The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  “Why do you laugh, Ernesto?” He blew smoke at me—maliciously, I thought. I looked up at the sun setting over the palace. A long point, like a sword, ran from the coat of arms that formed its central decoration. A ray of the sun was split by the sword. I struggled for breath. “Don’t you see?” Nico said. “Fidel believes in justice. He will follow that wherever it might lead him. Even against his own father!”

  Chaco laughed, stomping his feet up and down in the bleak delight of his despair over Nico, over this thralldom that had destroyed the black man’s character. “Especially his father!” Chaco had chaperoned Hilda and me late at night, as we argued about Freud. “Of course, Nico. Especially his father!” Chaco’s heels left round marks in the soft turf.

  I pulled up some tufts of grass and chewed on them. Cool, but a little bitter. The food of nationhood. I thought of my own father, lying on the floor, his arms at his side. Severing his attachments to my mother and myself, preparing for death. I had abandoned him. 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.

  I hadn’t written back.

  “His father,” Nico said proudly, “his father is a real son of a bitch.”

  I spat out the grass helms. Why was there so much talk about fathers?

  A barefoot Indian ran directly, intently, towards us across the grass, as if he had a message especially for our ears. Where had he come from? Had he been hiding behind that bush with the red berries? We stopped talking, amazed, and awaited him. He wore wide three-quarter-length pants with broad brown stripes, a bright-blue shirt with white squares woven on it, and a small straw hat with a red cord around the crown. He stopped before Chaco. Perhaps the message was for him. But then the man stood silently, staring unselfconsciously at Chaco’s odd face. It was worth a stare. Or perhaps he’d forgotten his message.

  “Take his hand,” I instructed, “and put it to your forehead.”

  Chaco picked up the man’s dirty hand and touched the stubby fingers to his face. The Indian looked away and pulled his hand from Chaco’s weak grip. His lips closed tightly, making a sour pucker; he scrunched his eyes shut. “Why do you do that?” he asked. It was not his custom; it disgusted him.

  Chaco smiled. “He told me to,” he said, inclining his head towards me.

  “Do you do whatever he tells you to? You can get in a lot of trouble that way. Unless he’s your boss? But he doesn’t look like a boss.” He stared at me through half-closed eyes.

  His look reminded me of the mestizo waiter at the bar in La Paz, the Indian guards outside Obrajes. This man turned me into a store dummy. He took his time examining me. My once-white shirt gave off a smell. My pants were stained with mud from our nights on the golf course, where my rolled-up jacket had been my pillow. I held the jacket in my right hand. It looked like a leather rag.

  “He’s our leader,” Chaco said, continuing his joke on everyone. “We have to do what he says. We have to trust in his hatred of injustice. It is real. We have to trust his guidance.”

  “Well, he’s not a very good leader if you ask me,” the Indian said. “He should lead you all out of here, right now, before something bad happens to you, my friend. This is a dangerous street. This is a dangerous town. You should get out of here. You should get out of here right now. I think you need a new leader!” He laughed, and rubbed the side of his face with his hand. His thin eyes looked worried for Chaco, his lost nephew. “Follow me!” He ran off down the empty park path, down the empty street, out of town, getting smaller and smaller, another Indian off to feed the dying sun.

  Nico rose suddenly, moved forward without waiting for us or even looking to see if we followed. Smoke trailed out behind him. We followed. “His father,” he said, “is the worst man in Cuba! Except for Batista.”

  Fidel’s father was a thief. He stole from everyone, even the United Fruit Company! On moonless nights he’d cut away at the forests, enlarging his holdings. Fidel’s father had stolen deeds. Fidel’s father had been unfaithful to Fidel’s mother. He had fucked every woman in the province!

  Nico pounded the heels of his hands together. Some ecstasy beyond joy. The pleasure (I imagined) of his imagining the coupling of Fidel’s parents; poor child, all the body that was left to him was in watching the primal scene of someone else’s parents. What selfless discipleship, my mother’s mocking voice said. Or perhaps his pleasure was simply in remembering that Fidel had once shared such intimacies with him.

  I turned from the loud sad spectacle. My father walked beside me, the opposite of all that Nico had said, a good faithful man in a silly hunting cap, the ear flaps tied up at the sides. What did he care what others thought of him? We walked by the slums near our house. He told me the story of Latin America, our unredeemed continent, the moral failure of its leaders. His hands balled into fists. But how could he do anything? How could he strike a blow at the United States? The United States, the land of rich unfeeling immoral men, imperialists who starved our people, cracked their skulls to reveal runny yellow yolks. It was easy to kill people. But that was something for weak people to do, ones without character, “Imperialists.” A dirty barefoot child ran near the basin in the slum; I ran, I shouted something, it didn’t mean anything, just sound shouted up at the sky. My father took my hand. He moved faster than I did, pulled me along. It was hard to breathe.

  It was hard to keep up with Nico, to push through the bad air. Now he fluttered his large hands against his thighs, like a penguin. Each fluttering motion made my lungs move spastically in my chest. He walked faster, lost in love for Fidel’s grandiose old man, his prodigious appetites, his fabulous larceny, his terrible betrayals. A mythic father for such a godlike son!

  Why had he denied me my myth at the end, the one he had been chief author of? Did he want me to fail? I was crying.

  And Nico’s own family? Chaco asked.

  Why did this clown remind him of his own mortality? He didn’t want to talk about that. It wasn’t worth talking about. He held his fists wide apart. He was a butcher’s son. He was one-quarter Negro. He, too, had been a butcher. But that was before he met Fidel. What did that matter! It didn’t matter. That was another life.

  We came near the cathedral. It had a clock in each of its two huge bell towers, and one over its main entrance. (Our time on earth is transitory. How parched we are without the moisture of belief!) I pushed Nico along now, pressing my palm against his broad sweaty back. We were late for our meeting at Hilda’s. It was past dinnertime, I said, and there would be some fruit at Hilda’s. But most of all I wanted to see her. I wanted to have her embrace me in my sorrow. I wanted to embrace her.

  Now Nico, the inexorable, wouldn’t be hurried. He didn’t respond to my weak touch, but stood, intent on the noise from the church. From inside the cathedral the bishop himself spoke, and large loudspeakers mounted on the bell towers broadcast his homily to the street. Arbenz’s soul, the bishop said, was a withered black thing, like a bat. Arbenz and the Communists had wounded Christ, just as if they had stuck a spear into Christ’s side.

  A crowd of fifty or so stood by the high bronze doors, open now to the street. Candles glowed within the church, as if miming the setting sun. The last rays of that sun made the faces of the crowd look serene, peaceful, though the bishop spoke of blood. The women wore black. A few Indians stood off to one side. Catholics wagered on Arbenz’s future instead of the afterlife, demonstrated the health of their political souls for the Ruler to Come. Cooks listened to the bishop and plotted our betrayal.

  It was the duty of Catholics, the bishop said, to pray for the success of the brave men of Castillo Armas, avengers of the wrongs the Church had suffered. His men were knights of the faith. Castillo Armas was the cross and the sword.

  “Castillo Armas,” Chaco whispered from behind me, “is a banana shoved up the ass of the peasants.”

  “Why do they let that son of a bitch talk?” I shouted. My cheeks were wet. I cried for the Guatemalan Revolution
.

  Some people in the back of the crowd turned to look at us. Chaco put his palm into my back, and we walked on.

  “They should kill the bishop,” Nico shouted back over his shoulder at the crowd. His voice screeched and slid. “They should kill him! They should kill him!”

  Chaco ran forward and put his arm about Nico’s broad shoulders. “Shut up, dear!”

  “Don’t call me ‘dear’!” Nico shook Chaco’s arm, that stick, from his shoulder.

  “Is that what Fidel would do?” I asked. “Assassinate him?” I wanted to hear Nico say yes. I was avid for it. “Would he have him shot?”

  “Yes,” Nico said softly, implacably, like a lover. “Yes. Yes.” He could hear the eagerness in my voice. He went on, with growing sureness. “Yes. Yes, he would. Except that he wouldn’t order it, Ernesto. He is not that kind of leader. He acts for himself first. He would do it. For it is just. The people should have their revenge. He would act for them, in their name, for justice!” His voice skidded about on the bishop’s blood. The word “justice” was a sharp angry bird escaping from his chest. Nico, I remembered then, had never killed. He had run away. No wonder it excited him so!

  “More blood!” Chaco said disgustedly, looking towards me, asserting our tacit agreement, our Gandhian certainties. But I was not thinking of that, in that way. I saw a man in a high gold hat, holding a shepherd’s crook. I couldn’t see his face. He stood by an altar. A dark man from the back of the church danced crazily in the aisle, hopping from foot to foot, shouting at the bishop, mocking his words in strange garbled parodies. But that mockery was not enough for him. He was not satisfied. He took a pistol from his belt and—before the multitude—shot the gold-hatted man. The image engrossed me utterly. I looked at it from a great height, as if from a theater balcony.

  I had to tear myself from it to look at Chaco. His brows were quiet now, his features still, beyond mockery. There was no irony in his voice. He had a huge nose, little chin, thinning hair. I no longer thought him funny-looking, for he was my friend. But today I had to remind myself of my feelings for him, recall distantly his kindness. I could not now possess those, or any, feelings.

  “Nothing comes of that, Nico.” Chaco stared at me. He could see my tears. “But more blood. World without end. We don’t require that Nico. Our continent has suffered enough.”

  Absently I nodded my agreement, my confirmation. The stern judge. Why did they want that of me? For truly I was still inside the church, watching the sacrifice, the necessary sacrifice.

  Nico laughed at Chaco. I heard him from within my distance. There was no good humor in his laughter. It was his hands thwacking together in a new key, uncontrolled, gears slipping, grinding.

  “I know what Castro would do, Ernesto,” Nico said. He pointed at the air in front of him as at some confirming image. “Because I know that he himself has shot many many men.” But then, the true Voice not present to assure him, Nico faltered. “I think. He never told me so directly. But I’ve heard it from many people. When he was at the university.” Nico’s own deep voice grew firmer. He stepped hard on the pavement. “He took risks.”

  “Of course,” Chaco said mildly. He hummed to himself. What would Castro be in this verse?

  For example, the head of the student federation at the high schools had boasted that he was going to take power at the university. He had been shot.

  “Of course,” Chaco said. (Perhaps “Fidel Is a Pistol.”) Chaco tapped each hollow black metal lamppost, with its three round globes, as we passed. A satisfying clack.

  We walked on. Nico looked towards me. The crowd was silent, dumbstruck by this man’s act. And some moved forward silently to take the gold hat from the dying man. Would they bury it? Or offer it to the dark man?

  “And someone shot Manolo Castro, State Secretary of Sports, a most corrupt man.” Nico turned his head to the side, as if he had said something very sly. Coyness was odd on his large face, an adult in children’s clothing.

  “Mais certainement,” Chaco said. “One Castro kills another. Who would not appreciate such irony? C’est délicieuse.” But clearly Chaco, one-time connoisseur of ironies, didn’t. His voice was thick with disgust.

  A jeep raced through the empty street towards us, and, at the last moment, swung in a wide arc to the other side of the road, FEDERATION OF LABOR was painted in black block letters on its doors. Four or five workers in dirty undershirts sat on the backs of the seats, shouting “Go home Yanquis” at the shuttered buildings. One of them fired a pistol in irregular rhythm at the sky.

  “Your Castro,” I said giddily, “is a gangster.” It wasn’t a judgment; only a description; another verse for Chaco’s song. I didn’t care about Castro’s murderous qualities. No, more than that: I wanted them, I wanted Nico’s litany to go on. These spectral corpses made me feel peaceful. I breathed easier. I wanted the hecatomb to mount and mount. Death, dying, dead. They were just words, after all.

  Nico laughed richly, as if my apparent insult had given him the greatest pleasure. The dark formed around him now, as if shading itself to his tone, slowly absorbing him. “That’s just what Fidel says now! The regime, he said, which could not impose justice, permitted vengeance. The blame lies—listen to this Ernesto!”

  He was right. I wasn’t listening. Castro’s words bored me. This would be more justification, more Castro rant. I wanted the savagery itself, the list of suffering bodies, held or holding others; escaping; killed. Across the street from us one of the Guatemalan soldiers threw his rifle into the road and ran into a shuttered shop. The shopkeeper had nailed boards across his windows. That morning the artillery commander at Chiquimula had fled to the Panamanian embassy.

  “Listen,” Nico insisted. “Ernesto you must listen! ‘The blame,’ Castro said, ‘lies not with the young men who desired to make a revolution at a moment when it could not be done. Victims of illusion, they died as gangsters. Today they might be heroes!’ ”

  Chaco stopped. We walked in the middle of the road, for there were no cars in the streets anymore. Chaco’s body shook with rage. I had never seen him so angry before. With Gandhi’s vision had come the possibility of judgment, of outrage. He took Nico’s broad shoulders with both of his hands, and made Nico face him. “Now you listen Nico! You listen to me! Do you hear what garbage you’re repeating as if it were the word of God? Revolutionaries are gangsters at a different time. Thugs are embryonic revolutionaries! Don’t you see, Nico? It’s just killing. He kills now for the people, you say. The people deserve revenge. You sound like that flyer of Castillo Armas’s! You sound like that bishop! Castro’s just another priest offering a sacrifice! Hilda’s right! Revolutionaries have become priests to the people.” Nico twisted this way and that, but Chaco, surprisingly strong, would not let him go. Bits of Chaco’s saliva clung to Nico’s clothes and face. From my grief, my distance, behind my voices which severed me from the world, I watched these two odd men in the street, and wondered what they were so excited about? No one had really died! It’s only words.

  “But Hilda’s wrong, Nico. It’s because the people won’t kill. They only watch. They aren’t transformed by that, only shocked into silence. Castro lifts himself away from you by all this killing. He kills, you think, but you ran away!” Nico, bewildered by this madman, looked imploringly at me. I could see the cords in his neck. They were just a show. As Chaco had once said, You can’t enter a movie. And who would want to? I had no desire to interrupt them. Nico saw my indifference. He turned back to his accuser.

  “You ran away, not because you’re a coward, but because you’re better than he is! It’s all just killing, killing killing. And that’s all that will ever come of it! Not justice! Just more killing! Ernesto’s right, Nico. You should listen to him. We don’t need more death. We need to change ourselves.”

  Chaco released him.

  It was Fidel, Nico began after a moment, who had rallied the people in Colombia when Gaitan was murdered.

  We walked on. If Nico h
ad been shaken by the clown’s outburst, then clearly a rapid repetition of the magical name was the remedy.

  Fidel had been there for the Pan American Conference. Peron had paid for the Cuban Student Delegation, for Peron had known that Fidel would stand up to the Yanquis.

  Nico looked about in the dusk. He took longer strides; he wanted to be sure he was a good distance ahead of Chaco.

  Then, when Gaitan had been shot, the people had gone wild. A spontaneous outburst. “The sort of thing,” Nico said over his shoulder to me, “that Hilda talks about.”

  And it had been a real uprising. Police stations had been blown up! Shops had been looted!

  Yes, I thought. Yes. Go on. Get to the deaths.

  Fidel had gone on radio. He had said his own name. Fidel hadn’t been afraid to say his own name. He had called on the people to revolt. And the people had responded to his voice. And Fidel himself had fought.

  “I have heard,” Nico said, “that he killed thirty-two people himself.”

  Chaco stopped again, stood with his hands on his own cheeks, pulling them downward, curving his mouth. “I want to throw up,” he said.

  But I, I wanted these deaths. They felt a barrier to my grief. As if I could bury his death in so many!

  Nico went on and on in the dusk. More rant delivered in reverent tones. Something about marching towards death. Smiles. Supreme Happiness. Great Joy. On their lips. The Call of Duty.

  I couldn’t concentrate on it. Nico’s churchy tone, Castro’s empty rhetoric, always sent me far away. And my lungs hurt. I needed to sit down. I needed a shot. I couldn’t keep up with Nico.

  Nico stopped. We formed a little line in the empty street. “But I failed him.” Perhaps he would cry?

  “Of course,” Chaco said. “Of course you did, de—” He stopped himself theatrically, putting his hand across his own mouth. “Of course you did, Meo.”

  A smile of joy on their lips? Why? They looked like zombies going into that dark land. When he raised the gold crown they all might die. But they smiled. They wanted it. The call to a great sacrifice.