The Death of Che Guevara (22 page)

“Sure.” I didn’t want to hear more. “It’s time for dinner.”

“Yes. Oh, yes,” Ricardo agreed. Hunger made him poetic.

“Yes,” Fernando said.

I didn’t want Chaco to talk. I wanted what I had seen. Or anyway, not his story.

Dinner was six miles away, at Isaias Nougues’s house in Calacoto. There, two or three times a week, Nougues, an Argentine, served stew to the citizens of exile.

Isaias, leader and financier of a provincial Argentine party, a former member of our country’s Parliament, had interests across several borders. I found his massive poem of woe, the contempt he suffered from Peron, a little hard to swallow (and a stanza had to be taken with dinner), for the cost of his opposition was paid down in gold from his sugar plantations, and there was still enough of that sweetness left to feed us all.

He was welcoming always to Fernando and myself, a friend of our families. (And this was the most nourishing food we had in La Paz.) “Your mother,” he said to me, “has a sharp tongue, a great wit, and an immense heart. She tries to hide it, but she cannot. I think her cutting wit is meant to protect, to mask, her tender heart.” Perhaps true—though Isaias spoke always only in compliment or complaint. Towards him, though, as phrases in her letters revealed—and we shamelessly used his house for mail—her heart was a lump of coal. She found him, as she did so much of her life, preposterous. “Isaias tells his beads, while his accountant keeps his books. Try please to eat him out of house and home.”

The house was a light-pink stucco ranch, a long “L” with a pale red tile roof. Masses of shrubs with dark-red blooms surrounded it. We were rarely inside the house, except to use the bathroom; business was conducted in the fields. There were cultivated areas mixed with wildness, and artistry—according to Fernando—had gone into their counterpoising. (I didn’t care about the setting. Landscapes were no clue—not yet.) I remember a large vegetable garden where burlap bags on tall sticks stood over the mounds of earth, and the green runners of potato plants. It made me uneasy to see the empty men flapping in the wind. (The bags, Isaias explained, had been coated with dried
blood, to keep creatures away from the garden.) There was a small cornfield, with attendant ghouls, and long meadows, only partly mowed, with trees and large rocks in them. A river. I remember that. It ran between the house and the fields where we ate.

Fernando, Chaco, Ricardo, and I stepped carefully, single file, across the narrow footbridge, overlapping boards hammered together, with ropes for supports and railings. The bridge swayed. Chaco put one arm on my shoulder to steady himself. He closed his eyes, though we were only a few feet over the narrow river. Water terrified him.

Thirty others stood scattered in the field before us, waiting for dinner. Isaias had promised that Paz Estenssoro, leader of the MNR, would be in the field tonight. Helena, a nervous young exile from Peru, raised her arm in greeting to Ricardo, her fiance. Hunger, and the difficulty of breathing, made her form waver in front of me, as if she had several overlapping hands. The damp air from the river was thick on my skin. I pulled the matted wool collar of my jacket up around my neck, and eagerly pushed Ricardo forward into the land of shadows.

Paz Estenssoro’s name had cut through my uneasiness and my deep dream of stew. I wanted to feel the force of his vision, the emanation of his leadership. I wanted to ask him my questions, and press his answers against Gandhi’s words. I thought that Paz Estenssoro might be the leader in whose cause I might find my work.

“Damn,” Chaco said, already afraid. “You be careful what you say Ernesto. Paz Estenssoro hates criticism. Do you understand me? Lots of hard guys do what he says.”

The household staff came out from the side of the house, carrying sawhorses and boards across the bridge. They constructed a table by the river, near a new useless white washing machine.

The kitchen people came out from the side of the house, a processional of seven men, led by the cook carrying a bright tin ladle. Each of the staff held a black pot filled with stew.

“Blood for the ghosts,” I said to Ricardo. “To make them talk.”

“What?”

“Grub first,” Chaco paraphrased. “Then talk.”

“They’re serving,” Ricardo said, turning away with surprising speed before we finished speaking.

The food was dished up on tin plates. A good stew with thick pieces of beef, potatoes, and large chunks of corn on the cob, sweet, freshly picked. We ate with big wooden spoons, strolling about the grounds, absently, unconcerned
with sad history, or each other, or their wandering intersection, at least until we’d had our dinner.

History, though, went on without us, and as the light waned (it didn’t so much wane as become bit by bit opaque, as if we watched flakes of mica overlap) you could hear shooting from the city, and the roads around it, short high staccato bursts, echoing faintly from the mountains around us, like pebbles in a padded bucket. Each day this week had brought new violence. The smudged mimeographed sheets of the Falange had grown shrill with threats. “The Army and the Falange fight for the redemption of Bolivia’s Martyrs. We will be avenged.” Yesterday, they—or someone—attempted to assassinate Paz Estenssoro as he spoke from the steps of the Presidential Palace. A militiaman had been killed. The day before armed fascist groups attacked the government radio station and fire-bombed the office of
Intransigencia
. The gunshots we heard now were the Indians, the vigilant ones, guarding their revolution. My heart beat faster; I felt a solemn excitement. I remembered the militiamen I’d seen guarding the square in La Paz, I saw them lying in blood on the steps of the Presidential Palace. I imagined the cathedral in ruins, as if it had been bombed from the air. I felt that if I gave way to the angers I felt inside me at the enemies of this revolution, showed my fury to the North American in the bar whose words would rot this revolution like mold on fresh bread, my anger would drown the world in blood. But, I reminded myself, there had been enough suffering on my continent; streams of blood veined it.
Our
work was to save life. (I allowed myself to feed on the imagination of battle, and on the more intimate thoughts of ripping their tongues out, driving their noses back into their brains, crushing their eggshell heads—all, that is, that I would not do.) I looked over at Helena, who brought the large spoon to her mouth. She didn’t place the whole spoonful in, but nibbled quickly at the contents. How dear she looked! I wanted to ask her to dance. “Odd dinner music,” I said to Fernando, for no reason. I didn’t want to think anymore about the source of my gaiety.

He looked at me blankly. “Good stew,” he said, taking another mouthful.

Many of the other guests tonight, I noticed—when I’d put enough inside to look about—were Argentines, pilots whose plot against Peron had been broken. They wore long uniform jackets for dinner, though they worked during the day in their undershirts, building an asphalt road far away, between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. (Wouldn’t so many roads be bound to conjure vehicles richly laden to run down them?) The soldiers were landscape. The people I wanted to speak to were the leaders of the MNR, and the sun in that galaxy, Paz Estenssoro.

Isaias, a thin graying man with a white mustache, moved about the field
in a long white Mexican wedding shirt, a genial ghost. After saying hello to each of us, he would disappear into the house for a fifteen-minute nap. (The meal, of course, continued without him.)

“Just the people I wanted to see,” Isaias said, smiling warmly. “I wonder if one of you doctors could feel this bulge in my stomach. At least I think it’s a bulge.” He lifted up his white shirt and placed my hand, still holding one of his spoons, on his stomach. “Is it a bulge? Or nothing at all? I’m worried about my kidneys, you understand. Urination has been very painful.”

This dinnertime consultation made me feel fondly towards Isaias. He knew how false our pride in our bodies is, and how unimportant courtesy was compared with pain. “It’s just gas,” I said in what I hoped was a reassuring manner. I returned to my stew.

“That can’t be good for you,” Isaias said, turning his paternal attention to me, “eating that fast.”

I cast my eyes upward from my plate. “Good stew,” I said. He raised his pale eyebrows in concern, or surprise, as I picked up speed, my wooden spoon striking the tin clickety-clack. I raced against a competitive crowd. It was a mournful moment for us all when those big black pots wended their empty way homeward.

“It’s a reserve meal,” Fernando explained. “Hasn’t he told you his theory of reserve meals? His theory is, Eat when you can, eat as much as you can, and store up food like a camel.”

“Or a cow,” Isaias added, a little glumly.

“Good stew,” I said.

“Well, you’re the doctor,” Isaias said, regaining his hostly equanimity. “You know what’s best.”

“Good stew is best,” I said, spooning up more of it. The competition for thirds would be fierce.

After a few platefuls I’d lost my appetite, even the memory of my appetite. But I continued. I ate for the future. Tomorrow the only meal would be for my will, the cold ecstasy of not indulging my body.

We got our thirds. Eating more slowly, forcing myself to swallow (tomorrow I would force myself not to), I circulated about the field with Fernando, searching for interesting talk. Tonight, listening to two young Bolivians, I heard gloomy news. Paz Estenssoro had reopened the military and police academies. New officers would be recruited from the middle class and the peasants. The U.S. had sent experts on detection and interrogation. I knew what this meant: the attempt on his life had terrified Paz, broken his will. He thought a more efficient police force—trained by imperialism—would protect
him. He was wrong. Only the will of the people could protect him. But he did not have the courage of Gandhi, the willingness to march beneath the guns, to die.

Fernando smiled wanly at me, shaking his head as I told him my thoughts. He found my talk of death too exalted, the misty sublime of the effete poet looking out at a contrived sea. His shaking head stopped me. Did I have any real imagination of death? Of dying, dead, death? Just a word? I imagined: a coldness spreading in my limbs. Or was it like being paralyzed piece by piece, then altogether stone? This field with myself absent, but all else present, round, colored, warm? Or the field gone, nothing, blankness, without even the imagining (by me) of blankness? Everything gone, even the imagining? Whatever it was, it was to be faced fearlessly. I would. (Would I? If only I had been here during Holy Week! Then I would know about myself!) I returned Fernando’s smile.

There were good, vital signs tonight, too. A new board to oversee the mines had been elected, strongly nationalist and uncompromising. No more compensation would be paid the U.S. owners. If the United States threatened to cut off its purchases or withdraw its loans, then Bolivia would look elsewhere for buyers.

Behind us, as we listened to these men, Chaco hummed a song. It had no melody, and little rhyme. He would raise his voice here and there as if he’d suddenly been prodded, or remembered fitfully that there was something particular about what people called “a song.”

Why did Chaco demand defeat? He continued to follow us, whining his song:

He stopped. “Damn. Nothing rhymes with ‘consortium.’ ”

“You’re very clever,” Fernando said, shaking Chaco’s skinny hand.

“I’m not just clever,” Chaco replied. “I’m also very profound.” He looked at me, head to the side, eyes squinted. “But I can tell Ernesto doesn’t like my singing.”

“You long for loss,” I said. “You hate yourself. You want defeat.”

“You don’t like my song?” He pretended a hurt whimpery tone, pushing out his lower lip like a child. “I know you, Ernesto. You want to scream at my music, don’t you?
NO! NO! NO!”

I nodded. Chaco was a perspicacious man.

“Don’t you see, Ernesto? I’m not making this song up, such as it is. And your shouting
NO
doesn’t put an end to it. It’s just another note in the chorus.”

I turned my back on him.

Near an old tree a broad-shouldered man of about forty, in a light-brown sports coat, had drawn an attentive group of five or six people. A familiar face, thinner and more vulnerable than I remembered: I had seen it in the newspapers. Voting. Speaking from the steps of the palace. “We must build the nation,” he declaimed, “in the framework of international cooperation.” Was he saying that now, as the sun set, or was it a caption on a photograph I’d seen? Fernando and I drifted over to the tree, our clown following after, humming to himself.

The man held an empty plate, thinly filmed with gravy, turned on its side, with the wooden spoon pressed against it by his large thumb. He gestured broadly, with a cigarette held in his other hand, sweeping the arc of the circle. The man’s hair formed a sharp “V” in front, with large areas of scalp on either side. His voice had authority but was a little toneless, as if he were reading a speech. “If Bolivia goes too far, too rapidly with its nationalization, without
paying the
necessary
compensation, it will make for a nice gesture, but it will only endanger the Revolution.”