The Death of Che Guevara (94 page)

Dogs barked. There is a high barren field at the edge of the ravine.

I cleared the pus from Marcos’s wound, and I injected him with painkillers. When he is unconscious Marcos moans, troubling our sleep.

Eusebio woke with a white-ridged tongue, like the boy who lived across the street from us. How far I have come!

10/6/67: Our explorers found water in a ravine farther away. We went there and cooked all day long, under a big ledge.

On the radio they claim that Debray says he was not a guerrilla, but a reporter only, and never carried a rifle. He has called Che Guevara an adventurer, and not a true Marxist. A crowd in the background called for Debray’s death.

Perhaps—if the story is true—Debray will have a good reason why it must be this way and no other. Or will this be the first time he recognizes the irrational power of brute force, its ability to make things happen that go counter to the march of history, that cannot be recouped by theory, that don’t work to some good end? And if it could do that once, to him, couldn’t it perhaps do it over and over, and triumph in that black senseless endless meaningless night that is one possible conclusion to history?

The day was spent bucolically, without complications, until an old woman herding her goats came into the canyon where we are camped, but farther down, to get water. Ponco and I followed her to her hut.

10/6/67: A child watched us from the corner of the shack. I say “a child,” though she looked about twelve. Her eyes were dead. She was an idiot. She put dirt on her head, beat her fists together, and pushed her hands into her mouth. Her clothes were smeared with dirt and shit.

The old goatherd gave us a looking-over. “Welcome to our house,” she said impassively. “You don’t look well.”

She was right.

“It’s been very difficult,” Che said. He poked his hand in at his waist, spreading his fingers. “We have not received enough to eat.”

He’s presenting us as charity cases, I thought. A new line! “You are the guerrillas.”

“Yes.”

“What is your name?” This fat woman was too curious, I thought.

“Some people,” Che said, “my parents especially, called me Ernesto. Most now call me Che.”

I was surprised to hear how calmly he talked to the woman. I wanted to get food from here and run. I am terrified all the time now, and pray with every step I take that God may save me. We are all desperate and would scream at each other, but are afraid that the army would hear us. Che, though, grows calmer every day. He has no more bursts of temper; he has, as he promised, “modified.” But I find his calm, as he sits at our center, horrifying.

The woman said that Che was very fortunate to have two names. People with two names, she had noticed, lived practically forever. It is difficult for death to find them. He’s confused by the two names. He says, “I’m looking for someone named Ernesto.” And all things say, “There’s no Ernesto here, sir, only someone named Che.”

“But,” she sighed, sitting down behind her table in a little wooden chair, “you shouldn’t have told me your secret name. Death has many creatures that work for him, and they may have overheard.”

It’s not enough of a trick, I thought at first, having two names, death being a clever fellow, after all, with North American advisers. He’ll see through it after a while. Then I was angry with Che for giving away his secret name. Maybe it was bad luck.

Still, Che has a lot of names, some that only I know. Adolfo Mena, Ernesto Banana, Banana Guevara.
I
would never tell death (though maybe he has ways to compel me to speak the truth).

And there’s one more name that even I couldn’t tell death, the one his mother wanted to give him, before his father named him. So maybe, I thought, we were safe. (You see, I
believed
her for a moment, I was that far gone into my fear. It made sense to me. Death, after all, is what gave us our real names back.)

“But you are a Hero,” she said, “you can only be killed by an ax in the head. One that has been kept a year in a dish with the first ear of corn, blessed by a priest on All Souls’ Day, and over which twelve Masses have been spoken by twelve saints. The Giants protect you.”

Again I had the feeling that she was making it up as she spoke,
and
that
she believed it as thoroughly as if she were describing the color of a stone she held in her hand.

It was good news, I thought at the time. Where would they find twelve saints in Bolivia?

“Still,” she added, “you’ll be safe even from that if you follow the signs.”

“We have followed the signs,” Che said, “but though we lived for the people, they were weak-willed and afraid to help us.”

Again, he wants to shame them.

“Well, why did you start all this fighting?” she said, suddenly angry with us. We stood in front of her table, and her tone made me feel like a child at school. Not that I’ve been to one, though. “Why have you gone around our country killing our soldiers? I’ve heard about that. You’re a bloody man. You’ve killed thousands of Bolivians. You say you have a bloody hand.”

Their crazy talk is driving me mad—Che and the Indians are in league together! Even the women’s bowlers are part of their effort to be senseless!

“Yes,” Che said, “and I will be avenged by the courageous ones who follow us.”

Follow us? Did he mean the men? Or the ones who would come … later.

“I have fought for Bolivia,” he said. “And we have killed only those Bolivians who are slaves to the North Americans, the ones who keep you countrypeople poor. We have fought so that children like yours will have enough to eat.” He pointed to the girl on the floor, who was now putting dirt on her head. “If she had had enough meat or eggs to eat when she was younger she would be fine now. And after the Revolution there will be a place where she can be properly cared for.”

The old woman smiled, changing the map of her wrinkles like a country suffering an earthquake. “She eats enough for three as it is! And she can stay here with me. We take care of the goats together.” She was angry again, by the time she finished, thinking Che had accused her of negligence. “Anyway, you’re foolish. You want to give her food when you don’t have enough for yourself.” She looked at her little saint, the kind taxi-drivers in my country which I pray to God I will see again used to keep on their dashboards. He stood in a little bowl that floated in a larger plastic bowl of water. White candles burned alongside it.

“But I can see you are a good man,” she said, after consultation with her saint. “I want to give you something. You have difficulty breathing.”

“Yes,” he said, “I have asthma.”

Even a weak man can be terrible, I thought to myself, or a fat woman—for this fat woman scared me. She could betray us to the army. Now we must take her with us.

The woman looked blank at the word “asthma.” “If you have five bolivars,” she said, not to be distracted from her business, “I can help you breathe. It will cure your as …”

“Asthma.”

“Yes. That. The recipe came to me in a dream. I have had all the saints bless it.”

“I don’t believe in your saints,” Che said. “Or in your Christ. He is not for us. We are for each other.”

And for the Giant, I thought. And I hoped He, at least, was for us.

“Impossible!” she said to Che’s blasphemy. “You are a good man!”

“And if I don’t have five bolivars?”

“But of course you have them!”

“Why? Do I look like a rich man?”

No, I thought. You look like a dead man. My own thoughts made me chill. My body trembled. I hope to God I don’t have malaria!

“You look richer than me,” she said, matter-of-factly. Clearly she thought Che was trying to get her price down and wasn’t having any of it. “You have so many things, you even carry some of them strapped to your back, like a turtle. And you have a rifle.”

And so we could just take your fucking salve, lady, I thought. Why the hell were we spending so much time on this crap?

Che gave her a wad of bills, and she held out her hand to him. When she opened it to reveal the secret, there was a small tin in the center of her palm, about the size of a quarter.

It was mentholated vaseline, the kind sold in all the Indian markets.

Che laughed, a little wheeze that sounded to my ears lamentably like Ricardo’s. I didn’t see the humor in this bag of shit’s cheating us, the dishonest crone.

But Che opened his shirt right there and spread the grease all over his chest. You could see his ribs poking through his skin, I thought, as they soon would. You could see mine, too, I suppose. Why are
his
more pathetic than mine? Why do I weep for
him
instead of myself? I fear for myself, I thought, but I mourn for him.

“It will take five or six days to work,” she said. “You must use it every night. If it doesn’t work bring it back to me.”

“If it doesn’t work,” I said, “we’ll be back to get our money.” I wanted her to know that we would have our eyes on her.

She flinched from my voice, the bitch.

“Your money? No, I will give you special prayers that will make the salve work.”

Che asked if she could sell us some coffee.

For another ten bolivars she offered us some grounds. Then she reconsidered. We could have them for nothing if we wouldn’t judge Bolivians so harshly.

“You will judge yourselves,” Che said, unrelenting. “And you will see that you have failed all those who wanted to help you. And if you have failed, then it is you who must make it right again, by helping yourselves, and completing their work.”

So it all can begin again, I thought, as it was, as it will be forever, amen, everything in its proper place.
Except us
. Being under this stony ground was not the proper place for me, and it was where I was going.

“You must not tell the army we were here,” I said, “or the Giant will spit you out. And we will be very angry.”

She laughed, the nervy fat bitch! “Angry? My child and I aren’t afraid of you. Look how thin you are,” she said to me. “And you can hardly breathe properly,” she said, pointing at my chief. “My child and I aren’t afraid of anybody. But the army has never done anything for us. We won’t be among those who have abandoned you.”

That word again!

Che thanked her.

She took his hand across the table, and touched it to her wrinkles and furrows. She wouldn’t touch my hand. She could feel how I hated and feared her.

“May the saints be with you,” she said to Che, but tonelessly. Had she received some unfortunate augury from his flesh?

She handed him a pot made out of red clay but shaped exactly like a gourd with knubbly bumps. It had the coffee grounds in it. “You can have the grounds,” she said, “but not the pot.”

Che took what was left of a copy of
State and Revolution
from his knapsack—the last book he had taught us—ripped out another page, and wrapped up the grounds.

“You don’t have to pay me for it,” she said, looking down at the wood of the table. “But you could leave something for my saint.”

“Your saint means nothing to us,” Che said. I didn’t want to hear another theological argument! “But we will leave something for you and your child.” He put another huge wad of bills down by the little plastic bowl.

On the way back down the ravine, our hidey hole, I told him that we should have taken her with us. But he said no, that we could trust her.

10/7/67: We camped near the bottom of the Churo ravine. Willy unpacked the tin pot from his pack, and we scooped up some water from the clear stream that runs through the ravine. The water disappears during the hot day, and returns at night.

I took the well-used discolored grounds from Lenin. Willy filled the pot with cold water and brought it to a boil over our little brush fire. I dumped in the grounds, let them steep for a while over lower heat, tapped the container hard against a rock to settle the grounds.

Rolando tasted the coffee first. Not Rolando. He was dead. Eusebio. He needed the liquid.

We passed the coffee from hand to hand in a tin cup. Everyone took a few sips and passed it on. It tasted like heaven, bitter, but hot.

Isle of Pines, July 1968

A happy moment for him—sharing coffee with us, his comrades. So he did manage a moment of pleasure for himself—without the need of my imaginings, my land of Cockaigne—managed a swallow of pleasant bitter hot liquid on a cold night, warm beyond theory’s ability to dream of. I remember now that he had told me of a time like that in Cuba, during the long difficult march, when he and Camillo’s forces had split the island in two. He had, he said, “thrown himself upon the world, riding the tossed coin down. The world buoys you up.” I would like to add: Well, sometimes it does. But that misses the point, for the issue isn’t living or dying, but being altogether in love with the turning of the world, whether it’s into darkness or light, in love with fate, beyond caring about the outcome. Not the gambler, on the ground, who waits to see the result of the toss, but the coin itself, spiraling downward, all eyes upon it.