The Death of Che Guevara (81 page)

The vines would twist around and within me, and live off me, and then I would die, and they would take root.

The ants that bit me were really protecting me. They would put me in one of their deep chambers, and bring me leaves to eat, so I would survive and they could continue to bite me.

The trees I saw were once colonies of ants, grown thick. They ate everything in their path. If you brushed against the ants they would become vines, vines made out of ropes of ants, sewn together by their own strong jaws, and strangle you.

The stories Inti told me (not stories,
facts
) all ran together like the jungle until they made no sense to me. The jungle was a sign—but of what? Of too many things; it didn’t make sense, or it made too much, or one idea kept changing into another and then, before I could hold on to it, it crumbled away. The jungle was a giant toad. The jungle was
bureaucracy
.

Why were we there?

We straggled from one little settlement to another, several days’ march between each, from nowhere to nowhere. We would never find Joaquin this way. We would never build a base among the peasantry.
We would never get enough to eat
.

During the second week, at a criticism-self-criticism session,
Eusebio expressed a doubt
. It was a little muttered thing—in a tangle of his usual whining about Ricardo making him carry more than his share, Marcos having insulted him, etc. But despite our fatigue and the fact that we were only half listening to him, we heard it:
we had begun too early
. Inti silenced him with a long slow speech about the victories we had won, about the guerrilla as catalyst, creating enormous instability in La Paz, etc. But
this
little doubt was
a sign
I
could
read. It meant that there were in all the men other reservations, growing as quickly as white filaments of mold, doubts forming inside their tongues. Inti might quiet them now, make them see the inevitable wisdom of what Che had done (but where in this waste
was
the wisdom?), yet like the growth of the jungle itself new doubts would spring up, stronger someday, breaking through the vines of discipline, demanding expression. I could see their thoughts in their hesitant steps. Julio stumbled over a crawling vine: that meant:
guerrilla warfare is too elitist
. Benigno and Pacho pushed each other: that meant:
guerrilla warfare is too adventurist
. Eusebio started to stumble, and grabbed at a piece of prickly vine. He held it in front of him, smeared with his own blood, fascinated: that meant:
guerrilla warfare should not have begun until we had prepared the ground more
.

Che hardly spoke. He listened to us at meetings, and in camp. And on days when his lungs would allow it, he smoked his pipe, and nodded at Inti’s remarks. Usually he sat a little ways off from the rest of us, surrounded by his
silence like a heavy blanket, like a circle of solid air—what I had felt around the crazy boy in the church, a lifetime before.

At the end of our second week in the jungle, physical fights broke out. Ricardo hit Eusebio, the stocky, whiny Bolivian with doubts. Ricardo had hit other Bolivians, like Pacho, before.
But this time Eusebio hit him back
They were both too weak to do any damage. Inti hung across Eusebio’s arm, and Moro—risking his own newly healed arm—threw himself across Ricardo’s back. They hung on each other’s bodies like vines, and then they all went tumbling to the ground, looking like some four-headed jungle monster. No one had the energy for
real
fighting. But this four-headed thing lying in the mud was another sign I could read.

When we started marching again I hit Ricardo across his shoulder with my cane, and he turned around. He looked savage, one lens of his eyeglass had shattered in the fight. Then he made out that it was me, and he smiled. I said a short prayer that he wouldn’t, but he laughed.

“You asshole,” I said. I was furious with him for fighting.

“I’m sorry, asshole,” Ricardo said. He brushed mud and bugs off his uniform. “But I can’t understand what you’re saying. You sound like you have a very bad sore throat.” Then he laughed some more.

Finally I made
the impossible suggestion
. I waited on the march until Che was behind the rest of us. He was shaking from the effort of breathing, and he looked like he couldn’t even tear at the vines, only lean against them until his weight broke through the tangle. I stood aside, on the trail, watching him, and when he came past me, I held his arm to stop him. He hadn’t seen me, and he jumped away, as if I were a snake. He tripped and fell into a plant with sharp leaves.

I helped him up. His body vibrated from the strain.

The others trudged forward, disappearing behind the green curtain, and we were soon completely alone. We stood under a plant with leaves five feet across, like a ceiling, in our own room of the jungle.

I was a snake
. But I had to speak.
I suggested that we give up the struggle in Bolivia
.

I said that it wasn’t too late to make our way out of the jungle, and to the northwest, into the mountains. We could march into Chile. There we could make contact with Cuba, and so find a route home.

Che stared at me, his eyes angry, his chest thrust forward.

I crushed ferns under my foot, delicate things, fidgeting like a boy embarrassed before a teacher.

Our retreat, I knew, would be a disaster, a blow to morale for every movement on the continent. In the world, maybe. I saw a news photo of our getting onto an airplane, a flight back to Cuba,
CHE
GUEVARA DEFEATED, FLEES WITH HIS BAND OF MEN BACK TO SAFETY
! It was a picture that would
destroy
us,
destroy him
, a group of hollow-faced men, dressed in rags, covered in dirt, their arms, hands, faces, crisscrossed by nicks, cuts, scars. The men had difficulty struggling up the metal stairway to the plane. A black man, leaning on a cane, had to be supported by his comrades.

We had left the Congo, given it up as impossible. But this was different; the Congo for us was an anonymous venture, a training mission. Guevara was Che now, and all that the name meant: Objective conditions are ripe in Latin America. The guerrilla’s blow will reveal this, will clarify the situation, will ring in the air and gather the masses. One two three many Vietnams to save Vietnam, to destroy Imperialism once and for all.

My flesh crawling with uninvited animal life, I reviewed this catechism as if it were written on Che’s furious face. Che’s name, Che’s face, was a promise, a strategy, a faith. If we left Bolivia the faith would crumble, the name grow ordinary, the face dissolve. And he would be Ernesto again (and I would be Walter). I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to do that to him.

But I didn’t want to die either.

Che stared at me savagely, like the curse he would never utter. His labored loud metallic clanking terrified me. I was afraid of what his anger might do to him, what I might have done to him by speaking. I
knew
how much more isolated I had just made him feel.

“Joaquin,” he gasped, by way of cursing me.

He meant that we must rejoin Joaquin, that we must not abandon him.

He waved me ahead of him, and I walked forward, leaning on my staff, digging it into the mulch near a fallen tree trunk covered with ticks and chiggers. A thousand brown-and-black bugs, a battalion of them, charged from the rotting wood, like the log was giving birth to them, throwing them out into the world. Why? What great force cast them out? It made me think of firecrackers going off in Havana, sparkles of light poured from the center of the explosion, one circle following upon another. I stared. Where was the very heart of the wood where all the insects came from?

“Retreat, too, is a kind of battle,” I said, afraid to turn around, to face him again.

He pushed me forward, hard. I fell, and stuck my hand on the log, to stop myself. My hand sank into it up to the wrist. It was an army ant bivouac, that
was what the insects had been running from, the “great force” that cast them out. I could feel their pincers closing on my fingers, their stingers entering my palm, and it hurt terribly. But I didn’t draw my hand out immediately. I wanted to punish myself for speaking to Che, for suggesting retreat, suggesting we abandon Joaquin. For betraying Che. Finally I took my hand out, and ants crawled all over it, and hung down from it. I shook them off, and pounded them dead.

In a few moments my hand was swollen with painful lumps.

His first notes begin a few days after we entered the jungle. There were entries of miles marched, his difficulties breathing, medicines tried, and some distant, brief remarks about disputes in the group, problems maintaining morale, praise for Inti, the leader to come.

Then:

 … that knife as it came down to cut the webbing between Calixto’s fìrst fìnger and his thumb, the tenderest part of his hand. As I watched the blade come down into the light from the lantern, I could feel in myself the mild but pervasive effects of the coca we had chewed together. And I knew then that Calixto watched his own body surfer from a long distance. Even the sharp blade slashing into his own flesh would occur for him as if it were all happening on a movie screen. The knife, the hand, the welling blood were all part of a distant drama. Even his pain would be only another actor, fìat, clear, distant, almost a memory
.

And we, too, are only spectacle to them. How can we make them enter a spectacle?

Those were the notes we saw him scribbling each time he called a rest period, while we wrote nothing ourselves. We were too tired. We were too confused. We would not know what we had seen, what we had done, until he told us
why
we had done it. The different parts of our sentences would have gone off in different directions, like ants that had lost the scent of the ants in front. (Once, the day Ricardo struck him, I saw Eusebio fill a few pages hurriedly, and I wondered what vicious things he was saying about that bastard. Now I have his diary and I know:
Dear God
, it says, dear God, please save my life, dear God please save my life, dear God please save my life, Dear God please Save my Life Dear God Please SAVE
MY LIFE dear God, over and over in a large shaky hand for pages and pages. Then nothing more.)

The next day Che wrote:

And yet they move, they move constantly—repeated actions, like obsessed things, without thought, without change. They work tilling their fields—chewing coca—pushing in seeds—chewing coca—harvesting potatoes—chewing coca—coca gives them strength, numbs the pain in their shoulders, places them above the dissolution of their bodies—spectators to their own lives, from an arctic distance
.

They are filled with an icy energy, without heat, electric—and they follow the wires endlessly. These Indians aren’t a fìre that blazes across the held, consuming everything in its path, gathering to one enormous conflagration. They follow the thin copper bands of their lives as electricity does. They couldn’t live outside those bands, and so they run the pattern already laid for them, the threads in a weaving whose design has long been known—till their hearts stop. And in this cold all the turns of their life, that maze, are clear to them, clear and infrangible. They even see the pointless death that awaits them and all the generations to follow. But they cannot imagine a way out of this maze—any more than an electric current could dream of leaving its wires. Everyone moves along this path, yet each of them is far away, as if watching, utterly still
.

The coca makes their hearts pound like imprisoned things, and reminds them that beyond the unchangeable confìnement of their poverty there is only another confìnement, that life itself is a prison. This world of theirs, perhaps they can imagine it being shattered, like a construction made of ice, but it cannot be molded. Life is coca solid, coca pure, coca clear. The world is a Bible text from the mouth of God. Not one iota of it will ever change
.

But this is no different from what we faced in Cuba. Why even pretend that the dried green leaves are an important obstacle—they are only a symbol for some darker thing that I cannot yet name. For we have brought the violent event that should have woken them from their chain-step somnambulance; yet they do not respond. I feel in them something deeper than sleep. (Or perhaps they dream while awake.) In any case, they watch. We remain a spectacle. They observe us, as Calixto eyed the knife, glinting in the soft lantern light, moving down towards his hand. Their life is a story that someone reads to them. You cannot change a story once it is already written. Or it is a play; and it would be rude to stop a play just because the actors pretend to be in pain;
or dying. (We will get up and walk again, the mad boy shouted. How could we shout back that we won’t? They would hear it as only another line of dialogue.
)

Then there are many more entries about his problems breathing, and the different substances he injected.

His birthday. He would have been forty today. Then he would (he said) have to have given thought to leaving the guerrilla. If he had lived till now, maybe he would have agreed to our leaving, and we would still be alive.

(What a strange thing to have written.
I am alive.
)

I took the day off, in honor of his birthday, and started to walk down towards the ocean, through the field of tall grass. My thigh ached, as if the bullet had made a hollow space, a tunnel in my leg. When I got halfway down to the beach, the ocean glimmered invitingly in the distance, indifferent to my limp, asking me to dance back and forth with the waves. I began to sneeze. I told myself:
I
am not allergic to pollen! I even shouted aloud to the other specters who lie in ambush in this field. But saying it aloud didn’t make any difference; the field still wavered in front of my watering eyes.