The Death of Che Guevara

by Jay Cantor

  But then why didn’t he give me his journal? If it hadn’t been for the Bolivian Foreign Minister—unable to live with his guilt, his offenses against the Bolivian people and nation, and the heroes who had tried to liberate it—we wouldn’t have his pages. Che didn’t care what happened to the journals. His giving Camba’s journal to me didn’t mean anything!

  Wait a minute. Let’s look at this calmly, rationally. Che couldn’t simply hand me his notes while the others watched, for then they would have seen that we five had been chosen by Che to be the survivors, and they were walking towards their certain death. So he couldn’t give me his journal; it would give the game away.

  That must be true.

  Time for dinner. Tonight I want—and will have—a spicy chicken dinner, a Ghanaian recipe, like a thick soup, with lots of red pepper and peanut butter; a “heavy soup,” they call it. I must keep up my strength for the work he has left me.

  JULY 27

  The firing started at ten-thirty in the morning, and it came from all along the length of the ridge. Machine guns, as continual in their din as the roar of a saw, made a rapid staccato ringing that formed itself into one high-pitched tone that I thought would drive me mad. My group lipped the dirt or pressed ourselves like fossils into the rock. Mortars cratered the ground behind us and shook the bones of our heads to dust. The mortars splintered the reddish rocks into our faces. Things didn’t want to stay together anymore. Most of the firing seemed to be coming from behind us, in the direction in which Che’s group had retreated.

  Towards noon the firing became less intense, as if a switch had been thrown. Isolated rounds clicked off, as if at particular targets. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed now as if all the firing was coming from above, and there was no return fire anymore from elsewhere in the ravine. The rest I know only from others.

  They say that Che and Willy climbed up the side of the ravine, holding a screen of dry brown branches in front of them, a pathetic attempt at camouflage. Che had been wounded in the left leg, and had his arm clasped tightly around Willy’s shoulders. Willy dragged the barrel of his sub-machine gun along the ground with one hand, and caught hold of the brambles with the other, pulling the two of them upward. They say that Che wheezed so loudly that the soldiers at the very top of the ravine could hear something coming—something that sounded like an old train engine—and knew that it was Che.

  “Surrender!” the soldiers shouted. “Or we’ll kill you!” They almost laughed with relief, the soldiers, for now the whole thing had become like a game for them, one without danger.

  Che shouted upward at the faceless heaven of soldiers, up the long sloping rock and dirt wall that was the height of the ravine, “I am Che Guevara.”

  He didn’t say, “I surrender.” He didn’t say, “Don’t shoot. I’m like you.”

  Captain Prado, accompanied by two soldiers, clambered down the sides of the ravine, loosening rocks and dirt. The soldiers kept their rifles pointed at Willy and Che. Prado ordered the prisoners’ hands and legs tied tightly with leather thongs.

  One of these men, Prado thought, looked something like Che Guevara. But his cheeks were sunken, and his face emaciated—it gave a wolfish look to his jaw.

  “You’re so thin!” the captain said, his voice filled with a concern beyond his control.

  He squatted beside Guevara, keeping his balance with difficulty, and took Che’s hand, pushing back onto the wrist the thin leather thongs that bound it. Prado spit on the back of Che’s hand, and rubbed at the dirt, so he might compare that hand to a picture from his wallet. Among the thick veins there was a scar running in welts from the wrist to the base of the third finger

  the

  mark of some angry young man’s rugby cleats, the mark of Che’s distance, and the fury it caused.

  Reluctantly Prado let Che’s hand go, giving it a little pat (as involuntary as his expression of concern).

  I know what he received from the feel of Che’s flesh. Holding his hand was like having your name already inscribed in the history books: it was like being on television, and seeing yourself through the audience’s eyes. It was like looking down on the two of them from the mountain-top. Take this body away from beside him, this hand out of his, and he would lose that sense of things, that high-angle shot on his own life. He would be back at ground level, a man squatting in the dirt.

  Che let Prado examine his hand, like a patient. “I would like to have a doctor for my comrade’s arm,” Che said—for Willy had a flesh wound in his right shoulder—“and for the bullet in my right leg.”

  “I have men,” Prado said, in his overly precise way, “far more seriously wounded than you are.” But he gestured to the soldiers to bandage Che’s leg, to avoid hemorrhage. He wouldn’t care to lose this prize!

  “… in my right leg.” And then other accounts say his left. Which was it? And what does it matter? Yet I want to know. I want to hold the fact in my mouth and bite down on it. It matters to me. When he was alive, and here at this board, I wanted him to lie, to make it interesting. Now that he is dying I want to know exactly how it was—as if that might keep him alive!

  The soldiers dragged Willy, then Che, up the ravine, and laid them down beside the corpses of Pacho and El Chino. A young soldier came up to Che, as he lay there. “You fuck, you stupid fuck!” he screamed down at Che. “You should die you little fuck, you should be shot you little motherfucking bastard bitch!” With his long boot he kicked Che in the chest.

  Firing continued in brief bursts from the north of the ravine.

  The corpses of soldiers and guerrillas, wrapped in striped blankets, were thrown across the mules. Che and Willy’s legs were untied, so they could walk as best as they could manage. Che dragged his right leg, propped up by Willy from behind, and leaning on a soldier by his side.

  Dead men on mules, soldiers, prisoners, made their way back to La Higuera along the narrow track of rocky gray soil. A field alongside the road sloped upward, dotted with patches of trees, to a ridge where the sun was setting.

  Che (they say) pointed to one of the wounded soldiers. “If you don’t apply a tourniquet that man will die. He is bleeding from the femoral artery.”

  I am suspicious of them now. Only the exact details, the truth, can keep him alive. They will lie in order to introduce impure elements, acids that will rot away the threads of the tapestry. But that last remark sounds true. He couldn’t help himself; he had to teach everyone, to get things right, the right way to apply a tourniquet, the right way to run an economy, the right society for a man to live in, the right political line to bring that world about. At the end he detailed how to make coffee, so his followers in the world to come might drink his health, saying as they did, “That was how Che made coffee.” God is in the details; his body would become the scattered details of what they did in his name.

  I have left some of his instructions out of his journal: how to make a raft, how to bandage and tourniquet wounds, how to make a litter for the wounded from branches, how to remove a tooth, how to make a simple mortar.

  “Didn’t you receive training in first aid,” Che asked, “in the counter-insurgency school in Panama?”

  And this? Did he say it? Who is using him in this report? And why? There must be an account that isn’t distorted by the use someone is making of him, a report called the truth. What God saw. Or is God just another point of view—the propaganda of heaven? the holy ideology? Or does He see the undistorted facts, for he is the One who doesn’t distort, because he has no needs to serve—he has no use for us?

  I want the truth. If there must be a God for that, to see impartially and judge, then there must be a God! I want to know exactly what he said, the words God heard. (The words my parents—the few times the sons of bitches were together—said to each other in bed; the secrets hidden since the beginning of time.) The truth.

  “No,” Prado said. “But the training was quite good otherwise.” Prado, a tall thin man with a mustache clipped sharply i
nto a precise rectangle, was called the English Gentleman by his men—because of his stiffness, his reserve, his way of speaking, his certainty about whatever he said.

  “And you,” they say Che said, to the wounded soldier, “what does your family think about what you’re doing? Are they very rich, as your captain’s family undoubtedly is?”

  “There will be no more talking with the prisoners,” Prado said.

  The little parade moved along in silence. Sweat chills in the mountains when evening begins, a cold hand surrounding your body.

  I can be sure of that!

  Then Che asked for a cigarette.

  Prado took a red-and-white package from his coat, a North American brand.

  “No. Thank you anyway. But I don’t smoke light tobacco.”

  “What would you prefer?”

  “An Astoria, or some dark tobacco.”

  True to his taste, anyway, though it sounds like an advertisement for cigarettes —The Brand Guerrilla Leaders Prefer. (I could have one of the soldiers say that.)

  No!

  Why do I want to make jokes?

  Because I’m afraid. Writing this, I have pain swallowing. Does it remind me of the danger I was in then, how close I came to dying? No, I’m afraid that he is going to die, so I make jokes to distract myself, like watching the birds over the ocean outside this window—the way Che would follow his birds of theory off into the land of speculation.

  And he is going to die.

  One of the soldiers hesitated for a moment—calculating the effect on his career (who knows? maybe on his life itself, for this was Che Guevara, the chief of all demons, responsible for the ills of the world)—then reached into his long brown jacket for a package of Astorias.

  At evening sweat (water) dries on the skin, becoming cool as it does. That is a fact of nature. Human beings calculate whether a kind gesture will have a bad effect on their careers—another fact of nature. So I can be certain that it’s true.

  Why do I keep interrupting their motion down the path?

  Because I don’t want them to get to the schoolhouse in La Higuera, where they will shoot Che.

  Che took the package of cigarettes between his two hands—but they were tied together still. He could do nothing more with it.

  The soldier took the package back, withdrew a cigarette from it; put the cylinder between Che’s lips; and lit it for him.

  “Look, Captain …” Che said, and paused, the smoke stinging his eyes.

  This would have been a moment for the captain to have offered Che his last name. But he didn’t; he didn’t want Che to say his name

  because death

  might find him? or history? because he knew that he would kill Che, and he didn’t want a dying man’s curse?

  “Captain, don’t you think it’s unnecessary to keep me tied up? There’s nothing I can do It’s all over.”

  “No!” Willy shouted, as if a fist had struck him in the belly.

  Che was surrendering! Poor Willy, it was something more that he shouldn’t have seen, shouldn’t have heard!

  The procession went down the little dirt track that runs through the town of La Higuera, past the brown mud shacks. Forty or fifty people stood by the side of the road. A woman pointed at Che, who leaned now on his friend the wounded soldier, and dragged his leg along. “Kill him!” she screamed. “Don’t delay! He must die! Kill him now!” A few other voices (they say) joined her.

  Whose voices? Who screamed? Probably it was the mayor’s wife, the woman who hid in her fireplace. Or the goatherd. Was the woman fat? They don’t say, afraid of how much I might deduce from that. It might have been her—she would want Che killed before the army could speak to him, find out that she had sold him things. I must find out the name of the bloodthirsty woman, record it for the history of infamy, the world in its many disguises, so that she might live as the very image of betrayal.

  They put Che in the schoolhouse—that is certain, all the witnesses agree—a low-ceilinged mud shack with whitewash peeling from its walls. It had two rooms. They threw Che down on a wooden bench, against the back wall, and put Willy on the floor in the other room. The shack had two small square holes in the wall, with cross-pieces of wood that let the moonlight in—the moon just past full—in a lattice pattern.

  Guevara sat in the dark, and puffed on his pipe.

  Outside, Prado put a lantern on the edge of the town well, so that he might examine the contents of Guevara’s worn green knapsack. He pulled out each item, and held it up to the light, like a jeweler doing an appraisal. The less valuable things he threw to his men, who traded them among themselves.

  This, alas, sounds like someone else’s story, the very tale that Che wanted to avoid. But Che is porous now, he who had, at first, held himself apart so that he might be a sign of intransigence, so that he might ring like a bell. Now—as he later wished—he takes the shape of older stories, the darkness that is already in our hands, his thin body filled out by shadows. His dream—not so very different from the first—was that there might be a core that would always show through the tellings, like the soul in all its transmigrations, still the same soul somehow, in a bug or a god, the soul that said, It is right to rebel.

  Prado fished out a black velvet box, rimmed with golden thread, and immediately brought it in to the prisoner.

  He placed the lantern down in front of him, and sat down on the bench next to Che, the open velvet box in the center of his palm.

  “Are these yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you would have much use for cuff links in the mountains. Did you have dinner parties?”

  Once we did, yes, at Christmas, with nougat from Spain for dessert.—But Prado sounds too foolish. His taunts lack force. How can Che have the size he deserves if his tormentors aren’t more skilled? Should I help them torment him, so that he might become even more clearly the hero?

  “No. We ate badly. Like the peasants.”

  “Our peasants aren’t unhappy with their fate.”

  “It isn’t fate.”

  “It was a peasant,” Prado said sharply, “who turned you in.”

  Was it? I thought it was Camba. Maybe Prado lied. Or maybe Inti hadn’t seen Camba. Then what did happen to the little prick?

  “If that is true then he was a weak greedy man who wanted the reward.”

  “No, just a man who hated you for disturbing his life. A man who wanted to be left in peace. Our peasants don’t like people telling them what to do. This is not your country. They don’t want to die for your plans.”

  “They prefer to die for yours,” Che said, “and the North Americans.” Che smiled.

  His lips curled upward without parting and then clicked down shut. It’s a bond between myself and Captain Prado—only he and I know what Che looked like at that moment.

  “Please see that the cuff links are sent to my son.”

  Prado smiled,

  “Don’t be silly,” Prado said—or should have said. “What do you really care about your children? You left them long ago.”

  Che slapped the captain across the face—infuriated by his smile, enraged that he was in someone’s power.

  Prado’s head was knocked to the side, though the blow had been a weak one, from a sick, wounded man. The captain stood up, and stepped back a few paces. He unholstered his pistol, and shot Guevara in the right arm.

  “See that he gets a doctor,” Prado said to the sentry as he left. “And tie up his hands. He doesn’t know what to do with them.”

  No. Too simple, crude, physical. Only someone who knew Che well, who Che loved deeply enough to share his thoughts, who loved Che deeply enough to understand him inwardly, only someone like that would be able to torment Che properly, so he might reach his true stature.

  JULY 28

  Prado materialized in the room, sitting beside Che on the bench. He had the lantern in his hand, a face with a body in shadows, a face lit from below, like one of those goblin heads
that swing towards you in a funhouse—a not unattractive, though austere, face this time, thin, with well-chiseled features. Prado put the lantern on the floor between them, so half of their bodies were in light, half in shadow. Prado was a head taller than Che, so the top of his forehead reached into the darkness.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Prado said. Usually Prado clipped his words, like someone cutting them from paper with a sharp scissors. The English Gentleman, they called him; he had a sense of efficiency in all his gestures, of polite decency in getting the job done, and of certainty about the rightness of his course. But when he spoke with Che his voice changed. His men wouldn’t have recognized it. It wasn’t a harsh ugly thing, like some people’s voices, a tree’s voice, no, it was smooth, fluent, almost musical.

  “I have been waiting a long time for you,” Prado said.

  “A prize,” Che said, “an asset to your career. It bodes well for your future.”

  “Yes. But more than that. Since I first heard of you I had the feeling that we would have a lot to say to each other. You understand?”

  “No. We have nothing to say to each other.”

  “How sad for me, if true. I am as lonely among these people as an arctic explorer in a waste of snow. That’s why I speak so curtly to the men, because I don’t expect to be really understood. I cannot tell you how a man can long for some good conversation!”

  Che said nothing.

  “Well, in any case, I have so much to say to you. I’ve heard, you know, what you’ve been telling our villagers. I don’t understand it all, of course. I don’t pretend to be your equal. And I suppose in a way it wasn’t meant for me to understand. I suppose you would have said something different—taken a new line—to win over the cities. Still, I think I can detect some problems with your thoughts.”

  Che puffed on his pipe.

  “You’re right about work, of course. All men must work. You know, though you may not see it my way, it’s my opinion that even the very rich work now, in our world. They work at luxury. Court etiquette, you know—it’s changed its forms, of course, but it’s still absolute, imperious in the way it runs a person’s life, as I know from my own. To be a king—or even a prince like myself—is like being a revolutionary—you must be already dead. The palace and the tomb, the same.”