Getting to Know the General by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online Page A

but at least in this poor area near Las Minas one of them had made converts. ‘He was a good man. He taught us things, and he drank with us always on Sundays.’ I seemed to be in another country, very distant from the slum dwellers of El Chorillo and their belligerent cries or the song of the Wild Pigs.
    It must have taken nearly two hours to have our sandals made. They were not very good sandals and I abandoned mine next day, leaving them behind in a bad hotel where there were too many large cockroaches in the dull town of Chitré. Chuchu was disappointed in me, the sandals were genuine home-made Panamanian (he might have been talking of shoes by Lobb of St James’s), but I noticed that he didn’t wear his own for very long either.
    9
    On our way to Panama City we stopped at Rio Hato where the Wild Pigs had their cantonment and the General was staying in his modest house close by on the Pacific. General Torrijos had with him that day Aquilino Boyd, the Foreign Secretary, and the members of his military staff who had gathered there because the American delegation and Mr Bunker were due to arrive next day. A little to my embarrassment because of what I had told him of Colonel Flores, the General insisted on introducing me to the members of his staff, beginning with the Colonel, who was chewing gum as he had done at El Chorillo. In the hand which he reluctantly offered I thought I could detect his dislike and his disdain. For what reason, I could feel him demanding, could he, the Chief of Staff, be expected to greet a civilian and foreigner as an equal? But in the handshake of the intelligence officer I thought I detected a sympathy and a kind of connivance – an interesting contrast.
    Chuchu and I bathed in the clean, clear, quiet water of the Pacific while the staff met, and afterwards we lunched very badly in the mess of the Wild Pigs, lingering there until the General had got rid of his military guests. Apparently he wanted to talk to me. The visit of the Americans seemed to weigh heavily on his mind, perhaps the thought of the endless haggling for a fair treaty which seemed never to reach a conclusion, and yet an open confrontation was denied him if he was to follow Castro’s advice. He made an odd comparison which to this day I don’t understand: ‘You and I have something in common. We are both self-destructive.’ He added quickly, ‘Of course I don’t mean suicidal.’ It was as though at that moment he had opened for me a crack in the door of a secret room, a door which he would never quite close again.
    He continued to talk of the confrontation which he had in mind with the United States, and I remembered how on Contadora he had said that 1977 was the year when his patience would be exhausted. Confrontation meant war – a war between a tiny republic with less than 2,000,000 inhabitants and the United States with more than 200,000,000.
    Torrijos, I had begun to realize, was a romantic, but in most Panamanians I was soon to find that romanticism was balanced by a streak of cynical wisdom which you can detect in their popular songs – they are far less sentimental than ours – for example, ‘Your love is a yesterday’s newspaper’, and you can read cynicism even in some of the slogans on the beautifully painted buses – ‘Don’t go and get dressed up, because you are not going with me.’ The General may have felt self-destructive, but he had estimated his chances realistically.
    ‘We could hold Panama City for forty-eight hours,’ he told me. ‘As for the Canal, it is easy to sabotage. Blow a hole in the Gatún Dam and the Canal will drain into the Atlantic. It would take only a few days to mend the dam, but it would take three years of rain to fill the Canal. During that time it would be guerrilla war; the central cordilleras rise to 3,000 metres and extend to the Costa Rican frontier on one side of the Zone and the dense Darién jungle, almost as unknown as in the days of Balboa, stretches on the