The Death of Che Guevara (21 page)

I felt disgusted by Chaco’s fooling, by North Americans, by the sophistical science of economics. I wanted to pull Ricardo’s hair and force his head back up. Chaco was right: my eyes glazed. I hated this sort of thing. I hated Ricardo’s cowed posture. I didn’t want to understand Chaco’s nonsense. Every way you walked imperialism tripped you up, hampered you. Chaco delighted in surreal twists: that if you wanted to develop the silk industry it caused lines to form outside the grocery each night, people waiting for the morning’s
opening, praying something might be left on the shelves. (A new national industry had developed: waiting in line at night for wealthier people.) Chaco liked that; it proved the mind’s inadequacy to its tasks; he delighted in proving failure over and over. (What else could be done? his burlesque implied.) I despised it. The point of morality was not to revel in your own destruction, but to rise above the urinous snares of this world. I wanted to burn this world up with my indignation. “I’ll tell you why beer is so expensive. It’s not cupos. It’s human greed. That’s the root of the problem. That’s what Chaco is really talking about. Greed. We have to change ourselves basically, radically, totally. We’re greedy because our lives are empty, and we’re afraid to die. We think if we get enough money we won’t be empty, we won’t die. Human greed is the problem. And people don’t need beer. It’s pois—”

Ricardo turned and stared at me. His frank gaze interrupted my thoughts. He put his fist down on the table. “I think you’re right about greed. People are too greedy. They don’t want to work. But I don’t ever want to hear that shit again about beer. You don’t like beer. Fine. Don’t drink it. But I like it. So no more of that Gandhi shit.” He put his glass to his mouth.

“Oh, no,” Fernando cried, wincing theatrically, pursing his lips around a sour taste. “Oh, no. Please Ricardo, don’t say ‘shit.’ Anything but that. I couldn’t stand hearing about that again.”

Ricardo and I laughed. Fernando had reconciled us, restored us to the world that the language of the men at the center table had garbled up.

“I think I would like another beer,” Ricardo said; enormous spaces opened between each small word. He wiped his lips with the sleeve of his brown sports coat.

Fernando and I put some money on the table.

I turned towards the window and marched dizzily in the dry sun with the Indians. What did we care for cupos or lines in front of the city grocery stores? The world would be just again when we returned to our proper place, our villages. Our demand was simple: land to grow our food on. Hundreds of small processions walked back and forth, up and down the narrow colonial side streets, in military formations, scattered like colored ribbons on the hills about the center of town. Over their heads the balconies almost touched, the stone leaves of a feudal forest. Men waltzed gravely, in groups, machetes attached to their belts like ceremonial swords, tools home from a savage harvest. They held their hands together in front of their chests, and walked as if to measure. Women in bowler hats, and black ponchos striped with green and red bands, carried their babies trussed to their backs, and followed after the men, running thread as they walked, bobbins dangled and jumped at their feet, familiars kept in place by spells.

The Indians moved with profound, inexplicable deliberateness, like monkeys, children, growing trees. Ten or eleven sat in the square; suddenly they all rose and walked off together in a short parade, as if a single vein ran through them; they circled about the plaza once, then returned to their spot and, as if on signal, sat down. “I feel like there’s a secret they all know,” I said to Fernando. “It’s a dance. Each one has a part. And I can’t even hear the music.”

“If it’s a dance,” Fernando said, smiling fondly, remembering my debacles in Buenos Aires night clubs, “you’ll never get it. Even if you hear the music.”

“Look at the way they move around,” I said. It filled me with a deep excitement, as if there were a solemnity to it. “They’re so curious. They’ve come into their mansion, some rich strange place they built but were always excluded from. They want to walk in all the rooms. They’re serious about the furniture. They don’t know what any of it is for. See? Look! That family, the little boy in a woolen hat walking between his parents, they go up and down the same street, stopping at every store window. Boxes that voices come from.”

“Dead people’s voices,” Chaco said.

“Yellow coats on plaster figures?”

“Saints of
these
people,” Chaco interpreted.

“They want to palpate the city, feel the stones against their bodies, taste it, see every inch of it.” It gave me joy to imagine this. “They don’t want to
live
in the house. They didn’t think of building something like this in the first place. They don’t want to buy that silly junk. They don’t even know what money is. If they got some they’d only bury it under a rock. This is what ownership means to them. That they can look their fill.”

“Idealist.” Fernando laughed tenderly. “That’s what you think. You don’t know
them
. Those are
your
Indians. If I were one of them I’d like to have one of those yellow raincoats, to wear, for my own.”

“No. Not them. They have it already, all they want of it, the sight of it. They bought that during Holy Week. The city is theirs now. They’re marching through their domain, their inheritance, taking possession of it by walking in it, seeing it. Anyway, where would you wear a thing like a raincoat? Would you wear it to go planting?”

“I would if it were raining,” Chaco said, nodding, his head turned to the side. “But I’ll tell you what I’d really like if I were one of those Indians. I’d like a ballpoint pen! I really would.”

“But you wouldn’t know how to write,” Fernando said.

“The MNR will teach them how to write.” Ricardo made a covenant. APRA and the MNR shared the same promises. (I was sure then that he was right.)

Four men in loose-fitting white pants and colored belts walked by our
window, carrying rifles. Their wives followed after, wearing leather bandilleras.

Chaco waved to the people near us, construction-company owners. (In a government office somewhere, a man drew red lines like welts all over a map, planning roads. Roads would cause the land to prosper.) The men looked out the window at Chaco’s direction. The middle class of La Paz sat terrified of the Indian militias. They demanded the government disarm them, reorganize a regular army to protect them. (Who knows these Indians? They might suddenly, as if on signal—one that we couldn’t hear, that we couldn’t see—go berserk in the capital. A dummy in a store window might order them to kill us all.) Chaco smiled at the others, his fingers and thumb forming a gun pointed at their heads. One of the men frowned severely. Chaco scratched his thick earlobe with his gun barrel.

No, I thought, fear is not the way to produce national unity before imperialism, the common enemy. It is the readiness to die for what one believes that impresses others and would unite all classes of the nation. But Chaco’s flapping earlobe made me smile.

Near our window two men in brown felt hats blew on long wooden Indian flutes, wide ones, tied round the top with blue thread. The song was a few high notes played over and over. A simple song, a children’s song, even I could tap out its rhythm. A group of dancers stepped out to the center of the square in broad steps, six men in wide white pants and long red-and-yellow woolen caps that formed tasseled peaks. Around their waists and necks they wore woven squares of cloth thick with an intricate embroidery of smaller and smaller squares. The flaps of cloth overlapped one upon the other, like the tiles of a roof. These embroidered men formed a line. Three other men, taller ones, stood opposite. They wore black ponchos over white pants.

The man in the center of the embroidered men, the line of six, carried a light-red silk cloth. He walked to the tall men, and the other bright men followed, forming a “V.” He stamped his feet before the taller men, as if in anger, hard, over and over, to the beat of the flutes. The tall men stared at him, and did nothing. The red man walked over to one of the other men and stamped his feet in anger. The man stared at him but did nothing. Over and over, he went back and forth between the three tall men, and stamped his feet. He looked behind him at the men in his group. One of these men went over to the tall ones, and stood with them, taking off his hat; and it seemed to me that he became taller too. Then another of his men went over. Finally there was a line of eight men, and the one man still wearing a round red cap stood alone, facing the man in the middle of the other line. He stamped his feet, first one, then the other, raising his knees high into the air, bringing his legs
down, rocking back and forth, flinging the cloth up and whipping it down. When it came down, the flutes grew quiet, as if there were an ending. Or a separation. Then the flutes began again; played their short tune; and stopped as he brought his red cloth down. And began again. In the intervals of silence I lost myself, felt myself falling into the silence, like an unraveling, the letters that made up my name scattering all over the page. I didn’t know who he was he means I am. There. In that place. The flutes began again, that breathy whistling, and reknit me note by note. One of the tall men turned his back to the single man. Then another. Then they all had their backs turned. The single man became more and more furious in his motions. There was nothing beautiful about it. It was far from beautiful. I thought he was in pain. He couldn’t breathe. He flailed about in the thin air. The line of men formed a circle around him, with their backs to him. I could see him between their legs and bodies, he stamped his feet and leapt up, and his red hat looked like the tip of a flame. His body was wound round with the scarf, not artfully, but as if he’d become tangled in it. The circle dispersed, and there was no one in the middle. The music of the flutes went on. I loved the Bolivian Revolution. I wanted to dance my love. (I knew those steps! This ugly dance I’d done all my life!) I wanted to jump up and down and circle the table.

A North American scowled at me, his lips pursed in distaste. I stared back at him. I have come into my city! I have come to dance its possession!

Our eyes met. He must look away first. I would never harm him, but I would not look away; I would be recognized. And this man felt the same! A vivid current of hatred ran between us. I despised this man’s face, middle-aged but still perfectly smooth, the face of congealed adolescence. He had been sent from Washington, to bring the Bolivian Revolution to heel! I loathed his thinning blond hair and small blue eyes, that he would not take from mine until I submitted to his look, to his possession of me. “You’ll lose,” I said quietly, in English. “It may take time, but we will win.”

“Are you speaking to me, pal?” my enemy said, in Spanish. He even used the Argentine slang—
“che
.”

“It would be better for you, pal, if you didn’t talk to me.”

Anger must be sublimated! Nobility is self-rule! But I rose from the table without volition. A glass shattered. Fernando pulled hard on my sleeve, and I came back to myself, half out of my seat. My principles would not let me go forward. But I would not look away.

“Damn you Ernesto,” Chaco said quietly. He tugged at my sleeve. “You’re going to get us killed. These guys talk to the guys who do the bad things for these guys. Be still, child, please! I’m begging you!”

“I’m telling you, pal,” my enemy said, “it would be better for you to sit
back down. You don’t know who I am. You don’t know who you’re talking to.”

You don’t know who I am
. I laughed, puzzled and delighted by this repetition, as if, strolling in a foreign city, I’d found a favorite childhood toy of mine—discolored on the right paw by the glass of milk I’d spilled on it—displayed in a museum. My anger dissolved. I felt as if I were in someone’s story. I felt chosen for instruction.

“What are you laughing at, you shithead?”

“You remind me of an old woman, a friend of mine.”

He said something to his companions, without looking away. My jacket in tatters, my chest covered with grease—was I a madman?

Anger must be sublimated, I thought calmly. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”

That
enraged him. His face flushed. “Fucking goddamn right
you
won’t hurt me, pal!”

An arm—I saw Chaco’s long thin fingers—took me around the shoulder. “Ernesto dear,” he said, “it was so good of you to come today.” Chaco spoke English. “We’re very glad to have your opinion. And we have so much to talk about with the minister. Let’s walk over to the palace now.” The North American, confused by this travesty, thought he’d misjudged me. Who knew in this crazy place, where a thousand Indians slept in the streets, what my role might be? He looked away. Chaco pulled me from the table, and Fernando took me under the arm. We walked out into the bright sun, the swirl of Indians, the pungent odor of cooking oil and spent rifle shells, the gaiety of inheritors.

“I know what you want to know,” Chaco said. He patted me reassuringly on the back of my neck, to calm me, gentling the ponies. He was proud of himself. He thought he had saved our lives. Maybe he had.

My heart beat quickly, and my chest and throat hurt, heavy with blood, flushed with anger and some shame. I had risen from my chair to hurt that man; my anger had been a sun nearly blotting out my principles. I was still an undisciplined disciple. But mostly the whole thing seemed funny to me. Two big horned toads, sitting on the plush banquettes of the bar, puffing our chests with air and hissing.

“It’s called Lucifer’s Fall.”

“What?” For a moment I thought that Chaco knew my fears about my discipleship.

“The dance. You’re wondering what the dance meant.”

But I wasn’t. That movement had been, for me, sufficient in itself. I had moved in those bodies, I had stamped and leapt and suffered with that man’s
ugly shaking. I didn’t wonder what it meant.
They were cutting off his air
.

“Lucifer and the band of former angels rise from hell to challenge the Trinity. And fail. And fall. Lucifer cast out. Get it?”