by Jay Cantor
“You are all specters,” Camba said from just outside the doorway, “hobgoblins. Ghosts.”
The men at the table looked horrified, but they nodded their agreement. “I see,” one of them said.
Calixto opened the fingers of one of his hands. His face was in agony. “I couldn’t do this without coca.”
Calixto passed the fingers of his clawed left hand through the now wide-open fingers of his right. If a man was fortunate enough to have a vision, and kept it in mind, then nothing could harm him.
He was speaking to the other men in the circle, because, I guess, he thought we must already know this.
All the things of this world would go right through us, because our real bodies were in the world of vision, and this stuff—he clasped at his precious table, the gourds that hung over our heads, the lovely woman who made tortillas, as if he were angry with them—this stuff had no substance in the place where our minds and our real bodies were. That was why, during the Revolution, the best fighters hadn’t been killed by the army.
“Yes,” Camba said seriously, “they were already dead in this world.” He smiled and looked intently at the Indians.
They nodded. Either he understood them or he was an expert to them—he lived in the world of vision. (He certainly does live in his own fantasy world.) The bottoms of the men’s faces, their teeth and mottled lips, were clear in the kerosene light. Their eyes and foreheads were in shadow.
Che turned slowly towards Camba, and gestured for him to come over. When Camba bent down to speak with him, Che slapped him slowly, hard, across his skinny back. Camba coughed and fell forward onto his hands. It looked like Che was burping him!
One of the men across from me pushed his felt hat back on his head, so I could see his eyes. Their best fighters, he said, had been killed by traitors, as they played with their own children. The man looked furious, for his right eye was streaked with a bloodline.
Traitors had killed the best fighters, he said again, angry at these betrayals. The fighters had been enjoying themselves with their families. They had thought they were safe. They didn’t have their visions in mind.
The young man with the bowl of limestone shavings turned his face away from the table and the lantern light, embarrassed by this old-people’s talk.
Then he asked to see the twigs that we used to push the soldiers’ bullets aside. The boy had a small round pleasant face, like an old friend’s. It glowed with curiosity and expectation.
Che told him that we had no twigs. Che’s voice was so weak that though I sat next to him, I could hardly hear him. The circle leaned towards Che. They looked like shadows waving on the ground, when a tree shakes in the wind.
One of the shadows made a voice. We had dreams, he said, that told us when the enemy was present. We could read the insides of animals, and we understood the patterns of the clouds.
Calixto leaned into the lantern light, and smiled at his friends, the pork traders. They nodded their agreement. As the night went on they looked sicker and sicker.
The people here knew that we had suspected the traders at first, and wanted to scare them a little.
Che said that we had no dreams, and no omens but our own cunning and the help the countrypeople gave us.
The young man interrupted. How did we put the soldiers to sleep so we could sneak up on them and cut their stomachs open?
Ponco leaned towards my shoulder. “We’re exasperating the boy. We know about fucking and we won’t tell him.”
The rotten-apple-faced man put another leaf into his mouth.
“We don’t put them to sleep,” Che said, in a whisper.
“Except permanently,” Camba added, “with our guns.”
The boy was disappointed. “We’ve just told him,” Ponco croaked into my ear, “that men and women are exactly alike.” His voice tickled me, and I laughed. Everyone stared at me, leaning into the light. Their faces looked like goblins’.
One of the goblins said that we had invisible cars that ran on magic fuel. That was how we got over the countryside so quickly, appearing where the army didn’t expect us, surprising them, and killing them all.
Camba laughed behind me. His laugh was a squeaky sound, a coward’s laugh. But he didn’t say anything, for fear of Che.
“They have white liquids to make the sorcerer’s worm crawl from your stomach.”
“There are two of him,” a man said, pointing to Che.
“And he has rings that make him invisible.”
Che held his fingers up near the lantern, to show that he didn’t have any rings. They shrank back from his hand.
Che has scars on the back of his hand that I hadn’t noticed before. I looked at my own hand, covered with scratches from tearing away at the vines, but Che’s were different, more like teethmarks.
“They have farts,” the young man with the limestone said, “that are like thunder and lightning.”
I was reminded of my mother’s rules: it was rude of them to talk like this, to call us “they” to our faces. But we wouldn’t give them the satisfaction they wanted—so they just ignored our denials, and talked about us as if we weren’t here. It was a spooky feeling—I felt like a specter.
I thought the boy was just joking about the farts, but no one laughed. I felt sure that I knew his face; whose was it? It was like having a hair stuck in my throat.
A raspy voice, speaking Quechua, said our leader had a strong special smell that put people to sleep.
This was too foolish, so I didn’t translate it for Che.
Che put his hands over his ears, and they all grew quiet.
The only sound was a badly led army of mosquitoes that charged the lantern a few at a time and were sizzled up. Their unburied corpses surrounded the light. The young woman went on rolling out the dough. A small breeze blew a flurry of ashes, and each flake turned slowly in the wind over the fire. It was very beautiful. I walked around in the wrinkles on the old man’s face, and slid across the young man’s smooth cheeks. I wiped away some dirt on the back of my hand with spittle, and watched the blood flow through my veins. I felt pretty good. I wasn’t hungry, and I felt like I could walk all night. The coca will help me keep up with the others if the fever comes again.
I liked watching the woman by the fire, too. Her hands had long fingers that fluttered in the air like a bird’s slowly beating wings. She squatted down over her work, and showed the outline of her thighs through her heavy red-and-blue dress. Maybe seventeen years old, I thought, she wore her hair in black braids.
With her right hand she grabbed up one of the squealing guinea pigs and bashed its head against the pot, gutted it, and threw it in. She wiped her hands on her dress, and went back to her board.
I haven’t had a woman in more than nine months! But I had hardly thought of them either. I have thought mostly of the pain of my own body, and if I have dreamt of anything it was of having more food. But now I wanted this woman very much! I liked watching her arms move rhythmically back and forth over the corn meal. I wanted to be the corn! I even felt stiff—a miracle! I thought my cock had died long ago. (The village will have to build a statue for the miracle of my cock!) I looked over at Che’s face, afraid that he had seen me staring at the woman, and knew what I was thinking. But he looked emptily at the apple-faced man who stuffed another leaf into his hole. I wondered if Che and Tania had made love in our camp? Camba smiled at me from the opening. I think he knew what I was thinking!
Calixto detached a bone-handled hunting knife from his belt, and I thought he, too, had seen my lust for his daughter. I wanted to reach out to hold his arm, but it felt like there was an enormous distance between us, and I could never get across it. I remembered a story from school, about how first you would have to go half the distance, and then half of the half, and so on. So really it was an infinite distance. That was how it felt to me. Calixto held out his clasped hands with his knife in the right one; the knife gave a blue shine in the lantern light. He cut his left hand at the
webbing between the third and fourth fingers. Blood welled out slowly. He brought the cut hand to his mouth and sucked his own precious red fluid.
I thought I was going to throw up.
“Here,” Calixto said to me, in a goblin’s hoarse voice, “give me your hand.” He held the knife towards me, point down. “The blood will make you stronger.”
I held my hands together between my knees, and curled my body over them.
The young man with the limestone shavings told me not to be scared. He gave me a dour disapproving look.
With coca, Calixto said, a man can stand pain. He can walk through snow barefoot. The Spaniards couldn’t do that! Even before there were saints the Benefactors had given coca to the Indians. That was why the priests didn’t like it. It was a bond among the Indians. It made them forget their place!
“Boy,” Calixto said. And the boy who had spoken of our farts took the knife. It was Paulino—the one who had led Wolfe’s mule, hundreds of miles from here! Paulino, smiling mockingly at me, cut himself with the knife, and held the bloody hand towards the cooking fire. He wanted the young woman to see it. She looked at his hand, and smiled fondly. His blood dripped down to the dirt floor, and hit a wet patch, where someone had spat, mixing the white foam and the red.
“My future son-in-law,” Calixto said proudly.
My hands felt cold. I prayed that that didn’t mean I had malaria.
Calixto and Paulino, like terrible birds, sucked blood from their own hands. Calixto spat a glob of blood into his other hand, and mixed some brown leaves up with it. He shoved the bloody mess into his mouth. I thought again that I would throw up, and shut my eyes.
After a time I felt small stones falling on my head. I opened my eyes to Che, his legs crossed, drumming his fingers on the heel of his boot. My head hurt. Most of the countrypeople had left.
“You can’t sit still,” Calixto’s father said to Che. “You are a very uneasy man.”
“Because you have such big plans for us,” Calixto sighed. “And we cannot do them for you.”
To my surprise Che and Ponco both laughed, one low and breathy, one a harsh rasp. “A nervous ambitious man,” Che said to Ponco. I didn’t understand. Why didn’t he show any anger at Calixto or his father? Che and Ponco’s laughter reminded me how long they have known each other, how much they have already shared. I felt excluded and a little sad.
Che got up and we left. We made our way into the forest, on the trail that had been prepared for us by the vanguard group. I pushed my tongue towards my teeth and felt the tip of it disappear. It reminded me of what Calixto had said when he passed the fingers of one hand through the other, that the things of this world just passed through the man who thought of his vision. Where had the tip of my tongue gone? To join the specters!
I told this to Che as we walked along in the dark, and we laughed together. I told him of my feeling that I could walk on their faces and I asked him if the coca had helped him at all.
A little, he said, for the pain, but it couldn’t free his lungs, it couldn’t help him breathe. Still, he thought it might be useful for numbing the mouth for dental work. (Sometimes the peasants let him work on their rotting painful teeth.)
Near morning we slept—or my comrades did. My heart smashed at my chest, asking to be released, and I had to stay awake to keep it from getting away.
From My Journal
6/27/67: We made camp in the forest outside the village, a few kilometers from the corn. Che’s breathing hasn’t improved. He is our center, our lungs, and his metallic clanging makes the air seem thick around us.
In the morning I said to him how surprised I’d been that anyone had seen us pissing in the truck’s radiator.
Ricardo asked, in his dainty way, what the fuck I was talking about.
I said that the piss must be the truck with the magic fuel the Indians had spoken of.
Che agreed that that made sense. And clearly they had heard about Ispaca’s boy, and the worm, though that, too, was some distance from here.
“They have one ear,” Camba said. We ignored him, so that he might calm himself. Yet he is right, for it does seem that way. In each village they seem to know of things that happened hundreds of miles away. (It seems that way—the very thing Che had said about the lies in his life story.)
“And they knew about our farting, too,” Camba added.
“And the smell,” Coco said. Then it was clear on his sweet plain round face that he wished he hadn’t mentioned that.
“What smell?” Che asked.
Coco told him that someone the night before had spoken of a magic smell, a smell that put the soldiers to sleep. Coco is the only one of us who really commands Quechua.
Che laughed, hiding his face behind his tin coffee mug, embarrassed to remember his smell.
“Who are the two Che’s?” I asked, to change the subject.
No one could answer that.
Coco amazed me when he said that the boy who had cut himself was Paulino, poor Michael Wolfe’s guide. His face had been too far from the lantern for me to see clearly.
I was afraid that the young men would have fled by this morning, and that I wouldn’t get a chance to speak with Paulino. But Che had posted guards to make sure no one left the settlement.
From Guevara’s Journal
6/28/67: Ponco has renewed his acquaintance with Paulino, Wolfe’s guide and Calixto’s future son-in-law, the boy who performed the self-mutilation. Paulino’s fiancée, Calixto’s daughter, informed him that the “pork merchants” are frauds—one of them is a lieutenant in the army.
The center guard surrounded Calixto’s house, and told the spies that if they came out immediately they could avoid being shot. The officer, a tall sallow man, stumbled out, as if he’d been pushed, sobbing piteously. He made a nice spectacle of himself for the countrypeople! He is a second lieutenant, not with the army, but with the police force. The other man is a teacher in Postre Valle who, the lieutenant said, had volunteered for the assignment. If true, that willing complicity was a disagreeable sign. It was a bad sign, also, that Calixto and the others went along with the charade. The army is having success in working on their fear.
Ricardo was for killing them, of course. I was surprised when Ponco agreed with him. He said that the lieutenant had violated the articles of war. This bloodthirstiness bespeaks an unusual degree of anxiety on Walter’s part. (Che, they had made fools of us!) I decided to keep them with us for a while, then send them away with a warning about the rules of war; they were out of uniform; spies.
As punishment, we took their pants.
I was in a forgiving mood, for Ponco has convinced Paulino to act as messenger for us. His mother wept at the idea, but Paulino was adamant.
I decided to trust him with messages to the Party, and ways to contact our agents in Cochabamba. This is a crucial moment in the country’s history. I must have the necessary men in the field to take full advantage of the coming miners’ strike and the shaky situation of the government in La Paz. Perhaps, too, I can get the medicine I need for myself. I have also entrusted Paulino with messages for the city to transmit to Fidel. Fidel must oversee the activities of Monje and the Bolivian Party in spending his money or we may never get the necessary men from them. The Party and the city network can set up way stations for us where we can obtain supplies as we pass—guerrilla department stores. I have marked some possible locations on the map.
Help now could be decisive.
From My Journal
6/28/67: Che told me of the messages for Paulino, and the guerrilla department stores. Che has big plans. (“He is the master / He is the Man.” Would he, I wonder, like to hear a few verses of his friend Chaco’s song?)
Our interrogation of the army spies reveals no sign of Joaquin in the area, so we are heading farther west, towards the forest. To the east of here is only jungle that the countrypeople never enter. There is a certain kind of vine there, Calixto instructed us, and if a man steps on it he wil
l wander in the jungle, lost forever. “A pointless place,” Calixto called it.
From Guevara’s Journal
6/30/67: While listening to the radio tonight we drank some coffee—“gift” of Calixto’s household. (After we discovered his cooperation with the army’s ruse, I allowed the men to take from his house without payment—but there wasn’t, despite his fears, much to take. It is the third time we have used the coffee grounds.) Good news: Barrientos had banned the BCP, the POR, and has arrested militants from the Party and from the MNR. According to the Chilean radio some of these militants have already been shot.
“Yanqui efficiency,” Ponco said. And in that voice he can make efficiency sound like a euphemism for a death sentence. Which it often is.
The Party has no choice now but to forge an alliance with us.
The Chilean announcers also speak of more Green Berets being sent to Bolivia, and of the use of napalm—both of which La Paz unconvincingly denies. It seems certain now that the North Americans will intervene here in strength.
After the news Camba insisted on singing a song for us. The men shrank back from him, expecting some new display of his instability. Instead it turned out to be an amusing thing, about a revolt of the vegetables against the gardener.
There was general good feeling in the camp. Coco, Inti, Jorge and the other militants are pleased that the comrades they left behind—the ones who were shot—are also sharing the risks of revolution. And, of course, the increased North American involvement is good news.
JULY
From Guevara’s Journal
7/1/67: The radio is rife with rumors of deals and counter-deals. Two more parties have withdrawn from Barrientos’s government, demanding that the Communists and MNR militants be freed, and legal status returned to both parties. Clearly the minor parties are trying to curry favor with us, believing Monge and Kolle’s statements that the Party and the guerrillas are comrades. (Once again History is made when people act on misapprehensions, lies, and myths. Yet their actions have real consequences!) The Peasant Union has warned Barrientos against forming an alliance with the Falange.
