The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  “And a dog barking,” Ispaca added, though he—thank God!—didn’t sound pleased at this confirmation. “Five of my children have died,” he said, “and it was always this way beforehand.”

  These stories sickened me. There was, I told him, no magic. His son did have an animal in his stomach, a worm. It might have come in food, or it might have entered through his son’s feet, because the boy had no shoes. Now the worm lived in his son’s stomach, and everything they fed to the boy the worm ate. That’s why he was so thin.

  But they didn’t feed him, Ispaca said. They were trying to starve the animal.

  The old man smiled at me, happy to offer instruction. What I had described was exactly what a sorcerer would do. He would leave a piece of corn on the road, a piece with a blood spot on it. When the boy stepped on it the spirit of the animal entered his stomach. It would live there till it killed the boy.

  He grew emphatic in his lesson, delighting in defeat, in the sorcerer’s triumph, in the implacable vindication of his story—the boy who lay beneath him moaning.

  Only someone who knew more could save him. But the old man had never known that to happen.

  My disgust became palpable in my stomach. The way the old man twisted my words, made them congruent with his magic stories—it caused an animal to grow in my stomach. I felt nauseous. They must be forced to enter the twentieth century, to give up these stories that reconcile them with their humiliations, their children’s deaths. I said again that the worm would not kill the boy. It was not magic. It was a real worm in his stomach. We had a medicine for it. (A real worm? I thought, hearing my voice rise towards the hole in the ceiling with the smoke. What would that prove? The worm that grew from the corn no doubt had a physical body, indistinguishable—had one ever seen it—from the worm our medicine would kill. Their stories had many entries and no exits.)

  I sent Inti for El Medico. A black man, his entry startled the household. The women placed their heads together over the pots, then returned to their stirring.

  El Medico gave the boy a white liquid. The boy retched emptily, his body flopping like a desperate fish. The women stopped stirring, and stared at us angrily. They wailed more loudly, more sharply, to curse us forever. The old man spat on the floor, in the dirt.

  The worm, El Medico explained in his musical voice, can’t stand the medicine. It would come out through the boy’s mouth.

  Which it did. El Medico pulled it gently, several meters of long white flat flesh the texture of rubber, jointed in segments, streaked with the boy’s blood and bile. The women screamed at this obscene vision.

  The boy lost consciousness, and the women instantly became silent.

  El Medico said that he had only fainted, that he would wake soon and would be all right. It was, as they could see, only a worm. It was good fortune that the worm’s head had come out first, El Medico said (for demonstration purposes, since we could not be certain), for if the head remained the worm could grow a new body inside the boy’s stomach. Now he would crush the head; the worm would die; the boy would live.

  El Medico found a small rock, and did the deed with his boot. I could tell from the old man’s face, his lips drawn up into a toothless death-mask smile, that the talk of a worm regrowing its body had made an impression on him, an unfortunate wrongheaded one. It had given him another confirmation of his hobgoblin world, a new possibility for evading us. The worm that regrows itself would be another room to his dark construction, the Indian’s endless tomb.

  Our magic was greater than the sorcerer’s, he said, sucking his lips with satisfaction.

  “No,” I said, wanting to spit his bad taste out. We had no magic, I explained. We had medicine, made by workers in factories. The tapeworm was a natural creature, like any other animal. Like their pigs. But what would that mean to him? Natural? He knew of no discredited supernatural. They had only one world, this one, visible and animated by unseen powers. I felt as if I were pushing my meaning up an impossible incline. Their minds were a maze of dark walls that my sentences might wander in, lost forever. Or worse, my words might be transformed (by magic!) into parts of the prison. His world was as coherent as mine, included as much. There was no word that I might speak that he couldn’t translate to his own satisfaction, and so avoid entering history. He needn’t even argue with me. I said “workers” in “factories”—and he heard of new magicians from unknown hells.

  We would have to batter our heads against this maze’s walls until they broke, and light and air rushed in.

  If the children had good food, I said, then they would be safe from worms. If they had shoes then they would be safe from the small white worms that he had seen come from children’s mouths. They didn’t need men who knew, they needed shoes. The children didn’t have shoes because all the wealth of Bolivia, all its tin and oil, go to the United States, just as the little money they earned from their crops went endlessly to the men who sold them seed and tools.

  “You made the worm’s soul go into something else? An animal?” He was thinking of Jesus, whose spell sent demons into swine, ruining someone’s family. (Every soul went somewhere. Nothing was wasted—or the avalanche of death would be too terrible.) And what were pigs but familiar domesticated demons?

  The air was too thick in the hut. My lungs closed painfully into fists.

  Ispaca followed us outside into the clear but moist air. He was grateful for our help. I felt that he had understood the things we’d said. I told him that he could help us by telling his neighbors of what we were trying to do for Bolivia. And he could help by giving us food, so we would be strong in fighting the rich people’s army. And by not cooperating with the army when they tried to find out from him whether we had been there.

  “… from us?” he said, for his fear suddenly only let him stammer out a fragment of his thought.

  He need only tell the army, no matter how they threatened him, that he knew nothing about us.

  He brought himself under control. “Whatever I can do,” he said graciously, “I’ll do.”

  Gracious, but tautological; it bound him to nothing.

  El Medico told him to see that the boy had something soft to eat when he awoke.

  I gave Ispaca some money to raise hogs for us. This will implicate him and convince him that we will return. I told him that if he helped the army we would punish him.

  The army will tell him that if he helps the guerrillas they will kill him and his family.

  Time will tell which way he jumps.

  For now we will head back southeast, towards Gutierrez, a town on the main road from Camiri to Santa Cruz. There we can pass Debray, Bustos, and Tania back to the city.

  From Coco’s Journal

  3/19/67: On the march today I walked with my brother. “Inti,” I said, “you remember during the battle?”

  “Remember what?” A long sentence for him.

  “I want to tell you something. I was so scared that I pissed in my pants. I don’t think I’ll make a good guerrilla.”

  Inti stared at me for a moment. He is very quick-witted, I know. What does he think about in those silences? “That’s nothing,” he said, “I shit in my britches.”

  “Come on,” I said, “you’re saying that to make me feel better.”

  “No. I really did. Big soft wet turds and shitty liquid in a stream, it started coming out all at once, I couldn’t control it. As soon as they started firing at us. And all the time I was talking to the prisoners about liberation and our fight against imperialism my pants were full of shit. I thought everybody would be able to smell it.”

  Moro came up behind us with his arm in a sling. He was a big strong man who had joined Fidel during their Revolution. Later he had become a doctor. I was carrying his pack for him. It was heavy and the sun was terrible. He must have overheard us. “That’s nothing. The first time I was in battle in Cuba, I shit my pants, and pissed, and I swear to god, snot came out of my nose. I was leaking from every hole in my body.”

 
“See,” Inti said, “the Cubans do more of everything than we do.” He didn’t smile, but I’m sure he was joking. It’s better to make jokes about those feelings than to let them fester.

  “No, really. When I’m nervous I snort. When the firing started I began to snort really hard. When I felt the snot on my lip I thought it was blood. That’s when I pissed in my pants, because I thought I’d been wounded in my face. When I felt the wetness in my underwear I thought I was bleeding there, too, that I’d been shot in the balls. That’s when I shit in my pants. Every one of the Cubans has some story like that. Even Ricardo.”

  “Even Che?” I asked.

  “Even Che, I suppose. I don’t know. I’ve never asked him.”

  From Guevara’s Journal

  3/20/67: We have run out of dry corn and powdered milk, and the peasants we’ve contacted haven’t been very forthcoming.

  To get anywhere we must hack our way through jungle growth that is like a wall. There have been several faintings among the machete wielders.

  From Camba’s Journal

  3/21/67: Buzzz Buzzzz Buzzzzz. The mosquitoes are always in our ears, on our skin, sucking our blood. Soon all I’ll be able to hear is that sound; it will fill my whole brain. That’s when I die. When my head is one big red mosquito buzz, all my blood gone, replaced by buzzing.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  3/22/67: Today: monkey meat, bitter and fibrous—a day of good hunting. Yesterday: dead fish from the backwaters of the river.

  3/23/67: In camp Tania played the tapes she had made—Indian voices singing, telling stories, chanting. It caught me up again in the web of my youth, the repetitive chords (or so I heard them), the slow mournful syllables, the sequences chanted over and over and over.

  On the march I told Tania of my time in Bolivia after medical school, of watching a dance on the main square in La Paz—for I found that that was my most vivid image of the Bolivian Revolution—and of my truck ride through the Andes. Those were the first times I had heard music of the kind she had played for us. I had wanted then to submerge all I was in their steady song, be woven up and transformed by the repetition that rocked back and forth, high and low, like a loom’s shuttle. I had thought the sound wove the Indians and their world together into an indissoluble whole—thus their immobility: they could no more move than a piece of a tapestry could change its shape or position, a woman become a city. They sat indifferent to the jolts of the truck, the danger, the stink, or our words. “But that’s what’s slowing down our development now. They still think everything is as it is forever. The stones, the trees, the landlords, the soldiers—all facts of nature, immutable. They’re all stoics. They’ve forgotten how to protest, how to rebel.”

  “Unable to rebel!” she said, laughing. “But, Che, they had just made a revolution! It’s easy to mistake them. But their life is really one long slow rebellion against their rulers, their conquerors, a quiet, steady, implacable resistance. They haven’t fought again as they did in ’52. But they haven’t had the leadership for that. Within their own lives, though, the resistance is still alive—they rebel constantly. Like their Christianity. For centuries the priests have been trying to impose a nice Christian servility on the Indians.”

  “Haven’t they succeeded?” Coco asked. “Each of the villages has a house the Indians have built for the priest. And they feed him from their own stores. They kneel down and beg the priest to accept the food that their own families need.”

  “Nonsense!” Tania said contemptuously. She was quite capable of a peremptory gesture of instruction, striking the children with her vara, if that was what the role called for. “The Indians here scare the priests to death. I met this young priest, in the town where I made the tape I played you, a nice guy, didn’t even have a beard yet, a very sweet face. And he was confused, lonely, helpless-looking. He said he talked to them and talked to them, and the Indians listened in absolute silence, perfect immobility, like the Indians you rode with, Che. That silence is an icy indifference, a coldness beyond hatred, just as you described, where you don’t even exist for them anymore. He said his words began to sound absurd to him. His voice echoed emptily in the big barnlike church. He felt he was going mad from their silence. Alone, he had found himself repeating the catechism over and over, something he hadn’t done since seminary, to remind himself what made him. But it didn’t work. Nothing in the village returned his speech to him. His gestures didn’t find any response. His words became empty fragments of sound, floating away in all directions. He said he was even starting to hear voices. But the Indians, he said, already heard voices. Every element the priest told them, the Indian voices took and twisted about. The priest baptizes a child, and the Indian mother takes him away immediately after paying the priest and has a curer take a mouthful of rum and spit it all over the baby.”

  “A baptism of fire,” Camba said, “after the one of water.” Single file, we walked down the thin path the macheteros had prepared for us. The heat was thickening the air.

  “Exactly,” Tania said to him, “you think like an Indian. And after the priest performs a burial, the whole family goes up and starts kicking the coffin. They want the dead man to be furious with them. They believe in resurrection, all right. Immediately, the body comes back covered with dirt, to sour milk, and with a syringe, to suck blood. They don’t want Mr. Corpse coming to take them to the land of the dead for company. They kick him to show they’re not his pals anymore.”

  [I want to kick his corpse. I want to get his syringe out of me. I want him to know that I’m not his pal anymore and to stop making the room dark.]

  “The priest said he spoke to them about Christ, his love and his mercy. The Indians listened attentively and ignored Christ completely. They think Christ must have been an Indian. Because the Jews—that means rich whites with tails—crucified him. They don’t care what the priest says, they can’t see the value of praying to Christ, the sweet powerless bastard couldn’t keep himself from being nailed to the wall. They only worship the saints, who are store dummies they’ve got dressed up in their idea of rich people’s clothing, lace tablecloths and dried fruits on a string for necklaces.”

  “But the saints they worship are still white people,” Coco said, not combatively, but trying to think the thing through. “Rich white people.”

  “In the churches they are, yes. But when the saints come to them in their dreams they don’t look white. They look like Indians. They speak Indian languages. And the saints told them to put my friend the priest in a deep hole with some dry turds and only give him enough corn and water for a week—enough to keep him alive. And, of course, they did it. But the police can’t find out who did it, because the whole village did it, nobody did it, the saints told them to do it. It may not sound like much.…”

  “It doesn’t,” I said. My lungs had begun to ache. I had a hard time getting the words out. “It sounds like mumbo-jumbo, or practical jokes. They’ll have to leave all that behind if they’re to understand their position and become revolutionaries.”

  “It got to the priest, though,” Tania said. “My friend couldn’t stand it anymore, the silence most of all, because he knew that as his words fell through that silence they were twisted, bent to the Indians’ needs. That was their rebellion. And what was that ungodly need? My friend abandoned his church to the Indians after the turd treatment. They could do whatever blasphemous thing they wished there. He said they drank real blood, menstrual blood, on the altar. But he was a little odd by then. He went there twice a year, to say Mass—because the Archbishop made him do it. Why syringes? he wondered. They made everything barbaric, ugly, dark. ‘You can’t make savages into Christians,’ he said, ‘you only make Christianity savage.’ He was leaving right after Mass.”

  “Tania,” Ponco croaked, “don’t you see? We’re the priests, this time. We’re the white people.” And he wheezed an unhappy laugh. For if they thought white people were devils, what might they make of him?

  “For th
e moment we’re the priests,” I said. “Till they join us.” I could feel that Ponco had spoken against his own will, from a presentiment he could not deny.

  “Yes,” Tania said, “for the moment. The main thing is that they will join, for their spirit is already bent to resistance. They need only be shown how to rebel, how to fight for their land.”

  Later, in camp, I took Walter aside to speak to him about morale. It is all right to speak critically with Tania and me. But he must be more careful that others—like Coco and Camba—don’t hear such talk.

  Isle of Pines, May 1968

  MAY 10

  Can I change things? I review his words, our talks about his own writing. He made his brothers and sisters disappear, his father die of cancer. Because it felt that way. Can I change things—depending on how he felt to me, how I felt about him?

  What about history?

  Can I change his words? I know how to mimic his style.

  He took me aside to speak about morale—I’ll leave that in. It was very unfair and I felt the world a little unsteady underneath my feet, a hole had opened, for I had just been speaking as he sometimes did. But I’ll leave it. People will know that I’m giving an honest account if I put in something so wounding to my vanity.

  Do I want to hurt him?

  MAY 11

  I spent a very bad night, playing with my blanket edges, but not sleeping. Not eating, either. (Weight remains at about ninety-eight pounds. Maybe that’s why I sleep so much.) I am sure I don’t want to hurt him. (I’m keeping him alive. I’m giving up my life to keep him alive, telling his story. Isn’t that enough?) The only change I’ve made so far is this: once he said “jerking off,” and I have taken it out. It wasn’t like him. Sometimes, I think, we are invaded by the souls of other people, the ones around us, and our voices sound like theirs. (When I was with him it was easy to make myself sound like him.) But it isn’t really ourselves then, and the true picture of a man would leave it out. (Of all the people I have known, he was the one most himself all the time, as if he were protected against our migrating souls, behind some glass.) Not much will have to be changed. He wanted to have his gesture pure, have it ring out clearly. I could help him. I’ll show what’s already there more clearly. I read somewhere: the statue is already inside the stone.