The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  Or so I thought. I remember that in 1943 my cousin Alvarados, lacking the inoculation of irony, had succumbed to madness. He had led a series of student demonstrations in Cordoba, against the restoration of Catholic education. The crazy people put him in jail.

  Alvarados, though he was two years older than I was, had always been a good amiable friend to me, the sort who retold the plots of movies in detail—agreeable at first on the long motorcycle trips we took together as teen-agers, yet the way he told them made them turn boring, a mechanical series of occurrences that rendered even tragedy into slapstick. And, like the projectionists in Cordoba, Alvarados often put the parts in any order. At the end, right before the finale, seeing how blank I looked, how anxious to get into my sleeping bag, he’d say, “Did I tell you they were on board an ocean liner? I didn’t! Well, they were on board an ocean liner. And they were leaning out a porthole. I mentioned that? I didn’t! Well, it was a very rough sea. And one of the women was his first wife, right? I didn’t say that? And Gable was on deck.…”

  But now, since he had begun college, Alvarados had been transformed. He had lost his clownish air, become a leader of his class. Along with his physical grace there was a seriousness to Fernando that was more important than the irregular way he organized his discourse. That moral seriousness had in fact gathered up and transformed his oddity as well, as it sometimes will our clownish qualities, and made it a sign of his sincerity: you were constantly reminded that what he said was all that mattered to Fernando, not his own eloquence in saying it.

  I got a note from Fernando in jail. He had a job for me. He wanted me to organize the high school students to demonstrate against the arrest of the university students. I went down to the jail to talk with him.

  “You can do it Ernesto. I’ve seen how they listen to you. They all admire you. As I do. All these high school students in the street to support us! Did I say I wanted you to organize them in our support?”

  I nodded. I was standing in the cement corridor of the jail, talking to Fernando through the bars of his cell. There were only a few lights in the corridor, and they too had little wire cages around them. There were no lights in the cell. A guard let you in and out of the corridor. I hated it. The air was pressing in on me. I couldn’t breathe well. I wanted to get this over with and get out of there.

  Alvarados had grown thin in jail. His tall frame was bony again, as when I’d first met him, my aunt’s child, a refugee. His brown eyes looked feverish in his skull. They had bruised him badly on the cheeks. You bastard this isn’t your country, they would say when they hit him, this isn’t your country, holding him, working him over, not caring whether their work showed. This isn’t your country. As if that explained it.

  “They’ll know then, the colonels will know, that we’re serious. Repression won’t work. Jails won’t work. We won’t stand for this Catholic crap. We just need to stand up to them.” He was emphatic, convinced. But he couldn’t stand up that well. He leaned forward, holding the bars to steady himself, staring at me, as if my image would keep him from falling.

  I nodded again, but my mind was on his bruises. There were big purplish swellings under his eyes. As he spoke to me I heard the voices of our kitchen, my mother’s voice, talking along with Fernando, taking his words just a few seconds after he said them, and twisting them slightly, mocking him. I spoke (she spoke), “Fernando, what will we do when they arrest us? Organize the primary grades? Toddlers against Fascism. No. That’s crazy, Fernando. I love you.”—That was true. I had never cared for him so much as I did at that moment when I refused him. I wanted to hug his thin body to me, to protect him. He needed protection, from the police, from his good heart, from his own insanity. “But this won’t work, Fernando. If we go out into the street, the same thing will happen to us. They’ll grab some of us and beat us to the ground with sticks. The rest will run away.” I was speaking with my mother’s hurried phrasing, quick, reasonable, ironic, even moving my hands in the air, suddenly, as she did. “Look at you,” I said, “blood caked over your hair like pomade.” But I didn’t feel ironic. I was horrified, near hysteria, barely controlling myself with this impassioned analytic tone. I hardly saw Fernando, leaning forward into the light. My mind was filled with images of what the police might do to me if they had power over me. They would strip off my shirt, they would beat me across the chest. Every blow would violate me. “Didn’t your blood teach you anything? We’re not going to destroy them with our moral resistance, the good-natured way we offer them our heads. If we go out in the streets it should be serious. It should be a real fight.” I meant it: a real fight: for as I spoke my fear changed, showed this other face: that they would spare me. They would be merciful towards me because I looked weak. I wanted the fight to be real. I wanted it to be serious. I wasn’t sick, I wasn’t ugly, I wasn’t contemptible, I was not helpless, and I could not have stood to suffer their mercy. (Or so I thought: death was still only a solemn word to me.) Their mercy would make me small, insignificant. “If it’s not a real fight, Fernando, people will have contempt for us. They’ll say we’re students play-acting. If you give me a gun I’ll go out there. But if we’re not serious we shouldn’t show how damn helpless we are. Why demonstrate our powerlessness? Everybody already knows about that. If we’re going to fight I want a gun. I want to fight back. I don’t want to play games.” But my voice had gone on now too long without response. It sounded hollow in my chest. I felt hot all over, flushed. What did I know about guns? I was a pretentious impostor, a fraud. A fool. (What would my father have thought of my violent words? I felt deeply ashamed. How contemptible he would have found me!)

  Alvarados moved a little, supporting his shoulders against the bars of his cell. The weakness of his body, the curve, called to me. I wanted to embrace him fraternally, be his comrade, act with him. Against the pull of irony I admired him. But his action was stupid. Or was it? Was it the stupidity I hated, or the risk, the blows across my face, being put into a rotten hole? And in someone else’s power. My penis shrank, as if something cold were touching it. But I was right! What he did was stupid! But if I’m right why do I feel ashamed before him? I hated looking at him. (And at the same time I wanted to stare at his face, his bruises. They transfixed me.)

  Alvarados, though, simply believed my words, even if he didn’t agree with them. We argued for a little while.

  “Give my love to your family,” he said, reaching out his hand through the bars. I hesitated, clasped it lightly; let it fall.

  I turned and walked from his cell, calling to a guard to let me out of the corridor. I hated being enclosed in this damp stifling place.

  Alvarados believed me, didn’t think me a coward. Alvarados believed me, but I no longer believed myself. He even continued to admire me. We remained the closest of friends.

  My Asthma, My Enemies

  My third memory:

  We are playing rugby. A bleak windy day. A cold rain starts that whips against our faces and will soon turn the field to mud. But we continue our game. My father, hands thrust into his jacket pockets, wearing his red hunting cap, watches from the sidelines with a few other men. They run back and forth a few steps, carried along by the game. I am the captain of the team (I had to be captain), and play scrum half. I carry an asthma inhaler in the top pocket of a sweater that I wear under my blue cotton jersey. But in scrimmage I am knocked down, and the inhaler falls from the pocket. There isn’t time to look for it in the muck.

  Soon the air turns thick on my skin. It’s the storm, I think, the humidity, a change in air pressure. I begin to sweat too much, and gasp, but do not leave the field. My father is watching me. I continue, to my own surprise, to run about, to shout out plays. I feel as if I’m watching myself from the air, watching my body move around. My head is floating far above my legs, far above the field itself. My body is enormously elongated; I look down from a great distance. During the scrimmage I am unable to fight back; to push anyone is impossible. I fall to the wet ground, ga
sping, and am too weak to lift my arms, to cover my head and protect myself. The other players swarm about my body, their legs darken the air. They kick me, and I think, ever a slow student, They don’t know I don’t have the ball. No, I realized suddenly, it’s because I’m down, because they can. They repeat the lesson, their blows come hard, rapid, they pummel me, until I learn: They do this because they hate me! They pound me to make their hatred clear. But it’s only a game for God’s sake. No, they say with their blows. This is as you want it, this is not a game, not accident, or play, we want to hurt you badly now, do you damage, really smash you down. We do this because you keep yourself distant from us, think yourself our leader, our superior, better than us, because you’re arrogant. This is your pride come home; you’ve practiced making us keep our distance, compelled our admiration, and this is how we show it to you. I can do nothing against their blows but huddle up to protect my head, my balls. They pile on me, jumping at my body, hitting at my chest and legs with their knees hands cleats. My body’s twisted, my arm’s buried under me, broken, pushed down slanting into the mud. My lips and nose are struck, they tear sharply and begin to bleed. Why doesn’t someone stop them? Blood is running from my nose, down my throat. I taste salt blood mixed with balls of sputum and dirt, it clogs my throat, choking me. Get them off me! I can’t cough, the press of bodies stops my chest from moving. I can’t move my chest to breathe, I’m stifling, shaking with hatred and rage and pain and fear. I want to be, to go on being! There is a sharp ripping pain across the skin of my stomach, where my jersey has ridden up. My ribs will crack, my chest is caving in. They’ll smother me! The beating goes on forever and ever. Do they want me dead? Why doesn’t someone help me? The blood from my nostrils runs together with the rain and the sweat that streams from me. I’m in panic, shaking with spasms, physical sensation is gone, my whole consciousness is fear that they’re going to kill me, no one will help me. My head’s tilted back against the ground. My wounds release a film of blood that covers my eyes. Stop them, Father, for God’s sake stop them! My eyes are bleeding, my eyes are bleeding! Do you want me to die!

  They rise and pass, my tormentors. Long ago they beat me because I was helpless; helpless, I became arrogant so they would not dare to beat me; when I was arrogant, they waited for me to be helpless, so they might beat me for my arrogance. The game goes on. The world is running motion, cries and runs, and clots of reddish light. Someone notices me. The rugby game is stopped for a moment. My teammates carry me over to the sidelines. When I come to it will be in a hospital bed. As in my childhood my father will be sitting beside me. I’ll think, brought back to ordinary life by my father’s presence, It couldn’t have been as I thought, so much hatred in their blows. It was asthma, it was hallucination.…

  The last thing I remember from before I passed out is the sound of my own wheezing, too loud, too loud, and my father’s face, leaning close to me, too close, his features distorted, enlarged, his huge hand pulsing as it clumsily, tenderly, brushes the water and blood from my face. And he is whispering, soothingly, “Good boy, son, good boy.”

  I have done my utmost.

  Argentina, 1952

  My Letter

  University of Buenos Aires

  May 1952

  Dear Father: This work, this life

  Dear Father:

  I cannot do this work you’ve chosen. I write this letter

  Dear Father: This work, this life you’ve chosen

  I have not chosen, I cannot yet find the will

  Dear Father, I have written this letter to you over and over this last year, my last year of school, to tell you of my decision not to join you in practice. A letter—for we cannot speak to each other anymore. Yet I never stop speaking with you. So many nights here in this damp city, or while I walked in the mountains, or picked my way among the numinous stones of Peru, I spoke with you in my mind, trying to piece these things out. And your voice was always in my mind, answering me, your voice always speaking, always

  Dear Father: I write this letter to you over and over in my mind, night after night. But I can’t send it to you, I can’t let you read it, and I can’t stop writing it, explaining myself to you, accusing you, justifying my ways, justifying

  Dear Father, This letter is meant for you, but it will always remain with me. That is our nature: to think more than we say, to hold back, but to let everyone know, by our distant manner, that we are holding back, observing, judging. We drop their hand a moment after shaking it. We withdraw at a party, sit in a corner, not speaking, while others bob up and down in a drunken dance. Their judge, understanding all, forgiving nothing, our verdict contained in our thin-lipped smile. (My lips do it too.) We’ll forgive the drunken dancers eventually—the kind of forgiveness extended to children and countrypeople—if they’re contrite and accept our judgment of them, our right to judge.

  I do not like our character. I must change. I will find the will to change. The will to change that

  I will not be like you. Not in the way that is most important to you. I will not join you in practice.

  When I was a child we filled my head with visions of my future glory as a doctor. Those visions (garishly colored, like cheap pictures of the saints) now live inside me. I can’t enact them, and I can’t rid myself of them.

  You and I said I would be not just a doctor, but a great doctor, a Prince of Medicine. You told me stories of our country’s sickness, the diseases inflicted by poverty, by imperialism. But that misery was opportunity, was the field for my future exploits. I would cure the sickness. When I was twelve I imagined myself featured in a series of movie serials. I saw myself unobtrusively standing in line on the dirty mosaic sidewalk outside our movie theater, buying a ticket like everyone else, and sitting anonymously among the audience. A modest smile crossed my lips as I watched the very slightly exaggerated re-enactments of my achievements. Each episode was devoted to one of my discoveries. At the age of nineteen I would be the man who discovered the cure for (I kept dropping some diseases from the list and adding others) polio, cancer, leprosy, and—always—asthma. (It was given to me not as an affliction only, but as a sign.)

  And I still believed, five years ago, when I came to medical school—already a little behind in my schedule of discoveries—that I would find out something about asthma. The pain would put me intuitively in touch with some piece of knowledge about that disease, knowledge that I would recognize, because it would speak to me a truth about my own character; it would be self-knowledge.

  Now I know my asthma is my pain only; it means nothing.

  from a journal 3/50 The faces in the street, “nothing, nothing you can do.” Broken, even their anger gone. And what is it I wanted really by becoming a doctor? To exercise my compassion on a princely scale for these people. To discover a cure that would save thousands. And now?

  I hear my father’s voice. “You know what you remind me of, Ernesto? Those monks who keep a death’s head before them, to remind themselves that the world’s a wicked place. You hold up these poor like a memento. You say, I can’t do enough for them. So I won’t do anything at all.”

  —But imperialism is an inferno, it is the Fire of London that consumes millions. Still, he is right, of course—one must work tirelessly to do what one can.

  Father, I worked hard at medicine, though it was very difficult for me. I felt as if I were breaking my will, memorizing, sitting quietly, sitting still and solitary with my books. It’s hard for you, you told me once a week throughout my third year here, because you don’t work steadily enough. Things came too easily for you in the past. You have no staying power when things are difficult. You give up.

  That was unfair. And yet, like all your words, they cut me to the heart. Or wounded my pride. For if I accepted your lifelong judgment—that I was especially gifted, a genius—then I had to accept your reasons for my difficulty: I wasn’t trying hard enough. For I could do anything I really wanted to.

  The other students, my competitors, m
ade me jumpy. Within a year my old comrades from the student union had fallen away from me. The times are cold, frightening. Peron has us at each other’s throats. As Mother says, tell a group of Argentine leftists to form a firing squad and they’ll make a circle. We were isolated, sullen; we could not find an action; we turned back on ourselves, made gestures—for a while. Soon we were terrified to do even that. We talked. Afraid to demonstrate, be beaten pointlessly, sent to jail, disappear, we hid our terror from one another, and talked. Near the university there are huge billboards, pictures of Eva and the General. No words. Just enormous pictures, lit up at night. The image of our world. Outside of them there is nothing.

  from a journal 6/50 Often now I am overcome with that same madness that seized me throughout my childhood. When I am in class, or walking in the city, or at one of the political meetings, I will see someone who rubs me the wrong way: perhaps he is condescending to me, or to someone else, or I simply don’t like the way he looks. I am seized by a sudden savage lightheadedness. I want to throw myself upon him, to wrench his head back, I want to humble him utterly, to tear at his skin, smash his nose till it bleeds. My head is pushed upward by anger. All I know of myself disappears suddenly into this harsh wind that makes my body tremble. I can feel my muscles strain, feel the man’s fìesh as if I were actually tearing it. The street, the room, the whole world, shakes for me, as it does during one of my attacks. I feel as if there is a terrible force inside me; if I were to turn it outward I couldn’t control it; it would surely destroy someone. The wind would shake him, shake the world, to bits.