The Death of Che Guevara (34 page)

She smiled, closed her thin eyes, shook her head to clear it of this poetic nonsense, closed that place to me.

Hilda was the origin of Ricardo’s—that bear’s—certainties; she had graven her beliefs upon her brother, her faith in the spontaneous revolutionary will of the masses. She had given him that solidity I so much admired.

But she was unlike him, too. She was quick, not playfully so, like my mother, but almost angrily. She wouldn’t allow confusion or unmoored irony, which corroded one’s ability to work. (And in her presence even Chaco grew more serious, willing to acknowledge that there was a question about his proper work that he, too, wanted answered.)

To error Hilda offered sharp immediate correction. I was drawn to that, to her stocky form in a short-sleeved dress with a brightly colored shawl over it, her hair drawn back into a bun, giving her round face a clearer definition. The woman prophet, the woman judge. “We were very serious,” I said to Ponco. For some reason I felt compelled towards honesty with him, as if it were very important that he, especially he, have an accurate account of all I had thought and felt. “Not what you expect: fiery passion!” But that was wrong: there was passion, fierce in its way; not always for each other, but for our common cause, the defense of the Revolution, the defeat of Imperialism. (And that was wrong, too. For it was also
a passion between us
.) “It wasn’t a tango, comrade. It was more like a seminar, a study group. Not what you think.”

“Wrong,” he said. “That
is
what I think.” He pointed his long finger at me in quick jabs. I recognized Mr. Prosecutor. “Intellectual violence! Cold intelligent passion! Passion of the intelligence! We see!” He pointed to his own head. “Of the mind.” He lowered his eyes suddenly, as if perhaps he’d gone too far with me. After all, I was.…

But no, not here on this magic island, where prisoners become young Communists become lunatics, become … enchanted princes, talking animals, the King of Argentina, avenging angels, words in Ponco’s harsh transforming mouth. I wasn’t
him
, that
name
(“Only your name could unite the guerrillas on the continent”), that giant costume I will once again reinhabit as if it were a
papier-mâché
dummy. For the moment here I felt a simpler thing, outside
the sweaty costume of my fame, a person alone with his tastes, a few old habits, and his childhood. There was no going too far with
me
, I thought.

The rain began to come down in long transparent sheets, like wings. One of the wings beat against us, soaking us, and we scuttled towards the door.

“I want to tell you about Hilda.” We sat at the table, and I sipped mate from my hollow tin spoon, my nubbly gourd. Ponco ate forkfuls of rice meditatively, as if it were more than food, as if it were the best, most involving amusement his world now offered. Ponco always gave himself over wholeheartedly to his pleasures. But rice! He must be very bored on this island. A thick book lay beside his plate. I couldn’t see the title, but the cover had a picture of people being pushed aside by a train, a funny-looking train with a spherical engine. “I decided I can’t deny you the satisfaction,” I lied. I hadn’t been able to write after our conversation yesterday. The sound of the rain against the window annoyed me. The feel of the damp annoyed me. The saliva in my mouth annoyed me. Really, I needed Ponco, his ear, his participation, his questions, his painful mean-spirited mocking insights. Otherwise the scene faded from me, the flowered print lost its bright colors as after too many washings. I saw the parlor under the waters of a deep river, the chairs and single wood table swaying this way and that, pushed by currents that dissolved them. Someone looked down into the river from its bank, but he saw nothing and turned away. I needed Ponco’s participation to return my life to me. I wanted to know it immediately, to possess it whole; and it was in speaking to him that I regained its colors; it was my desire to tell him that made my memory work, that made things vivid. I couldn’t wait anymore to write, and
then
have Ponco read the pages. I had to speak my story (and then return here, to my boards, to record the conversation). Without Ponco’s questions I didn’t know what it was important to talk about. Hilda’s quick, decided voice? (It was her voice, high, rapid, unfolding a world, that I first loved.) Or should I speak of the Chinese cast to her eyes, the pleasant fullness of her body? Or of Nico’s self-hatred, his abrupt motions, his constant, nearly odorless sweat making pictures on his shirts? Or of the CIA agents in the cafes, their dead, drawling voices taking a world away, their red cigarette packs offered as bribes for information on the city’s crumbling morale. Or—or what might he lead me to discover?

“Good,” Ponco said. He looked up at me, still chewing methodically. “The seminar on love.”

I felt relieved. A topic. And then I felt, sadly, how much this damnable
waiting has dissolved me. That
I
should be anxious for a subject! That I should need someone’s responses, need to be set a topic!
I am a topic
, a revolutionary catechism, the unity of the military and the political, the struggle to begin
now
, the stroke that will arouse the masses and reveal to them that revolution is possible. My
name
.

But not then. And it is as if I were hurled back into the mood of that time, when one dispensation was fading, and I did not know from where revelation might come to me. Gandhi’s words were the truth I had, and I held to him still, held to him hard. But he was only intermittently a vivid speech in my mouth (and mostly, oddly, when I spoke with Chaco). I heard in Gandhi’s words my father’s pathetic melancholy dirge of judgment, and wasn’t pleased. And Gandhi’s theses were corroded, too, by my mother’s shards of uncertainty. The world Gandhi had formed, the sense he had made of things, fell about, like letters jumbled on a page. I could still make out the meaning, but where it had once been an unavoidable truth, the inescapable clarity of revelation, now I strained after it, as if solving a puzzle. Humanity, Gandhi said, had suffered terrible physical wounds, and one must not make it suffer more, no matter how right the cause. Blood soaks the earth, then, now, always in the name of justice. But justice, no matter how clever the dialectician’s rhetoric, cannot come from blood. A violent savage man was no better than the wolf, the oppressor, the imperialist. Oppressed humanity must be the first to refuse the wolves’ ways, to become true men, nonviolent warriors.

A catechism. I held hard. I believed him still. (Did I?)

“We studied Marxism,” I said to Ponco. “We read the classics, and some of Lenin’s pamphlets,
Imperialism
, and
State and Revolution
. Though Hilda disagreed with Lenin: she saw no need for central parties, new kings.” Myself, a member of a Central Committee, I smiled. “I had read Marx before, of course.”

“Of course,” Ponco said, favoring me with one of his smiles. I understood. My tone was pompous—the student afraid he’d be thought ignorant. And he—of course—had joined Fidel, had acted, before he had theories for his actions, before he knew how to read theory, or anything else.

“The Argentine Communists were priests,” I said. “They enshrined Marx. They interpreted Marx for the masses. And they compromised with the powers of the world, whoever they were at the time, as if keeping the church alive were the only value. They used their Marxism as an excuse for delay, for compromise with imperialism against Peron. The masses are not transformed by such dirty cleverness.” I had thought of the young Communists at the university, lecturing us. I had remembered, too, my mother’s dialectical flights at the kitchen table, her sleight of hand with the Cunning of History, evil means employed,
like a conjurer’s false bottoms, for good ends.
No
, my father said, severely; and I had assented. “But with Hilda, Marxism came alive for me. It was the Guatemalan Revolution. At first the party pushed Arbenz’s government into more radical stands. They expropriated land for the peasants. Not just any land. Land from the United Fruit Company.”

“Hallowed ground,” Ponco said.

“Exactly. The Party seemed to stand guard at first over the integrity of the land reform. It was only then becoming clear that they and Arbenz would turn cowardly, that they couldn’t take the last, the necessary action—that they would be ready once again to use Marx to justify cowardice and betrayal. They weren’t the leadership I longed for.”

“The Whore of Babylon.”

“What?”

“My grandmother said. A Protestant.”

“What?”

“The Book of Revelation. The Communist Party is the Whore of Babylon.”

“What?”

Ponco shook his small head in strokes of weary disappointment. I was a man without significant culture. Mysteries were closed to me.

“The Communist parties in Latin America: the Church of the Revolution. But they betray the Revolution. They are the real Antichrist, the real Whore of Babylon.”

“Oh.”

“Protestants. We are. Revolution in the Revolution,” Ponco said. That was the title of Debray’s book. Was this rigmarole a joke about Debray? Or me? This waiting——–

“Hilda,” Ponco said, interrupting my dark thought. It sounded a gasp, a plea, as if he were afraid I’d forget my topic. “And Marxism.”

“Yes. It was the times that let me see. And Hilda.”

“Ah,” he said, smiling in a most annoying way. Walter showed me a mouthful of rice mush. I didn’t like his tone. I didn’t like his smile. I thought—to myself—of Hilda. I would deny him the pleasure. (And being sure that I denied him something was almost as good, I found, as telling him.) Hilda found in Marx, I would have said, one message always: the spontaneous revolutionary will of the masses. She felt, as I did, that the Communist parties had only bridled the masses, held them back, as if, she would say, they were the head, and the workers no more than muscle. The Party made Marx’s work hermetic, unintelligible. It was incapable of speaking the people’s language. So she had turned to the nationalist groups, to APRA. It was the weakness of the
United States after the war, she said, that had given the nationalist parties space to blossom. (Our generation was a weed growing, before the gardener’s hand regained its strength.) But the “democratic nationalists” were soon corrupted by compromises with imperialism. She, too, didn’t now know where to turn.

So, for the moment, we studied. I told her of my plan, formed in Bolivia, to devote the next ten years to writing about the Latin American Revolution. (I thought this a necessary narrowing of my previous subject, my continent, my self.) I would travel for a decade, then go back to Argentina. I would also visit Europe—chat with Sartre—and the Soviet Union, India, China. I would …

Her thin eyes narrowed further, and looked to the wood floor. I found then that I did not want to disappoint her. But there was nothing, anymore, for us to do in Guatemala but wait. The beautiful Guatemalan Revolution, which we both loved, was endangered. And we would not be allowed to defend it.

So we studied together.

And Marx’s work became a space between us, a field for play of a very serious kind. Each term—superstructure and base, vanguard and proletariat, surplus value and alienated labor—meant something more, something not sayable, a gift. Like a lover giving food, warm with her spittle, from her mouth to her lover’s mouth.

What a thought! Not mine surely. I stared at Walter’s mush mouth. I knew what his “Ah” had implied. And he was right. “That’s rude,” I said sharply. “Close your mouth!”

Hilda and I appropriated a world together; made it; this world, but reformed, different. It
was
the world, in its truth. And it was (I know this sounds mad) Hilda herself; and it was a bridge between us, a copula. Made and remade. She said that everything in imperialism’s lying order, its badly made-up story, caused Marx’s vision, his truth, to be obscured, hid it, scrambled the story about, mystified us, as if the ruling class were the bad witch in the fairy tale. We were enchanted, dazed. And the trees, under spell, turned against us, blocked our eyes, scratched our faces. Her words, Marx’s words, made clarity for me. “The MNR,” she said of Bolivia, “is Bonapartist. It veers between the imperialists and the peasants. Because its power comes from the workers and peasants, it makes gestures in their direction. But only gestures. Because it must placate the imperialists, it always stabs the peasants in the back. The Indians you saw will round the corner of the stairs only to find another stairs. Or a drop into nothing at all.” All so obvious. But it gave me a feeling of power over the world, this science, this order. I even understood Chaco’s “Second
Talk on the Price of Beer,” the way that, without a real revolution, inflation grew inevitably, a spreading stain.

You had to study and study again, though, so that things might be called by their proper name, so that the trees and the workers might be taught—no, they needn’t be taught, they need only hear the words and the spell would be broken—that they might remember their true powers. But one must break the spell, re-call, re-form the true word, the true world, over and over. Arbenz and the Guatemalan CP would not speak the words, provide the leadership the masses required for that unremitting struggle against imperialism. They were afraid to say “United States”—(“potato”!)—afraid to die.

And Gandhi? She
rejected
him. He tried to transform a revolution into a religious experience. He was a preacher. And he didn’t even preach workers’ taking power. He preached
reform
. He didn’t prescribe doing away with the ruling class, just begging them to act more humanely. Gandhi didn’t free India. What freed India was a Britain weakened by war and supplanted as the leading Imperial power by the United States. Gandhi had denied India the revolution that it needed, the revolution that China’s masses accomplished. “He was,” she said, leaning forward from her chair for this final damnation, “petit-bourgeois, the grocer’s caste. And he had the notions of a petit-bourgeois.”

“My father was a pharmacist,” Chaco said. He sounded wounded. Chaco had definitely changed—one
could
wound him (or Hilda could)—and he, too, now wanted an action he could join himself to, a self that would act.