The Death of Che Guevara (8 page)

But despite my mother’s free and easy attitude, I was, at first, more my father’s child. Ernesto was my given name, named after my father, by my father, according to an Argentine custom that my mother (who hated the customary) was then too weak to protest against. (
And how did he feel when I changed my name to that nonsense syllable, a cry in the streets?
) When she left her childbed she refused to use his name, calling me instead Tete—supposedly to avoid confusion between myself and my father.

A confusion I did everything I could to encourage. I imitated him constantly, even to the harsh jokes he made about his wife, blunt remarks about the way she ate (too loudly, she chewed the way cows do, mouth open, it got on his nerves, how could he enjoy eating with her?—and a small orbiting voice added: Go moo, Mother). Or the way she wore her hair (too severely, it was unfeminine); or the way she kept house (a mess, with books and magazines all over attracting dust. It was bad for the child). My father was an anxious, angry man, but Celia was his equal in force. Tactically astute, she feigned indifference to his criticism. She didn’t care for his style of battle—crude complaint from an imagined vantage of moral superiority. So she waited till he was off guard—puffed up—and then struck. (For there were hard things to say about him. He was in the process of squandering her considerable inheritance in “cunning investments” in mate fields.) It was a fair fight—until her husband made an ally, one she loved and felt she had wronged. How could she reply to her son’s childish insults? Not until after I’d left home did I allow myself to think of the many evenings at dinner when my mother turned her body away from me—Go moo, Mother—so that I could not see her face.

Yet he did love her, too (though the rebelliousness, wit, and energy that had once been so attractive to him became a more uneven joy, I suppose, when he was the authority she turned on.—But he loved being the authority).

One day, I remember, when he was feeling close with her, my father wrote in chalk letters on the tall brown doors that led to the dining room: “This is what Ernesto Guevara said to his mother …” and then there followed some of my mean remarks, ones that even now I would rather not recall. It was
unbearable to me that the children who came to see us that day should see my father’s sign.

For those children were my mother’s friends as much as mine. On her walks downtown she recruited playfellows for me. Newspaper boys, her friends’ children, the maids’ children at her friends’ houses, caddies, shoeshine boys, they were all invited to come visit us. Perhaps this was a contemptuous gesture towards her parents, her upbringing, a way of shocking her friends—for she certainly wasn’t beyond using people that way. But there was something more to it: she liked gossiping with people from all over town, finding things out from them, adding to her never completed education. (Isolated and without theory, anything might be a clue to her nameless project.)

So it was a special shame to me that these children should see how I had treated her when they weren’t there. I cried in front of those chalk marks until I was overcome by a tightening in my chest. I vowed I’d never again be nasty to her (within a few days I’d broken my vow). But I cried most strongly because
he
had betrayed me. A hole had opened in the world, and I’d fallen through. For hadn’t I simply been doing what he did? And was there no safety in that either?

I was to be a son worthy of my parents, a prodigy (no matter how meager my abilities were). I was to become, as my father was, a doctor. But I would be a surgeon also, a famous man certainly, one who discovers the cures for many diseases.

When I was six years old my father began to prepare me for my calling, teaching me, each evening, a few of the bones of the body. We sat together on the deep white sofa in the living room, our thighs touching, holding across our two unequal laps the large red anatomy book my father had used in medical school. My father’s strong fingers, red and rough around the knuckles from so much scrubbing, outlined the pictures of the bones, and traced for me their gray spidery covering of musculature.

He pointed to places on his body, and asked me the names of the bones beneath. I rose from the cushions and paced about the room, swinging my arms back and forth as I recited the Latin words in a rapid singsong. It meant nothing to me. I didn’t want to imagine a connection between the shadowy pictures and the life beneath my father’s skin. (That would mean he could die!) But I learned the right responses, for my father, because it meant so much to him. Soon I could chant the names of thirty or so bones for my parents’ guests.

My parents took me everywhere with them, to educate me, to show me
off (and perhaps, too, they liked my company). I was entertained, when we still lived in Buenos Aires and they had money, by plays where I didn’t understand a word. But the ritual of showgoing, the feel of the plush seats, the lukewarm fruit juice, the bitter taste of the program that I chewed on during the show, all this pleased me (even though I had to sit more or less still). I told myself I would be an actor too, a great doctor-actor. I practiced for it by being the entertainment at parties, where Mr. Bones did his Latin routine, and was rewarded by the hostess with bogus praise and delicious greasy hors d’oeuvres.

I was invited, too, despite my precarious health, to stay up with my parents most of the night, to listen as they discussed the newspapers with each other. This newspaper reading was a serious business for them, was ritual, was their way of having commerce with forces greater than they were, of connecting themselves with a more impassioned life, with their nation, with history. I felt the pleasure and gravity in them as each evening they cleared away the dinner dishes, laid out their hot drinks and papers on the glass kitchen table. They were serious, even courtly with each other in the white stone kitchen. It would be a good time. There would be nothing said about how my mother chewed her food, or my father’s stupid investments.

My father, in a loose brown sweater with big wooden buttons, rocked back and forth in his wicker chair as he read from the paper to my mother and me. My mother, like me, couldn’t sit still while being read to, she had to be moving about, even when engaged in some essentially still activity—though she managed to confine her motion (or over the years it had been confined) to her hands. They fluttered about her constantly as her husband read. (I wanted to reach out, to trap her scarred hand, but I couldn’t; it might annoy him; I was only his assistant.) She bit her fingernails, ran her hand through her red hair, cut out something from one of the papers, tapped her leg with a pencil, dug the point into her thigh, reached for one of the dozens of black notebooks she had scattered across the tabletop, made a note to herself. She chain-smoked cigarettes, rarely using the ashtray, for she would forget in one of her argumentative gestures that there was something held between her long fingers, a cigarette burned down to a shaky gray worm. As she spoke her hands strewed ash on the glass table, on the stone floor, on her blouse—all her blouses had charcoal stains—or into her coffee. Not noticing, or not caring (it was the vitality she wanted, not the taste) she drank it anyway.

After the reading of an article my father strained a cup of mate for himself (he despised her “vile” coffee) and clipped the end of a cigar. Then one of my parents, usually my mother, analyzed the article for us, talked about the way it lied, the distortions it contained, the way the papers had been bought by Britain, the United States, part of the piecemeal dismemberment and auction of that fallen god, our country. My mother mocked whoever spoke in the article, Justo, Chamberlain, Blum, Roosevelt. She would turn him into, reveal him as, a raving fool. My father smiled, enjoying her performance. He puffed his cigar, filling the large stone kitchen with a foul earthy smell (an odor that permeated the history of my infancy, and still makes the events of ’33-35, when they occur in conversation, slightly distasteful to me. Small stoic, I never complained to him. And by the Spanish Civil War I was used to it, a veteran). Delighted by my mother I happily sipped up some mate through a silver straw that fit neatly into my own yellow and brown gourd.

The procedure was the same each night. The points made were usually the same points; the lies the government told, the same lies. And as a child I particularly liked the repetition, the energy summoned to frame the same wonderful remarks, turn the same figures into clowns with the same invective (fool, tool, puppet, traitor), the same mock accents (British, American, provincial Argentine), the same gestures of disgust: my mother pursing her lips, puffing out her cheeks till they were round and smooth, sticking out her tongue crookedly. History for me was my mother making faces. And yet, through it all, her thin face, her voice remained recognizably—but barely, barely—still my mother’s. That was the special pleasure of it for me as I danced about the table staring at her: the there and not-there, peekaboo from around the edges, then disappearing back into her mockery. As a little boy I liked the ritual of the evening, and it was only very gradually that I began to understand what any of it meant, this constant hopeless procession of villains, this nightly morality play of history—though the parade was meant in large part for my benefit, my education.

I walked round and round the glass table, trying to comprehend by movement what my parents were saying, until, brought low by fatigue, and my father’s cigars, I lay down on the cold whitewashed stone floor.

My father saw me down there, rubbing my eyes. “Ernesto,” he said, “this can’t be very interesting to you. I can see you’re tired. Time for bed.”

“But I
am
interested,” I said crankily. “I don’t want to go to bed. I
do
understand what you’re saying. I want to stay up with you.”

And when, as occasionally happened, I was sent to bed, I couldn’t sleep. The murmur of their impassioned voices, overheard in my bed upstairs, the
words hanging always on the edge of sense, was like a wall my whole body yearned to fling itself against, to break down, or batter myself into exhaustion and tears trying.

And really my parents wanted me to stay with them. So I made history my bedtime story, drifted off to sleep on the floor of the big white kitchen, listening to my parents’ voices. Even when I was too groggy to understand their meaning I loved to lie there watching my mother’s hands moving constantly, like two caged birds fluttering in the air before her face. My eyes closed and their words entered the texture of my dreams. I saw the Roca-Runciman Agreement (two fat men with oddly colored duck-billed caps), the vile General Justo (a fat black spider). I dreamt myself wasting away with Gandhi; the cold white stones my cheek lay against were my prison pillows. Or I wore the tall soft leather boots I’d seen on the soldiers in the city squares, ready to step out with the Eighth Route Army on the Long March.

When I awoke the next morning I was magically in my own bed, with three paper cigar rings on my fingers. I had survived another night’s acrid smoke, mate, irony, and shameful political betrayals.

The start of my schooling was a disastrous change for me. I was used to being stage center, with my own spotlight and an audience that was certain to admire my routines. In school the teacher misjudged me: she found me no more precious than thirty others. And the other children weren’t amused by me. I was weaker than they were, odd looking, with dark rings under my eyes and an invalid’s concave chest and stooped figure. Yet I carried myself as if I were special.
They
were indifferent to my knowing the bones of the body. They would not abide an attitude of superiority from someone physically weaker than they were. So they bullied me.

They pushed me about when we stood in lines, and I lost my place. They pulled my hair. (My mother had allowed me to grow it as long as I liked; I liked it down to my shoulders—so I could run my hands through strands of it as if they were blanket edges. My long hair and my habit of playing with it were more signs of my queerness, my fitness for being tortured.)

They stole my things. They made fun of my—and my father’s!—name.

“Here’s your cap, Ernesto Banana, Banana Guevara,” a freckled boy says with mock politeness, offering it to me. I reach for it, and the boy tosses it over my head to a friend.

“No, he doesn’t have it anymore,” the friend says, “I do.”

My chest constricts with sobs like hard glass bubbles, blocking my breath. Crying, I hurl myself at my tormentors, flailing out with my fists, windmill-style, hitting air. My body begins to shake with hatred, frustration, bewilderment. I want to hit them in the face, rip their flesh, make blood run from his freckled nose. The children, the schoolyard, blur. I am terrified, the world is shaking apart, everything trembles with my rage, everything is disappearing!

The freckled boy grabs my wrist and bends my arm behind my back, spinning me around. I scream with pain and fury. The boy pushes me over to the water basin. Another boy (I can’t see his face) pulls my head down hard by the hair. With the flat of his hand the freckled boy forces my face under the tap and runs cold water over me. I gasp desperately, spitting water and sputum, falling to the ground, no longer able to stand, clutching the dirt in my hands as if it would keep me from dying.

The other children stand around and stare, a blur of white smocks and imprisoning legs, the bad air incarnate. They watch an animal, howling in pain, rolling on the ground, trapped in the circle of their legs, with no control over himself.

The spectacle unnerved them. They ran away.

Soon asthma attacks kept me out of school one day out of three. I was far behind the other children, a complete rather than partial illiterate, classed, humiliatingly, with the other slow ones as barely worth the teacher’s attention. Lines of print filled me with bafflement and anger (
and in that anger was the remnant of my aristocratic heritage: this humiliation was unfair: I was special; I was entitled to understand
). If only they would let me walk around during lessons, as I walked around the tables at home, then I could learn! But in school we were forbidden to move about. We could not leave our seats without permission. We even had to hold our hands still in front of ourselves, on our desks. My understanding was blocked—for as some people have to draw a figure with their hands in order to understand it (though it is not the figure but the act of drawing that resolves the tension, brings understanding), so I had to have movement, the thought making its way through my body. I hated staying still when I didn’t understand something; I kicked my bare legs against the table legs, or twined them around the chair leg, I felt a fluttering start in my chest, I grew anxious, and flushed. Deprived of motion, I was deprived along with it of the ability to reason.