The Death of Che Guevara (45 page)

[A placard appears in front of the curtain:
LUKEWARM ORANGE DRINKS WILL BE SERVED DURING INTERMISSION.]

Ponco leaned forward, his head right over my shoulder. “Well?”

Was he serious? Did he really want my (or anyone’s) opinion of this nonsense? Then I remembered his light last night; he had not slept in order to produce this pastiche. I might offend him. (One is, I had learned, strangely sensitive about such matters.)

“It wasn’t quite like that,” I said.

“Of course not.” Ponco busied himself at the stove, lit the charcoal, started some water to boil for coffee. “This isn’t a story where things simply are as they were. This is …”

“Art,” I said, smiling, hoping to deflect his annoyance, and any further discussion of his work. “First time tragedy, second time farce. Karl Marx said that.” But why, I wondered, did Walter want to make us all ridiculous?

“Karl Marx,” Ponco said, from the stove. “The theater critic?” He measured some coffee grounds for the water. “So? What was it like?” He didn’t sound angry, merely curious.

I thought.

Ponco came over with his coffee in a blue pottery mug.

“We talked,” I said. “He did introduce me to smoking cigars, by the way. How did you know that? He said they were good for asthma. Mexico City has an air drought. I wheezed throughout our first meeting.”

“Fidel thinks cigars are good for everything. If you had had leprosy, he would have told you that cigar smoke was good for that. What did you talk about?”

“We talked about everything. Our ideas of revolution, of socialism, of the need for sacrifice, personal and national, to form the New Man of our continent. We talked about the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu. I said the United States would never allow the elections mandated by the Geneva Accords. I had the feeling he agreed with me. But you know, Walter, I’m not sure that he said so!”

I looked over at Walter, and realized we were both shaking our heads, in rueful unison. We smiled.

“I had never met a man so curious, so utterly given over to conversation. He loved ideas. And yet his abstractions seemed very palpable to him, like characters in a book. I could feel them. He always looked for the practical within the metaphysical. He wanted to know what might advance his work, and he would search anywhere for that, plunder all culture for insights, military tactics, metaphors, rhetorical tricks. We didn’t agree on everything. But he seemed to me someone of tenacity and modesty. He was the best element, I thought, of the national bourgeoisie. Nothing more than that. His inclinations were socialist, but he was not yet a thoroughgoing Marxist. He wouldn’t be able to carry the revolution through. There would be a further struggle, with Raul and myself on the Left. Other leaders might have to supplant him, to carry the revolution forward.”

Ponco pointed to me. “Now,” he said.

“Perhaps,” I said, but it wasn’t something I wanted to think about. The small nickel pistol raised from the breakfast plate. “And his plan! His plan was mad, Walter!”

Ponco held the cup before him, with both hands around it, and smiled and nodded. I knew what he thought: one madman speaks of another. A loony-bin Napoleon, confiding to the doctor that so-and-so is crazy to think that she’s Joan of Are, here in nineteenth-century France.

“It
was
mad. To land on the coast of a heavily defended island and spark a rising with a group of eighty men! And he announced the time of our landing in advance! To show the people he could be trusted! That’s madness! But I was schizophrenic in his presence. I knew his plan was crazy. I knew that his class viewpoint was limited. But I also felt something very different. I felt a limitless possibility. Hadn’t the Vietnamese defeated the French? Impossible event! And I felt that I could no longer avoid declaring myself. The struggle would be a stage, however limited, in the fight against imperialism, against the Yanquis who had destroyed the Guatemalan Revolution. It was like the cigars,” I said, and, as if in delicious illustration, I took one from my shirt pocket and lit it. “They’re no good for asthma. I
knew
that. But I smoked them anyway.”

“You became Che,” Ponco said, nodding slowly. “For real.”

And though I didn’t fully fathom his remark, it seemed right to me; I nodded in agreement. “When I spoke to Fidel my guilt fell away. Or rather, I discovered something about myself harder to acknowledge than guilt: that I didn’t feel any remorse, really. About killing that man. That confused me. But it was undeniable. I had killed a man, the unthinkable thing for the doctor and the doctor’s son—the so-called Gandhian! I had been a fatal disease to him, as my father’s voice
had said to me, and I didn’t regret it. I didn’t think anything about it, at least not while I spoke with Fidel. Fidel was amplitude, Fidel was sweep, Fidel was permission, Walter, you were right about that. He spoke of a grand historical movement, of necessity, of wrong turnings that were needed for the march to find its way. And it all seemed far more than the personal, than petty morality. Killing a man was a mild indiscretion in the larger wave of history. It all seemed a huge staircase, and one’s ascent was inevitable.”

Ponco made a sweeping motion with his hand. He had very graceful hands. They looked like the wings of a circling bird, rising, rising, rising. And then I thought of his little playlet. No staircase there. Just a game of chutes and ladders. What if all sense to history was arbitrary; just farce?

“I was mixed up by it all. Thinking I felt guilty had been an anchor to my personality, a touch of home. There had been confusion for me in killing that man. But there was a deeper confusion in realizing that it didn’t matter, provided I went on with my new business. So I held on to what I knew a little while longer and I joined the expedition as a doctor.”

“Permission!” Ponco said gleefully. “I knew it! Read on.” He picked up some more pages from the table and handed them to me.

[A shadow is seen in the window behind Castro. “Che” Guevara rises from his seat, takes a pistol from the table. He fires through the window. Glass shatters. A man screams. A body falls.]

“That’s true, in a way,” I said, though I didn’t know why I should offer Walter satisfaction. (He was staring at me when I looked up, reading my face as I read his words.) “I felt that I couldn’t go back after killing that mercenary and watching Chaco die. Back anywhere. I couldn’t return to Argentina. I couldn’t return to practicing medicine. The world had vomited me up. So these people—most of them had killed, too—these people became my new family, my group, my world, others who had acted with only their own sanction, others who couldn’t go back.”

“Precisely,” Walter said. “My feeling exactly.” For after all, he, too, had made that crossing. “Read on!”

The growl of command! I read:

I was sure from that “collaborative” that Walter had been in my room. “You’ve read my journal.”

“No. But I’d like to.” He took it, or pretended to, as if I had meant a compliment for his inventive intuition.

I didn’t say anything more. He’d read my mind, he’d read my journal. What did it matter? That was the feeling Travis’s little effort left me with. What if history was just plain stupid?

“Hilda must have hated him,” the
farceur
said. “Taking you away to Cuba. Endangering your life.”

“What? No. You don’t understand her Walter. She didn’t hate him. She wanted to
join
him. She wanted to go with us. Not because I was going. But because of him, because of the cause.”

Walter laughed. At me? At Hilda? At all of us? He laughed alone this time. I wasn’t sure of his laughter anymore.

Cuba, 1956-57

11/26/56: Nico and I stood on the long wooden dock at Tuxpan, in bright sunlight, with most of the men around us in our new olive-green uniforms. We stared at the
Granma
. My hands pricked with dread, as if they’d been asleep for a week. We had a good long look. “It’s happening again, Che,” Nico said finally, in a choked voice. “He’s gotten us a twenty-two.” His large brown eyes filled with water, and he made no effort to hide his face from the others. “Cover your face,” I said, worried about morale. “No,” Nico said sulkily, a child having a tantrum before bed. Nico is a coward, but I saw his point. The
Granma
is fifty-two feet long, a white pleasure boat with a sporty prow and guardrails made from shiny chrome. It is a plaything made for eight amiable people, not eighty-five men with arms and supplies.