The Death of Che Guevara (72 page)

Who am I kidding? Only
he
could grant me that privilege. And
he
left me to die.

Bolivia, 1967

6/8/67: The Masicuri River. We bathed in small groups, all through the late afternoon and into the night. The long trees over the river were thick with balls of leaves at the top; the white light of the full moon was softened by them as it flowed down onto our bodies. It was like being in a huge room. The water was cold. Che was in my group, and I could hear him clanking near me. “He sounds like a motor,” I whispered to Inti. Camba overheard. “A motor shouldn’t get wet,” he said. He sounded genuinely worried, as if Che really were a motor! Che’s breathing became more labored, more and more mechanical-sounding, but he went on splashing himself. The water was thick with cold, the cold was like a color you could drink with your skin. Feeling it on my legs and balls was like drinking a color. Sometimes, after a difficult time on the march, or in battle, the way things look is very intense, I feel like everything, the trees, the river, is alive, as if it might be about to speak with me.

In the morning we did laundry. Marcos has dozens of handkerchiefs! He washed each one individually, very carefully. Ponco went over to Marcos by the riverside, and held the linen up to his face. He said that each handkerchief was a story that he could read.

Planes moved above the trees, the drone fading and returning.

Che ordered a march northwest, towards the Rio Grande, where we will look for a crossing.

6/14/67: We walked along the riverbank until this evening, when thickets, tangled so tightly that they formed a wall higher than a man, blocked our way. We could cut through the thickets, or cross the river. Che decided to cross, but the raft-building group couldn’t find suitable wood.

I went with a small party, under Marcos, to look for peasant families that might have a boat. Suddenly the rocks behind us exploded into fragments. The enemy had set up a mortar tube across the river. Marcos remained calm, and we fired back, while retreating towards Che and the center.

Che ordered an ambush set up on our side of the river, and sent a party to cut a trail for our retreat, parallel to the Masicuri, but farther into the forest.

The army never crossed the river towards us.

They are on both sides of the Rio Grande. Che says that they will expect us to go back south, towards the Nancahuazu, but we will continue moving west, along the riverbank, looking for a crossing. Che has an instinct for thinking the way the army does. (He said once that for as long as the war lasts the army and the guerrillas are part of the same organism.)

I worked for a while as one of the machete wielders, hacking at the tangled bank. It was part woody material, part thick green vine that ran in and out and all through it. I copied Ricardo’s motion, raising the long blade and my arms across my chest and high above my head, over my right shoulder, then swinging down from the balls of my feet. But I was not so strong or graceful as he was. Sometimes the blade nearly bounced back from the vines. I felt their strength working against mine, as if they didn’t want to be cut.

We made our way through. Che says we’re near Ispaca’s house.

6/18/67: Ispaca came running out of his house to meet us, not by way of greeting, but to keep us away, to ward us off. And yet he did not have the courage to tell us to go away. He stammered. He looked down at the ground. He pulled on his black hair. His first words—when he could get them out—were that the pigs had died. He had cared for them, he swore, but none of them had lived.

I tried to calm him. I told him not to worry about the pigs. I asked after his children’s health.

The boy we had cured was fine. He was very grateful. But otherwise things were very bad with his family. The little girl, the one who talked all the time, she had died. And the infant that she had talked to—describing the world, I remembered, and its skinny suspicious characters—she had died, too. The sorcerer had taken them, Ispaca said. It was punishment, punishment for his son’s being saved by us. And then the pigs had died. Who knew what might happen next?

I gagged hearing Ispaca’s story, as if his words had physically caught in my throat. He wouldn’t look me in the face. I felt that he himself didn’t believe
the nonsense he’d spoken, that there was a deeper shadow than superstition behind him, forming his words. I asked him if the army had been there.

He didn’t speak, but looked off towards the bright sky. He ripped some strands of tall grass from the ground, and threw them aside. A light breeze picked them up and carried them towards the river.

I repeated my question.

“Yes,” he said. The army had been there.

Had they harmed him or his family?

Yes, he said, they had. Then he laughed. Yes, they had
harmed
them.

I promised that we would avenge whatever had been done to him.

No, he pleaded. He didn’t want revenge. He didn’t want anything. He simply wanted to be left alone.

Then he stared at the ground, and I think an inspiration came to him. The army, he said, they had killed the pigs, thinking that they were meant for the guerrillas.

Possible, I thought, but unlikely. Still, I wouldn’t have thought Ispaca would have had the courage, or the desire, to steal from us—unless he were desperate.

But there is simply no way to get to the bottom of their tangled stories.

I asked if he could spare us some food. Of course we would pay well for it.

Please, no, we needn’t pay. We could take whatever we wanted.

He meant: we needn’t pay for it, if we would only leave quickly, leave him alone.

He gave us directions to a turbulent but shallow crossing. He said again that he was sorry about the pigs.

6/19/67: The cold waters of the Rio Grande are now to the south of us.

Monje, on Chilean radio, announced the Party’s total support for the guerrilla movement, the people in arms.

The interview had an unsettling effect on the men. The possibility of help makes our isolation more palpable. And for the militants, Monje’s speech held out the possibility of reconciliation with that majestic (if, in the case of Bolivia, mainly imaginary) organization, the Communist Party, the church to which they had thought they might dedicate their lives, and so align those lives with the grand march of history. The guerrilla, not the Party, they realize now, is the forward point of that march in Latin America. But their old loyalty, and the nagging sense that the Party might still triumph over us in the end, made them anxious for a reconciliation. After all, the keys of the Revolution had been entrusted to the Party; Lenin had established its inevitability; so perhaps it
would inevitably be the ultimate leader and master of the Bolivian Revolution. (And the Party had the support of the chief socialist power of the world.)

I sat on my canvas ground cover, at some distance from the men. I could see that Jorge was excited. Jorge has hair all over his face now, but not a lot of it, and he played with the ends the way Debray used to (or, if he is alive, still does). Jorge was certain that the Party had been won over to our line by our victories, as I had said they would be. Monje, whom Jorge had once been ready to murder, had redeemed himself in his eyes—in part because Monje had shown himself adaptable to changing conditions. (What Jorge would previously have called unprincipled.) Adaptability, Jorge thought now, was a good Machiavellian trait, a necessity for the Modern Prince—and perhaps there was a criticism of me in this. Jorge is alert, and he senses how desperately we need the Party’s help.

Coco chimed with Jorge in excited agreement—Monje had been won over.

Monje had also spoken of the situation in the mines. It was clear from his words that the leadership was now chasing after the miners, who were far more militant than the Party, more fearless, and already galvanized by our actions. The miners are about to strike. This will be a heavy blow to the government. If, to save face with them, Monje has deceived the miners into thinking he has contact with us, is helping us, then his actions are criminal, he is a traitor, and no punishment would be too severe. He is leading them into a trap. But if the Party does supply us with men, in the next month the situation in Bolivia could be immediately transformed.

If only we had more men! The peasants have given us nothing, and so far show a profound incomprehension of our goals. It will take many more victories to win them over. For now the cadres must come from the cities.

But I remain firm that no men will leave the group to go to the city. I am far from certain about the Party’s sincerity. Monje seemed to me a thoroughgoing coward. Yet perhaps Jorge is right. Monje could not know of our separation from Joaquin, and how desperate things may soon be with us. Perhaps Monje now thinks the Party needs us far more than we need them.

6/22/67: Abrapa was a little settlement in the valley, ten adobe houses. Once it had been a big ranch, but all that was left of that time was a high brown wall with a scalloped center. The wall went across only one side of the village, and had a tall wooden door in the center.

The villagers waiting behind the wall wore white wool smocks with a line
of red thread near the waist. They looked like angels. Maybe they wore white because we had come on a festival day. There were signs of celebration. A big wooden board on two sawhorses had been laid before we arrived with thick clay plates of cold pork, chicken, tortillas, potatoes, corn and beans.

One of the villagers, a portly old man, danced forward to welcome the center guard. He almost sang his welcome! We must sit down! We must have some food! He had been waiting for us for a long time!

“How could he have known we were coming?” Inti asked his brother.

Coco shrugged, but I had overheard, so I told them how the ants connected us to the animals and to the Indians. The Indians could hear us in their blood.

The brothers turned away, because they don’t like me.

The food looked awfully good!

The portly man held his short arms wide. Since he had first heard of us, he said, he had had the feeling that he and Che would have a lot to say to each other. “You understand?”

Che stood open-mouthed in the hot sun. There were small stones all over the field in front of the houses, not as if they hadn’t cleared the field, but as if they had gone out and gathered stones to spread around. Che, standing among this harvest, looked slack, as if the man’s statements had hit him across the chest with a pole. Ponco, standing next to Che, started to smile, and then laugh like a child—a child with no voice—as if we were all his toys. Everything had been placed here to entertain him, made up for his amusement.

Che didn’t say anything to stop us, so the rest of us went and took the food with our hands. We were hungry. There had been no food for days, and we had had a hot dry march from the Rio Grande.

The other people in the village, the old people and children (for there are no young men in the Bolivian countryside), stood about as we ate, not speaking, silent white birds. We grabbed at the food they offered us, pushing each other aside, overturning the plates.

“Why are you so quiet?” Benigno asked one of the little boys. Benigno is a tall man, thin, but very strong, and handsome-looking.

“Pastor Barrera speaks for us,” the boy said, pointing to the old man who had been waiting to talk with us. “He is our mayor.”

I put a bottle of clear liquid to my lips, some of their liquor. Che shook his head no at me, so I put it down. Maybe the food was poisoned!

“Pastor Barrera is a generous man,” Coco said, chewing pork rapidly.

“Maybe it’s a trap,” I said. “Maybe we’re being poisoned.” I was passing on what Che had told me.

“Shut up asshole,” Ricardo said. Ricardo hates me. He hates everyone, but he hates Bolivians more and he hates me most of all.

After we had eaten, and arranged for food to be taken to the rear and vanguard groups, the mayor asked Che if he might talk with all of us.

“How does he know Che is chief?” Inti asked his brother. The Indians bewilder Inti. They are like a long march in the hot sun, so long, and so hot, that the world wavers in front of his eyes.

Coco shrugged. I knew that the mayor knew that Che was leader because he had seen Che control me with a shake of his head. The mayor saw that our bodies are connected to parts of Che’s body. But the brothers had been rude to me before, so I didn’t explain.

I wish I didn’t know these things! They make my head swell, and they make everyone hate me.

Pastor Barrera raised his right hand behind his ear. Everyone in the village grew quiet, as if he had put them into a trance. They are all connected to
his
body. “Look,” the mayor said loudly. He walked over to a big rock by the side of his house.

“An Inca rock,” Che said. “Six-sided.”

“Where’s the rest of it?” Inti asked.

“End of the empire,” Ponco croaked. “Bits and pieces.”