The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  The man in the center of the embroidered men, the line of six, carried a light-red silk cloth. He walked to the tall men, and the other bright men followed, forming a “V.” He stamped his feet before the taller men, as if in anger, hard, over and over, to the beat of the flutes. The tall men stared at him, and did nothing. The red man walked over to one of the other men and stamped his feet in anger. The man stared at him but did nothing. Over and over, he went back and forth between the three tall men, and stamped his feet. He looked behind him at the men in his group. One of these men went over to the tall ones, and stood with them, taking off his hat; and it seemed to me that he became taller too. Then another of his men went over. Finally there was a line of eight men, and the one man still wearing a round red cap stood alone, facing the man in the middle of the other line. He stamped his feet, first one, then the other, raising his knees high into the air, bringing his legs down, rocking back and forth, flinging the cloth up and whipping it down. When it came down, the flutes grew quiet, as if there were an ending. Or a separation. Then the flutes began again; played their short tune; and stopped as he brought his red cloth down. And began again. In the intervals of silence I lost myself, felt myself falling into the silence, like an unraveling, the letters that made up my name scattering all over the page. I didn’t know who he was he means I am. There. In that place. The flutes began again, that breathy whistling, and reknit me note by note. One of the tall men turned his back to the single man. Then another. Then they all had their backs turned. The single man became more and more furious in his motions. There was nothing beautiful about it. It was far from beautiful. I thought he was in pain. He couldn’t breathe. He flailed about in the thin air. The line of men formed a circle around him, with their backs to him. I could see him between their legs and bodies, he stamped his feet and leapt up, and his red hat looked like the tip of a flame. His body was wound round with the scarf, not artfully, but as if he’d become tangled in it. The circle dispersed, and there was no one in the middle. The music of the flutes went on. I loved the Bolivian Revolution. I wanted to dance my love. (I knew those steps! This ugly dance I’d done all my life!) I wanted to jump up and down and circle the table.

  A North American scowled at me, his lips pursed in distaste. I stared back at him. I have come into my city! I have come to dance its possession!

  Our eyes met. He must look away first. I would never harm him, but I would not look away; I would be recognized. And this man felt the same! A vivid current of hatred ran between us. I despised this man’s face, middle-aged but still perfectly smooth, the face of congealed adolescence. He had been sent from Washington, to bring the Bolivian Revolution to heel! I loathed his thinning blond hair and small blue eyes, that he would not take from mine until I submitted to his look, to his possession of me. “You’ll lose,” I said quietly, in English. “It may take time, but we will win.”

  “Are you speaking to me, pal?” my enemy said, in Spanish. He even used the Argentine slang—“che.”

  “It would be better for you, pal, if you didn’t talk to me.”

  Anger must be sublimated! Nobility is self-rule! But I rose from the table without volition. A glass shattered. Fernando pulled hard on my sleeve, and I came back to myself, half out of my seat. My principles would not let me go forward. But I would not look away.

  “Damn you Ernesto,” Chaco said quietly. He tugged at my sleeve. “You’re going to get us killed. These guys talk to the guys who do the bad things for these guys. Be still, child, please! I’m begging you!”

  “I’m telling you, pal,” my enemy said, “it would be better for you to sit back down. You don’t know who I am. You don’t know who you’re talking to.”

  You don’t know who I am. I laughed, puzzled and delighted by this repetition, as if, strolling in a foreign city, I’d found a favorite childhood toy of mine—discolored on the right paw by the glass of milk I’d spilled on it—displayed in a museum. My anger dissolved. I felt as if I were in someone’s story. I felt chosen for instruction.

  “What are you laughing at, you shithead?”

  “You remind me of an old woman, a friend of mine.”

  He said something to his companions, without looking away. My jacket in tatters, my chest covered with grease—was I a madman?

  Anger must be sublimated, I thought calmly. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  That enraged him. His face flushed. “Fucking goddamn right you won’t hurt me, pal!”

  An arm—I saw Chaco’s long thin fingers—took me around the shoulder. “Ernesto dear,” he said, “it was so good of you to come today.” Chaco spoke English. “We’re very glad to have your opinion. And we have so much to talk about with the minister. Let’s walk over to the palace now.” The North American, confused by this travesty, thought he’d misjudged me. Who knew in this crazy place, where a thousand Indians slept in the streets, what my role might be? He looked away. Chaco pulled me from the table, and Fernando took me under the arm. We walked out into the bright sun, the swirl of Indians, the pungent odor of cooking oil and spent rifle shells, the gaiety of inheritors.

  “I know what you want to know,” Chaco said. He patted me reassuringly on the back of my neck, to calm me, gentling the ponies. He was proud of himself. He thought he had saved our lives. Maybe he had.

  My heart beat quickly, and my chest and throat hurt, heavy with blood, flushed with anger and some shame. I had risen from my chair to hurt that man; my anger had been a sun nearly blotting out my principles. I was still an undisciplined disciple. But mostly the whole thing seemed funny to me. Two big horned toads, sitting on the plush banquettes of the bar, puffing our chests with air and hissing.

  “It’s called Lucifer’s Fall.”

  “What?” For a moment I thought that Chaco knew my fears about my discipleship.

  “The dance. You’re wondering what the dance meant.”

  But I wasn’t. That movement had been, for me, sufficient in itself. I had moved in those bodies, I had stamped and leapt and suffered with that man’s ugly shaking. I didn’t wonder what it meant. They were cutting off his air.

  “Lucifer and the band of former angels rise from hell to challenge the Trinity. And fail. And fall. Lucifer cast out. Get it?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t want to hear more. “It’s time for dinner.”

  “Yes. Oh, yes,” Ricardo agreed. Hunger made him poetic.

  “Yes,” Fernando said.

  I didn’t want Chaco to talk. I wanted what I had seen. Or anyway, not his story.

  An Open Field

  Dinner was six miles away, at Isaias Nougues’s house in Calacoto. There, two or three times a week, Nougues, an Argentine, served stew to the citizens of exile.

  Isaias, leader and financier of a provincial Argentine party, a former member of our country’s Parliament, had interests across several borders. I found his massive poem of woe, the contempt he suffered from Peron, a little hard to swallow (and a stanza had to be taken with dinner), for the cost of his opposition was paid down in gold from his sugar plantations, and there was still enough of that sweetness left to feed us all.

  He was welcoming always to Fernando and myself, a friend of our families. (And this was the most nourishing food we had in La Paz.) “Your mother,” he said to me, “has a sharp tongue, a great wit, and an immense heart. She tries to hide it, but she cannot. I think her cutting wit is meant to protect, to mask, her tender heart.” Perhaps true—though Isaias spoke always only in compliment or complaint. Towards him, though, as phrases in her letters revealed—and we shamelessly used his house for mail—her heart was a lump of coal. She found him, as she did so much of her life, preposterous. “Isaias tells his beads, while his accountant keeps his books. Try please to eat him out of house and home.”

  The house was a light-pink stucco ranch, a long “L” with a pale red tile roof. Masses of shrubs with dark-red blooms surrounded it. We were rarely inside the house, except to use the bathroom; business
was conducted in the fields. There were cultivated areas mixed with wildness, and artistry—according to Fernando—had gone into their counterpoising. (I didn’t care about the setting. Landscapes were no clue—not yet.) I remember a large vegetable garden where burlap bags on tall sticks stood over the mounds of earth, and the green runners of potato plants. It made me uneasy to see the empty men flapping in the wind. (The bags, Isaias explained, had been coated with dried blood, to keep creatures away from the garden.) There was a small cornfield, with attendant ghouls, and long meadows, only partly mowed, with trees and large rocks in them. A river. I remember that. It ran between the house and the fields where we ate.

  Fernando, Chaco, Ricardo, and I stepped carefully, single file, across the narrow footbridge, overlapping boards hammered together, with ropes for supports and railings. The bridge swayed. Chaco put one arm on my shoulder to steady himself. He closed his eyes, though we were only a few feet over the narrow river. Water terrified him.

  Thirty others stood scattered in the field before us, waiting for dinner. Isaias had promised that Paz Estenssoro, leader of the MNR, would be in the field tonight. Helena, a nervous young exile from Peru, raised her arm in greeting to Ricardo, her fiance. Hunger, and the difficulty of breathing, made her form waver in front of me, as if she had several overlapping hands. The damp air from the river was thick on my skin. I pulled the matted wool collar of my jacket up around my neck, and eagerly pushed Ricardo forward into the land of shadows.

  Paz Estenssoro’s name had cut through my uneasiness and my deep dream of stew. I wanted to feel the force of his vision, the emanation of his leadership. I wanted to ask him my questions, and press his answers against Gandhi’s words. I thought that Paz Estenssoro might be the leader in whose cause I might find my work.

  “Damn,” Chaco said, already afraid. “You be careful what you say Ernesto. Paz Estenssoro hates criticism. Do you understand me? Lots of hard guys do what he says.”

  The household staff came out from the side of the house, carrying sawhorses and boards across the bridge. They constructed a table by the river, near a new useless white washing machine.

  The kitchen people came out from the side of the house, a processional of seven men, led by the cook carrying a bright tin ladle. Each of the staff held a black pot filled with stew.

  “Blood for the ghosts,” I said to Ricardo. “To make them talk.”

  “What?”

  “Grub first,” Chaco paraphrased. “Then talk.”

  “They’re serving,” Ricardo said, turning away with surprising speed before we finished speaking.

  The food was dished up on tin plates. A good stew with thick pieces of beef, potatoes, and large chunks of corn on the cob, sweet, freshly picked. We ate with big wooden spoons, strolling about the grounds, absently, unconcerned with sad history, or each other, or their wandering intersection, at least until we’d had our dinner.

  History, though, went on without us, and as the light waned (it didn’t so much wane as become bit by bit opaque, as if we watched flakes of mica overlap) you could hear shooting from the city, and the roads around it, short high staccato bursts, echoing faintly from the mountains around us, like pebbles in a padded bucket. Each day this week had brought new violence. The smudged mimeographed sheets of the Falange had grown shrill with threats. “The Army and the Falange fight for the redemption of Bolivia’s Martyrs. We will be avenged.” Yesterday, they—or someone—attempted to assassinate Paz Estenssoro as he spoke from the steps of the Presidential Palace. A militiaman had been killed. The day before armed fascist groups attacked the government radio station and fire-bombed the office of Intransigencia. The gunshots we heard now were the Indians, the vigilant ones, guarding their revolution. My heart beat faster; I felt a solemn excitement. I remembered the militiamen I’d seen guarding the square in La Paz, I saw them lying in blood on the steps of the Presidential Palace. I imagined the cathedral in ruins, as if it had been bombed from the air. I felt that if I gave way to the angers I felt inside me at the enemies of this revolution, showed my fury to the North American in the bar whose words would rot this revolution like mold on fresh bread, my anger would drown the world in blood. But, I reminded myself, there had been enough suffering on my continent; streams of blood veined it. Our work was to save life. (I allowed myself to feed on the imagination of battle, and on the more intimate thoughts of ripping their tongues out, driving their noses back into their brains, crushing their eggshell heads—all, that is, that I would not do.) I looked over at Helena, who brought the large spoon to her mouth. She didn’t place the whole spoonful in, but nibbled quickly at the contents. How dear she looked! I wanted to ask her to dance. “Odd dinner music,” I said to Fernando, for no reason. I didn’t want to think anymore about the source of my gaiety.

  He looked at me blankly. “Good stew,” he said, taking another mouthful.

  Many of the other guests tonight, I noticed—when I’d put enough inside to look about—were Argentines, pilots whose plot against Peron had been broken. They wore long uniform jackets for dinner, though they worked during the day in their undershirts, building an asphalt road far away, between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. (Wouldn’t so many roads be bound to conjure vehicles richly laden to run down them?) The soldiers were landscape. The people I wanted to speak to were the leaders of the MNR, and the sun in that galaxy, Paz Estenssoro.

  Isaias, a thin graying man with a white mustache, moved about the field in a long white Mexican wedding shirt, a genial ghost. After saying hello to each of us, he would disappear into the house for a fifteen-minute nap. (The meal, of course, continued without him.)

  “Just the people I wanted to see,” Isaias said, smiling warmly. “I wonder if one of you doctors could feel this bulge in my stomach. At least I think it’s a bulge.” He lifted up his white shirt and placed my hand, still holding one of his spoons, on his stomach. “Is it a bulge? Or nothing at all? I’m worried about my kidneys, you understand. Urination has been very painful.”

  This dinnertime consultation made me feel fondly towards Isaias. He knew how false our pride in our bodies is, and how unimportant courtesy was compared with pain. “It’s just gas,” I said in what I hoped was a reassuring manner. I returned to my stew.

  “That can’t be good for you,” Isaias said, turning his paternal attention to me, “eating that fast.”

  I cast my eyes upward from my plate. “Good stew,” I said. He raised his pale eyebrows in concern, or surprise, as I picked up speed, my wooden spoon striking the tin clickety-clack. I raced against a competitive crowd. It was a mournful moment for us all when those big black pots wended their empty way homeward.

  “It’s a reserve meal,” Fernando explained. “Hasn’t he told you his theory of reserve meals? His theory is, Eat when you can, eat as much as you can, and store up food like a camel.”

  “Or a cow,” Isaias added, a little glumly.

  “Good stew,” I said.

  “Well, you’re the doctor,” Isaias said, regaining his hostly equanimity. “You know what’s best.”

  “Good stew is best,” I said, spooning up more of it. The competition for thirds would be fierce.

  After a few platefuls I’d lost my appetite, even the memory of my appetite. But I continued. I ate for the future. Tomorrow the only meal would be for my will, the cold ecstasy of not indulging my body.

  We got our thirds. Eating more slowly, forcing myself to swallow (tomorrow I would force myself not to), I circulated about the field with Fernando, searching for interesting talk. Tonight, listening to two young Bolivians, I heard gloomy news. Paz Estenssoro had reopened the military and police academies. New officers would be recruited from the middle class and the peasants. The U.S. had sent experts on detection and interrogation. I knew what this meant: the attempt on his life had terrified Paz, broken his will. He thought a more efficient police force—trained by imperialism—would protect him. He was wrong. Only the will of the people could protect him. But he did not hav
e the courage of Gandhi, the willingness to march beneath the guns, to die.

  Fernando smiled wanly at me, shaking his head as I told him my thoughts. He found my talk of death too exalted, the misty sublime of the effete poet looking out at a contrived sea. His shaking head stopped me. Did I have any real imagination of death? Of dying, dead, death? Just a word? I imagined: a coldness spreading in my limbs. Or was it like being paralyzed piece by piece, then altogether stone? This field with myself absent, but all else present, round, colored, warm? Or the field gone, nothing, blankness, without even the imagining (by me) of blankness? Everything gone, even the imagining? Whatever it was, it was to be faced fearlessly. I would. (Would I? If only I had been here during Holy Week! Then I would know about myself!) I returned Fernando’s smile.

  There were good, vital signs tonight, too. A new board to oversee the mines had been elected, strongly nationalist and uncompromising. No more compensation would be paid the U.S. owners. If the United States threatened to cut off its purchases or withdraw its loans, then Bolivia would look elsewhere for buyers.

  Behind us, as we listened to these men, Chaco hummed a song. It had no melody, and little rhyme. He would raise his voice here and there as if he’d suddenly been prodded, or remembered fitfully that there was something particular about what people called “a song.”

  There are many people in his field tonight,

  —O how can Isaias feed them all?

  But far away in New York tonight

  The price of tin started to fall,

  To fall. Can you hear it?