The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  “Do you need a shot?” Chaco asked, touching my arm lightly. “You’re wheezing badly.” I had taught my friend to give me the necessary injection.

  “No,” I said, though I did. I wanted to collapse in front of Hilda’s chair, have her tend me.

  “Do you want to hear my song then?” He looked beneficently on both of us, and spread his arms like a crooner. “It’s called ‘Fidel Is a Horse.’ ”

  “No!” Nico shouted furiously. He spat on the pavement in front of Chaco’s shoes.

  “No,” I said. It was dark now. I couldn’t see the globule of spit on the pavement. The air felt moist. The rain was coming down hard on the roof. “We were at Hilda’s.”

  “What?”

  I had spoken aloud, interrupting his reverie as well as my own. Ponco sat beside me reading his thick book.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot where I was.” I sipped some mate. It was cold. And Ponco had cleaned up the dishes.

  “Me, too,” Ponco smiled amiably. “I’m on a stove boat. The captain’s grand, but he’s not trustworthy. He has odd ideas.”

  What boat? Did he mean me? I half clung still to the skirts of my story. He showed me the book jacket. Moby Dick. Men, their faces disfigured by fear, leapt into the sea from a small boat. A shadow menaced them from behind. A vengeful railroad train? In the ocean?

  “You should read it,” he said. That growl—it was indeed a voice to give orders in.

  “I don’t like North American books,” I said. “Too crude. It is North American, isn’t it?”

  Ponco smiled and nodded at me.

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about …” He paused, staring at me openly, as if he were trying to read some hidden word in my face. Or perhaps he wondered what my response would be if he risked a sally. “… it’s about whales.”

  “I’m not interested in whales.”

  Ponco said no more, but went on staring, no longer smiling. It was like a small sun gone down. What sad message had he found in my features? I allowed him this silent interrogation, casting my eyes down at his book jacket. I could see now that this shadow was a whale, not a railroad engine. Do whales, I wondered, eat flesh? (“Fidel Is a Captain”? “Fidel Is a Whale”?)

  “Perhaps,” Ponco said, at the conclusion of his study, “you should write down what you were dreaming about. Hilda?”

  “No. Not precisely. No. Yes. Perhaps so. In a way.” I was fuddled, still walking the empty terrified streets of Guatemala City, waiting for the attack to begin.

  I went to my board. I couldn’t yet stop to write down all that came before. I had to go through with it, to its conclusion, the paratrooper I killed. I killed a mercenary in Guatemala. A man who needed killing? Yes. No …

  Yes.

  Guatemala, June 1954

  A Dark Room

  I heard the radio playing from behind Hilda’s door. It was the Voice of America (their America. We were static on the airwaves, a noise between the true articulations, their civilized speech). The announcer indifferently crumbled the Guatemalan Revolution. Four thousand dead. Castillo Armas promised more bombing of the capital. The city would suffer, he said, until Arbenz and his Communist agents capitulated. (The city would suffer for decades after, until the end of time. Until Yon Sosa and the guerrillas liberate Guatemala. It will come.) The mercenaries claimed the rail junction to El Salvador, the railroad town of Chiquimula. And this evening Puerto Barrios celebrated its freedom from Communist tyranny. White flags hung from the windows. Church bells chimed; they would ring their joy all night long.

  Guatemala City was cut off, its connection severed. Betrayed. Its hands empty at its sides. In corpse position.

  We entered. I couldn’t see anyone there in the dusk. Perhaps Hilda had left the radio playing and fled, gone into hiding. Our friends had all fled. How would she leave a message for me? I gasped for breath.

  But she was there! Sunk deep into her large chair. I saw the outline of her calves first, by the pale green light of the radio dial. The candle was out. Or it hadn’t been lit yet. She didn’t rise to greet me.

  There was nothing to do. We argued about what to do. Outside we could hear the drone of the planes; the bombs dropped near the air base first; and then, like rolling thunder, they came forward. I lifted the corner of a newspaper page that we had pasted over the window, and saw the red spots, the fires. There weren’t any fire engines tonight. A large explosion shook the glass, and a giant column of fire with a corona of black smoke tongued the air on the edge of the city. They had hit an oil storage tank.

  “We must act!” Nico implored us from the couch. There was a sobbing sound to his voice, a fear, a longing. “We can’t just sit here. We have to fight. We have to keep the idea of resistance alive.”

  No one responded. He looked loony, banging his hands together; and his words seemed more pointless discharge, another heavy thwacking sound.

  Hilda had let her long black hair down and was braiding it slowly. I could see her hands as they moved towards the green glow; too intimate an act, I thought, for others to witness. “The government came from above,” she said. “It was never the people in power. It was only Arbenz, a friend of the people.” But her pronouncements lacked the stonecutter’s force; her voice was hollow. She wasn’t judging really, but letting go, accommodating to loss. She undid the braid, and slowly began to braid her hair up again.

  My lungs felt a little better here, for the moment, though the room seemed very stuffy. I sat down on the couch with my companions. Perhaps I only needed to rest. “They haven’t struggled,” I said. There was a jagged metallic aspiration to my words, the asthmatic’s overtone. It was a clear formulation; it had logic; but it was very distant—and it was hardly mine to speak. “They haven’t been transformed,” I said slowly. My grief closed about each word, engulfed it. Gandhi’s thought disappeared from me. “They haven’t become men yet.”

  Hilda laughed. “If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs …”

  “… and blaming it on you,” I said. “If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you …”

  “… but make allowance for their doubting too.” Her voice grew high and solemn when she recited poetry.

  And this was our favorite poem; it was pass and counterpass of a small secret society; it was a way we had found each other one afternoon a few weeks ago as I lay struggling for breath on the couch. I had wanted very much for her to know me, to think well of the direction of my life. Something she had said reminded me of “If,” and I had said a line or two of it to her. And she had finished it; for she, too, had once memorized it, taken heart from it. (It was, she said, a favorite poem of Gramsci’s. He became a part of our curriculum.) And “If” became a sign between us, another field of play.

  The glass shook. The bombing moved closer to our neighborhood.

  “Do you want to hear my poem?” Chaco asked. His voice had a tremor. “It’s a song really. It’s called ‘Fidel Is a Horse.’ ” His fingers, as if by their own will, moved slowly towards his wrist, and the repeated comfort of his own pulse.

  “No!” Nico shouted.

  “No,” Hilda said. “Please. Not now.” It was too painful, she said, to think of us sitting in the dark, squabbling, while the planes destroyed the city.

  We sat quietly, counting our rapid pulse beats, drawing our painful breaths, listening to Nico’s anxious empty assertion. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

  Then Chaco spoke, his voice quieter now, not nervously playful, but insistent, chastened by Hilda’s rebuke. Hilda was right, he said. There should have been mass struggle.

  The tremor was gone from his voice. As once with me, the thought of the masses in motion, of action that all might join in, the symbol raised—the feeling that by imagining its necessity one had already joined in the struggle—all this brought courage. There should have been, he said, the kind of struggle Hilda and Ernesto both talked about. But not more killing. She was wrong about that. Our masses
would not kill. Killing only made the revolutionary powerful, turned him into a priest. It should have been as Ernesto had said: noncooperation.

  “Nonviolence!” Nico turned to shout the word contemptuously into Chaco’s big ear. “Listen, Chaco!”

  We thought a quotation from Fidel—that Horse—would follow. But Nico said nothing more. Listen, he meant, not to words, but to the sounds of the explosions destroying the workers’ houses, terrifying them back into their burrows. I thought of Hilda’s brother’s milder lesson, raising my arm behind my back till I stammered with pain. (My muscles felt that still, a spectral discomfort.) I saw the windows of this house explode inward, the harsh wind slamming us against the light-pink walls.

  “Nonviolence!” Nico shouted over the roar of the planes. He spat on the carpet.

  A small old woman stepped suddenly through the swinging door to the kitchen. She was dressed in her best long black wool skirt, to greet the invaders. “I saw that!” she screamed. “You filthy pig! You disgusting man! And I heard what you’ve been saying all these nights!” She came forward quickly into the room, as if she had little uneven wheels beneath her, and stood fronting Hilda, her palsied head rocking back and forth. “I saw what that black man of yours just did!” She pointed towards Nico, a tiny bony hand from under her black shawl. How did she dare? But she thought her righteousness, her rage, would protect her. “You are animals, filthy filthy animals! You are disgusting people! Only this poor Catholic,” she said, pointing to me, “is a good man. The rest of you should die! You are bad people! You are Communists! I’ve told the right people about you! They’ll come to get you! They’ll kill you! You should die!” There was ecstasy in her final words. She saw our blood.

  No one spoke. She was an apparition, she was Death itself, the sour-milk woman, the bad witch who waits in the cellar to bite your head off. Her shrill voice, her small black figure, barely visible in the dark, made me bring my arms against my sides. Hilda pulled her brightly colored shawl about herself.

  The cook scuttled back into the kitchen, as if that were already liberated territory, where we couldn’t follow.

  Nico rose, without speaking, and walked to the front door. Hilda put on her long green knitted coat. We went out. (Despite Death’s accusation, we felt ourselves held securely in the palm of our youth, that sweet stupid unending vitality. What bad could happen to us?) We would check on blackout violations. We would be witnesses.

  The Argentine Embassy

  Guatemala City,

  Guatemala

  Dear Father,

  This is the last letter I will write to you, even this way, in my thoughts. (Tonight I am waiting for sleep on the floor of our embassy’s main reception room.) For to write to you I need to imagine your angry answering voice. And I have done what I can to silence your voice inside me, just as it has been silenced in the world.

  But let me tell you the story of that death.

  When we left Hilda’s the planes were no longer dropping explosives, but they still made passes over the city, a darker shadow against the night sky, a black shawl over a black dress. The machine guns had been silenced, and the planes flew slowly, at lower and lower altitudes, surveying their domain. We could see the bottoms of their wings in the fires from the bombings. The city was dark but for those fires, and a monstrous glow of light from the cathedral. Perhaps, we thought, it too had been bombed.

  A few other students, in small groups for mutual protection, wandered about as we did, and we joined together, drawn towards the fire in the cathedral. There were about thirty of us. We passed each other the bleak rumors of the day. The delegation I had seen enter the palace that afternoon was not from the unions. They were army officers come to arrest Arbenz and take over the government. They themselves had then been summoned to the office of the U.S. ambassador, and arrested. Castillo Armas and his masters would not be cheated of their victory. The Cabinet, the army staff, Fortunoy—the head of the Communist Party—had fled. There was now no government in Guatemala.

  When we neared the end of the street we saw through the stained-glass windows how a thousand candles prayed for Castillo Armas’s arrival, implored God that the land might be returned to its rightful owners. And more light: joyful searchlights beamed from the balcony around the bell towers, protectors of the cathedral, guides for the planes. The bells began to ring, slowly at first, a heavy clang, a mournful sound.

  “Look,” my friend Chaco said. He stood with his right foot up near his left knee, balanced on one leg. Chaco pointed past the right-hand bell tower.

  I followed his finger. Paratroopers floated through the night sky, lit by the glow from the church and the sharp lights sluicing up at them. We were all quiet, transfixed by this vision of a new angelic order, this coming hell on earth. Have you ever seen such a thing, Father? (But I forgot. You won’t reply to me anymore.) It was peaceful, their slow floating, the white silk moving down through the thick beams of light, the burning city silent except for the departing planes, and the bells that chimed now in higher faster peals of joy and welcome. It looked, as everything had that day, like a distant image, unconnected to me, as if I were just hearing about it, the story of the fall of a city that Fernando might have told me long ago. (Perhaps this, I thought, was what you meant when you said that from your meditative posture on the living-room floor you looked upon life as a play of images? Had I assumed your distance, your death? Was I sentenced by you to spend the rest of my life behind this glass, walking around like one of the already dead?)

  My lungs clanged and wheezed. The paratroopers had brought more bad air with them. The other students moved away from me.

  Ten or twelve apostles of the new order had already fallen to earth. In irregular ranks they came towards us, down the wide boulevard. They wore suntan-colored uniforms and high leather boots. They all carried automatic weapons. I felt the way my Cuban comrade, Nico, had. I couldn’t take my eyes from their rifles, the long blue-black barrels.

  The students cursed the soldiers in shrill voices. Bastards! they screamed. Whores! Pimps!

  It was more spit. I heard the inward-falling roar of the fires burning a few streets away. People ran shouting in the parts of the city we had just left. Their shouts were anxious, calls without responses, a bewilderment of cries. Where would they run? They had lost everything, even their future.

  Nico took his gray metal pistol from his belt and held it up before everyone like a chalice. The students were silenced by it: a knife that cut their voices away. Nico waved the pistol about in the air and screamed and screamed, not even a curse, it didn’t mean anything, just screaming up at the sky.

  “Don’t do that dear!” Chaco said sharply. He meant to calm Nico, and spoke to him decisively, as one might to an anxious patient, as both you and he have often spoken to me. For the sight of that gun in the air would surely draw fire on us. The other students moved backward, behind Nico, washed there by fear, yet held by their fascination. Something terrible clarifying bloody might happen here on this ground. (They formed an audience, just as Chaco said. Nico would be their priest.) Now Chaco shouted at Nico, “Please dear, please please please please don’t do that!” The medical student had seen blood. He knew its sources.

  I seized Nico’s hand, forcing it down. He was a coward, Father. And like all cowards he could only make pointless gestures. (How could a man strike a blow at the United States? How could you do anything, Father, but make gestures?) Nico didn’t know what he was doing, and he would accomplish nothing, and get us all killed. Because he wanted to die. That was the funeral procession in his voice the night before. He had sentenced himself to death because his comrades had died at the Moncada, and he had survived his foolish leader’s foolish plan. (How stupid you would think his Castro, Father!) Good, I thought, then Nico should die. But he shouldn’t bring death to these others, to Hilda, to Chaco, to the shocked innocent students standing behind him.

  The gun came away in my right hand, as if Nico had passed it to me; and
Nico ran into the dark. He would not, he had sworn, run away again. But he couldn’t change. Now he knew his nature. (But I? I was still unknown, Father, always unknown, pure potential.) The gun felt heavy in my hand, as if it were a test to lift it up, to point it outward, to hold it steady.

  The mercenaries came towards us, past the low white rectory building, nearly to the edge of the cathedral. With my left hand I clicked the small metal flange on the butt of the gray pistol from red to blue. But the gun still pointed outward. The man in front walked casually, like a large complacent townsman out on a stroll for a June evening, his belly full from a good dinner. About six feet tall, he had a broad chest. His features were still in shadows, but I thought they had an Indian cast to them. There was a cool breeze that night. The sweat chilled on my skin as the breeze passed over him. Me, I mean. (For I stared at him that intensely.) He would smile as he looked about. Those who march towards death with a smile of supreme happiness on their lips. His smile disgruntled me, gave me a sour pain in my gut. I loathed him then as I had never hated anyone before.

  I clicked the safety catch from blue to red. I have often wanted to kill, Father, though since I have been a follower of Gandhi I have actively bent my will against that violence. This time, when you and Gandhi were weakest in me, I had a gun in my hand. It might have been another time. It might have been another one of imperialism’s thousand servants. But it would have happened. I was, as Chaco said, a faulty pistol, waiting to explode in someone’s hand.

  Should I have asked them, Father: Is this Christian is this fair play is this civilization? Mother was right. They wouldn’t understand. Their faces were Latin, but their cruelty, their stupidity, their rapacity, the money that bought them and set them floating dreamily in the sky and put them in motion towards us down the avenue, that was North American. They were Imperialism’s creatures. Inwardly I saw their faces: identical round smooth things, the features little polyps, barely formed; they had no ears—well-designed things: they couldn’t hear people scream. Father, listen to me: Our nation is not one family! No reconciliation with these creatures is possible! My rage, my hatred, my desire to throw myself upon them tore apart all the atoms of my body; my fury dispersed me into my elements; I streamed forward towards them. Dear Father, I thought, I can’t please you anymore. You are gone now. I can’t harm you anymore with my anger.