The Death of Che Guevara (76 page)

In the morning I said to him how surprised I’d been that anyone had seen us pissing in the truck’s radiator.

Ricardo asked, in his dainty way, what the fuck I was talking about.

I said that the piss must be the truck with the magic fuel the Indians had spoken of.

Che agreed that that made sense. And clearly they had heard about Ispaca’s boy, and the worm, though that, too, was some distance from here.

“They have one ear,” Camba said. We ignored him, so that he might calm himself. Yet he is right, for it does seem that way. In each village they seem to know of things that happened hundreds of miles away. (
It seems that way
—the very thing Che had said about the lies in his life story.)

“And they knew about our farting, too,” Camba added.

“And the smell,” Coco said. Then it was clear on his sweet plain round face that he wished he hadn’t mentioned that.

“What smell?” Che asked.

Coco told him that someone the night before had spoken of a magic smell, a smell that put the soldiers to sleep. Coco is the only one of us who really commands Quechua.

Che laughed, hiding his face behind his tin coffee mug, embarrassed to remember his smell.

“Who are the two Che’s?” I asked, to change the subject.

No one could answer that.

Coco amazed me when he said that the boy who had cut himself was Paulino, poor Michael Wolfe’s guide. His face had been too far from the lantern for me to see clearly.

I was afraid that the young men would have fled by this morning, and that I wouldn’t get a chance to speak with Paulino. But Che had posted guards to make sure no one left the settlement.

6/28/67: Ponco has renewed his acquaintance with Paulino, Wolfe’s guide and Calixto’s future son-in-law, the boy who performed the self-mutilation. Paulino’s fiancée, Calixto’s daughter, informed him that the “pork merchants” are frauds—one of them is a lieutenant in the army.

The center guard surrounded Calixto’s house, and told the spies that if they came out immediately they could avoid being shot. The officer, a tall sallow man, stumbled out, as if he’d been pushed, sobbing piteously. He made a nice spectacle of himself for the countrypeople! He is a second lieutenant, not with the army, but with the police force. The other man is a teacher in Postre Valle who, the lieutenant said, had
volunteered
for the assignment. If true, that willing complicity was a disagreeable sign. It was a bad sign, also, that Calixto and the others went along with the charade. The army is having success in working on their fear.

Ricardo was for killing them, of course. I was surprised when Ponco agreed with him. He said that the lieutenant had violated the articles of war. This bloodthirstiness bespeaks an unusual degree of anxiety on Walter’s part. (
Che, they had made fools of us!
) I decided to keep them with us for a while, then send them away with a warning about the rules of war; they were out of uniform; spies.

As punishment, we took their pants.

I was in a forgiving mood, for Ponco has convinced Paulino to act as messenger for us. His mother wept at the idea, but Paulino was adamant.

I decided to trust him with messages to the Party, and ways to contact our agents in Cochabamba. This is a crucial moment in the country’s history. I must have the necessary men in the field to take full advantage of the coming miners’ strike and the shaky situation of the government in La Paz. Perhaps,
too, I can get the medicine I need for myself. I have also entrusted Paulino with messages for the city to transmit to Fidel. Fidel must oversee the activities of Monje and the Bolivian Party in spending his money or we may never get the necessary men from them. The Party and the city network can set up way stations for us where we can obtain supplies as we pass—guerrilla department stores. I have marked some possible locations on the map.

Help now could be decisive.

6/28/67: Che told me of the messages for Paulino, and the guerrilla department stores. Che has big plans. (“He is the master / He is the Man.” Would he, I wonder, like to hear a few verses of his friend Chaco’s song?)

Our interrogation of the army spies reveals no sign of Joaquin in the area, so we are heading farther west, towards the forest. To the east of here is only jungle that the countrypeople never enter. There is a certain kind of vine there, Calixto instructed us, and if a man steps on it he will wander in the jungle, lost forever. “A pointless place,” Calixto called it.

6/30/67: While listening to the radio tonight we drank some coffee—“gift” of Calixto’s household. (After we discovered his cooperation with the army’s ruse, I allowed the men to take from his house without payment—but there wasn’t, despite his fears, much to take. It is the third time we have used the coffee grounds.) Good news: Barrientos had banned the BCP, the POR, and has arrested militants from the Party and from the MNR. According to the Chilean radio some of these militants have already been shot.

“Yanqui efficiency,” Ponco said. And in that voice he can make efficiency sound like a euphemism for a death sentence. Which it often is.

The Party has no choice now but to forge an alliance with us.

The Chilean announcers also speak of more Green Berets being sent to Bolivia, and of the use of napalm—both of which La Paz unconvincingly denies. It seems certain now that the North Americans will intervene here in strength.

After the news Camba insisted on singing a song for us. The men shrank back from him, expecting some new display of his instability. Instead it turned out to be an amusing thing, about a revolt of the vegetables against the gardener.

There was general good feeling in the camp. Coco, Inti, Jorge and the other militants are pleased that the comrades they left behind—the ones who were shot—are also sharing the risks of revolution. And, of course, the increased North American involvement is good news.

7/1/67: The radio is rife with rumors of deals and counter-deals. Two more parties have withdrawn from Barrientos’s government, demanding that the Communists and MNR militants be freed, and legal status returned to both parties. Clearly the minor parties are trying to curry favor with us, believing Monge and Kolle’s statements that the Party and the guerrillas are comrades. (Once again History is made when people act on misapprehensions, lies, and myths. Yet their actions have real consequences!) The Peasant Union has warned Barrientos against forming an alliance with the Falange.

The Barrien tos government continues to disintegrate. If only I have a hundred more men when the miners finally deliver their blow! That would be the end of Barrientos! Seldom has the possibility of the guerrilla as catalyst been so clear!

The messages I gave Paulino will alert our allies to the necessary measures. This will make the decisive difference.

On the march, deep in the thick forest, Camba shared another verse of his vegetable epic with us.

7/2/67: Camba sang us into the little settlement, repeating the last few days’ worth of verses—but all out of order—and adding one about a pretty but stuck-up tomato. Che’s spirits were good today and he enjoyed Camba’s tuneless singing. But I don’t trust Che’s mood—not because it is bad or good, but because he usually doesn’t
have
moods. He
shouldn’t
have moods. He surrendered his rights to them long ago, when he assumed his empty name.

The small settlement—perhaps thirty square brown thatched huts—had a huge church, white stone and adobe with a sloping roof, and a scalloped front piece. The land in front of the church was bare dry earth, worked out long ago. Green hills rose behind the building; some plots of corn and the runners of potato plants spotted the small terraced fields of the hillsides. These people,
I thought, had to walk a long distance to get to their work. Why do people make their lives so difficult?

Why did I?

We gathered up twenty or so from their huts with our insistent invitations, asking them to join us in the church for a talk. I held my rifle in front of one man, explaining to him that now he could tell the army we forced him to come to our meeting.

He looked at the ground, sourly. “Do you think the army will care
why
we talked to you?”

Most of the ones we found were older men, and women in black derby hats. But there was one young fellow, of a possible age for a recruit; he was very skinny, with large brown eyes.

The church’s interior was a cave, with no seats. There were high tall windows near the wooden altar in front, but they were nearly black with smoke and dirt, and let in almost no light. Some green boughs had been scattered on the stone floor. Every fifty feet or so on a raised platform against the wall stood a clothing-store dummy. His costume had been painted on, but across his shoulders they had placed bright pieces of cloth. Silver and gold thread in the cloth absorbed the light from the dozens of candles that burned before each saint. The Indians had placed strings of dried berries around the dummies’ necks, and from the center of the strings they had hung little round mirrors.

“You are in their hearts,” Camba said as he and I stood in front of one saint. I think that was a good guess—he has the knack of understanding them. Camba stuck his tongue out at the mirror.

I didn’t like that. I felt uneasy even being inside a church—my stomach was queasy; maybe I was profaning something. I don’t believe in God anymore (do I? what will I say when I know I am dying?), but I still believe in profanation, or my stomach does. And now that I don’t believe anymore I feel I don’t belong in a church. The Indians’ piety, dark and thick, hung all over everything and seeped into me from the green boughs, the expensive cloth, the grotesque dummies. Each candle flame was a tongue sticking back at Camba and me, a tongue of flame from hell. (I still believe in hell.)

The skinny fellow came over to the saint we stood near and crossed himself. He gave Camba a sniff, like a dog’s examination, and returned to the back of the church. It was funny, because the kid gave off a terrible stink himself, like compost, or a body decomposing. He carried a hoe, and stood in back by the big door, like a guard.

Some of the other Indians crossed themselves by a favorite store dummy, or peered into the mirrors. “To see the state of their souls?” I said, and Camba
smiled approvingly. As the Indians walked about, they lit more candles, and muttered brief prayers, just the way my mother would. The church blazed with white candles. But the dark that gathered under the high roof was too great for the light. The church was like a night sky, with many many stars, but no moon—pins of light, but still a dark place.

Inti spoke, and the villagers quietly knelt on the floor in front of him, as if he were a priest come to perform Mass for them. He was barely visible from where I stood in the back, by the side, holding my rifle, just a tall shadow. He spoke of local conditions, the need for new tools to work the land efficiently, of new kinds of fertilizer and seeds. After the victory of the Revolution, he promised, when the villages formed cooperative ventures, they could work the land with tools paid for by Bolivia’s national resources. They could even have tractors!

He asked for questions, and some of the Indians crossed themselves.

Che spoke then of the need for violent revolutionary action against the army. The Imperialists used the army to rule over Bolivia. They oppressed the people and stole from them. If the people worked together with the guerrillas, we could defeat the army and the Imperialists. Then the people would have their own army, and their own government.

As Che spoke the skinny boy hopped about excitedly by the door, leaping up on one foot, with the other tucked up behind him, then bringing that hidden foot out at the height of his jump, to land upon. He went up and back behind the Indians with that crazy hop, his hoe on his shoulder. It looked like a parody of an army marching.

The boy had on a white shirt with big wooden buttons, and as he hopped about, and Che talked, he took the shirt off. His skinny chest glistened with grease. Maybe he has a bad chest, too. All the time that he jumped about he talked to himself in a loud, rapid voice. Sometimes he pointed his hoe like a rifle.

I thought that he must be a little mad fellow that they all took care of.

Che spoke of the necessary battles we had won already—with the people’s help. My mad friend said “killy killy kill, die die die”—helping Che along. Then he said—I think, for he spoke very rapidly in a garbled mixture of Quechua and Spanish, shouting some syllables out and swallowing the rest—something about the Sheep and the Goats, and the Last Judgment. Everyone would get up again. Everyone would come back, good as before. “Where’s your
arm?” he asked. He was very excited. “Where’s your leg? Have you lost it? It will all begin again!
It will be all right!”
He screamed this last promise in a choked voice, strangling the words.

He reached out his hand to some imaginary playmate. “I am the Resurrection and the Life!” he said. So I supposed then that he hadn’t been listening to Che at all, but was remembering some things he had heard the priest say. I supposed Che was too far away, half in shadows, the fellow couldn’t hear him. And the boy spoke all the time anyway, he couldn’t be listening to anyone, couldn’t respond that quickly.

But then Che said, “We must not abandon the miners, we must not abandon Vietnam!” Che’s words had a breathy sound, a halo of aspiration around them.

The mad boy howled, “abandon Abandon ABANDON! Don’t abandon Me! I’m drowning, I’m drowning, I’m drowning!” His voice had a piteous choking sound, not of drowning in water, but in the darker stronger current of his confusion. I thought of my mother, late at night, very drunk, touching my face, and trying to recall my name, and I felt tears starting up behind my eyes.

The people on their knees bent forward towards Che and back towards the half-naked boy, not turning towards him, just making a slight motion of their heads, like corn waving in the wind. No disrespect showed on their faces, no sly smiles—no expression, really, at all. They were stones. Or turnips.