The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  Che said: Hunger.

  “Yes, hunger,” Prado agreed. “I get your drift. But as I was saying, the rich work at their luxuries, all for the sake of the poor, who require it of them. The poor, you know, don’t want everything shared equally. They wouldn’t want to be denied the relief that the spectacles of the rich offer them. Not that they dream of having it for themselves, mind you, but they want to see it—the display, the variety, the luxury, the waste.”

  Che said: Cold.

  “Yes, cold. Of course,” Prado replied. “But you speak of suffering. Che, my friend, you cannot give a deeper meaning to suffering. Only God can give a meaning to suffering, not men.”

  Che said: Thirst.

  “Yes,” Prado replied. “Of course. Thirst. But I was speaking of God, wasn’t I? And He must have priests, mustn’t He? Priests who rule? who sanctify our suffering (or, like your party, justify it)? Then what difference between your way and ours?”

  Che said: Sickness.

  “Yes, yes, sickness. Of course,” Prado said. “So you hate luxury, and you want to share suffering and poverty, because you—excuse me, I know this is a difficult time for me to bring it up, though I must say you are taking your situation very well, very calmly (though I think the reasons for your calm are quite ill-founded)—because you’re a pathetic thing, Comandante Guevara. Even before this campaign and its hardships, you were a sickly creature, hardly fìt to live in this world apart from your great sustaining willfulness. You hate luxury, perhaps, because you hate the body, the sensual pleasures? Or more: because you hate variety itself, don’t you—all that you’re cut off from? You can’t hear tunes. Shades of color don’t reach you. So you dream of an end to luxury, the elaboration of color and tone, you dream of shared work, shared poverty, shared suffering. One Body, all the same, a fìre where everything is fused to one single color, utter blank whiteness.”

  Che said: Ignorance.

  “Yes, ignorance. I see what you’re getting at,” Prado said. “But do you follow me? I think you need to study natural history, Comandante Guevara. Luxury means diversity, the elaboration of diversity and distinction for its own sake, and diversity is the very stuff of life. Display is what makes nature, and diversity is what allows a fortunate species to survive unpredictable changing conditions. The maximum diversity for the species, you see, many throws of the dice, so that one of them might be the lucky response to the next change, one of them might be the next, the necessary step. That’s what happened to your friends the dinosaurs, don’t you think? Not enough diversity in the gene pool, not enough waste (for, of course, most of the throws are wasted). Not enough luxury. You dream of uniformity, of one body, the Internationale, because you hate diversity, and so you hate life itself. You don’t want order, as some of your critics say, or slavery—though I don’t doubt that would end up being part of your new order, your faceless new man. What you want is death. A new man: faceless, without body: dead.”

  Che said: Suffering.

  “Yes, yes, suffering,” Prado replied. “But let me continue, please. You have misunderstood life, and you have misunderstood our peasants, Mr. Guevara. They want luxury, you know, for their rulers, their gods, because they, too, want to see change, color, novelty, just as much as any Paris crowd. You looked at their weaving and you thought it is the pattern that they want to repeat, that it’s repetition itself that they want. You thought the pattern had always been the same, and you must offer your new world of machinery as an endless repeating pattern. Nonsense! The pattern changes. Yes, our peasants, too, have their changes in fashion—only, of course, they change more slowly, because of their poverty. Bowlers aren’t some archetypal costume for our Indian women, you know; they were brought here by the British. A recent development, only a hundred years old or so. They don’t want repetition, they only suffer it for lack of funds and lack of imagination. You thought your story would be remembered here forever. Well, wrongheaded though your story was, it will be remembered here longer than most places—forgotten more slowly, let’s say—after they’ve done with it, that is, made you over the way they want you, and that will have nothing to do with the themes you think, of violence and rebellion. Your story will last a bit longer here because poverty means a dearth of stories, too. Poverty has a bad effect on one’s imaginative faculties. But you, too, will be sacrificed—and not to the victory of the Revolution where they all become heroes—but to the change of fashion. You’ll be replaced by some new, equally foolish idea of the hero.”

  “Hunger,” Che said.

  “Yes,” Prado replied. “Haven’t you already said hunger? But let me add this: if the war had gone on—if you’d been the lucky one, and your fantasies about these people had been more than fantasies—then you would have let yourself been made into more than a leader, a hero. You would have let yourself be made into a god and obeyed as one. You wanted to feed these people. You wanted to offer them industry, but in the guise you thought acceptable to them, of the Inca, industry in the mass worship of your new-style selfless proletariat, joined to your ridiculous Giant by repeated acts of sacrifice and suffering, and listening to their leader with an empty face. But to have them build the industry they need to feed themselves would have required unquestioning obedience from these recalcitrant stones. And you—the god who would make the stones march to your will—would have required sacrifices and more sacrifices, hecatombs of death—to add to your terror, your luster, your distance—and their necessary obedience.”

  “Hunger requires food,” Che said, stung into speech, almost crying, in a high rapid voice. “Thirst requires water. Cold requires shelter. Sickness requires medicine. Ignorance needs education. Our suffering requires stories. And this world,” he said, “requires destruction!”

  Prado clapped, slowly, his hands coming into the light for a moment, and returning to the shadows. “Anyway,” he said, “I forgot. I have something of yours.” He took a small black velvet box with a thin gold thread embroidering its top, and held it towards Che, in the lantern light. “Gold,” Prado said, “a piece of luxury that I see you kept with you.”

  “Please see that the cuff links are sent to my son.”

  “Ah,” Prado said mildly. “But what can you really care about your children? You cannot descend to that level where ordinary men put their love into practice. Descend?” Prado said musingly. “Or rise?”

  Che cried out as if he’d been shot.

  “Still,” Prado said, “if you like, I’ll see that they’re sent to your son.”

  And those one-word answers of Che’s, those monosyllabic grunts of man’s needs, and (depending on your point of view) his apocalyptic hopes, or fears? I would have had Che remain silent, but that reminded me of Christ. And making him like Christ, if you ask me, is like translating him to the United States—it would make him and the world absurd. (The Indians understood this.) So what could I have him do? Babble? Speak the language of the future that we cannot yet understand—speaking in tongues, pentecostal. Have rainbows appear when he opened his mouth? Or fire? Have him change into a peasant, a prince, a seltzer bottle?

  Che only knew one argument really, from the inside out, in all its endless permutations—his pain; pain itself; our need.

  And the truth is, I don’t know what he would have said to this Prado. I do know that he would have said something, something that would have made sense. He would have made a response, and if it were too early or too late for an action, then he would have elaborated a gesture. But I don’t know what it would have been. I can’t imagine the next, the necessary step.

  That’s why he’s him, and I’m me.

  JULY 29

  OCTOBER NINTH

  “A clean wound,” the doctor said. He sounded as if he were praising Prado’s efficient work, rather than reassuring the captain’s victim. He dipped a cotton swab into a brown bottle of disinfectant by the prisoner’s feet, and dabbed Guevara’s arm.

  “Colleague,” Che said, “would you light my pipe? It’s in
my pocket.” The doctor did as he was asked.

  With his pipe and boots a guerrilla is secure. He’d lost his boots. Shall I provide the poem to his pipe that he never wrote?

  This was Che’s pipe

  For the fag-end of butts

  It made his mouth smell

  Like an old whore’s twat.

  Kneel down and suck it!

  I’m going crazy. I want to pile obscenity on obscenity; I want to build a wall with them. They shot him. That’s it. The End.

  No. Later that morning a muscular young peasant named Guzman, a provisioner for the army, was let in to see the prisoner, a special favor for services rendered.

  “You’re very courageous to come see me,” Guevara said. He was slumped against the wall, his legs almost straight out in front of him.

  Guzman stared, his mouth open.

  Which allowed for a lesson. “You have two rotting teeth in front. That must be very painful. I would have taken care of them if we had met earlier. We have always helped the people, in big ways and small, though few of them, had the courage to help us. You have to take care of your teeth, you know, if you want good health.”

  “Go to hell!” Guzman shouted. “You can go to hell! Fuck you asshole, and fuck your mother. Go to hell!”

  Guzman ran from the room.

  The High Command had left the manner of the prisoner’s execution up to Prado. He gathered his junior officers by the well, and had them draw straws from his hand.

  Meanwhile, while we await the winner, I go into the schoolroom to talk with the prisoner. It’s cold in the mountains near evening, so I turn my sports-shirt collar up around my neck.

  “Why did you leave me to die?” I ask. I want to hear from his own mouth that he hadn’t. That really he had wanted to save me. That really I was to be his archivist, his author—authorized even to change things that would make the lines of his story clearer, that would fulfill his intentions.

  “Give it up, Walter,” Che says. He shivers on the bench. “This anger is a way of keeping me alive—alive and just for yourself, just as we were. You want to hear my voice arguing with you, unchanged. It’s like your sudden love of facts.”

  Yes, I thought, the other authors want him to die, his name empty, severed from his intentions, his correcting voice, so they can use it however they wish. But I want him to be alive, just as he was. I want to hear him. Only I could be trusted with his story, trusted not to betray him. Why didn’t he see that? Why wouldn’t he say so?

  He smiles, but his smile is the closed-lipped giving and withdrawing kind that I hate. After all, Walter—he should have said—you will always be first among my authors.

  But he had authorized himself; he had known what History wanted to say, needed to say; and I—his truest follower, like him self-created or always responsive (which? both)—must do the same.

  “After all, Walter,” his voice says in the cold air of the schoolroom in La Higuera, in the warm air of our workroom by the ocean, “I taught you. You will always be first among my authors.”

  Anyway, I could only delay things so long. After I left, Sergeant Teran—the loser, the winner—a short fat skinny sweaty ugly handsome man, came a few steps into the room, holding a rifle with a curved clip.

  The last face he would see. What in God’s name did he look like, this hole, this bastard, this blackness!

  Very well: it is up to me. He told me so himself, or wanted to, that last day in the ravine when he gave me Camba’s journal. I can hear his voice (the man who has no voice of his own can conjure the voices of others from the air). “I taught you,” he meant to say, as he handed me the journal. A short sentence that none of the others could understand—but I knew what he meant. He meant my word is his word is law.

  So, Teran was a short man, Che’s height, but well fed, with a paunchy belly, a sly smile, a broad flat nose, and a dark complexion like the blackness he came from. He looks exactly like my uncle.

  As Teran entered, Guevara moved slowly to the end of the bench, and pushed himself off it, and upward against the wall. He half stood, and stared towards the man coming through the door.

  Teran left the room.

  Che heard Prado’s sharp order, to return and finish the job he’d been given.

  “Please sit down,” Teran said, re-entering the room.

  “It’s easier for me to breathe like this,” the prisoner said. The sound of his breathing was getting louder and louder. He gasped now with a loud metallic sort of racket. It frightened Teran. He feared for Che’s life. Funny, Teran thought, that he should be concerned about this fellow’s health! That’s what it means to be famous, he decided. Everyone worries about your health. Well fuck him, Teran thought. No one worries about my health.

  “People like you,” the prisoner said, “have poisoned the air.”

  Fuck you and your nonsense! Teran thought. Fuck you fuck you fuck you!

  “In any case,” Guevara stammered between gasps of air, “you have only come To kill Me.”

  “No,” Teran said soothingly, half believing his own lie for a moment, just as he half believed himself when he would promise to take care of my mother and me, to drink less, to get a job, to stay away from my friends. “I won’t hurt you. Please. Look, I’ll untie your hands.” Why did he care, he wondered, what this dead man thought of him? He wasn’t Teran’s judge, after all. Why should he want Guevara to approve of him? He didn’t, he thought furiously, he didn’t care. Fuck him. Fuck him in the ass! Fuck him to hell! But why couldn’t Che see his kind intention in undoing his bonds, why was his gesture refused? It made him angry. Teran was kind—kind, anyway, within the larger madness of their situation. He had to understand that, after all, he’d brought this on himself, that it wasn’t Teran’s fault.

  Teran clumsily undid the thong, fumbling at the knot, freeing Che’s hands. Dried blood and dirt flaked off as Teran received Che’s thrilling touch.

  “You are killing a man,” Guevara said, barely able to get out the words.

  “But you,” Teran said, “have killed many men.”

  THE END

  No. Teran walked a few feet towards the door, to the square of pale, criss-crossed light and shadow. There he turned and fired twice into the prisoner’s chest, his poor stinking painful chest.

  His asthma was the bullets already there, a spectral pain all his life long, now made real; the awful history of the continent already present in his lungs, moving towards this leaden realization.

  No. That’s nonsense. But his asthma brought him to this place. He wanted it to be a sign: as if the asthma had wanted the bullets, to give the grief of our continent a name, something outside him and inside him at once, always. Well, maybe it wasn’t a sign, but a problem. It made him will himself into what he had become, the revolutionary will itself, his self-creation, which could only have this ending.

  No. We might have won after all. Then what would he have done?

  Oh shit, I’m trying to imitate him, trying to run off into metaphysics.

  Che jumped and jiggled in the air and arced like a hooked fish, doing a dance so ugly that if you saw it you couldn’t possibly take your eyes from it, it was that profound, and that right, the appropriate ending to his life, as if he had imagined the whole thing backward from this ridiculous jiggly motion that would transfix your gaze if only you had seen it, hypnotize you, until you, too, wanted to make those terrible motions. Che stuffed three fingers in his mouth, and bit down on them to keep himself from screaming. One finger he bit right through to the bone, filling his mouth with his own blood as he died, blood that soaked his hand

  his bloody hand.

  And as he died he saw himself. Not as a store dummy speaking Quechua, urging Indians to rebel; and not as the star of a Hollywood movie; not as a doctor who had discovered the cures for a dozen otherwise fatal diseases, a hero of medicine whose life was shown in serial episodes in the Cordoba movie theater, not as the Prince of Argentina, or a great violinist, or a child made of magic
al clay brought to life by the potter’s love and longing; and not as an ascetic saint of nonviolence in a loincloth, marching to get some salt by the seashore; and not as a case history (the asthma of course, the central trauma), his body writhing then on a couch instead of a schoolhouse floor; and not as the main character, hardly even a hero, in the ambiguous story told by some North American, where he would turn and turn about as the winds of History turned and excited the author’s angers and fears; not as any of those things, and not as a man with a robe of hummingbird feathers, or a man sacrificing a llama, wearing condor wings, or angel wings or a crown of thorns (certainly not that!) or with light streaming from every orifice; no, he didn’t see himself as any of those things, he saw himself as whole, not only unwounded but well, always well, as he had never been well, not for one stinking moment of his wretched life; first he saw himself as a strong healthy infant, who watched his mother go into the sea, and waited patiently, without fear, unnervously, without ambition, for her return, and then as a young boy, about to go swimming, the sort of boy who was well liked, with many friends, a good team player; and then he saw himself as a healthy young man; and then at his own age—a perfectly formed man, naked now, and his chest was undeformed from the struggle to breathe, for this body didn’t have to struggle, inside that chest there were some perfectly normal lungs; and this body was as transfixing as his had just been, doing its jiggly death camba, transfixing not because its movements were surpassingly sublimely ugly, but because they were so beautiful, though it was just an ordinary motion really, he was walking towards himself—but isn’t the human body, when it is well formed and strong, and fed, and cared for, with firm muscles and tendons, isn’t it beautiful? and this lovely body was his own age, was his, and so he stepped forward towards it, and became it, and so was supremely happy before he died.