The Death of Che Guevara (25 page)

“And do you know what all those young people died for?” I asked. More killing; work for stupid men. It would probably be rubbish. Like the rotten part of the MNR: renegotiating the terms with the imperialists. (But I had faith still that the militancy of the miners and Indians, if they were led by people of vision, like Nuflo Chavez, the Minister of Peasant Affairs, would prevail over that rottenness.)

“Well, no, not precisely. I don’t know his program. I think maybe Castro’s a Communist. Or his brother is.” Soto stopped, turned towards me; a different inflection to his shadow, a waft of perfume mixed with the sharp medicinal odor of the eucalyptus. What did he hope to see on my face?

“It sounds to me,” Fernando said, “like Castro’s still a gangster.”

Soto continued to look at me, for a moment, till Fernando and Chaco came up behind us. “Well, maybe he’s not a Communist. Maybe he’s a realist.” Our footsteps began their soft plof plof plof. “I suppose that would be your opinion, Ernesto? He’s certainly crazy enough.”

I stopped to stare at his darkness. “What? Crazy enough for me, you mean? Crazy like me?” Soto made me laugh.

Fernando walked into my heel, hurting me, scraping my Achilles’ tendon. Without thinking, I pushed him backwards.

“Excuse me,” Fernando whispered.

Still, I liked Soto, though he was an obvious opportunist; he had a pleasing vitality, a generous animal warmth.

“No. Oh, no,” Soto said. “Of course not. I mean that crazy people are the only ones with a chance of success in a situation like Cuba’s. A crazy situation calls for crazy measures. Like my diarrhea. Sometimes being crazy is a form of realism.”

“Like Hamlet,” Chaco remarked.

“Shit!”

“What?” Fernando shouted, amazed at my voice.

“Shit. I said ‘shit.’ Yes I said it.” I, too, was surprised by my voice. “I stepped in it. Shit.” It was still soft and warm. I hoped it was cow stuff, not human, or some nondomestic animal.

“Feces you mean?” Fernando said joyfully. “Well you should pick it up carefully, and bury it. It will be a lesson for the villagers.”

We stopped. I wiped my foot in the dirt. We had reached the outskirts of La Paz, the town of Obrajes. A glow came through the trees, golden, as from a flare, a continuous contained explosion. The trees looked molded in this light, as if they were made of some translucent material. I heard tinkly music, and the voices of drunken people. Gunshots went off very close to us. Soto and I leapt backward. A high voice, a woman’s, shouted, “Halt!”

A few hundred meters from us two Indians came out of the trees. They wore woolen ponchos, black-looking, and carried old bolt-action rifles. I smelled the oil on the barrels and the sharp odor of powder.

Soto put his hands in the air, though no one had ordered him to.

“Damn,” Chaco hissed. “They’re not going to like me! They’re going to kill us!”

An old man brought his face very near mine and stared at me. He looked my features over as if he were studying a picture, moving along my cheeks, across my eyes, down towards my mouth. His breath smelled foul, decaying matter, a corpse’s. He didn’t say anything. I was a dummy in a store. He turned his face to the side, inspected my mouth and torso. The other Indian, a young boy, pointed his rifle at us.

“Who are you?” the boy asked. His voice hadn’t changed yet. It seemed a special indignity to be frightened by someone who hadn’t passed through
puberty.
Anyone can kill a man
. Our lives are more fragile than eggshells. Inside me was a precious runny yellow yolk.

“I believe in God,” Chaco whispered. “I really do. I want to see a priest.”

“We’re men of peace,” I said. The Indians wore caps with long ear flaps. The wool absorbed light and gave nothing back.

“And where do you come from?”

“From feeding ourselves,” I said. “We were very hungry.”

The boy’s expression didn’t change. “Could I see your papers please?”

I fumbled about in my shirt pocket for my Argentine identity card, a thick dirty piece of cardboard. The boy examined it in the weak unnatural light. Fernando stood next to me now, smiling, showing good will. Chaco stood next to him. He had one arm on Fernando’s shoulder, and stood on one leg, the other leg poised behind his knee, like a stork. He sobbed without shame. He had lost control of his face, bereft child, as if his cheeks had melted. I looked around for Soto. He had disappeared, evaporated, beat it! I saw a darkness against one of the trees. That shadow, and Chaco’s sobbing, triggered a panic in me.
Why had Soto run away?
I wheezed. The young one turned the card in his hand. He had a serious intent expression; perhaps he didn’t know how to read. Perhaps he’d shoot us in a rage at not knowing how to read. And if they led us off to some field, what appeal would we have? Who would even know?
Anger must be conquered
. My catechism returned as a prayer. Blood soaking into the earth, streams of runny yellow blood. No! That violence must stop!

The older Indian bent over the card. His black poncho was tied with a brightly embroidered belt, and a leather bag hung down from a silver buckle on his belt. I recognized him. He sold furs in the square, half animal, my grandfather. He had a bright-red rash down the side of his face.

And he wore a wristwatch. How had he acquired a wristwatch?

I twisted my feet in the dirt, trying to get the shit off. The smell reminded me of mortality. The older Indian looked at my feet. He pointed to the boots I carried, and said something in Quechua to the boy. Perhaps he wanted the boots.

“He says,” the boy said, “that he doesn’t care for them either.” He handed me back my card.

I laughed. Chaco put his other foot down. He snuffled the snot back into his nose, a child suddenly comforted.

“Yes,” I said, “they’re very uncomfortable.”

The old man spoke again. The young one said, “He says he loses his balance if he can’t grip the earth. He stumbles like a drunk. The stones in the city are too flat.”

“That’s it,” Fernando said to me. “They’re not used to pavement. There’s nothing there when something should be. Funny to think of the smoothness of a thing tripping you up. The lack of an obstacle, I mean. Like being rich spoiling the personality!”

The old man spoke again, clicked, barked, made guttural sounds. Quechua ineradicable! A language of stones, pebbles in the mouth. “He says he’d like to look at your hand.”

I held it out to him, happy with the repetition, a comic scene to write my mother. His touch was firm. I felt no moisture in his palm at all; it was almost dust. (You might have bathed in mine.) “I know. I have a rich fate awaiting me.”

The old man spread my fingers out, to make the palm flat, and continued his study.

The boy translated. “He says he doesn’t know about that. But you are what you say you are. A man of peace. A very ambitious and nervous one, he says. So we will walk with you through Obrajes.”

I looked behind me. Soto hadn’t heard the happy ending. He scuttled furtively from tree to tree. No one called to him. Let him decipher our parade!

The young Indian walked ahead, his rifle held in one hand. Fernando and Chaco walked behind. And the old man walked beside me, still holding my hand. A gentle way, Soto must have thought, for the prisoner to be led to his execution.

We came around the turn in the road. A neon sign of a golden rooster glowed in front of us, on top of a wooden shack. A man in a business suit staggered out the door, his arm embracing a police officer in an open brown tunic. They got into a car parked by the side of the shack. A woman, unsteady on high heels, followed. She fell forward, supporting herself with one arm on the hood of the car, and threw up. The lighting made it look like a play.

“Isn’t that against MNR rules?” I said to the young Indian.

“I’d like to meet …” Chaco stared at me, his head to the side. “… 
HER!”
He spoke boldly, defying my judgment.

Their putrid dance offended me. The Indians kept watch in the cold. The party bureaucrats, flaunting party discipline, drank in public.

The young boy stopped dead, fascinated. Perhaps he’d never seen a woman in high-heeled shoes. Or a woman stagger like that. Or throw up. His hypnotized voice told the old one what I’d said.

The old man lifted my hand and placed it lightly against his cheek. My mother’s face, a thousand years from now. The erosion caused by the Ice Age. A lizard.

“He says,” the boy said, still in his trance, “to feel his face. He says, we’ll
be here longer than the men in jackets”—the boy pulled an imaginary string running from his neck down his shirt—“the ones with cloth around their necks. He says, we’re older than they are. We’re as old as the mountains.”

Perhaps he’s right, I thought. There have always been lizards. “But those men are very old, too,” I said. “The oldest profession: those who waste. Bureaucrats and prostitutes. They go on forever, wearing away at the mountains. You have to make sure they don’t cheat you out of what you’ve won.”

“Enough Guevara!” Chaco said. “They don’t want to hear this! I don’t want to hear this! No one wants to hear this now! Not from you!”

“What are bureaucrats?” the boy asked.

“Bosses. Overseers.”

Reluctantly, he translated my words. The old man dropped my hand. Alvarados pulled at my sleeve. “Maybe Chaco’s right. They don’t want to hear such things. Not from us.”

And Soto, the shadow, came out of the darkness. “Yes,” he said, oracularly, “they wear away at the mountains. But look, the mountains remain!”

I looked up. Tall smooth darknesses, and many many stars. A parable. I couldn’t read it.

Soto addressed his remark to the old man. The young one translated. One had to admire such a versatile flatterer.

The old man laughed, showing his nearly empty mouth, his teeth worn away to dirty brown stumps. His foul breath came out in little gasps, dominated Soto’s putrid cologne. (What decay was it hiding?) “Well, perhaps,” Soto said urbanely, as if we rose from a dinner party, “we should be getting back to town now. It’s awfully cold.”

The Indians nodded to us, and we to them.

Soto pranced away, a scampering motion that looked droll on him, his top part was so round and his legs so thin. He made me laugh again, though I was angry at him for scaring me. “I don’t mind telling you,” he said, “that I felt very frightened there for a while.”

“Oh, you needn’t tell us,” Fernando said.

“Well,” Soto said, unembarrassed, “who knows what they think? But you handled it beautifully, Ernesto. ‘Men of peace,’ that’s just the way they talk. You saved our lives, I’m sure of it. It was very clever of you to take off your shoes.”

We all laughed at him, at his inane stupid compliments.

“Guevara owed it to us,” Chaco said, “after his performance tonight. But you missed his real stroke of genius. Dunking his feet in shit. Very Indian.”

Soto laughed good-humoredly at our mockery. He had a high-pitched squeak of a laugh. “Well, why don’t we all meet tomorrow afternoon, at the
Ministry of Peasant Affairs? I have a friend you should meet, the one Fernando says you admire, Ernesto, Nuflo Chavez.” We agreed. I could not have been more eager.

Fernando looked at me quizzically, for he could see how much I longed for this meeting. Nuflo Chavez, architect of the land reform, was now my hope for the Bolivian Revolution, for the democratic Left. He was the leader of the peasant unions. I had seen smudged newspaper pictures of him marching at the front of the militias; a young man with famously bad eyesight, he walked carrying a machete. He, I thought, would speak the word of the peasant, the chaste and self-sufficient life of the villages, the word, like a knife, that would destroy imperialism. Nuflo Chavez, a ruthless man, Soto said, would contest Paz for the party’s leadership. Nuflo Chavez, then, would be the land itself speaking, the rock showing through, not someone who spoke about the Indians, but someone who spoke for them, their union into a single force, as majestic as the Incas, and as ready for sacrifice. He would have work for me; and he would prevail. Chavez, I was sure, would be the leader I searched for. To speak with Chavez at the Ministry of Peasant Affairs would be to encounter the motor of the Indo-American Revolution.

Soto gave us each an embrace. “Good night dears.”

Chaco asked if we could put him up for the night. We walked back together to our dirty room on Yanachocha Street. Soto waved us out of sight. “He’s going back to that cabaret,” Chaco said.

“He’ll make many friends there, I’m sure,” Fernando said. “Politicians to introduce Ernesto to.”

The halls of the ministry got only a little light from a few small windows set high up in the walls. Long lines of peasants, Indians and mestizos, stood in each hall, up the broad stairwells, around corners, down the next hall, five stories of them, ranged two by two, waiting to receive certificates for land. There was barely room for the three of us to walk by, single file. Soldiers stood along the outside of the line, facing the Indians, their rifles held between both hands, like staves. The lines stayed next to the walls. They seemed subdued; patient; unexpectant. Once or twice people tugged at the rope on my pants, but they dropped their hands before I could turn.

Every hundred meters or so one of the militiamen stopped us, made us explain our business. The government was uneasy. This morning Paz had dissolved the radical mine board. Their infantile and extreme positions, he said, endangered the safety of the national revolution. They would bankrupt the
country in futile gestures of defiance. Paz Estenssoro, I thought, stood now in the field of the dead, a dried bag coated with blood, waving in the wind. Chavez and the forces he led must take control of the Revolution.

The people in line didn’t speak with each other.

The line moved along slowly, two by two. Many of the Indians walked barefoot; most wore sandals. They made a quiet shooshing sound as they moved down the corridor, a wave receding, receding.

Only men waited in line. They wore the hats of their regions, even here: colored wool caps of concentric circles or ridged patterns, and short-brimmed brown felt hats. The Indians looked sad; their long dour faces and ear flaps reminded me of unhappy animals, basset hounds. And the felt hats seemed cheap prizes won at too great a price from some crooked carnival. The halls were hot from the press of bodies, the lack of ventilation. The air stank with sweat and the foul breath of coca-chewing. The luster of the Indian clothes, which had lit the plaza like burning minerals, colored flames, looked sooty here, the ponchos grimed with dirt all along their intricate weaving. My stomach turned. I wanted to vomit.