The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  I was sure now that Willy’s father wasn’t long for this story, because Willy sounded too sweet about the son of a bitch. Dying makes a person lovely. I had even remembered my uncle as a witty man for a while after he died—for about thirty seconds.

  I looked down at the river, and at the rocks on the other shore. The trees were thick just beyond. If you jumped into them they would certainly catch you and hold you up! What if soldiers appeared out of those trees down near the rocks? We were like a series of targets strung out along the side of the light-brown cliff. The scouts said that couldn’t happen, there was no sign of the army in the area. (But the army had helicopter transports now, huge buglike things. We had seen one lay soldier eggs onto the hunting plain near the Nancahuazu.)

  Vertigo pulled me towards the edge again, and I squatted for a moment, but I got up before Ricardo could walk over my back.

  The miners had been destroyed, without a fight. All the drilling with the militia and the prehistoric guns was a joke. They never fought. They couldn’t leave their homes their wives their children. (Willy had no wife, no children. He wasn’t going to let happen to him what had happened to his father! He was chaste. I saw why it was a necessary discipline to bring about the Day of Change.) The army starved them. For a long time there was only a little dried meat that the Indians gave them. But no milk for the children. And no cough syrup. Che could imagine what it was like for the miners without cough syrup!

  That was true, I thought. Che could certainly imagine that.

  The men called the cough syrup “oil,” because their lungs wouldn’t work without it, so that they just coughed and coughed and ripped themselves open from the grit, until they bled. No one knew where to go, or what to do, and every time they took a breath they started a cascade of coughs, ripping pieces of the lung away. Little flakes of flesh mixed with the blood and speckled their lips, like chipped paint.

  The Party had said they would settle things, and Willy’s father had repeated the Party’s words. And that was wrong. When Willy had gone to jail he had hated his father for that. But what was the right thing to do? Until he had heard about Che’s plan Willy hadn’t known what to do, either. Anyway, his father had paid for his mistake.

  First the planes were small in the sky, and harmless-looking, but they grew with their sound, until the roaring filled Willy’s head until he couldn’t think anymore. The army had bombed the miners’ barracks. Bombs are furious things! Willy had been terrified. His father had everyone hide in the mines because he knew the army couldn’t risk destroying them. But Willy had been so scared that he had run about outside, not knowing what he was doing, just screaming up at the sky, and the earth and the rocks and the wood from the barracks had all leapt up at him! It was a miracle that he hadn’t been killed!

  As soon as the army had let them, the miners had surrendered. Then the helicopters landed outside the mines and spewed out soldiers. The soldiers fired into the mines and dragged the miners’ families out of their hiding places. Willy’s father was taken into an open muddy field outside the barracks, where they pushed him to his knees and shot him.

  Willy was arrested because he’d been everywhere with his father. He had had to watch the executions. A lot of men had been shot, union leaders, and miners, and people who had had nothing to do with the union. Most of them had been shoved into a big hole, still alive, and all the soldiers fired into the hole. The miners looked like a bunch of maggots on a piece of meat, crawling all over each other covered in blood. But they were the meat!

  Willy’s father hadn’t screamed, he had died bravely. He just gave his life back. Willy’s mother was dead now, too, killed by a punch in her stomach. She had gone to the political police to ask for Willy. That was a stupid thing to do! So now this fighting was all Willy had!

  Willy was furious at his mother for looking for him, for getting herself killed. Poor boy, he was right about one thing: we were his family now, such as we were. No life outside the Revolution.

  Willy had been brought from his cell so he could be shown to his mother. They had held him up and beaten him for a while, and his mother had cursed the police. They had been hitting Willy in his face and he had once been very handsome—before they flattened his nose.

  He was still a good-looking man, I thought, especially when he smiled. But perhaps his mother had been attached to the face he’d been born with. Mothers are like that—when they’re sober.

  I tripped over a piece of rock and fell. I clung to the stubbly ground with my hands, trying to dig my fingers into the stone. My nail bled, and I brought it to my mouth and sucked on it joyfully. I thanked God for sparing me!

  “What are you mumbling?” Ricardo said. “Are you losing your mind like the vegetable singer?”

  I rose and brushed myself off, laughing, for there was no point to the brushing. There was dust, I thought, all over my dust. “No,” I said. “I was praying.”

  Ricardo laughed, that ugly sound. He thought I was simply lying about prayer, for he didn’t know I had read Che’s version of him at Alegria de Pio. Probably he didn’t even remember that time himself.

  “I was reciting poetry,” I said.

  Ricardo accepted that with a nod—he has a taste for literature now himself.

  We continued on. We were finally going downward. I would have run to the bottom, but I was too afraid of falling. Willy’s mother had cursed at the police, and hit one of them on the side of his head with her fist. That was a stupid thing to do! But they were spoiling Willy’s good looks! And that was the only thing she had liked about him.

  Willy’s voice became slower and more urgent still; and I knew we had come to the point of the story, the reason he was telling it to Che. It wasn’t his father. It wasn’t the miners’ massacre, or his discovery of Che’s strategy—the necessity of guerrilla warfare. It was the policeman hitting his mother.

  The policeman had hit his mother once in her big belly. His mother had struck the policeman because she didn’t want Willy to be ugly; or dead. And with Willy’s father gone, he was the only one to support the family.

  I thought, You must never hit a policeman. He thinks it starts a relationship between you; it’s a policeman’s idea of romance.

  His mother had been pregnant, so when the policeman hit her—pow!—it had killed her. Willy watched the blood flow out of her middle, staining her skirts. He tried to get free of their hands to go to her, but they held him and went on hitting him for a while, absent-mindedly. They didn’t seem to notice what they were doing to him anymore, once they had started her bleeding.

  It must have been a rare treat for them, I thought, to hit a pregnant woman.

  His mother had gagged and fallen to the floor, and her face went white. Willy could have closed his eyes, maybe he should have closed his eyes, but he hadn’t. He had watched the blood pouring onto the cement floor till she had died.

  And that, I realized, was his embarrassment, I thought, his sin, that was why he had to tell Che this story. In all the blood, the stuff that had come up from the miners’ lungs, or out of his father’s head, or been smeared in the hole full of dying miners like maggots, it was his mother’s blood that had held his attention. Willy had seen it when he shouldn’t have, and he hadn’t turned away. But why was that so terrible? I thought of my own mother, her head fallen into a plate of beans I’d cooked for our family. Maybe he had wanted her to die? Pow, Willy had said, too loudly, with too much satisfaction. I felt sick.

  It was where the blood came from that was so awful, Willy said. She and his father had made love together, and that was the blood that poured out onto the floor. Willy thought of how his father had used to hit her, too.

  Had Willy wanted to hit her? To be on his father’s side? Like Che’s mockery of his mother? It didn’t make any sense to me. But then, why should it?

  The police made Willy mop up the blood.

  We walked on together. I felt crappy. I think it was remembering my mother.

  “I think,�
�� Willy said, “that we must all have stories like that to tell.” He pointed back to the men of the center group strung out along the cliff. Willy spoke slowly still. “Your own story,” he said to Che, “must be like mine.”

  Che smiled, but he didn’t respond to Willy. He was having trouble breathing.

  “No,” I said for him. “His story isn’t like yours. He had a gentler life.”

  Willy pointed backward towards Che’s rifle.

  “He’s a self-made man,” I said. “Like Rockefeller.”

  Che ordered us to go forward more quickly, so Willy didn’t turn around again. “Ah, Rockefeller,” he said to the air in front of him. But I don’t think he knew who I meant.

  Who did I mean? The man from the cartoons, top-hatted, turning our lives into gold. The One Who Owns the World. The metal rabbit the poor dogs chase. I noticed Benjamin, on point, wandering from the trail. His head was down, he staggered about, lurched towards the cliff, and then towards the air. Che ordered Willy to run forward and pull him back. But as Che spoke—just as if Benjamin had heard him and was so proud he would rather die than be helped—he made a single abrupt movement, like someone had yanked his string, stepped onto the air with one foot; and tumbled forward.

  For a moment I thought of those cartoon cats that can walk on air awhile, until they look down, realize where they are, and fall. But this was no cartoon. I entered Benjamin’s body, and fell with him, a slow spiral, down into the river. The blood pushed up to the top of my head as I fell and it felt like it would pour out through my ears. My hands went numb.

  Benjamin’s gun dropped to the side as he fell, and arched down to the river glinting in the sun—he had kept it clean. A pound of feathers and a pound of human being fall just as fast. It’s a law we will repeal after the Revolution. Benjamin didn’t scream. The men stood on the ledge and gaped at him, thinking, What does this silent sign mean? They probably felt numb with his blood, as I did. We were short of men, even scrawny ones like Benjamin. That made us all keenly empathetic.

  I knew that Benjamin couldn’t swim, for when we had crossed the Rio Grande he had clung to my arm.

  He was still conscious when he hit the water, and when he came up he beat the surface of the river. But the river pulled him under. Willy ran the rest of the way down the side of the cliff with his quick stiff steps. (That scared me! If Willy fell, that would be a real loss.) He shed his pack and boots by the side of the river, and dived in. But Willy didn’t know how to swim either, and an undertow pulled him out in the wrong direction. It took all of his strength to save himself and make it back to the thin line of rocks.

  Benjamin bobbed up once, and then disappeared again under the river. His arm came up through the water. “You see,” Ricardo said, “I told you Bolivians aren’t worth shit.” Benjamin’s hand flopped from the wrist. Ricardo laughed. “Look,” he said, “the nice boy is waving good-bye to us!”

  I could live without Ricardo, I thought. And then: I couldn’t live without Ricardo!

  In camp that evening Che gave a speech about Benjamin. Admittedly, he said, Benjamin was a weak and inept guerrilla. (And, Ricardo’s lips said to me, an asshole. I think Ricardo takes Benjamin’s death as a special vindication granted to him by the god of war. How dare the boy have spat at him? Sometimes Ricardo’s vengefulness blinds him, for Benjamin’s death brings us all closer to the edge.)

  But, Che said, Benjamin had had a strong will. And his will had sustained him long after his body had given up. Benjamin’s intelligence was hard, unsparing of anyone.

  That was true, I thought. He had been a sharp-toothed demon in our sessions of criticism-self-criticism, listing all his own faults scrupulously. And then all yours.

  Benjamin, the story went on, had joined the guerrillas because his thinking had shown him that guerrilla warfare was the only strategy for making a revolution. And only a revolution would save the lives of most Latin Americans—not another doctor. Benjamin could not know, and yet not act on that knowledge—despite his physical weakness. He couldn’t live a contradiction. That deserved our admiration.

  He was unsuited for guerrilla life. But we should have taken better care of him. Perhaps his comrades sometimes felt Benjamin was judging them too harshly, and that he had no right to judge them at all. But it was his deep morality and his pride in himself that had led him to join the guerrillas—and it was tragic that these should be the very qualities that had separated him from his comrades.

  That would not do. Every man must be the care of every other. Each man is his brother’s teacher, and keeper …

  And guard, I thought. I smiled at Che, who did not speak this last word. Maybe he didn’t even remember where this had all started! Maybe I remembered his own words better than he did! (Then I remembered too that, though Che suspected I had read his journal, he didn’t know for certain, so I stared into his brown eyes guilelessly, no longer smiling.)

  This eulogy of Che’s, I thought, like the one I wrote for Paulino, was as much for Che as for Benjamin. Pride, moralism, intelligence, physical weakness, and the inability to live a contradiction—who did that describe? The forces that sustained Che, that made him our leader, also separated him from us. Was he pleading with us then, that in his weakness we might look after him, if he couldn’t get more medicine and needed our help? Maybe all speeches over the grave aren’t about the body—no body in this case anyway—but about the speaker. He names the qualities he’s most attached to—fatally attached!

  Che didn’t seem to notice my stare. The other men all looked properly abashed and moved. I think they were, for Che’s pleading voice had been very moving. (After all, he was pleading for himself.)

  Che distributed the last ration of black beans to bolster the men’s morale.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  7/7/61: I had not been attentive to Benjamin, not to his condition in general (I wished him gone, really), to the animosity he had generated among the other comrades (none of whom cared for him), or, finally, fatally, to his location on the path on the day he drowned.

  I wasn’t listening very attentively to Willy yesterday, either. I heard a narrative punctuated by blows, the miners’ massacre, the policeman killing his mother (“pow!” Willie shouted, waking me from my reverie), but I was thinking of our encounters with the Indians the last few weeks. I saw again the knife that Calixto had held, cutting the webbing between his fingers. I thought of the old man, Calixto’s father, stuffing the coca leaves into his mouth. His face was all mouth, a toothless puckered hole, and the wrinkles of his skin were a landscape to dreamwalk, a thousand ridges and valleys. We moved on his face, and as he chewed coca the ground beneath our feet shook. I and my men fell forward towards his lizard’s mouth. We scrabbled at the ravines in his cheeks to keep from falling in, but one by one we failed and fell. We would be chewed up with the brown leaves and blood, ground down, spat out. (I looked towards the river and felt the damp rise from it along the cliff side, weighing down my lungs.) The Indian chewed us up. We’d be spat out in some new shape, reborn, with thunder and lightning farts, magic rings on our fingers. “Che” stood in front of a group of kneeling Indians. Grease covered his thin naked chest, grease that protected him against bullets. He held his right hand up before the Indians, and blood welled onto his palm from the webbing between his thumb and first finger. I am the bloody man, he said, I have the bloody hand, and I will be revenged.

  It made me laugh, a laugh that almost made me fall over. It was then that Ponco noticed Benjamin, and I shouted to him.

  From Coco’s Journal

  7/7/67: Today we captured another slat-sided truck, once again the property of the petroleum company. Benigno stepped out of the ambush and pointed his rifle towards it. The driver stopped, or I would have shot out his tires and sent him into a ditch.

  Che was glad to have the truck. “A welcome gift,” he said.

  “They’re right,” Ponco said. “Everything returns. Nothing is wasted.” Ponco laughed. His dry laugh
is full of sorrow. Ricardo asked if Ponco thought the truck still had our piss inside.

  Anyway, the truck will carry our knapsacks for a while.

  Che is having a lot of trouble walking, yet he continues without complaint. And so will I. (I don’t think anyone has noticed my night sweats or trembling, not even Inti.) We will move south towards where Che says Joaquin must be. We ordered the mestizo driver of the truck to march with us. We will let him go at the next village.

  From Camba’s Journal

  7/8/67: The center entered a settlement of ten thatched huts around a big empty dirt square. One part of the square faced a large adobe church with a brass bell on top of it. Brown paint flecked from the church walls.

  Dozens of white bodies ran from the church, back across the dirt to their huts. Dressed in white, they were like a plague of rabbits. Ricardo was so surprised to see them scurry that he drove the truck with our knapsacks on it into a ditch. The big back wheels spun in the air, and the truck slowly slid forward.

  The Indians were very shy, too, like rabbits, and stood by their huts, not saying anything, not even to each other. The women just peeked from behind the entries. And their silence was immense. They wouldn’t talk to us, or come out to get a better look, the way they do in most places.

  Che didn’t say anything about gathering them up for a meeting. He doesn’t want to talk to them or hear them.

  We worked in shifts at getting the truck out. When I stopped pushing I stood back to look at my comrades, struggling in the sun. Ricardo and Benigno jostled each other, trying to brace themselves against one wall of the ditch and push upward on the radiator. Tuma lost his balance and fell over. Tuma looks like Che, same long face and brown beard, the same sorrowful eyes. I saw that he was Che’s double. Tuma curses everyone in his high voice, especially Ricardo, because Che wants to curse Ricardo. Everyone was angry with Ricardo for getting us into this.