawless Roads. There was the same unhurriedness about both generals.

  Torrijos himself led Graham on a tour of Contadora. The conversation turned to the newly elected US President Carter. ‘What kind of man is this man, the farmer from Georgia?’ the General wanted to know.

  ‘We will have to wait and see,’ Graham replied cautiously. ‘He does appear to be much more sympathetic than his predecessor.’

  When the waiter at the Galleon came to check on us, I declined another round of rum punches.

  ‘Absolute rubbish!’ Graham snapped.

  ‘The sun is too high,’ I said, and explained how the strong rum punches in the tropics can glaze the eyes and cloud the brain of even a dedicated drinker.

  Graham disagreed, and the General agreed with Graham.

  I must concede that even after several rounds Graham remained fresh and alert. He never required a siesta, even after our lobster lunch accompanied by a bottle of wine. In many respects he defied all the usual medical advice and expressed horror at the idea of engaging in any special physical exercise. He was healthy, and his loping gait kept comfortably apace with Omar’s long strides.

  Walking us to the plane, Torrijos was obviously gratified. He and Graham had hit it off, and the small isthmus country’s economic woes and the seemingly never-ending Canal negotiations had been momentarily forgotten.

  Graham was excited. Back in Panama City he said he liked the General and believed his political compass was pointed in the right direction. I had taken a number of black-and-white photographs, one of which was eventually to become the cover of his book Getting to Know the General. I telexed a brief news item to Time the following day, and air-expressed the pictures to the magazine in New York. The item appeared in the 20 December 1976 issue in the ‘People’ section:

  It was like
a scene out of a Graham Greene novel: a Central-American strongman and an Oxford-educated Briton sat beneath a coconut tree on a tropical beach philosophizing. The strongman, Panamanian Dictator Omar Torrijos, noted that both their fathers had been teachers, and that he had left his family at 17. The Briton, author Greene himself, mused between sips of rum punch: ‘You should thank God you did escape from home, because if you hadn’t you might be an intellectual today.’ Greene quickly added: ‘I am not, because to be an intellectual is rather academic. A creative writer seems to me to be emotionally involved, and that is not being an intellectual. They are people who regard from a distance and don’t involve themselves. When an intellectual like Kissinger gets involved in events, it’s a disaster.’ ‘Intellectuals,’ added Omar, ‘are like fine glass, crystal glass, which can be cracked by a sound. Panama is rock and earth!’

  Before setting out to show Graham Panama City I suggested Mass at the Church of Christ the Redeemer, built in the barrio of San Miguelito by a group of progressive Chicago priests. Their misa tipica (folklore Mass) with guitars and bongo drums was one of the first to be celebrated in the hemisphere. When I finished quoting the pastor, Father Mahon, as saying that ‘the old Roman Catholic service had lost its spiritual appeal and reflected the monastic mentality of the Renaissance’, Graham’s expression told me I had forgotten his preference for the Tridentine rite said in Latin. So we skipped Mass and instead visited Panama’s ancient Cathedral of San José in the old section of the city. While on the topic of religion, the subject of the priest in The Honorary Consul came up. Graham said, ‘My priest is not, as some have suggested, modelled after Father Camilo Torres.’ (Camilo Torres was a Colombian priest who died fighting as a guerrilla in 1966.) ‘As a revolutionary Camilo is on par with Che Guevara, and they are much more romantic than my priest, for whom I invented a little personal theology.’

  Graham was like a schoolboy on a journey of discovery. The days were far too short for him. I couldn’t believe a man who had travelled as much as he had could still be so enthusiastic about new surroundings. His curiosity and enthusiasm were unabated by Panama’s heavy humidity and heat. He seemed to want to see everything, including Colon, the city on the Atlantic side of the isthmus.

  I said it was a good idea and suggested we travel by train. The train ride across Panama’s Canal Zone from ocean to ocean would be via the world’s oldest transcontinental railway which had opened in 1855, fourteen years before the last spike was driven on the first rail line to span the continental United States. British author David Howarth in his book Panama had noted that before the Atlantic—Pacific isthmus rail link came about, gold-seekers in the California gold rush were paying $100 each to cross by canoe and mule. The railway, constructed by a group led by New York financier William Henry Aspinwall, a grand-uncle of Franklin D. Roosevelt, charged them $25. It became a highly profitable enterprise. Thousands were said to have died in its construction, mostly from yellow fever.

  Graham and I paid $1.50 each for the ninety-minute trip from Balboa on the Pacific side to Cristóbal on the Atlantic (and literally across the street from Colon), which covered not quite forty-eight miles. Although it broke no speed records, the train ran on time.

  We settled down in a first-class car where we were the only passengers except for two Panamanian boys using the aisle as a playground while their parents travelled in the second-class section. The yellow-and-blue diesel-powered train clattered along with open windows and a view of the Panama Canal on one side and tangled rainforests on the other.

  We had a date to meet the General’s aide, Sergeant ‘Chuchu’ Martínez , at the George Washington Hotel in Colon and were to return by automobile with him on the Trans-Isthmian Highway.

  Graham did not share my enthusiasm for the old railway. As we were clickety-clacking through a section of jungle I could sense that he wanted to tell me something important. ‘There is this writer, a professor of English literature named Norman Sherry,’ Graham said rather sheepishly, ‘who wants to write a book on my work.’

  I could see that accepting the biographer’s offer had not been an easy decision for him.

  ‘I liked what he did on Conrad … and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind talking to him. He also wants to retrace my steps in Mexico, do The Lawless Roads, The Power and the Glory …’ Graham left the sentence hang without an ending and seemed to be deep in thought. Then he added, ‘You can tell him anything you wish, but don’t mention my personal life.’* By personal, he said, he meant private. Graham was very protective of his family and friends.

  The boys playing in the aisle had left our car momentarily and rejoined their parents in the second-class section. The American conductor (the railroad was operated by the US Canal Zone administration) came by and punched our tickets. Then we were alone and I could see that the subject of a possible biographer bothered Graham. I admitted I had not read Sherry’s book or books on Conrad.

  Graham explained that he had selected Sherry’s book on Conrad as the British Book of the Year in 1971. Sherry had been pleased, and his correspondence with Graham had led to a request to undertake a critical biography of Graham and his work, similar to the book he had done on Conrad. Among the considerations that had persuaded him, Graham said, was the fact that Sherry was neither a Catholic nor a friend. It was an odd conversation, and I felt as if Graham were reassuring himself that he had made the right decision. He commented that some of his friends had suffered from their biographers, and he mentioned Evelyn Waugh as a victim.

  I knew little of Graham’s personal life. I had only seen him with one woman, Catherine, who had accompanied him to Haiti in 1956. I remembered her as a very pleasant person, but he had never mentioned her again. In fact, except for Yvonne, his lady friend back in the south of France whom he did talk about, he had rarely discussed his relationships with women. He had mentioned his wife Vivien, from whom he had been separated since the end of the Second World War, telling me on one occasion that she was living in Oxford and had written a book on doll’s houses. He spoke of her in the most respectful manner. He talked about Francis, his only son, and his daughter Caroline. But he was very private about his family. His life seemed to be carefully compartmentalized and organized, much as he described his dreams. As foreign correspondents often do, he would talk at times about visiting brothels — he mentioned Havana and Hanoi — but he gave the distinct impression that he went there more as an observer than a participant.

  ‘He [Sherry] may soon look you up in Mexico. He may need help in travelling over my old trail,’ Graham said.

  ‘It will not be a problem,’ I said. ‘I’ll certainly talk to him.’

  I gazed out at the jungle rolling by and wondered whether it may have been my puzzled look or inner embarrassment over the term ‘personal life’ that had set him talking about his past romances. Then, even more out of character, he began discussing a Swedish actress with whom he said he had been romantically involved after his 1956 trip to Haiti. He referred to her as Anita.

  We were crossing the Continental Divide. The boys had returned to play in our train car, and I interrupted Graham’s romantic ruminations by snapping his picture. He didn’t protest.

  Later, when we arrived at Cristóbal, Graham paused to take a photograph of a Zonian policemen in his wide-brimmed hat which he believed dated from the US Civil War. ‘Awful thing. It won’t work,’ he complained and fussed with his camera.

  We crossed the street from the US town of Cristóbal to Colon, Panama’s second city. We admired Colon’s dilapidated French architecture of two-storey balconied houses, and Graham mentioned how they reminded him of Haiti and Hanoi. We headed for a camera shop, but the Panamanian attendant at the shop had no idea how to fix Graham’s camera. (The camera was eventually stolen in Panama, but Graham was not at all upset.) We asked for directions to the George Washington Hotel from the camera shop attendant. It was only eight blocks and it wasn’t yet lunchtime, so we decided to walk. The street was empty except
for a Guardia Nacional police van.

  As we passed the van two Guardia policemen barred our way. ‘Where are you going?’

  I was about to reply, ‘What the hell business is it of yours?’ but Omar was their commander and I didn’t want to make trouble. ‘To the Hotel Washington,’ I answered.

  ‘Get in, please,’ the policeman ordered, and waved to the back of the van. We got in and sat looking at each other, perturbed. I thought: What a great photograph: Graham Greene in a paddy wagon! The two policemen took places on each side of us and tapped the hood of the van to signal the driver. We drove off down Front Street.

  ‘Are we headed for jail?’ Graham asked.

  ‘This is a very bad street, lots of ladrones, plenty of thieves,’ one of the Guardia policemen said in English. ‘They have sharp knives and they like cameras like yours.’ Then he made a gesture with his finger running across his throat. We could have had our throats slit.

  Graham looked at me. ‘Why didn’t they tell us at the camera shop that it was dangerous when we asked directions to the hotel?’

  ‘Maybe the shop buys the stolen cameras,’ the policeman replied. He was very serious-looking and added that only recently they had terminated the career of two thieves. He didn’t elaborate on how the early retirement had occurred. We thanked the stony-faced policemen for the ride and clambered down from the van at the entrance of the Hotel Washington, with curious staff and guests staring at our inglorious arrival.

  We went to the bar and sat. Over our first planter’s punch, which Graham pronounced ‘excellent’, we discussed Colon. The city had become a sad, seedy and neglected place.

  Graham said he had read a French novel many years earlier set in Colon. It described the rip-roaring Colon of the Second World War. It was the fleshpot that provided countless servicemen with their last tryst before heading out to the Pacific. None the less Graham found the elegant old George Washington Hotel, built in 1913, delightful. At one time it ranked with the Raffles of Singapore and other celebrated hotels around the world. Will Rogers slept there, and the exiled Argentine dictator Juan Peron met and wooed his future wife Maríneza Estela Martínez Cartas (better known as Isabel) there.