by Jay Cantor
I wanted a drink badly. It was very hot. I had a terrible taste in my mouth, like something rotting.
Willy went on pushing alone as Tuma scrambled up. Willy feels bad about Benjamin’s dying. (No one liked Benjamin, but they like me even less.) The veins on the side of Willy’s head stood out; then they broke, and blood streamed down his cheeks.
Then everything was all right again.
But we weren’t making any progress on the truck. When we stopped pushing, the truck slid farther down into the ravine with a heavy sigh from the rocks and dirt, and more cursing from the comrades.
None of the Indians laughed, though we were a funny and pitiful sight. It was like they were made of glass, and lived in painted glass huts. The ground was a big pane of glass. The bell on the church tower might be glass, too. If they rang it, it would shatter into a thousand pieces, and the fragments would pierce our hearts. “I hope they don’t ring the bell,” I said.
“What the fuck are you talking about, asshole?” Ricardo asked. “Why the fuck would they ring the bell?” Ricardo was angry with himself because this problem was his fault; he had squandered our truck, and everyone cursed him for it.
I bit my arm and of course I wasn’t glass. Ricardo wasn’t glass. I saw that we didn’t belong there. Ricardo’s curses were stones, and the beads of sweat on his cheek were too thick, like gravel. If they fell, they would shatter the glass earth.
I went over to help push, so we could get out of here before we destroyed everything.
“Forget it,” Che said. “It’s a lost cause.”
I laughed, because of course in the world to come he will be the Saint of Lost Causes.
Che and Coco talked with some of the Indians who stood in front of the church. Coco had ripped the brown pants he had taken from one of the prisoners, and his leg bled.
Coco asked the Indians to help with the truck, and they stared at him.
“I think they speak Guarani,” Coco told Che. “I only know a few words of Guarani.”
In Quechua Coco asked about the best routes to the river. He made an up-and-down gesture with his hands, like water flowing.
The Indians made some gestures back.
“They understand him,” Ricardo said, “when they think it will get rid of us.”
We marched off, abandoning our truck.
But now the dust on the path was glass. And when we entered the forest again the green stuff, the endless green stuff that crawls between the trees, was glass. The machete wielders shattered some of it so we could move towards the river. When I grabbed a vine it felt cold and solid, and when I ripped it it broke in my hand and sent icy green shards to the ground. If I stepped too heavily the earth broke in long spidery lines. I could see the jagged edges we had already made. The Indians of this region hate us because we are too heavy, and our steps destroy their world, crush the vegetation, shatter the ground.
I tried to speak with Che about the problem we’re having with the peasants. We don’t belong here, so we will just break things wherever we go. Che should give this up and march to a different country that isn’t made of glass. Che could take us all back to Cuba with him.
But Che didn’t want to speak with me. He said we would have more water when we reached the river, and waved me away. But I wasn’t asking for water. I was trying to tell him something.
Che doesn’t like me. That was what killed Benjamin. The lines that link all the comrades together, that had tied Benjamin to the rest of us, were broken by their hatred so he fell off the cliff and drowned.
Now they hate me.
From Coco’s Journal
7/9/67: We continued moving back towards the Rio Grande. Che says that Joaquin must have remained in the south. We cannot expect immediate help from the party anymore, so we must rejoin Joaquin. With our full numbers we can at least make some demonstration to coincide with the miners’ strike. That could be decisive.
My night sweats have gotten worse. I still haven’t told anyone about them, not even my brother. As I walk, I say a prayer with each step that they will go away. I don’t want to be left with one of the peasant families.
I will keep up. Che labors under far worse burdens, and he is always among the first.
7/10/67: This morning Barrientos again announced that he will keep faith with the nation. A joke repeated over and over, Che said, begins to sound like a threat. This afternoon we learned again what imperialism’s lackeys mean by keeping faith with our nation. Barrientos had not waited for the miners to strike. He had ordered the Air Force to bombard the barracks in Catavi. The Argentine station says that the army occupied the mining area, smashed the radio transmitters, and killed eighty-seven, including women and children.
Che said this is a temporary setback for us, but it will mean much faster progress for the Revolution in the future. The miners’ union, the Party, the Trotskyites, and all progressive forces will see that aid must be concentrated on the guerrilla movement, that there is no other way.
We had never, Che said, thought that there would be a quick victory. It will be a long arduous struggle throughout the continent. But it will now be clear to all that only a mobile force dedicated to the destruction of the army and the establishment of socialism can unite the people and make the Revolution in Bolivia.
The other Bolivians, even my brother, were grief-stricken. Especially Willy, of course, who knew many of the miners who were killed.
I feel angry and abandoned, as the others do.
7/11/67: To increase cohesion in the group—I thought—and to help us overcome our sadness about the miners and the lost opportunities, Che put an ambush on the little road leading to Abapa. A column of twenty soldiers—still stupidly using the already cut paths and the roads—fell into it. We killed four of them, and the rest ran away. I am sure I got at least one of them myself.
We withdrew immediately into the forest, our spirits considerably higher. I got ready to withdraw from that camp, but Che said that the army would not have the morale for a counterattack, so we needn’t leave the area.
At dusk the firing began. At first I couldn’t believe it, but the sharp sound of the bullets convinced me! Chunks of the trees flew at us. Mortars shattered the forest to our right, and they were moving up towards us. The sound of their bullets popping and whining seemed to come from everywhere. We were all terrified. Eusebio screamed. It was like being trapped in a cloud we couldn’t see our way out of.
Che stood up in the center of the camp and rallied us, pointing the direction the attack was coming from, and the way we would retreat. Benigno fired back with the machine gun, making a big racket, while the rest of us gathered up our things as best we could. “Retreat, too, is a kind of battle,” Ponco said to me very calmly. But I couldn’t understand him then; it just seemed like empty syllables of sound. And now it just seems like retreat to me! And retreat was what I wanted then! The sooner the better! But I think Ponco wanted to help me calm myself.
Even as he spoke Ponco was hit in the thigh and fell down next to me. Inti and I picked him up and dragged him from the area while the rear guard covered our steps.
Throughout the night we moved up a hill. Next morning Tuma died from a mortar fragment near his neck. He was an old comrade of the Cubans and looked a lot like Che—but he had a terrible mouth, even worse than Ricardo’s though not as vicious, more like high spirits.
From My Journal
7/13/67: He has changed directions. We are moving northeast, towards the jungle, that “pointless place” that even the Indians won’t bother with. This is madness! We cannot establish ourselves in a zone where no one lives.
At the beginning of the day I hung on Inti’s shoulder, but I let go of him and dragged myself forward to question Che. He said nothing. Of course he is sad about Tuma’s death, as we all are, and about his own miscalculation on the counterattack. But to me it feels worse than that. Despite his brave speech about how relying on our own resources will give a new depth to our commitment, and ho
w the massacre of the miners clarifies the situation, what it all really means is that we are alone. We cannot reach the Party, and they have made no attempt to contact us. The city network too—if it still exists—has been ineffective in reaching us, supposing it has tried at all. Our contacts with Cuba and Argentina—if they are still alive—are in Bolivian prisons being questioned by CIA cowboys. And we have no idea how to rejoin Joaquin. The Indians don’t understand our goals, or misunderstand them, which is worse.
Camba marched with me in the afternoon, holding me up. In a desperate shocked voice he said he had to tell me a theory of his. (“Theory” was a strange word for him to use, like the Indians saying “reign.”) His “theory” was that Tuma was Che’s double, his shadow, and that he had acted out Che’s desires—such as cursing Ricardo. (I don’t know about Che, but I had wanted to curse R. for his carelessness.) What did it mean, he asked, if Tuma died? He sounded worried, unsure.
I shrugged, but I needed his arm and couldn’t walk ahead of him. Stupid man! It’s hard when I’m around him not to think in the crazy way he does.
What does it mean?
Nothing. Che will have to do his own cursing, I suppose.
My thigh burns, but Moro says it is a flesh wound and will heal rapidly.
Isle of Pines, June 1968
JUNE 10
And it did heal, though the rough lizardskin on the outside of my thigh stretches painfully tight on days like this one, dark days, before a storm. It did heal, but Che hadn’t withdrawn to that pointless place in order to speed my convalescence.
And the jungle was a pointless place, an awful place. The air was damp and hot and thick, like having a piece of wet rubber pressed against your face. After the first few steps of the morning’s march our bodies were covered with sweat, and our faces had a dull red color, like boiled meat. My body was dissolving—or just rotting—a sickening continual dizziness. I could see why the Spaniards—or so Inti told me—had thought the air in the jungle carried disease.
But really it wasn’t the air that carried disease, Inti said, it was the mosquitoes and other insects. I could believe that, too. They were everywhere, the biting stinging boring things, on the plants, in the trees, up our asses, ticks, spiders, chiggers, ants, mosquitoes, red-and-brown things even Inti didn’t have a name for. The mosquitoes smelled my blood and hung thickly around the drippings from my wound, an ooze tainted with red. The chiggers worked hard, too, boring into my flesh. Inti told me that the chiggers didn’t want blood. They turned our tissue to liquid, and supped on that liquid. The chigger bites—Inti said—swelled into hard lumps that itched fiercely. That made me laugh, for his pompous slow tone instructing me reminded me of the little schooling I had ever had—because, of course, it was obvious, we all had those lumps, we all knew what itching the bites caused. Inti tried to sound disinterested as he taught me about the “flora and fauna” (I didn’t even know it was called “flora and fauna”), scholarly and distant. But all the time my teacher’s hands scratched furiously at his arms and legs, just like the rest of us.
Anyway, the insects didn’t need Inti’s instructions. They knew their business, and chipped away at us, day after day, taking little bits of our flesh and blood and tissue-become-liquid. We were intruders, just as Camba said. They wanted to make us disappear. “At least if we were dead,” Marcos said, “we wouldn’t itch.” The insect bites irritated Marcos more than the rest of us, because he had very thin sensitive skin. Each day his face looked lumpier and sadder—almost as lumpy as Che’s, whose body was covered with walnut-size bumps. But Marcos was wrong; the jungle didn’t want us dead, it wanted us gone, like the toad I watched the army ants devour till it had never been. The jungle wanted to incorporate every part of us into itself, wasting nothing.
We stuffed our pants legs inside our boots to keep the insects out, but our boots were falling apart, and the insects got in through the cracks in the leather, and crawled up our legs. Our bodies were mottled and gashed where we had dug furrows into our flesh.
And there was nowhere safe to rest in the jungle, nowhere that wasn’t after us. The spiders and ants were everywhere, and the plants had long thorns, thin and sharp as needles, hidden inside their leaves and on their stems. The outer edges of the leaves had poisonous spines. When we marched we innocently brushed against the plants and their scratches erupted into long red painful rashes.
And walking in the jungle made the inside of my head hurt, it made a kind of painful fuzzy sound in my head, a staticky sound from the buzz of the mosquitoes and flies near my ears, from the lack of food and water, from the senselessness of everything.
Inti told me that the jungle wasn’t senseless. He had studied botany (which is plants, or “flora”) and biology (which is animals, or “fauna”) in college (which was far away from the jungle). He knew things about the jungle, and he tried to take our minds off our pains by teaching us about it. He tried to show me “the intricate harmony” of the place, how a tree with feathery leaves and long thorns “lived cooperatively” with red ants. He tore off a branch and displayed the ants clustered near the bottom of the leaf. The ants lived at the base of the thorns, and ate sugar sweetly provided by the glands at the stems. The ants were “partners” with the tree: it gave them food, and they protected the tree, by cutting away at the vines that attacked it, by eating insects that wanted to devour it, by biting any larger animals that brushed against its sheltering leaves. They even patrolled the perimeter of the trunk, and gathered up seeds scattered by other plants, seeds that might grow into competing plants that could block their tree’s access to the sun. (They were patriots, these ants.)
Inti pointed out a tree that looked to me like a man twisted in agony. There had once, he said, been another tree there, but a vine had grown up around it, and strangled it. The vine had taken root, and grown thick as a tree. The twisted shape we saw was the vine. (The tree had rotted away, had disappeared.) Now new vines curled about this vine-become-tree, and by and by would take its place. (As the bourgeoisie had replaced the feudal aristocracy, as we replaced the bourgeoisie. Count on it, I thought, there will be further revolutions.)
I stuck one leg behind me and leaned over to listen to Inti’s many many many lectures on the ants. He showed me “leaf cutters” walking home from a demolishing job with little bits of greenery in their mouths. A meal, I thought. But no, they didn’t eat the leaves, they buried them in special underground chambers. Delicious fungus grew on the green bits, and that was what the ants ate. Fungus and mold grew everywhere, tangles of thin white fibers like spiders’ legs in a jumble. Mold grew on the surface of my bandage, though Moro cleaned and changed it every day. Mold sneaked inside the telescopic sights of our rifles, and ate away at the protective coating on the lenses. And one night it grew on Eusebio’s eyes, and in his nose, on the bodies of some insects he had swatted as he slept (for his hands moved even when he was unconscious). When he felt the mold holding his eyes closed, Eusebio thought he had died, and he screamed and screamed until Moro decided on the prescription for hysteria, and hit him.
But on with the lecture: Inti showed me army ants, battalions marching in close-order formation (all that hup-two-three shit, Che had called it when we watched the new Cuban Army drill). They cleared the ground before them, scouring it clean, attacking a fat red toad who waited one moment too long before jumping away, sinking their pincers into his stomach and eyes, pushing him over, devouring him utterly. One minute there was a pile of ants moving forward towards a toad, towards a lump of flesh, then there was a little mound of ants, and then there was nothing. (I saw it when I closed my eyes that night. I was terrified of going away, terrified that my soul wouldn’t die, but would be spread out among a million army ants.)
The ants were nomadic, marauders, bivouacking during the nights, then setting off on a march at sunlight, leveling some new piece of ground. They rested three weeks at a time. “Their bite is fierce,” Inti said—though we all knew that, too. The Indians, he said,
had used the soldier ants to suture wounds. When the “doctor” squeezed the ant’s body, its jaws clamped the flesh, closing the wound. Then the body was pinched off, making a “stitch.” “If you were an Indian,” Ricardo said, “your thigh would have little ant jaws hanging from it.”
Army ants, by the way, form their lines by smelling the ant in front of them. (Every ant was the care of every other, the one forever in his nostrils, the one who smelled him. What revolution could use that metaphor?) Inti smeared a little of our useless bug repellent on the branch in front of their line of march. The odor disrupted their close-order drill—about the only thing the stuff ever did accomplish—and the ants milled about confusedly, tripping over each other.
The maddened ants swirled about in a daze that looked like the inside of my head. No matter what Inti said the jungle had no harmony for me. “No species dominates or grows too large,” he concluded. “Each holds one of the other species in check. Each has a place. The jungle forms one big organism.”
“A giant toad,” Camba said. “I feel like I’m in the intestines of a giant toad.”
But more than that I felt like I was inside a fire. The fuzziness in my head was the continual high-pitched crackling that I was sure you would hear if you lived inside a fire. The sharp leaves ripping my face, the thick vines that rubbed against my wound and inflamed my leg, the poisonous red trail left by the spines of a serrated leaf I had brushed with my hand were flames licking at me, the fire of hell that burns but doesn’t devour.
It wasn’t as noisy as I thought it would be in a jungle, really. The sound of our boots crushing the loam and thick ferns, the mosquitoes’ buzz, Camba’s high unmusical voice singing his little song of the vegetables, that was all the noise there was most times, except for the blessed days when we heard the chattering of a monkey swinging overhead, and held our breath, praying that Inti or Benigno might shoot it for our dinner. It was quiet enough sometimes to hear a rustling sound from the ground near us, the lady of the jungle giving a little shaking to her garments. “Ants,” Inti said. The other insects made the leaves rustle as they leapt from their homes, running away from the indifferent implacable marauders. The rustling sound was the jungle in panic, it was the insects screaming.