Promise me that you’ll always keep it on you, even at night.’ I promised.
A man came to fetch the Mexican film producer, who had been listening with growing bewilderment to my conversation with Camilo. The ‘someone’ was accompanied by a quite hideous woman, a Venezuelan with dyed red hair, who seemed to me obviously in pursuit of Chuchu.
We escaped on that occasion, but nobody in Panama City only turns up once. Like a play with a small cast the same actors were always reappearing in different roles. In the course of that muddled evening I had been supposed to meet a Peruvian refugee, but the meeting was cancelled at the last moment, so I suggested to Chuchu that we should take Camilo’s wife to dinner as she might be feeling lonely without him. But for some reason Chuchu couldn’t find Camilo’s house, though we had been there several times together, and for a yet more impenetrable reason he was convinced that María Isabel would be telephoning us at the house of Panama’s ambassador to Venezuela – or was it the other way round, Venezuela’s ambassador to Panama? – and the ambassador, he was sure, would give us a typical Venezuelan dinner, whatever that might signify. Of course, María Isabel didn’t telephone us, it was the hideous Venezuelan woman who turned up (had Chuchu foreseen that?) and the ambassador never asked us to dinner. Indeed, I don’t think he could understand what we were doing at his house. So we left, passing on the doorstep the Mexican film producer, who appeared more bewildered than ever at seeing us, and Chuchu and I had some chicken soup together at my hotel.
These last days in Panama unwound more and more quickly and confusingly. I hadn’t seen Omar for some days – it was as though in the past he had been directing events and now the disorder, which involved a Mexican film producer and a Venezuelan woman and Chuchu’s lapse of memory, arose from his absence. I had to get up very early the next morning because Omar wanted me to fly to a collective buffalo farm (an odd thing to find in Panama) in the mountain village of Coclesito. The farm had been started by Omar, who had built himself a small house nearby, after he had had made a forced landing in Coclesito in a helicopter and seen the hopeless isolation and poverty of the inhabitants. Their smallholdings had been washed out by a flood in which the chief’s son had been drowned. What gave the General the idea of a buffalo farm I never learnt. I was fetched by María Isabel, who complained bitterly that Chuchu had made a muddle the night before over my rendezvous with the Peruvian refugee. And why on earth had we gone to the Venezuelan ambassador’s house? Was it possible, I wondered, that it was because Chuchu wanted to see the hideous woman again?
Chuchu was waiting at the airport for the military plane which he had ordered and with him were a number of students from Guatemala, Ecuador and Costa Rica accompanied by their professors. Our journey to see the buffaloes was obviously meant to be an educational one, but we waited and waited and no plane arrived. Apparently the pilot, an air force officer, resented having been given orders by a mere sergeant. After two hours we sent a message to the General’s secretary that it was too late now for the buffaloes and we all trooped off to the Ministry of Culture where we were joined by the two Ultras and the Sandinista mathematician, Rogelio, and we had to sit through a long and boring videotape film of Panama folk dancing. I have always detested folk dancing since I was a boy when I had watched men morris-dancing in braces. (The dances appealed particularly for some mysterious reason to their wives, who wore shot-silk dresses bought at Liberty’s.)
In the middle of the film Chuchu was called away on an urgent errand. A Guatemalan professor recommended by the Dean of Guatemala University (the one who had been so drunk with Chuchu at David) had apparently been imprisoned some
A man came to fetch the Mexican film producer, who had been listening with growing bewilderment to my conversation with Camilo. The ‘someone’ was accompanied by a quite hideous woman, a Venezuelan with dyed red hair, who seemed to me obviously in pursuit of Chuchu.
We escaped on that occasion, but nobody in Panama City only turns up once. Like a play with a small cast the same actors were always reappearing in different roles. In the course of that muddled evening I had been supposed to meet a Peruvian refugee, but the meeting was cancelled at the last moment, so I suggested to Chuchu that we should take Camilo’s wife to dinner as she might be feeling lonely without him. But for some reason Chuchu couldn’t find Camilo’s house, though we had been there several times together, and for a yet more impenetrable reason he was convinced that María Isabel would be telephoning us at the house of Panama’s ambassador to Venezuela – or was it the other way round, Venezuela’s ambassador to Panama? – and the ambassador, he was sure, would give us a typical Venezuelan dinner, whatever that might signify. Of course, María Isabel didn’t telephone us, it was the hideous Venezuelan woman who turned up (had Chuchu foreseen that?) and the ambassador never asked us to dinner. Indeed, I don’t think he could understand what we were doing at his house. So we left, passing on the doorstep the Mexican film producer, who appeared more bewildered than ever at seeing us, and Chuchu and I had some chicken soup together at my hotel.
These last days in Panama unwound more and more quickly and confusingly. I hadn’t seen Omar for some days – it was as though in the past he had been directing events and now the disorder, which involved a Mexican film producer and a Venezuelan woman and Chuchu’s lapse of memory, arose from his absence. I had to get up very early the next morning because Omar wanted me to fly to a collective buffalo farm (an odd thing to find in Panama) in the mountain village of Coclesito. The farm had been started by Omar, who had built himself a small house nearby, after he had had made a forced landing in Coclesito in a helicopter and seen the hopeless isolation and poverty of the inhabitants. Their smallholdings had been washed out by a flood in which the chief’s son had been drowned. What gave the General the idea of a buffalo farm I never learnt. I was fetched by María Isabel, who complained bitterly that Chuchu had made a muddle the night before over my rendezvous with the Peruvian refugee. And why on earth had we gone to the Venezuelan ambassador’s house? Was it possible, I wondered, that it was because Chuchu wanted to see the hideous woman again?
Chuchu was waiting at the airport for the military plane which he had ordered and with him were a number of students from Guatemala, Ecuador and Costa Rica accompanied by their professors. Our journey to see the buffaloes was obviously meant to be an educational one, but we waited and waited and no plane arrived. Apparently the pilot, an air force officer, resented having been given orders by a mere sergeant. After two hours we sent a message to the General’s secretary that it was too late now for the buffaloes and we all trooped off to the Ministry of Culture where we were joined by the two Ultras and the Sandinista mathematician, Rogelio, and we had to sit through a long and boring videotape film of Panama folk dancing. I have always detested folk dancing since I was a boy when I had watched men morris-dancing in braces. (The dances appealed particularly for some mysterious reason to their wives, who wore shot-silk dresses bought at Liberty’s.)
In the middle of the film Chuchu was called away on an urgent errand. A Guatemalan professor recommended by the Dean of Guatemala University (the one who had been so drunk with Chuchu at David) had apparently been imprisoned some
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