The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  But he revived a bit when they gave us some potatoes and plates of stew. I bit down on a soft bitter taste that still had skin on it. “Guinea pig?” I said to Ricardo.

  “Who gives a fuck?”

  I saw his point, and ate greedily.

  After eating Che sent the vanguard on, and he and I went over to where a group of men sat on the ground by one of the huts, talking and chewing coca. These mountains are the place where the serious coca-chewing goes on. They stuffed great wads into their mouths, and spat to the side, spat above each other’s head, spat indifferent to where the droplets might go. In black ponchos and brown caps, their shapes were rounded off, like stones. This group had been at its chewing for a long time when we came and stood behind them and listened to their stories.

  If a hero is captured he is burned alive, or the dogs are set on him, the long sleek ones that rip their flesh. And once a hero’s wife was captured and her breasts and arms were hacked off. Then they sent her back with a note, “All those who rebel must see that they will eventually have to submit to the knife.”

  But (another man said) that makes the heroes fiercer and more determined, for they see that their opponents, our oppressors, are animals, not yet human beings. So when they move in a high gorge the guerrillas trap them, rolling boulders down so that the army can’t move forward, and then the heroes roll more boulders down on top of the soldiers and crush them.

  An army general (one man said) was taken captive by the heroes. They took him back to their kingdom near the Nancahuazu River, and the heroes made the general drink chicha, and tied him to a post. (And at this a chicha bottle—a Coke bottle filled with the cloudy liquid—was passed around.) Then the heroes made sport of him, throwing fruit at him, and they made the general shave off his beard, and cut his hair. The heroes changed him from a Spaniard and a general into a poor Indian, like us.

  But (another man said) they weren’t done with him. The heroes had all the general’s bones taken from his body, leaving the skin intact. The heroes had made him into a drum! The shoulders formed one end of the drum (the man touched his shoulders). And the stomach was the other end. (The Indian pounded on his own small belly, but it was muffled by his black poncho and made no sound.) So when the general was stiff he was transformed into an instrument for their festivals.

  Their festivals! (another man said, and I felt I could hear the spark of inspiration in his voice, and that he was adding to the story as he went, saying things never heard before. Yet all he described was true for each of them, as soon as said, as if saying made it so. Can they, I wondered, make mistakes?) At the festivals, when the llamas are sacrifìced—On the high white stone platform

  —Yes, then all the dead guerrillas are brought out, each one preserved perfectly

  —For they never let the army capture their dead, but take them back to the Nancahuazu

  —Yes, and they look as they did when alive, their hair—and even their eyelashes

  —Yes, just as they were in life. They give food and drink to the dead, and the heroes drink a toast in chicha, swearing to kill all the soldiers who are here now, and all who will come.

  And nothing was said for a few moments, as the bottle was passed around in memory of the toasts the heroes drank.

  And during the festival He looks into the entrails of the llama, and into the patterns of the clouds before the sun, and He knows from these when to attack.

  —Yes, and He marches before the heroes, chanting, Kill kill kill. And the heroes show their legs to the soldiers

  —Yes, to display their contempt.

  —Yes and He goes before the others, and holds up His hand,

  —Yes, and it is filled with blood. Look, they say, He has a bloody hand, and the soldiers are terrified. He is a weak man, no stronger than we are

  —Yes, so weak that the others must sometimes carry Him,

  —Yes, yet He is terrible to the soldiers, when He holds up His bloody hand.

  —A hand like Christ’s, like Jesus.

  No one spoke, but they leaned back from the last man who had compared Che to Jesus, and a chorus of saliva pattered above his head, and onto the ground. He had made them angry. He had made a mistake! They weren’t simply making it up any which way as they went, but were describing something that they all knew! But somehow they didn’t know they knew it; so in a way they weren’t describing it; they were discovering it by making it up.

  —Not like Christ, you idiot! (one of them shouted, his voice filled with a very palpable hatred. To make a mistake here was a serious business. It required implacable opposition to erase it.) Not like Christ! Nothing like Christ!

  —Nothing like the stinking Christ.

  —Not like the sad little Jesus!

  —Nothing like Jesus! They have sent many priests to him, to convert him and his followers. But he will not receive them.

  —He has them killed.

  —He has them killed, and he has their bodies made into drums for their festivals.

  —And the heroes save all his hair, and all the bones of the food he has touched, so that they cannot fall into the hands of the priest to cast a spell on him.

  —And there is a woman

  —Tania

  —His wife

  —Who is also his sister, the beloved woman

  —The woman who had his child, the chosen sister,

  —And she takes the hairs from his clothes, and swallows them.

  —And when he wants to spit she extends her hand and he

  —for he is very powerful

  —he spits into it.

  —He is very powerful, for those who follow him are Heroes, and have the protection of the Giant

  —But he is more than a Hero.

  —He is more than a king.

  Che stepped forward, standing above one of the men. The last light, a red glow, was all one could see by.

  “I am your Che Guevara,” he said.

  I looked at their hero, their king, their … god … and he was a short skinny man, with a brown beard, and sorrowful eyes. A man almost without the spark of life in him; a revolutionary; a doomed man; a dead man; a specter’s specter. His cheeks were hollow, his torn green pants held up by a piece of vine, his feet covered in rags caked with dirt and blood.

  But the men didn’t see what I saw, because they didn’t look at him. They simply stopped talking, and passed the bottle around, and the bags of coca, and waited for him to turn away.

  They had no more use for him.

  So Che is first among the chiefs, first among the first (one said, as Che hobbled away into the dark). And at festivals he wears the wings of the condor on his back.

  —Yes, that is how the Spanish got the idea for their angels

  —And the other heroes wear small animals on their hands, as they do in battle, to frighten the soldiers

  —And he wears the head of a puma, for he is descended from the puma.

  —And so he killed his mother when he was born, for he ripped open her womb. The blood she spilled cost her her life.

  —And he

  And he called me, so I went back to the center guard, and the march away from here.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  9/25/67: I say, You yourselves must rule. And they say, You must be our king.

  I say, You yourselves form the Giant, you shall see yourselves in the king.

  And they say, Show us the god!

  Not of them, but utterly beyond them. Give us the god! Too early for an immanent deity. They say, Give us the Man Himself.

  I must say now that I am that man? (As the Inca did. For the royal family knew that theirs was no lineage from the sun, nothing but a suit of shining armor that reflected light into their first followers’ eyes. The Inca entered the top of the pyramid, the small foul-smelling room where Punchao the idol dwelled. Then he emerged to tell the Indians what he wished; and they obeyed.) Fidel would say, I am that Man.

  The Bolivian radio announced that Loyola Guzman tried
to commit suicide while being interrogated in the Ministry of the Interior. She jumped from a third-floor window (where once I had vomited on the minister himself), but her fall was broken by the cornice of the building and she was only slightly injured.

  At the hospital, they say she told the press that she had wanted to kill herself because she had betrayed her comrades.

  9/26/67: A kitchen in an apartment in La Paz, yellow wallpaper with milkmaids on it. The remnants of the city network meet, to talk over the day’s events, the arrests. These are the very outer circle of our contacts, friends of friends, fellow travelers, men fascinated by the study of History, and its strange turns, by which out of the strong comes forth sweetness (or vice versa). “Yes, I knew one of the guerrillas,” a bearded man says at a cafe. “But you mustn’t tell anyone.”

  Now they sit at a round glass table with mugs scattered across it, and pieces of paper. One man points to a child asleep on the stone floor: “Is it all right to have him here?” The boy sleeps in his pajamas by his mother’s seat.

  “Of course,” his mother says. “Let him dream his dreams. What harm can it do?”

  Surely, someone says, there is something that can be done for the guerrillas? He stares into his coffee cup. Vile-tasting stuff. Does she draw the water directly from the tap, for her wretched instant coffee, without heating it?

  The few dissidents from the Party suggest that maybe a group could be formed to reinforce the sectors we control.

  Our remaining agent, or one who knew her, says that that is impractical. They had thought of it, in fact they had had seventy men ready to begin a month ago. But they hadn’t begun, and now it is too late. There are too many soldiers in the area, with North American advisers. In fact, the guerrillas don’t control any sectors anymore.

  Another plan is suggested: a front could be opened in Cochabamba or Alto Beni, to relieve the pressure on us.

  They analyze the proposal. Could it be done quickly enough? Who would lead? (Always a sticky point, worth squabbling over. The leader must have the right political tendencies.)

  No, they decide, it is impossible now.

  It is getting late, and it’s dangerous (they pretend) to be together like this. They finish their coffee, turn their collars up before going out.

  During the night one woman sits at the glass table, cutting articles from the newspaper. She keeps a scrapbook of the guerrilla campaign, of the History of the World in Its Many Disguises, her universal history of infamy. The guerrillas were fools, she had thought at first, adventurers, no better than bandits; they knew nothing of this country. But now that the last remnant is about to be snuffed out, die beyond help, become a fit subject only for discussion and mourning, not for action, she admires them, the purity of their hopeless action, the heroism of their leader, a man too good for this world.

  It’s unfortunate, the others think on their way home, walking quickly, head down. But it is too late. They have tried. But there is nothing to be done.

  The radio also reports that the guerrillas are surrounded and will soon be wiped out.

  9/27/67: Note for the revision of the essay: They will never chant their own name. Because they hate themselves they must have stories; and they will always hate themselves. The priest offers the sacrifice, separating himself from the masses. What if the revolutionary made himself the sacrifice, to shame them more? Then they have sacrificed him. (Not the god who rules, but the god who dies.) The hero must become the proper figure, the god they cannot forget, entering their flesh like a hook that they writhe about on, attracted by it, savaged by it, until they act

  From My Journal

  9/28/67: Pichacho. Midmorning on a clear dry day. By the time the center guard arrived the men of the vanguard had already joined the festival. Our men were scattered about the sides of the large dirt square in front of the imposing church, Spanish-built, with carillons in towers on either side of the roof.

  The Indians danced in the dirt to a three-man band—one man with a wooden harp, and two with flutes, a long wooden one, wound round with string, and another that looked like a dozen reed pipes banded together. The musicians were tranced; probably they had been drinking chicha and chewing coca since daybreak.

  The dancers had their arms around each other’s shoulders and bobbed up and down, bending their knees in time to the changing chords, a long line, a disorderly sort of procession, constantly losing its balance, then catching its footing and going on. The men wore embroidered shirts—festival clothes—and long caps that made them look like basset hounds. The women had on shawls of blue and red over their wide black skirts, a gay sort of mourning costume. And the thought of mourning made me tremble. I have been terrified every moment since my last talk with Che, when he said, We must submit.

  Che sent the vanguard on to La Higuera, and stood with the old men on the edge of the square, watching over the big tin pots of chicha. The old men’s mouths moved in time to the music, chewing their wads of coca, spitting in the dirt to punctuate the rhythm.

  Only one of the old men spoke Spanish. He asked Che if our work for the Giant was going well. Was it true, he started to ask—and then thought better of it. Why let Che deny what they all knew, that we could turn ourselves into birds, that our farts were like thunder?

  This man had a high womanly sort of voice and eyes clouded as if they were filled with broken pieces of translucent glass. Every so often he said something to the other men in the line with him, but even as he spoke with Che he stared straight ahead at the dance.

  Che said that our work for the Giant was going splendidly. He held up his hand, and at that all the men turned towards him, and bowed their heads. “We cover them,” Che said, “with blood.”

  Along one side of the dirt space there was a stone wall, its white paint flaking off to reveal the gray stone beneath. Coco and Inti sat on the wall, clapping to the music.

  What did Che hear? I wondered. A few repetitive chords played over and over, endlessly, without variation, or something, now, more complicated?

  I preferred the old days, when I was sure that he was simply tone-deaf.

  The old man looked Che up and down, appraising his body as if it were a horse. He knew that Che had submitted, that this was a god who they might examine like a store dummy. He was theirs now. Che wore dirty clothes, his feet were wrapped in filthy rags and bits of paper but probably they saw light streaming from every opening, and the wings of a condor on his back. Che had the poverty of Christ, I thought, but a rifle in one of his bloody hands that made him as terrible as Jehovah. Maybe he is the god for our time, and our people, a pathetic little motherfucker clothed in the glory of his violence.

  “The generals say you will be captured soon?” He made it a question, I thought, so as not to insult or provoke us.

  “We have heard that many times before,” Che said, “in many places. But we are here.”

  And I thought that that was true—in Cuba, the Congo, in Vietnam—and I took heart for a moment. We had escaped from scrapes as narrow as the defile between these mountains.

  “You don’t seek death?”

  “No,” Che said. “We want to live, to continue winning victories against the army and imperialists, until many men share our vision, and take their place in the body of the Giant. But the Bolivian people have not been worthy of the Giant, their nation. The Giant turns away, ashamed of this people.”

  And the old man looked away from the dancers, down at the ground, and scuffed the dust with his sandal like a child. He was ashamed to have disappointed the Giant! And I think that Che had intended to shame this old man.

  “Is your father alive?” the man asked, still looking at the ground.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.” He looked back at the dancers, his half-blind eyes filled with tears. I knew what that meant: it meant farewell. It meant that it was a sad thing for a son to die before his father.

  Why had Che lied? Had he? I couldn’t remember anymore if his father were alive.
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br />   The man said something that sounded to me like, He will have his own house, a grand one. For him and all his friends.

  Che said nothing. But I knew what that meant, too: not a palace, but a grave. Che was—at least—king. He had to be buried like a pharaoh with all his line. I saw the palace, with the long steps in front. It filled me with more fear than my body could hold, my stomach turned in agony, wanting to spew out my terror.

  The dancers, the white wall, my comrades shook. I wanted to tell someone how I felt, but if I tried to speak to Che or Ricardo I would stammer uncontrollably, I was that frightened. I hated the old man with his cloudy rheumy eyes. I hated all these people who set us apart.

  The old man dipped the lip of an empty Coca-Cola bottle half under the chicha, and it made thick bubbles filling up. I tried a trick that has worked in the past, concentrating on one small thing: I tried to imagine myself inside one of the bubbles, but it broke, and spilled me out into the liquid where I was gasping for air, inside the bottle, drowning. He offered us the bottle with me inside it. But before Che could reach out, I took it and had a big swallow. It had a raw taste that set little fires in the desert of my throat. But it did nothing for my fear. I wanted to throw up.

  When I handed the bottle back to the old man he wiped the lip of the bottle on his shirt. We were heroes. Kings. Gods. But we were lepers, too. He drank, and passed the bottle to Che.

  The dancers bobbed up and down, their hands on each other’s shoulders. A saint was brought from the church, and set in the center of the clearing. A plaster figure, a store dummy, like a parody human being. If it moved, I thought, it would be in spastic jerks, like Benjamin before he fell off the ledge; into the river. And if it talked it wouldn’t be a sacred text, but a horrible dirty joke told by a man with a speech impediment, a stutterer who said the last line of the joke over and over, unable to complete it, until the words became unintelligible and terrifying. You would end up on your knees in fear before him.

  The saint, a North American face, was dressed as an Indian, in a hat made of light-brown rushes with red ribbons on it. His pants were painted on him, and strings of dried fruit had been tied around his neck, with bits of bright red-and-gold cloth. He looked particularly stiff with all the swirling motion around him, sitting in a small light wooden chair, a child’s chair, with long poles attached to the seat in front and back. The dancers picked him up and carried him aloft on their shoulders, passed him about, and moved around and under him, each person with his arm on another’s shoulder, up and down. The band ran through its Che chords, the same ones over and over.