The Death of Che Guevara (17 page)

“You mean I tell the truth.”

I smiled. “Not just that. But talking about myself makes me talk more about myself. I can’t stop! It’s like a trance. You remember one thing, God knows from where, the edge of a blanket you had as a child, and it reminds you of something else you would have thought was gone forever if you ever thought about it, like the way the fruit bowl looked in the mornings in Hilda’s living room, or the quality of dust in the light in my parents’ house.”

“You should go back to work.” He got up from the table and went towards the porch and someone else’s story. He was afraid, perhaps, of more questions; he didn’t want to talk about me.

And next?
The goal is raising the production of zinc. The goal is increasing the participation in factory councils. The goal is taking that outpost. The goal is This business doesn’t seem to work like that. Where am I going here? I don’t know how to name it to myself. The goal is how I became the person that I am? That is: a certain will: the struggle must begin now. The beginning
of revolutionary violence will unite the masses, throwing them in one direction, in one way. The Third World will rise to save Vietnam, to end colonialism forever.

But how can that catechism be the story of my adolescence?

Before I asked: is it possible, can it be done? Is that like asking now: is it true? And then I think, but what about its opposite? Isn’t that part of the truth?

And next? Each sentence I write just stops. Dead. Like that. To know what comes next, after this sentence, I must imagine from the end backward. What is the end? (My plane lost over the sea? Some town in Bolivia? Or somewhere like Bolivia?) Make the life fit the death. To write one’s life story is to be already dead.

Is that true?

This morning, Ponco, up before me, had left a note on the table next to my mate gourd. (He had read my thoughts!) He provided direction.

After tea and bread I took this note back to my room, placed it before me on my board.

My day’s work:

I left the page by Ponco’s plate at dinner. He looked at it quizzically, folded it up into a very small square, and put it in his shirt pocket.

This morning’s note:

No
.

Yes
.

Yes, I have always been certain. Imperialism is the enemy of mankind. But my tactics have changed. Once I was a follower of Gandhi, or so I thought. I believed in chastity, abstinence, humbling my body for my soul’s sake. I believed in nonviolence and the life of the Indian villages. I was against industrialization. Gandhi, I thought, had shown the way to defeat the imperialists
.

And then there was an in-between time. The space between the sentences. Have you ever seen a strip of motion-picture stock? In between the frames there is a thin white line. On the screen the motion looks continuous, a man turning round or walking out a door. But there is really that line. A discontinuous dialectic that looks smooth
.

When I didn’t know what should be done the world seemed hateful, nonsensical, rotten. It was like having a stomach ache
.

But I was certain about Fidel. I had awaited him
.

At dinner Walter smiled, pointing at me. “Gandhi?”

“In Bolivia,” I said, returning his smile, remembering that young man’s sermons.

“Chastity?”

“Yes.” I nodded. There was something chaste in Walter’s harshness. “The body is evil, unruly. Form yourself by cutting into the flesh.”

Walter laughed, gasp gasp gasp, but said no more.

You don’t get the point
.

Not an interview
.

I meant a story. Tell a story about those things, about you
.

Argentina-Bolivia, 1953

My Book

THE DISCOVERY OF LATIN AMERICA

Notes on Gandhi’s Importance for the Latin American Revolution:

To the colonial intellectual—before Gandhi—revolution had meant aping Imperialist talk, Imperial culture, Imperial attitudes, even the Imperialists’ contempt for oneself, his contempt for “natives.” One wanted to be
modern
. Gandhi said No to this, Gandhi lived No. Western civilization, Western industry, Western Imperialism, Western science—that is the real savagery!

Gandhi showed us the way for Latin America, as for India. Gandhi drove the intellectuals into the villages. A spindly-legged little man in a white homespun loincloth, he sat by a wooden hand loom, spinning out cotton, spinning the world “backward,” away from the West, away from History. Let our ways replace imperialist machinery, imperialist wage slavery. Hand weaving: a symbol of the people’s unity, a source of quiet meditation, sustenance, independence. Through that meditation we can learn stillness, learn to renounce our lust for violence, renounce the degrading lusts of our bodies
.

—That was a piece of my notes on Gandhi and the Latin American Revolution (as I then imagined it!), a piece of the book I began on leaving Argentina, on the train to Bolivia. (Alvarados and I were on our way back to the leprosarium in San Pablo, Venezuela.) The “book” remained urgent homiletic notes—notes revised, notes added to with feverish exultation, notes rewritten, but always only notes, the preparation for a project not quite ever begun, a sermon never quite preached (except to Fernando, my congregation of one). The book was to be, I imagined, a tour de force; a political tract, a travel journal that was also the discovery of a self—in the existential sense. Whatever that meant. (I thought it meant “an active emptiness,” or “a continual venturing.” And I thought that meant …) I didn’t know what the book would be exactly. (I didn’t know exactly what a self was “in the existential sense.”) I thought that once it began it would all work itself out. (I thought
the same about the self.) So I rewrote my notes, expecting from the writing a clue as to what to write next; and when it didn’t come, I made more notes. My script shook as the train from Buenos Aires swayed from side to side on its worn tracks; the notebook bounced against my knees and splotched “lust.” I crossed out the spotted paragraphs (I would recopy them soon in almost identical words) and looked about for the paper bag filled with oranges. It was next to Alvarados, on the outside of our wooden bench. Alvarados, tired, had given up reading an article on allergies and, like a bird folding its wings across its eyes for the night, had put the back of his left arm against his right ear. He shifted slightly in his sleep as my shirt sleeve brushed the bottom of his nose.

My mother had given me the notebook I wrote in, late my last night at home, when I had told her of my plans for a book. My father, in anger and disappointment (so cunningly mixed together that I could not reply to his fury with the force of my own), had gone off to bed. “I tire so easily lately,” he said to my mother, who must surely have known. It was for me to overhear, for I could no longer be spoken to. He would not even look at me. I was a dead man for him; or I was his executioner; anyway someone had died. Watching him my body grew rigid.

He stooped over as he walked, his hands pressed into the pockets of his jacket, and he pushed out the white swinging door from the kitchen with his shoulder, as if he were too fatigued to lift his hands up before him. A shameless charade, I thought bitterly. I wanted to rise and hug him to me. I could not. My body was stiff, held in an arc of love and rebellion; if I were to reach out to him he would bend my gesture against me, misinterpret it, make me cry. I made myself hard. I was a knife, I thought grandly, as if it were all so basic to me, this problem, so deep in my soul, that it was beyond choice; not a family quarrel but a damnation.

“He’ll get over it,” I said. My voice sounded harsh, angry. The tone surprised me. I had meant it (I thought) as a gentle prayer.

“Are you sure you want him to?”

Her voice was calm, almost clinical. But it was a severe remark. Stupid amateur psychoanalysis, I wanted to say, but didn’t. She had hurt me. I sat sunk in my chair, not speaking. After a while I told her of my idea for a book, my existential travelogue. “I’ll make something of myself.”

“A book? You mean you’ll make a story out of yourself?” But she was smiling again.

“Yes. And I’ll dedicate the book of myself to you and Father.” She closed
her eyes, putting her hands out on the glass table, palms downward. She was silent. I thought she found my offering—a dedication—a paltry thing compared with the pain I’d caused my father. But I was glad to have the chance to stare at her face, to look without being seen. Her face fascinated me, and I have never looked my fill. It was thin; and old; and lovely; and ruined; a relief map. I felt protective towards her, and tender, though there was nothing I could protect her against. Perhaps, if we had been a different sort of family, I would have touched her cheek then, run my finger in one of the hollows of her face. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

“Yes,” she intoned, from her long silence. Her voice was low, and, I thought, intentionally “mysterious.” Her eyes remained closed. “I can see it. You will have many different adventures in many different climates. And you will be like me, cynical, and too trusting.”

I laughed nervously at her theatrical self-description, her fortunetelling act, her peekaboo around the edges. The performance was unsettling, a low voice, hers and not hers, coming from that impassive old face with its large closed eyelids. And it was uncanny most of all, I think, because her hands were (as they never were) still, her long fingers not tapping on the table before her. (A song called “I’m More Alive Than This Place Will Bear!”) “You need an earring,” I said. “For one ear. Fortunes told.”

She opened her eyes, reanimated her face and hands. “No, I’m sorry for joking, darling. I really mean it. I could feel it. It was like a strong wave buoying me up, buoying you up, because I felt
I was you
. Some rich fate awaits you, Tete. I’m more sure of it than ever.” She rose from her chair suddenly and clapped her hands together. “It’s a wonderful idea. You should write a book. You will do what I have all these years only made notes for, only dreamed of doing.” For she too, she often said, when I saw her jotting something into one of her notebooks, was writing a book. It was to be called (self-mockingly, of course)
The Complete History of the World in Its Many Disguises
. (I think she did have some historical work planned, a scathing of all the criminals, pimps, whores, charlatans, and clowns of our country, our continent, our world. That is: everybody, everywhere.) An interesting reversal this evening, I thought placidly. (Her buoyancy made me calm, as if I, too, were contemplating my rich fate from afar.) I have disappointed my father, I thought, but I will complete my mother’s destiny (“I felt
I was you
”), fulfill her desire. (The calm lasted only a few hours. Then, again, my adolescent mood returned; I felt myself as separate as a knife.)

From a pile of papers on the table she extracted one of her black notebooks, one that didn’t have any newspaper clippings sticking out from between its pages. She leaned over as if looking in a mirror, and in spidery script inscribed
a sentence on the title page: “Life is not a walk across an open field.” A cigarette clasped between her lips, her eyes sparkling, she gave me the notebook with both hands. A presentation volume.

A little puzzle solved: what I had spied at age eleven was the motto that began all her notebooks. What dangers, I wondered, did my mother fear? What reassurance had she taken from this bitter reminder of … of what? unfortunate accidents? (not me, I hoped) cunning pitfalls? malevolent enemies? (my father? myself?) Of all beings, I thought, she is the most mysterious to me. But I didn’t ask what the sentence meant to her. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

I left the notebook with Hilda in Mexico, “by accident”; and she, by accident, left it behind when she went to my parents’ house to wait for word from (or of) me. But someone in the boardinghouse (the police, perhaps) found it and sent it on to Argentina (it was my parents’ address I had written underneath my mother’s emblem on the flyleaf). Hilda brought it with her to Cuba, and handed it to me on the day I told her our marriage was over (a presentation volume). Bad penny, I’ve given up on losing it, have kept it with me since. I thought, I suppose, that I had left a necessary message in it for myself, that some quality that would make me whole would come back to me through its words. So every so often I would look into it. And shut it again quickly after reading a few pages, overcome by embarrassment. Until this morning. For then, as I looked over the entries, pages rippled from waterlogging, ink blurred, I felt myself hovering fondly, protectively, helplessly over the young man who wrote them, speeding over the continent towards his “rich fate.” (There is nothing I can protect him from. I am the fate that awaits him.) Brave lad, he does need someone’s advice. He seems to have brought a traveling pulpit with him everywhere! even on a train!