by Jay Cantor
A few Indian families, the advance guard of an MNR project to settle the wild places, still lived inside the fire, though the center guard of that march had never arrived. The government had brought the families here, helped them clear a little land, given them some seed and tools, and then—more than a decade ago—had abandoned them. The government in La Paz (where was that?) had been overgrown by Yanqui mold, they had long ago given up on this brave project in favor of other projects, like resettling Switzerland with the profits from the cocaine trade, the money from the mines, the bribes from the oil companies.
The peasant families lived in houses made of thin pieces of wood lashed together with vines and copper wire and string. We ate that month by stumbling from family to family, following the smell of the man in front, resting during the night, and marching during the day. Often there was three days’ march between families, between meals. And they couldn’t spare much, just some potatoes. We paid them well—though it would be a long walk for them to be able to spend our money.
They told us not to eat anything in the jungle, no matter how good it looked. The jungle, they said, wouldn’t help us. The demons filled the fruits with poisons. There were certain terrible trees inhabited by devils; we must not even stand under them, for if the rain washed their sap into our eyes we would go blind. (I looked to Inti and smiled. But he nodded. There were such trees!) The jungle was filled with the cleverest of demons, and we must be constantly vigilant not to be deceived by their tricks. This man had seen a sorcerer’s caterpillars sent to eat leaves while he watched so he would think the leaves were safe. But they had twisted up in his stomach and nearly killed him. He had shaken and sweated and vomited for days.
“Cyanide in the leaves,” Inti said. “There are species of caterpillars that have adapted so they can eat such things.”
The settler just stared. After all, what did this add for him? He still couldn’t eat the leaves.
“What about the monkeys?” Coco asked. “Surely we can eat them?”
“If your brother could kill them,” Ricardo added dourly, by way of criticizing Inti’s shooting.
The settler was horrified. How could we think of such a thing! Were we like the ants? he asked. Would we eat anything in our path? To kill a monkey was evil, the devil’s work! The monkeys were the souls of children not yet born, souls on their way through the trees, on their way to becoming human. Couldn’t we see that they had human faces?
We could, of course. But we were hungrier than the settlers.
Some days we passed through parts of the jungle where huge leaves grew overhead, like giant ears, and kept the ground dark. Nothing grew too thickly there; we only had to push the lianas away to move forward, and kick the snaky vines with our feet. Other parts of the jungle we had to tear our way through. The machete wielders went ahead of the main group, hacking at things, but they could only mark a path for us, not make one. And the jungle had nearly grown back around the marking before we could put our feet down. In those parts of the jungle they used the machetes like long fingers, not cutting things but picking the material up, tearing it away. And we finished the job with our hands, ripping at the vines as we went, pushing into the thick tangle of leaves, and feeling it close behind us as we stepped forward into more long leaves, and thick poisonous vines that tore back at the side of my thigh and my bandage. (Once, at night, I saw Eusebio, asleep, exhausted, but with his hands swimming above his head, pushing dream leaves aside, tearing at fairy vines.) The crawlers grew in a dense pattern like a madwoman’s senseless weaving. What was she weaving?
A net.
Why did he do it? It felt to me like despair and confusion. His. Mine. We couldn’t find Joaquin as long as we stayed in the jungle. We couldn’t make contact with the city network—that is, if they were trying to find us. But the army couldn’t find us there, either, we were safe. And I think Che was suddenly afraid of the army.
We had inflicted bad losses on the army, we had shaken the Barrientos government, we had begun to bring the Yanquis into the conflict, just as planned; and we had only taken a few losses ourselves. (Rolando, El Rubio, Tuma, Benjamin, from our group.)
But we didn’t need to take many. In eight months in Bolivia we hadn’t made one new recruit. Every one of our dead was a weight attached to our waists dragging us farther under the water. If we didn’t make new recruits we would drown. We could kill a hundred soldiers for every one of us they killed, but eventually they would put another hundred into the field, and kill just one more of us, and then, by and by, there wouldn’t be any of us left. We would have killed two thousand soldiers or so. And we would have lost. I ran through the sad mathematics as I marched, trying to hold on to numbers that scurried off into the buzz in my head. It was a way of marking time, keeping my mind off the terrible itching, the hot pain of my wound, my swollen feet surrounded by rags of fabric and leather. (I was one of the fortunate ones; I had a pair of the new boots we’d taken off the last batch of Rangers. U.S. boots, Vietnam issue, they let more water in through the drainage holes and fabric sides than they released. Mud clung thickly to the lugged rubber sole, adding extra weight to every painful step.) And being in the jungle was a way of marking time. But I didn’t know what we were marking time for? Until what? I ran through the figures again, trying to get my courage up to speak to him.
Two weeks went by in the jungle, and there was little to eat—mostly mealy potatoes from the settlers. Sometimes, on the best days, Inti or Benigno bagged a monkey, a fibrous bitter thing that we grilled on a spit. At first they were difficult to eat, almost human-looking, but after a few days in the jungle they looked less and less human.
There wasn’t much water. The settlers carried it into the jungle, for the only natural water was in stagnant pools covered with green slime. As we stared, black clouds of mosquitoes drifted up towards us, like our own unhappy fears.
We got weaker. Coco, when he was asleep at night and couldn’t help himself, moaned. During the day, though he tried to hide it, his body shook. I told Che, who had Moro treat him as best he could. Anyway, Coco stopped getting worse, though he didn’t get any better.
After the second week there were faintings, almost every day, from fatigue, malnutrition, and dehydration. And sometimes I had to be carried.
Che’s asthma grew worse, too. After a week in there he had no real medicine for it. Bad as the jungle air was for all of us, it was worst for him. He could barely suck the air in through the rubber mask of humidity.
Half the entries for his journal for this time are about his lungs, and the lack of medicine:
I have been injecting myself several times a day in order to be able to walk at all.
And:
My chest is on fire. I feel as if the air is burning up inside me.
And:
Today I tried a 1:900 adrenalin solution prepared from collyrium.
And:
All the adrenalin solution is gone. I have been into the sedatives.
And:
Today I finished off most of the painkillers, keeping only a small quantity, in case of wounded.
And:
The last of the sedatives are gone. I have been injecting myself with novocaine. There will be nothing left for tooth extractions. And it didn’t work worth a damn.
And:
To my shame, I used more of the painkillers; there will be very little for the wounded.
And:
Julio and Benigno carried my knapsack today. Until this attack passes I am good for nothing.
etc.
Why were we there?
I heard the jungle chattering and roaring, even when it really wasn’t making any sound at all. I just expected it would, and, as my hunger grew, my expectations made me dream those sounds. It was the fuzz in my head, that static on the radio that obscured more static, growing louder and louder.
The vines would twist around and within me, and live off me, and then I would die, and they would take root.
The an
ts that bit me were really protecting me. They would put me in one of their deep chambers, and bring me leaves to eat, so I would survive and they could continue to bite me.
The trees I saw were once colonies of ants, grown thick. They ate everything in their path. If you brushed against the ants they would become vines, vines made out of ropes of ants, sewn together by their own strong jaws, and strangle you.
The stories Inti told me (not stories, facts) all ran together like the jungle until they made no sense to me. The jungle was a sign—but of what? Of too many things; it didn’t make sense, or it made too much, or one idea kept changing into another and then, before I could hold on to it, it crumbled away. The jungle was a giant toad. The jungle was bureaucracy.
Why were we there?
We straggled from one little settlement to another, several days’ march between each, from nowhere to nowhere. We would never find Joaquin this way. We would never build a base among the peasantry. We would never get enough to eat.
During the second week, at a criticism-self-criticism session, Eusebio expressed a doubt. It was a little muttered thing—in a tangle of his usual whining about Ricardo making him carry more than his share, Marcos having insulted him, etc. But despite our fatigue and the fact that we were only half listening to him, we heard it: we had begun too early. Inti silenced him with a long slow speech about the victories we had won, about the guerrilla as catalyst, creating enormous instability in La Paz, etc. But this little doubt was a sign I could read. It meant that there were in all the men other reservations, growing as quickly as white filaments of mold, doubts forming inside their tongues. Inti might quiet them now, make them see the inevitable wisdom of what Che had done (but where in this waste was the wisdom?), yet like the growth of the jungle itself new doubts would spring up, stronger someday, breaking through the vines of discipline, demanding expression. I could see their thoughts in their hesitant steps. Julio stumbled over a crawling vine: that meant: guerrilla warfare is too elitist. Benigno and Pacho pushed each other: that meant: guerrilla warfare is too adventurist. Eusebio started to stumble, and grabbed at a piece of prickly vine. He held it in front of him, smeared with his own blood, fascinated: that meant: guerrilla warfare should not have begun until we had prepared the ground more.
Che hardly spoke. He listened to us at meetings, and in camp. And on days when his lungs would allow it, he smoked his pipe, and nodded at Inti’s remarks. Usually he sat a little ways off from the rest of us, surrounded by his silence like a heavy blanket, like a circle of solid air—what I had felt around the crazy boy in the church, a lifetime before.
At the end of our second week in the jungle, physical fights broke out. Ricardo hit Eusebio, the stocky, whiny Bolivian with doubts. Ricardo had hit other Bolivians, like Pacho, before. But this time Eusebio hit him back They were both too weak to do any damage. Inti hung across Eusebio’s arm, and Moro—risking his own newly healed arm—threw himself across Ricardo’s back. They hung on each other’s bodies like vines, and then they all went tumbling to the ground, looking like some four-headed jungle monster. No one had the energy for real fighting. But this four-headed thing lying in the mud was another sign I could read.
When we started marching again I hit Ricardo across his shoulder with my cane, and he turned around. He looked savage, one lens of his eyeglass had shattered in the fight. Then he made out that it was me, and he smiled. I said a short prayer that he wouldn’t, but he laughed.
“You asshole,” I said. I was furious with him for fighting.
“I’m sorry, asshole,” Ricardo said. He brushed mud and bugs off his uniform. “But I can’t understand what you’re saying. You sound like you have a very bad sore throat.” Then he laughed some more.
Finally I made the impossible suggestion. I waited on the march until Che was behind the rest of us. He was shaking from the effort of breathing, and he looked like he couldn’t even tear at the vines, only lean against them until his weight broke through the tangle. I stood aside, on the trail, watching him, and when he came past me, I held his arm to stop him. He hadn’t seen me, and he jumped away, as if I were a snake. He tripped and fell into a plant with sharp leaves.
I helped him up. His body vibrated from the strain.
The others trudged forward, disappearing behind the green curtain, and we were soon completely alone. We stood under a plant with leaves five feet across, like a ceiling, in our own room of the jungle.
I was a snake. But I had to speak. I suggested that we give up the struggle in Bolivia.
Is that why he left me behind at Churo to die? Because of that?
I said that it wasn’t too late to make our way out of the jungle, and to the northwest, into the mountains. We could march into Chile. There we could make contact with Cuba, and so find a route home.
Che stared at me, his eyes angry, his chest thrust forward.
I crushed ferns under my foot, delicate things, fidgeting like a boy embarrassed before a teacher.
Our retreat, I knew, would be a disaster, a blow to morale for every movement on the continent. In the world, maybe. I saw a news photo of our getting onto an airplane, a flight back to Cuba, CHE GUEVARA DEFEATED, FLEES WITH HIS BAND OF MEN BACK TO SAFETY! It was a picture that would destroy us, destroy him, a group of hollow-faced men, dressed in rags, covered in dirt, their arms, hands, faces, crisscrossed by nicks, cuts, scars. The men had difficulty struggling up the metal stairway to the plane. A black man, leaning on a cane, had to be supported by his comrades.
We had left the Congo, given it up as impossible. But this was different; the Congo for us was an anonymous venture, a training mission. Guevara was Che now, and all that the name meant: Objective conditions are ripe in Latin America. The guerrilla’s blow will reveal this, will clarify the situation, will ring in the air and gather the masses. One two three many Vietnams to save Vietnam, to destroy Imperialism once and for all.
My flesh crawling with uninvited animal life, I reviewed this catechism as if it were written on Che’s furious face. Che’s name, Che’s face, was a promise, a strategy, a faith. If we left Bolivia the faith would crumble, the name grow ordinary, the face dissolve. And he would be Ernesto again (and I would be Walter). I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to do that to him.
But I didn’t want to die either.
Che stared at me savagely, like the curse he would never utter. His labored loud metallic clanking terrified me. I was afraid of what his anger might do to him, what I might have done to him by speaking. I knew how much more isolated I had just made him feel.
“Joaquin,” he gasped, by way of cursing me.
He meant that we must rejoin Joaquin, that we must not abandon him.
He waved me ahead of him, and I walked forward, leaning on my staff, digging it into the mulch near a fallen tree trunk covered with ticks and chiggers. A thousand brown-and-black bugs, a battalion of them, charged from the rotting wood, like the log was giving birth to them, throwing them out into the world. Why? What great force cast them out? It made me think of firecrackers going off in Havana, sparkles of light poured from the center of the explosion, one circle following upon another. I stared. Where was the very heart of the wood where all the insects came from?
“Retreat, too, is a kind of battle,” I said, afraid to turn around, to face him again.
He pushed me forward, hard. I fell, and stuck my hand on the log, to stop myself. My hand sank into it up to the wrist. It was an army ant bivouac, that was what the insects had been running from, the “great force” that cast them out. I could feel their pincers closing on my fingers, their stingers entering my palm, and it hurt terribly. But I didn’t draw my hand out immediately. I wanted to punish myself for speaking to Che, for suggesting retreat, suggesting we abandon Joaquin. For betraying Che. Finally I took my hand out, and ants crawled all over it, and hung down from it. I shook them off, and pounded them dead.
In a few moments my hand was swollen with painful lumps.
JUNE 11
<
br /> His first notes begin a few days after we entered the jungle. There were entries of miles marched, his difficulties breathing, medicines tried, and some distant, brief remarks about disputes in the group, problems maintaining morale, praise for Inti, the leader to come.
Then:
… that knife as it came down to cut the webbing between Calixto’s fìrst fìnger and his thumb, the tenderest part of his hand. As I watched the blade come down into the light from the lantern, I could feel in myself the mild but pervasive effects of the coca we had chewed together. And I knew then that Calixto watched his own body surfer from a long distance. Even the sharp blade slashing into his own flesh would occur for him as if it were all happening on a movie screen. The knife, the hand, the welling blood were all part of a distant drama. Even his pain would be only another actor, fìat, clear, distant, almost a memory.
And we, too, are only spectacle to them. How can we make them enter a spectacle?
Those were the notes we saw him scribbling each time he called a rest period, while we wrote nothing ourselves. We were too tired. We were too confused. We would not know what we had seen, what we had done, until he told us why we had done it. The different parts of our sentences would have gone off in different directions, like ants that had lost the scent of the ants in front. (Once, the day Ricardo struck him, I saw Eusebio fill a few pages hurriedly, and I wondered what vicious things he was saying about that bastard. Now I have his diary and I know: Dear God, it says, dear God, please save my life, dear God please save my life, dear God please save my life, Dear God please Save my Life Dear God Please SAVE MY LIFE dear God, over and over in a large shaky hand for pages and pages. Then nothing more.)