The Death of Che Guevara (43 page)

“Ah,” Ponco said (for it was
our
problem). “Pictures! And did you write a poem for him?”

It was, I thought, an accusation. But of what? That I turned defeated comrades into poems, pictures, stories? That I sacrificed them for my art? What madness! And then I recognized poor Ponco’s condition—it was the moody self-hatred of a man unhappy in his love, in love half against his will, and struggling with the delicious poison. And I—our cause—the poison apple, that love.

“And when I’m shot you’ll write a poem about me.”

“Or you about me,” I said. Ponco’s voice had not been bitter.

“To excite others,” he said, “so the business can go on.”

“Yes,” I said. We were on the edge of a precipice, skating together.

“Good. Someone should keep up our end. But I don’t write poems. I used to tell stories. Now you tell a story. The room,” Ponco said. “Fidel. Remember?”

The room: it sounded like a stage setting. The place the deed was done. And that felt right to me. “Soto had found Nico with the Cubans. And he brought Nico and Raul to see me—to encourage me to meet Fidel.”

“He thought you’d insult him!”

“No. I had acted like a Fidelista. Shooting that man. So everyone thought. And, for myself, I knew that I couldn’t really go back to the practice of medicine. What
could
I do? Perhaps this Castro knew? And Raul and I agreed on things politically. Hilda and I often ate with the Cubans, at their boardinghouse. They were waiting for Castro to be amnestied. They were a very mixed group then, very different tendencies. Castro’s instructions had been to unite all who could be united. I remember that I spoke there once of seeing the struggle in Latin America in the international context. The Bolivians, I said, should have asked for Soviet aid to build their own smelter, make themselves independent of the United States.”

I remembered I had half risen from my seat as I said it. It was like my uncertainty in making love. I could see the truth of what I said, but I couldn’t attain to it, not yet. There was still a prohibition, nausea, the hangover of all I had once thought. As I had spoken, I had seen a factory rise up in the middle of the Indian villages, taking the place of the church. High black smokestacks, covering the praying people and their water with black ash. Was that what I wanted? Yet through that smoke I glimpsed a different shape to the world.

“They should, I said, sell the tin to the Soviets. And some of the Cubans were shocked. I remember one of them took me aside, and said, ‘Batista made a thousand concessions to the Yanquis to hold power. We will make a thousand
and one and take it away.’ The revolution purified things, of course. But after meeting these people I didn’t expect much from Fidel.”

“Fi—del!” Ponco chanted. “I like the way your Nico used his name. Said it so many times. It became a nonsense word. Like a kid saying ‘spoon’ over and over. Till it becomes hollow. And floats away. Empty sound. Might mean anything. Like Che.”

“Yes. I thought Fidel would be another empty fraud, like Moreno. But in other ways the Cubans were a very different group from the student radicals I’d known. Rawer. They had escaped death. They had been in jail. Both the fanatics, like Nico, and the opportunists reminded me of what Chaco had felt about the Bolivian Indians. Intensity from an unknown source. Who knew where it might take them? Most of all I felt they wouldn’t calculate their actions. They might suddenly run away, as Nico had. Or they might charge the guns. The inspiration of a great leader is like great wealth. They might carelessly squander everything, even their own lives. But they wouldn’t calculate.”

“Raul.”

A name, I thought, like farewell. “No. Even Raul. He’s shrewd and mistrustful. But he believed utterly in Fidel. He was sane within the larger madness. But always within it.”

Ponco smiled. Why, I wondered, did that formulation bring him such particular delight? Did it describe one of us?

I rubbed my backbone against the edge of the step, just for the pleasure of it. A very old cat. My mice were now dream things, memories. “I remember after dinner once, Ricardo—
our
Ricardo, not Gadea—came over to me. He was very thin then, even more than he is now, and he moved in an abrupt way, as if he were ashamed of his natural grace. He grabbed me by the shoulder. It hurt.”

“Do you think,” Ponco asked, “he’s afraid he’s a Travis?”

“What? A what? Are you serious? I don’t know. You may be right.” It was an odd thought. And what did it matter really? “You read too many stories,” I said.

“I’ve found a new activity,” he said, “a substitute.”

I thought, at the time, that he meant interrogation.

“Why did he take your shoulder?”

“He said, The continental traveler! The hero of the Guatemalan Revolution! Nico has told us about you. Endlessly. Frankly, we’re all sick to death of hearing about you. Do you know a lot of things, as Nico says?’ Yes, I said, I know a lot of things. Just like my wife, I thought. ‘I’ll bet you do! I’ll bet you know how to read and write.’ I thought Ricardo Morales was a little mad.”

“He is,” Ponco said.

“Well, I said, ‘Yes, of course I know how to read and write.’ That was a mistake. ‘Of course you do,’ he drawled. His grip on my shoulder tightened. ‘Of course!’ He pointed to me with his free hand, showing me off to the others. ‘Well, I don’t! So why don’t you teach me?’ Once, he told us, he had seen a bandit just arrested by the police. Ricardo had been bringing in a herd of beef. He stood by the barracks door, listening to the officers taunt the bandit. The police were educated men. They, too, knew many things. And the bandit had said, ‘Oh, gentlemen! If only I had known how to read and write, I would have destroyed humanity.’ Ricardo laughed in that mirthless way of his, as if bitterness itself were his favorite food. That was his ambition, he announced. To rid the planet of its stinking lice. Present company apparently included. He dreamed, he said, of a hare looking up one morning in an empty field. I took a copy of
The Civil War in France
from my jacket pocket. I told him he needed to know Marxism for a project like his. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I know all about Karl Marx, from Fidel’s letters.’ For Fidel had sent lectures from his cell and they had formed study groups around those documents. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I know what Fidel knows about him. And that’s enough. I want something I don’t know the end of. Like a story.’ ”

“Smart man,” Ponco said. “I always thought so. He’ll join us.” I could hear the relief in his voice at Ricardo’s imagined assent.

“Yes. He will.” And I, too, was pleased, thinking of that thin, lined, bitter face, looking so much older than its years. I thought of how he came to be with the 26th of July: After the Moncada, Fidel had fled to the mountains. Ricardo had taken him in, for no reason. He envied bandits and Batista said Castro was a brigand. Castro was found in Ricardo’s hut, unshaven, covered with mud, asleep on the floor. The lieutenant who discovered him bent over Fidel, holding him down. He brought his cheek close to Fidel’s, and whispered in his ear, “Don’t give your name or you’ll be shot.” Fidel and the lieutenant had been in the debating club together, at the university. So Fidel escaped to stand trial. But the soldiers burned Ricardo’s house down. And the same lieutenant had put Ricardo’s right hand on a rock and smashed it with the butt of his rifle. (There was no debating it: Ricardo had harbored a brigand.) Ricardo followed them down from the mountains, to the prison. He waited there till he could make contact with survivors of the Moncada.

“So you found a story for him.”

“Yes. I borrowed a detective book from one of the other men, and taught him from that, every night for a month.”

“I know,” Ponco said, his face alight with joy. “Ricardo was my teacher. The book was torn by then. He had the alphabet you’d drawn on the back leaf. He kept it in his breast pocket. A charm. It makes me …”

“My grandchild,” I said.

“No. I was thinking: your father’s great-grandchild. That nice old man.”

I saw Ricardo in the mountains, at the beginning, when there were only eighteen of us, already defeated, without a chance. (Or were there fourteen? Or twelve? I sometimes count. But someone is missing. Or counted twice. There are other needs being served here—like a man enumerating his lovers, confused by guilt, longing, and his vision of himself.) Ricardo walked up to a large man watching some cattle in a field. I heard him say, “Do you know how to read and write? Don’t lie to me!” The big peasant looked at Ricardo’s rifle. Then he picked Ricardo up, though Ricardo is a very tall man, and sat him on the back of one of the cows. Ricardo laughed, and shouted, “You’re a stupid … ventriloquist!”—using the most preposterous-sounding word that he could remember. He got down from the cow, and kicked the man in the backside. Then he put his arm around Joaquin’s shoulder. They walked off, a little ways ahead of us, and then a little ways more, Ricardo cajoling him, insulting him, flattering him, till we were ready to make camp. The two of them squatted down, and Ricardo took out his detective novel. It still had its green cover then, with its lurid picture of the woman in the short black negligee.

It was a racist North American novel, full of gooks, spies, and niggers. When we had a mimeo machine later on, Ricardo duplicated passages for our classes. I remember that the book began, “I had just come out of a three-chair barbershop, where the Agency thought a barber named Dimitrios Aleidis might be working. It was a small matter.…”

And even as I recalled the words, I heard my uncanny collaborator’s spectral voice. “ ‘It was a small matter.’ When R. needed volunteers he’d say, ‘The Agency needs an operative. It’s a small matter.’ You know, we made up heroic exploits for Dimitrios Aleidis. How he had come to Cuba to join Fidel. Etcetera.”

That serial, I remembered, was mostly the work of my young friend, Walter of the high unquenchable voice. Much like his stories of himself, but with Aleidis substituted for Walter.

“R. and I,” Ponco said, “are the only ones in Cuba who know the whole plot of that detective story.” He smiled, seraphically.

But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking.

“All right. I’ll tell you the murderer. It was.” And he made a muffled noise into the back of his hand. “You know, Che, Ricardo shared your pleasure. Using pussycats to shock people.”

Found out, so easily!

“He’d cook them up on a Bunsen burner. Make new recruits eat a piece.
I told him how much I And my whole family Enjoyed their little livers and tongues. Thus our Friendship.”

I laughed and sat looking out at the ocean, and thought of the water covering the field, lapping up over my boots, my legs, ridding the planet of its vermin.

“Fidel.”

That name, recalling me to my memory work, and suddenly there were no more images. It was too hot outside, that’s why I wanted to drown the world. I was sweating under my arms. My pants clung to my thighs. You’d think this remembering was hard work. I pulled myself back into the shade of the veranda. “I don’t remember what was said.” For today, I thought, was no good for voices. “But I remember how I felt before he arrived.”

“Yes!” Ponco said. Clearly, this was best of all.

“I thought I was angry with myself. I had killed a man for little reason. Or too much for my own reasons. What I’d written my father was bravado. I felt guilty for what I’d done. I hadn’t left his world. And I was confused. I was not the sort of person who could have done such a thing. Then what sort of person was I?”

Ponco made a sound of agreement, a long grating sigh.

I looked off into the sun. “And I remember an odd thing Castro said to me when we met: ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ ”

Ponco clapped his hands together. “And?”

I didn’t speak for a while. Looking at the sun had made me a little woozy.

“And? How did it
feel?
Meeting him?”

I stared out at the long grass. The sun scythed it straight across, like a plain fact. Once again the grass moved inside my blank mind. I saw the room at Maria Antonia’s. Someone entered. “It felt … it felt like I was suddenly part of a drama.”

Ponco clapped and clapped and clapped. Was it the word “drama”? Was I supposed to bow?

“Don’t speak,” he said peremptorily, though I had no thought of speaking; I was entirely vegetative. “Don’t say Another word.” He left his thick book on the chair and went inside. I sat and waited for him to return with some new sheaf of accusing documents. What might they be?

For half an hour the sun slowly rounded itself to a single color. Ponco’s doll’s-head popped out from the doorway, startling me. The rest of the body didn’t follow.

“Is it true you saved his life. In Mexico?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t tell me about it!”

He disappeared. The sun grew larger, achieved a more coherent form, and it, too, disappeared. Ponco didn’t return.

Or come out for dinner. That night I saw the light on in his room. I knew that my collaborator’s ban on speech still applied, so I didn’t disturb him.

He emerged in the morning, after I had been at the table for an hour. He walked a slow shuffle, a tentative step, holding some pages again, but this time apparently uncertain of his accusations. He looked weary, as if accusing me (the substance of our romance) wore him down. And he had shaved his wispy mustache. (It had never amounted to much.)

He sat for a few moments at the table, running his palm over and over on his hair, just touching the top of his curls. “Here,” he said, handing me the papers. He smiled wanly, not sure, I thought, of my pleasure in his work. But why, suddenly, did it matter to him? Before, the barb of the accusation had been its own delight.

“A pen name,” Ponco said. He had risen from his chair, and come over to stand behind me, bending towards my shoulder. He was not the sort of author who would be reticent in offering guidance to the reader. “It’s like a
nom de guerre
. Perhaps you need one, too. Make you freer in talking about yourself.”