Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

by Ben Fountain

  “‘Education,’ I said at once, ‘I would build schools, Comandante Guevara. To raise the awareness of the people.’

  “‘Good answer,’ he said, ‘but wrong. Before schools, before medicine, before anything, there must be security. Security is the pre-condition for all other advances.’ Therefore,” Laurent continued, raising his voice to an imaginary crowd of thousands, “when I am elected president, the security of the nation will be my number one priority!”

  “Don’t laugh when he talks like that,” Ponce told me later. “Don’t ever laugh when a Haitian tells you he’s going to be president, because it might happen. And if it does he won’t forget that you laughed at him.”

  Ponce was right, of course—as proof we had the elections of several years before, when only a fluke of history kept Laurent from high office. After thirty years in exile, he had returned shortly after Baby Doc’s fall and declared himself a candidate for the senate, one of a pack of hopefuls vying for the three senate seats from Port-au-Prince. He ran a lucid if little-noticed campaign until the final week, when Duvalierist diehards launched a terrorist blitz that threatened to doom the elections. Amid the all-too-familiar scenario of lies, international hand-wringing, and a rising body count, Laurent caused a sensation by appearing on TV and announcing that he was going to dance for peace. “All Haitians should dance!” he cried wherever he went, breaking into a hot, hip-swiveling shuffle that brought cheers from an instantly smitten electorate. “Let’s dance instead of fight, all Haitians should dance!” Election day turned out to be a disaster, with death squads running wild all over the country, but before voting was canceled observers in Port-au-Prince reported that huge numbers of people were marking their ballots for “the guy who danced.”

  It was scary to think how close he’d come to real power, though the idea was good for some vengeful laughs too, because the sane politicians had made such a mess of things. But as for poor Laurent, he’d missed his chance; now he spent his days dropping in on friends and battering them with stories about his time with Che. At the Bay of Pigs he’d commanded a detachment of militia, putting his life on the line for the Revolution; he’d also been at Che’s side in the humiliating aftermath of the missile crisis, when angry Cuban crowds had chanted “Khrushchev you faggot!” There in the small, sweltering apartment without running water, Laurent would describe Che’s brilliant mind, his Herculean work habits, his love of practical jokes, and the curse of his asthma, the stories piling one on top of another until we lapsed into a sort of historical trance. Then the old man would catch himself and glance at his watch.

  “Bon,” he’d say, taking a last slurp of coffee, “please excuse me, I’m due for my appointment now,” and off he’d go to meet Carter or Yeltsin or whoever was on the agenda that day, dismissing us with a wave of his empty portfolio.

  4. The Consoling Voice

  Throughout my thirties I kept going to Haiti, convinced that I’d found ground zero for all the stupidity, waste, and horror inflicted on the hemisphere since Columbus and the Spaniards set up shop. Meanwhile Ponce, as part of his duties for a national medical commission, made several trips to Cuba, returning with tapes of Che’s speeches that he’d play in the evenings on a cheap boom box, Che’s voice ringing through the old gingerbread mansion with the propulsive resonance of hammered sheet metal. As he rose in prestige and prominence, Ponce began to neglect his wife, a beautiful woman with piercing anthracite eyes and skin the color of brandied chocolate. She came from a poor family, but she was direct and strong-willed, and had a quick, intuitive mind that put my college degree to shame. She and Ponce had met shortly after the Aristide coup, when a ruthless military regime took control of the country; their romance had flourished amid the heady atmosphere of brutal repression and messianic resistance, but the adrenaline rush of those days was long gone. Now they spent most of their time together arguing about money. There was never enough, of course, and they spent too much, and the debts were piling up and so forth, and watching them fight I began to think that Marx, who was so wrong about so many things, had been right about money’s relentless genius for invading every aspect of human life.

  Ponce, not the most practical man when it came to finance, dealt with the problem by running around on his wife, and he described his erotic adventures to me in an urgent, hissing whisper that sounded like the air leaking out of their love. He told me everything; to her he denied everything, though what he was doing was pretty obvious. “I’m going out to get some Cokes!” he’d yell, and then be gone for three hours. So she and I would sit in the dark at the kitchen table, drinking rum without Coke and talking into the night while her family snored on mattresses scattered around the room.

  “Je suis une femme deçue,” she told me, I’m a disappointed woman. She knew her position was tenuous; even though Ponce introduced her around as his wife, they’d never actually married, and along with her lack of legal standing she had no money, no family means, no education to speak of. Things lacked clarity, she said. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. She kept returning to a dreamlike story about a resistance group that she and some friends had formed shortly after the coup. At first it was all blòf, just meetings and talk, but then a blan turned up and started teaching them things. How to use a gun, how to make a bomb. How to plan an ambush. How to disappear.

  Who was this guy? I asked.

  She shrugged. Just a man, a blan. An American.

  Was he military? CIA?

  Another shrug.

  Where did you meet?

  In Carrefour, she said vaguely, at a friend’s house. At night.

  It sounded like a fantasy to me, a crude form of wish fulfillment; on the other hand there was the .38 she always carried in her purse, with which she seemed as casually proficient as your average American housewife with her cell phone. So maybe I was the one dreaming, living the fantasy. When I asked what happened to the group, she said, I quit. I got scared. One night the blan gave them a stack of Aristide posters and told them to blanket the neighborhood. They split into teams of two and slipped out the door with their sheaves of posters and pots of wallpaper glue, and within minutes she and her partner were picked up by attachés. She would have been shot if this boy hadn’t convinced the attachés that she was a stranger, just a girl who happened along and stopped to talk. So the attachés told her to go, get lost; the next morning her partner’s body was found in a sewer on Grande Rue. A few days later she met Ponce and moved in with him, in a different part of town where she wasn’t known.

  “He saved my life,” she said. “He got me out of there.” When I was alone with either of them, they spoke tenderly of one another; when they were together they couldn’t stop arguing, and eventually Ponce threw some clothes in a suitcase and moved out. He gave her some money now and then, but it was never enough, and whenever I was in Haiti I’d go by to see her and bring a little cash if I was able. Sometimes when I arrived for one of my visits, Che’s speeches would be playing on the boom box. It surprised me at first, because she didn’t understand the words any more than I did, but then I realized that the sound alone was enough, that the tense, florid arabesques of Che’s Spanish served her much the same way as a torch song. This was the record she chose to play in her solitude, the music that spoke all the longing and truth and hurt that we couldn’t talk about in ordinary conversation. Those secrets we keep, even when they aren’t so secret. When I asked, half-joking, if she was learning Spanish, she just laughed and turned away.

  5. Seremos Como El Che!

  “Be like Che!” Fidel urged his countrymen on the day that he announced El Comandante’s death. Thirty years later Che’s unmarked grave was discovered at last, bringing an end to one of the Cold War’s more potent mysteries. For eighteen months a team of forensics experts had poked holes in the airstrip near Vallegrande, Bolivia, searching for the famous revolutionary’s remains; I followed the story with guarded interest from three thousand miles away, wary of attaching yet more personal baggage t
o the subject. For decades Che’s enemies had kept his shameful grave a secret, fearful of creating a shrine and rallying point for the militant left, but once he was found it seemed that everyone wanted him for themselves. The Bolivian government lobbied to keep him in Vallegrande, where he was sure to generate millions in tourist dollars. The Argentines, their savage “dirty war” safely in the past, laid claim to him as a native son. The Cubans, who had ignored Che’s pleas for help in his last desperate days, insisted on their rights as his adopted countrymen and spiritual brothers.

  The Cubans got him, though not without some ugly bickering. I continued to follow the story in the newspapers, goaded by the notion that I had some sort of stake in the outcome. In any event, the discovery and subsequent reinterment of Che’s remains inspired a spasm of worldwide reflection on the Guevara legacy. Dozens of new books were published, and old ones reissued. Thousands of sordid CIA documents came to light. Fidel made a lot of interminable speeches, while tidal waves of Che merchandise swamped the world’s free markets. The global revolution prophesied by Che had yet to come to pass, though he would surely find the reasons just as compelling as ever. Poverty, injustice, oppression, suffering, these remain the basic conditions of life on most of the planet—whatever else has changed since his death, this hasn’t, but as life becomes more pleasurable and affluent for the rest of us, the poor seem more remote than ever, their appeal to our humanity even fainter.

  I’m in my forties now, halfway to heaven, as they say—the years are going faster, gathering speed. Recently it occurred to me that I’ve spent a lot of energy and many years trying to learn a very few basic things, which may turn out to be mostly crude opinions anyway. There’s so little in the world we can be sure of, and maybe it’s that lack, that flaw or deficiency, if you will, that drives our strongest compulsions. The last time I visited Haiti, Ponce was harried and overworked as usual, embittered by the terrible working conditions. “I’m like a jet pilot without a plane!” he cried. There were more sick people than ever, and fewer doctors to cure them; what was left of the Haitian professional class was bailing out, liquidating their assets and heading for the U.S.

  “Not me,” Ponce declared. “I’m staying. Everybody says I’m crazy, but I’m staying.” I told him I wanted to see Laurent, to get his thoughts on the final chapter in the Che story—it might be an interesting historical exercise, I said, though secretly I was hoping for some sign or clue that always seemed to be hovering just beyond my reach. Because his health had declined considerably, Laurent rarely left his home these days, but Ponce knew where he lived, and so one hot, sleepy Sunday afternoon we bought some sweets and rum to present as gifts and drove over to his house. Laurent lived in the old Salomon quarter near the center of town, close enough to the palace that he could still, if proximity counted for anything, sustain his dream of ruling the country some day. Ponce got lost in the tangle of eighteenth-century streets, made some random turns, swore, seemed to find his way again. Bands of sunlight and shadow tiger-striped the narrow streets; the old houses had the slumped, encrusted look of shipwrecks lying at the bottom of the sea. After some more addled swearing and driving around, Ponce pulled up in front of a crumbling wood-frame cottage. The sorry state of the house, the piles of trash in the yard, seemed to belie the fundamental human wish to cope. Two teams of wild-looking boys were playing soccer in the street, the match swirling around us as we climbed from the car.

  “I’m sure he’s home,” Ponce said as we crossed the street. “He hardly ever leaves his house anymore.”

  The afternoon light had a coppery, brackish tint. The dry weeds seemed to explode at the touch of our feet. “He might not recognize us,” Ponce warned as we crossed the yard. “He’s pretty senile, but maybe the rum will get us in.” We stepped from the sun into the cavelike shadows of the porch, careful to edge around the rotten floorboards. We knocked on the door, waited, and knocked again. I turned and watched the street for a minute, the shrieking boys absorbed in their game of soccer, the slow procession of Sunday passersby. The wall of sunlight tracking the porch’s shadow-line seemed as smooth and final as marble slab.

  “Is he sick?” Ponce wondered out loud. “My God, has he died?” We knocked again, and we called, then we walked along the porch tapping all the windows, trying to rouse some sign of life from the house. He could be sleeping, we told each other, or maybe his hearing was gone, or maybe he was confused and couldn’t find the door. So we kept knocking, though after a while it was useless, we knew. And yet we stayed, we knocked and called until we made fools of ourselves, but no one ever answered within.

  Fantasy for Eleven Fingers

  So little is known about the pianist Anton Visser that he belongs more to myth than anything so random as historical fact. He was born in 1800 or 1801, thus preceding by half a generation the Romantic virtuosos who would transform forever our notions of music and performer. Liszt, more charitable than most, called him “our spiritual elder brother,” though he rather less kindly described his elder brother’s playing as “affectation of the first rank.” Visser himself seems to have been the source of much confusion about his origins, saying sometimes that he was from Brno, at other times from Graz, still others from Telc or Iglau. “The French call me a German,” he is reported to have told the countess Koeniggratz, “and the Germans call me a Jew, but in truth, dear lady, I belong solely to the realm of music.”

  He was fluent in German, Slovak, Magyar, French, English, and Italian, and he could just as fluently forget them all when the situation obliged. He was successful enough at cards to be rumored a cheat; he liked women, and had a number of vivid affairs with the wives and mistresses of his patrons; he played the piano like a human thunderbolt, crisscrossing Europe with his demonic extra finger and leaving a trail of lavender gloves as souvenirs. Toward the end, when Visser-mania was at its height, the mere display of his naked right hand could rouse an audience to hysterics; his concerts degenerated into shrieking bacchanals, with women alternately fainting and rushing the stage, flinging flowers and jewels at the great man. But in the early 1820s Visser was merely one of the legion of virtuosos who wandered Europe peddling their grab bags of pianistic stunts. He was, first and foremost, a salonist, a master of the morceaux and flashy potpourri that so easily enthralled his wealthy audiences. He seems to have been something of a super-cocktail pianist to the aristocracy—much of what we know of him derives from diaries and memoirs of the nobility—although he wasn’t above indulging the lower sort of taste. His specialty, apparently, was speed-playing, and he once accepted a bet to play six million notes in twelve hours. A riding school was rented out, fliers printed and subscriptions sold, and for eight hours and twenty minutes Visser incinerated the keyboard of a sturdy Érard while the audience made themselves at home, talking, laughing, eating, playing cards, and roaming about, so thoroughly enjoying the performance that they called for an encore after the six-millionth note. Visser shrugged and airily waved a hand as if to say, Why not? and continued playing for another hour.

  No likeness of the virtuoso has survived, but contemporaries describe a tall man of good figure with black, penetrating eyes, a severe, handsome face, and a prominent though elegantly shaped nose. That he was a Jew was widely accepted, and loudly published by his rivals; there is no evidence that Visser bothered to deny the consensus. His hands, of course, were his most distinguishing feature. The first edition of Grove’s Dictionary states that Visser had the hands of a natural pianist: broad, elastic palms, spatulate fingers, and exceptionally long little fingers. He could stretch a twelfth and play left-hand chords such as A flat, E flat, A flat, and C, but it was the hypnotically abnormal right hand that ultimately set him apart. “The two ring fingers of his right hand,” the critic Blundren wrote, “are perfect twins, each so exact a mirror image of the other as to give the effect of an optical illusion, and in action possessed of a disturbing crablike agility. Difficult it is, indeed, to repress a shudder when presented with Visser’s sin
gular hand.”

  Difficult, indeed, and as is so often the case with deformity, a sight that both compelled and repelled. Visser seems not to have emphasized his singular hand during the early stages of his career, but the speed with which he played, to such cataclysmic effect, in time gave rise to unsettling stories. It was his peculiar gift to establish the melody of a piece with his thumbs in the middle register of the piano, then surround the melody with arpeggios, tremolos, double notes, and other devices, moving up and down the keyboard with such insane rapidity that it seemed as if four hands rather than two were at work. His sound was so uncanny that a certain kind of story—tentative, half-jesting at first—began to shadow the pianist: Satan himself was playing with Visser, some said, while others ventured that he’d sold the devil his soul in exchange for the extra finger, which enabled him to play with such hectoring speed.

  That Visser had emerged from the mysterium of backward eastern Europe gave the stories an aura of plausibility. “There is something dark, elusive, and unhealthy in Visser,” remarked Field, while Moscheles said that his rival’s playing “does not encourage respectable thoughts.” His few surviving compositions show a troublingly oblique harmonic stance, a cracked Pandora’s box of dissonance and atonal sparks, along with the mournful echoes of gypsy songs and the derailed melodies of Galician folk tunes. He became known as the Bohemian Faust, and was much in demand; neither the sinister flavor of his stage persona nor his string of love affairs seemed to diminish his welcome in fashionable salons.