The Death of Che Guevara (40 page)

The cook scuttled back into the kitchen, as if that were already liberated territory, where we couldn’t follow.

Nico rose, without speaking, and walked to the front door. Hilda put on her long green knitted coat. We went out. (Despite Death’s accusation, we felt
ourselves held securely in the palm of our youth, that sweet stupid unending vitality. What bad could happen to us?) We would check on blackout violations. We would be witnesses.

The Argentine Embassy
Guatemala City,           
Guatemala                   

Dear Father,

This is the last letter I will write to you, even this way, in my thoughts. (Tonight I am waiting for sleep on the floor of our embassy’s main reception room.) For to write to you I need to imagine your angry answering voice. And I have done what I can to silence your voice inside me, just as it has been silenced in the world.

But let me tell you the story of that death.

When we left Hilda’s the planes were no longer dropping explosives, but they still made passes over the city, a darker shadow against the night sky, a black shawl over a black dress. The machine guns had been silenced, and the planes flew slowly, at lower and lower altitudes, surveying their domain. We could see the bottoms of their wings in the fires from the bombings. The city was dark but for those fires, and a monstrous glow of light from the cathedral. Perhaps, we thought, it too had been bombed.

A few other students, in small groups for mutual protection, wandered about as we did, and we joined together, drawn towards the fire in the cathedral. There were about thirty of us. We passed each other the bleak rumors of the day. The delegation I had seen enter the palace that afternoon was not from the unions. They were army officers come to arrest Arbenz and take over the government. They themselves had then been summoned to the office of the U.S. ambassador, and arrested. Castillo Armas and his masters would not be cheated of their victory. The Cabinet, the army staff, Fortunoy—the head of the Communist Party—had fled. There was now no government in Guatemala.

When we neared the end of the street we saw through the stained-glass windows how a thousand candles prayed for Castillo Armas’s arrival, implored God that the land might be returned to its rightful owners. And more light: joyful searchlights beamed from the balcony around the bell towers, protectors of the cathedral, guides for the planes. The bells began to ring, slowly at first, a heavy clang, a mournful sound.

“Look,” my friend Chaco said. He stood with his right foot up near his left knee, balanced on one leg. Chaco pointed past the right-hand bell tower.

I followed his finger. Paratroopers floated through the night sky, lit by the glow from the church and the sharp lights sluicing up at them. We were all quiet, transfixed by this vision of a new angelic order, this coming hell on earth. Have you ever seen such a thing, Father? (But I forgot. You won’t reply to me anymore.) It was peaceful, their slow floating, the white silk moving down through the thick beams of light, the burning city silent except for the departing planes, and the bells that chimed now in higher faster peals of joy and welcome. It looked, as everything had that day, like a distant image, unconnected to me, as if I were just hearing about it, the story of the fall of a city that Fernando might have told me long ago. (Perhaps this, I thought, was what you meant when you said that from your meditative posture on the living-room floor you looked upon life as a play of images? Had I assumed your distance, your death? Was I sentenced by you to spend the rest of my life behind this glass, walking around like one of the already dead?)

My lungs clanged and wheezed. The paratroopers had brought more bad air with them. The other students moved away from me.

Ten or twelve apostles of the new order had already fallen to earth. In irregular ranks they came towards us, down the wide boulevard. They wore suntan-colored uniforms and high leather boots. They all carried automatic weapons. I felt the way my Cuban comrade, Nico, had. I couldn’t take my eyes from their rifles, the long blue-black barrels.

The students cursed the soldiers in shrill voices. Bastards! they screamed. Whores! Pimps!

It was more spit. I heard the inward-falling roar of the fires burning a few streets away. People ran shouting in the parts of the city we had just left. Their shouts were anxious, calls without responses, a bewilderment of cries. Where would they run? They had lost everything, even their future.

Nico took his gray metal pistol from his belt and held it up before everyone like a chalice. The students were silenced by it: a knife that cut their voices away. Nico waved the pistol about in the air and screamed and screamed, not even a curse, it didn’t mean anything, just screaming up at the sky.

“Don’t do that dear!” Chaco said sharply. He meant to calm Nico, and spoke to him decisively, as one might to an anxious patient, as both you and he have often spoken to me. For the sight of that gun in the air would surely draw fire on us. The other students moved backward, behind Nico, washed there by fear, yet held by their fascination. Something terrible clarifying bloody might happen here on this ground. (They formed an audience, just as Chaco said. Nico would be their priest.) Now Chaco shouted at Nico, “Please dear, please please please please don’t do that!” The medical student had seen blood. He knew its sources.

I seized Nico’s hand, forcing it down. He was a coward, Father. And like all cowards he could only make pointless gestures. (How could a man strike a blow at the United States? How could you do anything, Father, but make gestures?) Nico didn’t know what he was doing, and he would accomplish nothing, and get us all killed. Because he wanted to die. That was the funeral procession in his voice the night before. He had sentenced himself to death because his comrades had died at the Moncada, and he had survived his foolish leader’s foolish plan. (How stupid you would think his Castro, Father!) Good, I thought, then Nico should die. But he shouldn’t bring death to these others, to Hilda, to Chaco, to the shocked innocent students standing behind him.

The gun came away in my right hand, as if Nico had passed it to me; and Nico ran into the dark. He would not, he had sworn, run away again. But he couldn’t change. Now he knew his nature. (But I? I was still unknown, Father, always unknown, pure potential.) The gun felt heavy in my hand, as if it were a test to lift it up, to point it outward, to hold it steady.

The mercenaries came towards us, past the low white rectory building, nearly to the edge of the cathedral. With my left hand I clicked the small metal flange on the butt of the gray pistol from red to blue. But the gun still pointed outward. The man in front walked casually, like a large complacent townsman out on a stroll for a June evening, his belly full from a good dinner. About six feet tall, he had a broad chest. His features were still in shadows, but I thought they had an Indian cast to them. There was a cool breeze that night. The sweat chilled on my skin as the breeze passed over him. Me, I mean. (For I stared at him that intensely.) He would smile as he looked about. Those who march towards death with a smile of supreme happiness on their lips. His smile disgruntled me, gave me a sour pain in my gut. I loathed him then as I had never hated anyone before.

I clicked the safety catch from blue to red. I have often wanted to kill, Father, though since I have been a follower of Gandhi I have actively bent my will against that violence. This time, when you and Gandhi were weakest in me, I had a gun in my hand. It might have been another time. It might have been another one of imperialism’s thousand servants. But it would have happened. I was, as Chaco said, a faulty pistol, waiting to explode in someone’s hand.

Should I have asked them, Father: Is this Christian is this fair play is this civilization? Mother was right. They wouldn’t understand. Their faces were Latin, but their cruelty, their stupidity, their rapacity, the money that bought them and set them floating dreamily in the sky and put them in motion towards us down the avenue, that was North American. They were Imperialism’s creatures. Inwardly I saw their faces: identical round smooth things, the features
little polyps, barely formed; they had no ears—well-designed things: they couldn’t hear people scream. Father, listen to me:
Our nation is not one family! No reconciliation with these creatures is possible!
My rage, my hatred, my desire to throw myself upon them tore apart all the atoms of my body; my fury dispersed me into my elements; I streamed forward towards them. Dear Father, I thought, I can’t please you anymore. You are gone now. I can’t harm
you
anymore with my anger.

I aimed my pistol at the first man’s chest, gripping it with both my hands. Just as North America had set them walking towards me, past the edge of the cathedral, so, I felt then, some equal and opposite force had set me here, where one street joined another, facing them. I know now that it was an illusion, that there was no election, all just molecules thrown together by chance with opposite valences. But I felt then as if I were concentrated to one blow, that I could in one stroke make the world mine again, the true world that Hilda’s words had revealed to me, that was our place of play, that was Hilda. “Are you a Communist, Ernesto?” your friend, old man Isaias asked me in that field. He was shocked at that thought. The United States, he said, is our ally. We have a shared concern for the worth of the individual. Wasn’t that stupid, Father! Criminally stupid! You taught me in our walks about the city that the United States is a callous top-hatted magician turning dead people into round gold coins. They are our enemies, Father, now and forever, yours and mine. They destroyed the Guatemalan Revolution as if they were crumpling the page of someone’s story. They condemned the Indians to death, death from parasites, death from cold, death from hunger, all for a few more gold coins. Am I a Communist, Father? I, child of the conquistadors, plantation owner’s son, petit-bourgeois? No. I’m not. Not yet. Nor are those who, like Fortunoy and the Guatemalan party, call themselves Communists, but only talk, sitting around their glass kitchen tables—and so betray the masses. But I could change myself. It was given to me to act. I could bind Marx’s truth to me.

And then, Father, I heard your voice:
Is someone dying here? I’m a doctor. Can I help?
—as if you were bewildered, set down in a strange place. (The street faded from me, and I fell inward to our private theater. There were only our voices now.) You saw what was happening. You became angry.
By what right is this thing done, Ernesto? This Indian has thoughts of his own, a family, a small pain perhaps in his back from his fall. He wants to learn to read the newspapers. He has a history of his own, Ernesto, a way of seeing things, particular, and so invaluable. You’re like a fatal disease to him, son. Is that what you want to become, is this the grand career you dreamt of, that you left me for?

I listened to you; my thumb flicked the safety catch from blue to red, back and forth, click-click-click (where would it stop?). I couldn’t let you take this
opportunity from me. For it seemed then a chance to declare myself finally, beyond any possibility of second thoughts. I felt, Father, that I must act, that I could, if I acted, silence your voice, all that obstructed me. I could, by doing this, make myself single, become this action only, beyond your commentary. I could break through the grief that sealed me off from the world. (For I miss you terribly, Father. I mourn you constantly.) So I begged you to help me. You, I pleaded, must help me now to silence
your
voice. You knew that I was a knife, Father, and that I could never become a doctor in your way. You must accept that now. But with your help I could be a small story in the fall of the city, a tale that might one day awaken another. (A book, she had said laughing, you’ll make a story out of yourself!) I stammered to you then, broken sentences! A story. The fall of a city. The continent needs. A surgeon’s knife.

“Don’t, che!” Chaco shouted into my reverie. He didn’t sound scared. He, too, was angry. Something awful was being done. He had found courage, my Chaco. He had transformed himself. I envied him, Father. “Dear che, no! Only more blood will come of that! Only more violence! Only more death until the end of time! Please please please please stop now!”

But what did he know of blood? He, or any of them? We might stop, Father, be nonviolent warriors. But they would then kill us all indifferently. They would never limit their greed until we destroyed them utterly, crushed their heads. I slammed my foot down on the pavement, smashing one underfoot, and not blood but a milky-white juice ran from it, like sperm. My chest shook. A harsh wind took me over and made my body tremble.
No
, you said,
you must not tremble. Remember
The Hindu Science of Breath Control!

I brought my other hand up to steady the pistol.
Count to eight
, you said helpfully. You became my ally, Father, in the death of your voice, your moralism, your hopes for me.
Count to eight, now gradually let out your breath as you squeeze. Make that tin can dance, Ernesto! Remember how we did it? Well, make it hop now!
The man we were going to kill passed near the front of the cathedral’s high stone pillars, the huge molded bronze door with its reliefs of suffering bearded saints. I felt a warm flush on my skin, like a blanket. My back and chest were covered with sweat.

I could see his smile now.

Why should he live, Father, when you are dead?

The trigger jammed against my finger, and that small halted gesture jolted my body. The safety was on. I flicked it off. (I had an intense feeling for that small piece of metal. I felt as if it were in my mouth, on my tongue, like a sweet involving taste.) The sweat made the ball of my thumb slip over the flange. This small necessary motion required enormous concentration.

Was the safety On or Off? Is someone dying here? I fell towards him in
sudden discontinuous clicks, as if our two images were coming together. Are they only words, I thought, as I pulled the trigger through, Death, dying