The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  Really it isn’t the end. The movie goes on.

  The river. Nighttime. The captain’s p.o.v. Medium long shot. Braulio goes a little bit farther on, walking towards the center of the screen. The water is suddenly deep moving and extremely turbulent. Close-up of Braulio’s face. He is very suspicious now. He looks around, but doesn’t see anything.

  Medium long shot. He walks forward.

  The riverbank, behind some rocks. The captain and the lieutenant.

  LIEUTENANT: They’re close enough. Let’s open fire.

  CAPTAIN VARGAS (his face tense): No, I want to be sure of all the targets. Wait until the column is all the way in the water.

  And his men, unlike some other men, somewhere, obey him.

  The camera moves in a slow tracking shot towards Braulio as he walks forward, the water sloshing around him.

  Braulio looks towards the camera, which is to say, towards the Captain’s p.o.v. Cut to Braulio’s p.o.v. He looks directly at the clump of rocks where the captain hides. We should feel for a moment that they look into each other’s eyes. But the guerrilla doesn’t see anything, for he continues to move forward, to the rocks and the shore.

  Or does he? Perhaps he knows what he is moving towards, perhaps he has survived too many comrades and wants to die.

  Tight close-up of Braulio’s face and neck. We see his Adam’s apple, prominent, bobbing up and down as he swallows.

  Medium long shot. Braulio walks to the right of the captain’s rocks. Braulio raises his machete as a signal for the others to come across.

  Braulio’s and the captain’s p.o.v., which are virtually identical now. The guerrillas, spread out in a line as they enter the water. The woman carrying a knapsack, rolls her blue pants up to her knees. She is last. The camera pans across the line of guerrillas.

  • • •

  The guerrillas are all in the river, some close to the shore. The water is up to the woman’s waist where she stands in the middle. The current pulls at her, and she loses her footing, putting her hands out into the water, as if it were solid. She regains her footing and stands.

  A high-angle shot of the whole scene. The guerrillas halfway across the river. The soldiers hidden here and there in the foliage and rocks. They look like children playing hide-and-seek.

  A wider higher angle still, and the people are little more than dots in the cartoon quilt of the landscape.

  A wider higher angle still and you can’t see the people at all, just mountains and deserts and rivers, the landscape of Bolivia, looking like a relief map.

  A helicopter shot, Ernesto thinks, at first—in the know—laughing at himself for taking satisfaction, yet still taking satisfaction in knowing. But the highest angle of all, how did they get that?

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

  His father would have liked this part too, Ernesto thinks. Finding our place—our not-too-significant place—in the natural order. His father’s emotions, his anxieties, his dissatisfactions with his life, they must have been terrible things, if he had to find such complicated ways to convince himself that they didn’t matter.

  High-angle shots were something you could do in the movies, but not in life. And Marxism? That was an impossible high-angle shot, too, on one’s own petty concerns.

  He squeezed Tania’s hand.

  “It must be near the end,” she says, sighing reassuringly. “The real end.”

  For the movie has gone on.

  Medium shot. From the bank of the river. The firing begins, a tremendous sound made up of a thousand little sounds. It should drown out the roar of the river. The guerrillas fire back towards the camera, but it is clear that they can’t find any targets, they are firing in all directions, at the bank where they came from, at the far shore, even into the river or up at the sky.

  Captain Vargas’s point of view. Braulio is running towards the ambush. He comes face to face with the lieutenant. A close-up of Braulio’s face, mad with rage and terror. A close-up of the lieutenant’s, soft and scared. Braulio’s machete blade starts at the upper-right corner of the frame and comes down in slow motion, splitting the boy’s head. Blood gushes out.

  The captain fires directly into Braulio’s face.

  Ernesto thinks about shooting a photo and shooting a man. Is the filmmaking a comment on that? Why is the word the same? But he finds he cannot think about it, he has to watch the screen, as if someone won’t let him think, won’t let him distract himself.

  Close-up of the river water, a multitude of little red spots that turn into purple swirls.

  THE END.

  What does that close-up of the spotted water mean? Perhaps that even terrible events can release something beautiful if only we have eyes to see. He wants to make love to Tania/Tamara. He wants to feel her press her breasts into his hand. Could she have been so passionate with him lately if she were having an affair? Or does that mean that she is having an affair? He hopes that she’ll be in the mood after all this carnage.

  He remembers their first movies here, in this country. He had stood in front of the candy stand just staring, unable to believe the number of things offered, all beautifully packaged in bright colors. He had wanted to get the high-school kid behind the counter to describe each one to him. The people in line behind him had grown restless. Now he wondered if they had thought he was on drugs, for he has since then seen young people in a similar sort of stupor at the candy counter. Tamara had suggested that he try a new one each time, and he had found, to his disappointment, that most of the candies were variations on the same, a sugar and gelatin mixture, with coloring added. “A singular land,” he thought, “superior to others as art is superior to nature, where nature is revised by dreams, where it is corrected, embellished, reworked.” Now he always got the chocolate-covered raisins—a pitifully small number of them, considering the price.

  In those days he and Tamara had gone to the movies just to practice their English. They still usually went to American movies, trying to learn about their country, to keep up with their children. He hoped Tania enjoyed hearing the German tonight.

  Medium shot. The captain’s point of view. The woman waves a bit of white cloth torn from her blouse as a signal that the guerrillas want to surrender. The sounds of screaming now drown out the sounds of firing. The screams are so loud that they are painful to hear.

  Medium close-up of Vargas’s face. He is shaking his head no to his men. He isn’t interested in surrender. The firing continues.

  Medium long shot. Joaquin has gotten back to the bank they had started from. He runs along the edge, a fleeing shadow. The camera tracks him. He gets almost to the edge of the screen, as if he has outrun the camera, where he is shot and killed.

  The river, from above. The dead, the wounded, the knapsacks are dragged along indifferently by the current. Medium long shot: the soldiers fire at everything that moves, killing the dead over and over.

  We see that one of the smaller guerrillas, Paco, let himself be carried downstream, and another guerrilla, Freddy, swims over to join him. They get out and hide behind rocks, watching their dead comrades float by, swept past by the current.

  The army p.o.v. Freddy’s head is seen peering out from behind the rocks. Bullets begin to chip at the rocks. Screams. Close-up of Freddy as he is hit twice, once in the right forearm, and once below the shoulder, in the armpit.

  Close-up of Paco, with his arm around Freddy.

  FREDDY: Stop firing! Stop firing! We surrender! I am a doctor! For Christ’s sake stop firing!

  Medium shot. Three soldiers approach the rocks, shouting: “Come out with your hands up!”

  Soldiers’ p.o.v. Paco rises with his hands up. Then he bends down again, to hold Freddy up.

  • • •

  Medium shot. The soldiers enter the frame. They kick at the two guerrillas to separate them. They push them. The camera moves in to watch. They knock them down, and then order them to get up again.

 
When the soldiers stop, Paco tries to give Freddy first aid, ripping his own dirty shirt to get cloth to bind Freddy’s wounds.

  First soldier kicks at Paco.

  SECOND SOLDIER: Leave him alone!

  First soldier is from Paco’s home town.

  FIRST SOLDIER: you murdering son of a bitch!

  He kicks at Paco’s legs, trying to get him in the crotch.

  Paco covers his genitals with his hands and tries to dance out of reach.

  “Bolivians are funny,” Ernesto says.

  PACO (crying): Leave me alone.

  FIRST SOLDIER: Sure. (He shoots Paco in the arm.)

  THE END.

  “It will never end,” Tamara says with mock anger. “It goes on forever.” She gives Ernesto’s arm a squeeze.

  It’s impossible, he thinks. She couldn’t be having an affair. He has never loved anyone so much, never perhaps loved anyone before. He hasn’t tried to remain in touch with his former wives, children, lives. Better to make a clean break. But he couldn’t stand to lose Tania. Sometimes when he comes home before her, he sees a pair of her shoes on the floor, little blue ones, like ballet slippers; they come from Hong Kong. How dear they look.

  As the soldiers torment Paco we hear Vargas’s voice off screen, shouting: “Bring the prisoners here!”

  Medium shot. The two prisoners are half dragged over to where the other corpses have been laid out on the riverbank.

  VARGAS: Tell us the names of the dead.

  PACO: That was our chief, Joaquin. And the black man is what’s left of Braulio. That one is Alejandro, a Cuban. That is Polo. That is Ernesto. That is Moises Guevara.

  Vargas in close-up. It is clear that there is a certain name he is greedy for.

  VARGAS: You mean Che Guevara?

  FREDDY: No, a union leader from the mines, Moises Guevara. Che was not in our group.

  Freddy collapses next to the dead bodies, as if he wanted to join them. Shot from above of Freddy writhing on the ground.

  FREDDY: I’m being bitten! My arm is being bitten!

  Medium shot. Paco tries to kneel down beside Freddy but is restrained. A corpsman bends over him.

  CORPSMAN: Shut up!

  FREDDY (shouting): I’m being clawed up! I’m being clawed up! For God’s sake stop it! Stop it! Stop it!

  The captain leans down and shoots Freddy in the chest and head with a burst of automatic fire.

  PACO, in medium close-up: And that was Freddy, our doctor.

  A card comes on and fills the frame with big black letters: THE END.

  Then the whole thing starts again. The guerrillas come to the edge of the river. Braulio enters the cold water. But this time in the form of a drawing. Then it is as if someone were rubbing away at the drawing, blurring the outline to a dirty smudge. Then all the deaths—Braulio shot in the face, Joaquin falling by the riverbank, Paco shot in the chest—are clipped together. Hands reach up. A woman’s body hits the water. Braulio’s machete opens a man’s head. A small boy, his head shaved for lice, lies arms akimbo in an open field. Braulio’s head is blown off.

  THE END.

  A white light fills the screen. No end credits.

  They weren’t wearing coats, so there’s nothing to gather up but their gray umbrella. They file down the aisle to the exit.

  The night air is warm. They have parked by the Causeway, near the ocean. Ernesto puts his arm around Tamara, gathering her under the umbrella as a light rain starts to fall. 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

  “What did you think of it, my dear Angel?”

  She smiles at him, as if this were a new pet name, and she puts her hand out in front of her. Her hand wavers up and down. “So-so.” For a moment she loses her footing as if water were pulling at her legs, but his hand around her shoulders steadies her.

  They agree. It wasn’t that good. It was mere rhetoric, not a real imagination of their dying.

  “See on these canals,” he says, “These ships sleeping / In vagabond spirit / It is to fulfill / Your last desire / That they come from the ends of the earth. / The setting suns clothe the fields, / The canals, the entire town / In hyacinth and gold / The world falls asleep / In a warm light.”

  JULY 6

  It can’t be done. By the end Ernesto was Che only, without possibility of change, without even the possibility of “descending.” In one of his adolescent notes he wrote, “To be a revolutionary, finally: to create in one’s own life the conditions so that there is no life outside the Revolution, so that if the Revolution does not win, you die.” He cannot be translated; not there anyway, to the land of Cockaigne, to the life of luxury, of “petty” jealousy, of physical love—of love! “Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize their love for the people, for the most hallowed causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the terrain where ordinary men put their love into practice.”

  Descend. Or rise.

  Anyway, he had his way. I cannot even imagine him doing it without it all—him, and the world he is woven with—becoming absurd.

  Bolivia, September 1967

  From My Journal

  9/15/67: Pacho declared that he is tired of being bossed around by Cubans. He threw his knapsack into the dirt and pounded on Benigno’s thin face with his fists—like a young girl having a tantrum—blackening our machine-gunner’s eye. Inti and Coco separated them.

  Sadly, it was not only hysterical, but unfair; Benigno is surely the mildest and least bossy of any of us.

  9/16/67: The once fat Peruvian, Eusebio, says that the Bolivians are pigs. They eat up all the food. “They steal extra meals for themselves. They help each other out. They give each other extras.”

  We sat on the ground, cleaning our rifles, talking. “And you, Che,” he said, “you let them get away with it.”

  9/17/67: Eusebio rushed into camp, in the small valley, to announce that soldiers were coming around the bare brown hill ahead of us.

  We scrambled about collecting our knapsacks.

  “How many?” Che asked.

  Eusebio, struck suddenly dumb, held up a hand and showed five fingers. He kept his other hand up, too, showing a fist. Was that a zero? Eusebio’s eyes looked suddenly blank and lifeless.

  Che sent Benigno to look. The soldiers turned out to be ghosts, a hallucination.

  “He’s psychotic,” Ricardo said to me, by way of showing off his clinical vocabulary.

  Che took Eusebio aside as we prepared to march, packing the mule with the little firewood we’d been able to find. Eusebio swore that he wasn’t worried, that he knew we’d get out all right. But he hadn’t had any sleep because of the punishment Che had given him. (Eusebio had fallen asleep at his post, allowing the soldiers to attack us in camp a week ago. And he had denied it, so he’d been given six days’ extra duty.)

  9/18/67: Che talked with Pacho on the march. A little fellow, Pacho is worried by our lack of contact with the city, but remains, he says, firm in his commitment to country-or-death until the end.

  Eusebio, skin hanging loosely on his neck, took me aside and begged me to speak to Che about taking him out of the vanguard. “I can’t get along with Ricardo,” he said. “The man is a monster.”

  I saw his point. I spoke to Che, but he refused to do it.

  9/19/67: Ricardo, the monster, had another run-in with Eusebio; perhaps he’d gotten wind of Eusebio’s complaints—Ricardo can smell that kind of thing. Ricardo says that Eusebio called him an asshole, so he gave him another six days’ punishment of guard duty. Che respected Ricardo’s decision, though no one thinks it is just. (After all, R. is an asshole.)

  Eusebio accused Benigno of taking an extra meal. Be
nigno admitted that he had eaten some suet from hides.

  9/20/67: Moro says that the men complain of him unfairly. He can’t walk well because of malaria. And indeed Benigno screamed at Moro this morning that he was holding everything up, that his delay would kill us all.

  The Bolivian radio reported that sixteen members of the underground network in La Paz have been arrested, among them Loyola Guzman, their leader. In her apartment they claim to have found a list of the guerrillas’ city contacts—though I think she was a good intelligent person, and unlikely to keep a list lying around.

  Still, the news had a demoralizing effect, like acid dissolving our bodies, lacerating into pieces the One Body of the guerrilla.

  Pacho said that Marcos stole fifteen bullets from his magazine, because Marcos knows the army is about to attack and doesn’t want Pacho to be able to defend himself. Pacho has sinister close-set eyes if you ask me, and speaks only to make trouble. He has run-ins with all the Cubans. Fortunately, the other Bolivians think he is as crazy as Camba and Eusebio and pay no attention to him.