The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  We went southwest of the highway to get away from the army, then north. There were good people in that region, followers of the MNR. They hid us, gave us new clothing. The other men worked on farms, pretending to be laborers. But I am a black man, and Bolivia doesn’t have many blacks. And Che had taken lots of pictures of all of us. Now the army had his knapsack and the pictures. I would be easy to identify. So I hid all day in a tunnel they dug for me, moist-smelling, with crumbling sides and thousands of insects. Chicken-wire-and-stick gratings, covered with leaves, hid both ends—two exits for my burrow, for escape. For weeks I lived like a mole, underground. I pretended it was my grave, I practiced being dead, and I gnawed my pork strips alone in the dark, with the smell of decomposing things and wet earth filling my nostrils. But I could eat. (I was happy to eat. It was the day’s big amusement. Not that the social life outside was much; we hardly spoke with each other anymore.)

  The peasants got a lightweight green truck for us and we rode on the flatbed into Santa Cruz, our legs stretched out like farmworkers. We took a plane to Cochabamba, a little thing with two propellors. (I hated it! I thought we’d die! Before, I hadn’t been afraid of airplanes. But Che had.) Parts of the city network were still intact there, and Inti knew how to reach them. They hid us in their apartments. But I’d been in a tunnel for weeks, underground, already dead. I needed to see some people. So I took a little stroll, and got a bad haircut from a talkative fellow with mottled skin. And I had a lemon ice in a little white paper cup. It was fine. Very tasty. No trouble drinking it.

  The dissident Communists, the ones who had broken with Monje and the Party, got us dark jackets, heavy mufflers and caps, and white knapsacks for the trip to the Chilean border, to Sabaya.

  The magistrate in Sabaya was a rat, he suspected something and telegraphed the army. But they couldn’t get to us: there were no landing fields for their planes. And, like an answered prayer, it began to rain every day, a cold endless deluge, the final onslaught of the waters. On its way to extinction the world became mud. The army couldn’t get its trucks into the mountains.

  The way out was terrible. The rain turned to snow as we walked higher through the pass, towards Chile. The ground was mud that froze around our feet. I had never been any place so cold, and please God I never will be again! The wind sliced through my jacket and scarf. I thought my bones were ice and might shatter. The wound in my thigh ached like a stone inside the flesh. We didn’t speak to each other anymore except about necessary tasks or directions. It was as Che had written about the men of the Granma marching near Belie: we felt we were in purgatory, and perhaps if we just kept marching we might get out. Whose sins had put us here? Ours or his? We were the extension of Che’s body. But it wasn’t like the Granma and Fidel. Che was dead! I looked at the snow and thought of Che’s first wound, and the white field he had imagined for himself to die in. This was it. (I was already inhabited by scenes from his memory!)

  All this time we hadn’t had much to eat, and what there was we had to pay dearly for, to greedy, frightened peasants. But I ate greedily too. Roasted corn: I could eat it! Pork rinds: I could eat them! Lemon ice!

  We made it across into Chile, to Arica, unsure of what would face us there. You felt in the mountains that you were moving from desolation to desolation, that nothing good could await you. The Bolivian government might have asked for help from the Chilean Army. If they had received it, then the mountains might be filled with troops waiting to surprise us.

  But the people came out of their huts to greet us, to cheer us. The Mayor of Arica is a Communist. I drank the hot rough liquor they offered us—I could hardly stop drinking it!—and I ate some salted beef.

  The government in Santiago gave us forty-eight hours to leave the country—we were like lepers who might spread their contagion. Allende arranged for our passage to Tahiti, where the ambassador met us. We had pork again, very tender, cooked outside on a spit for hours with a sweet sauce. On Friday, March 1, we flew to Paris. I began to have some difficulty swallowing food. I felt like my throat had pebbles in it, little circles of pain. By the time we got home the pebbles had become boulders. I would stare at my plate and acid would wash into my stomach, a hand would form to throw the food out of my belly, giving my insides a squeeze as it went. I couldn’t eat anymore.

  I had lost maybe fifteen pounds during the insurrection, maybe more—it was hard to hold my pants up at the end. I probably lost ten pounds more after Churo, during the escape. But I have already lost ten pounds since Paris. I now weigh a hundred pounds. If I go on like this I’ll float away! I don’t want to kill myself, and in truth it doesn’t feel as if I’m doing it.

  He is. He has stolen my appetite. He has stolen the rest of my life. What do I have left to look forward to? From now on my life will be to tell his story. I can see the days to come: I give a talk to a group of Young Communists who are doing volunteer work in the orange groves, telling them how important the spirit of sacrifice was to Che, how he taught that it is through sacrifice that we are unified with our comrades and the New Man is formed. I will meet with Yanquis here to cut cane, and tell them of Che’s sense of internationalism. I will dedicate schools named after him, and launch literacy campaigns. (They should use the detective novel. But I wouldn’t suggest it, for I see signs that the Revolution is losing its sense of humor.) Each October 8 there will be a memorial rally for me to address. I am going to hide out here, underground, already dead, from the almost daily festivals of the Year of the Heroic Guerrilla. It hurts me to talk. I’ll shame myself, croaking in public like a rusty machine. No wonder I want to vomit all the time! It isn’t acid inside me. It’s my hatred of him. I want to vomit him up! His body has become the food I eat! He almost killed me—that’s what I want to scream at meetings of Young Communists and innocent cane-cutters. He almost killed me! I curse him, but when I do the curse comes back and withers my own body.

  I can’t even say that. I’m not allowed to hate him. I feel woozy and the bad feeling makes the room grow dark. (Or maybe it’s the lack of food.)

  I don’t understand why I’m not allowed to hate him. He nearly killed all of us—all but five! (Inti stayed behind to lead the Army of National Liberation—consisting of Inti Peredo, sole proprietor. Inti is inhabited by Che’s dream, and like all the others who tried to be his body, Inti will die. I give him three months at most. He’s under his own curse, too, doubly guilty—he survived both Che and his own brother.) The strange thing is, we didn’t try to survive. When we volunteered to protect him and the others we expected to die. Should we feel guilty that we were lucky and outlived him? We shouldn’t. But we do.

  He nearly killed us all! There were plenty of times after it was already clear that the business was over, that we didn’t have a chance of success, when most of us could still have gotten away if he’d led us out into Chile or Peru. We could have come back here to our island, rethought our plans. But he wouldn’t consider it. Fidel would have given it up as a bad business, retreated, and thought up another plan—though Che was right, Fidel would have pretended that the new notion had been the only plan all along. But not Che—he had to live out his first idea, his words engraved in stone. He wouldn’t allow us to escape. He wouldn’t let us live!

  I know: I love him and I hate him, and that’s why I’m “upset,” that’s why I want to vomit. That feeling of mixed-up love and hatred—it reminds me of Che’s family, the one he wrote about—or made up—here, on this board. They didn’t know if they wanted to caress each other or hit each other. They must have wanted to puke all the time! They must have walked around their big house doubled over with nausea.

  He almost killed us all! If I could hold on to that fact, I could simply hate him and maybe eat something. But hating him makes me feel heavy and sad. And thinking that he wanted to kill me, when I loved him so, that “upsets” me, that drives me crazy. I know I shouldn’t take it personally. But why did he choose me to guard the retreat from Churo if he thought it would be cer
tain death? I did love him. Maybe if I could simply hold on to that fact I could eat something.

  In a way he did kill me. He sentenced me to this, turned me into his talking gravestone, my memory a movie theater with continuous showings of his life story, his many miraculous discoveries. I’m his “archivist.”

  He almost killed me! Why should I feel guilty towards him—and not Nato, whom I shot in the temple with my own gun? Why do I feel as if I failed him?

  MAY 3

  Move on to step four.

  Bolivia, 1966

  SEPTEMBER

  From My Journal

  9/7/66: La Paz, Bolivia. Notes for the beginning of a book:

  These are the things you need if you have the will to make a revolution: canned foods, sacks of corn, men, cooking utensils, leadership, lard, good sturdy boots, a government without legitimacy, hungry powerless people, radio equipment, canvas, padded jackets, courage, woolen caps, hammocks, accurate maps, a compass, courage, machetes, guns, ammunition, men

  I’ve forgotten something.

  9/9/66: The air in La Paz is very thin and sharp; it makes me feel lightheaded, and as if my skin were stretched very taut. Yesterday Ricardo passed out on the sidewalk in front of a movie theater. It made him angry at everyone. (I’m sure now that he’s afraid people will think he’s a Travis.) The miners, Ricardo, and Che. A name for the Bolivian Expedition: The Revolution of the Weak Lungs.

  OCTOBER

  From My Journal

  10/15/66: More disguised comrades from Cuba. Cadres recruited from the BCP. We wait together at the farm. Ricardo in charge. Four men pretend to be pig farmers and employees, and are building outhouses on the property. Also under construction: a corral, a kitchen garden, a henhouse (we have a few hens, and a rooster who screams at any hour of the day or night—only by chance does he announce the dawn). The rest of us hide in this little shack with a corrugated tin roof—the only real building on the land. Its walls are made of halved tree trunks daubed with mud. The many chinks let the wind through. Thirty men place their sleeping bags close to the stove at night, warming themselves. In the morning almost all of us wake with stiff necks.

  NOVEMBER

  From Guevara’s Journal

  11/4/66: Ernesto Che Guevara died in the street-fighting against U.S. Marines in Santo Domingo, one of those insanely opposing soldiers with sticks and stones. His handwriting in hotel registers proves his death definitively this time. (For he has died many times before, in Argentina, Vietnam, Cuba, the Congo.)

  Adolfo Mena, a Uruguayan businessman, arrived today in La Paz, where the thin air hurts his weak lungs. Mena is middle-aged, with deep worry wrinkles on his high forehead, and thick black eyebrows. He wears heavy glasses in severe tortoiseshell frames, and slicks his thin, graying hair back in the manner of Robert McNamara.

  11/5/66: The air is too thin here, it will not support me. As I walked along the square I was seized by a kind of vertigo, as if the air itself had let me drop and I was falling and falling through an enormous empty space, with nothing to stop me from falling forever.

  Instead, I arrived at the Hotel Austria Bar, a retreat of frosted glass and red plush opposite the Government Palace. This time, with my businessman’s gray suit, my immaculate though scanty coiffure, and an authoritative stare through my glasses, the mestizo waiter seemed happy to serve me. I looked rich and used to command. As, in fact, I am.

  The waiter snapped open the cap of the beer bottle for me, and, because of the altitude, foam gushed up. I grabbed at it with my hand, as is (or was) the custom. “Money will come to you,” one of the men at the bar said, smiling. He was a colonel in the Bolivian Army, and wore sunglasses despite the bar’s dim lighting, giving him an insect look. “You bet,” I said, and turned away. No more staring contests with bugs for me; my anger has found more appropriate means.

  The red plush of the bar has worn away to frayed cord in places, like the Bolivian Revolution itself. The bar and I are both the worse for the wear of history. One beer, at this height, makes me tipsy—a fact that my Gandhian vows kept me from discovering before.

  I toddled back to my hotel room, unmolested, a man of peace still, although a nervous, ambitious one. The only older Indians who show themselves in La Paz after the curfew are specters, ghost dancers. The government wishes not their visible presence but their silent labor. And the only posters on the walls are of half-naked women carrying rifles: movie advertisements. I shouted angrily at one of the begging boys who had risked the police in hopes of a coin. He didn’t run from my rage, or turn away; he simply stared at me and began a long racking cough. I was angry at myself really. It was stupid to go to that bar, stupid to show myself, the equivalent of a staring contest.

  Tomorrow, early in the morning, Mena is to be driven from La Paz to the guerrilla base in the Nancahuazu region.

  11/6/66: Jorge, my driver, has let his hair grow while at the farm. Thick black curls stand out on all sides of his head, like a bushy hat or a hidden animal. His mustache, though, has grown less profusely. There’s a little space, right below his nose—the very deep indentation of his lip—which is completely empty. As we talked he kept taking his hands from the wheel, smoothing down the wings of his mustache, touching under his nose, to feel if anything had sprouted. (I mentally christened him with the nom de guerre of Mustache.) He thinks, as he’s been told by Tania, that I’m an old man, a Cuban Party official, come to survey the arrangements. He spoke with me as you might with an old man, polite chatter, but with the air of being slightly more knowing about this business than a member of an older generation could be. Mustache talked a good deal, which made him a good companion for a car ride, though it might be a strain later. The ones who talk a lot continue often, out of fear, when they have nothing more to say, driving everyone mad. Jorge gestured when he spoke, a cause for worry in the present, because he insisted on taking his hands from the wheel, poking them in the air or at my shoulder. (Airplanes frighten me; I don’t like cars or trucks; my theory of guerrilla warfare is the work of a man who can’t stand any means of locomotion other than his own feet.)

  I made old-man’s talk back, fleshless, banal. We were chatting on this way as we drove, talking of the prospects for guerrilla war. It was hard to speak with him about it. He was eager for the fight, and knew all the formulations, but he didn’t really feel how the formulations were earned. It was difficult to talk, too, because there was a loud rattle from the metal doors and the Plexiglas windows of the jeep. You had to shout everything.

  “I suppose,” I said, “a great deal of secrecy is necessary to make sure you’re not discovered in the early stages.”

  “What? Oh. Yes. Absolutely. Before the center is firmly established is the most dangerous time for the guerrilla. Perhaps you know what happened to Masetti’s group in Argentina? They were discovered before they could establish good contacts with the peasants. So they were destroyed before they began engagements with the army.”

  “Yes,” I said, abstractedly. “I’ve heard that. It’s important to learn from past mistakes.” I turned away. I didn’t want to talk of Masetti with him, not yet. (I switched his name back to Jorge.) He sounded like a rich boy: he spread an air of unreality on whatever he talked about. We were on a bumpy road that ran near the edge of cliffs, high above the Nancahuazu River. The seats of the jeep were raised up off the road, and I could sometimes stop the talk in my mind, and let myself wander with the last light off the water, hear the splash of the river—or imagine it—as it moved hard over the rocks.

  It was near evening. There was a moistness in the air that made me anxious in my chest. How will my asthma treat me here this time? The canvas top of the jeep was down to make room for the crates of guns brought from the warehouse in La Paz. (Not .22s!) I felt a chill on my neck and buttoned up my long Russian coat, pulling the felt collar about my face and lips.

  Jorge was saying something like “Some say there are elements left.”

  “Elements of what?” I shouted.<
br />
  “Of Masetti’s guerrillas. Still operating.”

  “Oh. You sound very committed to the guerrillas yourself,” I said, though he didn’t; he didn’t sound like he knew what he was talking about. (The basis of a first commitment is a very good imagination, so that you can at least dream the dangers you are entering. I need a battalion of dreamers?) “Will you stay with the guerrillas,” I asked, “if the Party doesn’t support them?” My hands were touching my wrinkles as I spoke now, crawling through the ravines of my forehead, scurrying through the wiry vegetation on my eyebrows, acquainting myself nervously with the new map of my face. My old face was there and not there; peekaboo around the edges. I’m not comfortable in disguise; I hate being old.

  “I don’t know if I’d stay then,” Jorge said, alarmingly taking his hand from the wheel to open his palms into the air and turn towards me. His eyes are deep-set, and they looked troubled by my question. “I’m not sure. For myself, I’m certain that this is the right course eventually. But Monje, the Party’s first secretary, says one must be sure to pick the right time to open hostilities, that’s just as important as the rightness of your course. Otherwise it’s just suicide, and you help no one. And only the Party can decide when the revolution is on the agenda. That’s what Monje says.”