The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  JULY 4

  Today I cannot bear to think of his life. Today I think there wasn’t one moment of pleasure in it. If Che was a ladies’ man, as they used to say in the mountains, then it was without pleasure. (Perhaps he—the hero—wanted them to say that he wasn’t a sickly ugly little thing. Or perhaps he was never a ladies’ man and it was all lies.) He couldn’t hear music. And I don’t think Che ever saw a color; if he did see a color he certainly did not see a shade! The only physical sensation I think he ever had intimately, fully, was his first attack as a child, giving himself without thought to the painful struggle to breathe. But after that moment I swear he couldn’t hear, taste, see, feel—he was a doomed man, a dead man, already in the grave of his thoughts. He never loved anyone, any one person—certainly not me. He was always talking about love, thinking about love, trying to make it come out right, as if it were a problem not of the body, but of mathematics. “Altruism … anger … overcome by sharing the same condition, the fire of our continual suffering …”—all so much pigeon breath! Why couldn’t he want simply to hit someone (or kiss someone)? Why couldn’t he ever have been content with the way things look, smell, are in this imperfect perfect world? Why couldn’t he have even been unhappy the way we—the rest of suffering humanity—are unhappy, simply unhappy, jealous, just desiring a woman who betrays us or makes us angry, without some theoretical escape, some escape into theory, a special exit into philosophy, a scampering off into a dream of absolute identity, instead of just eating the sublime muck we’re served with now.

  I want there to have been a romance between them. I want him really to have made Tania pregnant. He was the father. (Because I say so. Really, he wasn’t. None of us had the energy for that. There wasn’t any pregnancy. But I will have it so.)

  When Tania told him she was pregnant his heart turned. Discovering this weakness that couldn’t be called a weakness but a strength beyond willing, he didn’t want to draw the lines more sharply. He wanted simply to embrace and protect her.

  The first battle at the Nancahuazu River hadn’t occurred yet. They made love. (What would he have thought making love to her? About the problem of tenderness … about a time when there was something beyond this sham tenderness which was only an inward-turned violence, about a new identity, One Body? No! I say that he just liked the feel of her body. And then he found it perhaps a little … disappointing.)

  The first battle hadn’t happened. Tania is pregnant. He doesn’t draw the lines. It isn’t too late for us to go out simply, the way we came in, running the film backward.

  So we do.

  Che and Tania don’t go back to Cuba with the rest of us. They go on to Miami, for that is the place for luxury, for romance! “There all is but order and beauty / Luxury calm and sensual pleasure / My child, my sister, / Dream of the sweetness of going there to live together / To love at leisure and die / In the land that resembles you.”

  He becomes a doctor there, an allergist. She worked first as a secretary, until he was recertified to practice in the United States. Once they spoke of this, during the time when they were poor, how things would be handled differently in Cuba. There they needed more doctors. Here they protected their profits. Soon they were his profits, too, and they didn’t talk of Cuba anymore.

  They have a large ranch-style home. Two children. The first one was born while Ernesto was a student again, studying for his boards. They named him after Walter, Che’s friend from the old days.

  No. He would want to forget Walter. They gave the boy a British-sounding name: Alfred. Alfred Guevara.

  The years go by like a soak in a warm bath. And now it’s a spring night in Miami, a little humid but not too unpleasant, and Che and Tania have found a high-school student to watch the children so they can go to a movie at a theater near the Causeway, a highway that runs by the ocean. It’s a big theater that looks like an office building or a mausoleum. Admission to the movies costs as much as a week’s wages in Cuba. A month’s wages in Bolivia. A year. A decade. I want it to he luxurious, I want to pile outrage on outrage, I want them to dive into a mountain of sugar until the white powder fills every crevice in their bodies!

  It is a movie about a very rich man (richer than you can possibly imagine) and his problems when he falls in love with a shopgirl. His family disapproves. He forsakes her. She dies of a broken heart, and becomes his “good angel,” guiding him through life, advising him who to marry. Giving him tips on the stock market.

  That was the movie they meant to go to. But they couldn’t get in, it is so popular, so they go to the one next to it, off the lobby of this entertainment complex. It’s a mistake. It’s a movie about Latin America.

  During most of the film Ernesto keeps looking at his watch and thinking about other things. Recently he’s worried that Tania had once been an East German agent, sent to attach herself to him and betray him for the Soviets. No! He worries about another sort of betrayal, about whether she’s been having an affair. But with whom? There are too many candidates. Another doctor, a Cuban who works in the same medical building with him? He’s been to the house sometimes and been very attentive to her, praising the watercolors she’s taken to doing during their vacations. Or maybe it’s the man from the office where she worked as a secretary? He thinks of her with that other man, a tall balding but boyish Anglo who calls everybody “pal.” He thinks of Tania betraying him, making love to this red-faced fellow It’s painful but interesting to think about this man’s cock inside her. He doesn’t have a theory about why she’s done it—if she has—or why he thinks about it lately. He just does, painfully, almost greedily. He strokes her hair, which she’s pulled tight into braids. “The watery sun,” he thinks, “in these misty skies / Has the same mysterious charm for me / Of your treacherous eyes / Shining through their tears.” Funny, he rarely thinks of Baudelaire since coming here. What poem is it that just came into his mind?

  Troubled by his jealousy he has hardly even looked at the movie, a European one as it turned out, and very arty. A card came on the screen saying LAST SCENE. He’s glad. He wants it to be over. After all these years he’s really unchanged, a restless man who finds it hard to sit still.

  Medium long shot. An army patrol enters the scene and walks across a grassy field to a peasant’s thatched hut. Sound of dogs barking.

  Medium shot. Dogs running about and barking as the soldiers come up to the house. A peasant rushes out of his house, to keep the five soldiers from entering.

  CAPTAIN VARGAS: We know you’ve given food to the guerrillas. We should kill you. Maybe we will.

  ISPACA (the peasant): I couldn’t help myself. They threatened to kill me if I didn’t help. They killed all my pigs. There aren’t any more pigs.

  The captain shrugs as if to say, Why is the man talking about pigs?

  He gives orders to a sergeant, who takes clothing out of his knapsack. He puts it on and is dressed as a peasant, in wide dirty pants, and a black jacket. The sergeant stays behind, and the patrol goes off. FADE-OUT.

  Long shot. The guerrillas, led by a big man with a prominent Adam’s apple, move horizontally across the field to Ispaca’s hut. The camera follows them. Dogs are heard barking wildly again, and Ispaca rushes from his hut.

  Interior of the hut. It is very dark and filled with dust and smoke. Close-up of a woman.

  ISPACA’S WIFE: Someone is going to die.

  Medium shot. The sergeant pulls a striped blanket over himself on the floor near the fire.

  The rebels enter the hut.

  JOAQUIN: Who’s that? (His point of view: we see the sergeant, who looks worried.)

  ISPACA: A neighbor. He is very hot. It’s a witch who’s done it to him.

  JOAQUIN (to a woman who came in with him in a striped jersey. His p.o.v.: We see the woman. She is very beautiful, but her face is worn, as if she is feverish): They haven’t learned anything. (To Ispaca:) We’ll send a doctor for him.

  The audience is mostly refugee Cubans and college students. The re
fugees are happy, confident that the guerrillas will be killed. They lean forward in their seats as if they can almost taste the happy moment.

  But in this movie the guerrillas aren’t all bad. Everyone in the film speaks German, and it was obviously made on a small budget, it has poor “production values.” Ernesto wonders if perhaps he and Tania shouldn’t have gone to Europe—not to East Germany certainly, but to the Federal Republic or to France. Politically they aren’t so stupid. They have lost wars, and admit that they have lost them.

  Like me, he thinks. Troubled by his asthma, he fishes in the breast pocket of his plaid sports jacket for his Inhalator. For several years he’s had unreasonable nagging worries that he might have to go without his medicine (he’s even had dreams about it), so he keeps Inhalators everywhere, in the jackets of his clothing, under seat cushions, by the bed, in the glove compartment of the Lincoln.

  He goes up the aisle, feeling he’s watched by the expectant faces of the audience, thinking he’ll get some candy and go to the bathroom.

  The bathroom light hurts his eyes, and the fixtures themselves look dazzlingly clean and white. “A veritable land of Cockaigne, I tell you, where all is rich, clean and shiny, like a clear conscience, like a magnificent set of cookware, like a gaudy set of jewelry.” Invitation to a Voyage, that was its name. And surely this was the place he meant! What would his mother have thought of all this, he thinks, looking about at the empty urinals, the six polished mirrors, the chrome soap-dispensers. She would have understood, he thinks, the pleasures of living comfortably, the pleasure even of a bad conscience that had become as familiar as an old habit that will never give notice.

  The huge lobby is almost empty. A few high-school kids. What are they doing out here? What are they doing anywhere? Their amusement seems to be in just lounging with each other. He stands before the candy counter, looking at the rows and rows of different candies, like a gaudy set of jewelry. It is all so overpriced Monopoly capital. He thinks again that they must remember to bring their own food when they come to these places. Lukewarm orange drinks are no longer as delicious to him as they once were. Now he requires “a cooking poetic and rich and stimulating at once.”

  Medium shot. Joaquin and Ispaca stand outside Ispaca’s thatched hut. Ispaca’s p.o.v.: Joaquin towers over Ispaca. He is as tall as the roof of the hut.

  JOAQUIN: We need your help. Tomorrow you must help us find a place to ford the river.

  Ispaca nods, looking towards the mountains beyond.

  Interior, Ispaca’s hut. Daytime (which in the hut looks the same as nighttime). Medium shot. The soldier gets up from the floor and without a word goes running out of the hut.

  Exterior. The field outside Ispaca’s hut. The sergeant dressed as a peasant runs across the field (long shot) towards the river.

  Exterior. Near the river, thick growth. Large rocks in the foreground.

  Close-up of the sergeant’s face.

  SERGEANT: They arrived. Ispaca will lead them to a ford tomorrow.

  Captain Vargas smiles.

  Exterior. Daytime. Near the river. Medium long shot. Vargas addressing his troops—thirty soldiers.

  VARGAS: We must defend our country against the well-armed foreigners and killers. They may have defects and perhaps virtues, but they aren’t invulnerable or invincible. (The camera pans across the frightened young faces of the men.)

  Exterior. Nighttime. By the river. Shots of the soldiers taking up positions. Behind rocks. In the junglelike growth.

  Exterior. Ispaca’s hut. An army patrol crossing the field in medium long shot. Ispaca’s family, sneaking out of their hut. They run into the patrol.

  Medium shot of Ispaca and the army patrol. Ispaca has all the household things on his back. A soldier knocks Ispaca to the ground.

  Close-up of Ispaca on the ground. Close-up of his farm tools and gourds rolling about in the field. Medium shot of the children gathering them up.

  CAPTAIN VARGAS: you will return to your hut and wait for the guerrillas. Your wife will stay with us. Tomorrow you will lead the guerrillas to Vado del Yeso. The river narrows there but is sufficiently turbulent.

  Ispaca’s face in medium close-up.

  ISPACA: Dear God please don’t hurt me!

  Vargas’s face in medium close-up.

  VARGAS: Your concern for your wife is touching. (Vargas laughs, an unpleasant breathy sound.)

  Vargas and Ispaca in medium shot.

  VARGAS: Of course we won’t hurt you. You’re our friend! You put on a white shirt, and it will be easy for us to recognize you.

  Exterior. Night. Near the river. More scenes of the army patrols choosing positions in the high growth. High-angle shot so we can now see the layout of the forces around the river, in a horseshoe position.

  Exterior. Night. Near the river. The army can’t be seen. We hear the sound of mosquitoes, and can almost feel the heat.

  We wait.

  A card comes on the screen. Large black letters, filling the frame: THE END.

  The audience stirs restlessly. Are they to be cheated of the real ending, the one they long for?

  No. The movie goes on.

  Exterior. Night. By the river. The captain’s face in close-up. The captain’s p.o.v. of the rest of the river, and the crossing.

  Really, Ernesto thinks, it was all shot in the daytime. That’s called shooting day for night. You put a filter over the lens until it looks dark enough on the film. Since coming to America he has learned how these things are done, learned words like “production values.” It’s the greatest American pleasure: being in the know, backstage. The whole country likes to think itself a theater. That reminds him of something Tamara once said, about intellectuals wanting to be in the know, and … And what? He can’t remember.

  Metaphysical speculations. That reminds him of Walter’s play. Not physical. He smiles. But he doesn’t want to think about Walter. Walter’s play made his life then sound absurd. Was it absurd? Actually, he feels fine now. This particular place he’s in, this movie theater that feels like being inside a cash register, it’s absurd. Absurdity is a delightful privilege, like fancy French perfume or angst.

  “Bolivians are funny people,” he says to Tamara. It’s absurd that they should be so poor and he so rich.

  She takes his hand in hers, stroking it. “They are absurd,” she says. Her Spanish still has a slight stiffness to it, a slight Germanic tinge. He is touched by how close together their thoughts are. Her stroking makes him feel restless. He looks at the beautiful strong lines of her face, her prominent bones, and feels how much he loves her and his sweet new life. A veritable land of Cockaigne, where everything resembles you. Shall we ever live, shall we pass into this picture my mind has painted, this painting that resembles you? The beloved woman, the chosen sister. He hands her the package of chocolate-covered raisins.

  Exterior. Night. By the river. The captain’s p.o.v.

  We see a black knot of people moving alongside the bank of the river, the outline of the jungle in the back. The knot moves very slowly, stops, and waves a woman forward. She moves to the head of the group unsteadily, as if she has been pushed. She has a graceful figure, in blue pants and a striped jersey.

  The camera pans to Braulio, a tall black man who is seen to be ahead even of the woman, by the bank of the river. Close-up of the black man. Head down, he studies the ground for footprints.

  But the soldiers, Ernesto thinks, have erased their footprints with branches, the way their Yanqui advisers told them to. A clawing begins in his chest. Where is his Inhalator? He feels furiously in his pockets till he finds it.

  BRAULIO (speaking to Ispaca, who is a few paces behind him): What is that?

  ISPACA (nervously): Those are my old footprints. I was out here not long ago.

  (Checking the spot.) Those are my footprints.

  Sometimes Ernesto stays up all night, till daybreak, watching TV, nights when the temperature in the warm bath of his life seems to have gotten a little tepid.
The stations here never go off the air, so there must be, Ernesto thinks, a lot of people who sometimes feel as he does. There are Spanish broadcasts late at night—but he doesn’t care for those. He wants to learn about the United States of America. He is always learning, mostly from his children. Sometimes he feels that he and his children are the life forms of different geological epochs. They are the more evolved creatures, and he is a dinosaur. Everything gets reversed in the land of Cockaigne: the children know more about the U.S. than he does, about the essence of the place, how to dress and talk, and what to think about the popular music (it’s easier for him than the complicated Latin tunes. 1, 2, 3, 4, like an army marching). A land of Cockaigne where the children teach the adults; the performer, the speaker, is the child; the audience are the adults. It makes leadership impossible.

  Exterior. Night. Medium shot of the riverbank. The guerrillas and Ispaca embrace.

  The captain’s point of view. Medium long shot. Braulio walks into the river, a machete held in his right hand and an automatic weapon with a curved bullet clip in his left. His body is struck by the current and he staggers. Close-up of Braulio’s face. The current was unexpected. Why had Ispaca led them to such a tricky crossing? But he walks on.

  Medium shot. The water is up to his calves. He stops, puts machete and rifle in the same hand for a moment, bends over, and takes a drink. Close-up of his face as his hand brings the water to his mouth. The water is cool and delicious.

  A card comes on the screen, filling the frame with big black letters: THE END.

  Ernesto understands: the point of the movie is this: a man is about to die, and he tastes some water, and it is very cold and good. Why isn’t the sensual world and the pleasures it offers us enough? My father, Ernesto thinks, would have liked that point. His father had thought that that would be the way to live, enjoying each moment—for just like this Braulio, we’re always on the point of death, and we don’t know when it’s coming. That was his father’s theory. His father had had the theory of enjoyment instead of enjoyment. That would have been his fate, too, if he hadn’t found both Tamara (Tania, he thinks. But he only calls her that when they make love, and only in a whisper) and this country. A veritable land of Cockaigne, where all is beautiful, rich, tranquil, honest; where luxury is pleased to mirror itself in order; where life is rich and sweet to breathe; where disorder, turmoil and the unforeseen are excluded; where happiness is married to silence; where the cooking itself is poetic, rich and stimulating at once; where all resembles you, my dear Angel. He touches her braids, plays them between his fingers like the edges of a blanket, and she smiles, still looking at the screen.