The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  Pastor Barrera was speaking with Che still. He told Che that he must have visions of his own, ones that comforted him and his men. Che looked away very rudely, pretending not to listen. His breathing got worse and worse, grinding away, like it was grinding up his insides, and when it was all done there would be no Che left.

  The mayor, wanting to be friends, said that he and Che were alike, that they were both connected to the very center of things, both in their proper places.

  “No,” Che said. It was hard for him to speak. His words came out like a slight breath of wind, the merest thing. But he wanted things to be clear with the old man, with the people of the village. He wanted to settle accounts.

  Pastor Barrera was furious. He recoiled a step from Che, and tripped over one of the small stones. He put out his hands for balance, and he looked so much like a plump little angel that I thought he would float away.

  The people of the village gasped, and in fear the little boy hit me again.

  I went to Che and put my arm around his shoulders to help him keep his balance. “Why does he hide his book under a rock?” I asked.

  “What shit,” Che said with weak anger. He must have been very upset, though, for he almost never curses.

  I told him that if he wanted the Indians to stop talking he should cover his ears, and I showed him how.

  From My Journal

  6/22/67: After the little set-to with the village leader, Camba had put his arm around Che, half holding him up. Che made that animal sound, almost a groaning, but deeper and more metallic, that means a ferocious attack. Camba let him go, and put his hands over his own ears, not wanting to hear Che’s breathing. Che’s illness scares the men—it scares me—like a sick parent’s. Che scrabbled the Inhalator out of his shirt pocket, and sucked on it. He tossed it aside—used up I suppose—but the machinery of his lungs was oiled, and slowly grew smooth and quiet again.

  The mayor ran to where Che had thrown his Inhalator and grabbed it up. He hid it away under his white shirt.

  An old woman told Che that he should be more careful. Throwing things away like that was dangerous, they might fall into the hands of sorcerers. He should have things that had been close to him like that, as close as his hair or fingernails, destroyed, burned up, so that the evil ones couldn’t get at it.

  Che said nothing.

  Pastor Barrera was all right though, she said, as if Che had been worried. He was a good man. He cured the sick by reading parts of his powerful book to them, the one he had read to all of us from. It was a great honor. He would take care of Che’s things.

  Che walked away.

  I listened to Camba, who spoke with the mayor. “What are specters?” Camba asked.

  Specters were the body of all the actions that others perform for us that we should perform for ourselves.

  Camba nodded, though I could make no sense of that, any more than his earlier speech. It sounded very philosophical. I wish Regis had been here to explain it all.

  But the next bit was very unlike the Sorbonne, I think. “At night,” he said, “the specters come from the river and watch over the fields for us. During the day the village worked for them. We are their specters, you see, and they are ours.”

  “Like shadows,” Camba asked. He annoys the men—myself among them—but I don’t think he means harm.

  The mayor nodded. And he warned that if we didn’t show our gratitude to the specters, if we didn’t leave anything for them, they would use their syringes. While we slept they would come and take our blood. They would put that blood inside themselves, and then they would come and take our place during the day. We would die and go into the river, and could only live by night. We would be specters.

  Camba listened intently. When the man was done he took out his notebook and wrote something down.

  “Are you planning a book?” I asked.

  “I’m making a map,” Camba said, and smiled at me. It was a cringing smile, as if he were afraid I’d hit him. He is a coward and knows that most of the men despise him.

  Che had recovered fully by now, and had taken the camera from his knapsack. He took pictures of Marcos and Moro standing by the table we had found set for us, and then asked for some of the countrypeople to come forward, and have their pictures taken with us. I can’t see what good these photographs will do us. We can’t develop them, and if we could, we couldn’t use them for propaganda, since they would only help the security forces punish the friendly peasants. Yet in every camp, and in every village, Che takes pictures. (An old habit, he said, the last time I asked. And I added, “Memories of what time will destroy.” He didn’t think that was very funny.)

  Anyway none of the people of Abrapa wanted to be shot with us. Che explained to them how the camera worked. Most just stared, and the rest of them looked positively horrified. In some way I didn’t understand there was a syringe in there somewhere, or something just as awful.

  The little boy I had seen smashing away emphatically at Camba’s leg demanded that we make a picture right now. Che said that the pictures couldn’t be developed for a long time.

  “Developed?” the boy said.

  Che, the patient teacher, began a lecture on how pictures were developed, but the boy had lost interest and returned to hide behind his mother’s skirt.

  Camba walked over to some countrypeople, including his little boxing partner. People in pictures never age, Camba said. It was medicine against the specters.

  Use it once and it’s your own, I thought. But Camba had goofed. The townspeople gasped, and the mother put her hand on the child’s head, to reassure him.

  Our special helpers, Camba went on, the ones that could lure the pictures out from where they hid in the camera, they were far away, in the cities. For the pictures to be seen, everyone in the village had to work with us for the Revolution. Then we would all go down to the cities and have the pictures developed. Only when everyone here worked for it would there be pictures to see. The pictures would show that they had been for the Revolution at the very beginning, when the army pursued us, that they had recognized us, before everything changed.

  Che looked unhappy at Camba’s talk. But Camba had gotten the knack, and with his inducements the woman with the little boy came forward to have his picture taken with Che. Moro, his sling off, took the snapshot, and then we moved east, towards the village of Morroco.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  6/22/67: Abrapa was another disappointing encounter. The countrypeople refuse to comprehend what we offer them. I feel their resistant will in each response, in each story they tell about us. And Camba continues to be a difficulty, even going so far as to pander to their evasive magical thinking, their dream talk. But we are not a dream; and by entering their language he enters their long sleep, the sleep that we must awaken them from or die. Even Ponco does not yet see how their incomprehension, and worse, their twisting of our words into millennial fantasies, bandit stories, could lead to our defeat. He smiles at them.

  I am troubled, too, by my own anxieties, which I allowed to overtake me in a most unpleasant way. Camba’s nonsense convinced one of the mothers to have her son’s picture taken with me, “so he might be revealed as an Angel at the time when everything is different” (different, they insist, and yet somehow the same). I sat up on the table, and Camba posed the child on my knee. I put the last cigar in my mouth, to make a prop for the photograph, and put my hand on the child’s head. A rambunctious boy, he was very light on my leg. He had a large nose for such a small child, and had had his hair shaved off, perhaps for some curer’s ceremony. The down of his head was sweet against my hand. He was a leaf, too thin, with a slight protuberant belly, and deep circles under his eyes. Probably he wouldn’t live long.

  Moro held up the camera, and the child began to squirm. His mother threatened him, but he wouldn’t stay still. I held his head harder with my hand, and he screamed. His head was like an eggshell in my palm, and I felt how easily I could have crushed it. I was angry.
I didn’t feel well; my breathing was easier, but still unsteady, and my stomach churned from the feast that had been here for our arrival. But there was a more than unsettled feeling arising from my bowels, a feeling that was erotic, and very ugly, the feeling of power that I had over the doomed little boy, almost as if I wanted to hurt him, to squeeze his head, to make him cry. It was all the more disturbing in that it had followed so closely upon the tenderness that I had just felt, or thought I had felt, for the boy. Perhaps the tenderness was a mask. Or perhaps both feelings were of a piece, a desire for control, for the exercise of altruistic power over another, and gratification for oneself; if one couldn’t help, then hurting would do as well.

  They refuse our gestures towards them. Nothing we do is understood. Our love, so far, is impotent. And then there is the great anger that comes in each of us when our love is misunderstood, rejected. I wanted to make contact, to be recognized, if not as a benefactor, then I would strike that child, that woman, that stupid old man, hit them hard across the face, wake them up!

  Moro, his arm fully healed now, took the picture. The mother took the crying child away. We bought some food, mostly dried salted corn, and the little meat that was left. I insisted on paying. We began our march east.

  From My Journal

  6/23/67: The one who told us that everything happens over and over had a point. An hour’s march from his town, the organ concert began again, a chamber piece compared to our last recital, but it still left us weak.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  6/25/67: Extraordinary news! The Chilean radio reports that a mass grave has been found in the Nancahuazu region, with sixteen bodies in it, men women and children, an entire village, executed by Barrientos’s forces. The government, of course, denies the executions, denies the mass grave, denies that any bodies were found.

  From Coco’s Journal

  6/27/67: Fifteen kilometers’ march today. The forest was thick; Che says we cannot use the woodsmen’s paths; so our trails have to be cut for us by the machete wielders. Vines that tangled into the branches made it slow going. And the hills were very steep. At one point, Marcos and Benigno both fell and rolled over with their packs, until trees stopped them. Marcos had a big bump when he rejoined us, and was unsteady on his feet for a while. Benigno was angry at Camba, who had jumped over him as he rolled his little way downhill.

  In the afternoon we left the forest for a settlement of four thatched huts. A cry went up from the village as we came out of the forest, a sad sound, like mourning, and some of the inhabitants were seen running away from us into a field of tall corn. We ran after, waving our rifles in the air, to bring them back. Camba is right; they are like little animals.

  “The mass grave,” Ponco said, in that ominous voice of his. He meant what we had heard on the radio—that was what had terrified the peasants.

  Still, most of the animals were friendly, if shy, once they overcame their fear. Their mayor—a middle-aged man with broad features and short gray hair named Calixto—sold us food, but didn’t speak much except for the negotiations about price. A military commission that passed through here last month had named him mayor, so it is possible that he is one of theirs. Another peasant told me that the commission had made a list of all the inhabitants, and had taken photographs of the area, and of every house. Che says this sounds like the Yanqui advisers.

  “Thorough,” Ricardo said glumly.

  At dusk two pork merchants in broadly striped gray-and-brown serapes arrived at the settlement. I was surprised by how clean their clothes were. When I felt underneath their shirts I found two pistols. Che was furious. He is worried about infiltration and assassination. Inti, who had interrogated the merchants at the vanguard post, should have uncovered the weapons. But Calixto said that he knew both men, that they were traders from Postre Valle—so there was no harm done. Calixto is a very nervous man, and as he talked with us in his house, he skittered about touching his things—the gourds that hung from the ceiling, his one tin plate, his hoe, his sewing machine.

  “For sending and receiving messages,” Camba said.

  I laughed, but then I worried that Camba might actually have meant it. He has been saying more and more strange things lately.

  Calixto stroked the top of the black sewing machine with a hand curled up like a claw. Frightening-looking—for a moment I really believed the peasants were part animal. Arthritis, Che said, and offered Calixto some cortisone, a medicine for it.

  Calixto declined, but he offered us some coca, which he said was good for his pain, for all pains.

  Che accepted the offer. I turned to Ponco, showing my surprise. “It’s for his asthma,” Ponco said to me. “He’s running out of epinephrine.”

  At the word “coca” all the men in town, even some of the younger ones, came from their hiding places, in the houses, the woods, and the corn stalks. The stuff is far from rare, but I think they all wanted to be part of the ceremony, the initiation.

  Che placed men from the center all around the perimeter of the settle ment. And the rear-guard and vanguard groups remained in ambushes some distance away, at the approaches to the village.

  In the middle of the dirt floor Calixto put a kerosene lamp that made a soft pleasant light. Che’s breathing was a grinding sound that filled the whole hut.

  I felt cold sitting on the dirt, and a little feverish. It had turned chilly at dusk, and I had worked up a sweat chasing down the people from the settlement. I hoped the coca might help me too. I’m worried that I have malaria, like Tania. I don’t want to be a burden to the group. Maybe the coca could help me carry on if I get sick, the way it does the Indians.

  Near the opening a woman in a broad red skirt with a blue zigzag pattern on it, like regular bolts of lightning laid one upon another, rolled out corn meal on a long board. A small cooking fire glowed between some rocks. I could smell charcoal and the smoke stung my eyes. There was a big black cooking pot on the fire. Guinea pigs ran about on the floor, eating green scraps.

  Calixto filled one of his clawed hands, like a little scoop, from a leather bag that hung by his waist. It had the same blue zigzags on it. He sprinkled some chicha on the leaves, and thanked the Benefactor for giving them coca. (I wondered if the Benefactor was the fellow with the coat made from the skin of vampire bats.) He bent our heads back and poured the dull green leaves into our mouths. Calixto had a gentle touch, like my mother’s when she fed us something special from her own hands, even when we were teen-agers. It was funny to feel a man’s hands against my lips like that, feeding me.

  Calixto instructed us: the first time we should chew only as much as our human benefactor’s hands could hold. He took some for himself, and passed his leather bag to an old man with a face like a rotting apple, dirty, spotted with darker browns and reds. The enamel on the old man’s teeth had decayed away to a black color, and his upper lip was pitted, as if a little animal had been gnawing at it. Other men took leather bags from their own waists and passed those around, too.

  A young man with a familiar face gave us some limestone shavings in a small gourd, to mix in our mouths with our leaves. That really made my saliva flow with an acid bitter taste! I was thinking about my stomach when the old man said something to me about my visions.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.” I was too nauseous to attend to him. I thought I was going to throw up from the bitterness. Unable to help myself I spat on the floor. “I’m sorry,” I said again, wiping my mouth with my sleeve. But several other men spat; a little rainstorm of droplets fell on my hands and thighs.

  When I came back to the hut, the old man was saying that Bolivians didn’t have visions like ours anymore, because they hadn’t fought for a long time.

  Calixto smiled. He said he didn’t remember his father’s ever having been much of a fighter. (Neither is Calixto. Every feature of his face says coward. How could he ever leave his house, his gourds, his sewing machine? Even as he spoke to the old man, his eyes glanced over
his possessions, his precious things.)

  Still, Calixto had to agree with his father. We must have a powerful vision, for there were many soldiers, and they hadn’t been able to catch us. “In fact,” Calixto said to the pork merchants, “they have killed a whole lot of soldiers, a bundle full.” He sounded proud of us. Maybe, I thought, he wasn’t such a bad sort.

  One of the pork merchants nodded, and the other followed suit. Their faces looked yellow—fellow sufferers, I thought, sick from the coca.

  “Yes,” Calixto said, smiling at the merchants in their identical clean serapes. We had killed a whole bundle. A lot of soldiers. We had “covered the soldiers’ faces in blood.”

  He dragged his claws across his cheeks, to show the blood flowing down.

  Calixto’s father, the old man with the apple face, took another leaf of coca for himself, and pushed it with his tongue to the side of his cheek. He mashed his gums together.

  His mouth was disgusting-looking! My heart started beating awfully fast, like it wanted to run away from my chest. I put my hands over my ribs to keep it in.

  Perhaps, Calixto added politely, we didn’t want to talk about visions?

  Che didn’t say anything. He doesn’t like their foolish talk. And the coca hadn’t helped him; his lungs made a clamor; he was still having trouble breathing.

  Another man said that to speak of our vision might give away its power.

  I was about to say that there was no vision, but Calixto’s father had the floor. In the world of vision, he said, all that happened here was as nothing, was empty.