by Jay Cantor
Bits of sentences came to me. A soul. A symbol. Asleep. I formed the bits into ranks. You must find the gesture to reach deep into their sleeping souls. I spoke. “I want to vomit.”
Someone kicked my leg, behind the knee. I stuck out a hand to break my fall, and half toppled onto Chavez’s desk.
Chavez glanced at my hand as if it were unsavory stuff. “You’re very young,” he said. “The world isn’t as easily understood as you think now. It doesn’t always respond to the force of our desires. The Indian lives, the Indian acts and produces. But the Indian doesn’t allow himself to be understood. He doesn’t wish communication. Retiring silent immutable. He inhabits a closed world. He is an enigma.”
Chavez must hear the truth! “You humiliate them,” I whispered. My lungs fluttered.
“Please shut up now Ernesto,” Chaco whispered. “I don’t want to go in back.”
“I think we should leave,” Soto said, with miserable false heartiness.
“Our intention, Mr. Guevara, isn’t to humiliate anyone.” Chavez’s lips were huge, half the size of a normal face. His eyes glinted like machine parts. “You can’t overcome centuries of oppression in the twinkling of an eye, just by willing it. I think you believe too much in the power of your own wishes, your own will. The Indians don’t understand soap and water. We have no choice. We must attack the result of their ignorance. This way we kill the lice for them. We have no choice.”
“I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Damn him,” Chaco said to Fernando. “Damn him. He won’t shut up till he gets us all killed.” He began to cry again. “My father was a pharmacist. My mother thought I was ugly. All of you think I’m ugly too.”
“No one thinks you’re ugly,” Fernando said. He put his arm about Chaco’s shoulders. His voice, too, sounded choked. “We just think you’re a little funny-looking.”
Chavez, the despicable piglet, would destroy the Indian villages; he stage-managed this farcical land reform that handed out pieces of paper that entitled you to wait till you died; he made the Indians’ eyes go blank. “You treat peasants like rotting meat. You do this, you do that. What you do is keep yourself in business. Nothing changes. But you can’t understand me, can you? You have no vision. You have no face.” I reached out towards his glimmery head, which receded backward down a tunnel. I wanted to draw him back into the room. I had more to say. He must hear the truth! My fingers went through his cheeks. He slapped me across the face, his hand open, and the room shook into overlapping images. Anger must be conquerated. No. Not a word. I wanted to wrench his head off his neck! No! I must not! I would not!
I hung on his shoulders, unable to move. We fell down to the floor. I lay across him, my cheek next to his, panting for breath. My friends tried to pull us apart. But Chavez wanted to hurt me; he held me around the back and squeezed my chest hard. I threw up all over his face, green bile and DDT, mucus, and a few bits of corn from last night’s gorging.
Fernando walked me down the steps of the ministry, his arm around my back and under my arm. When we reached the plaza he let me drop. I fell, like a sack, to the stones. The Indians walked around us. I might have been dying, but this accident didn’t excite them.
“I’ve had it with this …” Fernando stumbled over a word. “… with this shit! Because that’s what it is! I thought you wanted to write about the villages, on our way to our work with the lepers. I didn’t know you were interested in this cocktail party!” He sounded as if he’d said “shit” again. “What’s the point Ernesto? They’re just politicians. They’re not going to listen! Or do you just like talking?”
Chaco knelt beside me and, with the end of my shirt, in a strangely gentle gesture, wiped the vomit from my chin. He laughed. “A demonstration of nonviolence and self-control.”
I pushed Chaco away, letting my hands flap against him, and sat on the stones with my head bent down, surrounded by my friends’—my enemies’!—legs. I didn’t have the strength, or the will, to rise. “Why do you want me to meet these people, Soto? These bureaucrats!” My words came out in little gasps, an old man’s voice. I panicked for breath, and heaved like a fish.
“What?” He looked bemused. After all, I’d just embarrassed him. “Oh, I don’t know. I like my friends to know each other. You have an interesting point of view, Guevara. You’re an interesting character. Perhaps you’re right. I do want to see what you’ll have to say. You have audacity. I admire that. I think one can learn things from you.”
“Shit!” Fernando rarely spoke this way, and so, having succumbed, he gave himself over to it. “Shit. Shit. Shit. What a lot of shit!”
“I suppose,” Soto said to me, “that meeting these people isn’t very valuable to you.” He was angry; he had remembered that I was the guilty party. “You seem to know what they have to say already.”
“Go to hell.” It was all the wit I could think of, or had the energy for. Why didn’t Fernando prepare an injection?
“Well, no. I didn’t mean it that way.” Soto’s voice became placatory. “It’s not that you’re wrong. But you speak as if you’d already thought of what you’d say, long ago, as if you’d already read this story. You seem to know what everyone’s going to say before he says it. As if you’d already administered a land reform!”
“That’s true,” Fernando said, his voice full of musing wonder at Soto’s perceptiveness.
“He’s like an Englishman,” Chaco said, smiling, giddy with escape. “They’re so certain of everything.”
“You see,” Soto said down to me, “you’re nodding now as if you’d already thought of this too.” His head looked a hundred meters away, smiling pleasantly again, as if we shared a wonderful joke. “I thought you wanted to ask some people some questions. But you’re not looking for answers. Perhaps you have answers?”
Soon they’d drag me off and put my head into a trough. “Please Fernando, I need an injection.”
Chaco nudged me with his foot. “You think you can just vomit all the bad things up.”
“That may be,” Soto said. “But you’re an extraordinary sort, Doctor.”
Fernando spat. But he started back to our rooms to get the needle. “You are an interesting character,” Chaco agreed. “You have to be carried from place to place like some mystic invalid who keeps falling into trances. Then you insult people who might kill us, and have to be carried somewhere else. You’re better than an interesting character. You’re a dangerous character.”
I didn’t say anything. I had run out of things to say. I had run out of breath to say them with. I had run out of Bolivian talk.
But the four of us patched it up. We agreed to travel farther together.
For I liked being an interesting character. It promised a rich fate; a good story.
Isle of Pines, July 1963
JULY 5
Rice and beans, and a little greasy chicken, one leg each. Ponco added some cayenne to the rice. On our trip to Ghana, Ponco had acquired this taste for hot things. Food a la Walter means mined with pepper.
I live in a fuzzy distracted state. Only the past tastes hot to me; the time here is absent; it comes upon me like bumping into a stone. I have entered deeply into this self-criticism; all I want to say now, all I am now, must be formed with the materials of the past. I lose consciousness here (where?). Or almost. I reached for some water to cool my mouth.
“No,” Ponco said. The word sounded definitive in his growl, a desert not to cross. He broke off a piece of bread for me. I have to be reminded of the method for hot foods. I rarely eat them, for even mildly spicy things are bad for my asthma. But I didn’t want to nag Ponco. He hates cooking anyway. (My nights are bland; his are fiery.)
He noticed my discomfort. “I’m sorry. No more hot foods?”
“I suppose not.”
“And no taste for music?”
“No. My disabilities.”
He took another forkful of rice, and didn’t look at me. I felt he was working on a dossier, one that
was more aesthetic than political.
I licked the grease from my fingers. Sometimes a fragment of this world (the real one?), the one which nourishes my body, keeps me alive for elsewhere, breaks through my absence. “Spicy chicken tastes good, though.” I’ll rarely have it again.
“Something bothers me,” Ponco said, still without looking up.
I didn’t say anything. I had heard him, but from a distance. My body was jostled by Indians on a small truck, people wrapped up in blankets. They looked like sacks with faces painted on them.
“You had four.”
I came back to the table. Someone was criticizing me; that always focuses my attention. “Four what? Helpings? Limbs?” But I knew what he meant. I’d been expecting it.
“Brothers and sisters smart guy.”
“Yes.” I smiled. Strangely, it pleased me to be discovered. Hide and seek; peekaboo around the edges.
“You say. You were an only child. Or do I remember wrong?” Now he was playing with me. He knew.
“You’re right.” I got up and filled the pot with water, to boil for mate. For some reason, being discovered made me want to walk about. I was excited. I felt naughty and clever at once; a gay deceiver; my victims (who were they? my readers? my brothers and sisters?) should thank me for a good time.
“Wishes!” Ponco said when I was seated again. He smiled broadly, pleased with himself.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “We liked each other.”
A weak defense. Ponco chuckled, a growly sound, low, ominous, the lusty laugh of a villain. “We know.” He pointed to the back of his head. “Unconscious. Couldn’t help yourself. You lied!”
“I guess.” But that didn’t feel right to me, much as I wanted to feed Ponco’s delight. “No. I mean not exactly. It doesn’t feel like that.”
“Yes!” Ponco said, clapping both hands down against the wooden table. “We know! I remember. Someone showed you stories of the Revolution. You said no, not the way it was. You said, The only value is Tell the truth. Not make it pretty. Not heroic. Not, excuse me, even interesting. Accurate accounting. Balance the books. Not my way. Shame on me I thought. No writing for you Walter.…”
“But …” I interrupted him. I rose to get the boiling water for my gourd.
“No,” Ponco said. “Stay.” He walked to his room, and returned holding an open book. He stood in front of my chair, pointing out a passage to me. “Does the witness recognize the words?”
“Yes,” I said. He was a very good-humored prosecutor. We both enjoyed ourselves. I had not seen him so happy in this confinement since we’d talked of Hilda together.
“Read them please!”
He pulled the book back before I could look at it. But I remembered. We ask that the narrator be truthful, and that in an attempt to describe his contribution he does not exaggerate his real role or pretend to have been where he was not.
“Let the record show,” Prosecutor Walter said, “a quotation from his memoir was read by the witness.” Actually, I hadn’t said anything. “Not ‘where you’re not,’ ” Walter added for the jury, “but okay to murder a whole family?”
“But,” I said, “this is different from what I meant then.” I got the bubbling water and poured it over the brown leaves in my knubbly gourd. Ponco struck a pose by my chair, one hand on his lip, his head cocked to one side, his lower lip pushed out, one eye half closed. Confident dubiousness.
“I told you, before I wrote from the outside, recounting events, an observer. I wanted to say what anyone could have seen, a hawk’s view, who did what to whom.”
“No why?” Ponco asked. “Names. Dates. Miles marched. Soldiers killed. A movie with the sound cut off? No why?”
“You mean, boring.” I was a little hurt—vain, I found, about my first writing effort, my reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War.
“A useful volume,” Walter said, woundingly kind.
“A necessity for any library! Thanks. But these events, this writing, cuts into me. These events formed me. This is about how they formed me. The way I thought about them, the way I saw them, that’s what matters.”
“Poof! Brothers and sisters, good-bye! Didn’t form you!”
“Well, yes. They were there. We were, are, important to each other.” Were we? Are we? No, we’re not. The truth is in the way I wrote it. I can say more things than I can write. Perhaps that’s why Walter could only talk his stories, and when he could no longer talk, he turned to others’ narratives. “But our, my, parents acted as if I were the only one, maybe because I was first and I was sickly. And I had—made myself have—many interests in common with them that the others didn’t share. So I changed it to the way I felt about it.” I sipped some mate, rolling the heat around in my mouth.
“Convenient!” he taunted me.
“It’s not a story about them.”
Ponco rasped rasped rasped. His laugh. “Not about you and women. Not about brothers and sisters. What is it a story about?”
“I don’t know. It’s about finding Fidel. It’s about why I was ready to trust him when we met, ready for the expedition he proposed. It’s about finding my work. It’s about the project for Bolivia. It’s about …” I looked up at Walter, smiling. “It’s about me!”
Ponco put his arm around my shoulders, smiling broadly. “Good. Make it a good story then.”
JUNE 18
Leftover rice for breakfast. I burned the rice reheating it.
“I’m going to write a book,” Ponco said.
“I’m sure you’ll be better at it than I am.” Glutinous self-pity: I hadn’t been able to write since our conversation yesterday. It haunted my hand. All that I left out, the smell of the people, the fear I felt on that truck in the Andes (no shock absorbers, every bump slammed my bones against cold metal), going downhill, around curves, bags and people like bags falling on my legs. Or something else, I don’t know what, something lost. And why had I changed things, made Soto more amiable, more foolish than he was; why had I remembered (or had I)? constructed? invented? a Chaco Francisco more stridently askew than the man who sweated next to me on that truck (sometimes, for a moment, scared out of his whimsy)? He was thin. Soto was plump, with spindly legs. He did introduce me to many political men, or came along while I introduced myself. He did share interests that Fernando didn’t, and drew Fernando’s anger. But I have made him an initiator, when always I initiated myself. Did I? I have made him a petty devil. Why? Because I disapproved of his politics? (He went back when Peron fell, helped Frondizi take power, compromised from the start, without any vision but more compromises. My country’s future became a jumble of nonsensical fragments. Peronists on the Left and Right, CP bureaucrats returned from exile by puppet generals.) Or have I changed him from poorer motives? To interest people? (Who?) To thicken the plot? To amuse, the way I’d entertain my parents, my best audience, orbiting their table? (I haven’t thought of them so much in a decade!) Have I changed things without even knowing, my motives still dark to me? Am I serving some higher, or at least different truth, some near abstraction (self with extraneous matter rubbed away; a pattern already present). Or am I simply lying? I can’t bring them back as they were. I want to pinch Fernando’s arm. I want to see him wince, the skin between my fingers redden, the slight indentation left by my nails. “Owww! Why did you do that?”
“Do what?” Ponco said, recalling me to mineral things. Tables. Gourds. Burned rice.
“Nothing. I was thinking out loud.”
He laughed and sipped some tea from a cup held between both hands. “You’re just like your book!”
“Am I?” I said with what must have seemed startling desperateness. “Am I?” Perhaps that floating center, that little leaf carried this way and that by the river, was still intact! “Am I?”
“Yes,” dear Ponco said, “it feels like you. Before you became you.”
“Good.” But I could tell from the unsettled feeling in my stomach, something rounder than greasy rice, that I
couldn’t go back to work yet. I wouldn’t hit the target (get my man?). I needed the confidence that some force (another presence? History?) guided my hand, kept me from just lying, would make a false world, false word I mean, shake apart. (False world? Like this one: imperialism is a lying author.) Ponco went outside.
I went to my desk, this board
“Let’s go for a walk.”
Ponco sat tilted back, still reading The Charterhouse of Parma. “Good,” he said, gracefully bringing his chair back to the floor.
“We can talk about the book you’re thinking of. I’m sorry I was so distracted this morning. As soon as you said writing, I began to think about mine.”
Ponco looked puzzled. “A book?”
“You said you were thinking of writing something. A memoir, I thought, though I don’t know if you said that.”
“A memoir?” Ponco, I think, smirked. Impossible! Ponco doesn’t smirk.
“Yes. Are you smirking because I walk around in a daze here?” We strolled towards the ocean. I’d rolled up my sleeves and the tall grass tickled my arms. Ponco walked near the fence, playing a game, rapidly sticking a finger between the squares of barbed wire, in and out, while moving forward. Sometimes, because of his ancient gnome’s voice, I forget how young he is.
“A memoir. Yes. Of the war. I wonder. Can I add magic wings to fly over the enemy? It once felt that way. It seemed nothing could touch us.”
I looked down at my hands. “You can write it, I suppose, if you felt that way. I don’t know. No one will believe you. They’ll think you meant you felt that way. A metaphor!” New to the craft, I discovered simple things, like metaphors. And I felt that even my simple discoveries were questionable items. Could anything mean something else? “Anyway Walter, let’s skip that sort of nonsense.”
“Sorry. Didn’t realize how you felt.”
