The Death of Che Guevara (55 page)

His body
there
becomes this pile of papers
here
. And the no-smell from his papery body makes me want to puke.

I just went out on the porch and threw up on the grass, a yellowish pool of bile from my stomach, and the remains of a few pieces of bread I tried to eat for breakfast. I find it hard to swallow food. I take a few bites and gag. I can’t
order
the food to stay down. Some things, Che,
are
beyond our will! If I do manage to make myself swallow something, I throw it up half an hour later, decomposed, like a corpse. I don’t digest anything in my stomach, I just bury it there for a few minutes. I thought the difficulty swallowing meant the cancer had come back. (I
knew
it was cancer eight years ago, though the doctors lied to me about it. And I knew it would come back. Every time I have swallowed for the last seven years, I have felt my spit sliding down around little obstructions that I knew in my heart would grow until I eventually choked to death. That was another bond between Che and me. We
both
thought we were going to die every second of our lives.) But the doctors last month said no, it wasn’t cancer. I couldn’t eat, they said, because I was “upset.” (But they might be lying to me again?)

All of the men volunteered to stay at the top of the ravine and cover the withdrawal of the main force towards the river. He had said it would be certain death. And he chose Inti, Urbano, Nato, Benigno, Dario, and me.
And we were the ones who survived!
After the battle, we waited till night, and broke through
the encirclement. The soldiers at the edges of the ravine had grown inattentive, tired. They had already captured Che, taken the prize, the red kerchief. They thought the game was over. Why worry about us? Where was the glory in capturing us?

We killed four soldiers. After that we walked fifteen days through hardwood forest. The trees protected us from planes. The peasant who sold us food also sold our position to the army. The food was only some handfuls of roasted corn, but I could eat them. The army surrounded us again in the forest, but we got out. The sentinels were careless, talking with each other, not even holding their rifles when we came upon them. They thought the war was over. Inti led us into the Mataral region, to Casas Viejas. (We knew Che had intended to make Inti the leader if we succeeded in establishing a Bolivian center, so he was the leader.) We bought some food there, paying a lot for some scrawny chickens. But I could eat them, too. No problem! In November we went east towards the Cochabamba-Santa Cruz highway, trying to avoid the army—if they had asked us,
we
would have told them that the war was over! They caught up with us near La Cabana, and Nato was wounded in the spine. He couldn’t move his legs or control his bowels, and he was in terrible pain. He asked me to shoot him so that the army wouldn’t get him.

We went southwest of the highway to get away from the army, then north. There were good people in that region, followers of the MNR. They hid us, gave us new clothing. The other men worked on farms, pretending to be laborers. But I am a black man, and Bolivia doesn’t have many blacks. And Che had taken lots of pictures of all of us. Now the army had his knapsack and the pictures. I would be easy to identify. So I hid all day in a tunnel they dug for me, moist-smelling, with crumbling sides and thousands of insects. Chicken-wire-and-stick gratings, covered with leaves, hid both ends—two exits for my burrow, for escape. For weeks I lived like a mole, underground. I pretended it was my grave, I practiced being dead, and I gnawed my pork strips alone in the dark, with the smell of decomposing things and wet earth filling my nostrils. But I
could
eat. (I was
happy
to eat. It was the day’s big amusement. Not that the social life outside was much; we hardly spoke with each other anymore.)

The peasants got a lightweight green truck for us and we rode on the flatbed into Santa Cruz, our legs stretched out like farmworkers. We took a plane to Cochabamba, a little thing with two propellors. (I hated it! I thought we’d die! Before, I hadn’t been afraid of airplanes. But Che had.) Parts of the city network were still intact there, and Inti knew how to reach them. They hid us in their apartments. But I’d been in a tunnel for weeks, underground, already dead. I needed to see some people. So I took a little stroll, and got a bad haircut from a talkative fellow with mottled skin. And I had a lemon ice
in a little white paper cup. It was fine. Very tasty. No trouble drinking it.

The dissident Communists, the ones who had broken with Monje and the Party, got us dark jackets, heavy mufflers and caps, and white knapsacks for the trip to the Chilean border, to Sabaya.

The magistrate in Sabaya was a rat, he suspected something and telegraphed the army. But they couldn’t get to us: there were no landing fields for their planes. And, like an answered prayer, it began to rain every day, a cold endless deluge, the final onslaught of the waters. On its way to extinction the world became mud. The army couldn’t get its trucks into the mountains.

The way out was terrible. The rain turned to snow as we walked higher through the pass, towards Chile. The ground was mud that froze around our feet. I had never been any place so cold, and please God I never will be again! The wind sliced through my jacket and scarf. I thought my bones were ice and might shatter. The wound in my thigh ached like a stone inside the flesh. We didn’t speak to each other anymore except about necessary tasks or directions. It was as Che had written about the men of the
Granma
marching near Belie: we felt we were in purgatory, and perhaps if we just kept marching we might get out. Whose sins had put us here? Ours or his? We were the extension of Che’s body. But it wasn’t like the
Granma
and Fidel. Che was dead! I looked at the snow and thought of Che’s first wound, and the white field he had imagined for himself to die in. This was it. (I was already inhabited by scenes from his memory!)

All this time we hadn’t had much to eat, and what there was we had to pay dearly for, to greedy, frightened peasants. But I ate greedily too. Roasted corn: I could eat it! Pork rinds: I could eat them! Lemon ice!

We made it across into Chile, to Arica, unsure of what would face us there. You felt in the mountains that you were moving from desolation to desolation, that nothing good could await you. The Bolivian government might have asked for help from the Chilean Army. If they had received it, then the mountains might be filled with troops waiting to surprise us.

But the people came out of their huts to greet us, to cheer us. The Mayor of Arica is a Communist. I drank the hot rough liquor they offered us—I could hardly stop drinking it!—and I ate some salted beef.

The government in Santiago gave us forty-eight hours to leave the country—we were like lepers who might spread their contagion. Allende arranged for our passage to Tahiti, where the ambassador met us. We had pork again, very tender, cooked outside on a spit for hours with a sweet sauce. On Friday, March 1, we flew to Paris. I began to have some difficulty swallowing food. I felt like my throat had pebbles in it, little circles of pain. By the time we got home the pebbles had become boulders. I would stare at my plate and acid
would wash into my stomach, a hand would form to throw the food out of my belly, giving my insides a squeeze as it went. I couldn’t eat anymore.

I had lost maybe fifteen pounds during the insurrection, maybe more—it was hard to hold my pants up at the end. I probably lost ten pounds more after Churo, during the escape. But I have already lost ten pounds since Paris. I now weigh a hundred pounds. If I go on like this I’ll float away! I don’t want to kill myself, and in truth it doesn’t feel as if
I’m
doing it.

He
is. He has stolen my appetite. He has stolen the rest of my life. What do I have left to look forward to? From now on
my
life will be to tell
his
story. I can see the days to come: I give a talk to a group of Young Communists who are doing volunteer work in the orange groves, telling them how important the spirit of sacrifice was to Che, how he taught that it is through sacrifice that we are unified with our comrades and the New Man is formed. I will meet with Yanquis here to cut cane, and tell them of Che’s sense of internationalism. I will dedicate schools named after him, and launch literacy campaigns. (They should use the detective novel. But I wouldn’t suggest it, for I see signs that the Revolution is losing its sense of humor.) Each October 8 there will be a memorial rally for me to address. I am going to hide out here, underground, already dead, from the almost daily festivals of the Year of the Heroic Guerrilla. It hurts me to talk. I’ll shame myself, croaking in public like a rusty machine. No wonder I want to vomit all the time! It isn’t acid inside me. It’s my hatred of him. I want to vomit him up! His body has become the food I eat! He almost killed me—that’s what I want to scream at meetings of Young Communists and innocent cane-cutters. He almost killed me! I curse him, but when I do the curse comes back and withers my own body.

I can’t even say that. I’m not allowed to hate him. I feel woozy and the bad feeling makes the room grow dark. (Or maybe it’s the lack of food.)

I don’t understand why I’m not allowed to hate him. He nearly killed all of us—all but five! (Inti stayed behind to lead the Army of National Liberation—consisting of Inti Peredo, sole proprietor. Inti is inhabited by Che’s dream, and like all the others who tried to be his body, Inti will die. I give him three months at most. He’s under his own curse, too, doubly guilty—he survived both Che and his own brother.)
The strange thing is, we didn’t try to survive
. When we volunteered to protect him and the others we expected to die. Should we feel guilty that we were lucky and outlived him? We shouldn’t. But we do.

He nearly killed us all! There were plenty of times after it was already clear that the business was over, that we didn’t have a chance of success, when most of us could still have gotten away if he’d led us out into Chile or Peru. We could have come back here to our island, rethought our plans. But he wouldn’t
consider it. Fidel would have given it up as a bad business, retreated, and thought up another plan—though Che was right, Fidel would have pretended that the new notion had been the only plan all along. But not Che—he had to live out his first idea, his words engraved in stone.
He
wouldn’t
allow
us to escape. He wouldn’t
let
us live!

I know: I love him and I hate him, and that’s why I’m “upset,” that’s why I want to vomit. That feeling of mixed-up love and hatred—it reminds me of Che’s family, the one he wrote about—or made up—here, on this board. They didn’t know if they wanted to caress each other or hit each other. They must have wanted to puke all the time! They must have walked around their big house doubled over with nausea.

He almost killed us all! If I could hold on to that
fact
, I could simply hate him and maybe eat something. But hating him makes me feel heavy and sad. And thinking that he wanted to kill me, when I loved him so, that “upsets” me, that drives me crazy. I know I shouldn’t take it personally. But why did he choose me to guard the retreat from Churo if he thought it would be certain death? I did love him. Maybe if I could simply hold on to that fact I could eat something.

In a way he
did
kill me. He sentenced me to this, turned me into his talking gravestone, my memory a movie theater with continuous showings of his life story, his many miraculous discoveries. I’m his “archivist.”

He almost killed me! Why should I feel guilty towards him—and not Nato, whom I shot in the temple with my own gun? Why do I feel as if
I
failed
him?

Move on to step four.

Bolivia, 1966

9/7/66: La Paz, Bolivia. Notes for the beginning of a book:

These are the things you need if you have the will to make a revolution:
canned foods, sacks of corn, men, cooking utensils, leadership, lard, good sturdy
boots, a government without legitimacy, hungry powerless people, radio equipment, canvas, padded jackets, courage, woolen caps, hammocks, accurate maps, a compass, courage, machetes, guns, ammunition, men

I’ve forgotten something.

9/9/66: The air in La Paz is very thin and sharp; it makes me feel lightheaded, and as if my skin were stretched very taut. Yesterday Ricardo passed out on the sidewalk in front of a movie theater. It made him angry at everyone. (I’m sure now that he’s afraid people will think he’s a Travis.) The miners, Ricardo, and Che. A name for the Bolivian Expedition: The Revolution of the Weak Lungs.

10/15/66: More disguised comrades from Cuba. Cadres recruited from the BCP. We wait together at the farm. Ricardo in charge. Four men pretend to be pig farmers and employees, and are building outhouses on the property. Also under construction: a corral, a kitchen garden, a henhouse (we have a few hens, and a rooster who screams at any hour of the day or night—only by chance does he announce the dawn). The rest of us hide in this little shack with a corrugated tin roof—the only real building on the land. Its walls are made of halved tree trunks daubed with mud. The many chinks let the wind through. Thirty men place their sleeping bags close to the stove at night, warming themselves. In the morning almost all of us wake with stiff necks.