The Death of Che Guevara (35 page)

Myself, I didn’t bother defining the doctor’s caste. Chaco, I thought then, didn’t understand the nature of these abstractions: impersonal, scientific.

But Marxism, I said, was rationality without poetry, without that which would rouse the masses to act. It denied what I knew to be necessary, the leader, the symbol which would unite us, which spoke of the needed sacrifice, even of one’s life. Gandhi’s words had a transforming music to them, a call. They promised not just a new social order, but a New Man, the self-sufficient villager, free not only of poverty, but of greed, of insecurity, of deforming anger, servility, the cringe left by colonialism. (I knew that Chaco required direction in his life. I looked from Hilda’s angry face to his. I wanted him to believe in this vision, this man.) Gandhi’s words spoke of an end to the terrible rhythm of violence, of revenge and vendetta that might disfigure humanity forever.

I could argue with Hilda as I never could with other critics of Gandhi, like my mother. For Hilda did not want simply to turn about lacerating herself. She, too, had a belief: that the masses did not require leadership. For sometimes the election would fall upon one man, and he would give voice to what
was needed; and then it might alight upon another. All men could be prophets. The Revolution would come.

It was good to argue. And Gandhi gave us another subject, like Freud, to fight about. But it gave me, too, another voice. My head nearly burst from this dance that I was. I pressed one vision against another, Marx and Gandhi; both stood; both failed. I was between.

“There were usually four or five of us there talking,” I said aloud. “Hilda, Chaco, Soto, one of his lawyer friends, and a Cuban, Nico, a follower of Castro, who had fled to Guatemala after the Moncada.” I wanted to say that despite Ponco’s smile, Marx was not a love poem. There were others present always. Things were not so intimate as Walter implied. (I was lying.)

“I don’t know Nico,” Ponco said. “Are you done with your rice?”

I pushed my plate towards him: new material for his meditative, methodical work.

“Granma?”
Ponco asked.

“Do you mean did he go on the
Granma?”

Ponco nodded, his lips curled upward in a smile, but closed. He was demonstrating politeness. He would not, I realized, this now fastidious man, this student of letters, have liked my telling him to close his mouth, criticizing his manners. “Yes. You knew. I meant
that.”

And I had. I nodded back, ashamed of my momentary anger. “Yes. He died at Alegria. He ran behind me. I had just examined his foot.” Why did I say that? How did his foot figure in the story?

“Fungh Ny.”

“What did you say?” This time I really hadn’t understood him, not even a word.

He swallowed, looked angrily at me, narrowing his eyes. I had reminded him again of his imperfection, his loss.

“Funny,” he said, overly precise this time. The word didn’t mean amusement.

“What?” I was distracted by an odd unrelated thought. My rediscovery of Marxism, the way that it made a shared space between Hilda and me, a country we ruled together, the deep satisfying involvement I felt in those talks in her parlor, the way the words joined us and allowed us to care for each other—it reminded me of something now—of telling my life to this short thin black man, my Ponco. “What’s funny?” I repeated. I looked down at the table, away from his face, embarrassed. But I smiled.

“The way he held them. The few who survived the Moncada.” He continued to lift forkfuls of rice to his mouth, dividing his phrases with bites.
“Went on the
Granma
. With him. Like losing. At roulette. And doubling. Your bet.” He looked down sadly at his plate. No more rice. “How did he hold them? So many defeats. So many crazy plans.” His face looked distracted, far away. His large brown eyes moved up and down following some inward play of images. (Pictures of a body falling—his? mine?—grasping for air, clawing the ground?) His thin cheeks, surrounding a voice barely there, a light scraping in the silence. He was lost in wonder—about himself, really. The boy who had come to the mountains. Or perhaps he wondered about his involvement in another mad plan.

“Nico loved him,” I said, though I knew that explained nothing. It was, in a way, what needed explaining. But one could never get to the bottom of that. Infrastructure? Surplus value? The crystalline science could do nothing with
that
moisture. But it was passion in all its manifold and compound forms that made revolution. “And Nico hated him. And he couldn’t speak of anything else.” We sat in the parlor and talked of the defense of the revolution, of responses to the mercenaries already moving towards the border. How could the people be aroused to protect the Guatemalan Revolution? Nico thought my ideas of nonviolent resistance “diabolical.” (If we were outside he would spit, his most frequent, most pronounced gesture of contempt, of damnation.) The government, Hilda said, must allow the people to act, to organize their own neighborhood committees for self-defense. Too late, Soto said. Too late. It was all empty prayer; parlor talk. Nico rose suddenly from the couch, knocking the bowl of fruit (bananas today) to the floor. His left arm punched the air. “Fidel would know what to do!” he cried. It was the jerking of an overexcited body, beyond Nico’s control, frightening to watch. He was a large fierce-looking man. He had a broad flat nose, wide bones, and big veins that stood out on his neck and forehead beneath his light-brown skin. Anger made him taut, more sharply defined than those around him, as if he were outlined by flickering electricity, a man chosen by lightning, a man apart. “Fidel would know what to do!” Long welts, an irritable red, marked his cheek and neck: battle scars.

Chaco imitated Nico, punching more air, and humming “Fidel Is a Meteor/Fidel Has Big Plans/Fidel Is the Master/Fidel Is the Man.” Soto laughed at the two of them standing next to each other, punching air together. Castro, he thought, was someone to be watched, a madman whose lunacy might be what the times demanded, might bring him to power. But Nico was someone to be laughed at, a person of no account. And Nico agreed with Soto’s judgment; after all,
he
was not Fidel. His arm moved more and more slowly, as if the air had suddenly become thick around him. He opened his palm,
slapped it against the side of his leg again and again, not softly, but with a hard sound, the sound of bruises, of damage being done. He sat, and looked down at his lap, silent. Fidel would know what to do.
He
didn’t.

Nico and I sought each other out. He had seen battle. And though I did not condone that stupid pointless violence (“Oh, they were all captured,” Soto said with mild astonishment. “Most of them were tortured and then killed by the police”), still, I knew also that Nico had knowledge that I coveted. He knew the depth of his own courage, the sacrifice he was prepared to make, his willingness to die. He had found the leader he longed for, and had recognized him, and been obedient to what he had seen in him. There was no mocking, ironic voice in his head, no sad, impeccable moralist, denying him the chance to declare himself, to act. I was sure that this gangster, this Castro, with his bloody badly planned adventures, was not the leader who would call the suffering people of Latin America to the great, the necessary transformation. He was a man with a red kerchief running towards a police line—as if he could stand horizontally! He was a failure, a charlatan—a lawyer! But I respected Nico, even if he was so obviously deceived in his love. For I wanted to have in my life his commitment, his courage, his faith.

And Nico, for his part, saw that I was not, like Soto, or the others, merely tolerant of his admiration of Castro. He felt the strength of my ambivalence, my refusal of his leader, and yet my search for someone like this Fidel, my search that was so much like Nico’s own. I was more than merely skeptical. My contempt for this Castro was more urgent than that. I
might
believe in him, but I didn’t. Why did I ignore, Nico wondered, Fidel’s unmistakable grandeur? What blindness of soul! he said. If only he could find the right story to tell me! For Nico had to convince me in order to remain secure in his own faith.

As I, I felt, had to convince Chaco to remain standing in mine.

An odd dance. Nico and Chaco and I often walked through the city together during the last days of the Guatemalan Revolution. We did guard duty with the Youth Alliance throughout the morning, standing outside the tall stone posts and iron gates of the university, watching for anti-Communist saboteurs. But the daytime saboteurs were easily spotted: they were the single-engined planes, their North American markings painted over, that flew as they wished over most of the city. Guard duty meant witness, witness to the power of North America, to the final cowardice of the Guatemalan leadership, to the fall of the Revolution, to the death of the Indians’ hopes.

One afternoon in June, a week after my birthday, a woman in a long blue-and-red skirt brought out to us a petition being circulated by the Young
Communists. It implored the Congress of the United States to desist from their aggression against Guatemala. I laughed at this craven inanity and passed it on to Nico. “Implore,” he said angrily, “what does that mean?” He spat on the paper and handed it back to the woman. She wiped the spit off on Nico’s own sleeve, and went back through the tall iron gates. One of the planes flew low over us. The roar filled my head. Nico took out his pistol and fired at the plane, leaping a few feet off the ground as he pulled the trigger, as if the extra distance would send his bullet home. I laughed. He was spitting at the plane with his gun. It all seemed far away to me. The city was behind a pane of glass made of memories and voices; people’s gestures looked like a movie with the sound cut off. They seemed absurd. Nico’s angry arrogant actions, spitting at paper, firing at planes. The plane itself. What did they mean? I couldn’t quite remember. The only vivid sound was the roar of the plane, and that meant nothing. I felt very tired. (
Please come home
, he had scrawled across the bottom of his letter, in a child’s unsteady hand.) My limbs made enormous effort to hold me up on the sidewalk.
That morning at Hilda’s I’d received news of my father’s death
.

The pilot waggled his wings, as if in friendly response to Nico’s noise. Leaflets came fluttering down through the air, like huge light bird droppings dried by the sun as they descended.

“Look,” Chaco said, “you hit it!” He picked up one of the leaflets and read it to us.” ‘Friends of Christianity! Be sure that the liberators will execute all the Communists and their sympathizers! Vengeance will be ours for all that our nation has suffered from this foreign disease! Justice will be done! But to those who have cried out under the yoke of tyranny: We have heard your cries! Castillo Armas bears no anger against the Guatemalan Army, betrayed by a few of its highest officers! Surrender and you will face no punishment! Continue to obey the Communist tyrants and you will surely die!’ ” Chaco did not giggle as he read.

“Christianity,” Nico said, and spat on the pavement. “There is no God!” He wasn’t kidding. He said such angry things about God often, in defiant affirmation of His absence, His recalcitrant Bad Character. “No judgment!” he shouted. “No judge! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” Clearly these curses were meant to keep some danger at a distance; Nico violently shook off the waters of baptism. I do not know what crisis of faith Nico had suffered before he found the true word, the faithful one, Fidel. But some of the water had soaked him through; his speech was wounded with theological metaphors, accusations of soul blindness, of diabolism—and good news and greetings, too, of a messianic sort.

We walked by the Government Palace, on our way to Hilda’s. That
morning we had heard, and heard about, two twin-engined gray planes strafing the huge palace. Now rows of soldiers stood in front of the pillars of the long portico. More impotent witnesses. On the long uppermost balcony of the palace’s right wing, men remounted machine guns. Chips in the gray stone ran the length of the balcony, from the morning’s attack. They had fired back from there, while the soldiers hid under the portico. More spit. Ineffectual gestures; a rite; last rites. Only the masses could have saved the Revolution. But no one had raised the symbol that might unite them. Black drapery covered the palace’s long windows. The forty cornices, rounded forms with spikes in their center that composed the top of the balustrade, all still stood. The palace hadn’t been bombed, for Castillo Armas was certain he would come into possession of it.

Something crashed from above us. A tile clattered down near our feet. A young man in his undershirt on the long flat roof cursed and looked over the edge of the railing. Inwardly I heard his curses turn to screams. The army and the mercenaries battled now for bridges near the rail town of Zacapa, the link to Ecuador. North American planes had bombed that town, and the hospital in Guatemala City had been cleared for the wounded. The Federation of Labor sent loudspeaker trucks through the empty city, calling for blood donations.
What did she know of blood? Of the dignity of nonviolence?
Poor man, without friends, lying on the floor of the living room, with his hands at his side. Corpse position.

“It will all be over,” Nico said, with great decisiveness, “if they get this close.” But then, as always, he denied his own authority; his voice grew quiet, tentative. “I think,” he added. His expertise, he admitted, was borrowed. He spread his fingers and pressed them into his neck. What would Fidel think? That was Nico’s hesitation. Opinions could only be offered provisionally, until Fidel marked them valid. And Castro’s confirming voice was far away, in a dictator’s jail, on the Isle of Pines.

Is this leader, she asked, making men more themselves?

“Go away, Mother,” I whispered. I wanted to silence these voices. They came without my asking, while the palpable world moved farther away, became spectral.

“What?” Nico asked. He bit his lower lip in anger. He thought I’d insulted him.

I smiled. I
would
insult him. (I watched from behind a glass. Did he have feelings? Perhaps by making him wince I could establish our reality for each other.) “Fidel would know what to do,” I said. My mother played with the charismatic’s name. The people of Guayaquil chanted it. Fi—del! As if it had
some protective powers. Armed men moved out of the carnival crowd, towards the army barracks.…