The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  So it’s into the pot when he thinks we’re full grown,

  When we’re tasty and juicy and all he desires,

  It’s into the pot, and onto the fire!

  (“I have a feeling,” Coco whispered, “that this has an unhappy ending.”

  “Bolivian stories,” Inti said, echoing a thought I had once shared with him.)

  Think of our fathers, think of our mothers!

  Where are they dear comrades?

  Nig glub fig pick poo nig nig nig

  (“Camba couldn’t think of a rhyme,” Ricardo said, flaunting his critical abilities. “The asshole.”)

  I hate this vegetable existence, don’t you?

  I want to be free, touch the sky, move around

  I can’t stand the feeling that I’m half buried in ground

  —But you are, said the Carrot,

  And what’s wrong with that?

  I want to roam widely, see the world, hear its sounds

  I don’t want to flavor his stew—

  Do you?

  —Oh, don’t be silly, said the Celery

  No one can touch me

  I’m leafy and green

  I’m lovely and tall

  It’s easy to see

  God loves me best of all!

  —You’re crazy, Mr. Chili, said the Carrot.

  The garden’s the world,

  There’s nowhere to go

  There’s nothing to do

  There’s nothing to see

  And nothing called “stew.”

  The Vegetable Chorus sang:

  Wise up, Mr. Chili,

  We’re not crazy like you

  It’s ordained

  It is written

  We’re telling the truth

  There’s no pot in our future

  And nothing called stew

  And if there was

  Well, just what could we do?

  We’re just Vegetables!

  —I’m so pretty (sang the Tomato), I’m red and plump

  And juicy, too

  —You’ll be delicious, said the Chili

  In a stew, in a stew.

  Oh please join me Comrade Vegetables (begged the Pepper that leper)

  Or we’ll all go into the pot

  Where it’s hot

  We’ll all go into the stew

  Even you,

  Little Tomato!

  —I’m wise (sang the Potato)

  I’m deep and profound

  I’ve leaves up above,

  While I live underground

  I’m old and I’m dirty

  But my brain is still sound.

  You’re a hothead Mr. Pepper,

  We old ones know better

  The garden doesn’t need a revolution

  The Vegetable World changes

  By slow evolution!

  —You’ve a hundred eyes, said the Pepper,

  But you don’t see a thing!

  —I’m too pretty, said the Tomato,

  I’m round and I’m firm, and I’m so full of juice

  That’s acid and witty;

  I’ve too much life to cut loose!

  The Potato sang:

  I know of the sun, and I know of the earth

  I’ll be here forever, for a thousand rebirths

  I just want to grow, send out runners and roots

  I’ve no need for a rifle, for gun grease and boots!

  The Celery sang:

  No salad, no stew, no dinner, no soup!

  I’m too singular, veined, not part of a group!

  I’m too good for a movement,

  My head in the air, naturally quite aloof!

  —You’re so hotheaded! they all chorused,

  Saying good-bye.

  You’re a fool or a Communist,

  And you surely will die

  Squashed like a nick pook big foop nig nig nig

  Leave us alone! We’re happy like this!

  And if we’re not, well, we’re not,

  It’s our lot

  And so what?

  This is the way it was long meant to be

  Vegetables are for gardens, they’re not meant to be free

  (Whatever that is!)

  We hate you, Chili Pepper

  Go die, Chili Pepper

  Get squashed, Chili Pepper

  Drop dead, Chili Pepper!

  But most of all, Chili Pepper

  Shut up and leave us alone!

  We’d all be killed if we pulled up our roots!

  We can’t leave now, we’ve too many shoots

  And who ever heard of a tomato in boots!

  Leave us alone Chili Pepper!

  Shut up Chili Pepper!

  You’re crazy!

  So the Chili Pepper,

  That leper,

  Went off all alone

  He strapped on his knapsack,

  And picked up his gun

  His fight was a long one

  With unquiet nights

  And days on the run

  The Chili Pepper went off all alone,

  The Chili Pepper left home all alone

  Good luck Mr. Chili!

  Camba keened the farewell, as if he hadn’t much hope for the rebellious ambitious vegetable, the poor sad lonely doomed little red pepper! It would have brought tears to the stoniest heart—if our bodies had had the moisture to spare for tears.

  As a joke one day Marcos said, “There’s something wrong with your political line, Camba. If the vegetables are the workers, then they clear the ground, not the bourgeois gardener who owns the land. Inti better have a talk with you and straighten you out.”

  Camba stared at Marcos, bewildered. He didn’t sing for several days, and we all missed his little ditty. To the extent that we could hold on to its silly world through our weakness and fog, it had refreshed us, it let us imagine ourselves in a cartoon, or at least in a nursery, somewhere far away, where such songs might occur, and children might listen. So I asked Marcos to apologize to Camba, and Camba began again one day, in the middle of a line, like an engine starting up, “Nig bloo bloo plig nig, the Celery sang:…”

  The song was called “United Vegetables vs. United Fruit.”

  JUNE 16

  The Inca versus the Conquistador, the Inca against the Imperialist, the Inca versus History. The Inca is the empire without history, static, settled, immutable. And within that stillness life was filled with meaning, their work joined them each to each and to the godhead. (Of course they had a history of conquests—but one within a fundamentally unchanging structure. So we, too, must give them our new territories—of industry, of the tractor and the factory—in an image that rings with the truth of their past.) Our mistake has been to offer them new words, what is called progress, the ability to enter history, the very acid they have bent their will to neutralizing.

  Instead: a rebellion against history. Against imperialism. One that will end history, though not for a long-promised rest or even “prosperity” but for suffering. Not an immediate or even a progressive end to suffering, but the re-establishment of a meaning for their continual suffering, a meaning that they can fìnd now only in broken fragments. They long for a messiah who comes not once but over and over at every moment, the pattern of recurrence that they dream of in their stories, that they wish to make of us, that they have instructed us in. They will sacrifìce in a battle against the present, for a future that they can think will be the past made perpetual, that will be a continual meaningful suffering. The God of Liberation is a God of violence. But he must also be a God of sufferers.

  That shared suffering is the vein of blood that ran like a road through the villages, forming the body of one giant Man. Their work, their suffering, made them part of that One Man, that God who was imaged in the Inca. It was not release from work, but shared continual work, not rest, but continual sacrifice of the self that joined one with the community, that makes the community, that makes it One Man. So it is, too, with Communism.

  Sh
e spoke of the return of the just king. The King who will return is the form of the Inca remade by us, the king of the return. The God who was imaged in the Inca will be the One Man we offer them, the Internationale. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, and … Inti perhaps. Or one of their own, unknown yet.

  We moved north, as a feint (and to get medicines for Che), and then back south, to search for Joaquin again.

  Bolivia, August 1967

  AUGUST

  From Coco’s Journal

  8/14/67: The time in the jungle was hard for me—for all of us. The chloroquine Moro gave me helped, but the jungle still made my tissues so watery that I could hardly stand. And the heat turned the watery flesh to steam; my face melted away; now I’m so thin that I look as dour and lean as Inti. The Revolution has made us into brothers!

  But the jungle was hardest on Che. At night, in our hammocks, we heard his lungs strain and wheeze like a piece of creaky overburdened machinery. They tried to wring the water out of the air, as if it were a moist rag, to find something for Che to breathe. But Che made the necessary sacrifice: going into the jungle and staying there, despite the pain it caused him, until we had confused the army, thrown them off our trail.

  And it worked! It was like the ground had swallowed us up. Today we surprised the soldiers completely, appearing out of nowhere, and taking the town of Samiapata.

  The town is on a branch road, a mile south of the highway. We drove up slowly, in the bus we had seized this morning back near the sawmill. (We had left the real passengers under guard with Che and the center at our command post there.)

  At the intersection there was a police booth for two or three men, and a gray wooden refreshment stand with a table in front, and a fading Coca-Cola sign leaning against its legs. (I looked forward to having a Coke.) The police waved us to a stop at the intersection. I saw three or four soldiers lounging by the stand, and threw the metal flange on my pistol nervously. The piece of metal felt comforting, as if my own blood went through it; the pistol has become a wonderful part of my body.

  We got off the bus without incident, hiding our weapons under the jackets we’d taken from the passengers, and we moved to the outside of the officials, pushing them to the middle according to Ricardo’s plan, like beaters in a hunt. One soldier gave me the evil eye when I bumped him with my elbow, and called me a clumsy son of a bitch.

  Ricardo, at the center of the circle, raised his arm, and we pulled out our weapons, pointing them inward at the crowd. The bald-headed soldier who had cursed me said, “I’m sorry,” in a choked voice.

  “That’s all right,” I said, and I pushed my gun barrel hard into the very small of the bald man’s back so it would hurt him.

  We had surrounded them! The police and soldiers were stunned. There were no more guerrillas, the radio said, and if there were, they were far from Samia pa ta. But then, suddenly, there we were! The Revolution had burrowed underground, and emerged like an old mole, covered with rotting leaves and dirt, blinking, its big teeth bared, outside their wooden refreshment stand.

  Pacho and Aniceto stood guard over the prisoners, and the rest of us rode into town on the bus. I was disappointed that there hadn’t been any Coca-Cola. We dropped Chino off at the Infant of Prague Pharmacy, a white building with a statue of the Holy Infant on a little piece of mosaic sidewalk in front. Samiapata is the largest town we have seen in four months—a dozen paved streets, sidewalks, even a movie theater.

  The army was bivouacked in a long adobe building that had once been the town school. One of our prisoners from the highway, the second lieutenant with the bald head—and a bad head-cold that made his tongue thick—identified himself before the door of the school, and ordered their surrender. He started to stutter, probably from fear, but I thought it might be a trick, and put my pistol to his temple. He bit his tongue right through then, and a thin thread of blood trickled down his lip, a vivid red. I laughed to see how scared he was, and that made it worse for him, and he started to choke on his own spit!

  They let us in. Julio gathered up their arms, munitions, clothing, and blankets and loaded them into the bus. I made the officers undress. Their underwear was so clean and white that I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Probably they thought I was queer!

  A private who was just coming to from his last-night’s binge lay on the floor, pretending to sleep. But I saw him put a hand out and move it towards a pistol near his pillow, so I shot him in the head. His legs twitched under his brown army blanket, like a child who doesn’t want to go to sleep. (I had hated to take my afternoon nap, and used to beat my legs up and down like that, to annoy our governess. It made me laugh again to see him do that. I thought the maid would have liked to put me to sleep in just that way, with a bullet through my forehead.) The bald lieutenant screamed, “He was only looking for his glasses! You’ve murdered him!” But I think he was lying.

  I telephoned the sawmill, and told the center that the town was now secure.

  Julio went through the street gathering up the townspeople for the march back to the police booth. They were afraid of us, and very reluctant to come. But they were afraid not to. As we went I looked into some of the houses, adobe rooms, sometimes with a charcoal stove to cook on, and I wondered what it would be like to live in this town, to trade with the mestizo peasants and Indians, to marry some young girl who would become one of these fat old women. But I can never have a life like that, any more than I can have the life I was raised for, and not only because my people wouldn’t have me back, but because I’ve changed. I can see it in the fear of the people we shepherded to the police booth, fear that I caused. Sometimes I feel split in two, and when one half of me sees the things the other half does he is bewildered, and I am bewildered. Nothing in my life prepared me to be a fighter—a murderer, the lieutenant said—but I think that can happen to anyone, for there are times when the whole world leaves its jobs on farms and in banks and goes off to war. What bewilders me is the joy I feel sometimes, the surge of agreeable power that overcomes me. I was right to lift and fire my pistol into that boy’s forehead. It felt good to see his legs kick up and down, the last convulsive involuntary motion that he will make on this earth—and I made him do it And when the lieutenant screamed in terrified disapproval of the man he saw before him, I was deeply pleased.

  Knowing that about myself where can I go live?

  It was noon by now and very hot in the streets. The buildings wavered, for I have trouble focusing my eyes when I get hot. I put my hand on Julio’s arm, so he might lead me back down the little branch road to the main junction.

  Soon Che came, with some of the center guard. He rode the mule that Benigno had found for him yesterday. Che can hardly walk, because of the asthma, but the medicines Chino was getting would soon remedy that. Our leader would be whole again.

  Che had Inti speak first. Inti stood on the refreshment-stand table, and he talked with a lot of feeling about the international situation, but he looked unsteady up there, and I found it hard to concentrate. I wasn’t sure if he was off balance, or if it was my eyes—from the fever or the drugs—and that worried me so much I couldn’t concentrate on what my brother was saying.

  Bolivians must join other oppressed people of the world in their rising against the United States. (I wished they had had Coca-Cola. Our governess used to give me Coca-Cola when I was sick, and I suppose I still think of it as a cure-all, even for malaria.) Our blow now, Inti said, could be decisive in defeating Imperialism and gaining our liberation.