The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  The old woman smiled, changing the map of her wrinkles like a country suffering an earthquake. “She eats enough for three as it is! And she can stay here with me. We take care of the goats together.” She was angry again, by the time she finished, thinking Che had accused her of negligence. “Anyway, you’re foolish. You want to give her food when you don’t have enough for yourself.” She looked at her little saint, the kind taxi-drivers in my country which I pray to God I will see again used to keep on their dashboards. He stood in a little bowl that floated in a larger plastic bowl of water. White candles burned alongside it.

  “But I can see you are a good man,” she said, after consultation with her saint. “I want to give you something. You have difficulty breathing.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I have asthma.”

  Even a weak man can be terrible, I thought to myself, or a fat woman—for this fat woman scared me. She could betray us to the army. Now we must take her with us.

  The woman looked blank at the word “asthma.” “If you have five bolivars,” she said, not to be distracted from her business, “I can help you breathe. It will cure your as …”

  “Asthma.”

  “Yes. That. The recipe came to me in a dream. I have had all the saints bless it.”

  “I don’t believe in your saints,” Che said. “Or in your Christ. He is not for us. We are for each other.”

  And for the Giant, I thought. And I hoped He, at least, was for us.

  “Impossible!” she said to Che’s blasphemy. “You are a good man!”

  “And if I don’t have five bolivars?”

  “But of course you have them!”

  “Why? Do I look like a rich man?”

  No, I thought. You look like a dead man. My own thoughts made me chill. My body trembled. I hope to God I don’t have malaria!

  “You look richer than me,” she said, matter-of-factly. Clearly she thought Che was trying to get her price down and wasn’t having any of it. “You have so many things, you even carry some of them strapped to your back, like a turtle. And you have a rifle.”

  And so we could just take your fucking salve, lady, I thought. Why the hell were we spending so much time on this crap?

  Che gave her a wad of bills, and she held out her hand to him. When she opened it to reveal the secret, there was a small tin in the center of her palm, about the size of a quarter.

  It was mentholated vaseline, the kind sold in all the Indian markets.

  Che laughed, a little wheeze that sounded to my ears lamentably like Ricardo’s. I didn’t see the humor in this bag of shit’s cheating us, the dishonest crone.

  But Che opened his shirt right there and spread the grease all over his chest. You could see his ribs poking through his skin, I thought, as they soon would. You could see mine, too, I suppose. Why are his more pathetic than mine? Why do I weep for him instead of myself? I fear for myself, I thought, but I mourn for him.

  “It will take five or six days to work,” she said. “You must use it every night. If it doesn’t work bring it back to me.”

  “If it doesn’t work,” I said, “we’ll be back to get our money.” I wanted her to know that we would have our eyes on her.

  She flinched from my voice, the bitch.

  “Your money? No, I will give you special prayers that will make the salve work.”

  Che asked if she could sell us some coffee.

  For another ten bolivars she offered us some grounds. Then she reconsidered. We could have them for nothing if we wouldn’t judge Bolivians so harshly.

  “You will judge yourselves,” Che said, unrelenting. “And you will see that you have failed all those who wanted to help you. And if you have failed, then it is you who must make it right again, by helping yourselves, and completing their work.”

  So it all can begin again, I thought, as it was, as it will be forever, amen, everything in its proper place. Except us. Being under this stony ground was not the proper place for me, and it was where I was going.

  “You must not tell the army we were here,” I said, “or the Giant will spit you out. And we will be very angry.”

  She laughed, the nervy fat bitch! “Angry? My child and I aren’t afraid of you. Look how thin you are,” she said to me. “And you can hardly breathe properly,” she said, pointing at my chief. “My child and I aren’t afraid of anybody. But the army has never done anything for us. We won’t be among those who have abandoned you.”

  That word again!

  Che thanked her.

  She took his hand across the table, and touched it to her wrinkles and furrows. She wouldn’t touch my hand. She could feel how I hated and feared her.

  “May the saints be with you,” she said to Che, but tonelessly. Had she received some unfortunate augury from his flesh?

  She handed him a pot made out of red clay but shaped exactly like a gourd with knubbly bumps. It had the coffee grounds in it. “You can have the grounds,” she said, “but not the pot.”

  Che took what was left of a copy of State and Revolution from his knapsack—the last book he had taught us—ripped out another page, and wrapped up the grounds.

  “You don’t have to pay me for it,” she said, looking down at the wood of the table. “But you could leave something for my saint.”

  “Your saint means nothing to us,” Che said. I didn’t want to hear another theological argument! “But we will leave something for you and your child.” He put another huge wad of bills down by the little plastic bowl.

  On the way back down the ravine, our hidey hole, I told him that we should have taken her with us. But he said no, that we could trust her.

  From Guevara’s Journal

  10/7/67: We camped near the bottom of the Churo ravine. Willy unpacked the tin pot from his pack, and we scooped up some water from the clear stream that runs through the ravine. The water disappears during the hot day, and returns at night.

  I took the well-used discolored grounds from Lenin. Willy filled the pot with cold water and brought it to a boil over our little brush fire. I dumped in the grounds, let them steep for a while over lower heat, tapped the container hard against a rock to settle the grounds.

  Rolando tasted the coffee first. Not Rolando. He was dead. Eusebio. He needed the liquid.

  We passed the coffee from hand to hand in a tin cup. Everyone took a few sips and passed it on. It tasted like heaven, bitter, but hot.

  Isle of Pines, July 1968

  JULY 22

  A happy moment for him—sharing coffee with us, his comrades. So he did manage a moment of pleasure for himself—without the need of my imaginings, my land of Cockaigne—managed a swallow of pleasant bitter hot liquid on a cold night, warm beyond theory’s ability to dream of. I remember now that he had told me of a time like that in Cuba, during the long difficult march, when he and Camillo’s forces had split the island in two. He had, he said, “thrown himself upon the world, riding the tossed coin down. The world buoys you up.” I would like to add: Well, sometimes it does. But that misses the point, for the issue isn’t living or dying, but being altogether in love with the turning of the world, whether it’s into darkness or light, in love with fate, beyond caring about the outcome. Not the gambler, on the ground, who waits to see the result of the toss, but the coin itself, spiraling downward, all eyes upon it.

  I think that some men, like Che, feel their death inside them all the time, and to bear it they have to make it outside themselves somehow, stalking them, not themselves against themselves, but an enemy that they can see, something they can give a name to, like the Bolivian Army, like Imperialism. (Not that such things don’t exist, mind you. They’re what make the implacable ones so necessary.) And if the ones like Che succeed in putting their death somewhere else—on the whale’s back—then they have a momentary respite, free for a while of the rat’s teeth that otherwise gnaw constantly in their chests; they’re released into the world—to enjoy a swallow of hot coffee.

  Towards morning he let Camba
go. I saw them get up while the men slept, and walk a little ways down the ravine, talking comfortably together, like old chums out on a stroll by the ocean. Che had attained that inhuman unforgivable calm of his last days, riding the tossed coin down. And not only because the army was near, was all around us. He had sheared himself from himself—if you can imagine such a thing—given up the burden of his personality to the Indians, for their stories. He had put himself in their keeping, in a way, as we were in his keeping. He didn’t have to make himself known, declare himself, express himself, who he was, because he was (he had decided) whatever they said he was. He didn’t speak himself anymore; they spoke him. No longer belonging to himself; already dead; given over; he had submitted. He had fulfilled his father’s dream, as the old man lay on the floor of their living room, in corpse position: Che was nonattached to himself. It was as if he had two bodies, or as if one body (this one) were constantly leaving the other body (also somehow this one) at every moment. He was the story others made of him; and so he was always in the place “he” was meant to be, a figure being used by the impersonal cosmic drama.

  Excuse me, please, if I do take it personally: he let Camba go—to betray us—and he left me in the rear guard, to die.

  JULY 23

  Che clambered down the long side of the ravine, holding on to the gray wiry vegetation to keep his balance. In the light of the red rising sun I saw that he was alone. When the men awoke Che didn’t say anything about having released Camba; and no one suspected that he could have done such a thing.

  Camba had left his knapsack behind, and later that morning, when the situation was already desperate, Che gave me Camba’s journal, a black German-made diary, a few pages of which, here and there, were covered by Camba’s small scribbling. Che didn’t glance at the entries himself; no curiosity and no time; he didn’t ask if I wanted the book; there was no ceremony when he gave it to me; he just shoved it into my eager hands, and I tucked it into my knapsack, with Coco’s diary and my own. It was just another thing he couldn’t carry. By that time the soldiers had already taken up their positions above us, on both sides of the lips of the ravine.

  I think that Che knew that Camba would go to the army—or fall into their hands—and that he would give our position in Churo ravine away. Camba was not a likely man to stand up to the mildest physical persuasion, or even the threat of it. He was a milching little coward.

  And I think that our death in those mountains was part of the story, an ending that Che wanted written. He chose Camba to betray us because he was crazy already—Camba, I mean—and so he would be able to bear the mental costs; or, anyway, he didn’t have much to lose in that department.

  So he let Camba go on his mission, and the rest of us—the rear guard especially—were left behind, to end in the ending he had written.

  JULY 24

  Start again.

  Afraid, always afraid now, we marched the last night under a full moon. I made up superstitions—I was a tribe unto myself—about the clouds that sometimes cross the face of the moon. If a cloud went over the moon it meant we would get away. And if it didn’t … I was terrified for a moment and then made up a new kind of omen. And if it did go across the moon, I was reassured … for a moment … and made up a new kind of omen. If my foot came down on a rock, it meant … If I heard the sound of a bird in the next ten seconds it meant … And all the time I prayed, prayed with each step, ceaselessly, over and over, Dear God, please save our lives.

  At two that morning we stopped to rest. Everyone had been complaining on the march, in low whispers, about fatigue and lack of water. El Chino, who was courageous enough during the day, was a great problem on night marches, even with so much lovely dangerous moonlight. He could only see the most shadowy figures in the dark, and I had to lead him by the hand. He stumbled often, dragging me down, and shouted, terrified by some apparition, thinking it was a soldier.

  “He’s a regular old woman,” Che said to me, mildly—though Che was showing a meaner streak sometimes, since R.’s death, it was without fury.

  Chino overheard us, and laughed. He had a pleasant laugh. He wasn’t a bad sort, Chino, though when he would stumble, making me fall into a net of sharp branches, or when he would cry out, terrifying me, and maybe giving away our position, I wanted to rip his tongue out and make him swallow it.

  We made camp near a little creek at the bottom of a wide ravine—Churo ravine—so wide and deep it was almost a canyon. The creek was a clear thin rivulet that disappeared during daylight and returned at night, the stuff of parables once again, like the “flora and fauna” of the jungle. But once again none of us had the energy for parables. A fig tree a little taller than a man grew near the stream, and we camped by its base. We risked a small fire, and scooped a little water out of the creek to brew coffee.

  And we shared it all around in a tin mug. I don’t remember what it tasted like. But in the mountains at night it was very cold, my hands were numb, and I would have liked to have held the cup for a long time, forever, and never passed it on.

  Before we slept, Che hung from the branches of the tree by his hands, and Camba beat him on the chest. Then Che lay on the ground—in corpse position—by the roots of the tree, and Camba—it was always Camba for the job, it was his new dance rhythm I guess, the Camba—beat on Che’s chest some more, making him into a drum.

  Then, while the others slept, Che led Camba away. I think.

  When we awoke we saw troop movements, parts of the soldiers’ arms and legs, rifle barrels, even some faces at the height of the ravine. There was thick scruff, and some trees all along the bottom of the canyon and halfway up the sides, but it thinned out as it went up—so we could see them, while they couldn’t yet make us out. Camba was gone. I thought for a moment of Che’s return alone, with the sun tinging him red. Had I dreamed it? Had Che finally found Camba as much of a burden as the rest of us did, and given him his release by killing him quietly, throttling him to death, as I had sometimes imagined doing? But then Inti thought he had seen him among the soldiers, waving at us—the little prick!—a crooked smile on his face. I was glad Che hadn’t done what I imagined. And it was only later that I realized the far worse thing that he might have done.

  Che said that we still had a good chance to get away, moving down the length of the ravine, to the Rio Grande. The wiry vegetation along the bottom and sides would provide cover. If we didn’t exchange fire with the army until four o’clock we could hold out against them until dark, and make our escape.

  He called for five volunteers to give covering fire to the rest of the group, as it moved down the ravine towards the river.

  Everyone volunteered, each and every man.

  But Che chose Dario, Inti, Urbano, Aniceto, and me. He gave each of us a hug. As I held him, half holding him up, I felt the continuous rattling tremor of his body, the tremor that was his body now. I was going to die to save this walking corpse!

  But at the time I felt exalted. I had wanted him to choose me. I lived in them, in all of them, but most of all in Che, who had willed us there, and whose will supported us as the earth did, and kept us alive, like the flow of blood in our veins. His will seemed like the fruitful force of the earth itself. I wanted to do this thing, to sacrifice myself if necessary, as if that would weave me into the very molecules of my comrades’ flesh. I would live forever in their bodies, and through them in the earth’s vitality itself, in its recurrent transmutations; I would extend forever into the future if I gave myself up now. It was a way out of my fear.

  I would live in the Giant!

  Later, after we escaped, I didn’t feel that way anymore.

  Che gave us each a hug. I felt his beard against my cheek, and snuffed up his stink as if it were perfume—though his smell wasn’t much different from my own.

  If we were separated we were to meet again near Ispaca’s house.

  My group took up positions behind large reddish-gray rocks, and the others started off down the ravine, leaving
us to die.

  JULY 25

  The rest I know mainly from newspapers:

  THE DEATH OF CHE GUEVARA

  Guerrilla leader killed in Bolivia

  ————————

  Shot in battle? Or executed by the army?

  ————————

  Was he betrayed by peasantry? Or one of his own?

  ————————

  Special from our correspondent

  No. He was my friend. I owe him more than that, a more dignified and appropriate death, something less absurd—even if he left me to die.

  No more today.

  JULY 26

  Dearest Che, please forgive me! How could I have been so blind to the obvious, to your kindness and love and mercy?

  He gave me Camba’s journal. He had said before that I was to be his archivist. Would he have given me the documents for his story if he were about to leave me to die? He wanted me to live—me particularly. In a precise serious voice, each word with its breathy halo of pain, he said that those who covered his retreat stood little chance of surviving, and he knew that if he said that we would all volunteer, for we all wanted to be heroes, worthy to live in the Giant that is our continent, and that is somehow Che’s own body, the god he spoke for.

  But really Che knew that what he said about the dangers was a lie, the complete opposite of the truth. For he knew that when he and the others went down the ravine they would certainly run into army patrols and be captured. And he knew, too, that when the army captured him they would go slack. They would have the red kerchief! The game would be over!

  Then we in the rear guard would be able to make our way through the encirclement and escape.