The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  Coco chimed with Jorge in excited agreement—Monje had been won over.

  Monje had also spoken of the situation in the mines. It was clear from his words that the leadership was now chasing after the miners, who were far more militant than the Party, more fearless, and already galvanized by our actions. The miners are about to strike. This will be a heavy blow to the government. If, to save face with them, Monje has deceived the miners into thinking he has contact with us, is helping us, then his actions are criminal, he is a traitor, and no punishment would be too severe. He is leading them into a trap. But if the Party does supply us with men, in the next month the situation in Bolivia could be immediately transformed.

  If only we had more men! The peasants have given us nothing, and so far show a profound incomprehension of our goals. It will take many more victories to win them over. For now the cadres must come from the cities.

  But I remain firm that no men will leave the group to go to the city. I am far from certain about the Party’s sincerity. Monje seemed to me a thoroughgoing coward. Yet perhaps Jorge is right. Monje could not know of our separation from Joaquin, and how desperate things may soon be with us. Perhaps Monje now thinks the Party needs us far more than we need them.

  From Camba’s Journal

  6/22/67: Abrapa was a little settlement in the valley, ten adobe houses. Once it had been a big ranch, but all that was left of that time was a high brown wall with a scalloped center. The wall went across only one side of the village, and had a tall wooden door in the center.

  The villagers waiting behind the wall wore white wool smocks with a line of red thread near the waist. They looked like angels. Maybe they wore white because we had come on a festival day. There were signs of celebration. A big wooden board on two sawhorses had been laid before we arrived with thick clay plates of cold pork, chicken, tortillas, potatoes, corn and beans.

  One of the villagers, a portly old man, danced forward to welcome the center guard. He almost sang his welcome! We must sit down! We must have some food! He had been waiting for us for a long time!

  “How could he have known we were coming?” Inti asked his brother.

  Coco shrugged, but I had overheard, so I told them how the ants connected us to the animals and to the Indians. The Indians could hear us in their blood.

  The brothers turned away, because they don’t like me.

  The food looked awfully good!

  The portly man held his short arms wide. Since he had first heard of us, he said, he had had the feeling that he and Che would have a lot to say to each other. “You understand?”

  Che stood open-mouthed in the hot sun. There were small stones all over the field in front of the houses, not as if they hadn’t cleared the field, but as if they had gone out and gathered stones to spread around. Che, standing among this harvest, looked slack, as if the man’s statements had hit him across the chest with a pole. Ponco, standing next to Che, started to smile, and then laugh like a child—a child with no voice—as if we were all his toys. Everything had been placed here to entertain him, made up for his amusement.

  Che didn’t say anything to stop us, so the rest of us went and took the food with our hands. We were hungry. There had been no food for days, and we had had a hot dry march from the Rio Grande.

  The other people in the village, the old people and children (for there are no young men in the Bolivian countryside), stood about as we ate, not speaking, silent white birds. We grabbed at the food they offered us, pushing each other aside, overturning the plates.

  “Why are you so quiet?” Benigno asked one of the little boys. Benigno is a tall man, thin, but very strong, and handsome-looking.

  “Pastor Barrera speaks for us,” the boy said, pointing to the old man who had been waiting to talk with us. “He is our mayor.”

  I put a bottle of clear liquid to my lips, some of their liquor. Che shook his head no at me, so I put it down. Maybe the food was poisoned!

  “Pastor Barrera is a generous man,” Coco said, chewing pork rapidly.

  “Maybe it’s a trap,” I said. “Maybe we’re being poisoned.” I was passing on what Che had told me.

  “Shut up asshole,” Ricardo said. Ricardo hates me. He hates everyone, but he hates Bolivians more and he hates me most of all.

  After we had eaten, and arranged for food to be taken to the rear and vanguard groups, the mayor asked Che if he might talk with all of us.

  “How does he know Che is chief?” Inti asked his brother. The Indians bewilder Inti. They are like a long march in the hot sun, so long, and so hot, that the world wavers in front of his eyes.

  Coco shrugged. I knew that the mayor knew that Che was leader because he had seen Che control me with a shake of his head. The mayor saw that our bodies are connected to parts of Che’s body. But the brothers had been rude to me before, so I didn’t explain.

  I wish I didn’t know these things! They make my head swell, and they make everyone hate me.

  Pastor Barrera raised his right hand behind his ear. Everyone in the village grew quiet, as if he had put them into a trance. They are all connected to his body. “Look,” the mayor said loudly. He walked over to a big rock by the side of his house.

  “An Inca rock,” Che said. “Six-sided.”

  “Where’s the rest of it?” Inti asked.

  “End of the empire,” Ponco croaked. “Bits and pieces.”

  Pastor Barrera said he would roll away the rock, and under it there would be a book.

  He pushed the rock with one hand, but it was an enormous fellow, and of course it didn’t move. He made pretend grunting sounds, while he reached under it, and his hand came out with a package wrapped in an embroidered piece of cloth. There were red and blue and green threads in the cloth, and other colors, more than I could count.

  Carefully, he unwrapped the cloth, and took out a book, worn, with a torn brown cover, and pages half falling out. The countrypeople laughed and applauded. They had seen this trick before; it was an old favorite. A little boy was so delighted that he punched my leg.

  “I can read this book,” the mayor announced. He smiled directly at Che.

  Che stood holding some of his beard in his hand, pulling on it. He didn’t smile back. The upper part of his body swayed in a little circle. Maybe he had eaten too fast.

  “I believe you,” Coco said to the mayor.

  The mayor asked if we didn’t want to hear him read?

  Coco nodded. Coco is kind, but really he is like Inti and Che. He doesn’t realize that the Indians are the only ones who know the secret doors in the forest that lead out of here. Coco just humors them—to get their good opinion for us—as if they were the children.

  The old man opened his book, and held it at arm’s length. “A specter is haunting Europe,” he said in a ringing voice, “the specter of Communism.” Pastor Barrera’s eyes had many wrinkles around them, and his nose was covered with broken veins. He looked alight as he read to us.

  The people of the village applauded and laughed.

  “You’ve been reading Marx,” Che said, with genuine admiration. He had let go of his hair, and he stood steadily again. I wish men respected me as they do him!

  The mayor told us that a Communist had given him the book many years ago, when he was a boy, during the Revolution. And we were Communists, too. And we had come to hear him read from this book, just as the first man had said we would. We had come to see if he had truly learned to read, to see if he had made himself ready for the Day of Change, for the Revolution.

  The man’s small face lit more brightly still with his deep satisfaction in himself. He had passed his test.

  The countrypeople smiled. They were proud of their mayor.

  The Communist had told him that if he studied the book carefully he’d understand many things. The Communist was right. The mayor did understand things!

  Che, too, beamed with satisfaction. At last he had met a reasonable man. The way had been prepared for Che, made smooth for us.


  The man held the book to his face, half-covering his pocked lips. He smiled coyly from behind the dirty cover. I thought he looked like a picture I’d seen, a Japanese girl hiding behind her painted fan. In a sly mocking voice he said, “I don’t really know how to read.”

  More tricks! Che put his fist in front of his face. He looked like the man was about to hit him, and he wanted to ward off the blow.

  Did we want to know how he did it? the mayor asked in a high rapid voice. His eyes darted about my comrades (hah! really they hate me). Che looked over the mayor’s shoulder.

  “Yes,” I said, though I shouldn’t talk. I’m not connected to Che’s soul. “How?” I thought it was a good trick.

  He smiled. He had gone to a class after the Revolution, and they had heard the book read aloud. Then they had talked about it. And whenever he had had a job outside the village, or in Santa Cruz, building the roads, he had taken the book with him. When he had heard someone on the job say things he agreed with, he took the book out and showed it to him. He always knew which ones it would be safe to ask, for the Specter meant for him to learn, and it protected him.

  “The Specter?” I asked. I knew that the man’s talk made Che unhappy, but I knew, too, that he had things to teach us.

  “The Specter of Communism.”

  Inti laughed in a melancholy way. He sounded like someone who had lost a lot of money.

  The mayor would go off with his comrade, away from the bulldozers, behind the mounds of earth, and they would read a little of the book. He kept a special marker with him.

  From out of the book’s pages he held up a small blue wand, and the villagers applauded.

  “A ballpoint pen!” Che said. He hadn’t wanted to speak; his voice sounded like a cry, something struck from him by the pole that had swung into his chest before, when the man had said that he had expected us. Ballpoint pens must have special powers. (I will ask Che about it later, though I know he will despise me for asking.)

  The ballpoint pen was the mayor’s special marker. If he heard a friend read a part he especially liked, he had him draw a line next to it. When the mayor met someone else who knew how to read he’d show him the passage with the line next to it, and have him read it. In a few years the mayor had the best words written in his heart. Now he loved to say them out loud to everyone.

  The little boy gave my leg another blow. They liked to hear him read aloud, too.

  “There are,” the mayor said, “many very true things in the book.”

  Che’s face came alive again. He shone at the man, amazed, uncertain, delighted by his words. A dog had started to talk to him like a human being! “After the Revolution,” Che said in his high, kind voice, “everyone who wants to will be able to read, so they can understand things for themselves.” When Che speaks of the future he always sounds soft and sweet, as if he were caressing it.

  The mayor smiled warmly at Che. But there was, I thought, something crafty and mean in his face, too. He was testing us. “Sometimes,” he said, “one book is enough to make a man understand.”

  Che agreed. He turned to Inti. The people, he explained, need only be given a hint. A few words about imperialism, about the necessary struggle, and the circumstances of their lives teach them the rest.

  Inti and Che like to please each other by repeating the things they already know.

  The mayor explained that after a man understood things he didn’t need books anymore. The whole world was like a book to him, and he could read God’s thoughts.

  Che’s face fell. He looked sick again; the man had turned back into a dog and peed on his leg. Che couldn’t see that he and Pastor Barrera were saying the same things.

  But Pastor Barrera didn’t notice Che’s disappointment. He said that he knew from what the radio had said about us that we would understand things. And that was the main thing—to understand things. For we all became like the rocks in the end.

  The crowd nodded sorrowfully.

  “No,” Inti said. He spoke up to the sky in that sorrowful way of his. Inti is like Che—he can’t listen, not even to an angel. “We don’t agree. We must act also. There are accounts that must be settled.” Inti is the most intimately attached, because he is connected to Che’s soul. He can be Che’s mouth.

  Accounts to settle? The mayor was shocked. Crinkly lightning came from his eyes, flash! flash! flash! I put my hands in front of my face, to keep from being burned. My hands smelled of pork.

  The lightning drove Inti backward.

  I held my hair up with my hands to show the mayor that I had understood him.

  “Things are never really settled,” he said angrily. “They must go on over and over forever, THAT IS WHAT THE BOOK SHOWS!”

  The people of Abrapa looked at the field of dust and stones. Why would anyone dispute with Pastor Barrera?

  “No,” Che said. He turned away from the mayor, towards the people. “The children of your village,” he said, “die from diseases that could be cured.…” He stopped and pushed his chest forward, for his lungs hurt him.

  The mayor’s hands formed into fists at his sides, and the thick veins stood out on the backs. “You don’t understand,” he said. He was disgusted. We had called ourselves communists. He had thought that we had come to hear him read. We had deceived him. “Look!” he said, his voice patient again. “You and your men are all worn out.”

  That was true, I thought, looking about me. Our skin was covered with dirt and cuts. Moro’s arm was in a sling. Many of the men looked like paper cut-outs about to fall to the ground.

  We had marched down the road into the village, Pastor Barrera said, and we were hungry. The food was already there for us, waiting. We ate something at their table, and then we marched away. They had set the table for they had known we were coming. They knew that we would leave. They knew that we would come back again, so they had a table always set for us. We said, Accounts must be settled with the rich! And the countrypeople thought we were the Messiah. And we made the Revolution. The people were living in their village again. It had begun all over. Someone marched into their village covered with dust and hungry, and he said, “The time has come for us to settle accounts with the rich!” The way for redemption was to follow him. And he was telling the truth! The mayor himself could feel it in his words, he could see it in the saviour’s face, for it would glow as ours did. So he and the others followed him.

  The saviour was coming. He walked down the road towards us now, into their village. He ate at their table with his men. No, he wasn’t there yet. He was about to come into their village. The mayor could see him on the road, walking with his men, raising a cloud of dust around themselves as they stamped the ground in fury. He was always about to arrive. He was always right at their big doorway. He was about to say, Accounts must be settled. He was always eating with them. No, he wasn’t. He and his men had just gone. They had always just left the village, just this minute, they were on their way down the road. We could get a glimpse of them. Look at all that dust! The saviour comes over and over again. Everything must happen over and over again. NOTHING WAS EVER SETTLED? THAT WAS WHAT THE BOOK TAUGHT!

  Pastor Barrera, mayor of Abrapa, bobbed his head up and down, in profound agreement with himself. His head was barely attached to his neck, like a doll’s head on a spring.

  Many of the heads in the crowd, men and women and children, went up and down, too. I tried to make my head go the way his did, with a palsy. I wanted to see things the way he did; it would mean that I wasn’t here anymore, in this terrible valley, so far from home, outside this adobe house—but far away from here, in a better place. I would inhabit all the bodies that he had named, that were all my own body, and it would be impossible for the soldiers to kill me, for they would have to kill each and every one of my bodies at once, and some of them were already, and some of them were not yet.

  The mayor told Inti and Che that if they lived as long as he had—but I think he was really only a few years older than Che!—then
they, too, would understand things. He had thought that they were communists like himself, and that they knew that it was first one person’s turn, and then another’s. But no, apparently they couldn’t see that. He was sorry—and he did sound deeply, sadly regretful; he was giving us some very bad news—but he was now certain that it was impossible for us to understand things. It was our time to do our violent work, as he had once done, so we couldn’t be like he was now, standing at the side, watching, seeing things clearly. We had to think that it all mattered, that it was done once and for all, that it settled accounts.

  Slowly, ceremoniously, making gestures as broad as a priest’s, he took the cloth from the top of the rock and wrapped up his book again. He took the bottle of chicha from the table and sprinkled a few drops on the package before putting it under the rock.

  I was thinking of a carnival I’d been to once in La Paz. There was a huge barrel, bigger than a room, turned on its side, and dozens of us stood inside it. The barrel spun around. It was hard to keep your footing, and if you fell over, other people would trip over you, or you might fall over them. But maybe it was our feet moving around, stepping this way and that to stay upright, trying to settle accounts, that kept the barrel moving!

  I thought of our long march, up the Rio Grande, and back to Muyupampa, and back to Nancahuazu, and then up to the Rio Grande again, and it was like being in that barrel that went round and round; everything did happen over and over, the heat and the starvation, and the vines we had to rip away to keep our balance, they were all the side of the barrel. But you couldn’t just get out, for the people in the barrel and the barrel itself would roll right over you. We would have to get everyone to agree that accounts couldn’t be settled; then we could stop at the same time. But they wouldn’t believe we would do it, they would think it was a trick to make them stop dancing as fast as the barrel and fall down so we could laugh at them. So I would have to get off alone, the way Pastor Barrera had, at just the right time, so the barrel wouldn’t crush me. I would have to learn when the right time was.