Free Getting to Know the General by Graham Greene Page B

enough inside yourselves – where you would find us too.
    ‘Who was the first Latin American? Cortés – not Columbus. Columbus stayed on his boat in Portobelo Bay and wouldn’t land. He was old, like Europe.’
    But there was one genuine line of the General’s dialogue which haunted me still by its mystery. What had he meant when he said, ‘You and I are both self-destructive’? It was like a friend speaking who knew me better than I knew myself.

PART II

    1977

1
    The novel On the Way Back nagged at me night and day on my return to France. Those characters which I had so mistakenly drawn from life wouldn’t let me rest. I would constantly remember Chuchu’s boast, ‘I’m never going to die’; his complex theology – ‘I believe in the Devil. I don’t believe in God,’ and the way that he would prove the existence of the Devil by pushing at a swing door in the wrong direction. The General and Chuchu went on living, far away in Panama, and they refused to become characters in my novel. And Panama – so much of the little country had still been left unseen and it seemed highly unlikely that I would ever be able to return for a second visit. I hadn’t got as far as Columbus to the undesirable island of Bocas del Toro; Nombre de Dios was a name only in a pageant and a poem; we had failed to penetrate the Haunted House. News came to me, I think from my friend Diederich, that Señor V, poor man, was dead of a heart attack. Had that last Black Label party been too much for him? In the novel, which I began to despair of ever writing, it was essential that he should remain alive, for his role was an important one. After Chuchu’s death in his bombed car – at David? – the General had to send Señor V to fetch the girl back by helicopter to Panama City, and it was in his unsympathetic company that she would find herself being flown over all the places which she and Chuchu had planned to visit ‘on the way back’.
    I put the first two pages of the doomed book down on paper in the months that followed. Marie-Claire, the French journalist, arrived as I had done on that first occasion to see the General.
    She found herself surrounded in the small courtyard of a white suburban villa with half-Indian faces. The men all carried revolvers on their belts and one had a walkie-talkie which he kept pressed closely to his ear as though he were waiting with the intensity of a priest for one of his Indian gods to proclaim something. The men are as strange to me, she thought, as the Indians must have seemed to Columbus five centuries ago. The camouflage of their uniforms was like painted designs on naked skin.
    I had not got much further with the book when one night at bedtime my telephone rang in Antibes. It was the voice of Chuchu speaking from Panama. ‘When are you coming?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘The General wants to know when you are coming.’
    ‘But . . .’
    ‘Your ticket is waiting for you at KLM.’
    So after all, I thought with a certain happiness, I am going to see Panama once more.
    On this occasion I flew from Paris to Amsterdam, so as to catch the KLM flight, and next morning I was drinking Bols once again over the Caribbean. In my diary I noted: ‘21 August. Towering cloud formations above Trinidad. Lovely mountainous coast of Colombia and then the dense Darién jungle. Chuchu met me at airport.’
    It was as though I had never been away. Life without any difficulty began to change to the Panama rhythm. A siesta, bad planter’s punches with Chuchu at the Holiday Inn, back for my whisky at the hotel, a good dinner from the Basque patron at the Marisco. However, there were some important changes and Chuchu brought me up to date. His own life had not stood still. Chuchu’s beloved ex-wife had left her American husband, but she had written to Chuchu saying she wouldn’t return to him (rather, I think, to his relief) because when she was with him she didn’t feel free. He said, ‘She’s trying