The Death of Che Guevara (48 page)

I fell on the ground near Marcos. “Oh shit,” I said. “I’ve had it. The stupid fuck has killed me.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, before he looked at me. He went on firing. Then he turned, and I saw in his empty eyes that I was a dead man.

All the firing was from the woods. I looked this way and that down the tree line, and saw some comrades sprawled in the grass. I thought they had been killed in their sleep, and that seemed especially awful to me—as if they’d been cheated of something. The soldiers had moved up on us, and we hadn’t heard them because of the planes. I fired towards the trees with the greatest passion I had so far felt in my life. I couldn’t see them, but I wanted to kill as many of them as I could. I wanted to kill some of them. Even one. I wanted to set the wood on fire, the shore on fire the island the sea the continent on fire. But
the old gun I’d taken on the boat was a piece of shit, and jammed after two shots.

Marcos was no longer next to me in the dirt. He had left me to die. I wanted to have a good death, and remembered a story that I’d been read as a child, about a man freezing to death in Alaska. I saw myself leaning against a single pine tree in a field of snow, the open field, watching flakes come down in the sunlight like motes of dust. Why weren’t there any of my tracks in the snow? My boot marks were filling up with new snow, and it would all be as it had been before, as if I’d never been! I hadn’t accomplished anything! I started to say a favorite poem of my mother’s. Time blots me out, as flakes on freezing bodies fall/I’d like to kill that stupid bastard/I see the whole round world with every animal and every flower and it’s all one big pile of shit, a big big big pile of shit/and every leaf and every branch/is shit too, and you’re a stupid shit, and there’s nothing that I like at all. Come down and carry me away O avalanche! Baudelaire (was it Baudelaire?) he was really a stupid shit, living in his mother’s house, waiting for his mistress to sneak up the back stairs, Fernando was right, he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. Somebody on his knees near the cane field shouted, “We surrender! Please don’t kill us! We surrender! Don’t kill us! We’re like you! Please don’t kill us!” And Ricardo, already in the cane behind him, shouted so everyone could hear him, “Shut up you stupid cowardly fuck! Nobody surrenders you piece of cow dung!” I was already dead, I didn’t want to surrender, I wanted to fire my rifle more, I wanted to kill some of them. Raul Suarez crawled towards me from the edge of the woods, and I saw his body jerk upward as a bullet hit him. He reached me and showed me his chest, a black stain in the middle of the dust on his shirt. He started to rip the shirt open, so I could examine him. “Don’t,” I said. “I can’t do anything for you. I have no medicines. I’m dying.” And he was going to die, too, the poor bastard, another of the giant’s casualties. Six or seven spectral pilgrims crawled past me towards the cane, and Suarez joined them, abandoning me to my recital. I turned the page to a poem that had solaced Nehru in jail. A lonely impulse of delight/Drove me to having my face shoved in the dust the mud the muck the shit/I balanced all brought all to mind/The years to come seemed waste of breath, what the fuck is he talking about? he doesn’t know what he’s talking about either, poets are a useless bunch of pricks, Fernando was right, I should have gone with him, and not that one-eyed charlatan opportunist liar with his fake eye, this was the blood I saw in his eye, my blood. I touched my neck as if it might suddenly have magically healed. My hand came away wet. It felt very hot there. A waste of breath the years behind. That was true. A voyeur of revolutions. I wished I’d
killed more of them. Any of them. It was all wasted time. Gandhi was a joke! I wanted to kill those soldiers more than I wanted anything. Except my life. And I wanted that so I could kill some of them. I wished I’d killed more of them in Guatemala.

Ricardo came towards me from behind, from out of the cane, on his belly, pulling his long bulk forward with his hands and forearms the way Bayo had taught us. What kind of animal was Ricardo?

“I’m dying,” I said. I thought he wanted to have a better look at my death.

Another theological debate ensued:

“Stop praying,” he shouted angrily.

“I’m not praying.”

“Yes, you are, you bastard. I heard you saying the rosary. You’re a coward, Che. I thought you were a Communist. I thought you were an atheist. I thought you meant the things you taught me. But one small bullet wound and you start saying the rosary.”

“Two wounds,” I said. It was important he get it right—my wounds were my last, my greatest, my only accomplishment. “And I wasn’t saying the rosary. I was reciting poetry.” I was dying. Soldiers we couldn’t see were scattering the field with bullets as if bullets were seeds. It was important that he get it right; it didn’t matter at all.

Ricardo stupidly stood up and pulled on my shoulders. He ripped the skin further, and I could feel more blood come out. He wanted to kill me! Then he lay down again. “Poetry! You’re worse than a coward. You’re a faggot bastard asshole.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “Everybody fucks your mother. Especially Castro.” How could he talk that way to me? “I’m dying,” I said.

He smiled. “Not yet.” He stood up again—he would get killed like that!—and dragged me a few feet towards the cane, by my legs. I couldn’t feel anything anymore in my shoulder. He got down next to me again, putting his face close to mine, and ordered me to crawl the rest of the way. Bullets kicked up dust just behind us. “You stupid Argentine scum, if you don’t move I’ll bash in your sick little chest with my rifle.”

This must be love, I thought—and I meant it. Ricardo’s affection astounded me! The feeling of rescue flooded me. We made it to the cane. The soldiers still hadn’t come out of the woods towards us. They fired furiously into the cane, but they couldn’t see us clearly anymore. Suarez pushed his hand in my face. His thumb was gone, blown off. “Use a handkerchief,” I said to Marcos, who always had one. I reminded him how to bandage a wound. Airplanes came in low and strafed the cane field behind us. Almeida shouted,
“Where’s Fidel? Where’s Fidel?” like a bird call. He wanted orders on what to do next. I couldn’t see Almeida through the leaves.

“Fuck Fidel,” Ricardo mumbled.

I saw a fat comrade try to hide behind one of the cane stalks. I saw a man lying on the ground with his fingers to his lips shouting, “Silence! Silence! Silence!” as if it were the noise that was killing him. I saw a man bleeding from his face, who took off his belt and tried to tie it to the top of a stalk, to hang himself.

I moved on my belly towards the last rows of cane. I shouted for Almeida and the others to follow me. The men had to be moved quickly, before the planes returned and strafed the cane again. My chest stung as I crawled, but not with the profound pain of before. Suddenly the field to my left exploded into high flames and thick black smoke. I choked on the air, rolling over on my back and kicking my legs out from the strain. If you can keep your head and all about you are losing theirs and their hands and their faces and their lungs then you’re a stupid dumb fuck who doesn’t know what he’s doing and you deserve to die.…

“Shut up Che! You’ve prayed enough! You’re making me puke!”

I crawled again, until I had to rise and lead the men, running across the open field into the woods beyond. I knew as I ran that I wasn’t going to die. In the woods Marcos bandaged my neck, while Ricardo watched, drinking in my winces. The wound was close to the shoulder, and much less serious than I had at first thought; so I wasn’t ready to become a recitation yet. With me were Raul Suarez (badly wounded in the chest and hand), Almeida, Ricardo, Marcos, and Benitez. We walked farther into the woods, until night came, and slept piled on each other, nourished by the smell of blood and feces and sweat; exhausted; defeated; ecstatic. Mosquitoes blanketed us, attracted, I thought, by the blood.

“Can’t you do something about that sound? You’re wheezing like a broken machine.”

“What sort of machine?” Benitez asked innocently. Older than the rest of us, a veteran of Spain, he was also the most convivial. He loved conversation.

“A toilet, Benitez, you stupid Spanish shit. What the fuck does it matter what kind of machine?”

This morning I counted our resources: two canteens, the rifles and pistols. Two packs, mine and Almeida’s, but no food. Marcos has only one shoe. I counted the men over to myself, as if their names formed a poem. There was joy in looking at them. Blood covered Ricardo’s sleeve—my blood; and blood
mixed with dirt dried on my chest and fell away in big flakes. Suarez’s hand looked already infected. Almeida had ripped his shirt sleeves to bandage wounds, and the tatters hung from his arms, making him a scarecrow. In the distance, somewhere else in the woods, I heard the crack of a few shots. “Army patrols,” Ricardo said, “shooting stragglers.” He sounded as if the image gave him pleasure. (After all, he wasn’t among them.) Benitez advised against marching during the day, to avoid the patrols, and so I might rest from my attack. So we remained in the wood, and I made these notes.

“Good,” Ricardo has just said. He has come over to my resting place, where I lean against the rough bark of a tree. He is six feet, half a foot taller than I am. From his shirt pocket he takes his new pair of metal-rimmed spectacles, and holds them over me. “Write more,” he says. “Blind the world!” It was while learning to read that Ricardo acknowledged his need for glasses. He thinks that the little letters, so difficult to decipher and make yield their names, have robbed him of his once-perfect vision. He’s squatted down next to me while I write, and cleared the leaves away. With a small stick he’s drawn the alphabet in the dirt; an obscure mockery of my writing. Hearing the scratching, Suarez woke up screaming, and Almeida put his hand over his mouth.

I see now that, giddy with my returned life, I’ve made the battle sound funnier than it was (it wasn’t funny at all). From survivors’ stories the business of war finds new recruits.

As we wait for nightfall the army might come upon us; if we move through the woods we might run into one of the patrols. The men sit rigidly, their heads down, immobilized by anxiety. Or they lie on the ground, in corpse position, not even twitching in their sleep. If I could look into their minds—how I wish I could!—I would find them equally still in their dreams, afraid that if they reached out a hand for that lovely glass of water it would shatter, and the army would discover us. Our once-new olive uniforms are covered with dirt and excrement. I cannot take my eyes off this raggedy army, their chests moving in and out in small spasms. I find I can hear the music most intensely when I watch them.
We’re alive
.

12/8/56: I led the men out of the woods last night, and towards (I hope) the Sierras. Perhaps the others will follow Fidel’s plan (though he might have another plan by now), and find their way to the mountains. If there are others.

For food, we took handfuls of grass and chewed on them. I stuck a few holes in a can of condensed milk. Each man got a little of that, measured out in the end of a vitamin capsule, and a few sips of water.

“Castro’s dead,” Benitez said, licking his lips, as if he’d just finished a greasy meal.

“Shut up,” Ricardo said. He was furious. Benitez had spoken the worst blasphemy, the only desecration that Ricardo recognized. Once he had been the first to curse Fidel, but now he could not bear the thought of Castro’s death. So many sacrifices had made Fidel holy. What did Fidel matter, I wondered? This business was over. And yet he did matter. It couldn’t be over. It mattered more now that he be alive than it had when one could almost sensibly have had faith in him, love for him, loyalty to him. Fidel had to be somewhere in the mountains, ready to lead us into new disasters. We all felt it, even the atheist Ricardo. By the deaths of so many comrades Fidel had taken all our soul stuff, all our brains and courage, into his keeping. We thought we might be, felt we had to be, stumbling towards him, our mouths stuffed with bitter grass. Who could really believe that if this discredited leader were still alive the Revolution might move forward?

And yet we did believe that.

12/10/56: “I’m never taking my boots off again,” Marcos said.

We walked through thick scrub, tearing at it with our hands, to get to the ocean. (My plan is to keep the ocean in sight, on our right hand, to make sure we are moving towards the Sierras.) There was too much moonlight—the army might spot us. There wasn’t enough moonlight—we kept stumbling, and falling on our faces over the roots and rocks in the field.

When Marcos spoke I realized that for five days I had been carrying Nico’s boot in my pack, that I’d taken it from his hand in the field, as he’d coughed, vomited I mean, his life up.

Another theological moment:

“Here,” I said, handing the boot on.

“A miracle!” Benitez exclaimed, as if I’d just now materialized the shoe.

“Try it on first,” Ricardo said, ever the doubter. It fit.

“A miracle,” Benitez repeated, this time triumphantly.

“It’s not the kind of world,” I said, remembering a friend, another casualty of the struggle against imperialism, “where a person can take his boots off.”

“More of Guevara’s Marxism,” Raul Suarez said. He was feverish now, and rarely spoke. I think he felt that as a doctor I had failed him, that if I had looked at him instead of reciting poems I might have saved him.

“Not more of his Marxism,” Ricardo said disgustedly. “More of his poetry.”

“I don’t care,” Marcos said. “I think Che’s right. I’m not taking off my boots again until Jesus comes back.”

No one asked why I hadn’t given him the boot before.

12/11/56: I asked Marcos what the Sierras were like.

“It’s like the movies,” he said. And then he added, nonsensically, or making all the sense in the world, “I’m hungry.” He is a big man, and the hunger seems hardest for him. But I cannot allow another adventure like yesterday’s. We had come near a palm-wood house on the shore. There was music playing inside. If this was a celebration, I thought, it would be best not to show ourselves. The peasants would announce our presence all over the area, simply for the joy of gossiping. But the others wanted to eat. I went with Benitez towards the house. The music stopped, and a man said, “And now let’s drink to our comrades in arms, whose brilliant and courageous exploits …” We ran back to the brush. The men complain often, but I can’t risk another sortie. Yesterday has made the world ominous to me, the trees might betray us.