The Faraway Nearby (9 page)

When I became fascinated by the implications of leprosy, I first thought of those who felt nothing for themselves. Those who suffer are considered to be worse off than those who don't, but those who suffer can care for themselves, protect themselves, seek change, prevent further injury, and recover. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke called the sufferings that are drowned out “spurned, lost life, of which one may die.”

If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, one way or another.

Those with leprosy lose their own boundaries another way as they lose sensation, and sometimes the body itself falls away as it becomes unfelt and then unprotected and untended. But this is only physical pain, the pain that defines the boundaries of the corporeal self. Granado wrote, “The scourge of leprosy forces its victims out of society and at the same time makes them particularly sensitive and grateful.”

In one section of his poem “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg cries out over and over, “I'm with you in Rockland” to his friend Carl Solomon trapped in the psychiatric hospital, meaning that he's with him in solidarity, that they are not separate, and the assertion itself sounds across the distance. And then the poet rescues his friend in a final line of that section of the poem, “in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”

We're close, we say, to mean that we're emotionally connected, that we are not separate; or, we've become distant, to describe the opposite. After years in New York City, Georgia O'Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, “from the faraway nearby.” It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby, within the boundaries of the self. You can be a thousand miles from the person next to you in bed or deeply invested in the survival of a stranger on the other side of the world.

Paul Brand wrote, “I believe that this quality of shared pain is central to what it means to be a human being.” To injure, to kill, to cause suffering in others, requires first that withdrawal of empathy that would have made such action painful or impossible, and to intentionally cause pain in others requires you to kill yourself off a little in the process. Some undertake that process willingly, if unwittingly, while soldiers are often forced to undergo some version of it as training and as wartime. Surviving the horrific is likewise often done by shutting down sensation, by becoming numb to one's own pain.

When the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton went to investigate the psychology of survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he coined the term “psychic numbing” to describe the survival strategy of disassociation and apathy—“a diminished capacity or inclination to feel.” In such extreme circumstances it was necessary or at least understandable, but even there Lifton called it “dehumanization” and cautioned that it “comes to resemble what has been called ‘miscarried repair.'” He compared it to autoimmune disorders that begin by eradicating hostile outside organisms and then turn on the body itself.

You erected a wall between yourself and annihilation or horror and sometimes it then walled you off from life. The wall itself sometimes grew like a disease if left untreated. Those with leprosy lose only physical sensation; it is the rest of us who tend to lose moral, emotional sensation around their suffering. Which is to say that leprosy was for millennia a psychological disorder of whole societies, though it was a bacterial infection of only a minority.

If numbness contracts the boundaries of the self, empathy expands it. You can describe what happened to Guevara in the trip across the leprosariums of South America as an awakening, but you can also think of it as an enlarging; he took the people he met in, into himself, and his boundaries moved outward. When he and Granado met the shivering couple in the Chilean desert, they gave away one of their two blankets. They sometimes gave nothing more than attention and affection, and they were given much in return. As they left the leprosy hospital in Lima, the patients bade them a fond farewell: “They had all chipped in 100½ soles, which they gave to us with an effusive letter. Afterwards some of them came to say goodbye to us personally and in more than one case tears were shed. . . . If there's anything that will make us seriously dedicate ourselves to leprosy, it will be the affection shown to us by all the sick we've met along the way.”

The young men were hardly saints. They lied a little and pumped up their roles as leprologists to get food and lodgings, and hustled a lot to get into bed with the women they met along the way, usually to no avail. They drank when the opportunity arose, ran away from unpaid bills, shot a beloved dog by accident, and bumbled along making messes that others would clean up, as young men often do. But they were kind to the sufferers they met. In the leprosarium they lingered in the longest, they broke with precedent by touching the patients without barriers such as gloves and later by playing soccer with them.

Granado writes, “Then we went to see another patient, a former teacher at a nearby school. She was very moved when we greeted her with a handshake and sat on the same chairs she sat on, and her tears—a blend of sorrow and happiness—moved us too.” This was the leprosy colony in the jungle of the headwaters of the Amazon, where the doctors and staff lived on one side of the river and the patients on another. In what seems to have been an epochal act in his life, Guevara jumped in the broad river and swam across it, toward them. The river was a physical space that had become a psychic space, and in crossing the one he crossed the other and arrived at some firmer sense of self and solidarity.

Several years later, during the invasion of Cuba by Castro's small, ragged band of guerrillas, Guevara had another pivotal moment in the midst of heavy gunfire. He had to choose whether to take his first-aid kit or a box of bullets as he fled. He took the ammunition and in taking it crossed back over that river in some sense. He had become a revolutionary out of the most tenderhearted empathy for the suffering he encountered in particular men and women. As a revolutionary he became hardhearted, dedicated to humanity in the abstract and often callous with the individuals met en route.

Guevara became a guerrilla leader, known for being harsh with his men, and he assumed a leader's right to mete out punishments. He wrote about a moment in the campaign when by their own rules someone had to execute a Cuban who had betrayed them to the government soldiers. No one wanted to. “I ended the problem [by] giving him a shot with a.32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal. He gasped a little while and was dead. . . . We slept badly, wet and I with something of asthma.”

Doctors take oaths not to kill or harm, but they often cause pain and commit violence upon the body with drugs and with scalpels. They learn to subdue, to cut, to inflict pain for the sake of healing and for life, and to deliver bad news. The end justifies these means. To succeed in their profession, they have to strike a balance between empathy and separation, closeness and distance, to find the right distance at which to function best for their own and the patients' well-being. Like parents, they sometimes must do what is unpleasant, and they grow accustomed to others' discomfort.

Hubris is a doctor's danger, and one way to read
Frankenstein
is as a tale about a medical student's arrogance and lack of empathy. In Guevara's time, doctors also made decisions on behalf of their patients and sometimes kept them in the dark—patients with cancer were not always told their diagnosis, for example. A revolution in medical care was part of the great antiauthoritarian revolutions of the 1960s and after, a revolution whereby patients insisted on their rights to be fully informed and to participate in decisions.

The Marxist revolutionaries of the past assumed a similar paternalistic privilege of acting on behalf of peoples who might not particularly agree with the actions or the goals. The vanguard was supposed to lead the revolution and the masses eventually to wake up and follow. It was the end that justified many means. Che wrote to his children, “The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love,” but what that love was for is opaque. He became one of the harshest parts of a harsh regime. All this was unimaginable to the young man who gave a blanket to a cold unemployed miner and his wife and empathized with a pretty girl stranded in a leprosarium.

I think of empathy as a kind of music Guevara had caught the sound of, the “still sad music of humanity,” as Wordsworth once called it, and then he became deaf to it, a dancer falling out of step. The Cuban Revolution might have been his great moment, when he united his sense of purpose with the intensity of the experience of war. Afterward Che, as he was then known, became a minister of various things, but a restless minister at odds at times with the revolution's commander, Fidel Castro. He tried to foment revolution in the Congo in 1965, with little immediate effect, and then in a backwater of Bolivia in 1967. It was as though he wanted to go back to that moment of becoming rather than live with what the revolution became.

He went to Bolivia to overthrow the government with a handful of men and no popular support. He and his small band of guerrillas were lost, dirty, desperate, and hungry, adventurers run aground in a hard land. They appeared to the isolated peasants as supernatural beings, and those last days unfolded like a folktale. One woman told the army that she thought they were
brujos,
or witches, and she imagined that the money with which they bought food would, like fairy gold, “turn worthless in her hands.” Che rode a horse, smoked a pipe of silver, was dressed in rags but wore two Rolexes, and was evidently failing physically. His men had to help him off his mount. It was as though his body could not live up to the legend he was endeavoring to become, or remain.

Anderson recounts, “He no longer even had boots; instead, his mud-caked feet were encased in crude leather sheaths, like those a medieval peasant might have worn.” He was captured, bound hand and foot, and left overnight on the dirt floor of a schoolhouse, and in the morning of October 9, 1967, he was shot to death. The CIA agent who shot him suddenly found that he could hardly breathe, and all the rest of his days suffered from such trouble. He came to believe that somehow Che's asthma had passed on to him. A glamour of the supernatural hovered around those last days, but it was no substitute for the navigational power of empathy.

It was a strange arc, Ernesto Guevara's life, from the great empathic awakening to the triumphant taking up of arms on behalf of the poor to the series of drifts that landed him in Bolivia in an unsupported insurrection doomed to fail. Fail in all practical senses, though in a less practical one, Bolivia was where Che rode a horse into his own legend and disappeared, like the Tang dynasty artist Wu Daozi who strolled into a painted landscape.

Maybe it's the transmutation of a living man into a legend that the locals felt as supernatural or otherworldly. You can still see in the photographs of his bare-chested corpse laid out with its beard and matted hair and faraway look in its eyes why the local women thought he looked like Christ and snipped off bits of his hair as relics. After his death “Che” came to mean one infinitely glamorous image of a fierce resolute face with shaggy hair and a beret bearing a comandante's star.
Pero yo ya no soy yo,
ni mi casa es ya mi casa.
The image was reduced to a map of dark and light areas, as though Che's face had become at that moment of the photograph a strange new country. This is the image that still travels everywhere and is particularly common on T-shirts, as though the beating heart beneath had chosen a face.

That image taken by photographer Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960, is far more widespread than is knowledge of Che Guevara's life. It means everything and anything.
Guerrillero Heroico,
the posthumous face that came to represent revolution's ferocious spirit, may be the most reproduced photograph of all time. Dr. Guevara made a marvel or a monster named Che, and the monster and his magnificent glare became immortal.

When
The Motorcycle Diaries
was being filmed, Che's companion Alberto Granado came along as an adviser. He wrote, “But nothing was as deeply felt as the meeting with several of the patients afflicted with leprosy who remembered our stay at the leprosarium of San Pablo—and this peaked when the youngest of them (who back in 1952 was fifteen years old) recalled the moment in which I shook his hand without putting on gloves when we met and said affectionately: ‘After you two visited our hospital, people were kinder to us.'”

Granado concluded, “What greater reward could one ask from life?”

I found leprosy useful for thinking about everything else, for thinking about how my mother had gone numb in some way, so that I became the limb that could not be felt. I wonder whether it was fear of her own pain as it might extend and recur in me. Though if I was a mirror it must have been herself she saw and lashed out against. She was often kind to others. It was a wry irony that this tale of the true nature of leprosy, that made me think so much about empathy, was told to me by a man whose affection and trustworthiness failed me when I was most hard-pressed myself, because of that mother.

Of course we all turn away in various ways, if more mildly. As I write, I'm troubled by two people I'm delaying writing back to, or three. I delete several unopened e-mails a day for causes ranging from endangered animals to political prisoners, because there is more out there than I can take on, even as a reader. To feel for someone enlarges the self and then that self shares risks and pains. Or to feel for something, since the last half century has seen a vast expansion of concern and compassion for the nonhuman world, for animals, species, places, ecosystems, and finally the earth itself.