The Death of Che Guevara (52 page)

P.S. Did I mention that I’m married? A fine woman, an activist of APRA, my wife’s name is Hilda Gadea. And I have a daughter, born just before I left for Cuba, also named Hilda.

5/23/57: A notable day: I received a canvas hammock. I don’t think that since childhood I’ve been so happy about a gift, felt the same sort of simple warm involvement with a thing. These canvas hammocks usually go to those men who have already made burlap ones for themselves. That’s a precaution against the laziness, the slackness about tasks that is our worst enemy. Then when the city network manages to get some of these beautiful canvas things to us, they are distributed only to those who have already made and used the burlap ones. But the lint from the burlap infuriates my lungs, so I’ve been sleeping on the ground. Since I didn’t have a burlap hammock, I wasn’t entitled to a canvas one. Fidel noticed this vicious circle and himself intervened to award me one of the canvas prizes.

Today, too, we ate our first horse. The peasants in the group were revolted by this cannibalism. Joaquin, Ricardo, Ponco, Rolando, and Moro all at first refused to eat their ration of meat. This was clearly the greatest crime in their eyes that the guerrilla could have collaborated in, and they treat Manuel, our butcher, as if he were a murderer. He had cut the horse’s throat, and by the time I got there it had fallen over, and was pouring its blood onto the grass. Ricardo had squatted down a few meters away, watching the ceremony.

“It’s a pity,” Ricardo said, as the blood flowed out, “that you can’t take a bite from an animal, and have him live and grow it back.”

“What?” I was stunned by the quantity of blood that fell from the horse’s neck, and formed a pool on the ground. And I was surprised that Ricardo’s imagination would run to whimsy—though I suppose it was also a vision of continual cruelty.

“The way you work a man,” he said.

“Ah.” He was more poet than I supposed.

“It’s a badly designed world,” he said, rising. He walked to the grass where the blood had pooled, and put a finger in. He brought the finger to his mouth,
as if he meant to suck on it. But then he jumped back from his own hand, and shook the drops off; the horse’s blood was cursed stuff.

I went to touch the horse’s flank. It gave off a great heat at the end. The heart beat faster and faster, then more and more slowly. Its big eyes looked as if they implored all creation, the palm trees, the grass, the bright sky, and then went glassy.

Eventually the countrypeople came around, from hunger. It was our first meal in more than a day. Several of them took their dishes off under separate distant trees to eat alone.

It is a fibrous gamey meat, sweeter than beef.

Today, too, I wrote the following poem:

Isle of Pines, July 1965

Ponco came into my room, to return my pages. I sat in front of my board, staring at the tall grass and the ocean. All still today, like my imagination.

He showed me that he had underlined some phrases from my letter to Fernando. “For the Speech,” he said. “On Vietnam. The Call.”

If
, I thought—as he did—
I’m allowed to deliver it
. But that isn’t to be spoken, not even between us. I looked down at the underlined phrases and saw more dares that I had made myself, further scaffolding for the part I wished to play. I had not then had the right to speak such things.

“Jack London,” Ponco said inexplicably to me. Perhaps he simply intended to change the subject from the one neither of us had mentioned:
Why hasn’t Fidel spoken?

“What?”

“Alaska. The story.”

“Ah.” Ponco stood beside my chair, but I continued to look out the window. The light turned the small waves translucent at the bottom, the mild wind dusted them with snow at the tops. O avalanche!

“I like the part about me,” Ponco said, still trying to attract my attention.

“Good,” I said. My mind felt empty, tired, as if writing had meant pouring out its contents, returning an empty shell to the present. “I had been worried you might not like it.” A lie. I hadn’t given it a thought.

“No.” He smiled. “I like reading about me. Young. A believer. Before I lost my faith. To an agent of the devil. Atheist. You.”

I returned his smile, but could think of nothing to say.

“You should write a book about me.”

“My next project,” I said ruefully. It seemed a cruel joke on Ponco’s part—as if to say the time on this island might stretch out until …

“And I’ll write one about … you.”

“Oh.” That round emptiness was the circle of my mood. I couldn’t locate the target of Walter’s irony.

He reached from behind my chair and started to turn the pages of my old water-soaked book, the one covering my years before Cuba. He thought in my absence to have a more intimate look. I held his hand. It felt light, as if the bones were hollow. Perhaps our Ponco will take flight one day!

“Sorry,” he growled—apology was impossible in his tone. “Did you remember to say that I was a very curious fellow?”

Each day passes now without word, and without words. Ponco accompanied me towards the ocean, object of all my empty stares. I stopped, for no reason, in the middle of the field, balancing my palm on the tips of the tall drying grass, letting them tickle my hand.

“No writing?” he asks.

“No. The story seems over to me.”

“What about the rest?” he asked. “The building of socialism.”

It was very hot. Sweat already formed under my armpits. “Not my work anymore,” I said. I remembered a speech I’d given with Fidel, after the missiles had been taken back. My memory of before—myself, deaf, in the crowd below—was false.

I had been on the platform with him. I, and no one else, not even Raul. And his speech had been a failure. It had reminded me of my parents’ kitchen, the provincial stage of that master dialectician, my mother. I could hear her intonations in Fidel’s voice that day, as she turned a staff into a snake, interpreted craven compromises as heroic acts, tried to make us accomplices to the mysterious cunning of history. That day his voice was like hers, it lacked a certain energetic confidence; we were all in a little town in the mountains of Argentina, just guessing about the big doings in the metropolis. (Who could say if the words had the same meaning for us that they did for Churchill and Stalin? The fashion might have changed, and we wouldn’t have been notified.) He lacked conviction; he’d failed, remained a commentator on events, not an
actor. The nation was diminished. Four hundred thousand people waited, looked up at Fidel and me. Behind the crowd and on the sides of the plaza, there were towers of crisscrossed wood to support the huge black loudspeakers. A field opened beyond the towers. Children, a few inches high, were back there, running about, kicking multicolored balls the size of marbles, while the adults talked. To my left were the pastel buildings of Havana, and you could already see in them signs of decay, broken windows, chipped cornices—the destruction the government had allowed to happen. (To give back the life and money drained by the cancerous city, Fidel would say—but not when he was in Havana—to let Havana die so that the countryside might live.) To my right, past a boardwalk, a metal railing, and a thin strip of beach, was the ocean. That day it was dark, choppy, and there were masses of black clouds on the horizon.

But it was still sunny in the square. I talked on. The sun was dull but constant, and we had all been there for hours, sweating. It should have been good for us—like drunks in a steambath getting out our bile, our defeat, our anger. But the feelings were bottomless. Their sweat rose towards me, a thousand different smells, blending to an overwhelming perfume—dirt, fear, soapy cotton, grease, humiliation, longing. They were a jungle, a swamp, a rank hot smell, a stagnant inlet. So many of the countrypeople (brought in by the Party Committees in huge schoolbuses and flatback trucks) wore white smocks and loosely woven light-tan hats that they also looked a cloud filling the plaza, a cloud with raggedy edges stretching towards the ocean. I felt that I looked down at the sky itself from above. Cloud, swamp, jungle, ocean—why not a flock of birds, gulls, blackbirds, bright green-and-red parrots, all mixed together in Fidel’s aviary? Or the sun? … Or the very source of all metaphors?… etc.

Or why not a field of radishes! Or of stones! That’s the way they responded that day.

I jiggled up and down in spasms, a nervous excited speaker, a man dangling on a wooden platform a hundred feet in the air. (And my bladder ached. I had to piss. I had a rubber bottle strapped to my leg, and a tube running to my penis, but I was too embarrassed to urinate with a few hundred thousand people watching. I just couldn’t make the flow begin.)

Fidel, as always, was another verse. He and the crowd were an old married couple, comfortable, altering each other to fit, annoying and forgiving each other. (Except for the ones he’s divorced, across the barbed wire in this field, in jail.) Like a married man he isn’t ashamed to piss, to use the bottle strapped to his leg.

Fidel and the crowd are, he likes to say, two parts of a tuning fork, the
waves from the one making the other tine shake. But there was no oscillation today. He had already spoken, and he hadn’t done the trick. They were still sullen. I was speaking again, Fidel standing by my side, strangely still, absolutely still. And his immobility was so striking that it destroyed my speech. Everyone looked towards him. The son of a bitch was upstaging me by doing nothing at all! So I gave up, leaned forward, pressing my hurting chest hard into the sharp edge of the podium, raised my arms high over my head, shouted, “Ever Onward to
Final
Victory!” letting my voice rise high on the last word—too high: I screeched. Spots of the crowd answered me, but only spots. I, too, had failed. The despair drifted up to my nose, black acrid stuff.