by Jay Cantor
Chaco imitated Nico, punching more air, and humming “Fidel Is a Meteor/Fidel Has Big Plans/Fidel Is the Master/Fidel Is the Man.” Soto laughed at the two of them standing next to each other, punching air together. Castro, he thought, was someone to be watched, a madman whose lunacy might be what the times demanded, might bring him to power. But Nico was someone to be laughed at, a person of no account. And Nico agreed with Soto’s judgment; after all, he was not Fidel. His arm moved more and more slowly, as if the air had suddenly become thick around him. He opened his palm, slapped it against the side of his leg again and again, not softly, but with a hard sound, the sound of bruises, of damage being done. He sat, and looked down at his lap, silent. Fidel would know what to do. He didn’t.
Nico and I sought each other out. He had seen battle. And though I did not condone that stupid pointless violence (“Oh, they were all captured,” Soto said with mild astonishment. “Most of them were tortured and then killed by the police”), still, I knew also that Nico had knowledge that I coveted. He knew the depth of his own courage, the sacrifice he was prepared to make, his willingness to die. He had found the leader he longed for, and had recognized him, and been obedient to what he had seen in him. There was no mocking, ironic voice in his head, no sad, impeccable moralist, denying him the chance to declare himself, to act. I was sure that this gangster, this Castro, with his bloody badly planned adventures, was not the leader who would call the suffering people of Latin America to the great, the necessary transformation. He was a man with a red kerchief running towards a police line—as if he could stand horizontally! He was a failure, a charlatan—a lawyer! But I respected Nico, even if he was so obviously deceived in his love. For I wanted to have in my life his commitment, his courage, his faith.
And Nico, for his part, saw that I was not, like Soto, or the others, merely tolerant of his admiration of Castro. He felt the strength of my ambivalence, my refusal of his leader, and yet my search for someone like this Fidel, my search that was so much like Nico’s own. I was more than merely skeptical. My contempt for this Castro was more urgent than that. I might believe in him, but I didn’t. Why did I ignore, Nico wondered, Fidel’s unmistakable grandeur? What blindness of soul! he said. If only he could find the right story to tell me! For Nico had to convince me in order to remain secure in his own faith.
As I, I felt, had to convince Chaco to remain standing in mine.
An odd dance. Nico and Chaco and I often walked through the city together during the last days of the Guatemalan Revolution. We did guard duty with the Youth Alliance throughout the morning, standing outside the tall stone posts and iron gates of the university, watching for anti-Communist saboteurs. But the daytime saboteurs were easily spotted: they were the single-engined planes, their North American markings painted over, that flew as they wished over most of the city. Guard duty meant witness, witness to the power of North America, to the final cowardice of the Guatemalan leadership, to the fall of the Revolution, to the death of the Indians’ hopes.
One afternoon in June, a week after my birthday, a woman in a long blue-and-red skirt brought out to us a petition being circulated by the Young Communists. It implored the Congress of the United States to desist from their aggression against Guatemala. I laughed at this craven inanity and passed it on to Nico. “Implore,” he said angrily, “what does that mean?” He spat on the paper and handed it back to the woman. She wiped the spit off on Nico’s own sleeve, and went back through the tall iron gates. One of the planes flew low over us. The roar filled my head. Nico took out his pistol and fired at the plane, leaping a few feet off the ground as he pulled the trigger, as if the extra distance would send his bullet home. I laughed. He was spitting at the plane with his gun. It all seemed far away to me. The city was behind a pane of glass made of memories and voices; people’s gestures looked like a movie with the sound cut off. They seemed absurd. Nico’s angry arrogant actions, spitting at paper, firing at planes. The plane itself. What did they mean? I couldn’t quite remember. The only vivid sound was the roar of the plane, and that meant nothing. I felt very tired. (Please come home, he had scrawled across the bottom of his letter, in a child’s unsteady hand.) My limbs made enormous effort to hold me up on the sidewalk. That morning at Hilda’s I’d received news of my father’s death.
The pilot waggled his wings, as if in friendly response to Nico’s noise. Leaflets came fluttering down through the air, like huge light bird droppings dried by the sun as they descended.
“Look,” Chaco said, “you hit it!” He picked up one of the leaflets and read it to us.” ‘Friends of Christianity! Be sure that the liberators will execute all the Communists and their sympathizers! Vengeance will be ours for all that our nation has suffered from this foreign disease! Justice will be done! But to those who have cried out under the yoke of tyranny: We have heard your cries! Castillo Armas bears no anger against the Guatemalan Army, betrayed by a few of its highest officers! Surrender and you will face no punishment! Continue to obey the Communist tyrants and you will surely die!’ ” Chaco did not giggle as he read.
“Christianity,” Nico said, and spat on the pavement. “There is no God!” He wasn’t kidding. He said such angry things about God often, in defiant affirmation of His absence, His recalcitrant Bad Character. “No judgment!” he shouted. “No judge! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” Clearly these curses were meant to keep some danger at a distance; Nico violently shook off the waters of baptism. I do not know what crisis of faith Nico had suffered before he found the true word, the faithful one, Fidel. But some of the water had soaked him through; his speech was wounded with theological metaphors, accusations of soul blindness, of diabolism—and good news and greetings, too, of a messianic sort.
We walked by the Government Palace, on our way to Hilda’s. That morning we had heard, and heard about, two twin-engined gray planes strafing the huge palace. Now rows of soldiers stood in front of the pillars of the long portico. More impotent witnesses. On the long uppermost balcony of the palace’s right wing, men remounted machine guns. Chips in the gray stone ran the length of the balcony, from the morning’s attack. They had fired back from there, while the soldiers hid under the portico. More spit. Ineffectual gestures; a rite; last rites. Only the masses could have saved the Revolution. But no one had raised the symbol that might unite them. Black drapery covered the palace’s long windows. The forty cornices, rounded forms with spikes in their center that composed the top of the balustrade, all still stood. The palace hadn’t been bombed, for Castillo Armas was certain he would come into possession of it.
Something crashed from above us. A tile clattered down near our feet. A young man in his undershirt on the long flat roof cursed and looked over the edge of the railing. Inwardly I heard his curses turn to screams. The army and the mercenaries battled now for bridges near the rail town of Zacapa, the link to Ecuador. North American planes had bombed that town, and the hospital in Guatemala City had been cleared for the wounded. The Federation of Labor sent loudspeaker trucks through the empty city, calling for blood donations. What did she know of blood? Of the dignity of nonviolence? Poor man, without friends, lying on the floor of the living room, with his hands at his side. Corpse position.
“It will all be over,” Nico said, with great decisiveness, “if they get this close.” But then, as always, he denied his own authority; his voice grew quiet, tentative. “I think,” he added. His expertise, he admitted, was borrowed. He spread his fingers and pressed them into his neck. What would Fidel think? That was Nico’s hesitation. Opinions could only be offered provisionally, until Fidel marked them valid. And Castro’s confirming voice was far away, in a dictator’s jail, on the Isle of Pines.
Is this leader, she asked, making men more themselves?
“Go away, Mother,” I whispered. I wanted to silence these voices. They came without my asking, while the palpable world moved farther away, became spectral.
“What?” Nico asked. He bit his lower lip in anger. He thought
I’d insulted him.
I smiled. I would insult him. (I watched from behind a glass. Did he have feelings? Perhaps by making him wince I could establish our reality for each other.) “Fidel would know what to do,” I said. My mother played with the charismatic’s name. The people of Guayaquil chanted it. Fi—del! As if it had some protective powers. Armed men moved out of the carnival crowd, towards the army barracks.…
It had no protective powers. They were tortured and then killed by the police.
“You’re mocking me, I know,” Nico said sadly, for it was a great sorrow to him that we could not feel the power of his beloved, the warmth. “But you’re wrong, Ernesto. It’s easy to mock. We’re a generation of mockers.” He turned accusingly towards the archvillain, Chaco, as if the source of derision were always in him. Chaco looked away from the accusation, humming to himself contentedly. He was, I knew, composing a song, another piece of his “cycle” on Fidel, little verses with titles like “Fidel Is a Mansion,” or “Fidel Is a Soap,” which he sang at inopportune times to torment Nico.
“But Fidel would know. I tell you Guevara—listen to me!—he is the most extraordinary man. Not only on the little island of Cuba. But in all the Americas. It’s simply an accident that he was born there and not some bigger place! The rest of the democratic Left on this continent, they talk. They talk. Then they rest and talk some more. But Castro acts. History will show. He has guidance. He will liberate Cuba from that spider Batista. I know. I am certain. Absolutely certain.”
Chaco smiled at me. Nico, Chaco said one night at Hilda’s, frightened him, with this hagiography of a murderer. Who knew what it might incite him to do! “Nico frightens me, Hilda. But not so much as Ernesto, of course.” He spoke his accusation directly to Hilda, who sat and looked at him quizzically. Who might ever know if he were serious? What use was such irony? “In the long run, in my opinion, Hilda, this Guevara will do more damage.” But such mockery of me was rare now from Chaco. Our acquaintance had changed these last few weeks in Guatemala, as the city grew nervous and despaired, and had become a friendship. At night on the golf course he talked with me about Gandhi. And when I spoke he listened, with his face strangely calm (or so I thought watching him by moonlight). The absence of movement signaled a serious concentration for Chaco, the way Fernando’s contortions had mimed the passage of his thought. Perhaps Gandhi might bring him singleness. As for Chaco’s irony, Nico was now its preferred object. We stood and watched the palace. The men finished with the machine-gun emplacements and left the roof-balcony. Would they return, I wondered? I rolled up the sleeves of my sweaty shirt. It was hot here even in the late afternoon. I had slept in my clothes for days. My white cotton shirt had a sea-smell to it, and a moist feel.
“And you would be certain if you met him. You would see the light that is in his face, Ernesto. You would know then as I know. He is a fire in the field! Nothing can stop him! All is consumed! He would take action against these mercenaries. He would leap at them. He says only an action will move the people, show them that a fight is possible!”
My words! I realized suddenly. His words. The longing of a generation. You’d like him, Soto had said; you share a certain viewpoint with him. Impossible! I could share nothing with such a man! He was a charlatan, a fraud, a killer, a gangster. (Was that my own voice, I wondered. Or that of a sad, stern, isolated moralist? I will not become you, Father. “Go away old man!”)
“No,” Nico said. He clapped his hands together, an engine revving up. “He is your age Ernesto. Or maybe a few years older. You would like him. He is manly. He wouldn’t let the Guatemalan Revolution die without a struggle. That lacks courage! He would keep the idea of resistance alive for the future, even if we were to fail now.” His hands thudded their approval.
But what action could Fidel or anyone take? Defeat was thick in the air of Guatemala City, like humidity before rain. The bad air was everywhere. The military would not allow Arbenz to arm the workers and peasants, so the Revolution’s life depended on the loyalty of the Army, its only defenders. And the generals, Arbenz assured the nation, would remain loyal to him. The officers were his friends, his former students at the military academy. He had taught them how to read, a word at a time, each word a test of their worthiness. Poor Arbenz! The Party supported Arbenz’s decision. The people must not struggle.
A North American aircraft carrier had anchored off shore near Puerto Barrios. The time for revolution was … not yet.
But Fidel, ah, Fidel would take action! Fidel would know what to do!
Fidel began each of Nico’s thoughts. Fidel instructed him by word and example. Fidel accused him. Fidel had nearly gotten him killed. He had betrayed Fidel by surviving. He hadn’t been courageous enough for Fidel. Fidel took risks. Fidel acted. Fidel spoke beautifully. Listen please, Ernesto, to this magnificent speech of Fidel’s! Fidel knows what to do. History guides him.
Why haven’t we heard from him? Why hasn’t he spoken? This story fills his silence; entertainment between the acts. I continue telling the story of my past until Fidel speaks.
“You say the word ‘history,’ Nico,” I said. “History guides him. But I hear the word ‘God.’ God guides Fidel.”
Nico, furious at the mention of that Unfortunate Personage, spat an inch or two from my mismatched shoes. I pushed at the saliva with the flat end of my boot.
Fidel, he said angrily, would know what to do, by looking inside (as if that escaped theology). He was an instrument of history. Fidel wouldn’t sit still (as if movement were a kind of election). (He wouldn’t sit here at this table, waiting for the end.) He wouldn’t sit still.
Nor could Nico. His motions were constant; abrupt; halted halfway; forceful-looking, but without purpose. He seemed angry always, a man on the point of striking someone. But he only struck himself. He beat his large fist against his leg, the side of his jaw; he pounded the heels of his hand together in a rapid motion that was frightening to watch, like a destructive machine, or a seizure. (How would Pavlov have explained that? I asked Hilda one evening, as if I were presenting Nico’s case, as if he weren’t there. And, as he sat on the couch banging his hands, he wasn’t; he was lost in his painful ecstasy.)
Now he ran his palm through his long black hair, carefully straightened by him and formed into a high pompadour. He would not cut his hair, he vowed, until Fidel was released from Batista’s jail on the Isle of Pines.
The feel of his hair reminded him, as most objects did, this grieving lover, of his heart’s only subject. “And even in prison he struggles. He sends letters to guide our movement. Every day of his life Fidel fights. He needs struggle as you”—Nico turned towards me, the possible acolyte—“as you need knowledge.”
What more knowledge did I need now? I wondered. What might return this world to me? What might help me move my sodden limbs one more step? What might help me breathe this bad air?
We walked away from the palace. My leg muscles hurt, cramped from last night’s accommodations, the golf-course fairway. With every step my body complained from a thousand small places. I felt like a crumpled piece of paper.
Nico’s wide white shirt reminded me of the smocks worn in grade school. We’d been gauchos—our heads shaved for lice—and had ecstatic knife fights. We made daggers from sticks, their ends burned black. A hit left a charcoal mark on your smock, where delicious blood would have poured from your torn skin. I risked my eyes running at them. I was fearless in my savage maneuvers. I had to make a distance between us, hold them off by the actions I might improvise that they were afraid to perform.
We headed towards the park, a little way down the avenue. I saw them then. The boy with the round lightly freckled face came first, a tormentor bribed with pieces of linted candy. Ernesto Banana, Banana Guevara, Banana Guevara, Banana Banana. They must not mock my father’s name! (You have his name, she had written me. You are what was best in him. It felt like a curse.) They pulled me towards an iron basin, my tormentors, still with me, with me always, aro
used to walk again by this shirt of Nico’s, by my father’s death, more vivid to me than my companions in the empty streets of Guatemala City. Why hadn’t he protected me against them? Their legs surrounded me, trapped me. An animal, I writhed on the ground, straining for breath.
But he had protected me! He had taken the sickly boy, and with his magic regimen made him strong. Shazam, he said, tying the plaid scarf about my throat. He ran me through the streets until I could run no farther, until I had done my utmost. Together we charted my progress on the wall of my bedroom. The potter’s clay figure brought to life by his love and longing. I became captain of the rugby team.
Only to be beaten down again. He walked along the sideline in the rain in that silly hat, watching them torment me. Why hadn’t he stopped the game?
How childish, he said, to cry for your father’s protection! At your age! “You’re weak,” he said, “your generation is weak.”
Nico stopped in the middle of the street and looked at me, his face suddenly slack. He bowed his head, for he expected reproof. “Yes,” he said, “we are weak. Most of us.” But not Fidel! When he was fourteen Fidel had organized a strike of the sugar workers, a strike against his own father! And when he was eighteen he had walked all over the plantation, calling a public meeting, to denounce the old man.” ‘You abuse the powers you wrench from people with deceitful promises!’ ” These were Fidel’s own words; Nico could be sure that it was correct to speak them. So he shouted them. But there was no one else in the street to hear.