by Jay Cantor
12/7/56: I’m alive—the song my mother’s fingers sang as they drummed on the glass table. When I look at my comrades’ bodies, sprawled on the ground in filthy clothing, I wonder why we don’t say that to each other after every sentence, after every word of every sentence. Or perhaps we do, and until this moment I haven’t had the ears to hear this endless assertion. We’re alive, we all chorus, we’re alive. It’s our achievement. That is the music I’ll hear now in our voices, whatever doleful lyric we recite.
They found us on December 5 at four in the afternoon, at Alegria de Pio, three days’ march from where the Granma had run aground. On Castro’s orders we had thrown most of the extra supplies—the remaining heavy equipment that had escaped Roque’s panic, the explosives, extra ammunition boxes, food, and medicine—into the muck of the salt marshes. We couldn’t get them ashore; we couldn’t survive on shore without them. The black boxes half sunk into the marsh, as if the swamp couldn’t believe our folly and wanted us to reconsider. The area around the boat looked like the careless giant’s picnic ground.
A fighter plane flew over the yacht, and we jumped into the swamp, up to our knees in thick mud. It was night, and impossible to see through the tangled low branches of the mangroves and the thick vines that grew between them. Ricardo, walking in front of me, carrying his rifle with both hands over his head, tripped over a mangrove root and grabbed at a vine with his hand. His rifle fell into the marsh. He screamed, and one of the men behind us fired a shot. I heard Almeida cursing him. The creepers have thorns that ripped the skin on Ricardo’s good hand. I stopped and bandaged it as best I could. The air was humid, unpalatable, dense with mosquitoes. You couldn’t swat them away, your hand just moved through the indifferent swarms. They got into your nostrils and mouth. Immediately little walnuts formed on my arms and neck. But the worst thing about them was the sound, a continual low fretful annoyance. The men just ahead of me looked like wraiths, animated by the sin of their past lives, unable to stop marching, a purgatorial march (as if, if they just kept marching, they might get out). Our sins or his? I could hear the splat of men farther down the line falling into the mud and cursing. Why can’t my lips form those words? (It’s all too vivid to me. When one of them names an act, a part of the body, an excretion: I see it.) Behind us the shadow of a naval frigate moved towards the yacht. It fired towards the shore, several kilometers away. The roar shook the vines back and forth slightly, like the strings of a monstrous piano. More planes passed overhead, drowning out the sound of the cursing, the mosquitoes, the squish of our boots sinking into the mud. It wouldn’t be long, I thought. It was hard to breathe the damp air. I tried to concentrate on breathing, to keep away my terror. It was hard to push through the thick wet paste of the marsh with one’s shins. I tried to concentrate on the difficulty of taking the next step. My boots had filled with sandy mud. I tried to concentrate on the difficulty of lifting my feet. “The swamp,” Nico said quietly. He hardly spoke anymore. He meant we would die in the swamp. Men dropped their knapsacks, their canteens into the slime, to make walking easier. “Don’t throw away your rifle,” Marcos shouted, passing on a message from Castro. He had tied one of his handkerchiefs around his head to keep the sweat from his eyes; it was the brightest thing in the swamp. “The only thing worth holding on to is your rifle.”
“No,” Ricardo said from behind me. “Your shoes.” We knew what he meant: for running away.
After three hours’ march the tangle of branches let some light through. The ground grew sandier and firmer. Men lay down for a few moments on the damp beach. But we had to hurry onward. The white yacht, clearly visible in the dawn, marked our location. A B-27 appeared and flew over the boat, to the shore at Niquero, ten kilometers away, and then back again, looking for us. Castro’s plan—his new plan—is to move directly to the Sierras, and then make contact with the city network. He is sure we can establish ourselves among the peasants there, find food until the city sends aid. We had never, he said, intended to topple the dictatorship at one blow but to launch a revolutionary campaign that, with agitation and sabotage, would culminate in a general revolutionary strike. He told us this with great certainty, as if the past weeks had never happened, there had been no boat too small for the seas, beached a few miles from shore, plainly visible to the aircraft, no broken clutch, no missed meeting at Niquero. We had always meant to run aground in a swamp near Belie and throw most of our supplies overboard. You always sound so certain, Chaco had said to me as I lay on the stones in La Paz. But I am a pony of certainty compared to Fidel the Horse. He is a man without a memory.
Three more days of marching, in from shore, to dusty earth and low thick gray-and-brown scrub. When someone fainted we called a brief rest. But the planes continued flying overhead, and we had to move on. Some countrypeople ran out from their hut and told Almeida that they would offer a prayer for us to the Virgen de Cobre.
“What’s that?” I asked.
A theological debate ensued in my squad:
“A black virgin,” Almeida said. “It’s made of wood. It was found in the bay by Indians, before the Church came to Cuba. A miracle.” Almeida has grown a skimpy black beard. His small brown face is surrounded by streaming hair. He looks like a cartoon that forms a face no matter which way it’s turned.
“Horseshit,” Ricardo said. “It was placed in the bay by the Archbishop, for the Indians to find.”
“Shut up, asshole.”
And I saw a mound of steaming dung, an anus. I believe too much in the power of words, magical oaths, to give one’s word—as if the oaths were a solid fort that one lived inside. Not Fidel! He doesn’t inhabit his formulations; he is the motion between, the verb itself.
The 5th of December. We had walked through the night, following along the edge of a cane field. Towards dawn, few of the men felt they could go on. Every few minutes the whining would begin somewhere in the line, comrades begging the squad leaders for a rest period. Castro, at the center—the most protected area (though wherever he is, is called the center)—ordered a halt at daybreak. We made camp in the thickets at the edge of a dense wood. Across a wide dirt road were the cane fields of Alegria de Pio. The long curved leaves dangled down from five-foot stalks, leaf over leaf, a light film of dust coating the green leaves near the road. The sharp thin lines of the leaves had the clarity of a line drawing in a children’s book. (The reward for vigilance!) To the right of us there were more woods; and beyond the rows of cane an open field of short brownish grass sloped down to more thick brush, palm trees and hardwood. The sunlight and hunger made me woozy. The air felt like a thick scratchy blanket. I passed out, and slept through the morning. Towards noon Marcos woke me, to tell me a dream. The sunlight hurt my eyes, and I closed them as I listened to his deep slow voice. We were marching through a swamp, he said, Fidel sounded very sure of himself giving orders, but he didn’t really know the way out. The swamp was hundreds of miles long—Marcos could feel its length in the dream. Che knew the way out, but no one would listen to him—yet. Marcos went on with his recitation, but as he spoke I dozed off again, his words mixed with the pain the rocks were causing my back and I inhabited his dream. My body ached all over as we walked through the swamp. The swamp was alive and malign. The mud made a loud heavy droning sound as it sucked our boots down, trying to keep us there. My heart was beating rapidly, and I awoke to the great noise of planes circling over our hiding place; brightly colored Air Force piper cubs, yellow, blue-green, like streamers thrown into the air and carried about by the wind. Men in olive-green uniforms—my comrades, I remembered now—ignored the planes; they stood by a field of sugar cane, cutting pieces of thick brown-and-green stalk and sucking on them. The planes came in at lower and lower altitudes. Still unsteady on my feet, I set up a first-aid station, to treat the men’s feet. My last pair were Nico’s, huge blistered things, tormented by his new boots. Grayish-brown fungus grew over the sores. I cleaned and bandaged them. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. I know, because whe
n the firing started I looked at my watch. I had been leaning against a palm tree with Nico, after treating him, eating half a sausage and two crackers—the day’s food. I said something to him about the sausage, but the words were absorbed by the drone of the planes. (Hear that whine? It means: Run away.) Anyway, Nico wasn’t much of a conversationalist; no more stories of Fidel. The firing began—so many explosions seemed solid, like a curtain falling. The shots came from all over, from the woods, the cane, the sky, the earth. Bits of bark showered from the trees. The bullets, I thought crazily, were chipping the world away. Nico began to bawl. I lay prone. Why? Once, long ago, I’d been taught to. I heard someone shout, What time is it? What time is it? and I looked at my watch. But I was the one shouting.
Almeida ran back towards us, down the edge of the road. There were little puffs of dust near his feet, where the bullets landed. Another comrade came up from the other direction and dropped a black box of ammunition by my feet.
“Pick it up,” I ordered from the ground.
“Fuck yourself,” he said. “That’s all shit now.”
He ran towards the cane field. I left my medicines behind and picked up the box of ammunition. I followed him towards the cane. Nico grabbed his boots from the ground and ran after me.
“Where’s Fidel?” Almeida shouted over the awful din of the firing. “Where’s Fidel?” He ran down the path towards us, lifting his legs up suddenly very high, as if the ground burned his feet. Did he think he could skip away from the bullets? “I can’t find Fidel,” he shouted. He wanted orders. I shook my head—no, I hadn’t seen Castro, no, I didn’t know what Castro’s orders were, no, I didn’t give a fuck about Fidel—and ran towards Marcos. He was leaning on his knees in the middle of the path, firing a machine pistol. Nico screamed, “God save my life! God save my life!” I turned, surprised at the sound of his voice after so many days, and saw that he’d been hit in the face and chest at once. He held a boot out towards me, and blood poured from his mouth and nose. As I stupidly reached out towards his boot I too was hit, a sharp pain in my chest, and wetness on my neck. I touched my left shoulder and looked at the blood on my hand, red rich stuff, unbearably bright, beautiful in the sharp sunlight. I was dying. “There is no God,” I told Nico, and held my bloody hand out to him. Nico vomited thick clots of blood, and shouted, “They have killed me!” It came out with a wavery sound, as if he were under water. But the water was his own blood in his mouth. He fired his rifle at the sky again.
I fell on the ground near Marcos. “Oh shit,” I said. “I’ve had it. The stupid fuck has killed me.”
“It’s nothing,” he said, before he looked at me. He went on firing. Then he turned, and I saw in his empty eyes that I was a dead man.
All the firing was from the woods. I looked this way and that down the tree line, and saw some comrades sprawled in the grass. I thought they had been killed in their sleep, and that seemed especially awful to me—as if they’d been cheated of something. The soldiers had moved up on us, and we hadn’t heard them because of the planes. I fired towards the trees with the greatest passion I had so far felt in my life. I couldn’t see them, but I wanted to kill as many of them as I could. I wanted to kill some of them. Even one. I wanted to set the wood on fire, the shore on fire the island the sea the continent on fire. But the old gun I’d taken on the boat was a piece of shit, and jammed after two shots.
Marcos was no longer next to me in the dirt. He had left me to die. I wanted to have a good death, and remembered a story that I’d been read as a child, about a man freezing to death in Alaska. I saw myself leaning against a single pine tree in a field of snow, the open field, watching flakes come down in the sunlight like motes of dust. Why weren’t there any of my tracks in the snow? My boot marks were filling up with new snow, and it would all be as it had been before, as if I’d never been! I hadn’t accomplished anything! I started to say a favorite poem of my mother’s. Time blots me out, as flakes on freezing bodies fall/I’d like to kill that stupid bastard/I see the whole round world with every animal and every flower and it’s all one big pile of shit, a big big big pile of shit/and every leaf and every branch/is shit too, and you’re a stupid shit, and there’s nothing that I like at all. Come down and carry me away O avalanche! Baudelaire (was it Baudelaire?) he was really a stupid shit, living in his mother’s house, waiting for his mistress to sneak up the back stairs, Fernando was right, he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. Somebody on his knees near the cane field shouted, “We surrender! Please don’t kill us! We surrender! Don’t kill us! We’re like you! Please don’t kill us!” And Ricardo, already in the cane behind him, shouted so everyone could hear him, “Shut up you stupid cowardly fuck! Nobody surrenders you piece of cow dung!” I was already dead, I didn’t want to surrender, I wanted to fire my rifle more, I wanted to kill some of them. Raul Suarez crawled towards me from the edge of the woods, and I saw his body jerk upward as a bullet hit him. He reached me and showed me his chest, a black stain in the middle of the dust on his shirt. He started to rip the shirt open, so I could examine him. “Don’t,” I said. “I can’t do anything for you. I have no medicines. I’m dying.” And he was going to die, too, the poor bastard, another of the giant’s casualties. Six or seven spectral pilgrims crawled past me towards the cane, and Suarez joined them, abandoning me to my recital. I turned the page to a poem that had solaced Nehru in jail. A lonely impulse of delight/Drove me to having my face shoved in the dust the mud the muck the shit/I balanced all brought all to mind/The years to come seemed waste of breath, what the fuck is he talking about? he doesn’t know what he’s talking about either, poets are a useless bunch of pricks, Fernando was right, I should have gone with him, and not that one-eyed charlatan opportunist liar with his fake eye, this was the blood I saw in his eye, my blood. I touched my neck as if it might suddenly have magically healed. My hand came away wet. It felt very hot there. A waste of breath the years behind. That was true. A voyeur of revolutions. I wished I’d killed more of them. Any of them. It was all wasted time. Gandhi was a joke! I wanted to kill those soldiers more than I wanted anything. Except my life. And I wanted that so I could kill some of them. I wished I’d killed more of them in Guatemala.
Ricardo came towards me from behind, from out of the cane, on his belly, pulling his long bulk forward with his hands and forearms the way Bayo had taught us. What kind of animal was Ricardo?
“I’m dying,” I said. I thought he wanted to have a better look at my death.
Another theological debate ensued:
“Stop praying,” he shouted angrily.
“I’m not praying.”
“Yes, you are, you bastard. I heard you saying the rosary. You’re a coward, Che. I thought you were a Communist. I thought you were an atheist. I thought you meant the things you taught me. But one small bullet wound and you start saying the rosary.”
“Two wounds,” I said. It was important he get it right—my wounds were my last, my greatest, my only accomplishment. “And I wasn’t saying the rosary. I was reciting poetry.” I was dying. Soldiers we couldn’t see were scattering the field with bullets as if bullets were seeds. It was important that he get it right; it didn’t matter at all.
Ricardo stupidly stood up and pulled on my shoulders. He ripped the skin further, and I could feel more blood come out. He wanted to kill me! Then he lay down again. “Poetry! You’re worse than a coward. You’re a faggot bastard asshole.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “Everybody fucks your mother. Especially Castro.” How could he talk that way to me? “I’m dying,” I said.
He smiled. “Not yet.” He stood up again—he would get killed like that!—and dragged me a few feet towards the cane, by my legs. I couldn’t feel anything anymore in my shoulder. He got down next to me again, putting his face close to mine, and ordered me to crawl the rest of the way. Bullets kicked up dust just behind us. “You stupid Argentine scum, if you don’t move I’ll bash in your sick little chest with my rifle.”
This must be love, I thought—and I meant it. Ricardo’s affection astounded me! The feeling of rescue flooded me. We made it to the cane. The soldiers still hadn’t come out of the woods towards us. They fired furiously into the cane, but they couldn’t see us clearly anymore. Suarez pushed his hand in my face. His thumb was gone, blown off. “Use a handkerchief,” I said to Marcos, who always had one. I reminded him how to bandage a wound. Airplanes came in low and strafed the cane field behind us. Almeida shouted, “Where’s Fidel? Where’s Fidel?” like a bird call. He wanted orders on what to do next. I couldn’t see Almeida through the leaves.
“Fuck Fidel,” Ricardo mumbled.
I saw a fat comrade try to hide behind one of the cane stalks. I saw a man lying on the ground with his fingers to his lips shouting, “Silence! Silence! Silence!” as if it were the noise that was killing him. I saw a man bleeding from his face, who took off his belt and tried to tie it to the top of a stalk, to hang himself.
I moved on my belly towards the last rows of cane. I shouted for Almeida and the others to follow me. The men had to be moved quickly, before the planes returned and strafed the cane again. My chest stung as I crawled, but not with the profound pain of before. Suddenly the field to my left exploded into high flames and thick black smoke. I choked on the air, rolling over on my back and kicking my legs out from the strain. If you can keep your head and all about you are losing theirs and their hands and their faces and their lungs then you’re a stupid dumb fuck who doesn’t know what he’s doing and you deserve to die.…
“Shut up Che! You’ve prayed enough! You’re making me puke!”
I crawled again, until I had to rise and lead the men, running across the open field into the woods beyond. I knew as I ran that I wasn’t going to die. In the woods Marcos bandaged my neck, while Ricardo watched, drinking in my winces. The wound was close to the shoulder, and much less serious than I had at first thought; so I wasn’t ready to become a recitation yet. With me were Raul Suarez (badly wounded in the chest and hand), Almeida, Ricardo, Marcos, and Benitez. We walked farther into the woods, until night came, and slept piled on each other, nourished by the smell of blood and feces and sweat; exhausted; defeated; ecstatic. Mosquitoes blanketed us, attracted, I thought, by the blood.