The Death of Che Guevara (47 page)

“You’ve always been a gangster, you dumb stupid bastard. Your plan stinks. Your idea is impossible. I’ve had a thousand conversations with young fools.
They have a few drinks and dream of overthrowing Franco, Somoza, Trujillo, Perez Jimenez, Peron, Carias, Odria, Stroessner, Rojas Pinilla, and our own—your own, I mean—Batista. But their words are like our cigar smoke.” His large hands rose, miming smoke. “I’d be interested,” he said, “for four thousand dollars.”

“I’m not drunk,” Fidel said, tapping his mustache. “It’s a deal. Will you take it in monthly installments?”

That was equitable.

And after such doubts, Bayo, at the end, had wanted to join Fidel! My stomach ached. And I realized, as I looked over the bow, that I had heard the story of Bayo’s negotiations only from Fidel, heard it only after Bayo offered to join us (and had he? I had heard that only from Fidel, too).

I have Bayo’s rules in my new notebook (where, I wonder now, did I leave my old notebook, my old life? and why?). The pages are filled with diagrams of tactics, the ink already dissolving from the seawater that has washed over our small bow. I am chief of staff (for I was Bayo’s best student) as well as medical officer.—What vanity! Pride, nausea, and fear: my companions till the end. The old man outside Obrajes was right: I am a nervous ambitious man.

The radio receives, but doesn’t transmit anymore. No one knows how to fix it. Today, as ordered, Pais began the rising he did not want in Santiago. Courageously, loyally, he had followed Fidel’s instructions. A few men clustered below deck, near the set, and passed its words back to us, and above, where I stood looking at the sullen ocean. The customs house has been set on fire. Political prisoners have been freed from Boniato jail. Dozens of policemen and soldiers have been killed. Batista has suspended civil rights throughout the province.

Everyone, Fidel said, after assembling us on deck, should be cheered by the news. The 26th of July has many followers capable of striking blows at the dictator, willing to make the supreme sacrifice for the Movement. But I think we all felt (though would not say, for we are tender of each other’s morale, and to see the extent of one’s own fear on another’s face might be devastating) that it was only another big mess. The actions don’t coordinate with our arrival, because we haven’t arrived. We’re still at least a day from the coast. And we were meant to land at Niquero, where trucks and supplies wait for us. But Pino says he can’t find Niquero.

12/1/56: Each day brings new disasters, comic calamities, farcical presentiments of doom. The only omens anyone trusts anymore are bad ones. Last night we headed in for the coast, looking for the Cabo Cruz light. We must
make land soon, for we’re about to run out of food, fuel, and water. All night long the boat went back and forth along the coast, searching for the light. A wind sprang up, buffeting the ship. No stars were out. Roque climbed to the top of the bridge tower to get a better view of the coast. The tower slanted beneath him, he tripped and fell overboard. Ricardo, standing with me by the rail, turned his back to the sea. “Let the son of a bitch die,” he said. “The boat is too heavy. And he’s too fat. We can spare that shithead better than the machine guns he cost us.”

Towards morning we found Roque, barely conscious, but still alive. He’s lost some weight; but we’ve lost another day.

Castro seems to me now like a badly coordinated careless giant. He is something more than merely ambitious, and he is never anxious. If I close my eyes this evening I see him towering over us, somewhere off the bow of an absurdly small white boat. He looks a god of the sea, huge, powerful, charismatic, smiling at something we cannot see off in the distance. He is as heedless and unworried as a child, and as unknowing of what he does. He tosses us about, hardly noticing what happens to the tiny figures; he flings us here and there like toys, knocks us over, throws a few more of us into the air.

12/2/56: We’ve run aground. A salt-marsh swamp, Pino says, near a place called Belie. At least he hopes it’s near Belie. He hopes it’s near shore. There’s no moon, and it’s impossible to see ahead through the tangle of vines and mangrove branches. They are like cross-hatchings that lead to deeper shades of darkness.

12/7/56:
I’m alive
—the song my mother’s fingers sang as they drummed on the glass table. When I look at my comrades’ bodies, sprawled on the ground in filthy clothing, I wonder why we don’t say that to each other after every sentence, after every word of every sentence. Or perhaps we do, and until this moment I haven’t had the ears to hear this endless assertion. We’re alive, we all chorus, we’re alive. It’s our achievement. That is the music I’ll hear now in our voices, whatever doleful lyric we recite.

They found us on December 5 at four in the afternoon, at Alegria de Pio, three days’ march from where the
Granma
had run aground. On Castro’s orders we had thrown most of the extra supplies—the remaining heavy equipment that had escaped Roque’s panic, the explosives, extra ammunition boxes, food, and medicine—into the muck of the salt marshes. We couldn’t get them ashore; we couldn’t survive on shore without them. The black boxes half sunk
into the marsh, as if the swamp couldn’t believe our folly and wanted us to reconsider. The area around the boat looked like the careless giant’s picnic ground.

A fighter plane flew over the yacht, and we jumped into the swamp, up to our knees in thick mud. It was night, and impossible to see through the tangled low branches of the mangroves and the thick vines that grew between them. Ricardo, walking in front of me, carrying his rifle with both hands over his head, tripped over a mangrove root and grabbed at a vine with his hand. His rifle fell into the marsh. He screamed, and one of the men behind us fired a shot. I heard Almeida cursing him. The creepers have thorns that ripped the skin on Ricardo’s good hand. I stopped and bandaged it as best I could. The air was humid, unpalatable, dense with mosquitoes. You couldn’t swat them away, your hand just moved through the indifferent swarms. They got into your nostrils and mouth. Immediately little walnuts formed on my arms and neck. But the worst thing about them was the sound, a continual low fretful annoyance. The men just ahead of me looked like wraiths, animated by the sin of their past lives, unable to stop marching, a purgatorial march (as if, if they just kept marching, they might get out). Our sins or his? I could hear the splat of men farther down the line falling into the mud and cursing. Why can’t my lips form those words? (It’s all too vivid to me. When one of them names an act, a part of the body, an excretion: I see it.) Behind us the shadow of a naval frigate moved towards the yacht. It fired towards the shore, several kilometers away. The roar shook the vines back and forth slightly, like the strings of a monstrous piano. More planes passed overhead, drowning out the sound of the cursing, the mosquitoes, the squish of our boots sinking into the mud. It wouldn’t be long, I thought. It was hard to breathe the damp air. I tried to concentrate on breathing, to keep away my terror. It was hard to push through the thick wet paste of the marsh with one’s shins. I tried to concentrate on the difficulty of taking the next step. My boots had filled with sandy mud. I tried to concentrate on the difficulty of lifting my feet. “The swamp,” Nico said quietly. He hardly spoke anymore. He meant we would die in the swamp. Men dropped their knapsacks, their canteens into the slime, to make walking easier. “Don’t throw away your rifle,” Marcos shouted, passing on a message from Castro. He had tied one of his handkerchiefs around his head to keep the sweat from his eyes; it was the brightest thing in the swamp. “The only thing worth holding on to is your rifle.”

“No,” Ricardo said from behind me. “Your shoes.” We knew what he meant: for running away.

After three hours’ march the tangle of branches let some light through. The ground grew sandier and firmer. Men lay down for a few moments on the
damp beach. But we had to hurry onward. The white yacht, clearly visible in the dawn, marked our location. A B-27 appeared and flew over the boat, to the shore at Niquero, ten kilometers away, and then back again, looking for us. Castro’s plan—his new plan—is to move directly to the Sierras, and then make contact with the city network. He is sure we can establish ourselves among the peasants there, find food until the city sends aid. We had never, he said, intended to topple the dictatorship at one blow but to launch a revolutionary campaign that, with agitation and sabotage, would culminate in a general revolutionary strike. He told us this with great certainty, as if the past weeks had never happened, there had been no boat too small for the seas, beached a few miles from shore, plainly visible to the aircraft, no broken clutch, no missed meeting at Niquero. We had always meant to run aground in a swamp near Belie and throw most of our supplies overboard. You always sound so certain, Chaco had said to me as I lay on the stones in La Paz. But I am a pony of certainty compared to Fidel the Horse.
He is a man without a memory
.

Three more days of marching, in from shore, to dusty earth and low thick gray-and-brown scrub. When someone fainted we called a brief rest. But the planes continued flying overhead, and we had to move on. Some countrypeople ran out from their hut and told Almeida that they would offer a prayer for us to the Virgen de Cobre.

“What’s that?” I asked.

A theological debate ensued in my squad:

“A black virgin,” Almeida said. “It’s made of wood. It was found in the bay by Indians, before the Church came to Cuba. A miracle.” Almeida has grown a skimpy black beard. His small brown face is surrounded by streaming hair. He looks like a cartoon that forms a face no matter which way it’s turned.

“Horseshit,” Ricardo said. “It was placed in the bay by the Archbishop, for the Indians to find.”

“Shut up, asshole.”

And I saw a mound of steaming dung, an anus. I believe too much in the power of words, magical oaths, to give one’s word—as if the oaths were a solid fort that one lived inside. Not Fidel! He doesn’t inhabit his formulations; he is the motion between, the verb itself.

The 5th of December. We had walked through the night, following along the edge of a cane field. Towards dawn, few of the men felt they could go on. Every few minutes the whining would begin somewhere in the line, comrades begging the squad leaders for a rest period. Castro, at the center—the most
protected area (though wherever he is, is called the center)—ordered a halt at daybreak. We made camp in the thickets at the edge of a dense wood. Across a wide dirt road were the cane fields of Alegria de Pio. The long curved leaves dangled down from five-foot stalks, leaf over leaf, a light film of dust coating the green leaves near the road. The sharp thin lines of the leaves had the clarity of a line drawing in a children’s book. (The reward for vigilance!) To the right of us there were more woods; and beyond the rows of cane an open field of short brownish grass sloped down to more thick brush, palm trees and hardwood. The sunlight and hunger made me woozy. The air felt like a thick scratchy blanket. I passed out, and slept through the morning. Towards noon Marcos woke me, to tell me a dream. The sunlight hurt my eyes, and I closed them as I listened to his deep slow voice. We were marching through a swamp, he said, Fidel sounded very sure of himself giving orders, but he didn’t really know the way out. The swamp was hundreds of miles long—Marcos could feel its length in the dream. Che knew the way out, but no one would listen to him—yet. Marcos went on with his recitation, but as he spoke I dozed off again, his words mixed with the pain the rocks were causing my back and I inhabited his dream. My body ached all over as we walked through the swamp. The swamp was alive and malign. The mud made a loud heavy droning sound as it sucked our boots down, trying to keep us there. My heart was beating rapidly, and I awoke to the great noise of planes circling over our hiding place; brightly colored Air Force piper cubs, yellow, blue-green, like streamers thrown into the air and carried about by the wind. Men in olive-green uniforms—my comrades, I remembered now—ignored the planes; they stood by a field of sugar cane, cutting pieces of thick brown-and-green stalk and sucking on them. The planes came in at lower and lower altitudes. Still unsteady on my feet, I set up a first-aid station, to treat the men’s feet. My last pair were Nico’s, huge blistered things, tormented by his new boots. Grayish-brown fungus grew over the sores. I cleaned and bandaged them. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. I know, because when the firing started I looked at my watch. I had been leaning against a palm tree with Nico, after treating him, eating half a sausage and two crackers—the day’s food. I said something to him about the sausage, but the words were absorbed by the drone of the planes. (Hear that whine? It means: Run away.) Anyway, Nico wasn’t much of a conversationalist; no more stories of Fidel. The firing began—so many explosions seemed solid, like a curtain falling. The shots came from all over, from the woods, the cane, the sky, the earth. Bits of bark showered from the trees. The bullets, I thought crazily, were chipping the world away. Nico began to bawl. I lay prone. Why? Once, long ago, I’d been taught to. I heard someone shout, What time is it? What time is it? and I looked at my watch. But I was the one shouting.

Almeida ran back towards us, down the edge of the road. There were little puffs of dust near his feet, where the bullets landed. Another comrade came up from the other direction and dropped a black box of ammunition by my feet.

“Pick it up,” I ordered from the ground.

“Fuck yourself,” he said. “That’s all shit now.”

He ran towards the cane field. I left my medicines behind and picked up the box of ammunition. I followed him towards the cane. Nico grabbed his boots from the ground and ran after me.

“Where’s Fidel?” Almeida shouted over the awful din of the firing. “Where’s Fidel?” He ran down the path towards us, lifting his legs up suddenly very high, as if the ground burned his feet. Did he think he could skip away from the bullets? “I can’t find Fidel,” he shouted. He wanted orders. I shook my head—no, I hadn’t seen Castro, no, I didn’t know what Castro’s orders were, no, I didn’t give a fuck about Fidel—and ran towards Marcos. He was leaning on his knees in the middle of the path, firing a machine pistol. Nico screamed, “God save my life! God save my life!” I turned, surprised at the sound of his voice after so many days, and saw that he’d been hit in the face and chest at once. He held a boot out towards me, and blood poured from his mouth and nose. As I stupidly reached out towards his boot I too was hit, a sharp pain in my chest, and wetness on my neck. I touched my left shoulder and looked at the blood on my hand, red rich stuff, unbearably bright, beautiful in the sharp sunlight. I was dying. “There is no God,” I told Nico, and held my bloody hand out to him. Nico vomited thick clots of blood, and shouted, “They have killed me!” It came out with a wavery sound, as if he were under water. But the water was his own blood in his mouth. He fired his rifle at the sky again.