The Death of Che Guevara (83 page)

Camba keened the farewell, as if he hadn’t much hope for the rebellious ambitious vegetable, the poor sad lonely doomed little red pepper! It would have brought tears to the stoniest heart—if our bodies had had the moisture to spare for tears.

As a joke one day Marcos said, “There’s something wrong with your political line, Camba. If the vegetables are the workers, then
they
clear the ground, not the bourgeois gardener who owns the land. Inti better have a talk with you and straighten you out.”

Camba stared at Marcos, bewildered. He didn’t sing for several days, and we all missed his little ditty. To the extent that we could hold on to its silly world through our weakness and fog, it had refreshed us, it let us imagine ourselves in a cartoon, or at least in a nursery, somewhere far away, where such songs might occur, and children might listen. So I asked Marcos to apologize to Camba, and Camba began again one day, in the middle of a line, like an engine starting up, “Nig bloo bloo plig nig, the Celery sang:…”

The song was called “United Vegetables vs. United Fruit.”

The Inca versus the Conquistador, the Inca against the Imperialist, the Inca versus History. The Inca is the empire without history, static, settled, immutable. And within that stillness life was filled with meaning, their work joined them each to each and to the godhead. (Of course they had a history of conquests—but one within a fundamentally unchanging structure. So we, too, must give them our new territories—of industry, of the tractor and the factory—in an image that rings with the truth of their past.) Our mistake has been to offer them new words, what is called progress, the ability to enter history, the very acid they have bent their will to neutralizing
.

Instead: a rebellion against history. Against imperialism. One that will end history, though not for a long-promised rest or even “prosperity” but for suffering. Not an immediate or even a progressive end to suffering, but the re-establishment of a meaning for their continual suffering, a meaning that they can fìnd now only in broken fragments. They long for a messiah who comes not once but over and over at every moment, the pattern of recurrence that they dream of in their stories, that they wish to make of us, that they have instructed us in. They will sacrifìce in a battle against the present, for a future that they can think will be the past made perpetual, that will be a continual meaningful suffering. The God of Liberation is a God of violence. But he must also be a God of sufferers
.

That shared suffering is the vein of blood that ran like a road through the villages, forming the body of one giant Man. Their work, their suffering, made them part of that One Man, that God who was imaged in the Inca. It was not release from work, but shared continual work, not rest, but continual sacrifice of the self that joined one with the community, that makes the community, that makes it One Man. So it is, too, with Communism
.

She spoke of the return of the just king. The King who will return is the form of the Inca remade by us, the king of the return. The God who was
imaged in the Inca will be the One Man we offer them, the Internationale. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, and … Inti perhaps. Or one of their own, unknown yet
.

We moved north, as a feint (and to get medicines for Che), and then back south, to search for Joaquin again.

Bolivia, August 1967

8/14/67: The time in the jungle was hard for me—for all of us. The chloroquine Moro gave me helped, but the jungle still made my tissues so watery that I could hardly stand. And the heat turned the watery flesh to steam; my face melted away; now I’m so thin that I look as dour and lean as Inti. The Revolution has made us into brothers!

But the jungle was hardest on Che. At night, in our hammocks, we heard his lungs strain and wheeze like a piece of creaky overburdened machinery. They tried to wring the water out of the air, as if it were a moist rag, to find something for Che to breathe.
But Che made the necessary sacrifice:
going into the jungle and staying there, despite the pain it caused him, until we had confused the army, thrown them off our trail.

And it worked! It was like the ground had swallowed us up. Today we surprised the soldiers completely, appearing out of nowhere, and taking the town of Samiapata.

The town is on a branch road, a mile south of the highway. We drove up slowly, in the bus we had seized this morning back near the sawmill. (We had left the real passengers under guard with Che and the center at our command post there.)

At the intersection there was a police booth for two or three men, and a gray wooden refreshment stand with a table in front, and a fading Coca-Cola sign leaning against its legs. (I looked forward to having a Coke.) The police
waved us to a stop at the intersection. I saw three or four soldiers lounging by the stand, and threw the metal flange on my pistol nervously. The piece of metal felt comforting, as if my own blood went through it; the pistol has become a wonderful part of my body.

We got off the bus without incident, hiding our weapons under the jackets we’d taken from the passengers, and we moved to the outside of the officials, pushing them to the middle according to Ricardo’s plan, like beaters in a hunt. One soldier gave me the evil eye when I bumped him with my elbow, and called me a clumsy son of a bitch.

Ricardo, at the center of the circle, raised his arm, and we pulled out our weapons, pointing them inward at the crowd. The bald-headed soldier who had cursed me said, “I’m sorry,” in a choked voice.

“That’s all right,” I said, and I pushed my gun barrel hard into the very small of the bald man’s back so it would hurt him.

We had surrounded them! The police and soldiers were stunned. There were no more guerrillas, the radio said, and if there were, they were far from Samia pa ta. But then, suddenly, there we were! The Revolution had burrowed underground, and emerged like an old mole, covered with rotting leaves and dirt, blinking, its big teeth bared, outside their wooden refreshment stand.

Pacho and Aniceto stood guard over the prisoners, and the rest of us rode into town on the bus. I was disappointed that there hadn’t been any Coca-Cola. We dropped Chino off at the Infant of Prague Pharmacy, a white building with a statue of the Holy Infant on a little piece of mosaic sidewalk in front. Samiapata is the largest town we have seen in four months—a dozen paved streets, sidewalks, even a movie theater.

The army was bivouacked in a long adobe building that had once been the town school. One of our prisoners from the highway, the second lieutenant with the bald head—and a bad head-cold that made his tongue thick—identified himself before the door of the school, and ordered their surrender. He started to stutter, probably from fear, but I thought it might be a trick, and put my pistol to his temple. He bit his tongue right through then, and a thin thread of blood trickled down his lip, a vivid red. I laughed to see how scared he was, and that made it worse for him, and he started to choke on his own spit!

They let us in. Julio gathered up their arms, munitions, clothing, and blankets and loaded them into the bus. I made the officers undress. Their underwear was so clean and white that I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Probably they thought I was queer!

A private who was just coming to from his last-night’s binge lay on the floor,
pretending to sleep. But I saw him put a hand out and move it towards a pistol near his pillow, so I shot him in the head. His legs twitched under his brown army blanket, like a child who doesn’t want to go to sleep. (I had hated to take my afternoon nap, and used to beat my legs up and down like that, to annoy our governess. It made me laugh again to see him do that. I thought the maid would have liked to put me to sleep in just that way, with a bullet through my forehead.) The bald lieutenant screamed, “He was only looking for his glasses! You’ve murdered him!” But I think he was lying.

I telephoned the sawmill, and told the center that the town was now secure.

Julio went through the street gathering up the townspeople for the march back to the police booth. They were afraid of us, and very reluctant to come. But they were afraid not to. As we went I looked into some of the houses, adobe rooms, sometimes with a charcoal stove to cook on, and I wondered what it would be like to live in this town, to trade with the mestizo peasants and Indians, to marry some young girl who would become one of these fat old women. But I can never have a life like that, any more than I can have the life I was raised for, and not only because my people wouldn’t have me back, but because I’ve changed. I can see it in the fear of the people we shepherded to the police booth, fear that
I
caused. Sometimes I feel split in two, and when one half of me sees the things the other half does he is bewildered, and I am bewildered. Nothing in my life prepared me to be a fighter—a murderer, the lieutenant said—but I think that can happen to anyone, for there are times when the whole world leaves its jobs on farms and in banks and goes off to war. What bewilders me is the joy I feel sometimes, the surge of agreeable power that overcomes me. I was
right
to lift and fire my pistol into that boy’s forehead. It felt good to see his legs kick up and down, the last convulsive involuntary motion that he will make on this earth—
and I made him do it
And when the lieutenant screamed in terrified disapproval of the man he saw before him, I was deeply pleased.

Knowing that about myself where can I go live?

It was noon by now and very hot in the streets. The buildings wavered, for I have trouble focusing my eyes when I get hot. I put my hand on Julio’s arm, so he might lead me back down the little branch road to the main junction.

Soon Che came, with some of the center guard. He rode the mule that Benigno had found for him yesterday. Che can hardly walk, because of the asthma, but the medicines Chino was getting would soon remedy that. Our leader would be whole again.

Che had Inti speak first. Inti stood on the refreshment-stand table, and he
talked with a lot of feeling about the international situation, but he looked unsteady up there, and I found it hard to concentrate. I wasn’t sure if he was off balance, or if it was my eyes—from the fever or the drugs—and that worried me so much I couldn’t concentrate on what my brother was saying.

Bolivians must join other oppressed people of the world in their rising against the United States. (I wished they had had Coca-Cola. Our governess used to give me Coca-Cola when I was sick, and I suppose I still think of it as a cure-all, even for malaria.) Our blow now, Inti said, could be decisive in defeating Imperialism and gaining our liberation.

More than a hundred people stood on the asphalt in the hot sun, and the light made parts of their bodies look to me as if they were under water. When Inti spoke they stared at the road, like kids in a classroom who didn’t want to be called on.

Che spoke after Inti, still sitting on his mule. He had trouble forming his words, and sometimes wheezed for a minute at a time between his sentences. I was sure his body was shaking this time, and not my eyes.

He spoke of the miners’ massacre. Bolivian soldiers had pulled the triggers. But they worked for the United States. The United States was like a ghost, a specter, living off of our labor. It sucked the blood of Bolivians, using our own soldiers like syringes. And it turned our blood into gold coins, like a magician.

Barrientos and the other generals worked for the United States. The generals were weak-willed slaves who weren’t fit to lead. The Bolivian people themselves must rule. And the revolutionary struggle would form the Bolivian people into a nation of heroes, men of strong will, fit to govern themselves.

They could see, Che said, that he himself was not a physically strong man. They could hear the trouble he had speaking, breathing, they could see that he could not even stand. And as a child he had been even weaker. Other children had mocked him, bullied him, tried to make him do their bidding, just as the United States bullies Bolivia. But the people of Samiapata could see, too, that even a physically weak man could rebel, and that if he did, if he fought for the nation, then he gained in power. Now Che was no longer afraid. Now he was a man who caused fear in others.

Ricardo pushed the lieutenant, the sick stutterer, towards me, and I pushed him back with one hand, like a ball. I heard a sharp sudden intake of breath in the crowd when they saw this, as if they thought we might kill him for our sport. But I could tell, too, that they liked what we were doing. I thought again of the sudden upsurge of giddy pleasure I had felt when we took our guns out and surrounded the police.
We were weak, but we caused fear in others
.

Bolivia, too, Che said, could become a nation of heroes, a nation without fear, an independent nation that caused fear in others. A nation was the body of one Giant Man. That Man was brought to life by our acts of sacrifice. When one of us suffered for the Revolution—and we were all ready even to die if that were necessary—it filled the veins of that Giant Man with life. When all of the people of Bolivia joined together in the many acts of war and sacrifice that were necessary for liberation, then the Man who was Bolivia would awaken.