Getting to Know the General Read Online Free PDF

consulted he couldn’t make one, he said, because he had no milk. Milk?
    Later driving through the streets of old Panama, Chuchu stopped to speak to a black on the pavement. ‘He was one of my pupils,’ he said, ‘when I was a Marxist professor.’ Perhaps to show what a good professor he had been he asked the man, ‘Who was Aristotle?’
    ‘The first Venezuelan philosopher,’ the black replied without hesitation. For a while after that Chuchu drove in thoughtful silence.
    I had that night dinner with Señor V at a restaurant called Sarti’s – an elegant one by Panama standards – but it was an uncomfortable situation and not helped at all by the barman’s non-alcoholic idea of what a rum punch should be. I admitted that Chuchu and I intended to drive up to David, the second largest town on the Pacific side. ‘I will join you in David,’ Señor V said.
    ‘Or perhaps we may go instead to Taboga,’ I added hastily. ‘We haven’t decided yet.’
    Taboga is a small island in the Pacific where no cars are allowed – it sounded to me an ideal place to work.
    ‘I’ll join you there then,’ he said.
    He went on to demand that I warn him in advance whenever I had an appointment to see the General. He wanted to be present, he said, in order to study the growth of our relationship, and he told me that he intended to issue to the press some photographs taken on Contadora of the two of us, but here I was firm. ‘You can’t do that. The General has said that they are not to be released until after I leave.’
    ‘If you go to David,’ he said, ‘you must tell Chuchu to report at every guard post on the way. I want to be kept informed of where you are.’
    7
    So much that happened in Panama during the next four years proved as unexpected as the events in a dream. The Republic was to me an unknown land, and my voyage there was a voyage of discovery, and the first discovery was the Haunted House. Chuchu and I had driven over the Bridge of the Americas where we could see the ships lined up to take their turn to enter the Canal and pass towards the Atlantic; we had driven through the American Zone and re-entered Panama. There were no frontier posts to distinguish one from another, but the Haunted House was undeniably in Panama. Nothing could have been less American than the bar next door, decorated with cabalistic signs and bearing a name in Spanish meaning The Bewitched. The barman told us that the adjoining house had not been occupied for forty years. The owner of the house and bar was an old man who lived in Panama City. He would neither sell the house nor let it. Yes, the barman agreed, the superstitious believed it to be haunted.
    ‘By a ghost?’
    ‘By a woman screaming.’
    ‘Can we look round the house?’
    There was nothing to be seen, the barman assured us. The house was quite empty and anyway we would have to get permission from the owner.
    When could we see him?
    If we came back to the bar on a Sunday we would certainly find him. He came always on a Sunday.
    ‘Tell him,’ Chuchu said with the authority of his sergeant’s strìpes, ‘that we will be back next Sunday.’
    We left the bar and took a closer look at the house: an ugly square building with no character but its secrecy and its security. There were steel shutters on the already heavy doors and the windows were barred as well as shuttered. Only a hole, the size of a half-crown, in one of the doors gave us a view within. The house was certainly not completely empty – I could just make out in the obscurity two pictures and a cupboard. To me the house smelt of an old crime. A woman’s scream? ‘We have to see inside,’ I told Chuchu.
    ‘On the way back,’ he said, but a year was to pass before I had my way. It proved easier getting to know the General than the interior of the Haunted House.
    We drove on towards Santiago with the intention of stopping for a while at a small town called Antón where Chuchu said there was a miraculous image