by Jay Cantor
I went over to where some people spoke with Benigno, our machine-gunner.
“Where are you from, sir?”
“From Cuba.”
“Cuba? Where’s that, sir?”
“In the Caribbean.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an ocean.”
The man turned and said something in Quechua to the fellow next to him. Perhaps he was ashamed to ask Benigno what an ocean was. “Ah, I see,” he said, after his friend replied. “And where is your ocean, sir?”
Benigno curled his long fingers into fists with frustration. He couldn’t think of what to say. “It’s near … It’s near North America, near the United States.”
“Ah,” the old man said. “So the United States is North America! I see!” He clapped his hands together and smiled. “The Kennedys!”
And the old woman whose scream had been such a satisfying tribute to my rhetoric, asked, “What is a North American, sir? I’m glad to say I’ve never seen one. They must be very bad spirits, very powerful! The ones who have needles! The ones who want our blood!” She looked over at Ponco, who was talking to a child. Perhaps North Americans were like him, people with dark skins. “I don’t want you to make them come here. Please don’t make them come here and kill us!”
• • •
A few more women stood around the outskirts of the square, next to the shady wall of one of the houses. They were afraid to speak. Coco asked one of them if she had questions. She looked down at the ground, embarrassed by the attention. But another woman said, “What’s a university, sir?”
“It’s a place where high-school students go to study.”
“What are high-school students?”
“Those who have finished secondary school.”
And then, naturally enough: “What are secondary-school students? Where do they come from?”
“They come from you yourselves,” Coco said. The woman looked about herself, at the three other women standing near her in their long skirts and hats. She laughed, but I could not tell if it was a laugh of confusion, or mockery, or embarrassment.
But the other women grew brave: “Where is the Congo, sir?”
“It’s a country in Africa,” Coco said.
Camba laughed. He had come up behind me.
“And where is Africa, sir?”
“It’s across the ocean from Bolivia.”
Of course, the next development was inevitable.
“What’s an ocean?”
That was a hard one. There weren’t even lakes in the region. Coco’s round troubled face grew blank.
The last of the women in the group had found her voice. “Where is Vietnam?”
Camba stepped forward before Coco could speak. He hopped from foot to foot, like a child eager to give the right answer. “In Asia,” he said.
“Asia?” the woman said. “Where is Asia, sir?”
Camba turned to give me a sly smile. “Over the mountains, there,” he said, pointing past my shoulder at the hills beyond. “A thousand days’ walk.”
I had had enough. I felt dizzy from our lack of water, and my own smell. My speech to these people, when I heard it now, through their ears, became a dark maze of words where either the Indians, or I, were lost. The names of places and things unknown to them: my text might have crumbled around those sounds. Or perhaps they had put new thoughts in those places—dark-skinned creatures, Poneos with syringes. From those new nouns, new sentences must have taken shape, with a meaning I couldn’t imagine. If I could have looked into their minds, and heard my words as they had understood them (if they had understood them at all), I would have made no sense to myself. I would see a man standing in a dirt square, a man with my face, and he would be barking like a dog.
We got information from them about the nearest route to the Masicuri River, where we can get water for washing. They had none to spare, for they carry back only enough drinking water for two days at a time. They also told us what they knew of the army’s movements: a lieutenant had been through the week before, and had claimed that they had the guerrillas encircled.
But this report was not the end of our prizes: we also got some potatoes, and a small yellow truck belonging to the Bolivian Petroleum Company. One of the drivers had returned to the village to visit his parents. When he had heard we were coming, he had fled to the woods, abandoning his vehicle. Spoils of war.
We loaded some of our packs onto the truck, and sent it down the dirt road towards the river, with Marcos driving, wearing Chino’s policeman’s cap. We will cut our own trail through the forest.
On the march Inti suggested that we try another line with the peasants in this region. They already have land. We must promise them local reforms. One of them had told Coco that the bridge over the Masicuri needs repair. For years the authorities had made promises and done nothing.
Inti is right, of course. But I could not reply fully: that to offer that kind of help we must establish ourselves in a zone. To do that we must find Joaquin, for until we win the peasants’ trust we need more men, and more supplies from a support network. Right now we have none of those things.
Eusebio, one of the Bolivian slackers, said we shouldn’t talk about cooperatives, we should promise them their own land. Eusebio is a poor worker, and of weak political understanding. Inti explained to him the goals of the Revolution, but I felt that he understood those no better than the townspeople had understood the geography of our planet.
6/3/67: The directions they gave us were wrong. The road does not lead to the Masicuri but ends at a forest.
I have a special contingent of flies buzzing around me, which seems to amuse Camba. He is becoming a little unbalanced—from thirst, I think, though he has been unpleasantly odd from the first.
I sent out scouting parties to find the right direction to the river, and I established an ambush.
From Camba’s Journal
6/3/67: It was hot in the bushes by the side of a dusty road. I watched the red ants walk over my boot. I meant to kill some of them, and I lifted my other boot, and then, when I was about to bring it down, I stopped. The long thin trail of red was a way of seeing my blood move in my body. The ants are veins that connect the plants, the animals, and the people who live here.
A truck came down the dirt road. Two soldiers were asleep in the back. Marcos said they looked so comfortable he didn’t have the heart to kill them. We let them go by. The next truck came, and no one was asleep in the back, so we threw grenades. The truck formed a big red flower that hurt our ears. The explosion shook the ants from my boot, severing the blood line. A bad omen! (But I will do as Ponco told me, and not speak of it to anyone.)
From Guevara’s Journal
6/4/67: The scouts have found an encampment of farmers who say they live on the way to the river. I sent the truck up ahead, and had the center group follow after.
From My Journal
6/4/67: The village was six thatched huts and a lean-to, where they store tools and sacks—and where one family also lives. Inti was the speaker. Perhaps he could convince someone to join us. He told the assembled families about the Bolivian Revolution. As he talked, children—their heads wrapped in long dirty white rags—ran about examining the men. (Maybe the people here think the sun is bad for children.) There were only—or even—two young men in the crowd.
At the end of Inti’s talk Che stepped forward. “Now is the hour of decision,” he said to the thirty people, mostly old men and women. “Bolivians have a chance to make history. The whole world is watching what happens here in Bolivia.”
This received the usual deep well-like silence, the silence we might all drown in, the silence of the grass growing over our graves. An old man hobbled forward, clippety-clumpety. He was very thin and pigeon-toed—the perfect recruit. He wore one of their dirty sweaters, woven from dust, and the usual felt hat. He held Che’s shoulders and looked up and down his thinning body. Then he raised his own skinny arm, gestured to two young men—t
he only young men there—and they walked off, a small parade, into their hut.
Che looked stunned with remorse and anger, like a jilted lover.
After the dramatic departure the countrypeople talked with us in a surprisingly open friendly fashion. I drifted from group to group listening to the conversations.
An older man with a pleasant face and large bulging eyes talked with Coco. They stood in front of his hut (it looked, to me, like piles of hay baled together). He said that he had heard all about us from the people in Ipiticito. They had told him that we had come to establish a reign of justice.
Coco nodded uncertainly, his head half palsied by doubt. Reign? An odd word. Something out of an old story. Where could the man have learned it? The syllable sent a shadow across Coco’s kind smooth innocent face; he sensed that confusion was about to swallow him up.
“And you are all chaste?”
“Chaste?” Coco said. Another odd sound! “Yes, we’re all chaste.” Coco was tasting ashes in his mouth. Whose?
Ricardo laughed at this, a high, loud, rapid, breathy sound—and, as always, a very unpleasant one. Three or four people in the area stopped talking until Ricardo finished making his noise. “Yes,” Ricardo said. “We’re chaste. By necessity.”
I thought that R. had been in a terrible rush to add his bit, and I wondered again if his “necessities” were the same as mine and Coco’s.
“Good,” the man said. “That’s very important. You must not marry, or even lie with women until you are victorious.”
Ricardo threw his arms wide, as if he were about to laugh again. Fortunately this time he just stared up at the bright blue sky and smiled.
Apparently they are all part of the same sect (Adventist, they call it), for Inti was receiving similar marital advice from another old man. “You must not marry,” he said. He shook his tiny fist towards Inti, and rubbed his dirty right hand along his thigh for emphasis. They seem to have the idea that we all have June weddings planned. “You must not get married or drink or smoke until you have brought about the New Law.” There is a ritual. We’re the priests, though we don’t know the rules. And if we make a mistake it all might go awry. The women would become whores; the men would have to take pigs for wives. One misstep (and we didn’t know where we were walking) and we’d bring about hell on earth.
Inti, too, was confused. He showed it by looking sadder still. “We don’t drink or marry,” he said after his rumination. “But we do smoke.”
These people are incredible, I thought. Once you start talking to them you have to answer their questions; you try to think as they do: they take some part of your answer, misinterpret it, and lead you further afield; soon you’re made over in some foolish costume from their dream closet.
“Well,” the old man said thoughtfully, his hand moving more slowly against his thigh, “not everyone agrees with me about that.” He brought his fist up to his mottled cheek, and rubbed away the wrinkles. “But you should at least try to give it up.”
“It’s very hard to get tobacco,” Inti said, his voice full of mourning for his lost pleasure, his lost life. “Anyway.”
The man slowly—reluctantly, I thought—took a worn leather pouch from his belt. “Here,” he said, “you can have some of mine. It’s hard to do what’s right, I know. And life offers us so few pleasures.”
The old fellow looked abashed. Inti had made a stunning move, hinting at what he wanted—the old man’s tobacco—yet not asking for it. He had forced the fellow to share the treasure; he had won the game (though he hadn’t known he was playing).
The man took Inti’s scarred hand and poured some brown leaves into it, tobacco mixed with twigs and dirt.
Marcos, meanwhile, repeated Che’s promises to a group—one man, several women—by the lean-to.
After the Revolution, Marcos said, the people would have an army of their own, one that served them.
“After the Day of Change,” a man said, “we won’t need an army.” He sounded frightened—maybe of contradicting Marcos, maybe of armies, maybe that in our ignorance of the proper procedures we would screw everything up and they would have to eat garbage and walk around on their hands. “All men,” the worried fellow said, “will follow Justice.”
“Yes,” a woman said. “Tell us when the Great Day will come, when the Good King will return, and drive the Bad King away.”
“When?” Marcos said. “What?”
I knew that Marcos, after a manful struggle, would soon go under.
“The Day when we will follow Justice, when our King will come again, when we will all be in our proper places once more, when it will all begin again.”
This seemed like nonsense to me. But Marcos did what he could. The Day would come, he said, when we all worked for it, when all of the people joined us in fighting the soldiers.
Marcos smiled, thinking he’d done well.
“No fighting!” the woman said angrily. (We were going to make a mistake. We were going to muck up the ritual. Everyone would have to wear mittens on his feet.) “There must not be any fighting. There must not be any killing. That is a sin.” She shook her head back and forth, instructing the boy.
No fighting! What, I wondered, had she thought our rifles were for? But we were in their dream now, and who could tell what we looked like there? Maybe our rifles looked like hats in their dreams.
Anyway, she said that we didn’t need to kill. When we all wanted it the bad world would end. There would be a Day of Change. Those who were at the bottom would be at the top. The first would be last, the last first. We would all be in our proper places. Everything would begin again and nothing would ever change. Every day would have enough evil. World without end.
She had a singsong voice as she repeated some very old verses. I thought different pages of the prayer book had got mixed together. It sounded at first as if the words were so old, and so often said, that they didn’t have any meaning for her, just a tune she recited to herself as she went about her business. But as she went on, and Marcos’s pained face seemed to contradict her, her anger and her conviction grew. “The King will return,” she concluded furiously. “And each day it will begin again. We will be in our proper places.”
The Revolution, Marcos said, trying once more, would happen only when they helped us to bring it about. (His voice wavered as he said the word “Revolution.” King? he must have thought. Proper place? What did they think he meant?) The Revolution would happen only if the people made it happen. We would have to kill the greedy ones who stole all of Bolivia’s riches and wouldn’t share.
The sweat had already sprouted on Marcos’s broad forehead, the way it does in battle—the rancid-smelling sweat that is dangerous to him. And I detected another odor in my vicinity: Che was near my shoulder. I stepped to one side, so I could see his face as he listened.
The woman was saying again that there must not be any killing. She was a broad woman, wider still in her many-layered blue-and-red skirt. She wore several shawls around her shoulders. And she wanted to throttle Marcos. The lady was the killer!
The Change would happen when all truly wanted it, wanted it in their hearts. Her voice broke in anger.
“No,” Marcos said. His voice was weak, his face drawn and pale, until the spots came out and mottled it; he was no match for her. Marcos said that we had to do more than want it. There would have to be many battles against the army that protected the rich. The people had to join the guerrillas in fighting the army. And when we had defeated the army, then the people would take power. They would have their own government, and their own army. Then we would make a just world where all would be equal.
Marcos, too, I thought, sang an old song.
The woman no longer looked at Marcos, but at the high fields over his shoulder. “When all truly want it,” she said, “then this world will end. There will be a Day of Change. Those who are lost now, the hidden ones, will be first then. And we will all have our proper places.”
Their singing,
Marcos and this woman, didn’t mesh into a harmony—not one I could hear anyway. If they had both sung at once they would have canceled each other out (maybe canceling us out at the same time) like cross-hatched lines. Their two voices speaking at once would have made a blackness, a silence.
Marcos took a step backward into the lean-to, away from the final inexplicable unarguable assertions, away from the sun of her anger and misunderstanding, which was making him sweat so. He took a handkerchief from out of his jacket, and brushed the sweat from his forehead. The handkerchief was smudged and soiled. Marcos needs a Day of Washing, so it all can begin again, each day with its own evil. Each of Marcos’s linens is a memorial to a hard day’s march, or a battle. (If only we had the eyes to see, his pocket linen forms the record of our campaign.)
“Who is the lost monarch?” I asked one of the other women, one who I thought had a nice round face and mockery in her brown eyes. “The hidden one.”
She stared at me. Maybe it was my color, or my odd voice. She shrugged her shoulders under her sweaters and shawls. “I don’t know, sir,” she said, looking at the ground. “What is a monarch?”
“A king,” I said.
She went on looking at the dust by my torn and shredding boots. “Could you tell us about kings, sir?”
I had the feeling she didn’t really know what the word meant—this thing that they all waited for! “A ruler,” I said. “One not chosen by the people. He forces them to follow his orders.”
“He will wear a fringe of red wool,” Coco’s dietary adviser said, for the rest of the countrypeople had come up around us. “He will wear it over his forehead.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Because he does. He is afraid of nothing. Their horses don’t frighten him.”
“Whose horses?” I said. “Why would he be frightened?”