The Seeds of Fiction

by Bernard Diederich

  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.

  ‘Let’s get out of here. Let’s leave Chuchu. He is enjoying himself.’ Graham grabbed his throat dramatically to indicate he was suffocating. We walked until a taxi came along, and we returned to the hotel.

  That night over a quiet drink Graham talked about the curious fact that the late Comandante Zero’s pretty Panamanian wife, María Isabel, who had been our hostess at the birthday party, now lived with Dr Ramiro Contreras, brother of the slain commander. What Graham had found especially strange was that María Isabel had shown him a large portrait of her dead guerrilla husband peering down from a wall in her and Dr Contreras’s bedroom. ‘How could it be? It is strange. Maybe guerrillas look at life and death differently,’ Graham mused. ‘How can they make love with her dead husband looking down on them all the time?’

  Graham pretended to be a timid soul. He abhorred wars and revolutions, he said. Yet the night we met Pomares Graham told me, ‘I would go to Nicaragua if I could go with him. I trust him.’

  We never saw El Danto again. He was soon back in Nicaragua battling Somoza. A year later, covering the war in Nicaragua, I was promised an interview in the field with Pomares. The interview was postponed. Then I was told it was off. No reason was given. Then I learned why. On Sunday 30 May 1979 a final offensive was to be launched against Somoza’s forces. It was a final battle for Comandante Pomares. He was killed leading his men in an attempt to take the town of Jinotega.

  17 | OPERATION SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

  ‘What is this thing with El Draque [Drake]? Is he a relative of Graham?’ General Torrijos asked, mystified, as he ordered his helicopter for our early-morning flight to the Caribbean coast for ‘Operation El Draque’, as we had nicknamed Graham’s project.

  ‘No, General,’ I said. ‘Sir Francis Drake is related to his boyhood.’ Both Chuchu and I did our best to explain how British schools, even in the colonies, taught students about the sterling exploits of the
great English sea captain and navigator and how he had wrested control of the high seas from Spain for England.

  Omar shook his head, muttering something about how the English were a strange race. Maybe it’s good, he conceded, for a man of Graham’s age to seek to satisfy a boyhood yearning. Torrijos relished the humour in the cultural dichotomy. ‘We learned at school,’ he said, ‘that El Draque was a red-bearded hijo deputa [son of a whore], apinchepirata [plundering pirate] like that other son-of-a-bitch Englishman, Henry Morgan, who sacked Panama.’

  ‘Morgan,’ Graham corrected the General, ‘was a Welshman.’

  At a very young age, Graham said, he had seen a pageant play in London in which Drake attacked a Spanish mule train laden with gold and silver crossing the isthmus of Panama to Nombre de Dios, the Spanish King’s Caribbean treasure house. Loot from the Spanish colonies in America was stored there to await the annual convoy to Cadíz. The play had made a lasting impression on Graham. ‘With the aid of roundshot,’ he explained, ‘Drake hijacked gold stolen by the Spaniards from the Incas for his Queen.’ The exchange between Graham and Omar soared to the level of macro-economic theory. The kindest thing the General could say about El Draque was that he had really been working for the state (the Crown) and that his piratical activities were an early form of capitalist enterprise. Surprisingly, Graham agreed with the General. In fact, Graham had implied a similar conclusion in his book Travels with My Aunt. I mentioned this to Omar, and we all laughed, even though Graham never liked to quote from his own books. In that book wonderful old Aunt Augusta says, ‘A little honest thieving hurts no one, especially when it is a question of gold. Gold needs free circulation. The Spanish Empire would have decayed far more quickly if Sir Francis Drake had not kept a portion of the Spanish gold in circulation.’

  With a mischievous glint in his eyes, and clearly relishing the topic, Graham added that he had learned from reading history at Oxford that Drake was indeed a gentleman who had wined and dined the defeated Spanish galleon captains. This gave pause to Omar, who said Drake seemed like his kind of guy — as Omar had wined and dined his own enemies, even the gringo Canal negotiators. Graham continued building his case for Sir Francis, declaring that Drake whenever possible had put captured Spanish crews ashore. (Only recently I had told Graham about a contemporary Nicaraguan poem that cited Drake as behaving in the best tradition of a gentleman. The poet had obtained his research from actual files in the colonial archives in Madrid. The poem recounts that Drake had dined with the Spanish governor of what is today Nicaragua on silver plates, and Drake had apologized for taking some of the governor’s silver for the Queen of England.)

  Omar appreciated Graham’s English history lesson but remained unconvinced of the lofty humanity of El Draque. However, the General was duly impressed by the legend that Drake, a really cool character, had delayed the battle with the Spanish Armada until he completed his game of bowls.

  In 1596 Drake had died of a fever and was buried at sea in a lead coffin off Panama, which was one reason for our helicopter expedition to the coast. Despite the differences in historical interpretation, we took off for Panama’s Caribbean shore in high spirits. Soon the city of Colon on the Atlantic side of the Canal hove into view. Graham, who was the unofficial commander of the expedition, began signalling that he was thirsty and we should drop down for a drink at the George Washington Hotel. Chuchu agreed and instructed the pilot to land. The pilot followed his orders to the letter and descended in the hotel’s garden, forcing the palm trees to bend in salute to our rotor. We immediately went in search of a barman and had him open the bar even though it was still long before noon.

  Graham was in rare form. He pronounced the George Washington Hotel’s planter’s punch pure nectar, and we toasted Sir Francis and George Washington. Rejuvenated, we choppered off into the sun in search of Nombre de Dios, alighting near an Indian village. However, we came up empty. With a look of disbelief, Graham lamented that we couldn’t find a single trace of the fabled embarkation port — the end of the Camino Real (Royal Road) over which mules laden with Spanish plunder plodded across the rugged isthmus.

  ‘What a reassuring sight the colonial town must have been to the tough muleteers,’ Graham reflected, adjusting his floppy gardener’s hat that kept obscuring his view. He wanted to see what they saw, but nature defied us. ‘There must be some old fortifications left, surely!’ Graham protested.

  But we found none, not even a stone from the ballast that the Spanish ships carried en route to the Indies. ‘It [Nombre de Dios] was built on blood and plunder and man’s greed,’ Graham said as he surveyed the trees and heavy undergrowth. Nevertheless, like García Márquez’s mythical Macondo, Nombre de Dios had evidently surrendered to the jungle after more than two hundred years of solitude.

  The Indians and blacks that lived side by side in separate villages near by were not particularly interested in sharing Graham’s historic fervour. The sun was overhead, and they were sensibly indoors and seemed to know all about the saying ‘Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun’, which Graham recited for Chuchu’s benefit.

  Graham was ecstatic with his search and moved through the jungle at a good pace. He said the jungle reminded him of Indochina but that the Malay jungle was the densest he had ever penetrated. We stopped to rest in the shade on the stoop of a thatched house, where he began chatting to the Indians in English. They seemed amused by the rosy-faced man wearing a comical hat. An indigenous inhabitant with an enormous head replied to his questions in English and joined us in plodding along the beach where our shoes sank into the sand.

  Suddenly Graham stopped. Poised like a bird dog, he looked seawards. ‘I feel vibes. Drake is near,’ he announced dramatically.

  Chuchu, who always seemed prepared to believe anything, was the first to respond. ‘Where, Graham, where?’

  Graham stood anchored in the fine sand, which reached up to his ankles. We all waited in silence for more precise directional data from Graham’s vibes, but the spell was broken when our two helicopter pilots in their orange flight suits trudged up to show Chuchu a point on their map.

  ‘They want to apologize,’ Chuchu explained. ‘They dropped us in the wrong place. It’s up there.’ And he gestured towards an area further up the beach. So much for Graham’s vibes!

  We trudged along to another strip of sand. Undeterred, Graham was still animated by the adventure. When we rested again, he suggested that Drake had probably drifted a considerable distance in his lead coffin during his three hundred years in the water. He continued to act like a hunting hound, sniffing the air occasionally and surveying the sea. The George Washington Hotel’s planter’s punches and the sun were a powerful combination that made communication with the dead — even the long dead — possible. Unfortunately, Graham, who despite the heat was enjoying himself immensely, received no more vibes from his ‘spiritual sonar system’, as Chuchu called it.

  Chuchu suggested that we had covered enough of the Panamanian coastline for one day. Graham was sunburned, lobster-red, despite his wide-brimmed floppy hat. We trudged back to our waiting chopper and flew on to the ancient town of Puertobello to examine its colonial fortifications, which Drake had managed to pierce before he died at sea.

  ‘The casket is still there somewhere,’ Graham avowed, adding that a psychic had once said he would have been a good medium.

  After we landed in Panama City one of our pilots, when thanked for the trip, wanted to know what kind of treasure ‘the old man’ was looking for. ‘He’s just a history buff,’ Chuchu replied.

  When Omar heard of our expeditionary failure he joined in the game and offered Graham a dredge to continue the search in a more practical manner.

  My file to Time was brief:

  British author Graham Greene can recite what he calls the ‘good bad’ poem of Henry Newbolt verse after verse about the death at sea off the coast of Panama of Sir Francis Drake, that gallant British navigator. He made a sentimental journey back
to what is left of Nombre de Dios bay where the British poet suggests Drake’s remains were buried at sea, in a lead chest and weighed down with roundshot. Just in case he also visited Puertobello, the famous Spanish ruins further along the coast near the Atlantic mouth of the Panama Canal where … an expedition searched as recently as three years ago for Sir Francis in a lead box, without success.

  After a lobster lunch at the Panamar restaurant and careful wine selection, we returned to the hotel for an afternoon siesta. It was a rare luxury, but it proved to be my last siesta for a long time. The persistent ringing of the telephone awoke me.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ said a far-off voice.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered.

  ‘Why aren’t you in Nicaragua?’ the voice said disapprovingly.

  I was about to say, ‘Because I’m in Panama,’ but as my head began to clear I asked, ‘Why?’

  ‘The story is in Managua,’ the voice said excitedly. ‘Rebels have seized the palace there.’ It was the foreign editor of the Washington Star, which Time had recently acquired. He wanted me to file a story on the takeover of the palace for that evening’s edition. I told the editor it might not be that big a story because Nicaraguan President Somoza didn’t use the palace, one of the few buildings to survive the 1972 Managua earthquake. Somoza preferred to work from his so-called ‘bunker’ or at his nearby home. ‘It’s not Somoza we are concerned with,’ the editor said. ‘The rebels are reportedly holding four thousand people hostage in the palace, including the Nicaraguan congress, which was in session at the time.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ I replied and got out of bed. ‘I’m on my way.’

  I decided against waking Graham from his siesta and instead slipped a note under his door advising him of my departure. I then raced to the airport to catch the afternoon Pan American Airways flight to Managua. Anxiously I had checked the condition of my Olivetti portable typewriter and camera in anticipation of a good story, but as the plane neared Managua the captain announced that because of the unsettled political situation we would not be landing there.