The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  To error Hilda offered sharp immediate correction. I was drawn to that, to her stocky form in a short-sleeved dress with a brightly colored shawl over it, her hair drawn back into a bun, giving her round face a clearer definition. The woman prophet, the woman judge. “We were very serious,” I said to Ponco. For some reason I felt compelled towards honesty with him, as if it were very important that he, especially he, have an accurate account of all I had thought and felt. “Not what you expect: fiery passion!” But that was wrong: there was passion, fierce in its way; not always for each other, but for our common cause, the defense of the Revolution, the defeat of Imperialism. (And that was wrong, too. For it was also a passion between us.) “It wasn’t a tango, comrade. It was more like a seminar, a study group. Not what you think.”

  “Wrong,” he said. “That is what I think.” He pointed his long finger at me in quick jabs. I recognized Mr. Prosecutor. “Intellectual violence! Cold intelligent passion! Passion of the intelligence! We see!” He pointed to his own head. “Of the mind.” He lowered his eyes suddenly, as if perhaps he’d gone too far with me. After all, I was.…

  But no, not here on this magic island, where prisoners become young Communists become lunatics, become … enchanted princes, talking animals, the King of Argentina, avenging angels, words in Ponco’s harsh transforming mouth. I wasn’t him, that name (“Only your name could unite the guerrillas on the continent”), that giant costume I will once again reinhabit as if it were a papier-mâché dummy. For the moment here I felt a simpler thing, outside the sweaty costume of my fame, a person alone with his tastes, a few old habits, and his childhood. There was no going too far with me, I thought.

  The rain began to come down in long transparent sheets, like wings. One of the wings beat against us, soaking us, and we scuttled towards the door.

  JULY 11

  “I want to tell you about Hilda.” We sat at the table, and I sipped mate from my hollow tin spoon, my nubbly gourd. Ponco ate forkfuls of rice meditatively, as if it were more than food, as if it were the best, most involving amusement his world now offered. Ponco always gave himself over wholeheartedly to his pleasures. But rice! He must be very bored on this island. A thick book lay beside his plate. I couldn’t see the title, but the cover had a picture of people being pushed aside by a train, a funny-looking train with a spherical engine. “I decided I can’t deny you the satisfaction,” I lied. I hadn’t been able to write after our conversation yesterday. The sound of the rain against the window annoyed me. The feel of the damp annoyed me. The saliva in my mouth annoyed me. Really, I needed Ponco, his ear, his participation, his questions, his painful mean-spirited mocking insights. Otherwise the scene faded from me, the flowered print lost its bright colors as after too many washings. I saw the parlor under the waters of a deep river, the chairs and single wood table swaying this way and that, pushed by currents that dissolved them. Someone looked down into the river from its bank, but he saw nothing and turned away. I needed Ponco’s participation to return my life to me. I wanted to know it immediately, to possess it whole; and it was in speaking to him that I regained its colors; it was my desire to tell him that made my memory work, that made things vivid. I couldn’t wait anymore to write, and then have Ponco read the pages. I had to speak my story (and then return here, to my boards, to record the conversation). Without Ponco’s questions I didn’t know what it was important to talk about. Hilda’s quick, decided voice? (It was her voice, high, rapid, unfolding a world, that I first loved.) Or should I speak of the Chinese cast to her eyes, the pleasant fullness of her body? Or of Nico’s self-hatred, his abrupt motions, his constant, nearly odorless sweat making pictures on his shirts? Or of the CIA agents in the cafes, their dead, drawling voices taking a world away, their red cigarette packs offered as bribes for information on the city’s crumbling morale. Or—or what might he lead me to discover?

  “Good,” Ponco said. He looked up at me, still chewing methodically. “The seminar on love.”

  I felt relieved. A topic. And then I felt, sadly, how much this damnable waiting has dissolved me. That I should be anxious for a subject! That I should need someone’s responses, need to be set a topic! I am a topic, a revolutionary catechism, the unity of the military and the political, the struggle to begin now, the stroke that will arouse the masses and reveal to them that revolution is possible. My name.

  But not then. And it is as if I were hurled back into the mood of that time, when one dispensation was fading, and I did not know from where revelation might come to me. Gandhi’s words were the truth I had, and I held to him still, held to him hard. But he was only intermittently a vivid speech in my mouth (and mostly, oddly, when I spoke with Chaco). I heard in Gandhi’s words my father’s pathetic melancholy dirge of judgment, and wasn’t pleased. And Gandhi’s theses were corroded, too, by my mother’s shards of uncertainty. The world Gandhi had formed, the sense he had made of things, fell about, like letters jumbled on a page. I could still make out the meaning, but where it had once been an unavoidable truth, the inescapable clarity of revelation, now I strained after it, as if solving a puzzle. Humanity, Gandhi said, had suffered terrible physical wounds, and one must not make it suffer more, no matter how right the cause. Blood soaks the earth, then, now, always in the name of justice. But justice, no matter how clever the dialectician’s rhetoric, cannot come from blood. A violent savage man was no better than the wolf, the oppressor, the imperialist. Oppressed humanity must be the first to refuse the wolves’ ways, to become true men, nonviolent warriors.

  A catechism. I held hard. I believed him still. (Did I?)

  “We studied Marxism,” I said to Ponco. “We read the classics, and some of Lenin’s pamphlets, Imperialism, and State and Revolution. Though Hilda disagreed with Lenin: she saw no need for central parties, new kings.” Myself, a member of a Central Committee, I smiled. “I had read Marx before, of course.”

  “Of course,” Ponco said, favoring me with one of his smiles. I understood. My tone was pompous—the student afraid he’d be thought ignorant. And he—of course—had joined Fidel, had acted, before he had theories for his actions, before he knew how to read theory, or anything else.

  “The Argentine Communists were priests,” I said. “They enshrined Marx. They interpreted Marx for the masses. And they compromised with the powers of the world, whoever they were at the time, as if keeping the church alive were the only value. They used their Marxism as an excuse for delay, for compromise with imperialism against Peron. The masses are not transformed by such dirty cleverness.” I had thought of the young Communists at the university, lecturing us. I had remembered, too, my mother’s dialectical flights at the kitchen table, her sleight of hand with the Cunning of History, evil means employed, like a conjurer’s false bottoms, for good ends. No, my father said, severely; and I had assented. “But with Hilda, Marxism came alive for me. It was the Guatemalan Revolution. At first the party pushed Arbenz’s government into more radical stands. They expropriated land for the peasants. Not just any land. Land from the United Fruit Company.”

  “Hallowed ground,” Ponco said.

  “Exactly. The Party seemed to stand guard at first over the integrity of the land reform. It was only then becoming clear that they and Arbenz would turn cowardly, that they couldn’t take the last, the necessary action—that they would be ready once again to use Marx to justify cowardice and betrayal. They weren’t the leadership I longed for.”

  “The Whore of Babylon.”

  “What?”

  “My grandmother said. A Protestant.”

  “What?”

  “The Book of Revelation. The Communist Party is the Whore of Babylon.”

  “What?”

  Ponco shook his small head in strokes of weary disappointment. I was a man without significant culture. Mysteries were closed to me.

  “The Communist parties in Latin America: the Church of the Revolution. But they betray the Revolution. They are the real Antichrist, the real Whore of Babylon
.”

  “Oh.”

  “Protestants. We are. Revolution in the Revolution,” Ponco said. That was the title of Debray’s book. Was this rigmarole a joke about Debray? Or me? This waiting——–

  “Hilda,” Ponco said, interrupting my dark thought. It sounded a gasp, a plea, as if he were afraid I’d forget my topic. “And Marxism.”

  “Yes. It was the times that let me see. And Hilda.”

  “Ah,” he said, smiling in a most annoying way. Walter showed me a mouthful of rice mush. I didn’t like his tone. I didn’t like his smile. I thought—to myself—of Hilda. I would deny him the pleasure. (And being sure that I denied him something was almost as good, I found, as telling him.) Hilda found in Marx, I would have said, one message always: the spontaneous revolutionary will of the masses. She felt, as I did, that the Communist parties had only bridled the masses, held them back, as if, she would say, they were the head, and the workers no more than muscle. The Party made Marx’s work hermetic, unintelligible. It was incapable of speaking the people’s language. So she had turned to the nationalist groups, to APRA. It was the weakness of the United States after the war, she said, that had given the nationalist parties space to blossom. (Our generation was a weed growing, before the gardener’s hand regained its strength.) But the “democratic nationalists” were soon corrupted by compromises with imperialism. She, too, didn’t now know where to turn.

  So, for the moment, we studied. I told her of my plan, formed in Bolivia, to devote the next ten years to writing about the Latin American Revolution. (I thought this a necessary narrowing of my previous subject, my continent, my self.) I would travel for a decade, then go back to Argentina. I would also visit Europe—chat with Sartre—and the Soviet Union, India, China. I would …

  Her thin eyes narrowed further, and looked to the wood floor. I found then that I did not want to disappoint her. But there was nothing, anymore, for us to do in Guatemala but wait. The beautiful Guatemalan Revolution, which we both loved, was endangered. And we would not be allowed to defend it.

  So we studied together.

  And Marx’s work became a space between us, a field for play of a very serious kind. Each term—superstructure and base, vanguard and proletariat, surplus value and alienated labor—meant something more, something not sayable, a gift. Like a lover giving food, warm with her spittle, from her mouth to her lover’s mouth.

  What a thought! Not mine surely. I stared at Walter’s mush mouth. I knew what his “Ah” had implied. And he was right. “That’s rude,” I said sharply. “Close your mouth!”

  Hilda and I appropriated a world together; made it; this world, but reformed, different. It was the world, in its truth. And it was (I know this sounds mad) Hilda herself; and it was a bridge between us, a copula. Made and remade. She said that everything in imperialism’s lying order, its badly made-up story, caused Marx’s vision, his truth, to be obscured, hid it, scrambled the story about, mystified us, as if the ruling class were the bad witch in the fairy tale. We were enchanted, dazed. And the trees, under spell, turned against us, blocked our eyes, scratched our faces. Her words, Marx’s words, made clarity for me. “The MNR,” she said of Bolivia, “is Bonapartist. It veers between the imperialists and the peasants. Because its power comes from the workers and peasants, it makes gestures in their direction. But only gestures. Because it must placate the imperialists, it always stabs the peasants in the back. The Indians you saw will round the corner of the stairs only to find another stairs. Or a drop into nothing at all.” All so obvious. But it gave me a feeling of power over the world, this science, this order. I even understood Chaco’s “Second Talk on the Price of Beer,” the way that, without a real revolution, inflation grew inevitably, a spreading stain.

  You had to study and study again, though, so that things might be called by their proper name, so that the trees and the workers might be taught—no, they needn’t be taught, they need only hear the words and the spell would be broken—that they might remember their true powers. But one must break the spell, re-call, re-form the true word, the true world, over and over. Arbenz and the Guatemalan CP would not speak the words, provide the leadership the masses required for that unremitting struggle against imperialism. They were afraid to say “United States”—(“potato”!)—afraid to die.

  And Gandhi? She rejected him. He tried to transform a revolution into a religious experience. He was a preacher. And he didn’t even preach workers’ taking power. He preached reform. He didn’t prescribe doing away with the ruling class, just begging them to act more humanely. Gandhi didn’t free India. What freed India was a Britain weakened by war and supplanted as the leading Imperial power by the United States. Gandhi had denied India the revolution that it needed, the revolution that China’s masses accomplished. “He was,” she said, leaning forward from her chair for this final damnation, “petit-bourgeois, the grocer’s caste. And he had the notions of a petit-bourgeois.”

  “My father was a pharmacist,” Chaco said. He sounded wounded. Chaco had definitely changed—one could wound him (or Hilda could)—and he, too, now wanted an action he could join himself to, a self that would act.

  Myself, I didn’t bother defining the doctor’s caste. Chaco, I thought then, didn’t understand the nature of these abstractions: impersonal, scientific.

  But Marxism, I said, was rationality without poetry, without that which would rouse the masses to act. It denied what I knew to be necessary, the leader, the symbol which would unite us, which spoke of the needed sacrifice, even of one’s life. Gandhi’s words had a transforming music to them, a call. They promised not just a new social order, but a New Man, the self-sufficient villager, free not only of poverty, but of greed, of insecurity, of deforming anger, servility, the cringe left by colonialism. (I knew that Chaco required direction in his life. I looked from Hilda’s angry face to his. I wanted him to believe in this vision, this man.) Gandhi’s words spoke of an end to the terrible rhythm of violence, of revenge and vendetta that might disfigure humanity forever.

  I could argue with Hilda as I never could with other critics of Gandhi, like my mother. For Hilda did not want simply to turn about lacerating herself. She, too, had a belief: that the masses did not require leadership. For sometimes the election would fall upon one man, and he would give voice to what was needed; and then it might alight upon another. All men could be prophets. The Revolution would come.

  It was good to argue. And Gandhi gave us another subject, like Freud, to fight about. But it gave me, too, another voice. My head nearly burst from this dance that I was. I pressed one vision against another, Marx and Gandhi; both stood; both failed. I was between.

  “There were usually four or five of us there talking,” I said aloud. “Hilda, Chaco, Soto, one of his lawyer friends, and a Cuban, Nico, a follower of Castro, who had fled to Guatemala after the Moncada.” I wanted to say that despite Ponco’s smile, Marx was not a love poem. There were others present always. Things were not so intimate as Walter implied. (I was lying.)

  “I don’t know Nico,” Ponco said. “Are you done with your rice?”

  I pushed my plate towards him: new material for his meditative, methodical work.

  “Granma?” Ponco asked.

  “Do you mean did he go on the Granma?”

  Ponco nodded, his lips curled upward in a smile, but closed. He was demonstrating politeness. He would not, I realized, this now fastidious man, this student of letters, have liked my telling him to close his mouth, criticizing his manners. “Yes. You knew. I meant that.”

  And I had. I nodded back, ashamed of my momentary anger. “Yes. He died at Alegria. He ran behind me. I had just examined his foot.” Why did I say that? How did his foot figure in the story?

  “Fungh Ny.”

  “What did you say?” This time I really hadn’t understood him, not even a word.

  He swallowed, looked angrily at me, narrowing his eyes. I had reminded him again of his imperfection, his loss.

  “Funn
y,” he said, overly precise this time. The word didn’t mean amusement.

  “What?” I was distracted by an odd unrelated thought. My rediscovery of Marxism, the way that it made a shared space between Hilda and me, a country we ruled together, the deep satisfying involvement I felt in those talks in her parlor, the way the words joined us and allowed us to care for each other—it reminded me of something now—of telling my life to this short thin black man, my Ponco. “What’s funny?” I repeated. I looked down at the table, away from his face, embarrassed. But I smiled.

  “The way he held them. The few who survived the Moncada.” He continued to lift forkfuls of rice to his mouth, dividing his phrases with bites. “Went on the Granma. With him. Like losing. At roulette. And doubling. Your bet.” He looked down sadly at his plate. No more rice. “How did he hold them? So many defeats. So many crazy plans.” His face looked distracted, far away. His large brown eyes moved up and down following some inward play of images. (Pictures of a body falling—his? mine?—grasping for air, clawing the ground?) His thin cheeks, surrounding a voice barely there, a light scraping in the silence. He was lost in wonder—about himself, really. The boy who had come to the mountains. Or perhaps he wondered about his involvement in another mad plan.

  “Nico loved him,” I said, though I knew that explained nothing. It was, in a way, what needed explaining. But one could never get to the bottom of that. Infrastructure? Surplus value? The crystalline science could do nothing with that moisture. But it was passion in all its manifold and compound forms that made revolution. “And Nico hated him. And he couldn’t speak of anything else.” We sat in the parlor and talked of the defense of the revolution, of responses to the mercenaries already moving towards the border. How could the people be aroused to protect the Guatemalan Revolution? Nico thought my ideas of nonviolent resistance “diabolical.” (If we were outside he would spit, his most frequent, most pronounced gesture of contempt, of damnation.) The government, Hilda said, must allow the people to act, to organize their own neighborhood committees for self-defense. Too late, Soto said. Too late. It was all empty prayer; parlor talk. Nico rose suddenly from the couch, knocking the bowl of fruit (bananas today) to the floor. His left arm punched the air. “Fidel would know what to do!” he cried. It was the jerking of an overexcited body, beyond Nico’s control, frightening to watch. He was a large fierce-looking man. He had a broad flat nose, wide bones, and big veins that stood out on his neck and forehead beneath his light-brown skin. Anger made him taut, more sharply defined than those around him, as if he were outlined by flickering electricity, a man chosen by lightning, a man apart. “Fidel would know what to do!” Long welts, an irritable red, marked his cheek and neck: battle scars.