by Jay Cantor
The next day Che wrote:
And yet they move, they move constantly—repeated actions, like obsessed things, without thought, without change. They work tilling their fields—chewing coca—pushing in seeds—chewing coca—harvesting potatoes—chewing coca—coca gives them strength, numbs the pain in their shoulders, places them above the dissolution of their bodies—spectators to their own lives, from an arctic distance.
They are filled with an icy energy, without heat, electric—and they follow the wires endlessly. These Indians aren’t a fìre that blazes across the held, consuming everything in its path, gathering to one enormous conflagration. They follow the thin copper bands of their lives as electricity does. They couldn’t live outside those bands, and so they run the pattern already laid for them, the threads in a weaving whose design has long been known—till their hearts stop. And in this cold all the turns of their life, that maze, are clear to them, clear and infrangible. They even see the pointless death that awaits them and all the generations to follow. But they cannot imagine a way out of this maze—any more than an electric current could dream of leaving its wires. Everyone moves along this path, yet each of them is far away, as if watching, utterly still.
The coca makes their hearts pound like imprisoned things, and reminds them that beyond the unchangeable confìnement of their poverty there is only another confìnement, that life itself is a prison. This world of theirs, perhaps they can imagine it being shattered, like a construction made of ice, but it cannot be molded. Life is coca solid, coca pure, coca clear. The world is a Bible text from the mouth of God. Not one iota of it will ever change.
But this is no different from what we faced in Cuba. Why even pretend that the dried green leaves are an important obstacle—they are only a symbol for some darker thing that I cannot yet name. For we have brought the violent event that should have woken them from their chain-step somnambulance; yet they do not respond. I feel in them something deeper than sleep. (Or perhaps they dream while awake.) In any case, they watch. We remain a spectacle. They observe us, as Calixto eyed the knife, glinting in the soft lantern light, moving down towards his hand. Their life is a story that someone reads to them. You cannot change a story once it is already written. Or it is a play; and it would be rude to stop a play just because the actors pretend to be in pain; or dying. (We will get up and walk again, the mad boy shouted. How could we shout back that we won’t? They would hear it as only another line of dialogue.)
Then there are many more entries about his problems breathing, and the different substances he injected.
JUNE 14
His birthday. He would have been forty today. Then he would (he said) have to have given thought to leaving the guerrilla. If he had lived till now, maybe he would have agreed to our leaving, and we would still be alive.
(What a strange thing to have written. I am alive.)
I took the day off, in honor of his birthday, and started to walk down towards the ocean, through the field of tall grass. My thigh ached, as if the bullet had made a hollow space, a tunnel in my leg. When I got halfway down to the beach, the ocean glimmered invitingly in the distance, indifferent to my limp, asking me to dance back and forth with the waves. I began to sneeze. I told myself: I am not allergic to pollen! I even shouted aloud to the other specters who lie in ambush in this field. But saying it aloud didn’t make any difference; the field still wavered in front of my watering eyes.
I knew what that meant—so I came back to this little house, and our board.
It is different (he wrote) from what we faced in Cuba. Some darker force resists us here. It is as if, when we came to Cuba, the peasants were empty-handed. We came, and they looked down, and we had placed a powerful tool in their hands. Here they turn aside, they evade us, as if their hands were already full. Yet I cannot see what it is they have; it is present to them, but ghostly to me.
They do not listen to our story, and certainly they refuse to take their place in it. Instead they make one of their stories out of us.
But their story is nonsense, evasions, the twists and turns taken by cowardice! Perhaps cowardice, their deep soft cowardice, is all that we have fallen into—nothing darker or more mysterious than that! The magic rings, and cars, and thunderous farts, are all so much cowardice. The Indians put us above them, supernatural, so that they can retreat back into their burrows, and yet save their self-respect. How—they can say to themselves—could they dare to join us, or even to help us? For we have the magical protections—the ones that they have imagined for us—and they are just Bolivians, they are just … shit. So they are wise to watch us.
And we die.
1) I cannot yet see a way to use their magic stories against their cowardice. To agree to magic powers—and invite them to share in them—would only eventually retard the Revolution’s development. But in every speech I must stress my own physical weakness, the asthma, etc. Thus: Even the weakest of them can be terrible. (And so my childhood fantasy might be realized: my asthma given to me as a sign.)
It was amazing to us then: each rest period, as we lay in our hammocks, or on our ground covers, our tablecloths where we were the food, we looked over and wondered, wondered what he was writing, wondered how he could write when we had to bend all our willpower just to suffering the jungle.
I see now that he was the static in my head. He was what didn’t make sense. We had given all our soul stuff, our will, into his keeping, and he had wandered into that pointless place; that didn’t make sense, and so our world didn’t make sense. Since the first battle I had a special radio; I could tune in the thoughts of the men we captured. I didn’t pick up Che’s thoughts; he was the air the radio waves moved through. Now that air took my words and turned them into buzz. And behind that buzz there was only more buzz.
That static was the place he had told me about in his note to me here, a hundred years before, on our dinner table. That time was the thin band of white, the time between the frames on a motion-picture film, the time when he didn’t know what to do, when his stomach was upset and the world a jumble. But now it was our stomachs, too.
Daily fights broke out among the men. Marcos hit Pacho again, with the handle of his machete, breaking his nose. (Pacho, hit so many times, was beginning to look like a prizefighter—a losing one.) One day Camba sang, and Eusebio screamed at him to shut up, and then began to weep.
Che meted out punishment as necessary, and restored discipline.
But his thoughts were elsewhere.
Should we call attention to their cowardice?
Is it cowardice?
Chaco’s voice: “You want to say no to History, but your no is just another note in the chorus.”
That no is the shadow, the darkness that resists us: They want to say no to History.
They must take our instruction, we must show them what I learned in Guatemala, when Chaco died, that all the time, behind their backs, history goes on, wears away at them, takes their children, corrodes their bodies with the acids of work and malnutrition. History destroys their way of life, unravels the pattern of their weaving.
But we cannot shout at them to wake them into history, for they won’t even hear us, won’t shout back at us. They will live their refusal in their stupid dogged unending repeated unchanging suffering. They will live their no to History in the twisted stories they tell about themselves and us, the ones that make a spectacle of us; their myths and magic refuse not just our action but History itself. Their refusal is their constant work, the sacrifice of their own lives.
“The last shall be first, and the first last, and it will begin again. Each day has enough sin. World without end.” And the Marxist, with his Manifesto beneath an Inca rock, said, “It all returns. The Messiah comes over and over again.”
That is their dream, the dream of an over and over again, an end to history, to linear time, the dream of a circle of endless recurrence. Marxism is the dream that history itself has of its own ending, the Revolution, the expression of
its always unsatisfied desire for rest, a fiery consummation. But that is not their dream. Theirs is Gandhi’s dream, the dream of those who would refuse History, the dream of jumping over history and back to the past, to their way.
But their way is endless suffering!
And what was our way, those months, but endless suffering? Che, unable to suck up enough air to live on, sat and wrote those philosophical theses in his journal.—And by that time I could not have counted consecutively, without mistake, to a hundred! Yet Che wrote. Flies laid their eggs in scratches on Marcos’s and Camba’s legs. Maggots hatched out and burrowed under their skin. They screamed in agony as the maggots crawled inside them. We had to cut slashes in their arms and legs to burn the white things.
Meanwhile Che continued his line of thought, his new line:
Clearly the Indians despise us, despise what we represent to them. I am an ambitious man. I see now that they are horrified by that. I have a bloody hand that offers them change, progress—the things they have bent all of their imagination to refusing. Ambition which had no place in the Inca way. The Inca—that is the deepest shadow of their dark implacable resistance: the Inca way: recurrence, stability, without progress, without change. Everything in its place, changing only to begin again as before. The King over all, keystone to the arch. Ambition is a threat to them. They wish their life to be a continual recurrent task—the only thing settled once and for all is the rules of the game. “Final victories are the imaginings of violent men; apocalypse; fìery consummation. Gandhi’s way must be the will’s slow patient work. It requires serenity, and that comes from Ending one’s place in the larger scheme.” That was the Inca way; and that is the darkness, the opposition to History that we confront here. Even they hardly remember the meaning of their words. The fag-end of Empire—they only had a garbled sentence from the center, the god who spoke from afar, the Inca. The Conquest crumbled that world. And then the modern world fell like an atomic bomb on the rubble that was left. Only the imperfect memory of already broken fragments is left. They want to take their place in an endless recurrent pattern. We must offer to restore, to remake that pattern. We cannot drag them into the modern world, but we can lead them into it, if we offer it in the image of their desire.
They refuse the Revolution as the progressive consummation of History, the History that jolts and jars and fìnally destroys them now. We must offer them the Revolution not as an end to work, not as rest, but as shared work that will never end, shared continual suffering. Now they are the pointless sacrifìce, wasted by others, by the imperialists, in the name of a progress that never comes and that they do not desire. They want, and we must offer them, the chance to sacrifìce themselves not once and for all, but continually.
Around this time, our third week in the jungle, Che began to speak with Camba alone. They walked together, or sat to one side in camp, talking in low voices. Che listened intently, his chest thrust forward, his head bent towards our loony bird’s chirping. Camba, I saw, read to Che from his “special notebook,” the one I’d asked about, the one where he recorded “maps”—the Indians’ “secret paths” out of the forest. Those were the paths Che now wanted to follow, or bend into his new directions. They continued talking until dusk, when the bats came out of the trees, and Camba heard the disgusting whirring sound of their wings. Bats horrified Camba. He sat frozen with terror, unable to talk.
Socialism, and even industrialization, as the continual sacrifice of ourselves, as a way to honor the ancestors whose land this is, by our shared labor.
Their past refuses us if we seem like a continuation of the awful present that wears away at them now, that wastes them meaninglessly. Their dream is recurrence. So we must join that past to the future we offer them, leaping over the present. The Inca way has resisted us as it did the conquistadors. Gandhi was right! They do not want History, Western civilization. It was all contained in my first dream, the notebook I kept with me, The Discovery of Latin America.
JUNE 15
Almost every day on the march through—or was it around?—the jungle, Camba sang to us. The melody wandered about unsteadily, as we did. Sometimes Camba stopped in the middle of an old verse and simply started a new one. And sometimes he began a sentence and then sang nonsense syllables, as if he’d suddenly become a baby again. Or he would bawl out some imperious need.
So we couldn’t sing along. But we generally enjoyed the performance.
The song was about a garden full of vegetables, happy with their vegetable existence, and the Chili Pepper, who wanted them to revolt against the gardener. I have put the verses together as best as I can remember them:
The Chili Pepper sang:
You will all go into his pot
You will be part of his stew
You think you are rooted forever,
comrade vegetables,
But you’re not! You’re not!
The Vegetable Chorus sang:
What pot? What stew?
Someone’s crazy here—
And we think it’s you!
The Celery sang:
Mr. Chili, look at me,
And admit the fabulous beauty you see:
I’m so green, so leafy, so tall
I could never bend, I could never fall.
Drinking up rain, putting out leaves,
Sending down roots, choking out weeds,
Putting out leaves, making up seeds,
I’m far too clever to fall
For your story,
I’m far too clever to fall
Into his stew!
The Chili sings:
Says you!
Mr. Celery. Says you!
The Carrot responds:
I’m rich, I’m rich,
I own all the dirt
All the dirt all around
I own the whole garden
I’m deep underground
With leaves up above
I’m rich I’m rich
The sun sends me its love
I own all the sunlight
I own all the rain
Your talk of rebellion
Just gives me a pain!
The Chili sings:
Stupid petit-bourgeois carrot
It’s someone else’s lessons you parrot!
The gardener has a special kind of garrote
For skinning un-class-conscious carrots.
For the Red Pepper knew better, knew better,
The Chili Pepper knew better, and he sang:
Oh, you think you’re rooted forever
But you’re not, you’re not
Oh, you will be part of his stew, Oh,
You will go into his pot!
The Vegetable Chorus sang:
What pot? What stew?
Someone’s crazy here—
And we think it’s you!
But the Chili Pepper sang:
Friend Vegetables, he sang,
Comrade Vegetables, pay heed
(“I’m hungry!” Camba suddenly shouted, interrupting his own song.
No one said anything for a while, as we tore at the vines. After about five minutes Ricardo spoke, “So are we all, asshole, so are we all.” And that closed the complaining. Camba, as the Pepper, sang again.)
Comrade Vegetables pay heed!
I have been sent to you
In your hour of need!
Study History Comrade Vegetables!
We are not free, Comrade Vegetables!
We are owned, bought and sold,
We must leave this garden
I implore you—Be bold!
We are owned by another, this garden he owns
He cleared it of weeds, he cleared it of stones
He has stock for a stew and meaty soup bones
Now he wants us—he won’t leave us alone
