The Death of Che Guevara (87 page)

I was very glad to see him.

Ricardo, that stupid asshole, had led his group off to find cattle without leaving a sentry on the path. When he heard the dogs barking, and the firing from Benigno’s clash, he realized what had happened, that the army had set up an ambush ahead of him. So they cut a new way back through the woods.

Che was so relieved that he forgot to think of a suitable punishment for R.’s obvious gross criminal stupidity.

As we withdrew we heard the soldiers machine-gunning the place where we had camped.

Under a full moon, we marched all night to get away from the soldiers. The era of running away has begun. Che is certain that the army will think that we insist on the Masicuri region for supplies, or will wait for us farther south, towards the Nancahuazu.

On the radio, near morning, Jorge testified that Debray carried a gun. Debray said it was only because he sometimes went hunting.

“We will have to punish Jorge,” Che said, “as an example.”

Ricardo
laughed
.

9/10/67: Voice of America: The Bolivian Army today found the body of a woman guerrilla fighter called Tania, part of the band killed at a battle near the Rio Grande on August 31. Her real name was Haydee Tamara Bunkebider. Her body had apparently floated downstream and onto the shore, and was in an advanced state of putrefaction when it was finally discovered.

Her pocket diary, though, had been protected from the water by a leather pouch that she wore at her waist. According to the diary, the guerrillas had gotten lost and, unfamiliar with the Bolivian countryside, had been wandering aimlessly for months, hoping to stumble on the group led by the Argentine adventurer Che Guevara.

Tania was suffering from a fever, probably malaria, and complains in her diary that the other guerrillas refused to stop their ceaseless marching so she might rest. They held her responsible for their separation from Guevara. Tania writes of how they tormented her, waking her in the middle of the night, even threatening to rape her. She, in turn, said she would inform Guevara of the men’s treatment of her so that they might be suitably punished, and each of their offenses is carefully noted in her diary.

The Bolivian Army has been patrolling the Rio Grande since the foreign guerrillas were first spotted in the area, more than eight months ago. According to the captain in command at Vado del Yeso, Tania had been trying to surrender when she was accidentally killed by one of the soldiers. Her yellow
striped blouse, the only piece of feminine clothing that she wore, made her an easily visible target, even from a distance. She was killed while standing in the river, and her body floated downstream to its resting place, not to be discovered for many days.

Documents found in the small leather bag attached to her belt, and information now in possession of the Bolivian Investigatory Agency, reveal a tale about Tania that the other guerrillas must never have suspected. She was a double, perhaps even a triple agent. A colonel of the East German secret police who defected to the West only this year revealed that he himself had originally recruited Tania into his spy force, to keep watch on the Argentine Guevara, who was then a high-ranking official in the Cuban government. The Russians, the colonel says, were often at odds with Guevara about his planned military adventures in Latin America.

It is possible, the Bolivian Minister of Information announced today, that it was Tania’s mission here to betray Guevara, and to make sure that his expedition ended in defeat. This, the Minister said, would explain many otherwise very mysterious facts about Tania’s conduct. In Camiri, Bolivia, where Tania based her undercover work, she often strutted about the town with two Bolivians, the Peredo brothers, announcing jokingly to shopkeepers that she and her companions were guerrillas. In those days no one even dreamed of guerrillas in Bolivia. Why would she so needlessly draw attention to herself? Of course the Bolivian Army began to watch them. Tania must have known, too, that the movement of jeeps on the road from Camiri to the farmhouse where the guerrillas were located had drawn the neighbors’ attention, and that the police suspected them of being cocaine smugglers. Yet she conspicuously drove one of those jeeps about the town, and then simply abandoned it there.

The jeep was soon discovered by the Bolivian authorities, and a thorough search was made of its contents. The authorities found a number of incriminating documents, among them a list of the names and addresses of many of Tania’s urban contacts, parts of her spy network and those of a Cuban guerrilla, an agent of Guevara’s called “Ricardo.”

This discovery led the army to investigate further, reconnoitering in the vicinity of the Nancahuazu River on March 13 of this year. Ten days later another patrol, of thirty-two men, marched towards the suspected location of the guerrilla camp. The guerrillas laid an ambush and killed seven of the unwary soldiers, leaving their unburied bodies for vultures to eat.

But this ambush alerted the Bolivian High Command to the magnitude of the danger. General Barrientos, the President of Bolivia and Commander in Chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces, said today that the war began long before the guerrillas were ready. All the guerrilla bases are now in army hands.
The final defeat of the foreign mercenaries, General Barrientos announced, will come in a matter of days.

Credit for this complete defeat of the foreign-led guerrilla movement, President Barrientos added, belongs not only to the Bolivian Army, which has battled so tirelessly and so courageously, but also to the Bolivian people, who have rallied to the cause of liberty and once again demonstrated their faith that social progress can be made without recourse to violence, through Bolivia’s own democratic institutions.

9/10/67: Che says that it is all crap about Tania. He had had a thorough investigation of her made, in Cuba, and we can be sure of her complete integrity. It may be that she was killed at the Rio Grande, but the rest of it is just crap.

I had never heard him say “crap” before.

I said that Inti and Tania and I did not “strut” around Camiri, but were always circumspect. I looked over at Inti who was seated cross-legged on the ground, staring at his own lap. Could he have done something I didn’t know about?

No! Their propaganda corrodes even my faith in my own brother! I must not let it.

When we began to march again, Camba gestured at Che. “There’s blood running down your leg,” he said, trying to point at Che’s tattered pants. But he couldn’t keep his arm steady, and his finger moved up and down Che’s body, from his feet to his neck, and then off to the trees and vines and sky. “She was a witch. There was blood running down her leg. That’s why there’s blood dripping from your prick. Her blood smelled. The army smelled it. That’s how they got Joaquin. Now it will smell you, Che.”

Before he could say any more my brother took him aside and slapped him. I would like to knock the bones of his nose back into his brain myself and shut him up for good.

9/11/67: General Barrientos himself honored us with a speech on the radio tonight. Tamara Bunke—who was called Tania by the guerrillas—will get a Christian burial despite her murderous past, for she was pregnant when she died.

I looked about and several men—Coco and Ricardo among them—were counting out the months on their fingers. We parted in April. Could it be true that she was pregnant? Could it have been … No. It couldn’t. (We counted again.)

The enemy, Che said slowly, forming his words in pain, wants to turn the revolution into a romance called
Betrayed by a Woman
. A Hollywood movie instead of the miners’ massacre; imperialism; and the class struggle.

9/11/67: How did Wolfe know we were in the country so long before the first battle? Certainly
someone
had spoken too loosely.

But most of this nonsense will work for us. The people protected us but we were betrayed by one of our own, perhaps killed by one of them—killed after death, like a bandit by the police.

[July 3rd: Killed after death! He imagined himself already dead! “This will work for us”—he means after we’re dead. He already imagined our empty space filled by a story. He meant that the “nonsense” about Tania would be good for our story
.

His
story!

We
could still have gotten away
.

But it would have ruined his
endin
g. He sacrificed us to his story, the one he thought he could write in the minds of the peasants, his new theology of Heroes and Giants.]

9/12/67: Each day we move farther from the river. The landscape has changed as we have moved north into the mountains. Reddish-colored hills, nearly bare, with small clumps of woods where we camp. Most of the trees are twisted and half withered from lack of nourishment. The dusty rock-filled soil kicks into clouds as we move.

Maybe he has come to his senses now that Joaquin’s group is lost and is leading us towards Paraguay or Chile and away!

9/13/67: Today Che couldn’t march and rode the pack mule. Everyone has the same thought, though no one has wanted to speak it, as if saying it meant that one was responsible for what had happened.

Finally Moro spoke. “We are leaving the zone.” He meant: This is admitting Joaquin’s group has been killed. A simple sentence; a death sentence.

“Yes,” Che said, from muleback. “We are slipping. But we are entering a new stage of intensified contact with the army. Our victories will bring new recruits.”

So we are not going towards the border. We tasted the red dirt on our tongues, in our throats.

“Still,” he said, as if talking to the mule itself, “they couldn’t have wiped out the whole group. There will be survivors, and they will find us.”

In hell
, I thought.

9/13/67: A Budapest daily—Radio Moscow says—criticized Che Guevara as a pathetic and irresponsible figure. It hails the truly Marxist attitude of the Chilean Party, which assumes practical attitudes in the face of objective conditions. Guevara is a new Nechayev, who dreams of covering his continent in blood.

How I would like to take power, if only to unmask the cowards and lackeys of every kind, and rub their noses in their own dirty tricks!

9/14/67: A bad day. As we crossed one of the rivers not on any of our maps, my shoes fell from my hand and were carried away. I have bound up my feet as best I can with a bunch of rags and papers tied with pieces of string. This is not the sort of world yet where a man can take off his boots!

Isle of Pines, July 1968

Today I cannot bear to think of his life. Today I think there wasn’t one moment of
pleasure
in it. If Che was a ladies’ man, as they used to say in the mountains, then it was
without pleasure
. (Perhaps he—the hero—wanted them to say that he wasn’t a sickly ugly little thing. Or perhaps he was never
a ladies’ man and it was all lies.) He couldn’t hear music. And I don’t think Che ever saw a color; if he did see a color he certainly did not see a
shade!
The only physical sensation I think he ever had intimately, fully, was his first attack as a child, giving himself without thought to the painful struggle to breathe. But after that moment I swear he couldn’t hear, taste, see, feel—he was a doomed man, a dead man, already in the grave of his thoughts. He never loved anyone, any one person—certainly not me. He was always
talking
about love,
thinking
about love, trying to make it come out right, as if it were a problem not of the body, but of mathematics. “Altruism … anger … overcome by sharing the same condition, the fire of our continual suffering …”—all so much pigeon breath! Why couldn’t he want simply to hit someone (or kiss someone)? Why couldn’t he ever have been content with the way things look, smell,
are
in this imperfect perfect world? Why couldn’t he have even been unhappy the way we—the rest of suffering humanity—are unhappy, simply unhappy, jealous, just desiring a woman who betrays us or makes us angry, without some theoretical escape, some escape into theory, a special exit into philosophy, a scampering off into a dream of absolute identity, instead of just eating the sublime muck we’re served with
now
.

I
want
there to have been a romance between them. I
want
him really to have made Tania pregnant. He
was
the father. (Because
I
say so. Really, he wasn’t. None of us had the energy for that. There wasn’t any pregnancy.
But I will have it so.
)

When Tania told him she was pregnant his heart turned. Discovering this weakness that couldn’t be called a weakness but a strength beyond willing, he didn’t want to draw the lines more sharply. He wanted
simply
to embrace and protect her.

The first battle at the Nancahuazu River hadn’t occurred yet. They made love. (What would he have thought making love to her? About the problem of tenderness … about a time when there was something beyond this sham tenderness which was only an inward-turned violence, about a new identity, One Body? No!
I say that he just liked the feel of her body
. And then he found it perhaps a little … disappointing.)