The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  “A strange smell,” Chaco said. I had hoped he wouldn’t hear me. “Doesn’t that panic ponies?”

  Fernando nodded gravely towards me. He could hear how seriously upset I was.

  “Their silence was severe,” I said. “That’s what I meant about a smell. It was present, palpable. It was as if they were saying that silence. I felt like I was going to die. And now every time this damn truck sways to one side I think it’s about to tip over. I think it’s because there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve got no control over things. I know that’s crazy.”

  “Not that crazy,” Chaco said. I couldn’t see his clown’s face, fortunately, his nervous lips making flickering shapes. “Soto was right about this guy, don’t you think? He’s a maniac racing some phantom no one else can see. And trucks go over all the time, you know. I heard about it in La Paz when I told people at the cafes we were going to take one. And you saw that one we passed with the four little tombstones behind it. They’d already buried the bodies.”

  “Shut up Chaco.” Fernando spoke on my behalf, across my body.

  But Chaco had more to say. “Guevara’s a funny guy.” (Was I dead? They spoke for me. They spoke about me.) “Shooting off his mouth to guys who might have us shot doesn’t scare him. Trucks scare him. Trucks don’t scare me anymore, Fernando. He scares me.” He pointed his bony finger at my nose. “He wants us all to die—as a sign of our nobility. I think it would be safer, for his friends anyway, if instead of being nonviolent he just took out a pistol and shot the people he didn’t like.”

  Fernando turned towards me, as if Chaco hadn’t spoken. We had our cheeks pressed against the worn wood, facing each other. “That sounds like you,” he said. “About control I mean. You like to be in charge, don’t you. I mean like your football team of dangerous characters? And you find it hard to trust other people. But this guy has driven a thousand times through these mountains. I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  “You’re right,” I said, hoping to reassure myself.

  “I mean, their silence to all those questions was eerie. I felt it too, listening to you and Soto shouting at them. But it doesn’t mean anything. We all think the world is talking about us, that it means something about our personality. It doesn’t mean anything. They just don’t speak Spanish.” Fernando had studied psychiatry. Behind his words I felt the sodden weight of certain clinical terms.

  “Yes. My place in the scheme of things isn’t that big. I feel all right now,” I lied.

  Chaco climbed over me. The three of them pressed together for warmth.

  I put my leather jacket over my V-necked gray sweater, the one you and Mother gave me for my birthday, and I put my sports jacket, my largest item, over that. It split the seams. I hugged myself and repeated another verse of Gandhi’s prayer, “I will conquer my fear.” I imagined Gandhi walking towards the ocean. I must conquer my fear. Fear makes us slaves of the imperialists. Overcome your fear of death, and no one could rule you. He walks twelve miles a day, beginning far inland, to announce his teaching. (My heartbeat slowed.) Barefoot, dressed in a loincloth and a prisoner’s small white cap, he has little knobs of knees, knots in a stick, too frail for his business. He will make his body submit to his will. (It calmed me to think his image, walking towards the ocean.) He walks away from the already known, from titles, from political parties, from the lying words of this world. He throws himself upon the Indian masses, and if they do not respond, he will die. The veins in his temples stand out as he waves to the people along the side of the road, fluttering his fingers like Chaplin. Parents come from their huts, sprinkle water on the road, smooth the path with long green branches. Some feel compelled to join him. They want to share in this gay inevitable progress, this defiance. And I, too, am drawn to him, as you are, Father. I feel more courageous in his presence. His figure moving forward delights me: Chaplin prancing down a city street, eluding the police as if by accident.

  The symbol that will rouse the peasants is, I see now, not a thing made out of words, the deceitful speeches of impotent politicians. The Bolivian bureaucrats, the stinking opportunists of the democratic Left, are too craven for leadership. Our continent requires a leader’s fearless actions; the will calls to the will, arouses it; an action will make these men and women—these rocks—rub their eyes in wonder and rise up and follow it, follow him, towards the ocean. This action

  The time I can keep my hands out grows shorter.

  These Indians, wrapped up warmly among sacks (and easily confused with sacks) wait not for a voice, an order, but for an action. His weak body walking; the will asserting how little the body, or life itself, matters. A people needs a call to a great sacrifice, to test itself to the utmost. I am more sure than ever of Gandhi’s way, calling our people to a final suffering. They must suffer greatly (and they want to, even to die) in order to become a great people, single in purpose. They will die for an action, not words. But it must be something the leader does for himself first, by himself. Gandhi didn’t preach defiance of the Salt Law, he violated it. He didn’t recommend austerity like an MNR poster; he ate no better food than the masses, wore no better clothes. An action is true, you taught me, Father, if you can prove it on your own body. Only that action will compel belief in others. Paz Estenssoro, Betancourt, Chavez, Prio Soccaras, Bosch are men without courage, afraid to act themselves against imperialism. The democratic left is just talk, plans for others. The people lose faith, grow apathetic, cease to respond. The words, the deeds, the people live in separate houses. Where is the man whose actions could call them together?

  I stopped for a moment to warm my hands, and fell asleep. An Indian took a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen out from under his poncho. Chaco was right! He drew something on the paper and gave it to the man next to him. They passed it around the truck. I was afraid they wouldn’t let me see it. But it was intended for me! Everyone looked towards me. He had drawn a picture of a hut, but with no doors or windows. A voice came from the house. A woman’s voice, a woman moaning—I woke with my heart pounding, afraid that it was Mother’s voice. I could see her face, the moment before I woke, as I’d seen it looking down from my bedroom window the time you took her to the hospital. She squeezed your beard in pain. One of the Indian women moaned. My head and eyes ached. (Mother is right—a short nap, a dereliction of duty, and one loses the rewards.) I shook Fernando till he woke up.

  “Are you all right?” I asked the woman. She sat near the cab, with two burlap sacks leaning against her shoulders. She had taken off her blanket and wore only a dark poncho. Her hair, in a long black braid, came from under her bowler hat. She rocked back and forth in pain. “Can we help?” Fernando said. “We’re doctors.” He pounded on my chest, put his ear to my heart. (I.e., “Doctors.”) The woman moaned, ignoring us. Her face was lined all over, but not twisted as Mother’s had been. None of the other people looked towards her. They had pulled their caps down over their eyes during the night.

  Chaco woke when Fernando moved, and watched our mime. He smiled, raised an imaginary enema bag over Soto, and performed a charade irrigation. Soto slept on—the secret of such good digestion of life—his head slumped forward, shaken to one side sometimes by the truck’s bumping.

  “She’s singing,” Chaco said. “She doesn’t need a doctor.”

  He was right. The moaning had become a cadenced sound. Her song was a few notes in a narrow range, repeated over and over. She had a deep voice. The sound moved forcefully through the cottony feeling in my head. The accent of her chant moved forward, or around, depending on where it fell. She rocked slightly back and forth, like a Jew at prayer. The truck too rocked, and wind whistled lightly through the slats; it all accompanied her song. The sun must have been at the horizon. I could see huts through the slats, as we came off the mountain, and hear roosters screaming shrill obbligatos. Her song buoyed me up, eased the strain in my neck and shoulders. A mournful tune, the few notes chanted slowly, the accents changing gradually. My body swayed against the
potatoes in the sack. Chaco and Fernando smiled.

  The sound, the light that washed over us now like a pale transparency, woke the others. Perhaps that was her task. They freed their hands from under their blankets, pulled back their caps from their eyes. They, too, swayed to her song. This motion wove us all together. The others joined her, the same low moan at first, the same few notes over and over, their bodies rocking back and forth. Sometimes the accents fell as hers did, sometimes not. It was a rushing river; you felt you could follow one voice as it moved forward in eddies, around rocks, over branches; but the sound of them all together was unchanging, changing always. Perhaps it was a saint’s day. Chaco, ignoring all protocol, moaned too. One of the Indians smiled at him. (Impossible! What did he know about them?)

  I turned to Fernando. “It’s like the music for the dance we saw in La Paz, the same few notes, a simple thing, a chant.”

  “A few notes? No, it’s not. That’s the way you hear it. They’re both really pretty complicated tunes.” Fernando, too, began to sing. He smiled at me, encouragingly, tauntingly. I would think it was a tango. If I sang they would stop, their mouths dour. My limbs felt stiff. I hadn’t had enough sleep. My mouth tasted foul, and the bitter stench of these people on an empty stomach, along with the constant rocking, made me nauseous. My body returned; enclosed me. I looked towards the road, the silver of tree trunks going by.

  They sang the sun back into the sky. The sun I wait for, the leader I’ve written you about, will be, by his courageous action, the guarantee of the truth of the words of revolution. In his person the masses form a unity with the world, joined through his presence, the sun in their sky. His actions are the sign that cowardice will not shatter our unity; our world coheres, our work, our words will reach their objects; his acts weave the connection between the people, the words, and our deeds. I will find this man, this work.

  My head really throbs. I wonder what you will make of all this!

  An embrace from your

  tired, hungry, cold, loving son,

  Ernesto

  Isle of Pines, July 1965

  JULY 7

  Ponco handed me back my pages over breakfast. His breakfast. Attacks kept me awake last night. I took only a little mate. The reward for vigilance: I’m exhausted; the room seems vague.

  He giggled. “I see what you mean, ‘you awaited him.’ Fidel! The sun in our sky! I like that. Boom boom boom. Enter the god! Very mystical! Very flattering!”

  “Not flattery. I really was as I say. So were many others. The nationalist leaders, like Paz Estenssoro, Bosch, Prio Soccaras, they had begun something, a move towards independence. But they couldn’t complete it. Even to think of fighting the Yanquis they would have had to transform themselves, their bourgeois programs. They couldn’t call on the people to fight. What I said was true in a way: they would have to be willing to die.” I breathed shallowly. The room shimmered, bleached of color, losing substance. “We were burning with energy, a whole generation of us, disgusted with compromises. We wouldn’t compromise with imperialism.” I smiled, thinking of that purity, shining, without content. “We would destroy the whole world if we couldn’t find something that satisfied that longing.”

  Ponco looked at me sadly, his head halfway down. “I know. I’m not a child. I was there.” He tore off a piece of bread, and rubbed it in some jam. “You talk like someone’s old man.”

  “I’m sorry. Of course you know. Perhaps my conception was a little … abstract, grandiose. Young. I didn’t know the thing I was waiting for. I was sure I would recognize it, though, make whatever sacrifice was necessary.”

  Ponco smiled at me. “Free of this world’s names. Without title. Without party. On an island. Without breakfast. I know who that is.”

  I shrugged, barely able to lift my shoulders. “I didn’t know.”

  “Still.” He looked down at his coffee cup. What was going on in that cup?

  “Yes?”

  “The man who acts for himself.” He got up rapidly, and walked into his bedroom. I waited. I was learning how to wait. Wait for Castro’s help. Wait for inspiration. Wait for Ponco to come back.

  He returned with Debray’s book. I think he keeps a library of incriminating documents in there. He pushed it in front of me. His thumb occluded part of the paragraph, but I remembered it. “When Comrade Che Guevara once again took up insurrectional work, he accepted on an international level the consequences of a line of action of which Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, is the incarnation. When Che Guevara reappears, it is hardly risky to assert that it will be as the head of a guerrilla movement, as its unquestioned political and military leader.” Debray and I had worked on the book together. Walter knew that.

  “Yes?” I scratched my ear. What was I meant to feel guilty for?

  “See? The same story, different key.” Ponco stood next to me. “MNR bureaucrats don’t act for themselves. Gandhi acts for himself first. Et cetera. Action and politics.” He held up one finger. Meaning, I thought, the unity of theory and practice, political talk, and military action. “That’s you.”

  Ponco sat down again, drank some of that fascinating coffee. “Your letter. I wonder. It sounds … religious.”

  I laughed. “Coincidence of the metaphysical and the practical.” I was kidding around. Ponco reminded me of other accusers. Fidel. My mother.

  He looked baffled, stared at me, almost angrily. “Coincidence? Accident? Not physical?”

  “No. I’m sorry.” I realized I had borrowed his elliptical style. But to say that would be to remind him of his wound. “I meant that they all came together. This time. It must happen sometimes. What you call my religious urge, my psychology, and what needs to be done.”

  “That sounds religious too!”

  “You too!” Breathing was becoming easier.

  “Me too what?”

  “You sound like Fidel. He said, ‘The revolutionary who wants to become a saint.’ I was. He said.” I couldn’t stop talking like Walter.

  He rose again and went to his bedroom. What text would accuse me now?

  He returned with a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen. He pushed the dishes to one side, and worked away, quietly intent, while I waited.

  “Here!” Like a dream figure, he pushed the paper at me. A conglomeration of stick figures, and figures that looked like sticks. He could see I was puzzled. He came over to stand behind me.

  “That’s Fidel. On a big horse. That’s the horse’s tail. That’s a sword. That’s you. That’s burning wood under you. You wear monk’s robes. You can’t feel the heat. Go on reading a book. You two divide up the world. Happy coincidence. Use it and it’s yours.” I turned to look at him, and he pouted, sticking out his lower lip, imitating Chaco. “You don’t like my art?” he rasped. A whimpery tone was impossible for Walter. “I think it’s profound.” He tried to deepen his voice on the word “profound”; but his voice could go no deeper, and the word disappeared.

  JULY 8

  No word from Fidel.

  Ponco worries. This morning he said, “Odd. Debray hasn’t …” and then he stopped, afraid of his own dark conjectures. One expects promptness from Regis. Blue lycée notebooks with sharp theses. Before I came here I sent him to Bolivia to review our agreement with Monje, to locate sites. But his reports have not been forwarded to me.

  Fidel is silent. Perhaps he is waiting for the July 26 speech to announce my intentions. Or

  Or what will he announce?

  Ecuador, September 1953

  Guayaquil

  Soto and Chaco went to Lima, to the apartment of a nurse I had known in Buenos Aires. Fernando and I stopped at the Inca fortress Sacsahuaman; no longer a fortress, but walls, large smooth irregular stones, closely fitted. Our archeological project lay in our friendship, unearthing again our common interests, repairing the fissures caused by my love of political talk.

  “All this stuff about leaders, Ernesto. I don’t get it. That’s not self-reliance.” We walked alon
g the shady side of a wall that bulged in and out like a curtain. I pressed my fingertips hard against the cool stones. They had a message for me, a nourishment, if only I could press them strongly enough. The nail broke on my forefinger; the finger bled from the corner. A small but intensely painful wound. I smeared the blood against the stone, a light red trail mixing with dust; I wanted to leave my mark. Fernando looked at me, his head turned to the side. It embarrassed me. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a small roll of gauze.

  “I think you were right before,” he said. “Good is done a little at a time. Not by violence. And not by leaders. But by individuals. I mean our first task is to make ourselves independent individuals.”

  I sucked on my finger, and said nothing. I didn’t know what I truly thought. My thoughts were a tottery structure, not an active unity. This farrago about leaders, words, actions, these thoughts didn’t form me; I didn’t hold them; I only entertained them. But what might seal them to me? And why had I shown Fernando my letter? Why had I written my father? Like Betancourt peering about in Isaias’s field, I needed the reassurance of others. I, too, stood in the field of the dead. Or worse: on the truck, writing home, I felt myself in the kitchen of my family’s second house. I saw the wicker chairs, the cups of hot drinks from a height just above the table. I was a young boy, hurtling around the glass table.

  I wrapped a bit of gauze around my forefinger and ripped it free with my teeth. A man in a dark-red tasseled poncho walked out of a hut halfway up the mountainside opposite us. He carried a staff in his right hand that glinted silver in the sun. An elder; when he instructed the children on planting, he struck them with the vara, inscribed the knowledge on their bodies so they wouldn’t forget. He looked towards the top of the mountain. He should see stone terraces, low walls in regular layers, moving towards him down the mountain’s face. The priest had given them instructions, brought by messenger from the Inca, given to the Inca by the sun. Good soil had been carried to the topmost planting areas. Now different foods might be grown, each crop happy at its own proper altitude. Ditches, sluices brought water up and down the mountain, to feed the terraces. No. He saw none of that. It was all no more. Only a few of the small stones from the terracing his ancestors had built. Why had they chosen such impossible places? They must have found exultation in the challenge of making the grand and difficult landscape accept them. They had mingled their blood with the land, made it theirs and the gods’, and now they couldn’t leave it. The elder looked up at the sun. It was twelve noon. The holiest hour. Still? I looked up too. The mountain bleached away. I stumbled on a rock and caught myself on Fernando’s shoulder.