The Death of Che Guevara (49 page)

“Yanqui movies,” Marcos said, remembering his subject. “About the Wild West. The Sierra Maestra is large estates run by foremen. The foreman’s job is to keep the peasants from planting little plots of coffee trees on the unused land. If he sees a peasant’s house he burns it. Sometimes the countrypeople can’t take it anymore, and they wait for the foreman and shoot him in the head. The Rural Guard come for the peasants. They make examples of them. They tie people to trees and flay their skin off. Then they take the peasants’ land.”

“The countrypeople don’t make examples,” Ricardo said, smiling—a very disagreeable sight. “We don’t expect the shits to learn.” We were very lucky to have Ricardo with us—if only he wouldn’t smile!—as he is the only member of the Movement from a peasant background.

“Benitez,” I said, “give me the can of milk.” It was time for the day’s ration. But Benitez had turned the can upside down in his pocket, and the milk had dribbled onto his shirt.

Ricardo raised his hand beside Benitez, as if he were going to strike him on the head. But he stopped his arm in mid-motion and turned away. He knew that Benitez could bear denunciation or a blow, but it would be torture to him not to be spoken to. Ricardo has an instinct for a man’s weakness, his fear, how to punish him.

No one spoke to Benitez for the rest of the day.

12/14/56: At night, land crabs scuttled about our feet, among the red dirt and saw-toothed rocks near the shore. We stomped them. “A massacre,” Marcos said proudly, holding up one of the slain by a claw.

“The first great rebel …” Suarez said.

…“victory,” Ricardo said, finishing the thought for him. Suarez’s head lolled to one side, and he had difficulty remembering the end of his sentences. Ricardo had to hold him up on the march.

Suarez was wrong, though. It turned into another defeat: wide-winged observation planes fly over the shoreline; a fire was out of the question. So we ate the gelatinous parts of the carcass raw, and it made our thirst monstrous. The canteens are utterly empty.

I took the tiny pump from my vaporizer and sucked up rainwater from the declivities in the rocks. This yielded four or five drops for each of us, shared out in the eyepiece of the fieldglasses. There is a foul taste in my mouth. I feel like my tongue is rotting.

So I allowed a further folly: Benitez and I approached another shack. As we neared the door we saw a uniformed man, clearly outlined in the light from behind, a silhouette in the window, with an Ml rifle.

Benitez thinks the army has scattered patrols among the peasant families, expecting that we’ll look to them for food. So there’s no possibility of help from that direction. To enter one of their houses would be like playing Russian roulette.

12/16/56: Small planes fly over the sea to our right, saying unintelligible things through loudspeakers. Almeida and Benitez, veterans of the Moncada, say that the planes are calling for our surrender. But if we surrender we’ll be slaughtered.

We moved farther inland. Walking on the cliffs would leave us too exposed, so we must pick our way among the rocks, between the high paths and the sea. If the army finds us, we’ll be trapped.

I look from face to face for reassurance, to hear the song of our survival.

No one has the strength to walk anymore.

12/18/56: “I can’t stand it,” Marcos said. “I’m going to drink my own urine.” His puffy face suffused with pain. Tears would have come to his eyes if he’d had the moisture for tears.

I see no choice but to risk contact with the peasants. There is a shack near the road here (Puercas Gordas, Ricardo says). It’s a tottery wood-frame thing, with a small sagging porch. No windows on the side of the house, and no metal chimneypiece. It looks poor enough. A small child in a dirty white shirt and shorts has run into the house, screaming at the sky. I think she has spotted us in the low gray-and-brown brush where we’re hiding on our bellies. There may be soldiers inside. But I see no other choice. Almost
none of the men are willing to go on. We must throw ourselves upon their mercy.

12/19/56:
We’re alive
. And they know that Fidel—that was what they call him—is alive too. It won’t be easy to kill him, the father said. Fidel is an honest man. He always did what he said he would do. He said he would come this year, and he had. (Jesus Christ, I thought. He was right!) The radio says Fidel is a bandit (they are very proud to have a radio). But they know there was a family who gave his men some pork, and Fidel paid them for it. The rich lie about Fidel. (Poor Fidel! the mother said. She was a thin woman, with a deeply lined face. I couldn’t have guessed her age. She sounded as if she were speaking of one of her own children.) The man said he and his friends would take us to him. But the highways were heavily guarded, and we must leave our shirts and our weapons behind. He is clearly terrified, and yet, against his better judgment, wants to help Castro. I know the feeling!

We left the rifles, and Suarez, there. The families in the mountains passed us from hand to hand. Each countryman seemed to know a safe place where we could rest and find some corn and a little meat. The next man took us farther into the mountains.

12/21/56: Castro was already talking when we got to Cresencio Perez’s small farm in the valley. He came towards us shouting, where were our rifles? where were our fucking rifles? There were eight or nine comrades there, and one new man, Comrade Acuna, a peasant missing his top front teeth. He must be very courageous to have joined us under these circumstances! We are not a prepossessing group! “You stupid sons of bitches,” Fidel went on, by way of greeting. We met in front of Perez’s shack, under some palm trees; a flat dusty yard. At the sound of Fidel’s cursing everyone stopped. No one embraced us. We had abandoned our weapons, Fidel said. That was criminal! We should be punished for that, we hadn’t paid for our error yet. The price we
should
have paid for abandoning our weapons was our lives. Our arms were our one and only hope of survival if the soldiers had found us. (He looked well, I thought. He had already grown a full brown beard.) We were criminals, he said. Worse than that: we were
stupid
. Standing around him in the chalky dust, we stared at him dumbfounded, exhausted from our last long march to the farm. The countrypeople—Perez and his son (our lost guides), and several local families—were all there watching our humiliation. We looked at the bare ground, like children. Castro had no right to say such things! He had nearly killed us all! And yet I felt the hot shame rising all over my body.

He led us into some woods, a distance from the house, where we made camp. He said nothing else throughout the night. The men with me passed out on the ground. But Castro didn’t sleep. I would wake during the night, and I saw that some of the others did also—as if his presence troubled our sleep, made us fitful. And he would be sitting there, watching us, but not looking from face to face. He had led seventy-four of our comrades to their death, and now he sat in judgment on us for hiding our guns! Our guns hadn’t been very useful to us so far! We were defeated, for Christ’s sake! (And then my mind, like my uncomfortable body, would twist about: He was right. We were defeated, but there was no one to accept our surrender. Batista’s army would murder anyone who surrendered. We should have held on to our guns.—But why? So that more of us could be murdered in our sleep, or while eating a last piece of sausage? My mind was trying to accustom itself to the full hopelessness of our situation.)

As for Fidel, he sat and looked at us.

In the morning, as the sun rose, and the men tossed this way and that, wanting to sleep some more, Fidel stood up. Suddenly we were all awake. “We are in the Sierras,” he said, lifting his arms high above his head—and, without volition, my eyes looked upwards towards the indifferent sky. (And my nose smelled Fidel’s acrid odor.) “The days of the dictatorship are numbered!”

What nonsense! The man is insane! We were all going to die. I began to recite poetry again. Fidel went on talking, in a high excited voice, as if he were addressing a crowd of thousands (and perhaps in his imagination, his megalomaniacal imagination, he was), speaking of the help we’d gotten from the Sierra peasants. We must learn their lives. The foremen who hound them, and steal their land, and destroy their shacks. If you can make a heap of all your winnings/And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss/And lose/And lose Nico, and Raul Suarez, and Chaco. But Chaco wasn’t his responsibility. No, he was the North Americans’. And never breathe a word about your loss. That didn’t seem Castro’s style, not breathing a word. He’d breathe a lot of words, explain it away. The loss was really a victory; my mother’s magic; the dialectic. The peasants worked in the plain fifteen days, he was saying, gathered a few pesos, bought salt and a little fat, and then returned to their coffee trees. They will never have enough land of their own to live on. The Agricultural Bank gives only to the rich. When the Rural Guard pass a countryman’s house, they take what they want, a fine chicken perhaps. (I’d like a fine chicken!) The merchants cheat them. There are no doctors in the Sierras,
no schools. That will be our life. We will join ourselves to them. If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,/Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,/We have entered the Sierras (he said), people had accepted us, buoyed us up. (I saw the silhouette in the peasants’ window, holding a rifle. The army, too, lived with the peasants! The voice drinking the brave comrades’ health—who else had joined him in the toast?) In the rigors of the march, the sacrifices to come (there was a true word, I thought, touching the painful scar near my neck), we would be made to conform to our new medium, to the life of the countrypeople. Our rough city edges would be worn away. He went on:

He went on.

And on.

He spoke of the time when more peasants would join us, like Comrade Acuna, of the help the countrypeople had given us, of the fear they had already overcome—because they had seen we were willing to keep
our
word (his actually), to begin the struggle, at the sacrifice of our own lives. (That word again! I looked at his eyes—they stared off over our heads at the foliage beyond. Our own lives, I thought. Or other people’s.) If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken/Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools. Why the recitation? Because I didn’t want to believe anymore. (I looked about me: many of us had beards now—like a religious sect.) Had we known, really, how enormous the odds were when we set out from Tuxpan, known that of the eighty-eight men standing on the dock in the sunlight in their brand new uniforms, seventy-two (or -four, or -six) would die? Which of us had the imagination for so much death? Did he? Oh, he did in his way, but for him it was only one moment in some grander airy construction, the bodies sublimed into a stately thing, a snowflake in stone, the heights of Machu Picchu. And that wasn’t real death, at all. And lost and start at your beginning. We would not fail them, he said (I wanted breakfast. My stomach twisted painfully). The Revolution was for the countrypeople.

He went on. He shouted, he cajoled, he whispered, he kicked the dirt with his boot like an impatient horse. He had tossed us into the air, as if we were inexperienced riders, and most of us had come down broken. This was the man who had led his forces against the Moncada, and one unit had gotten lost in traffic, so the rest had died or been captured and hanged by the neck from the bars of the cell while their families watched. This was the genius who had bought the little boat to bring us to Cuba, a toy boat so small that most of our weapons had been thrown overboard to keep it afloat. Our precious weapons! Whose fault was that? We could not fail them, he repeated. They felt that already. They trusted us. Now we must prepare to strike our first blow at
the army. The boat had landed in a swamp, three days late for its rendezvous, twenty miles off course. And then he had led us by night into an ambush. (Perhaps they had followed the long leaves and chewed husks from the cane we’d sucked on. Perhaps a guide—one of the trusting countrypeople—had betrayed us. Perhaps no betrayal was necessary. Our beached white boat made our location obvious. And he had told them we were coming. (“Fidel keeps his word,” the peasant had said. So he was right to tell them? Impossible! I must think of another poem to recite.) Seventy-four(?) men captured and killed. Nico was right, poor bald Nico. Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it. Nico is in it now. Harden ourselves for battle, he said again. Or I wanted to hear it. My heart beat faster with expectation. I hadn’t managed to obscure enough of his words! I saw again the grand circular motion of his hand that evening in Mexico. What did deaths matter? The Movement swept all before it. It was inevitable. It must begin now.

No. Horse manure. He’s insane. Horse manure to be dried and used as fertilizer. But I longed for battle. If I do accomplish a brave act, I thought, it will be because I am led by a lunatic. I surrender my life now. (But, again, there was no one to accept my surrender.) We did not, I thought, have a chance of surviving his “plans.” And yet the schizophrenia I had first felt when I had met him and he drew his plans in the air before me was on me again; and on all the others. He is a madman, and we cannot possibly win. And yet that silence, that night vigil, waking on the forest floor to find him still squatting there looking off into the distance, that voice that came out of the dry place of our defeat, the loss of our weapons, the wreck of all our hopes, and then spoke of—victory! Impossible! And yet, I believed—or half believed, or half of me believed—that voice. Why? And why do the countrypeople believe him, believe us, help us?

He spoke, according to my watch, for two hours more. I finished all of the Baudelaire, and was halfway through the Neruda poems I knew.

1/11/57: Acuna, in the stillness of the woods, began to shout that he’d thought our camp would have plenty of food and water, and real anti-aircraft defenses. Now planes chased him, and he had nowhere to hide, no food, and no water. Almeida calmed him. But the next day the gap-toothed bastard sneaked off back to his home, taking his rifle with him.