The Death of Che Guevara (90 page)

THE END.

A white light fills the screen. No end credits.

They weren’t wearing coats, so there’s nothing to gather up but their gray umbrella. They file down the aisle to the exit.

The night air is warm. They have parked by the Causeway, near the ocean. Ernesto puts his arm around Tamara, gathering her under the umbrella as a light rain starts to fall.
A veritable land of Cockaigne, where all is beautiful, rich, tranquil, honest; where luxury is pleased to mirror itself in order; where life is rich and sweet to breathe; where disorder, turmoil and the unforeseen are excluded; where happiness is married to silence; where the cooking itself is poetic, rich and stimulating at once; where all resembles you, my dear Angel

“What did you think of it, my dear Angel?”

She smiles at him, as if this were a new pet name, and she puts her hand out in front of her. Her hand wavers up and down. “So-so.” For a moment
she loses her footing as if water were pulling at her legs, but his hand around her shoulders steadies her.

They agree. It wasn’t that good. It was mere rhetoric, not a real imagination of their dying.

“See on these canals,” he says, “These ships sleeping / In vagabond spirit / It is to fulfill / Your last desire / That they come from the ends of the earth. / The setting suns clothe the fields, / The canals, the entire town / In hyacinth and gold / The world falls asleep / In a warm light.”

It can’t be done. By the end Ernesto was Che only, without possibility of change, without even the possibility of “descending.” In one of his adolescent notes he wrote, “To be a revolutionary, finally: to create in one’s own life the conditions so that there is no life outside the Revolution, so that if the Revolution does not win, you die.” He cannot be translated; not there anyway, to the land of Cockaigne, to the life of luxury, of “petty” jealousy, of physical love—
of love!
“Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize their love for the people, for the most hallowed causes, and make it one and indivisible. They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the terrain where ordinary men put their love into practice.”

Descend. Or rise.

Anyway, he had his way. I cannot even imagine him doing it without it all—him, and the world he is woven with—becoming
absurd
.

Bolivia, September 1967

9/15/67: Pacho declared that he is tired of being bossed around by Cubans. He threw his knapsack into the dirt and pounded on Benigno’s thin face with his fists—like a young girl having a tantrum—blackening our machine-gunner’s eye. Inti and Coco separated them.

Sadly, it was not only hysterical, but unfair; Benigno is surely the mildest and least bossy of any of us.

9/16/67: The once fat Peruvian, Eusebio, says that the Bolivians are pigs. They eat up all the food. “They steal extra meals for themselves. They help each other out. They give each other extras.”

We sat on the ground, cleaning our rifles, talking. “And you, Che,” he said, “you let them get away with it.”

9/17/67: Eusebio rushed into camp, in the small valley, to announce that soldiers were coming around the bare brown hill ahead of us.

We scrambled about collecting our knapsacks.

“How many?” Che asked.

Eusebio, struck suddenly dumb, held up a hand and showed five fingers. He kept his other hand up, too, showing a fist. Was that a zero? Eusebio’s eyes looked suddenly blank and lifeless.

Che sent Benigno to look. The soldiers turned out to be ghosts, a hallucination.

“He’s psychotic,” Ricardo said to me, by way of showing off his clinical vocabulary.

Che took Eusebio aside as we prepared to march, packing the mule with the little firewood we’d been able to find. Eusebio swore that he wasn’t worried, that he knew we’d get out all right. But he hadn’t had any sleep because of the punishment Che had given him. (Eusebio had fallen asleep at his post, allowing the soldiers to attack us in camp a week ago. And he had denied it, so he’d been given six days’ extra duty.)

9/18/67: Che talked with Pacho on the march. A little fellow, Pacho is worried by our lack of contact with the city, but remains, he says, firm in his commitment to country-or-death until the end.

Eusebio, skin hanging loosely on his neck, took me aside and begged me to speak to Che about taking him out of the vanguard. “I can’t get along with Ricardo,” he said. “The man is a monster.”

I saw his point. I spoke to Che, but he refused to do it.

9/19/67: Ricardo, the monster, had another run-in with Eusebio; perhaps he’d gotten wind of Eusebio’s complaints—Ricardo can smell that kind of thing. Ricardo says that Eusebio called him an asshole, so he gave him another six days’ punishment of guard duty. Che respected Ricardo’s decision, though no one thinks it is just. (After all, R.
is
an asshole.)

Eusebio accused Benigno of taking an extra meal. Benigno admitted that he had eaten some suet from hides.

9/20/67: Moro says that the men complain of him unfairly. He can’t walk well because of malaria. And indeed Benigno screamed at Moro this morning that he was holding everything up, that his delay would kill us all.

The Bolivian radio reported that sixteen members of the underground network in La Paz have been arrested, among them Loyola Guzman, their leader. In her apartment they claim to have found a list of the guerrillas’ city contacts—though I think she was a good intelligent person, and unlikely to keep a list lying around.

Still, the news had a demoralizing effect, like acid dissolving our bodies, lacerating into pieces the One Body of the guerrilla.

Pacho said that Marcos stole fifteen bullets from his magazine, because Marcos knows the army is about to attack and doesn’t want Pacho to be able to defend himself. Pacho has sinister close-set eyes if you ask me, and speaks only to make trouble. He has run-ins with all the Cubans. Fortunately, the other Bolivians think he is as crazy as Camba and Eusebio and pay no attention to him.

9/21/67: Camba said that Benigno had allowed peasants to see him and had let the peasants leave the area. This seemed unlikely, but Che asked Benigno about it anyway.

Benigno admitted that it was true, and began to cry.

Che struck him across the face. Poor Benigno! “This is treason,” Che wheezed.

Benigno continued to sob throughout the night.

9/22/67: Camba came up to me on the march today, as we clambered up one of the ravines that line the hillsides. He whispered in my ear, “She put his genitals right where his nose was. In the middle of his face. And then led him around by the nose.”

“Whose?” I asked. “What?”

“No one’s,” Camba said. “Everyone’s.” He looked disappointed in me for not understanding and then walked away, to the side of us. Of course I had understood.

9/23/67: Alto Seco. At five in the morning, when the early risers went about their business, they found us already occupying their town. I asked one of the peasants on the way to his fields where the phones were, and was directed to the magistrate’s adobe house. (We took the peasant with us, since Che says no one is to leave the area.)

I walked in on the magistrate’s breakfast, and cut the line.

The magistrate, a short man of about forty, smiled at us from his wooden table. “It hasn’t worked for weeks.”

A little later Che arrived with the center guard. He rode down the dirt track of the little village on our new pack mule. He can hardly walk anymore, and Marcos had to help him dismount.

Che had us set up sentry posts around the town. The place has about ten small adobe houses with red tile roofs. The peasants, most of them mestizos, looked out from the openings of their houses.

The center guard set up at the edge of town in a half-destroyed house—it had no roof—near the watering place.

The mayor, one of the peasants told us, had left last night, for Vallegrande, the army staging area, to inform on us. Inti and I went to the mayor’s two-room house, which had a little wooden counter in the front room with cigarettes, candy, tins of mentholated vaseline, candles, etc. I stuffed all the merchandise into my knapsack as a reprisal for the mayor’s treason.

His wife, Sara, cried when I loaded up the things. “In the name of God,” she said, “you must pay for those things. That is how we earn our living. You can’t take those things from us! Our children will starve!”

I told her that her husband was an informer, and that he and his whole damn family should rot in hell with all those who have betrayed Bolivia.

Inti, calmer than me as always, said, “Your husband is mayor. You are the town’s richest family. Apparently your husband cares more for the government than for the people of his town. So let the government pay him.”

“Let President Barrientos pay him,” I said. “Let the Pope pay him,” I said, nonsensical from anger.

The woman wailed, but we would not relent.

Elsewhere in town we had acquired some pork and a few eggs. These we paid for, of course. Ricardo tried to pay in U.S. dollars, but the shrewd townspeople weren’t having any of this invaluable hard currency and insisted
on our own worthless pesos. We took our booty back to the abandoned house and spent the rest of the morning cooking. We have moved really very high up into the mountains, though the Andes still tower above us on every side, covered with snow. Water, Ponco pointed out to me, boils very quickly.

9/23/67: After a fine breakfast we went back into the town. The peasants greeted us with a mixture of fear, awe, and their new curiosity, which seems strong enough to overcome their timidity. They go so far as to touch our arms, and want to examine our hands, perhaps for magic rings, perhaps for blood.

I talked with some of the townspeople, and a few children. There is a school here for the first- and second-graders of the area. One of the older boys, a bright-eyed lad of about fifteen, told me that the schoolmaster was a terrible fox, and not to be trusted. I said that I would keep an eye on him. The boy helps his family work their land on the mountainside, and sometimes joins the labor gangs that go into the valleys. His family’s land is very rough—all stones he said—and they don’t have enough to eat. I told him about socialism as we have made it in Cuba. There everyone shares tools so that the most advanced methods can be used. And the work, too, is shared by everyone, so no one does all the work for others, the way it is in Bolivia.

“Do the Heroes work?” he asked.

“I worked in the fields sometimes,” I said.

He was disappointed, and looked away from me.

“But they thought I was better working with my head. We will make a world where everyone works at what he is really best at, no matter where he is born. Even in a little village like this. And where everyone takes what he needs to live, but no more than that. All will offer their work to the Giant each day, to the Nation, so that it might live and be strong and watch over all of us who live within it.”

9/23/67: At eight-thirty, as the last light fled to the mountaintops for safety, we organized a meeting in the school, a two-room building, as usual collecting the townspeople by showing our guns, so that they wouldn’t be implicated. But they seemed willing, even eager to come with us.

About forty peasants sat on the dirt floor, most of them wearing the long caps of the region, with ear flaps that make them look like cartoon characters to me. Some of the older peasants had come with loads on their backs in large
white blankets that were tied around their foreheads; maybe they expected to do some trading after the meeting. These traders took off their rubber sandals when they entered the mud shack, though the floor must have been very cold.

Inti spoke first. “You must think we are mad to fight like this. The army says that we are bandits. But they are the bandits. We fight for you, the ones who work and earn little, while the soldiers who hunt us, who slaughter the miners, get high wages from their Yanqui masters. You work for them, and what have they ever done for you? Nothing.

“Today my brother cut the telephone lines to keep the soldiers away, and the magistrate said, ‘It doesn’t work anyway.’

“Here you don’t have a doctor. You don’t have a decent school. You don’t have electric lights. You have been completely abandoned, like all Bolivians. That is why we fight. We ask you to join us, for we cannot succeed without your help. We ask you to join us to free our country, to fight with us for the final overthrow of Barrientos and the generals who work for the Yanquis.”

Inti spoke in a slow sad unmodulated voice, hopeless for recruiting, but even he felt that the ending of a speech required some special rhetorical emphasis. So he lifted his rifle up over his head. This was greeted by a gasp from the audience, who may have thought that despite his reassuring words we intended to shoot some of them.

Then Che spoke. He, too, had interpreted their gasp. “We want you to come, to join yourself to the body of the Giant and live within his immortal life. But it must be of your own free will, not by force, or the Giant will not have you.”