The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  My father, too, was happy. He stood more easily with the other men, chatting, almost expansive in the way he laughed or gestured with his cigar. He was wearing a blue suit, and he looked more sharply outlined than anyone else. He had, I felt, with his strong hands, his beard, the dignity of a prophet. Others felt this too, and leaned towards him (he did not lean; he stood straight). You enjoyed arguing with my mother, but wanted my father’s agreement. I too loved my father’s rightness, admired it, wanted it for my own, felt that I participated in it when I nodded assent to his grave shapely sentences.

  I let his voice fill me, his seriousness make me still (my mother’s voice made me want to laugh, to hop around). When my father spoke I was grown up, someone who mattered, an actor in the drama.

  I let go of his hand, and went over to be with my new friends. We were on the outskirts of town, among the small uneven farm plots, the wire-meshed cages of dirty chickens. I took sharp breaths, whiffing the interesting hot odor of dung fertilizer. The late afternoon sunlight warmed me through my thin jacket as I chatted with the other children. Here I had friends, had escaped for the moment (I knew they would catch up with me) my tormentors in Buenos Aires.

  We marched. I helped my parents hold aloft cloth banners that floated between two thin wooden poles. No one had thought to punch holes in the cloth, so the wind bellied the banners, bent the sticks. My hands ached from the strain and my arms hurt from holding my pole up even with my father’s. We chanted as we walked, making the birds squawk with our nursery-rhyme slogans, our singsong refrains that kept time with our stamping feet, our swinging arms and legs.

  When we came to the main square of Cordoba, towards evening (we took the long way around, through every street in town), we raised our voices, made our chants angrier, shouted our defiance at the indifferent soldiers who lined the square. Young men with Indian faces, made more dour-looking by their Nazi-style helmets, they stared at us, unimpressed. Our chants moved with wings through the darkening air, rose over the soldiers’ heads, battered themselves against the massive stone cathedral. Our words returned to us transformed, their sound larger, more powerful in the echo, but also strange, wintery, vast, our own words now almost unrecognizable to us.

  My mother’s jokes soon became more bitter. You hesitated in joining her. Her rhythm was wrong. (Who was the joke on?) There was something dark and mean in her laughter.

  Franco was moving triumphantly through the Spanish countryside. (Had the Communists betrayed the miners, so as not to disturb their new allies, the Paris bourgeoisie? Or were the miners treacherous undisciplined cowards, the class enemy in one of the disguises only the Party could penetrate?) My mother fought viciously with her sister, and her brother-in-law, as if over a family inheritance. My father’s bearing stiffened. My mother’s face became colorless again. She was restless at night. (I heard her get up again after we’d all gone to bed, the rustle of her bathrobe, the soft fall of her slippers moving past my bedroom. She would go to the kitchen, sit and read all night. Lying in bed I was invaded by these sounds, and turned, unable to sleep, near tears, staring at the shadowy ceiling. Why was she doing this to us?)

  My father’s practice was not making much money. The people here didn’t like him. My mother’s inheritance was completely gone, squandered on bad investments in mate fields. We would have to move to a smaller house in Cordoba. They fought now, worse than before.

  In time we stopped going to rallies. The crowds had grown smaller. Working-class people no longer came. The Popular Front had been defeated. Fascism was coming to Argentina. The street demonstrations of Communist militants—my parents long since absent—were met in the church square by more army conscripts with lackluster eyes. They fired indifferently into the crowd.

  Of course, my mother explained to us, our demonstrations never mattered. It had always been a farce. The Anglos ran the puppet show. We would have more colonels. We would always have more colonels. The country had an endless supply of colonels.

  We were sitting in the kitchen of our new home, around the glass table. The table was too big for this room. The wicker chairs were almost against the wall. They would have cramped me if I still walked around the table. My mother scissored out an article for one of her black notebooks. “You were right, Tete,” she said, for they both liked to give me credit for their own insights. I nodded, happy, sipping up some mate. “We were fools to get involved in this election nonsense.”

  She was right. Every political convulsion that shook my country throughout my childhood (see? newspaper pictures of thousands filling the plazas of Buenos Aires) always gave issue in a monstrous birth, the rigged election of another colonel. There was neither reason nor cunning to history.

  Soon strikes were forbidden. The schools were purged of leftist teachers. Union leaders were jailed and then disappeared. People’s lives were an unpleasant series of pointless shocks. They became obscurely violent even to themselves, driven back to their burrows. My parents’ friends talked of their sun signs, their predestined life, determined from birth, immutable, beyond history, the stars, fate.

  We—my parents and I—at least gathered together in our blue kitchen, drinking our hot drinks, reading to each other, keeping enlightenment alive. My father, in his ragged but unpatched sweater, swayed back and forth in his chair, the newspaper his prayer and his bereavement. My mother sat surrounded by her growing clutter of coffee cups and notebooks, her scarred hand running nervously over and over her hair, smoothing it down, smoothing it down. I read to them. We were keeping reason alive in a dark age. How important our mission was! We were the intelligence of a dark time.

  My Regimen, My Vocation

  I could read, I was acquiring a political education. But I was still marked as queer at school, as an invalid, by my sunken chest and sloped shoulders. So, for my body, there was what my father called “the Regimen,” making his improvised series of exercises sound military, magical, certain of success.

  There were long walks to start, far too long for me. My father—though time would reveal him as a short man—took monster steps. I scurried like a crab to keep up, dancing along as best I could, and chattering to him, trying to amuse him. My father strode forward in his walking outfit, black pants, a red flannel shirt, wide suspenders, and a brave hat: a brown duck-billed hunting cap with red ear flaps that tied up on top with a thin red ribbon. He was splendidly indifferent to the looks from people we passed.

  We walked all over the city, through the most desolate slums (for even if crowded in every inch they still looked empty, deserted, enormous spaces between things, like the bombed-out cities of Europe that I saw in the newspaper at night). My father listened to my talk as if I were an adult too, a performer, one who delighted him. He was lavish with his attention, took my silliest plans (to discover the cure for a dozen diseases) seriously. It was deeply satisfying to talk with him, it made me giddy with pleasure at my own seriousness, until I grew so full of my own power and interest that I wanted to throw my arms out and spin round and round in front of him. But I wouldn’t, I was too serious, too profound, too adult, to do that.

  My father spoke to me of history, of imperialism, told me over and over—until I understood it well—the story of Latin America, our unredeemed continent, and the cause of its misery: the terrible cowardice, the moral failure of its leaders, its people’s degeneracy. My father grew angry as he spoke, balling his hands into fists. But how could a man do anything? How could anyone make the people see reason? How could he strike a blow at the United States?

  My father, though, would never have struck anyone. Gandhi was one of the few leaders he admired, a man like himself, strongly moral and without violence. He told me often of the Salt March, the little man in a loincloth walking hundreds of miles to the sea and picking up on the shore a small fragment of salt. The British wouldn’t allow this and went crazy with anger. But other Indians, when they saw what Gandhi had done, were deeply stirred, wanted to do it too, to show that they also knew wha
t was right. I loved the story. My Gandhi looked like Charlie Chaplin, marching to the sea with a bow-legged walk. I was moved by his courage, his solitude, moved most of all by his obvious vulnerability. He was skinny. He had no shirt. His ribs showed. Like me.

  My father, like Gandhi, despised violent people. His work was to save life, and that was to be my work too. He said I’d already begun it by doctoring myself, giving myself my epinephrine injections. (What I had hated to have him do to me I was proud to do to myself for love of him. And every time I put the needle into my arm I felt I was mastering something, gaining knowledge by using my own body. It was an intellectual pleasure. I had to test the new medicine on myself, take the risk of being turned into a gibbering moron, a monkey monster.)

  It was worth the risk. To be a doctor, my father showed me on our walks, was the highest calling. Everything in the world, all its rich and powerful people, “the imperialists,” worked against my father and me. Hard, unfeeling, immoral men, they starved the people of our country, kept them ignorant and superstitious, so they didn’t even want the medicines my father offered them. The poor lived in disgusting unsanitary ratholes, like the ones down the street from our new house. Could I imagine what life was like in a place like that? We walked by quickly. It was a dirt lot with shacks scattered across it. Children played among the clotheslines. They had no real shoes, but here and there a mother had wrapped one of her children’s feet in rags and newspapers and tied them up with string—a floppy clown’s shoes. Dogs ran all over the place. There was a terrible smell from the unpainted wooden outhouses. The women bent over long black iron basins near the back edge of the lot. One of them shouted to a child to stay away from the line. Could I imagine the dirt, the squalor they lived in? (I was with the other children in the slum, someone was shouting at me, warning me of something. My clothes were dirty, torn, crawling against my skin. I was running along, shouting, shouting something, it didn’t mean anything, just sound shouted up at the sky. I felt as if I were falling into this life, losing myself.) I took my father’s hand. He was moving faster than I was, pulling me along. We passed by.

  It was difficult, it was nearly impossible, my father said, to save even one life the way we did. People were like eggs. They could be cracked just like that. (I imagined: inside our eggshell heads we had white brains with runny yellow centers.) It was easy to kill people. You could do it with dust, a maggot, a closed door, a heavy weight. But that was something for weak people to do, ones without character, “imperialists.”

  Excited by his rightness he strode ahead. I walked faster to get back into hearing range. A little refrain began in my head. Death from accident, death from drowning, death from hunger. Each time my foot hit the ground I thought of another kind of death. Dead from disease, dead drunk, dead tired. My chest was tightening. I panted up air painfully, my legs grew awfully heavy. Of course, he continued, that wasn’t the way the world felt. No, they admired killers, thought you were a hero if you killed enough, put up a statue to you. Most people were beneath our contempt. They were incapable of knowing right from wrong. You know what they admired most of all? If you used up a person’s life so as to turn him into money! (I understood: capitalism: a top-hatted magician turning dead people into round gold coins.) But only real men, like my father and me (I was eleven), could save another man’s life. When we arrived back at the door each day I was dizzy from the strain of keeping up with him, from the grandness of my mission.

  On Contradiction

  Before taking up my medical career, I had to finish primary school. My father and I studied my school lessons together, practiced my spelling on our walks. We went over my mathematics as we played chess. He had taught me the game with a crumbling set of black and red stone pieces that often broke when we accidentally tipped them over. I loved chess, though playing against my father was never very satisfying. I could not win. For even if I won, as I frequently did, I felt my father had let me win, had cunningly set up positions where I couldn’t avoid capturing his pieces. My father denied this. “No, son, I’m glad when you win. But you have to take your victories the way you just did, by your own strength. I’ll never give you anything in a contest.” But my father smiled when he spoke to me and I couldn’t believe him. (Perhaps he wanted me to doubt my victories, still think him superior to me?)

  Nights after I’d won games were the ones most likely to find me in bed crying, confused, resentful.

  On Practice

  The walks, the tutoring, the games of chess, all had their effect. I was hungry for more certain victories.

  Given importance by my father, I became a prima donna at school. I went not to learn (I did that with my father) but to perform before the others. I was far ahead of the other children now, pretended that I knew more than the teacher did—the dialectical reverse of my previous abasement.

  One day the teacher warned us not to put ink or chalk in our mouths. They were poisonous. “Nonsense,” I said, during recess. We were standing in the classroom, by our wooden desks, about to run into the yard. “I don’t believe him. They’re not poisonous.” But I was talking through my hat. I didn’t know. I just wanted to hold the others around me.

  “What do you know about it?” one of the boys said. A dark squat child, he had the same stony quality as my old adversary, the freckled boy. We were enemies, with the bone-shaking hatred of childhood. I wanted to make his nose go crooked and bleed. I would have annihilated him if I could have.

  “I think,” I said, “that they’re not poisonous. And I’m a scientist. I’m going to test my hypothesis. I’m going to find out if I’m right.” My heart trembled at where this was leading. I’d no idea if they were poisonous. But I made a point of contradicting everything the teacher said—unless I knew from my lessons with my father that it was true. Now, if I wanted to know about the ink I had to taste it, use my own body.

  The children clustered about my desk in a half-circle. I felt that by daring something the others wouldn’t I could bind them to my will—by exercising my will in front of them on myself. I was like Gandhi, cleaning the latrines of the untouchables, or walking barefoot through India. I would move men by my example. And so secure a further hold over them, make a distance between us; a distance I would be safe in—safe from their irritation, their anger, their casual blows.

  “How will you find out?” my enemy said. Usually no one taunted me. But my authority was personal: I had to renew it at every moment. This time my voice was shaky, so my hold on the others wavered.

  “I’ll show you how,” I said, and I bit off a piece of the powdery chalk. “I think I’ll wash it down with a drink of this,” I added, gagging as I reached across my desk for my ink bottle. I felt as if I were watching my hand from above; I was conducting an experiment; I would know the truth.

  “Don’t, Guevara,” my friend Alvarados said. “Don’t kill yourself.”

  I thought, He’s worried my father will hold him responsible. He’ll have to carry my body home. Stand in the doorway holding me in his arms. Mrs. Guevara, he’s dead. He ate chalk and drank ink. He’ll hand me to my mother and run away.

  The thought of Alvarados carrying me made me laugh giddily. I took a sip of the oily black ink. Made nervous by my cousin, I drank more than I meant. This is it, I’m going to die. I wanted to stick my finger down my throat to make myself throw up. I wanted to go screaming for a doctor before the dust and oil destroyed me.

  But my fear of humiliation before the others was greater, apparently, than my will to live. I could not show weakness. So, with a sublimity of gesture available only to eleven-year-olds who believe they are about to die, I casually patted my mouth with a piece of blotting paper from my desk. “Mmm, good,” I murmured. “Tasty. Would anyone else like some? Would you like some?” I asked the squat boy. My enemy said no and looked at his shoes, ashamed of himself, remorseful that he’d driven me to suicide.

  To clinch the demonstration I added some phrases of my father’s, in my father’s precise ph
rasing. “Take nothing on faith, children. That’s not the scientific way. Don’t believe things you haven’t tested for yourself. Most of what people believe is just nonsense that everyone believes.” Everyone looked at me wonderingly—not for my wisdom, but because I had poison in my veins. I had stepped over to that farther shore.

  The rest of the day the others sneaked glances at me from behind their books. They were waiting for the fearful spectacle of my going into convulsions, gripping my stomach, falling off my chair, writhing on the floor, my eyes rolling up white as I passed away. That would be marvelous.

  I, too, waited. When the teacher’s back was turned I took my arm from the table and held my hand in front of me. Had it started to shake? It will when the ink reaches my brain. I saw my brain, dyed black like a rotten nut. I’ll go crazy then. I repeated my address to myself to show myself that I was still sane. But when I’ve forgotten, will I remember that I’ve forgotten and know I’m mad? I pushed a book off my desk, so that while bending over to pick it up I could stick out my tongue, and check for the color change that would precede death. It was black! I bit it. It was going numb! Would the teacher, please God, notice that my teeth were inky and send me to the doctor?