The Death of Che Guevara (98 page)

“People like you,” the prisoner said, “have poisoned the air.”

Fuck you and your nonsense! Teran thought. Fuck you fuck you fuck you!

“In any case,” Guevara stammered between gasps of air, “you have only come To kill Me.”

“No,” Teran said soothingly, half believing his own lie for a moment, just as he half believed himself when he would promise to take care of my mother and me, to drink less, to get a job, to stay away from my friends. “I won’t hurt you. Please. Look, I’ll untie your hands.” Why did he care, he wondered, what this dead man thought of him? He wasn’t Teran’s judge, after all. Why should he want Guevara to approve of him? He didn’t, he thought furiously, he didn’t care. Fuck him. Fuck him in the ass! Fuck him to hell! But why couldn’t Che see his kind intention in undoing his bonds, why was his gesture refused? It made him angry. Teran was kind—kind, anyway, within the larger madness of their situation. He had to understand that, after all, he’d brought this on himself, that it wasn’t Teran’s fault.

Teran clumsily undid the thong, fumbling at the knot, freeing Che’s hands. Dried blood and dirt flaked off as Teran received Che’s thrilling touch.

“You are killing a man,” Guevara said, barely able to get out the words.

“But you,” Teran said, “have killed many men.”

No. Teran walked a few feet towards the door, to the square of pale, criss-crossed light and shadow. There he turned and fired twice into the prisoner’s chest, his poor stinking painful chest.

His asthma was the bullets already there, a spectral pain all his life long, now made real; the awful history of the continent already present in his lungs, moving towards this leaden realization.

No. That’s nonsense. But his asthma brought him to this place. He wanted it to be a sign: as if the asthma had wanted the bullets, to give the grief of our continent a name, something outside him and inside him at once, always. Well,
maybe it wasn’t a sign, but a problem. It made him will himself into what he had become, the revolutionary will itself, his self-creation, which could only have this ending.

No. We might have won after all. Then what would he have done?

Oh shit, I’m trying to imitate him, trying to run off into metaphysics.

Che jumped and jiggled in the air and arced like a hooked fish, doing a dance so ugly that if you saw it you couldn’t possibly take your eyes from it, it was that profound, and that right, the appropriate ending to his life, as if he had imagined the whole thing backward from this ridiculous jiggly motion that would transfix your gaze if only you had seen it, hypnotize you, until you, too, wanted to make those terrible motions. Che stuffed three fingers in his mouth, and bit down on them to keep himself from screaming. One finger he bit right through to the bone, filling his mouth with his own blood as he died, blood that soaked his hand

his bloody hand
.

And as he died he saw himself. Not as a store dummy speaking Quechua, urging Indians to rebel; and not as the star of a Hollywood movie; not as a doctor who had discovered the cures for a dozen otherwise fatal diseases, a hero of medicine whose life was shown in serial episodes in the Cordoba movie theater, not as the Prince of Argentina, or a great violinist, or a child made of magical clay brought to life by the potter’s love and longing; and not as an ascetic saint of nonviolence in a loincloth, marching to get some salt by the seashore; and not as a case history (the asthma of course, the central trauma), his body writhing then on a couch instead of a schoolhouse floor; and not as the main character, hardly even a hero, in the ambiguous story told by some North American, where he would turn and turn about as the winds of History turned and excited the author’s angers and fears; not as any of those things, and not as a man with a robe of hummingbird feathers, or a man sacrificing a llama, wearing condor wings, or angel wings or a crown of thorns (certainly not that!) or with light streaming from every orifice; no, he didn’t see himself as any of those things, he saw himself as whole, not only unwounded but well, always well, as he had never been well, not for one stinking moment of his wretched life; first he saw himself as a strong healthy infant, who watched his mother go into the sea, and waited patiently, without fear, unnervously, without ambition, for her return, and then as a young boy, about to go swimming, the sort of boy who was well liked, with many friends, a good team player; and then he saw himself as a healthy young man; and then at his own age—a perfectly formed man, naked now, and his chest was undeformed from the struggle to breathe, for this body didn’t have to struggle, inside that chest there
were some perfectly normal lungs; and this body was as transfixing as his had just been, doing its jiggly death camba, transfixing not because its movements were surpassingly sublimely ugly, but because they were so beautiful, though it was just an ordinary motion really, he was walking towards himself—but isn’t the human body, when it is well formed and strong, and fed, and cared for, with firm muscles and tendons, isn’t it beautiful? and this lovely body was his own age, was his, and so he stepped forward towards it, and became it, and so was supremely happy before he died.

“He’s dead!” Teran shouted, but not at Prado—at the body he had just killed, and too loudly, as if he wanted to reach the dead man himself, wherever he was. “He’s dead! I killed him! He’s dead!”

Once again Willy had been in the unfortunate place, had heard what he didn’t want to hear. From the other room he shouted, “We’ll kill them Che! Someday we’ll kill them all!”

Which wasn’t what Teran wanted to hear. Those words, Teran thought, must be erased. I didn’t hear them. No one heard them. They weren’t spoken. He went into the other room, to the man who had cursed him, and, without waiting for further orders from Prado, he shot Willy.

Hardly. The captain came into Guevara’s room, and fired a single bullet of his own, which pierced Che’s heart and one of his lungs.

No. It doesn’t matter how many times I write
THE END
; it’s not over. The other officers begged Prado that they, too, might be allowed to shoot Guevara’s body. “All right,” Prado said, giddy, as if a weight had been taken off his chest, as if Che’s life had made it harder for people like Prado to breathe. “But not above the waist.”

The officers unholstered their pistols and shot Che in the legs and genitals, not laughing as they did it, one after another, as if they’d been ordered to take turns. This is as you wanted it, not a game, certainly, or accident, or play, we want to hurt you badly, do you damage, smash you down, pulverize your atoms, blow away the dust and erase your memory from the earth. Shoot him in the balls. That means he won’t have any followers! You kept yourself apart, distant, judged us and what we did, you thought you could be our leader, our superior, better than us. This is your pride come home, you practiced making us keep our distance, compelled our admiration, and this is how we show it to you.

Che responded by jiggling a bit as the bullets struck him. When they were
done he just lay there, of course, where he’d fallen, on the floor, in corpse position.

The doctor leaned over the corpse, putting his ear to its nose. “He’s dead, gentlemen. I can’t hear a thing. And a man you can’t hear,” the doctor said, smiling, “is a dead man.”

He borrowed Prado’s pistol and put a bullet in Guevara’s neck. “A good hole for the formaldehyde,” he told the officers, who stood over him, watching.

At five o’clock that day a helicopter flew from La Higuera to Vallegrande, with the corpse tied to a board across its runners.

As was the army’s custom with the bodies of dead guerrillas, they put Guevara’s corpse on display outside the hospital laundry, a shed with a red tile roof and no front wall, in the middle of a dusty field. The press might see the body and know Guevara was dead. Photographers were permitted to take pictures.

General Barrientos announced to the reporters that Che Guevara had been wounded in battle, and had died a few hours later, from his wounds.

The corpse was left outside the laundry, on a board across two sawhorses. At dusk the next day some peasants came from their fields and placed candles at his head and feet, kicking the sawhorses he lay on, and praying. And each evening the week thereafter they came, too, in increasing numbers.

This solemn attendance was not what the authorities wanted. They took the corpse away and loaded it on a small plane. It was thrown from the plane into a jungle region, a pointless place where no one ever went; or went and came out sane.

Before they discarded the corpse they cut off Che’s hands at the wrist and stuck them in a jar.

—Because the first time is tragedy and the second time is farce. Because maybe he saved me, and maybe he left me to die.

•  •  •

The scene: November 1. Day of the Dead. Outside a laundry shed in Vallegrande. A corpse on a board laid across two sawhorses. A lime cross has been made on the ground nearby and around the corpse people had placed incense, a plastic bowl of water with a small saint floating in it, a plate of pork rinds, and some white candles.

Six peasants come down the mountain in the background. Or seven peasants. (They multiply like lice, as fast as the Lord can think up stupid names for them.) They have rented a truck for the occasion, for they couldn’t afford a mourners’ bus.
FAITH IN GOD! ONWARDS
has been painted on a board across the cab of the truck, in front. They have come because they know that where there is a corpse laid out there will be something to drink as well. But they have already started drinking. As they come down the painted mountain, a stream can be seen, like a rainbow in the last light of the setting sun, arcing over the back of the truck. It’s their piss—several of them are pissing over the back, and the wind carries their urine away in this high lovely curve. They wear rags, and their faces are smeared with dirt.

On the front of the stage, near the corpse, they climb off the truck, looking about. One of them punches the air vigorously as he goes.