The Death of Che Guevara (73 page)

Pastor Barrera said he would roll away the rock, and under it there would be a book.

He pushed the rock with one hand, but it was an enormous fellow, and of course it didn’t move. He made pretend grunting sounds, while he reached under it, and his hand came out with a package wrapped in an embroidered piece of cloth. There were red and blue and green threads in the cloth, and other colors, more than I could count.

Carefully, he unwrapped the cloth, and took out a book, worn, with a torn brown cover, and pages half falling out. The countrypeople laughed and applauded. They had seen this trick before; it was an old favorite. A little boy was so delighted that he punched my leg.

“I can read this book,” the mayor announced. He smiled directly at Che.

Che stood holding some of his beard in his hand, pulling on it. He didn’t smile back. The upper part of his body swayed in a little circle. Maybe he had eaten too fast.

“I believe you,” Coco said to the mayor.

The mayor asked if we didn’t want to hear him read?

Coco nodded. Coco is kind, but really he is like Inti and Che. He doesn’t realize that the Indians are the only ones who know the secret doors in the forest that lead out of here. Coco just humors them—to get their good opinion for us—as if they were the children.

The old man opened his book, and held it at arm’s length. “A specter is
haunting Europe,” he said in a ringing voice, “the specter of Communism.” Pastor Barrera’s eyes had many wrinkles around them, and his nose was covered with broken veins. He looked alight as he read to us.

The people of the village applauded and laughed.

“You’ve been reading Marx,” Che said, with genuine admiration. He had let go of his hair, and he stood steadily again. I wish men respected me as they do him!

The mayor told us that a Communist had given him the book many years ago, when he was a boy, during the Revolution. And we were Communists, too. And we had come to hear him read from this book, just as the first man had said we would. We had come to see if he had truly learned to read, to see if he had made himself ready for the Day of Change, for the Revolution.

The man’s small face lit more brightly still with his deep satisfaction in himself. He had passed his test.

The countrypeople smiled. They were proud of their mayor.

The Communist had told him that if he studied the book carefully he’d understand many things. The Communist was right. The mayor did understand things!

Che, too, beamed with satisfaction. At last he had met a reasonable man. The way had been prepared for Che, made smooth for us.

The man held the book to his face, half-covering his pocked lips. He smiled coyly from behind the dirty cover. I thought he looked like a picture I’d seen, a Japanese girl hiding behind her painted fan. In a sly mocking voice he said, “I don’t really know how to read.”

More tricks! Che put his fist in front of his face. He looked like the man was about to hit him, and he wanted to ward off the blow.

Did we want to know how he did it? the mayor asked in a high rapid voice. His eyes darted about my
comrades
(hah! really they hate me). Che looked over the mayor’s shoulder.

“Yes,” I said, though I shouldn’t talk. I’m not connected to Che’s soul. “How?” I thought it was a good trick.

He smiled. He had gone to a class after the Revolution, and they had heard the book read aloud. Then they had talked about it. And whenever he had had a job outside the village, or in Santa Cruz, building the roads, he had taken the book with him. When he had heard someone on the job say things he agreed with, he took the book out and showed it to him. He always knew which ones it would be safe to ask, for the Specter meant for him to learn, and it protected him.

“The Specter?” I asked. I knew that the man’s talk made Che unhappy, but I knew, too, that he had things to teach us.

“The Specter of Communism.”

Inti laughed in a melancholy way. He sounded like someone who had lost a lot of money.

The mayor would go off with his comrade, away from the bulldozers, behind the mounds of earth, and they would read a little of the book. He kept a special marker with him.

From out of the book’s pages he held up a small blue wand, and the villagers applauded.

“A ballpoint pen!” Che said. He hadn’t wanted to speak; his voice sounded like a cry, something struck from him by the pole that had swung into his chest before, when the man had said that he had expected us. Ballpoint pens must have special powers. (I will ask Che about it later, though I know he will despise me for asking.)

The ballpoint pen was the mayor’s
special marker
. If he heard a friend read a part he especially liked, he had him draw a line next to it. When the mayor met someone else who knew how to read he’d show him the passage with the line next to it, and have him read it. In a few years the mayor had the best words written in his heart. Now he loved to say them out loud to everyone.

The little boy gave my leg another blow. They liked to hear him read aloud, too.

“There are,” the mayor said, “many very true things in the book.”

Che’s face came alive again. He shone at the man, amazed, uncertain, delighted by his words. A dog had started to talk to him like a human being! “After the Revolution,” Che said in his high, kind voice, “everyone who wants to will be able to read, so they can understand things for themselves.” When Che speaks of the future he always sounds soft and sweet, as if he were caressing it.

The mayor smiled warmly at Che. But there was, I thought, something crafty and mean in his face, too. He was testing us. “Sometimes,” he said, “one book is enough to make a man understand.”

Che agreed. He turned to Inti. The people, he explained, need only be given a hint. A few words about imperialism, about the necessary struggle, and the circumstances of their lives teach them the rest.

Inti and Che like to please each other by repeating the things they already know.

The mayor explained that after a man understood things he didn’t need books anymore. The whole world was like a book to him, and he could read God’s thoughts.

Che’s face fell. He looked sick again; the man had turned back into a dog
and peed on his leg. Che couldn’t see that he and Pastor Barrera were saying the same things.

But Pastor Barrera didn’t notice Che’s disappointment. He said that he knew from what the radio had said about us that we would understand things. And that was the main thing—to understand things. For we all became like the rocks in the end.

The crowd nodded sorrowfully.

“No,” Inti said. He spoke up to the sky in that sorrowful way of his. Inti is like Che—he can’t listen, not even to an angel. “We don’t agree. We must act also. There are accounts that must be settled.” Inti is the most intimately attached, because he is connected to Che’s soul. He can be Che’s mouth.

Accounts to settle? The mayor was shocked. Crinkly lightning came from his eyes, flash! flash! flash! I put my hands in front of my face, to keep from being burned. My hands smelled of pork.

The lightning drove Inti backward.

I held my hair up with my hands to show the mayor that I had understood him.

“Things are never really settled,” he said angrily. “They must go on over and over forever,
THAT IS WHAT THE BOOK SHOWS!”

The people of Abrapa looked at the field of dust and stones. Why would anyone dispute with Pastor Barrera?

“No,” Che said. He turned away from the mayor, towards the people. “The children of your village,” he said, “die from diseases that could be cured.…” He stopped and pushed his chest forward, for his lungs hurt him.

The mayor’s hands formed into fists at his sides, and the thick veins stood out on the backs. “You don’t understand,” he said. He was disgusted. We had called ourselves communists. He had thought that we had come to hear him read. We had deceived him. “Look!” he said, his voice patient again. “You and your men are all worn out.”

That was true, I thought, looking about me. Our skin was covered with dirt and cuts. Moro’s arm was in a sling. Many of the men looked like paper cut-outs about to fall to the ground.

We had marched down the road into the village, Pastor Barrera said, and we were hungry. The food was already there for us, waiting. We ate something at their table, and then we marched away. They had set the table for they had known we were coming. They knew that we would leave. They knew that we would come back again, so they had a table always set for us. We said, Accounts must be settled with the rich! And the countrypeople thought we were the Messiah. And we made the Revolution. The people were living in their village again. It had begun all over. Someone marched into their village covered with
dust and hungry, and he said, “The time has come for us to settle accounts with the rich!” The way for redemption was to follow him. And he was telling the truth! The mayor himself could feel it in his words, he could see it in the saviour’s face, for it would glow as ours did. So he and the others followed him.

The saviour was coming. He walked down the road towards us now, into their village. He ate at their table with his men. No, he wasn’t there yet. He was about to come into their village. The mayor could see him on the road, walking with his men, raising a cloud of dust around themselves as they stamped the ground in fury. He was always about to arrive. He was always right at their big doorway. He was about to say, Accounts must be settled. He was always eating with them. No, he wasn’t. He and his men had just gone. They had always just left the village, just this minute, they were on their way down the road. We could get a glimpse of them. Look at all that dust! The saviour comes over and over again. Everything must happen over and over again.
NOTHING WAS EVER SETTLED? THAT WAS WHAT THE BOOK TAUGHT!

Pastor Barrera, mayor of Abrapa, bobbed his head up and down, in profound agreement with himself. His head was barely attached to his neck, like a doll’s head on a spring.

Many of the heads in the crowd, men and women and children, went up and down, too. I tried to make my head go the way his did, with a palsy. I wanted to see things the way he did; it would mean that I wasn’t here anymore, in this terrible valley, so far from home, outside this adobe house—but far away from here, in a better place. I would inhabit all the bodies that he had named,
that were all my own body
, and it would be impossible for the soldiers to kill me, for they would have to kill each and every one of my bodies at once, and some of them were already, and some of them were not yet.

The mayor told Inti and Che that if they lived as long as he had—but I think he was really only a few years older than Che!—then they, too, would understand things. He had thought that they were
communists
like himself, and that they knew that it was first one person’s turn, and then another’s. But no, apparently they couldn’t see that. He was sorry—and he did sound deeply, sadly regretful; he was giving us some very bad news—but he was now certain that it was impossible for us to understand things. It was our time to do our violent work, as he had once done, so we couldn’t be like he was now, standing at the side, watching, seeing things clearly. We had to think that it all
mattered
, that it was done once and for all, that it
settled accounts
.

Slowly, ceremoniously, making gestures as broad as a priest’s, he took the cloth from the top of the rock and wrapped up his book again. He took the bottle of chicha from the table and sprinkled a few drops on the package before putting it under the rock.

I was thinking of a carnival I’d been to once in La Paz. There was a huge barrel, bigger than a room, turned on its side, and dozens of us stood inside it. The barrel spun around. It was hard to keep your footing, and if you fell over, other people would trip over you, or you might fall over them. But maybe it was our feet moving around, stepping this way and that to stay upright, trying to settle accounts, that kept the barrel moving!

I thought of our long march, up the Rio Grande, and back to Muyupampa, and back to Nancahuazu, and then up to the Rio Grande again, and it was like being in that barrel that went round and round; everything did happen over and over, the heat and the starvation, and the vines we had to rip away to keep our balance, they were all the side of the barrel. But you couldn’t just get out, for the people in the barrel and the barrel itself would roll right over you. We would have to get everyone to agree that accounts couldn’t be settled; then we could stop at the same time. But they wouldn’t believe we would do it, they would think it was a trick to make them stop dancing as fast as the barrel and fall down so we could laugh at them. So I would have to get off alone, the way Pastor Barrera had, at just the right time, so the barrel wouldn’t crush me. I would have to learn when the right time was.

Pastor Barrera was speaking with Che still. He told Che that he must have visions of his own, ones that comforted him and his men. Che looked away very rudely, pretending not to listen. His breathing got worse and worse, grinding away, like it was grinding up his insides, and when it was all done there would be no Che left.

The mayor, wanting to be friends, said that he and Che were alike, that they were both connected to the very center of things, both in their proper places.

“No,” Che said. It was hard for him to speak. His words came out like a slight breath of wind, the merest thing. But he wanted things to be clear with the old man, with the people of the village.
He wanted to settle accounts
.

Pastor Barrera was furious. He recoiled a step from Che, and tripped over one of the small stones. He put out his hands for balance, and he looked so much like a plump little angel that I thought he would float away.

The people of the village gasped, and in fear the little boy hit me again.

I went to Che and put my arm around his shoulders to help him keep his balance. “Why does he hide his book under a rock?” I asked.

“What shit,” Che said with weak anger. He must have been very upset, though, for he almost never curses.