Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

by Ben Fountain

  “She looks surprised,” said one of my sisters.

  “She’s holding her breath,” said another sister.

  “She hates her husband,” said my oldest and wisest sister.

  As the youngest, and the only boy, I was expected to say nothing, but an opera went off in my head whenever I saw Mrs. Broun. That opera, of course, was the sound of sex, and the news that she hated her husband gave me a secret thrill, though hate was probably too strong a word—by then the Brouns had likely burned through enough high drama to have exhausted all the more flamboyant emotions. Years before, in the very early sixties, they’d lived in Cuba as part of an academic exchange, one of the last before diplomatic relations were broken. Either inspired by the Revolution, or sick of her husband, or both—maybe she’d met the dashing Che and already become entangled—Mrs. Broun remained in Cuba when her husband left. Her defection was a news sensation for a couple of weeks, a Cold War scandal of the human interest sort and a public humiliation for Dr. Broun, who returned to campus more abstracted and aloof than ever. He took up his old position in the sociology department and refused to speak to the press; when Mrs. Broun abruptly rejoined him several years later, she, too, maintained a stone wall of silence, resuming the life of a conventional faculty wife with no more fuss than if she’d spent a long weekend at the beach. Given material like that, the community had no choice but to glut itself with gossip. She’d been brainwashed, people said, or she was a spy, or had been switched out in Havana for a surgically altered double, but the steamiest and most persistent rumors concerned the affair she’d allegedly had with Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the famous revolutionary.

  According to the orthodoxy of the times, Che was high in our pantheon of national enemies, but for me he was a clue, a key player in some essential human mystery that linked us both to Mrs. Broun and therefore to one another. In any case, I was consumed; at faculty receptions I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. I watched her eat, her graceful juggling of purse and plate, and how she’d tap her ears from time to time to make sure that her earrings were still in place. I studied her clothes, the high heels and snug-fitting suits, the sleek bulge of her bottom underneath her skirt. She rarely spoke, preferring instead to be a poised and careful listener, though even when she seemed at her most engaged there was an air of distraction or restlessness about her, as if she sensed someone standing too close to her shoulder, an intimate, vaguely hostile presence to whom she would momentarily turn. I know now that this was her tragic aura following her around, though at the time I had only the coarsest sense that she would never be happy again. Certainly I couldn’t make her happy, and that, for me, was part of the tragedy.

  The fact that she ended up exactly where she started, as a faculty wife at a small, conservative Southern college, strikes me now as the sort of peculiarly specific hell that life has a way of devising for us. I remember my alarm on hearing the news that Che had been killed—what were we going to say to Mrs. Broun? It didn’t occur to me that people could act as if nothing had happened, but when I saw her at the Christmas party later that year, she looked absolutely the same. She moved about the room as she always did, saying little, eating less, seeming to blink about once every ten minutes. I kept trying to make passionate eye contact with her, to convey some urgent message of solidarity or love, but my best chance came when she approached the table for a cup of punch. I was trembling as I filled the cup and reverently passed it to her, and as the punch changed hands, her eyes met mine. She froze, staring at me as if I’d just that moment materialized, and the next instant she seemed to know everything—she understood, at the very least, what I wanted to say, because little lightning strikes started going off behind her eyes. I think she would have slapped me if I’d opened my mouth. She was that ruthless, that jealous of her epic shame and grief, and no brat was going to taint the great love of her life by talking of things he knew nothing about.

  I was desperate to speak to her, but that look stopped me cold. She scared me so badly that I remember thinking that I didn’t want to fall in love with anyone, ever, not if that’s what it could do to you.

  2. Death in Bolivia

  When I was twenty I dropped out of college and got a minimum-wage job delivering office furniture. At the time I was living in the Northeast, in a cold, dirty, technically bankrupt city where dozens of random murders occurred every night, but my main concern was finding work of the sort that would allow me to stop thinking for a while, which seemed advisable after a near-sleepless sophomore year in which I fell prey to certain compulsive behaviors, such as trying to read everything Ezra Pound had ever written. So I got a job with a discount-office furniture company, found a cheap apartment in a high-crime neighborhood, and started taking the bus to work every morning. It was a lonely, orbitless time in my life; I had few friends, and was too bottled-up to talk to women, but delivering furniture had its satisfactions. You could double-park all over the city, for one thing, and I liked lifting stuff and riding around in the truck, and the other guys in delivery didn’t mind me too much. I think they knew instinctively what they had on their hands, a stressed-out white boy whose life had jumped the tracks, but my troubles must have looked pretty puny to them. My first day they sent me out with Clifton Weems, an older black man with a barrel chest and a mangled, arthritic way of walking. After a couple of hours of brooding he turned to me and said: “Hey kid, you know what?”

  “No, what.”

  “You turn sideways when your woman’s shooting at you, you cut her target more’n half.”

  They thought I was funny with my goofy formal manners, the way I automatically called the older guys “sir” until they yelled at me to stop. During the day I hauled furniture and took a fair amount of guff; at night I listened to gunfire barking up and down my street and had conflicted, homesick dreams about the South. I’d come to this place of my own free will, following a perfectly honorable subset of the Southern tradition by going north for school, but somehow I’d managed to make an exile of myself. “Good luck,” my father said when I called to say I was dropping out. By then he was president of a bigger, even more prestigious college. “Come see us when you feel like getting serious again.”

  Life became very basic. Work, food, sleep—as long as I rolled my body out of bed in the morning, everything else just seemed to happen by itself. One day I was out on deliveries with Luis Batista and Clifton, sitting in the peon’s middle seat while Luis surfed the truck through six lanes of traffic. Clifton relaxed on my other side with his arm out the window, humming into the early spring breeze. We heard something shift in the back of the truck, then glass shattering. Clifton reached over and turned up the radio.

  “Hey,” he said, leaning back in his seat, “you know Gustavo’s the guy who killed Che Guevara?”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, instantly reeling with nostalgia; it was like opening an old steamer trunk full of mothballs. “You mean Che Guevara the guerrilla?”

  “No, man, Che Guevara the nightclub singer. Who the hell do you think I mean?”

  “I—”

  “You’re surprised I know about Che? You think I’m just an ignorant nee-gro, doncha boy.”

  “No Clifton, I just—”

  “Shit, man, I knew Malcolm X. I used to hang with Adam Clayton Powell Jr. all the time, you dig? I was right in the middle of all that sixties shit.”

  I couldn’t tell if Clifton was razzing me or really mad, so I shut up. Luis glanced at us and casually shifted gears.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I heard that about Gus.”

  “You think it’s true?” Clifton asked.

  “Sure, why not. He was in the army down there. He’s a pretty tough guy.”

  “You ever ask him?”

  “Fuck no man, you don’t talk about stuff that happened down there.” Luis was Chilean, a former soldier himself; it seemed a vaguely sinister coincidence that all the Latins in delivery were ex–military men.

  “Dude ought to write a book, mak
e himself some money.”

  “No.” Luis was adamant. “No books. He’d just bring a lot of grief down on himself.”

  They were talking about Gustavo Torres, a taciturn Bolivian whose flat Indian features and long mournful nose gave his face the moral authority of a death mask. Gus exhibited behaviors that were baffling to most North Americans—modesty, reserve, and courtesy, to name a few—and transmitted with every gesture an urbane self-assurance that made me think of the best class of movie gamblers. He had a wife and kids in Bolivia and a string of stylish lady friends here in the city, along with a Monte Carlo that he garaged at unimaginable expense. Nobody knew how he managed to live so well on a workingman’s wages, which only added to the Gustavo mystique.

  Of course I asked him about Che; the question burned inside me like a lit fuse. The next time we went out on deliveries together I gathered my nerve.

  “Ah, Gus,” I began, “I don’t mean to bug you or anything, but there’s these rumors going around about you, and I was just wondering—”

  He brought his hand down on the dashboard, slap, then raised it as if taking an oath. “The rumors are true,” he declared.

  “We’re talking about Che, right?”

  He flinched like I’d thrown acid in his face. “Che Guevara, of course. The revolucionario.”

  “I don’t mean to pry,” I said by way of invitation.

  “That’s good,” he said curtly, eyes fixed on the street. “You shouldn’t be too curious about these things.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, and then I told him about Mrs. Broun and her alleged affair with Che, because it made me feel good—more authentic and grounded, and less homesick, I suppose—to talk about Che. Gus just grunted, but a couple of days later he came up to me in the stockroom.

  “It is true,” he said in a low voice. “About that lady you knew, and Che. There was an affair.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes.” Gustavo’s English was all tight corners and crisp edges. “She lived in La Habana for two years, he kept her in an apartment in the Old City. It’s a miracle she got out with her life, you know.”

  “How did you—”

  “Yes, well,” he said with a tidy cough. “I just thought you’d want to know.”

  So that was the end of it, I thought, and I filed it away until a couple of weeks later, when a bunch of us went out drinking after work, to the sort of serious, no-frills neighborhood bar where the walls sweat tears of nicotine and the waitresses have the grizzled look of ex–child brides. I had three quick ones, drinking too fast as usual; I looked up halfway through beer number four to find Gustavo watching me with imploding eyes.

  “It is like the Pietà,” he intoned. When Gus drank his face planed off like weathered drywall, and his nose seemed more commanding and ancient than ever.

  “Say what?”

  “The portrait of Che in death, his body lying on the table. Have you seen it?”

  Of course I’d seen it, the famous Freddy Trigo image of Che laid out on a stretcher after his slipshod execution—it’s one of the iconic photographs of the twentieth century. Che’s eyes are open in the picture, fixed on some distant point, and his lips are parted in a sleepy half-smile. The tousled hair and beard give him a Christlike look; his naked torso, pitted here and there with bulletholes, seems to emanate light. In the hushed, satin tones of that black-and-white image, Che’s body has an aura of distilled transcendence.

  “I’ve seen it,” I answered, trying to match Gus’s gravitas.

  “The Pietà,” he repeated, “it’s so beautiful the way his eyes gaze past the camera, he seems so calm and forgiving, so much at peace. Yet for anyone who was there that day, that photo is like a curse.”

  “Hunh,” I murmured, afraid of spooking him, but I didn’t need to worry. Gustavo was speaking from some deep confessional booth within himself.

  “Jesus could not have been the Christ without his Judas, correct? And someone had to play the Judas for Che, too, for Che the man to be transformed into Che the martyr. But that goddamn photo, man, it drives me crazy, we were only trying to prove that Che was dead. Those were our orders that day, send us proof that Che is dead! So we looked for the best light, we took off his shirt to show his wounds, we had the nurse trim his beard and comb back his hair. We only wanted to take a decent photo that day—who could have known we were making the new Pietà?”

  While we drank he described the military operation for me, how his unit—most of them Indians—had harassed and tracked the guerrillas for weeks, finally cornering the survivors in the Churo Gorge. They captured Che after a firefight and marched him into the tiny village of La Higuera, where they locked him in the schoolhouse overnight. When the order came the next day to execute him, the junior officers drew lots to determine who would do the shooting. “I talked to him early that morning,” Gus said. “I brought him a cup of coffee and we chatted for a minute, I told him I was the guy who’d tracked him all this time through the mountains. Che was a human wreck by then—he was starving and sick, his feet were a bloody mess, and his asthma was like a snake crawling up and down his throat. But still fighting—that son of a bitch was still fighting his war. He just stared at me for a minute, and then he said, ‘Look around you, Lieutenant. Look at this village—what do you see? There’s no doctor, no running water, no electricity, no decent road, they have nothing, the lives of these people are shit. So all that time you were trying to kill me, brother, did you ever stop to think what this war is about?’”

  “It’s a conversation I have sometimes in my dreams,” Gus went on. “We’re in the schoolhouse there in La Higuera, and he’s sitting on the floor in his filthy clothes, his feet sticking out in their bloody rags. But he’s already dead! His skin is a pale blue color, and his shirt is torn and bloody where the bullets went in. We talk for a while, and he says he’s not angry with me. I ask him if it hurts very much to be dead, and he says, No, not very much. And then I get up the nerve to ask him about heaven and hell, whether they’re real, and where exactly he is in all that. He always smiles a little when I ask him that, and then he says, ‘You know, Gustavo, it’s a very interesting thing I’ve learned here, I had no idea God and the Devil live so close together. They’re neighbors, in fact, their houses are right beside each other, and sometimes when they’re sitting around with nothing to do they play cards, just as a way to pass the time. But they never wager money—what good is money to them? No, it’s only souls they’re interested in, the souls of all these sinners running around the Earth. It’s us they bet on when they sit down to cards.’

  “‘So what about me?’ I ask him then. ‘Have they ever bet on me?’

  “‘Of course,’ he says, but when I ask him who won, the Devil or God, he never answers. He just sits there staring at me.”

  3. Comrades-in-Arms

  In my early thirties I began making trips to the beleaguered island nation of Haiti. With the recent fall of the Duvalier regime, it struck me as an interesting place to be, and I had credentialed, more or less credible reasons for going—to write articles and, hopefully, a book—but my true motives seemed to have more to do with being Southern, and white, and having a natural affinity for the quagmire of race. By this time I had a beautiful wife and two wonderful children, a loving family which I’d done nothing special to deserve, but I’d leave them for weeks at a time to go messing around a place that was perpetually on the verge of devouring itself. After several trips I met a young Haitian, a doctor, with whom I became friends; Ponce, incidentally, was rather Che-like himself, an intense, good-looking, often disheveled mulatto who practiced near one of the downtown slums and treated most of his patients for free. Because he made so little money, he had to live with his wife and their two sons in a cramped, buggy apartment in the middle of Port-au-Prince, a few rooms carved out of an ancient gingerbread mansion that must have been quite grand in its time, but now looked more like a pile of moldering elephant bones. He insisted that I stay there when I came to Port-au-Pri
nce, and often I did, though with some misgivings. The apartment had no running water, for one thing, and for another it was always crammed with friends and poor relations and mysterious strangers whose connection I never could figure out. They just arrived, hung around for a couple of days, and moved on; I got the impression this was how a lot of them lived.

  It was by staying at Ponce’s apartment that I met an elderly Haitian who claimed to have been comrades-in-arms with Che. Laurent was a tall, spry, ebullient old man with jaundice-yellow eyes and ebony skin that glistened in the heat of the small apart ment, and I suppose there’s no point in withholding the fact that he was quite insane. He’d turn up several times a week, usually in the mornings for a cup of coffee; in his guayabera and slacks and white patent-leather loafers, carrying his zippered portfolio under one arm, he looked every inch the tropical man of affairs, but as soon as he opened his mouth you wanted to run for the doors.

  “I have an appointment with Mandela this morning,” he might say, shrewdly tapping the portfolio he was never without. Another day it might be Thatcher or Mitterand, or he might be going to the palace to confer with President Aristide. The thing is, if you listened to him long enough, his delusions began to take on a plausible air. For most of his life he’d flirted around the edges of power, ever since he’d been a captain in the Haitian Army and launched an early, failed coup against Papa Doc. He could talk quite rationally about politics and history, and there was a gamesmanship to his madness, a playful self-aware quality, that kept us guessing as to how seriously he took himself.

  He liked taunting the blans, the foreigners, best of all. If there were journalists at the apartment, and often there were since Ponce spoke English and lived near the Holiday Inn, Laurent would shake their hands and solemnly declare, “I am the lidder of the Haitian pipple!” Which was absurd, of course, but with time I found myself adjusting to the notion that, madness aside, Laurent would have made as decent a president as anyone could hope for. He spoke five languages, held degrees in business and economics, and boasted a distinguished if brief military career, and over the course of his harrowing thirty-year exile he’d kept body and soul together on four different continents. But Cuba had been his first stop, where he had offered his protean talents to the freshly anointed Minister of Industry, El Che. “We recognized at once that we were brothers,” Laurent told anyone who would listen. “He put me in charge of the of fice of Bureau of Statistics, and often I would accompany him as he traveled about the country inspecting projects of industrialization. We talked about so many things in our time together—about his life, about philosophy, about my dream of liberating Haiti, which he fully supported. ‘Laurent,’ he asked me on one occasion, ‘what is the first priority of government? What is the first thing you would do if you were President of Haiti?’