The Death of Che Guevara (26 page)

Every so often, as we toiled down one of the interminable corridors, a peasant walked back along the hall the other way, carrying a small sheet of paper in both hands, his mouth turned down, his eyes absent, distracted. His face and clothing were dusted with a fine white powder. (The agrarian reform turned them into ghosts.) A round old man passed at my chest level. He held a ribboned staff in his right hand and the paper in his left. His cap was sprinkled with floury-looking stuff. He looked like a pastry.

“One more flight,” Soto called down to me encouragingly. My friends stood on the landing above me, catching their breath. I rested a floor below them, chasing unsuccessfully after mine. The air here was too thick. To walk up to my friends would be like swimming through viscous distasteful muck.

I heard Fernando ask Soto how the government knew where each parcel of land would be. Voices floated down the stairwell towards me; the words, trapped in the gelatin, reached me like light from some distant planet, long after the event. I approached my friends and they suddenly moved on. Why didn’t they wait? I would never reach them. Some geometrical paradox would defeat me.

The job was enormous, Soto explained, walking up another flight of stairs. They
didn’t
know which land would be part of the reform yet. The landlord could appeal any redistribution order. He could object to the map-maker’s surveying. He could (they turned a corner; I pursued) protest the decree to the local agrarian board. He could appeal the decision to the council of the National Agrarian Reform Service. Oh, there were lots of democratic safe
guards. He could take the matter to the full council. He could appeal (we had to go down the hall to another stairway, and then up another flight. I stopped a moment next to two Indians in line. They stepped closer to the wall) to the President of the Republic, to Paz Estenssoro himself. “So they can’t
know
what’s available yet. Just one more flight, and down the next hall. My friend tells me that it will take about twenty-five years. So they’re not giving out deeds to the land yet, just certificates that say that when there is land, the Indian is entitled to some. It gives the peasants a sense of participating in the reform.” He disappeared from sight. I hurried along. My head felt light and my stomach very heavy, as if I dragged a wheelbarrow full of my nausea down the hall. Fernando’s face, moving around the corner, looked back at me, his body already gone away. “What do you think of that?” Fernando’s head asked.

“I want to vomit.”

But Fernando had already disappeared, following after his legs.

I trailed Soto’s high, amiable voice, a voice that accepted everything, a voice of good digestion. “Mostly what the government can do now is guarantee wages for hacienda workers, while this process goes on. That’s a good idea, the minister thinks. Gives the Indians some money, brings them into the national economy. They’ll start to want things like the rest of us, soft cloth, sturdy shoes. It’ll be a boost to the national manufacturers.”

I hated this; luring the Indians into history so the bourgeoisie in the city might grow rich. Chaco looked back at me, smiled sarcastically. He flapped his earlobes with his long finger.

“I want to vomit,” I said.

“Of course,” he said, and went off down another hall. Or the same one again for all I knew.

At the next corner a mestizo’s head appeared above the line. He stood on top of a wooden crate in a work shirt and dungarees. In his right hand he held a thick black rubber hose. The hose ran down to a silver pump-motor by his feet, next to the crate. The motor chugged, a regular rhythm, ka-thunk, ka-thunk; and the bent spokes of the flywheel, like the legs of a creature that was all legs, spun around in an abstract pattern that made me seasick. I stopped to rest, staring at the flywheel, hypnotized by my illness. The two Indian guards we’d met last night came down the hall to the box, the next ones in line. (I must have passed them in my hurry.) The old man laughed to see me, sucking his lips in and out. The boy translated his clicks and wheezings. “He says, ‘Everyone wants to join us now. It’s Judgment Day!’ ” The old man extended his dry hand to me, and I bent (as I’d seen people in the square do) and touched it to my forehead, scraping it against my skin.

The man on the box put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, stopped him.
They stood like that for a few seconds, neither one speaking; a mime. The old man opened the leather purse hanging from his belt and took out some new brightly colored bills. He lifted two misshapen fingers and waved them towards the boy—the bribe was for the two of them. The man on the box stuffed the money into his bulging back pocket and turned the old man by the shoulder, so he faced forward. Holding him like that, he put the worn rubber hose down the back of his poncho. The man on the crate said something, and the old man closed his eyes. The mestizo sprayed my friend’s hair and neck. DDT; outside Cordoba I’d seen animals sprayed this way, to kill lice. A little of the dust settled on my lips. It tasted sharp, acidic, bitter. The man on the box gave the old boy a push forward and took the young one’s shoulder. “You can go first,” the boy said to me. He made a sour little face; for the first time he looked his age to me, a boy not yet through puberty faced with an unpleasant task. I shook my head no. The man on the box turned the boy’s shoulder forward.

I tried to fix the old man’s gaze as he went by me. But he walked past as if I weren’t there; or he weren’t. Anyway, someone had died. The mestizo put the hose down the boy’s back; waited for his eyes to close; sprayed his neck and hair; world without end. No one asked for an explanation. Someone pushed your child’s head under water; someone doused you with this evil-smelling acid. The event required of you as much or as little faith as baptism; and it was, plainly, just as inevitable. The particles of DDT caused my nose to clog. Snot wet my upper lip. I ran down the hall, unsteady on my legs, running to catch my friends, hoping to outrun the attack.

Chavez, the Minister of Peasant Affairs, the despicable hypocrite responsible for this ritual, rose from behind his desk to shake our hands. He was a short young man, a few years older than we, with curly hair and thick eyeglasses. He looked smaller than his pictures. His office had only a big desk, with a high window behind it. The light washed painfully against my eyes. A few revolutionary posters, threats against moneylenders, had been taped to the whitewashed walls. A bright unused machete leaned against his desk.

“I heard about your argument with Betancourt last night.” Chavez’s head bobbed from side to side as he spoke.

“Betancourt!” Soto exclaimed.

“Yes. Our revolution, our democratic procedures, are an experiment for the whole continent. But you look surprised? Perhaps you are a different man?”

Betancourt, I thought, leader of “the democratic left” of Venezuela. Another pathetic opportunist! (Supposing it were him.)

The minister, Soto said to us, was a leader of the radical wing of the MNR. He had led the fight for extensive land reform.

The minister smiled, delighted with himself.

“He presides now,” a wheezing voice said, “over the DDT Revolution.”

“Damn you,” Chaco said emphatically. “Ernesto, this is Chavez now. The one with the machete. I don’t want to be his enemy.”

The minister stiffened and walked back behind his desk. “I don’t think you understand all we’re doing here. It’s far more than a DDT revolution. Let me give you some of our literature.” He reached into a drawer and pulled out a stack of smudged flyers. I didn’t take them. He left them on his desk. Fernando, who disliked rudeness of any sort, picked them up and leafed through them. Ink came off on his hands.

“I think they’ll give an idea of what we’re up against. Some things are a little difficult to imagine from Buenos Aires.” The minister’s face disappeared, a little at a time, eaten away by light from the window. His ears were gone, and the brightness was moving in on his nose. “The Indian is a sphinx,” he said. “He inhabits a hermetic world, inaccessible to whites or mestizos.” He looked up towards the flaking ceiling. He sounded in a trance. “We don’t understand his forms of life, the way he thinks. We call the Indian the masses, but we’re ignorant of his individual psyche, and his collective drama.”

Bits of sentences came to me. A soul. A symbol. Asleep. I formed the bits into ranks. You must find the gesture to reach deep into their sleeping souls. I spoke. “I want to vomit.”

Someone kicked my leg, behind the knee. I stuck out a hand to break my fall, and half toppled onto Chavez’s desk.

Chavez glanced at my hand as if it were unsavory stuff. “You’re very young,” he said. “The world isn’t as easily understood as you think now. It doesn’t always respond to the force of our desires. The Indian lives, the Indian acts and produces. But the Indian doesn’t allow himself to be understood. He doesn’t wish communication. Retiring silent immutable. He inhabits a closed world. He is an enigma.”

Chavez must hear the truth! “You humiliate them,” I whispered. My lungs fluttered.

“Please shut up now Ernesto,” Chaco whispered. “I don’t want
to go in back.”

“I think we
should
leave,” Soto said, with miserable false heartiness.

“Our intention, Mr. Guevara, isn’t to humiliate anyone.” Chavez’s lips were huge, half the size of a normal face. His eyes glinted like machine parts. “You can’t overcome centuries of oppression in the twinkling of an eye, just by willing it. I think you believe too much in the power of your own wishes, your own will. The Indians don’t understand soap and water. We have no
choice. We must attack the result of their ignorance. This way we kill the lice for them. We have no choice.”

“I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Damn him,” Chaco said to Fernando. “Damn him. He won’t shut up till he gets us all killed.” He began to cry again. “My father was a pharmacist. My mother thought I was ugly. All of you think I’m ugly too.”

“No one thinks you’re ugly,” Fernando said. He put his arm about Chaco’s shoulders. His voice, too, sounded choked. “We just think you’re a little funny-looking.”

Chavez, the despicable piglet, would destroy the Indian villages; he stage-managed this farcical land reform that handed out pieces of paper that entitled you to wait till you died; he made the Indians’ eyes go blank. “You treat peasants like rotting meat. You do this, you do that. What you do is keep yourself in business. Nothing changes. But you can’t understand me, can you? You have no vision. You have no face.” I reached out towards his glimmery head, which receded backward down a tunnel. I wanted to draw him back into the room. I had more to say. He must hear the truth! My fingers went through his cheeks. He slapped me across the face, his hand open, and the room shook into overlapping images. Anger must be
conquerated
. No. Not a word. I wanted to wrench his head off his neck! No! I must not! I would not!

I hung on his shoulders, unable to move. We fell down to the floor. I lay across him, my cheek next to his, panting for breath. My friends tried to pull us apart. But Chavez wanted to hurt me; he held me around the back and squeezed my chest hard. I threw up all over his face, green bile and DDT, mucus, and a few bits of corn from last night’s gorging.

Fernando walked me down the steps of the ministry, his arm around my back and under my arm. When we reached the plaza he let me drop. I fell, like a sack, to the stones. The Indians walked around us. I might have been dying, but this accident didn’t excite them.

“I’ve had it with this …” Fernando stumbled over a word. “… with this
shit!
Because that’s what it is! I thought you wanted to write about the villages, on our way to our work with the lepers. I didn’t know you were interested in this
cocktail
party!” He sounded as if he’d said “shit” again. “What’s the point Ernesto? They’re just politicians. They’re not going to listen! Or do you just like
talking?”

Chaco knelt beside me and, with the end of my shirt, in a strangely gentle gesture, wiped the vomit from my chin. He laughed. “A demonstration of nonviolence and self-control.”

I pushed Chaco away, letting my hands flap against him, and sat on the
stones with my head bent down, surrounded by my friends’—my enemies’!—legs. I didn’t have the strength, or the will, to rise. “Why do you want me to meet these people, Soto? These bureaucrats!” My words came out in little gasps, an old man’s voice. I panicked for breath, and heaved like a fish.

“What?” He looked bemused. After all, I’d just embarrassed him. “Oh, I don’t know. I like my friends to know each other. You have an interesting point of view, Guevara. You’re an interesting character. Perhaps you’re right. I do want to see what you’ll have to say. You have audacity. I admire that. I think one can learn things from you.”

“Shit!” Fernando rarely spoke this way, and so, having succumbed, he gave himself over to it. “Shit. Shit.
Shit
. What a lot of
shit!”

“I suppose,” Soto said to me, “that meeting these people isn’t very valuable to you.” He was angry; he had remembered that
I
was the guilty party. “You seem to know what they have to say already.”

“Go to hell.” It was all the wit I could think of, or had the energy for. Why didn’t Fernando prepare an injection?

“Well, no. I didn’t mean it that way.” Soto’s voice became placatory. “It’s not that you’re wrong. But you speak as if you’d already thought of what you’d say, long ago, as if you’d already read this story. You seem to know what everyone’s going to say before he says it. As if you’d already administered a land reform!”

“That’s true,” Fernando said, his voice full of musing wonder at Soto’s perceptiveness.

“He’s like an Englishman,” Chaco said, smiling, giddy with escape. “They’re so certain of everything.”

“You see,” Soto said down to me, “you’re nodding now as if you’d already thought of this too.” His head looked a hundred meters away, smiling pleasantly again, as if we shared a wonderful joke. “I thought you wanted to ask some people some questions. But you’re not looking for answers. Perhaps you have answers?”