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that Chuchu could leave the General’s car in safety for the night, for he remembered the bomb which had damaged his own. There we found Captain Wong. Captain Wong was much interested in the Russian weapon. He took his own American model and led us to a rifle range. The American repeater worked perfectly. The Russian spluttered out a few bullets and stuck. Another try. No trouble with the American weapon and the Russian stuck again. Chuchu was furious, injured, humiliated. It was almost as if he had been betrayed by a woman he loved. To think that he had given a good Belgian revolver in exchange for the Russian gun at the Cuban Embassy . . . It was as though the prophet Marx himself had failed him.
    I heard Chuchu tell Captain Wong that we should see him again ‘on the way back’ – Captain Wong, the miraculous Christ, the Haunted House, all were promised on the way back and my projected novel with that title again emerged from the shadows. In my book the promised return would never be fulfilled – there would be no going back for my chief character.
    Chuchu was silent and sad as we drove up next day into the mountains towards a village called Boquete, for he was brooding on his Russian repeater, but to me it was like a return to life after a long sickness – the malignant sickness of a writer’s block. I was coming to the end of The Human Factor, an abandoned novel which I had picked up again in desperation to escape just such a block. Five years had passed after the previous novel and I was beginning to feel already the menace of another long block when The Human Factor too would be gone and leave my mind empty.
    But with On the Way Back everything seemed to be possible: my writing days, I thought, were not over after all. The main elements of the story and the characters were already assembling – the dangerous situation between Panama and the States: Chuchu himself: the bomb in his car: the expression he had used in the motel – ‘A revolver is no defence’: his proof of the Devil’s existence: the Dean of Guatemala University and the fourteen homosexuals: impressions were clustering like bees round a queen on this journey we were taking together. It was for that reason I found myself happy all the way to Boquete, a charming little town nearly three thousand feet up the slopes of a volcano. The streets were full of the sound of rushing water, and the air was as fresh as the air in a Swiss village, even the small hotel was pretty, and so was the hostess who had the grace and the looks of a young Oona Chaplin.
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    Next day we visited the great copper mine, managed by Rory González, the General’s friend. It was a new State acquisition and believed then to be the great hope for Panama’s future, which otherwise depended on banking, flags of convenience, sugar, coffee and yucca, apart from the wretchedly small income received by the terms of the old treaty for the use of the Canal which was already incapable of taking the largest boats – the oil tankers and the aircraft carriers. The concession for working the mine had been bought from a Canadian interest: the mine was not expected to be in production for another four years, and it was to prove a very chancy gamble.
    The mine, I was told, was the largest in the world, larger even than the great mine in Chile at Chuquicamata which I had visited when Allende was President, but the copper had value for its quantity rather than its quality. A Canadian who belonged to the former management was naturally pessimistic about the chances – he didn’t want to be proved wrong – he wanted failure. He didn’t believe that the mine could be in full production before 1986 to ’88, and what would be the price of copper then? An assessment of the copper prices was no more reliable than a newspaper horoscope. Japan had formed big reserves of copper when her balance of payments was favourable and she might sell off these reserves at any time.
    We penetrated as far as