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the tunnelling into the mine had gone, we had lunch in the canteen, and a young Englishman made a mysterious remark to me, ‘To be superstitious brings bad luck.’ (Had I tossed some salt over my shoulder?) I noted in my diary for an unknown reason the presence of ‘a tired American’, but he has left no memory behind him. Then we were back on the road to Boquete again.
    Chuchu’s melancholy had quite gone. He sang and he recited poems and he quoted a cynical Panamanian phrase one could use to a girl, which stuck, I don’t know why, in my mind – ‘Come with me to be alone.’ It is odd what you remember and what you forget. There were unfamiliar birds and unfamiliar butterflies, and by the wayside the Indian faces of a tribe which might be threatened by the copper mine, for if it were a success it would change the whole pattern of the tribe’s life. A horseman rode by carrying a cock on his hand in the way a waiter carries a tray.
    When I went to bed I entered in my diary a note for the new novel, little thinking that it would never be written: ‘Start novel with a girl from a French left-wing weekly interviewing the General. She’s escaping the pain of an unsatisfactory marriage in Paris and wants to avoid further pain. In the end she goes back to her pain and not to happiness.’
    Next day we returned to David in order to catch a plane to the island of Bocas del Toro, a depressed banana port (just how depressed I was to find out only several years later). I had become attracted to it because it was the furthest point west that Columbus reached off the coast of Panama, and perhaps because the South American Handbook stated with its habitual frankness, ‘No tourist ever goes there.’
    As we drove I told Chuchu of the novel which I was planning, and perhaps that is the reason why it never came to be written beyond the first chapter. To tell a story is much the same as to write it – it is a substitute for the writing. ‘You and the Frenchwoman journalist are the main characters,’ I told him. ‘The General puts you in charge of her to show her the country. He lends you one of his cars, and you go off together, just as we have done. Always there are things you can’t see – like the miraculous Christ and the Haunted House. “On the way back,” you repeat, and that will be the title of the book. But the irony is that neither of you will take the road back.’
    ‘We make love together?’ Chuchu demanded with a certain eagerness.
    ‘Oh, the idea grows in your head, but she’s not like the other women you have known. You have fears and scruples. All the same by the time you reach David or some town still further off, you both know that it’s going to happen. You stop outside a hotel, and by mutual consent, without a word being said between you, you take one room. She wants to wash off the dust of the road and brush her hair. You tell her you must leave the General’s car with the National Guard for safety and then you will return . . . and make love of course, but both of you know that without speaking of it. She washes and does her hair. She’s happy at the thought that all the hesitations are at last over. The decision has been made. But you don’t come back. She waits for you in vain. During the few moments you were with her in the room someone has planted a bomb in the car which goes off. She hears the explosion while she brushes her hair, but she thinks it is only your car backfiring . . .’
    ‘Am I killed?’ Chuchu asked with excitement, and I remembered how he had told me earlier that day, ‘I am never going to die.’
    ‘Yes. Do you mind being killed in a novel?’
    ‘Mind?’ He bared his arm. His skin had risen in lumps. ‘You must write it. Promise you’ll write it.’
    ‘I’ll try.’ But the book was never written, and it was the General and not Chuchu who died.
    We missed our plane to Bocas at David, but Chuchu showed no sign of disappointment. ‘When you come back,’ he