Free Getting to Know the General by Graham Greene Page A

untasted with the help of water – Sunday was over. We talked of dreams – he seldom remembered them and those he remembered were disturbing like that of his dead father – of women (‘When one is young one eats anything but now one distinguishes’), of premonitions, from which he often suffered. His premonitions were usually of his own death by violence. I told him how appalling I found the Walt Disney figures on the roads of the Republic to which the names of villages and towns were attached. ‘Next time the students want to demonstrate against the States, can’t you tell them to burn all those Donald Ducks?’ Alas, my suggestion was never taken up. They are still there.
    As we talked, the solitary budgerigar watched us from its cage. ‘It will never sing,’ I said to Torrijos, ‘without a companion.’
    ‘Oh yes, it will,’ he said. He went into the next room and fetched a little cassette. He had recorded the song of a budgerigar and he played it to the solitary bird which burst into song in reply. How could one fail, I thought, to like this man?
    That evening Chuchu and I went to the open-air restaurant, the Panama, where the Pacific lay like a dark lawn in front and the stars seemed brighter and nearer than they ever were at home. We were to meet his ex-wife and their children, and Chuchu, while we waited, described her to me as the most beautiful woman I had probably ever seen. He knew he would feel so sad at parting from her when dinner was over that he had arranged for his comfort a rendezvous at half-past ten with a prostitute at a certain street corner – ‘the little girl’ at home would be quite incapable of soothing his unhappiness.
    Chuchu’s ex-wife arrived. She was good-looking, intelligent, and certainly a very nice woman, but I found her hardly the equal of Chuchu’s dream. She had brought with her (I think it may have been as a barrier against Chuchu’s attentions) a pretty young woman doctor who bristled with suspicion. Chuchu had put on his best uniform: he had combed his unruly hair and now he set out to seduce his thirteen-year-old daughter. Like Chuchu she was a romantic – in a few years’ time a friend of mine met her in Nicaragua, wearing khaki with a revolver on her hip.
    All through dinner Chuchu talked of his loneliness here in Panama: quite forgotten were the rich woman and his baby, ‘the little girl’ waiting at home, the prostitute by this time on her way to the rendezvous. ‘When you go back to the States,’ he implored his ex-wife, ‘at least leave me my daughter.’ His daughter held his hand and wept for the lonely man at her side – he wasn’t the professor that night, he was a soldier. Her young brother was of tougher material and he proudly produced a ‘thought’ as his father had taught him. ‘He can’t be lonely with the whole world in his mind.’ The doctor watched Chuchu’s performance cynically and the girl cried and cried.
    I was furious with Chuchu and I berated him as he drove me back to the hotel. ‘You had no right,’ I told him, ‘to upset your daughter like that with stories of your loneliness. Loneliness! What sort of loneliness?’
    ‘But I am lonely,’ he said. He stopped the car at a corner and looked up and down the road. ‘She’s gone,’ he said, ‘we are nearly an hour late.’
    Next day I had my last meal with Chuchu at the Marisco – a farewell to Panama – a meal given us free by the Basque owner. It was very light and elegant, consisting only of the cheeks of fish in oil and a Chilean wine chosen from a non-Pinochet year.
    I never thought I would see Chuchu or the General or Panama again, but I was haunted still by the novel I was never to write and in the months that followed I wrote down snatches of dialogue – though not the dialogue I had heard spoken.
    ‘You judge us,’ the General was saying not to me but to the woman reporter of On the Way Back. ‘You call us Latin Americans because you won’t look deep