The Death of Che Guevara (61 page)

Jorge and I: aristocrats still. I misjudged Algaranaz. (My mother’s contemptuousness for people who were “not our type.”) Or Tania?

2/6/67: The patient presented another symptom: reconnaissance planes flew over the zone today.

2/8/67: A group of thirty soldiers approached the Tin House across the open fields in front, and from along the riverbank. Pacho, one of the former miners, who was with Ricardo in the vanguard, disobeyed orders and shot one of the patrol. Ricardo struck Pacho across the face with the handle of a machete, and ordered the immediate retreat of the vanguard group towards the base camp, where Che was, with the main body of our men.

A messenger from Ricardo preceded the vanguard. He arrived at the main camp, sweaty and out of breath, and told everyone to prepare for complete retreat. Che was enraged by Ricardo’s orders. He pushed his chest out as if he were having one of his attacks. He dictated a message to me for Ricardo, that “wars are won with bullets.” He ordered the vanguard to return to Bear Camp and set up ambushes in the established locations.

He seemed exhausted by his rage, and conducted his meetings with Bustos on Argentina while lying in his hammock. After that he began a chess game with Debray.

It is all
too fast
I am stunned.

2/9/67: I told Debray what a useful tool a pipe is for a guerrilla. Shreds of tobacco, cigar ends, can all be used in a pipe. I began to wax lyrical about my own pipe, engraved with names of battles in Cuba. “A pipe and a pair of boots, that’s all a guerrilla needs, Regis. Make a note of that for your book. With them he has a feeling of contentment—that’s the pipe—and security—that’s the boots. With decent boots he can flee from danger, he’s the master of his fate.”

Debray, usually a note-taker, was hardly listening. He was jumpy about the coming battle. But he played well, as always.

A poem to my pipe and boots?

2/9/67: If it was too early to engage the army before, why is it right now? We could have withdrawn, given up this project. The Party is against us here. The reports, both on the Party and the landscape, were wrong. And the miners Moises brought with him are crap.

Che’s temper. Che’s pride.

No.
This time he was right
. We are here. The time to fight is now. You can’t balance these things forever. Our violence will change the political situation, the Party’s attitude. I hope.

2/10/67: My first battle.

Our ambush was by the river. After they walked into it and we opened fire we shouted, “Long live the Army of National Liberation! Long live free Bolivia!” At first I was so nervous I was firing my rifle as quickly as I could. Then I remembered what Che had said and husbanded my ammunition, picking my targets. When I did that I could hear my own voice, and I wasn’t really shouting our slogans—I was screaming them in a high-pitched voice at the top of my lungs. I could hear the other men from both sides, and some of them were screaming too. “Surrender, soldiers! We don’t want to kill you!” And: “Join us! We are your brothers!” I think it was my own brother, Inti, who was shouting that. He sounded calm. He always sounds calm. How I admire that!

Their lieutenant was in the middle of the river, and that was where he was wounded. I think I shot him, but I can’t be sure. (Ricardo put his arm around me afterward and said it was me.) The lieutenant kept on shooting at the mountainside where our part of the ambush was. I saw him hit someone and heard a scream. It was Moro, I guess, wounded in the arm. The lieutenant managed to get to the riverbank, but then he was right in range and the bullets really started to come down on him. He did a strange thing: he raised his hands up, as if he could protect himself that way, as if they would keep off bullets! He was wounded in so many places! He died by the river, his body half in and half out of the water. Some of his men followed him forward, and they died too.

2/10/67: After the battle, Inti, one of the best of the Bolivians, was delegated by Che to speak to the captured officers, offering the major in charge a truce for the entire zone, “if you would be willing to stay with the guerrillas to guarantee it.”

The battle had a curious effect on me. I felt my heart opening towards the captured men, not with pity, but as if it were a radio station! I could receive their thoughts, broadcast by their nervous mannerisms—and the major had a lot of tics. I was seeing things
from
their eyes. A tall sad-looking fellow with a mustache offered the major a truce if he would stay in the zone to guarantee it. The major laughed hollowly (I was sure his laugh had slowed his progress in the army). He tried to think of something to say to this bizarre offer. What did
he
care if there was a truce? And why did this sad-looking fellow think the major’s presence would guarantee anything? As if General Barrientos thought the major was the Holy Infant! He did not! The major twitched—he was finding it hard to come up with a reply. He was uncomfortable and scared. His clothes were wet. He thought: I wouldn’t want to die in water. Then he laughed again, thinking: As if your skin could feel clammy after death! For a moment he saw—
I
saw, I saw
him
seeing—the image of the lieutenant’s body lying half in and half out of the water. It made the major shiver. I don’t want a truce, he thought, I just want to be very very dry and very very far from here! The lieutenant’s body looked soft. The river was carrying the blood from a thousand wounds. It looked as if the river were killing him by draining his blood. But it wasn’t the river. It was these people, this tall stooped man, that black man staring at him now in a way that gave him the creeps. That stare made him shiver more. (It was funny thinking his thoughts, thinking that
I
gave his body that tremor.) He pressed his right arm against his side, to try to stop his shaking. It was getting out of control.

The major looked at the guerrillas. They looked at him. I smiled, and he shuddered, as if I’d been considering how he’d taste. There were ten or eleven of us standing around the edges of the clearing, drinking coffee. That reassured him for a moment, and he stopped his shimmy. Coffee is innocent enough. Then the earthquake began again. As if you couldn’t drink coffee and then shoot someone! So they drink coffee, what does that mean? Something silly went through the major’s mind: Socrates drinks coffee; Socrates is a man. We’re all men because we drink coffee. So what? Men shoot each other too. (He touched his cheek, which had joined the dance of his body parts.) After they fool around with us, he thought, they’ll shoot us. They don’t have prisons to send us to, they’re guerrillas. So they’ll shoot us. The one who’s talking seems like a nice enough fellow, though. But so dour-looking! Who can tell what crazy people think, how they’ll act. And these are crazy people, who wait by the sides of rivers to kill you! “I retire from the army next week,” the major said. “I get my pension. It’s a good pension.” He laughed again, a little repeated hiccup of a thing, tee-hee, tee-hee, tee-hee. The dour fellow—Inti, they called him—didn’t smile. He never smiled. Story of my life, the major
thought. Perhaps laughing was a mistake? “Well, I mean, unless you fellows overthrow the government. I guess that would be the end of my pension.” I wish that nigger bastard would stop staring at me!

Camba, thin with intense eyes under very heavy brows that grow together over his nose, walked to one of the prisoners, a private. He put his arm around him in a friendly way. “Hi,” he said, and gave the soldiers a big smile. “I’m called Camba. It’s my
nom de guerre
, you know. I love having a
nom de guerre
. You’ll never guess who I really am. I want to sing you a song I’ve just made up.” And he began to sing:

The song, I thought, didn’t have much tune, but Camba chanted it in a very cheerful engaging way. The soldier, though, didn’t appreciate the humor of it. He had fainted after the first verse. Camba finished the song anyway, on the ground, kneeling beside the ranger, cradling his impassive face between his hands.

Inti ignored the singing. When it was done he turned to the captain. I think Inti’s stare made the captain nervous, but
he
had his answers ready. “I’m a Communist. I only entered the army a year ago because the Party ordered me to.” The captain clearly thought of himself as a very clever guy. He had read a lot of books. He was sure to rise faster than the major. And he didn’t have an idiotic-sounding laugh. He was proud that he thought more quickly, was a quicker, better liar than the major. But wait—the major might believe him! That would be a disaster! “In fact,” the captain added, “I have a brother studying in Cuba.” That would prove to the major he was lying; he didn’t have a brother, only five sisters, everyone knew that and made fun of him for it.

Inti said nothing. The captain thought that maybe he’d made a mistake. There had been rumors about Cubans. But maybe there were no Cubans here. Maybe they didn’t like Cubans! As long as he’d been in the army there had been rumors about Cubans.

“We are here,” Inti said, after a time (I knew how they felt listening to Inti: you could die in those pauses. Or be shot.), “to liberate Bolivia from Imperialism.”

No one said anything.

Camba brought coffee and plain rolls for the prisoners. While they ate, Inti talked more of our goals. He spoke slowly, sincerely, almost sadly. I saw his eyes rest for a moment on each face, and then (he hadn’t found the face welcoming) he would turn to the next. The captain flushed. He had felt suddenly silly eating his roll. What a stupid thing a roll is! It tasted heavy and dry inside my own mouth. The captain looked about nervously, and saw that the others, too, looked down at the ground when Inti glanced at them. The captain became angry at himself. Shit, he thought, that’s the ground he was trying to put us under.

“Our quarrel,” Inti said, “is not with you, but with those who sent you, the rich men who plunder our country.” If I were the captain I would have understood that—theoretically. But if I’d been wounded? The captain looked over at the wounded men being bandaged by the guerrilla doctor, a dark man whose own arm was bandaged in a black sling. Would a wounded man, the captain and I wondered together, understand that it was nothing personal? We left out the dead altogether. They definitely wouldn’t understand.

“Soldiers,” Inti said, “remember you are our brothers. If your superiors force you to fight, come ahead and don’t be afraid. We won’t do anything to you if you throw down your arms, raise up your hands, and shout that you surrender. We won’t harm you then, as we are not harming you now. You will be released.”

The captain, clever man, saw the drawbacks to this offer. What if your superior sees you surrender, and he gets away? Things could go very badly for you when you got back to your outfit. Especially if your superior resents your cleverness and your masculine but musical laugh. Besides, a battle is like a natural disaster. (I was sure this had been the captain’s first. He would remember it vividly as fragments of color and light and wetness and heat, and each fragment still terrified him.) It wouldn’t have made any sense not to fire at the enemy, even if you thought his cause was just. It would be like a rock refusing to participate in a rockslide! Unthinkable!

Inti offered the prisoners a chance to join the Army of National Liberation, to join in the glorious work of freeing Bolivia from Imperialism’s stranglehold.

No one spoke.

During the silence, army planes bombed the area. The soldiers fell to the ground and clung to it, sure that their stupid officers would kill them by mistake. (They would have too, if they could have bombed more accurately.) The explosions were more than a mile away, in the river, but the sound was enormous, deafening. Freddy, one of the guerrillas from Moises Guevara’s group, grabbed Inti’s arm, and shouted something at his face. I couldn’t hear it, but I knew from many such incidents in the past, many men surprised by their own fear, what he was saying. He shouted that he’d been promised a safe camp, a place that would have defenses against air raids. He thought that if he shouted his resentment loudly enough, someone would be forced to protect him. Inti took Freddy’s hand from his arm.

The bombs raised spumes of water and shattered rock. The tips of the spouts were very beautiful, just visible over the foliage.

After the bombing, Inti told the major that he could recover his dead the next day if the burial party returned stripped to the waist. “We won’t take your uniforms,” Inti said, “because it’s cold tonight. But we have to keep your boots and watches and cigarettes. The army will give you others. But we don’t have anywhere to get them at the moment. I’m sorry, but we’ll need those things.” I helped Coco and Camba collect the various objects. I felt like a bandit, and smiled towards Ricardo.

The soldier that Camba had sung to stuck his hand in his pocket. “Wait a minute. I had ten pesos hidden in a cigarette pack.” He must have been ashamed of fainting. He needed a way to show some daring.

I laughed. “You’re a courageous son of a bitch, aren’t you? Shows what happens when we’re nice enough to sing to you.” I could see from his eyes that he had trouble following my words. He flinched at the sound of my voice.

“I told you we were too easy on them,” Ricardo said, laughing too. It is an awful thing to hear Ricardo laugh! “Here.” He handed the soldier ten pesos.

The soldier reached out slowly to take it. And then, ashamed again of his cowardice, said, “I’ll bet it’s counterfeit.”

“You know,” Ricardo said, taking off his glasses and cleaning them on his shirt, “Ponco’s wrong. You’re not courageous, are you? You just don’t know where you are or why. You never have. And you never will. Turn around.” Ricardo put on his glasses. The soldier stared at him. Ricardo had fat-looking eyes behind those lenses. “Turn around, you little bastard!” The soldier turned and Ricardo kicked him in the ass, knocking him to the ground. “All right.
You can go now! And,” he said to the man on the ground, “you can tell your superiors how the guerrillas tortured you, but you didn’t give them any information. As if you ever had any to give!”