Getting to Know the General Read Online Free PDF Page B

of Christ. Not that Chuchu believed in the Christian God – he was too good a Marxist for that – though he believed in the Devil. ‘Haven’t you noticed,’ he said, ‘when you try to open a swing door, you always begin by pushing it the wrong way? That’s the Devil.’ He was proud of his Mayan blood and he half believed in the Mayan gods. He told me that once in a museum he had talked to a Mayan idol and he knew he was understood. It was just a question of catching the right note. As he drove he gave an imitation of the note, which startled me. It was more like a shriek than a prayer. He had a small Mayan idol in his house and he was anxious to give it me so that there would always, he said, be a radiation of Maya in my home.
    I much preferred it when he recited Rilke in German, or one of the Spanish poets whom he admired, and I tried to respond with a few lines of Hardy and with Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage ; he preferred the French to the English in spite of my accent. English, he said, was not a poetic language, and Shakespeare was much inferior to Calderón. However, he approved of Newbolt’s poem Drake’s Drum. ‘Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay . . .’ He promised to take me to Nombre de Dios. It was impossible to go by road – there was no road: we would have to borrow an army plane – no, a plane couldn’t land there – a helicopter. The General would certainly lend us one.
    It was later on this trip that I discovered a poem which he could really appreciate and one of the few which I knew by heart, Yeats’s An Irish Airman Foresees his Death. Chuchu had a small second-hand aeroplane which at the moment was under-going repairs and there were lines in the poem he made me repeat more than once.
    I know that I shall meet my fate
    Somewhere among the clouds above.
    A lonely impulse of delight
    Drove to this tumult in the clouds.
    As a Marxist he approved of:
    My country is Kiltartan Cross,
    My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.
    Once in a Panama bar he made me put the lines on to tape.
    We passed several National Guard posts on our way to Antón, but he made no telephone calls to Señor V. He said, ‘If he comes to David to find us, we will have gone. We won’t spend a night there.’
    At Antón we couldn’t get into the church to see the miraculous Christ. The church was locked and no one seemed to know where the priest was. ‘Never mind,’ said Chuchu. ‘On the way back.’ It was the second time he had used the phrase and suddenly in my mind it became the title of a novel which, alas, I was never to write.
    As he drove I began to learn a little about Chuchu’s family life. He had a rather vague number of children by several women and he supported nearly all of them, though a boy and a girl were with their mother, his divorced wife, in the States. This wife had left him for an American professor and he spoke of her always with regret. I never knew what had happened to an earlier wife – the mother of the boy in the bombed car. He had a girl living with him now. She was only a poor thing, he said, and he sheltered her out of pity. He couldn’t turn her out as ‘the rich woman’ wanted. He would like to be rid of ‘the poor thing’ all the same . . .
    It was the first I had heard of the rich woman. By the rich woman, he told me, he had had a baby girl. The mother was a fellow poet. ‘If I go and see her we always sleep together, but she says I only come because of the food in her fridge.’
    We stopped at the cantonment of the Wild Pigs, near the General’s small house on the Pacific. Chuchu had nostalgic memories of his training there and we encountered the first friend he had made in the days when he was a middle-aged recruit. They must have been difficult days – being a professor among the Wild Pigs. He was even hit on the head once for reading a book. But this man had come up to him and said, ‘Come and shit with me,’ which was the greatest mark of