by Jay Cantor
I told Ponco that I didn’t think his story would usually have bothered me so. But I had been thinking of the man I’d shot leaving a trail of blood on the gray rocks, as he rolled over them into the river. I could taste the salty blood on my tongue, and I felt nauseous.
Ponco said that he understood how I felt. During battles he sometimes had that same strange taste in his mouth, like his saliva had turned to blood. But he could see the Congolese point of view. At least they made it a personal matter. The imperialist forces, in the Congo and Vietnam, dropped bombs whose metallic hearts fragmented to a thousand slivers. The bombs didn’t ruin property, but the slivers entered soft things, like bodies. The fragments were coated in plastic, so that X-rays wouldn’t show their location. The victims hemorrhaged and died.
It was the waste of a good heart, Ponco said. The pilots couldn’t even see their victims, let alone lunch on them. Ponco thought it was better to taste the man’s blood. He thought it was too bad we couldn’t develop an appetite for their hearts.
I don’t know. I saw what he was saying. But I thought, as he talked to me of those sorcerers’ weapons, Dear God, what are we beginning here? I thought of the rum I drank in this camp many months ago, when we toasted a new Vietnam in Latin America. Is that what we want for our continent? I saw our villages on fire, and I felt a sliver of smooth metal enter my chest, moving towards my heart, something no X-ray could see.
And later, when I thought over the battles I’d been in, I thought that I would rather have been flying an airplane myself, and killing soldiers I couldn’t see—from a safe distance!
But Che is right We are doing what is necessary.
From Guevara’s Journal
5/24/67: We seized a few loads of toasted corn from the soldiers, and some sugar and coffee. We also took their boots. Ours are worn through by the combination of the damp and the rocky terrain. The leather flakes away far more rapidly than I had expected. We also exchanged our rags for their fatigues.
According to Marcos’s interrogation of the prisoners, the army is encamped on the grassy flat hunting plain, half burned away now by their napalm. We will move north. I had bottles filled with lard from the caves for the march.
I think it is likely that Joaquin’s group will have moved north also.
5/25/67: On the Bolivian radio station today it was reported that Michael Wolfe, an admitted guerrilla, and Guevara’s liaison with Chile, had hanged himself in his cell, using his own belt.
Apparently Tania was right; it is better to have a secret.
• • •
5/27/67: The solid foods were gone, and the lard soup made everyone sick. Fortunately, yesterday we came upon a small farm, an adobe house, with a sewing machine. We bought some roast pig, chicken, squash, and corn, all at the usual outrageous prices. Coco, Inti, and Ricardo had a few empty conversations with the merchant farmer.
From My Journal
5/27/67: I listened to Coco, Ricardo, and Inti talk to the farmer we encountered, an old man in a thin dirty sweater and a soft brown felt hat. He had glittery eyes that kept darting about, and a quizzical ironic expression.
He welcomed us as great bandits, the greatest in memory, great bandits with special powers.
“What?” Coco said, as if the man had poked him. “We aren’t bandits.”
The man laughed amiably at Coco’s comic attempt to confuse him.
We were the best bandits, he said again, the greatest bandits. We paid for what we took from the poor. (And it was certainly true that we had paid him very well for the corn and squash he had sold us—enough money so that he wasn’t so poor anymore!)
“But we are not bandits!” Inti insisted. Inti sounded like someone had struck him hard. The two brothers were like Che: everyone must get things right: No opportunity for instruction should be lost.
“But of course you are great bandits!” The man was still amiable, despite the brothers’ attempt at deception.
After all, he said, if we weren’t bandits why did the army chase after us? And why did we carry guns? It was because we wouldn’t join the army! All the other bandits had joined the army by and by. It was so much easier to join the army and steal from the peasants that way.
He stopped suddenly, and looked off into the forest. Maybe he worried that he’d put ideas in our heads.
Inti insisted that we were guerrillas who fought the army because it stole from the peasants. We would help him and the others to set up tribunals to judge soldiers who stole. And whatever sentences the peasants decided we would carry out with our rifles.
“Yes?” the man said musingly, stroking his lip. He was relieved that he hadn’t inadvertently convinced us to rob him.
There was a bandit, he said, who had set up as judge over the army. In the thirties. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he thought that his wife probably could—she remembered everything. He had known a woman once who people said had slept with that bandit, the one whose name he couldn’t remember. He had joined the army eventually.
Coco said that we would never join the army. We would fight until the guerrillas became a new army, made up of all the people of Bolivia. An army that served the nation.
“Yes?” he said. “That would be nice.” But he had lost interest in Coco and Inti, for they distorted the basic fact: that we were bandits.
Coco asked if he would sell us some chickens, and named a very high price.
“Some chickens? No, we can’t. We have very few ourselves.”
Ricardo, who didn’t mind being thought the best, the greatest of bandits (with special powers, whatever that meant), laughed, alas, at the man’s refusal. He said, “But you’ve already told us we could simply take your chickens if we wished!”
The man looked at the ground. Ricardo’s laugh has that power.
“But,” Ricardo added, “we are very great and very good servants of the people. We do not take from them.”
Che was disgusted by all this talk. He named an even higher price for the chickens.
“Yes,” the man said to Che. “That’s very good. Just as I thought, you are very even-handed with your gains.”
Che wheezed angrily at the man’s stupidity.
“I am sure the army will never catch you if you are even-handed like that. Everyone will protect you. Everyone will hide you. But if I were you, sir,” he said, looking directly into Che’s eyes with an expression of blunt hard speech, “I would be very careful of the people around me.” He glanced quickly, meaningfully, at Inti and Coco, who had tried to fool him before, by denying that we were bandits. “There’s a saying, you know, ‘Killed before capture, like a bandit by the police.’ You understand what I mean? Those around you. Do you know their hearts?”
Che gave some money to Coco to give to the man, though Che stood only a few feet from him. It was clear that the old fellow made him uneasy. He instructed the man to buy some pigs for us, and said we’d be back in a few months to pick them up. This was to keep the man honest. Soon, I think, we will be the largest pig-raising corporation in the region.
“That was good,” Coco said, as we took our food into the forest to rejoin the rest of the center group and eat. “He liked the idea of the tribunals.” Really Coco was trying out the notion that the man had liked that idea; he didn’t know what to think.
Ricardo laughed, and there was great misfortune in the tune. Che looked sick.
But not as sick as he was about to be. We ate the man’s food too quickly, and it mixed up with the lard in our otherwise empty stomachs. Nato belched like a cannon shot, and everyone laughed. Benigno started to fart uncontrollably, like a pot bubbling. Soon everyone was belching and farting. “An organ concert,” Che said. But we were all too busy to laugh.
Marcos suddenly pulled down his pants, waddled one step away from the rest of us (for privacy), and squatted down. Diarrhea and vomiting became the fashion, and the leaves and small green plants and vines were covered with our shit.
When the concert had co
ncluded, we gathered up our things for the march. Che wove little circles, stepping first right then left, with tiny unsteady steps, and then he fell to the forest floor. For a moment the will left our bodies, and we stared at him, as if he’d died; or we’d died; or both. He had passed out.
Benigno and I made a hammock to carry him in. Even unconscious he animated us, drove us forward. He was our will. He was like a little god that we carried from place to place. And then, after we had set up his shrine for a few minutes, someone would interpret his mute body, like an oracle, and we would move on, wandering farther north, in the direction we’d divined he wanted.
I could see that Che, even though unconscious, was shitting in his pants. I turned his face to the side—in case he vomited, he wouldn’t choke. Julio and I and Marcos and Benigno carried him, though we were of uneven heights. The poles hurt my shoulders, and the others’, too. But none of us would surrender the burden to anyone else—as if it were an honor. We continued north.
Che recovered after a few hours. It was—if you want my diagnosis—the combination of the food, the asthma, his asthma medicine, and being thought a bandit.
From Guevara’s Journal
5/28/67: I’ve returned to my feet, though I still feel lightheaded. And my stench is disgusting, even to me. We must find water for washing.
JUNE
6/1/67: In the evening, as we ate more lard soup, Benigno, our machine-gunner, operated the radio. He has long thin fingers, and turns the dials in small motions, with wholehearted concentration, as if he were some new species of man, part flesh, part technical apparatus. Which didn’t improve reception. The only clear channel was domestic. A reporter asked Barrien tos what he planned to do about the bad situation in the mines. “The government,” Barrien tos said, “will keep faith with the nation.” We inferred from this that there is new trouble in the Altiplano.
Willy said that the miners had already been planning another strike at the time he was recruited by Moises for the guerrillas. The miners wanted to coordinate their actions with ours, and had waited eagerly for reports on our activities. While he was still there, the party had regularly taken up collections, supposedly for the guerrillas. (Willy would like, he said, to hold that Party member’s face between his hands now. For, of course, he knew now that none of the money had reached us.) In some of the mine shafts the miners had set up shooting ranges—so they would be trained and ready to join us when the fighting reached their area.
At first the news cheered the men. But then their smiles were haunted by the taste of lard on their tongues. We are unable to contact the city, unable to get supplies. If we cannot reach the miners before the army moves against them, our isolation may rob us of a great opportunity. And the only news of us the miners will have is the static on the airwaves, between the lies spoken by the Bolivian announcers. They will have to form true words from that static.
I began a night march towards Ipiticito.
6/2/67: We took the town of Ipiticito this morning at first light. The town is perhaps ten adobe buildings with bright tile roofs of blue and red, very inviting when the sun first struck them. The hillside around the town is worked-out gray dirt. The farming has moved on, farther up the mountainside. In the distance behind the town were the green high hills, thick with growth, that we must cross to get to the Rio Grande. Here and there on the hillsides were a few thatched-roof huts—the peasants who must feed us.
I had the townspeople gathered in the main square—a rectangle of beaten-down earth without decoration. I told my men to show their rifles at every house, so the inhabitants can tell the army that they were forced to attend our meeting. We gathered seventy-five townspeople in all, most of them very old, no likely recruits. The young people, one woman informed us, had fled when they heard we were coming, afraid they’d be pressed into service with us, for they assumed the guerrillas had the habits of the government road gangs that sometimes come through here to collect laborers. The old men of the village wore soft gray felt hats, and the women wore the derby-looking things (as if they were almost, but not quite, British bankers), thick woolen tops, and layers of skirts with red and blue checks. They all seemed to be unhappy to be standing out in the already bright sunlight.
I spoke of the general state of the country, and the coming miners’ strike. I predicted that once again, at the orders of his imperialist masters, Barrientos would try to bomb the miners into submission. All Bolivians must join together to stop such slaughters. The wealth of Bolivia should be shared by all Bolivians, not given away to North Americans.
One of the men, in a sweater the color of grime and worn wide pants held up by a rope, cleared his throat to speak, a long racking sound, like a small rock slide. The others moved away from him, afraid of his phlegm, or his audacity. The rubber from their sandals made a slight shooshing sound as their weight shifted. “But Bolivia,” the man said in a high voice, “has no wealth.”
In any case, the man had no teeth, and I had difficulty understanding him. As I stood dumbly, Inti answered him, from the side of the crowd. “Yes it does. But the North Americans pay Bolivian soldiers to take it from us. That is what we are fighting to stop.”
“But the radio says there are people with you who aren’t Bolivians. That man isn’t Bolivian.” He pointed at me with a bony finger, and a sour expression twisted his mouth, such as it was. Coca-chewing is an epidemic of lip and tooth disease for these people, producing a variety of spots, growths, and half-eaten areas.
“Yes,” Inti said, seriously, slowly, “North America has many enemies. All the enemies of imperialism must join together to fight it.”
“I know why there are foreigners,” the man said. He rolled what there was of his lip in upon his gums, in a parody of a smile. “It’s because Bolivians aren’t worth shit, that’s why!” He wheezed a laugh that started him coughing for a minute or two. No one spoke. We stood together in the hot sun and listened to the old man cough. “We can’t do anything for ourselves,” he said when he could speak again. “We’re shit! We’re helpless!”
There was a shroud of whispers woven in the crowd. They were shocked at the man’s foul language.
“No,” Inti said, patiently, sadly. “If we join together we can defeat our enemies.”
I spoke again. Many many countries, I said, were ruled by North America and kept down in poverty. All of these countries must fight together to free themselves. Every defeat of the North Americans, in any of these countries, would help to free their own country.
They had probably heard, I said, of Santo Domingo. I told them that I had been there, and that it was in a country like Bolivia. The people there had wanted to have a better life. And the North Americans had gone there and killed many countrypeople because they had wanted to work their land together, for themselves.
They had heard of the Congo. I told them that I had been there, too. The people wanted a better life for their children, and the North Americans had gone there and killed many countrypeople, like the people of Bolivia, because the people of the Congo had wanted to work their land together, and use their mineral resources to build their own country.
They had heard of Vietnam. I had been there. The countrypeople were like those in Bolivia. And the North Americans …
As I said “North Americans” an old woman in the crowd shrieked, a sound like a knife on a grindstone. She beat her hands in panic on the back of the man in front of her, who didn’t turn around.
I smiled at her. Yes, I said, the North Americans went there and killed many Vietnamese, because those people, too, had wanted a better life for their children. But the Vietnamese have fought back against the North Americans, and were still fighting. With our help the Vietnamese would defeat the North Americans. And in time the people of Santo Domingo, the people of the Congo, and the people of Bolivia would all join the Vietnamese in their fight against the North American imperialists. If Bolivians wanted decent medical care for themselves and their children, if they wanted schools, an
d even universities, for their children, if they wanted to work the land together, if they thought the money made from Bolivian tin and Bolivian oil and Bolivian labor should be shared equally by all Bolivians, then they would have to fight the North Americans, and those who worked for the North Americans, like General Barrientos and his officers. That was why people like myself, from Argentina, and people from Peru, and from Cuba, had joined with Bolivians.
No one spoke. The heat was heavy on me, and my stink was very unpleasant. For two days I have had only leaves to wipe my own feces off my body. Whichever way I fly I cannot escape my smell. I stared emptily at the crowd, and dreamed of finding enough water for a thorough washing.
I called off the meeting and sent the vanguard ahead under Ricardo. Most of the townspeople scurried back into their houses. But a few stayed to talk with us. No one approached me—perhaps because I had scared them, or perhaps because of my bad smell—so I stood about the edges and listened to the others.
A few men were gathered around Inti.
“But we work our own land now,” one of them said.
“Yes,” Inti replied. “But you owe most of your crops to the men who sell you seed and tools and cloth. You have nothing left for yourselves. After the Revolution, if you shared the land, the nation could provide you with tools, with tractors and new and better seeds. You would have much bigger harvests.”
“I wouldn’t want land that belongs to all of us.” He bit his lower lip in fear, and looked about himself from under the brim of his hat. “I won’t say any names, but there are people here that I don’t like. I don’t trust them. I want my own land. My family and I will work it, as we do now. You know,” he said, without turning around this time, “not everyone here is a good person. Some of the people in this village …” He was puzzled. How might he express their inexpressible evil? “Some of them smell bad.”