The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  “Run the maze,” Che said to me. “Coca music. Life will never change, life must never change. Not just a complaint, but a dream. They want, finally, not this life but a life that doesn’t change.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. I don’t understand him anymore, and I knew, sadly, that my incomprehension would pain him. But how the fuck would he know what it sounded like? “It’s a very complicated tune, actually,” I said, lying, to annoy him. “It changes all the time.”

  Che ignored me. The crowd swirled around its center, the saint. Camba, our little crazy one with the eyebrows that met above his nose, came bobbing by, on the outside of the crowd, not far from where we stood. “Where’s his rifle?” Che said—but not angrily, almost musingly.

  No one had an arm about Camba. His big eyes looked sickly huge in his skull. He sang his own little song to himself in Spanish. “We must dance!” he shouted. He put his foot down hard in the litter of leather tatters that is all that is left of his boots. His ripped pants leg flapped in the wind as he went. “We must dance!” he shouted to us, by way, maybe, of offering Che further instruction. He lifted each foot very high, up to his waist, and then slammed it down to earth; I winced to watch. “We must dance!” he sang. “We must dance! We must dance! We must dance!”

  I loved crazy Camba then, for I was fascinated by him in a way that distracted me from my terror. And it made me feel better to watch his high-stepping, as if his boots crushed the sharp-toothed weasel in my stomach. I wanted to give him a hug.

  He looked at us looking at him.

  “Why the long face?” he said to Che.

  “What are you doing?” Che asked, stupidly.

  Camba laughed—too fast, mechanically, more like someone imitating someone laughing, the way their saint would laugh, if he ever cared to. “We’re dancing, Che. Can’t you see? We must dance!” This time it sounded like an obligation, a curse even. Some of the other Indians smiled at him. “What did you think we were doing? You must join us!”

  “No,” Che said. He pointed to his feet wrapped in their rags and pages of Lenin’s writings.

  “Ah, Che,” Camba said, “you know you lack a certain feeling. If you had your way there wouldn’t be any dancing in the world to come.”

  One of Camba’s lucid moments.

  “Camba,” Che said, “you’re the giddy one. You do the dancing. Give them a new dance. The Camba.”

  From Guevara’s Journal

  9/28/67: … Further notes. His authors finish the hero’s work, that he must leave undone. Only when he is not can they be. Are they taking his blood for their dreams, or offering him their blood, so that he might live? A hundred shapes are given to the hero’s life, by a multitude of authors.

  An Indian imagines a store dummy, festooned with strings of dried fruit, speaking Quechua. But there will be psychoanalytic versions (the hero as case history). A movie—even a Hollywood movie! And other tellings, too, from northern climates.

  But the best of my authors, beyond question, will be my one true friend, Walter Villamil Tulio, called Ponco

  He didn’t write that. I did. But he knew it was true. I see that now! He knew it long ago, on this island, where he trained me to imitate his style, so that I might change things, add things to his journals and manuscripts, as if in his own words, give the proper shape to his story, the one he would have wanted, the one it already has but no one knows it has until I say it.

  NO! I AM LYING TO MYSELF! HE DIDN’T AUTHORIZE ME! HE DIDN’T CARE IF I WAS KILLED. HE LEFT ME, PART OF THE REAR GUARD, COVERING HIS RETREAT, CERTAIN TO DIE!

  From Guevara’s Journal

  9/29/67: La Higuera. We arrived in the morning, yet there were no men in the town, and only a few women. A town populated by ten or twelve small children. Coco went to the mayor’s house—which was empty—and to the telegraph office. He came back with a message: “Guerrillas in the zone. Wire news to Vallegrande.”

  We stood in the empty dirt street. La Higuera has fifteen crumbling mud houses, covered with flaking white paint.

  Inti found the mayor’s wife, hiding in the fireplace of her house. She said that the mayor hadn’t told on us, he had gone to the next town, to Jaquey, for their fiesta. Inti asked why she hid from us. She wasn’t hiding, she said, just sitting in the fireplace.

  I sent the vanguard towards Jaquey at one o’clock and they left, followed by a group of small children. A woman ran after them, shouting.

  A merchant arrived and was brought to me in the main square, by the well. He bought and sold coca, and had just come from Vallegrande, where he hadn’t seen anything—not even any soldiers. This was nonsense, of course.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why are you so nervous?”

  “The guns,” he said, pointing to my rifle.

  “We never use them against the people,” Coco said.

  “Though they have often betrayed us,” I added, staring at him. “We fight for them. But we accept their betrayals.”

  At about one-thirty I led the center guard to the summit of a barren hill right outside the town so that we might have a better view of the field. As we neared the summit there were shots from all over the open field beyond, but some distance away. The soldiers weren’t visible. They may be in the woods by the dirt road, or in the ravines beneath. It may be that they were firing on the vanguard group farther on.

  I led the men back to the town and set up our defenses, planning to wait there for survivors and then take the road we came on back to the Rio Grande.

  A few moments later Benigno arrived, wounded. Then Marcos and Ricardo. Marcos had his arm around Ricardo’s shoulder, for Marcos had been shot in the foot. But Ricardo had been shot in the chest, and was dying. They reported that Miguel and Coco had been killed.

  We went down the road, leading our two mules. Those in the rear were fired on at close range. The rear guard stopped to return fire and was delayed. Inti lost contact. I waited for him for half an hour in a small ambush we set up, at the edge of a ravine near the town.

  But the hillside opened fire in our direction, so I decided to leave Inti behind and moved down the ravine. I sent the mules down another canyon to mislead the army. Our ravine had some bitter water in it. We slept.

  From My Journal

  9/30/67: I lay with Ricardo during the night. He is my oldest comrade. He was making a terrible racket, moaning, and I grew afraid that the army would hear him, and find us. I wanted him to shut up, even to die, and I held him more tightly.

  “Did you ever do it with a man?” I asked him.

  “Only with your father,” he said, and tried to laugh. Blood came to his lips.

  I kissed him on his lips to show him it was all right with me that he was queer like my poor dear uncle who raised me, and to keep him quiet. I even put my tongue in his mouth. His mouth was filled with blood, and soon after our kiss he died.

  During the night, by a miracle, Inti found us, thank God. Marcos told him about Coco’s death. Marcos had dragged him away from the army as best he could, by his legs. Coco didn’t want to fall into their hands. They were getting very close. Marcos was still holding on to his legs when Coco shot himself. “I could feel them shiver.”

  Marcos had taken Coco’s knapsack. He gave it to Inti, in case there were some personal things.

  Inti wandered off for a while.

  10/1/67: Inti didn’t speak today; the gloom that has surrounded him as long as we have known him now has a name.

  In the evening he distributed the contents of both Coco’s knapsack and his own to the comrades. I took Coco’s journal, for the time being, I said, for “safe keeping,” until Inti wants it back. He smiled at me in that closed-lipped way he too has imitated from Che, and I felt like a son of a bitch.

  But I wanted Coco’s journal. When Inti was dividing up the things I put my hand on it, to keep it out of sight, and at the end I pushed it towards the dirt, as if it were a thing of no matter, and said I would take care of it. I didn’t wan
t to seem too avid, for it felt ghoulish to desire it so.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  10/1/67: The area—hills with a few clumps of trees, and a series of ravines, thick with growth near the bottoms, bare near the tops of each side—is covered with soldiers. If we can escape detection we can perhaps move down ravines, as far as they go, and then cross to new ones, until we find a way back to the Rio Grande.

  At dusk a peasant and a soldier climbed a hill opposite us, past the dirt track, and kicked a soccer ball back and forth.

  Tonight I sent scouts to explore the area. Towards morning the scouts brought water in. The whole forested hill in front of us is marked by trails, and there are peasants riding on them.

  10/2/67: Forty-six soldiers moved down the road at ten, with their knapsacks. There are twenty-two of us.

  At twelve another group of soldiers appeared. Seventy-seven men in all. A shot was heard. Perhaps one of our scouts had been seen. The soldiers took positions on the road, and an officer said, “Go down into the ravine.”

  We thought he meant the one we hid in. Then voices were heard over the radio, a mixture of Spanish and English, and they started marching again. Our refuge has no defenses against attack from above.

  • • •

  Later in the afternoon, a soldier who had fallen behind his buddies passed by with a tired brown dog. He pulled the dog’s rope to make him walk, half choking him from the look of it. The peasant we had spotted farther up the hill returned after a while, going down the road towards La Higuera on a white mare.

  The soldiers with their knapsacks may have been withdrawing from the area. This would give us a possibility for escape. There were no fires seen outside the town, and when night came, and the sun set, there were no shots heard. This adds to the evidence that the soldiers have withdrawn, for they usually fire off their rifles at sunset, just shooting up at the sky.

  10/3/67: In the morning there were soldiers, Rangers, without knapsacks, traveling in both directions, like a bad dream, and other soldiers leading empty donkeys. The donkeys returned loaded with packs.

  Inti, our scout, said the donkeys went down the trail into the farmland below us to the right and couldn’t be seen anymore.

  It is impossible to use the road, though that is the easiest and most direct route, for the soldiers may be in ambush along it, and there are dogs in the houses we would pass who would bark at us and give us away. Tomorrow I will send scouts to go out across the farmland and into the next ravines, to see if there is another way out of this area.

  10/4/67: Inti and Willy returned with news that the Rio Grande is two kilometers straight down. We will have to move between ravines, but we can make camp in places that can’t be seen from the side. We got some water, and at ten o’clock began a tiresome march to the end of this ravine. El Chino wandered off, delaying us. He is useless in the darkness.

  10/5/67: No soldiers, but some little goats, led by a shepherd dog, passed by our position. No food or water today.

  10/6/67: Benigno, today’s scout, heard some peasants passing by on the road say, “Those are the ones we heard talking last night,” and pointing towards our positions.

  At three we began the march across the hill that leads to the ravine selected, which again has no water. Some of the brush by the sides is broken, indicating that the soldiers have already been here. I found a red-and-white cigarette package.

  • • •

  The radio gave news of where I will be tried when captured, though I told the men that this is nonsense, if I am captured I won’t be tried.

  The men are exhausted because of lack of water. Eusebio cried, saying he needed just one mouthful or he couldn’t continue. But we haven’t one mouthful. The march was very bad, with all the men complaining, so that we had to stop frequently, despite the danger.

  Dogs barked. There is a high barren field at the edge of the ravine.

  I cleared the pus from Marcos’s wound, and I injected him with painkillers. When he is unconscious Marcos moans, troubling our sleep.

  Eusebio woke with a white-ridged tongue, like the boy who lived across the street from us. How far I have come!

  10/6/67: Our explorers found water in a ravine farther away. We went there and cooked all day long, under a big ledge.

  On the radio they claim that Debray says he was not a guerrilla, but a reporter only, and never carried a rifle. He has called Che Guevara an adventurer, and not a true Marxist. A crowd in the background called for Debray’s death.

  Perhaps—if the story is true—Debray will have a good reason why it must be this way and no other. Or will this be the first time he recognizes the irrational power of brute force, its ability to make things happen that go counter to the march of history, that cannot be recouped by theory, that don’t work to some good end? And if it could do that once, to him, couldn’t it perhaps do it over and over, and triumph in that black senseless endless meaningless night that is one possible conclusion to history?

  The day was spent bucolically, without complications, until an old woman herding her goats came into the canyon where we are camped, but farther down, to get water. Ponco and I followed her to her hut.

  From My Journal

  10/6/67: A child watched us from the corner of the shack. I say “a child,” though she looked about twelve. Her eyes were dead. She was an idiot. She put dirt on her head, beat her fists together, and pushed her hands into her mouth. Her clothes were smeared with dirt and shit.

  The old goatherd gave us a looking-over. “Welcome to our house,” she said impassively. “You don’t look well.”

  She was right.

  “It’s been very difficult,” Che said. He poked his hand in at his waist, spreading his fingers. “We have not received enough to eat.”

  He’s presenting us as charity cases, I thought. A new line! “You are the guerrillas.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your name?” This fat woman was too curious, I thought.

  “Some people,” Che said, “my parents especially, called me Ernesto. Most now call me Che.”

  I was surprised to hear how calmly he talked to the woman. I wanted to get food from here and run. I am terrified all the time now, and pray with every step I take that God may save me. We are all desperate and would scream at each other, but are afraid that the army would hear us. Che, though, grows calmer every day. He has no more bursts of temper; he has, as he promised, “modified.” But I find his calm, as he sits at our center, horrifying.

  The woman said that Che was very fortunate to have two names. People with two names, she had noticed, lived practically forever. It is difficult for death to find them. He’s confused by the two names. He says, “I’m looking for someone named Ernesto.” And all things say, “There’s no Ernesto here, sir, only someone named Che.”

  “But,” she sighed, sitting down behind her table in a little wooden chair, “you shouldn’t have told me your secret name. Death has many creatures that work for him, and they may have overheard.”

  It’s not enough of a trick, I thought at first, having two names, death being a clever fellow, after all, with North American advisers. He’ll see through it after a while. Then I was angry with Che for giving away his secret name. Maybe it was bad luck.

  Still, Che has a lot of names, some that only I know. Adolfo Mena, Ernesto Banana, Banana Guevara. I would never tell death (though maybe he has ways to compel me to speak the truth).

  And there’s one more name that even I couldn’t tell death, the one his mother wanted to give him, before his father named him. So maybe, I thought, we were safe. (You see, I believed her for a moment, I was that far gone into my fear. It made sense to me. Death, after all, is what gave us our real names back.)

  “But you are a Hero,” she said, “you can only be killed by an ax in the head. One that has been kept a year in a dish with the first ear of corn, blessed by a priest on All Souls’ Day, and over which twelve Masses have been spoken by twelve saints. The Giants
protect you.”

  Again I had the feeling that she was making it up as she spoke, and that she believed it as thoroughly as if she were describing the color of a stone she held in her hand.

  It was good news, I thought at the time. Where would they find twelve saints in Bolivia?

  “Still,” she added, “you’ll be safe even from that if you follow the signs.”

  “We have followed the signs,” Che said, “but though we lived for the people, they were weak-willed and afraid to help us.”

  Again, he wants to shame them.

  “Well, why did you start all this fighting?” she said, suddenly angry with us. We stood in front of her table, and her tone made me feel like a child at school. Not that I’ve been to one, though. “Why have you gone around our country killing our soldiers? I’ve heard about that. You’re a bloody man. You’ve killed thousands of Bolivians. You say you have a bloody hand.”

  Their crazy talk is driving me mad—Che and the Indians are in league together! Even the women’s bowlers are part of their effort to be senseless!

  “Yes,” Che said, “and I will be avenged by the courageous ones who follow us.”

  Follow us? Did he mean the men? Or the ones who would come … later.

  “I have fought for Bolivia,” he said. “And we have killed only those Bolivians who are slaves to the North Americans, the ones who keep you countrypeople poor. We have fought so that children like yours will have enough to eat.” He pointed to the girl on the floor, who was now putting dirt on her head. “If she had had enough meat or eggs to eat when she was younger she would be fine now. And after the Revolution there will be a place where she can be properly cared for.”