The Death of Che Guevara (56 page)

11/4/66: Ernesto Che Guevara died in the street-fighting against U.S. Marines in Santo Domingo, one of those insanely opposing soldiers with sticks and stones. His handwriting in hotel registers proves his death definitively this time. (For he has died many times before, in Argentina, Vietnam, Cuba, the Congo.)

Adolfo Mena, a Uruguayan businessman, arrived today in La Paz, where the thin air hurts his weak lungs. Mena is middle-aged, with deep worry wrinkles on his high forehead, and thick black eyebrows. He wears heavy glasses
in severe tortoiseshell frames, and slicks his thin, graying hair back in the manner of Robert McNamara.

11/5/66: The air is too thin here, it will not support me. As I walked along the square I was seized by a kind of vertigo, as if the air itself had let me drop and I was falling and falling through an enormous empty space, with nothing to stop me from falling forever.

Instead, I arrived at the Hotel Austria Bar, a retreat of frosted glass and red plush opposite the Government Palace. This time, with my businessman’s gray suit, my immaculate though scanty coiffure, and an authoritative stare through my glasses, the mestizo waiter seemed happy to serve me. I looked rich and used to command. As, in fact, I am.

The waiter snapped open the cap of the beer bottle for me, and, because of the altitude, foam gushed up. I grabbed at it with my hand, as is (or was) the custom. “Money will come to you,” one of the men at the bar said, smiling. He was a colonel in the Bolivian Army, and wore sunglasses despite the bar’s dim lighting, giving him an insect look. “You bet,” I said, and turned away. No more staring contests with bugs for me; my anger has found more appropriate means.

The red plush of the bar has worn away to frayed cord in places, like the Bolivian Revolution itself. The bar and I are both the worse for the wear of history. One beer, at this height, makes me tipsy—a fact that my Gandhian vows kept me from discovering before.

I toddled back to my hotel room, unmolested, a man of peace still, although a nervous, ambitious one. The only older Indians who show themselves in La Paz after the curfew are specters, ghost dancers. The government wishes not their visible presence but their silent labor. And the only posters on the walls are of half-naked women carrying rifles: movie advertisements. I shouted angrily at one of the begging boys who had risked the police in hopes of a coin. He didn’t run from my rage, or turn away; he simply stared at me and began a long racking cough. I was angry at myself really. It was stupid to go to that bar, stupid to show myself, the equivalent of a staring contest.

Tomorrow, early in the morning, Mena is to be driven from La Paz to the guerrilla base in the Nancahuazu region.

11/6/66: Jorge, my driver, has let his hair grow while at the farm. Thick black curls stand out on all sides of his head, like a bushy hat or a hidden animal. His mustache, though, has grown less profusely. There’s a little space, right below his nose—the very deep indentation of his lip—which is completely empty. As we talked he kept taking his hands from the wheel, smoothing down
the wings of his mustache, touching under his nose, to feel if anything had sprouted. (I mentally christened him with the
nom de guerre
of Mustache.) He thinks, as he’s been told by Tania, that I’m an old man, a Cuban Party official, come to survey the arrangements. He spoke with me as you might with an old man, polite chatter, but with the air of being slightly more knowing about this business than a member of an older generation could be. Mustache talked a good deal, which made him a good companion for a car ride, though it might be a strain later. The ones who talk a lot continue often, out of fear, when they have nothing more to say, driving everyone mad. Jorge gestured when he spoke, a cause for worry in the present, because he insisted on taking his hands from the wheel, poking them in the air or at my shoulder. (Airplanes frighten me; I don’t like cars or trucks; my theory of guerrilla warfare is the work of a man who can’t stand any means of locomotion other than his own feet.)

I made old-man’s talk back, fleshless, banal. We were chatting on this way as we drove, talking of the prospects for guerrilla war. It was hard to speak with him about it. He was eager for the fight, and knew all the formulations, but he didn’t really feel how the formulations were earned. It was difficult to talk, too, because there was a loud rattle from the metal doors and the Plexiglas windows of the jeep. You had to shout everything.

“I suppose,” I said, “a great deal of secrecy is necessary to make sure you’re not discovered in the early stages.”

“What? Oh. Yes. Absolutely. Before the center is firmly established is the most dangerous time for the guerrilla. Perhaps you know what happened to Masetti’s group in Argentina? They were discovered before they could establish good contacts with the peasants. So they were destroyed before they began engagements with the army.”

“Yes,” I said, abstractedly. “I’ve heard that. It’s important to learn from past mistakes.” I turned away. I didn’t want to talk of Masetti with him, not yet. (I switched his name back to Jorge.) He sounded like a rich boy: he spread an air of unreality on whatever he talked about. We were on a bumpy road that ran near the edge of cliffs, high above the Nancahuazu River. The seats of the jeep were raised up off the road, and I could sometimes stop the talk in my mind, and let myself wander with the last light off the water, hear the splash of the river—or imagine it—as it moved hard over the rocks.

It was near evening. There was a moistness in the air that made me anxious in my chest. How will my asthma treat me here this time? The canvas top of the jeep was down to make room for the crates of guns brought from the warehouse in La Paz. (Not .22s!) I felt a chill on my neck and buttoned up my long Russian coat, pulling the felt collar about my face and lips.

Jorge was saying something like “Some say there are elements left.”

“Elements of what?” I shouted.

“Of Masetti’s guerrillas. Still operating.”

“Oh. You sound very committed to the guerrillas yourself,” I said, though he didn’t; he didn’t sound like he knew what he was talking about. (The basis of a first commitment is a very good imagination, so that you can at least dream the dangers you are entering. I need a battalion of dreamers?) “Will you stay with the guerrillas,” I asked, “if the Party doesn’t support them?” My hands were touching my wrinkles as I spoke now, crawling through the ravines of my forehead, scurrying through the wiry vegetation on my eyebrows, acquainting myself nervously with the new map of my face. My old face was there and not there; peekaboo around the edges. I’m not comfortable in disguise; I hate being old.

“I don’t know if I’d stay then,” Jorge said, alarmingly taking his hand from the wheel to open his palms into the air and turn towards me. His eyes are deep-set, and they looked troubled by my question. “I’m not sure. For myself, I’m certain that this is the right course eventually. But Monje, the Party’s first secretary, says one must be sure to pick the right time to open hostilities, that’s just as important as the rightness of your course. Otherwise it’s just suicide, and you help no one. And only the Party can decide when the revolution is on the agenda. That’s what Monje says.”

“I think,” I said, “the time is very auspicious now, here in Bolivia. The miners have learned that if they stay by their mines, in fixed positions, they will be bombed into submission. The government and the army are the same, and they rule for imperialism. Guerrilla war is clearly the only possibility for liberation.” I had forgotten, as I spoke, who I appeared to be. My hands reminded me that I was an old man. “I think,” I concluded, “one creates the right time: by beginning.” In my disguise my words had none of the authority my name would have given them; spit bubbles; lacking my presence, they were merely rhetorical.

“You
do?” Jorge said, looking away from the road, and smiling condescendingly at me. He thinks I’m an old man! And Jorge is a bit of a brat, in my opinion. (I wondered what his class background was. I must keep up my charade, I reminded myself, till I know him better, have sounded his commitment more.) “Well, we—the others from the Party and I—are waiting for Monje to declare the Party’s position. I think,” Jorge said, “I will go along with the Party. When I became a Party militant I committed myself to their discipline. And we all respect Monje. He’s a very clearheaded man.”

“Is he?” This was the reverse of what Debray had reported to me. He called Monje “lacking in clarity, weak, and vacillating.” But Monje hadn’t known I’d
be leading the undertaking. I wondered what difference that would make.

“Yes,” Jorge continued, “very intelligent. And a warm good person too, very sincere. He’s the one who recruited me into the Party when I was at the university, and he made me editor of the Party newspaper. I feel very close to him.”

I said—because I was momentarily jealous of Monje’s hold on the boy, and because I wished to test the potency of my name on the other Party members (and why had Tania allowed Jorge, someone of such weak commitment, to know so much of our plans? what if the Party backs off now?)—“Jorge, I’m not what I seem. My real name isn’t Adolfo Mena.”

“It isn’t?” Jorge turned from the wheel again, to smile expectantly at me. He clearly liked secrets—perhaps that was what Tania played on to interest him in us. A good tactic with intellectuals: they like to be in the know.

“No. It’s Ernesto Guevara.” And, I added, to heighten the effect, “I’m Che Guevara.”

“What?” Jorge said, without surprise, still smiling expectantly. I had made my revelation in a quiet voice, to increase the drama. He hadn’t heard me over the rattling.

So I shouted, bringing my mouth up to his ear, my gesture turned idiotic by repetition and volume, a silly joke carved in stone, “
I AM CHE GUEVARA!”

Jorge let go of the wheel to grab my shoulder, squeezing it hard to see if it was real. We sluiced towards a cliff edge. He slammed on the brakes, no hands on the wheel, and we parked halfway in the air, our snout stuck out into nothing. A convincing demonstration of the power of my name. We crawled out of the jeep through the back, over the wooden gun crates. We hid the crates in some shrubbery, covering them as best we could with dirt and branches, and walked the rest of the way to the farm. I stumbled often in the dark, but Mustache’s night vision was good. He was a strong walker.

11/14/66: I’ve sent the men out in small groups, as explorers. From what I’ve seen, and what they report, it is hard to put together a coherent picture of the area. It is as if they were reporting to me on the individual landscape of their dreams. A semitropical area, but with little water. Areas of abundant vegetation, wide-leafed plants, jungle that opens inexplicably into fields of low grass, grass that turns to fields of stone, stones that end in tall cliffs that overlook the Nancahuazu River or one of its tributaries.

The rivers flow from the mountains that surround this valley, running down the mountainsides only to disappear for miles, and then reappear suddenly, almost as torrents. We are in a canyon between the Serranias de las Pirirendas, to the east, and the Serranias Incahuasi, to the west. They meet to the south
and become the Salta range in Argentina. The peaks of the mountains look like different planets, one bare of growth next to one covered with snow, and the next green all year. They incite my imagination, as if I could step from peak to peak, planet to planet, back to my native land, to Argentina. For once the guerrilla is established here that will be our next goal.

The land is covered throughout with grayish trees and a ground cover of prickly plants. To the north of the farm the mountains are covered with hardwood forests, and at the edge of the northeast corner of our land lie the sometimes sandy, sometimes extremely rocky banks of the Nancahuazu River. The river is broad and turbulent in most places, dangerous to cross. (In other spots it narrows to a creek.) The river runs through rocky inclines, very steep ones. The men move along the beach; the beach narrows away to nothing, and to continue to walk the men must climb carefully—very carefully, Ponco says—along the cliff sides, or hack a path through one of the deep wide ravines that run from the river, long slashes in the mountainside, as if someone had poured acid all over it, ravines dense with vines, spiny crawlers with cactuslike leaves, sharply serrated. All of the men’s hands have lost a little flesh, grabbing the vines for support. And as we walk into a ravine our feet scare up swarms of mosquitoes, dark clouds of them.

11/20/66: Days of construction, and exploration. We’ve spent the last week continuing our reconnaissance of the area, looking for places to build the permanent camps—places with access to water, cover of vegetation, raised areas for observation posts. We’ve mapped out several. The men enjoy the explorations, take pleasure in using their bodies. And so far the Bolivians and Cubans are getting along well together.

The Bolivians, like Jorge, are openly uncertain of their commitment to the insurrection. My name sways them to the brink—!—but they still await Monje to announce the Party’s position; they’d rather not break Party discipline.

For the moment we’re staying in the brush, not far from the Tin House, and usually we bring our supplies from there in the evening. It reminds me of when I’d play at camping as a child, in my parents’ back yard.

Last night a heavy rain forced us out of the thickets, for we don’t yet have canvas tops for the hammocks. (The people in the city network always find it hard to appreciate how important a piece of canvas can be out here.) I spent the evening in the Tin House by the fire, getting sheep and cattle ticks, glutted with my blood, off my arms and legs. You stick the still-hot end of a match
into them till they shrivel up: you must be sure to get the head or it burrows in deeper. (Possible metaphor for speech.) I reminded myself of my mother some nights in the kitchen, poking, or trying to poke, at the flies and mosquitoes with the lit end of her cigarette. “Psst!” she’d say. “My aim is uncanny! Pssst! Psst! Die now mosquito!” But she never got any.