The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  “I need to know more natural history,” I said. “I don’t know my place in things.”

  “What? I don’t get it.” Fernando kicked at the dust with his snub-nosed boot, raising a little explosion. “Well, I know mine,” he said. “It’s to learn about my continent, to live simply, and to do my work with the lepers now, a little at a time.”

  I stepped back a few feet and tried to run up the side of a stone wall. I imagined myself standing horizontally.

  Fernando looked down at me in the dirt, indifferent to my achievement. “All your talk of sacrifice Ernesto. I don’t get that either. You remind me of the Incas. Human sacrifice. I don’t understand. Is that the unconscious of Latin America? That’s madness! I don’t want to rebuild the Inca Empire. I want to heal sick people, comfort them if I can’t heal them. You know, you’re not even an Inca, Ernesto. You’re an Aztec. At least the Incas substituted guinea pigs.”

  “Oh, they offered the occasional human,” I said. “For the most hallowed times.” I spoke to the ground. Grit was embedded in my chin, and on my lips and tongue, mixed with gauze threads. I rubbed them off my tongue.

  “No. You’re an Aztec. You don’t want the occasional human. You want hecatombs of sacrifice. You’re afraid the sun will go out.”

  From the hard rocky ground I looked up at the sun. I forced myself to stare at it until it offered me a vision, until each ray stood out, distinct. Each one of us was a spoke of that wheel. Animals walked towards that center and spun about the sun—llamas, parrots, sheep, deer, owls, fishes, ducks, whippery wavery creatures formed from thin hollow lines, the vitreous bodies of my eyes. The sun had shown enough to me and forced me to close my eyes. My eyelids glowed red. I fell deeper into the ground. The sun with animals; the silver plate Monteczuma gave Cortes.

  “It’s like the sacrificial stone at Machu Picchu,” Fernando said from far above me. My prone position invited accusation. “You saw it and began to wheeze. It excited you.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “It was the altitude.”

  But I lied. Streams of blood had risen for me from the stone, long, thick, nearly black threads, still steaming; veins that held the sun to the earth and brought nourishment to the god. Here comes the knife! We stared. We all felt it: at the moment of sacrifice the offering’s blood became one’s own, spilled out and coursing upward from one’s veins. No. I wasn’t there. They were united with the god, and through him with each other. Not me; even in imagination I was excluded from their communion at the stone, their song from the truck. I lay on the ground, with eyes closed, and picked small pebbles from my chin.

  “You fell down panting across the stone. You wanted to sacrifice yourself.”

  “What are you talking about? That’s not true.” My body, subdued by the sun, was allowed to rise slowly to the surface of the earth. I opened my eyes. “I fell down, but I didn’t fall on the stone.”

  “No, I guess you didn’t.” Fernando smiled at me, his curly head blotched with spots of sun. “But I’ll bet you wanted to. I should have taken out my sacred Swiss pocketknife and offered you to Virachocha, the sun’s father.”

  Instead he had taken a syringe from his knapsack and bent over me in the dirt, a few feet from the gray pole that yoked the earth and sun. He prepared my arm for a shot. Why am I drawn to places where breathing is impossible for me, my food so difficult to scrabble up? (But that’s everywhere!)

  “You know,” Fernando said, no longer smiling, “I don’t see what you find so wonderful about people suffering and dying. I think our work, a doctor’s work, is to stop people from dying, not tell them what a grand and noble thing it is. I don’t think it would be very grand, I mean, I don’t want to die. I don’t know about you. I really don’t. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

  I got up, brushed myself off. My arm hurt. It ached still from where Ricardo had impaled me on my beliefs. “The dinosaurs died,” I said. “Big thunder lizards. All gone now. Death’s not such a big deal.”

  “You’re kidding,” my bewildered friend said. He smiled at me in a warm openhearted way, shaking his blotchy head from side to side. He wanted to be in on the joke.

  “Sure,” I said, and returned his smile. (So eventually we would part in bewilderment.)

  “And this Soto,” Fernando said, as we continued our stroll round and round the walls. “I don’t trust him, Ernesto. He’s a careerist of the worst kind. He makes me feel soiled.”

  The stones lay together in an odd yet precise way, beveled to fit. How had they done it? Some stones were as large as houses, yet they had been lifted without draft animals or machinery. It was their will that had articulated their fortress, their will that upheld it until this time, their will that fixed our attention here, in rapt contemplation. What confidence they must have had in their leadership! Their labor, they knew, was the god’s food, his delight, the community’s life. Through the sun that fell on that man’s hands, his hands became mine, mine his. “Soto is just a petty demon,” I said. “You shouldn’t take him so seriously.”

  “I don’t. But you take him seriously. I think you’re tempted by all the important people he talks about introducing you to. Paz Estenssoro, the Guatemalan ambassador, Arbenz, Fidel Castro. Who cares about such people? They’re all like Chavez. They have nothing new to say. Our task is to make ourselves strong independent individuals, like those stones.” Fernando’s face lit with delight. He had found a resource to make his point plain. “Each one has a different shape, yet they all fit together smoothly. So they’ve endured a long time.” He ran his finger along one of the edges. “No mortar,” he said. “But earthquakes can’t shake them.”

  I smiled too. Apparently the numinous stones were an all-purpose parable, skew to any particular point. But I knew, I always knew, what Fernando meant. Good can be done only a little at a time, without violence, like the careful building of this wall. And yet what was the use? There are calamities worse than earthquakes. Imperialism is a glacier, sliding down the mountains. What was the point of taking a rock from its path? And Gandhi’s vision was more than individual good works. It was of an action, a symbol—without violence, yet as powerful as the sacrifice to the sun. Not the offering of others, but of oneself. Such a symbol would unite a people, make them into a nation of strong nonviolent warriors.

  What action? What people?

  I stood silently looking at the blank wall.

  Fernando turned away, back towards the road.

  In Lima there were letters waiting from my parents. But I didn’t read them. I folded the light-blue envelopes in half and stuffed them into the side pocket of my leather jacket, the one with the zipper. “I understand about the nurse,” Chaco said; his thin lips curled upward.

  “There’s nothing to understand.”

  “It was the time before your vows.”

  “Shut up, Chaco.” I wasn’t offended by his mockery. But I suddenly felt an impoverishment at the heart of my vow; not a strong will, but an incapacity.

  No. I would not.

  We took the bus for Ecuador. Tumbes. Trujillo. A woman dressed in black, with a black shawl around her head, sat in the back with four small quiet obedient boys in a line next to her. The children sat with unnatural stillness, their hands folded in their laps, the muscles of their faces drooping, the skin under their eyes sagging. The woman shared her food with us, cold tortillas with some stringy chicken. We gave her some money for milk. Piura. Talara. Roberto and Chaco played a game of cards with two country people who wore dirty white pants, and large shirts with red-and-blue embroidery, intricate Moorish-looking designs. The men had put a tall thin silver-colored box in the aisle for a card table. They passed around a bottle without a label. I took a drink. The peasants enjoyed themselves, laughing at my friends’ mistakes at cards as if they were foreigners making riotous grammatical blunders. One of the men, a fellow with a long sharp face, hugged Roberto. “It’s not really a card game,” Soto said to me from out of this embrace. “It�
��s a social program, a way to redistribute the wealth. I don’t understand the rules. Chaco doesn’t understand the rules. I’m not sure there are rules. Every so often this fellow here hugs me like a brother and says, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you lose. My six makes what we call a happy set.’ Then he takes as much of our money as he wants.” The other man handed me the bottle and I took another drink to celebrate their happy sets. It felt pleasant to be here with such amiable companions. Talara. The two peasants became angry with each other. The thin-faced man took a knife from a leather case at his belt and laid it on the metal box. The other man drew his knife. (I knew this tableau: “seriousness.”) I took out the envelopes. My mother’s spidery hand was as I remembered. But my father’s handwriting made me uneasy. He had formed the address in the shaky block lettering of a child, nothing like his doctor’s scrawl. I folded each letter into a tiny packet and put them both in my sports jacket’s handkerchief pocket, way down at the bottom. Chaco stared at the knives, as if mesmerized, then put his head on Roberto’s shoulder and pretended to be asleep. Huaquillas. A woman transporting chickens as a gift for her son in Guayaquil lent me a blanket. We shared a seat. She was plump, with a broad friendly smile. I put my feet up on the poultry cage, a neatly carpentered construction of light-colored wood and mesh. She had made it herself, she did everything herself, she said, since her husband died last year in a sawmill accident. She put her mouth near my ear and made a rumbling sound, air forced hard against the back of her palate. “Hear that?” she asked. “That’s the saw. It means: Run the other way.”

  I nodded.

  The bus rocked, and each motion itself made a hundred smaller motions. I swayed against the woman’s side, and she didn’t flinch back from me. I felt comfortable on the bus, cradled by the pleasant warmth of the liquor and my companions. The swaying induced a meditative state. I played strips of leather from my jacket back and forth, back and forth, through my fingers, a troupe of acrobats I trained. Puerto Bolivar. I had fallen asleep on the woman’s shoulder, and woke to a tickling under my nose. She had put my feet on the floor, removed one of her birds from the cage, and snapped its neck. Its head dangled down forlornly, a thin line of blood trickled onto her lap. She made the rumbling sound in her throat, and with quick motions plucked the bird’s feathers. (The chicken had been too dumb to run the other way.) I had a pile of feathers on my pants. Bad for my asthma.

  Guayaquil. One foot above sea level.

  In the mountains of Bolivia the air was so thin that I could not make my lungs work quickly enough to take in a sufficiency; breathing was a race. Here the air was wet, too heavy to lift, and when lifted it was thick with more than oxygen, with something unnecessary; the damp formed a scum in my chest. Our money had run out, redistributed without a plan on that silver trunk. We were trapped.

  We lived in a small room by the Guayas River, close to the pestilence of mosquitoes and shit and worms and rats. Two new pilgrims joined us, law students from Argentina who felt they could not be lawyers. We shared our poverty to rent the room. There was one bed, where two people—Soto always, and the first other one to claim it each night—slept. The rest of us lay on the wooden floor, under a single sheet. (At first possession of the bed had been a simple scramble. But one night we awoke to Soto’s screaming. He lay on the floor, kicking his legs up and down. I saw flames coming from his skin, and ran to throw my sheet on him. But it wasn’t fire; it was fear. “I’m sorry,” Soto said, smiling at us shamefacedly. “It’s the rats. I’m terrified of the rats. I know it’s stupid, but I am. I’m afraid I can’t sleep on the floor.” So we reserved a place in the bed for him. During my attacks the rule was bent for me also, and I, too, enjoyed the grimy bed. And attacks came frequently in Guayaquil. The air was a mold, something diseased that I took into myself, a fungus growing in the alveoli, till it choked me and I had to cough it out. The attack passed. My vigilant friends heard my stentorian metallic breathing return to normal. They reminded me of proper precedence. I returned to the floor.)

  On the floor rats passed over our legs with light scratching motions that made Fernando want to vomit. We lay there naked, beneath a damp sheet, listening to the screams of fire engines, a long unpleasant whine. Boards crashed, collapsing nearby. In hell, fires burn when the flesh is already consumed. In Guayaquil, by miraculous dispensation, the houses of the slum burn despite the pervasive damp. (Beneath the fires, fueling them by transubstantiation, were streets covered with mud and fecal matter thrown up by the river.) Some part of the slum was always in flame, blocks of wooden shacks leaning against each other, burned to a deeper unity. The light ash and charred wood floated in the river. One evening I saw a man’s corpse, half burned away on one side, carved by the fire like a side of beef, bloated to a hundred fluorescences of gray rot on the other side. Men with long poles tried to pull it to shore, but the corpse’s cavity filled with water, and it sank.

  We had no reason for staying in Guayaquil. We had no reason for leaving. Fernando and I had meant to go somewhere, to help someone do something about something. What was it? We had no energy for travel. We had no money. We lacked will. We needed rest. We stayed. Mosquito bites on my arm swelled to the size of walnuts. We needed rest. We stayed. I lay half under the sheet reading my mother’s letter. Dear Tete: (Fernando, Chaco, and Gualo Garcia lay beside me, asleep. It was early evening. But an empty day in Guayaquil exhausted us.… I watched a mosquito walk into Chaco’s large ear.… Nothing to be done.) Your reflections about “The Discovery of Latin America” are very interesting But I wonder if Fernando isn’t right and you’re getting distracted by the talk of politicians (Maybe their talk talk talk their empty pedestrian words are what has created in you this craving for something sublime, for Poetry, for great leaders whom you imagine speaking magnificent speeches from horseback and leading grand charges But that’s just your imagination Tete, that isn’t politics, it’s literature? (The question mark didn’t indicate a question, even a rhetorical one. My mother used punctuation rarely, and as the mood took her.) I have always thought that perhaps you had more of a taste for literature actually than politics? But woe woe woe when the realms are confused! This talk of leaders isn’t the sort of book I thought you had in mind when you left. Fernando is, though willfully plain-spoken sometimes, very perspicacious. He is much wiser and more undogmatic than his Stalinist mother by the way! Do please give Fernando my love and tell him what I said about him) Anyway you must learn to listen to what others have to say—sometimes they have things to teach you Or you will end up like your father. (She described me; she described herself. She always castigated most vehemently her own faults in others. I rubbed at a series of bites on my right arm. The skin came away in damp flakes, like wet cardboard. Clear sticky fluid coated my fingertips.) Perhaps in the villages, there is nothing to be discovered. Nothing! At least entertain that thought for a moment? I say God forbid that our future should be a return to the stupidity, the human sacrifìce, the slavery the mealy milching measly life of the Indians before the Conquest. By the Conquistadors, our ancestors! (Yes! I am their child, I don’t deny it. And that is my inheritance from them, not to apologize. For God’s sake Tete affirm yourself!) It is unfortunate that History moves in diabolically cunning ways. (She didn’t think it unfortunate. It mirrored her own contrary nature. It provided opportunity for drama, for saying something seemingly evil and shocking our cousins.) But it does Tete! We may not approve of the cruelty of the conquistadors, but it is humanity’s good fortune that they put an end to the barbarism of the Inca priests, and dragged the simple Indian masses halfway to the light of Reason! Yes, their Catholicism is just as dark and cruel and barbaric, But now there is at least the possibility of a free rational life in the future It is criminal to look for guidance for our unhappy people in the Incas’ thousand years of suffering! The Incas are the past! Let the dead bury the dead! The conquistadors and the Incas have nothing to teach us. Nothing Nothing Nothing Listen to me! This is the twentieth century Tete! There’s no
refusing History, no going back. You can’t refuse History Tete It happens anyway And your refusal is part of it Your Gandhi (or should I say Tete your father’s?) (Having renounced coquetry herself, she easily recognized its ruses in others.) was a man of strong but very limited vision, his blind spots may have given him the courage to face the cannon’s mouth, but they were still enormous blind spots. He was a religious fanatic, and that’s the most dangerous variety of madman. Thank God that Mr. Nehru (and you know what a coward I think he is!) knows that Gandhi’s place is as a church for the simple at heart. In church the rational intelligent man pays his respects to nonsense and then he forgets about it and goes on about his business. Your Gandhi’s spinning wheel is religion; “Eden “; something to keep the stupid poor happy, mystified, spinning away like the irrational geese most of them are. And still poor. Yes, Gandhi did do things himself rather than ordering others to do them. In this he is superior to most of this poor suffering world’s leaders, its stinking Roosevelts and Churchills and Stalins. (She was unbiased in her contempt. Contempt itself was her party; the Great Refusal of Everything. I rubbed away at the flesh on my arm till the blood and serum oozed up. Four bites had grown into my right arm’s crop of walnuts. I put my shoes on and walked out naked to sit under some boards that were leaning against our shack. I had dysentery. Everyone in Guayaquil had dysentery. A warm rain poured on my body through the cracks in the lean-to. Someone ran to the river. I added my thin runny stream to the Guayas. There was still enough light to read by, and I sat in the stench with my mother’s letter, liquid dribbling out of me.) But is this constant activity always a good thing The world needs leaders that can stand back a bit, who reflect, who can THINK RATIONALLY, who can plan the future for the masses, who are themselves incapable of the most elementary plan. (Leaders should do things; leaders should stand back. My mother expressed her contradictions not by nuance or silence, but by whirling about, saying opposite things within a few sentences of each other.) But one thing the poor suffering world doesn’t need is more prophets, visionaries, more charismatic leaders, “suns in the people’s sky.” You sound like one of Peron’s toady hagiographers I’m embarrassed to quote that part of your letter to your father (I know why you wrote him Tete! you feared what I might say about this religious nonsense!) I hope that you do not see your fate as following or being one of these irrational hypnotists? Think about Gandhi! For a man who walked away from all the world’s honors he certainly managed to promote his name to everyone’s lips All his “sacrifices” were stunts, like his fasting where everyone could watch him. He wasn’t denying himself food, he was gaining the mindless crowd’s attention. (I felt light. From diarrhea, from my mother’s nihilism. I walked back to our sweaty sheet. The floor stuck to my skin.) These selfless people (might I count your father among them!) give me a pain It’s just a con job! Like Evita’s (or your father’s) “I make all these terrible sacrifices for you” Charismatic leaders are for religion—for slavery!—not the way to human freedom! Rationality and science are the way to freedom And it wasn’t Gandhi’s stupid ideas but his hypnosis that impressed the childish villagers. We’ve had enough of that In this benighted country! When he left the infantile villagers returned to fìlih! I know you think my notebooks are a little fad, a housewife’s sad hobby? But you are wrong. I have the whole world in them! And I have many that are fìlled with clippings about Gandhi For I too was once taken with him (Taken in by him should I say? But I soon saw through him (you and your father always give yourselves over uncritically to things.) Gandhi’s little stunts worked not because he reached into the soul (that ghost) of the benighted masses but because Indians are a stupid superstitious irrational people If they let him die, didn’t do what the Holy Man wanted they’d get Bad Karma, which is some sort of curse like original sin or syphilis (They thought they’d be reborn as caterpillars) Superstition, that was Gandhi’s stock in trade. When there were terrible earthquakes in India, he said it was because of Hindu oppression of the untouchables. Does that root out superstition? Does that help the few people capable of it to be rational autonomous individuals? After he died the morons all wanted to touch his corpse, they trampled each other to death trying to get to his body, to have that miraculous touch Just like Evita. (Oh, she hated Evita most of all! And was that hatred untouched by the feeling good women have against whores, against those who are “willing to do anything” to make their way in the world?—A thought in my mother’s style! Her letter, like any long contact with her, changed me, filled me with her sharp destructive energy. Chaco grabbed my hand. “No more. Every time I hear you scratch one of those bumps it makes my skin crawl.” He rolled over again, turned his back to me.) Gandhi didn’t liberate the masses into rationality; he fuddled them. And they are easily fuddled! Your father has been “explaining” things to me. He’s quite the Hindu these days, did you know that? (I feel like there’s a silent conspiracy between you two to drive me crazy.) Your father says that Hinduism means “conscious shedding of attachments.” By that your father means ignoring me. Tete, the truth is, I’m worried about him! He’s been very withdrawn lately. I don’t know if it has to do with your absence, but I think that perhaps it does. It is as if he were giving up. He won’t even argue with me anymore. And I try to say deliberately provoking things to him! But he just lies on the living-room floor like a corpse. He says that whatever I think is fine, just fine. He doesn’t mind. He has no desires, he has no opinions. It is very annoying. But I think that he took your leaving harder than you thought. He says it doesn’t matter what he wants, he isn’t going to live very long anyway.… It’s enough to make me scream!) You and I, Tete, it is true, don’t want many things. We have chosen voluntarily the life of deliberate poverty Gandhi recommends. (Age, I was happy to see, hadn’t robbed my mother of her makeup box, her powers of self-dramatization.) But can we realistically expect this voluntary poverty from many people? They are too weak-willed and given to gluttonous mindless amusements But worst of all is this nonviolence business. That’s where your Gandhi and I really part company. He preached nonviolence, but I think that he had just as much destructive energy as the rest of us. Enormous anger! He turns it inward. And he only does that—which is sick!—for the same reason others turn it outward, to make other people do what he wanted. It was just another way of being aggressive, by making people feel guilty. He reminds me of your father.—I think you’re old enough now for me to say that to you (Actually, she had been saying it to me since I was eight years old.) He hurts himself so that others will see how they’ve made him suffer, will cry about him, will feel what rotten people they are So he will get his way! (I only wish that I could fìgure out what it is he wants now so I could give it to him!) Nonviolence is just another mask for his egotism. You can see, I hope, how his ideas of nonviolence were all bound up with his insane ideas about sexuality. I’m afraid that I have to speak frankly to you about this. Your Gandhi is a man who hates and fears women, who hates and fears sex, and who confuses violence and sex, as if killing and making love were the same activity. And because he thinks sex is sick he thinks violence is always evil. He wants to keep himself to himself. (I hope you are not embarrassed to hear me talking like this. I have been up all night, keeping watch on the frontier of Reason. That is the imperiled Frontier. But you can see how very much it would worry me to think of you following someone like this?) Not to touch (or hit) or be touched, because it was polluting?! He wants to be untainted unsmudged, women will befoul him! They’ll make him waste his semen. You know that he practiced celibacy because he thought that keeping back semen would make him smarter? You know that Gandhi was making love with his wife when his father died. He felt so guilty that ever after that he refused to sleep with his wife She had to be punished for luring him away from his father! I hope it doesn’t embarrass you to hear your old mother talking like this Tete! There are many things I could tell you about your father But I won’t They’re not the sort of things a child should know. But when I hear you talkin
g about self-denial, about austerities, it terrines me. You remind me of a nun! I don’t want to see you growing up cursed with this same hatred of the body, this same hatred for women (Do you think that it is maybe bound up with your problems with your father dear? Have you considered that maybe you should see a psychoanalyst, someone who could help lift this curse from you? I don’t mean to interfere, but I don’t want you to have a barren life Tete!) Gandhi thought—listen to this! it’s true! I have it in one of my notebooks!—that if he could remain celibate, while sleeping with a naked girl, he could solve the Pakistani question! This is the magical nonsense of someone who thinks his semen is all-powerful Who thinks if he keeps back semen he’ll be smarter. Semen in the head! He thinks his organ is all-powerful. He thinks that to have intercourse will kill the woman. Why! Because he thinks the woman will kill him, take his organ away! He is terrifìed of his own sexuality, his own violence, because he is terrified of women!!! Do you know what his assassin said I have it in one of my notebooks. “I believed that the teaching of nonviolence would emasculate the Hindu community.” Now I will say something that I hope will shock you! His assassin was right! Gandhi stood before the British saying (Wait a minute, I have it somewhere)