The Death of Che Guevara (86 page)

8/27/67: A message from Fidel, in code. But we have lost the tape recorder, so we can’t replay it and translate. This god speaks now in a garbled voice, from afar.

Some of the men thought they understood a phrase or two from the oracle.

“Don’t sell any more milk, a hug, Fidel,” Ricardo said.

“Don’t see any more of that ilk, my love, Fidel.”

“Don’t be a piece of silk, you mug, Fidel.”

Etc.

It was the first laughter in weeks.

But there was uneasiness, too. It reminded us all, again, of our isolation. These words half understood, like the peasants themselves, were a barrier we couldn’t fling ourselves against. We were somewhere else; put to bed in another room. A dark one.

8/28/67: The army reports three killed in the Nancahuazu region. From the descriptions, it cannot be doubted that these are the party I sent out for medicine.

8/29/67: Morroco. Calixto’s village. This time, too, a larger crowd than before, more than twenty people, women, children, and a few young men. Curiosity now overcomes fear and their angry grief at the loss of Paulino.

Calixto said, “You know how to make the Giants do as you wish. As only a Hero can.” He stood in front of his hut, near the cooking fire where his daughter had bewitched me. He was authoritative; it all made perfect sense to him I guess.

Again Che said that the Revolution joined land and people into a Giant, ready to walk again among the liberated nations of the world. The Revolutionary struggle would make the Bolivian people into heroes, joined to the life of that Giant, part of his immortal life.

A woman in the back cackled. “You don’t look like heroes,” she said. She had a sly mocking smile that I had seen before. Could this be the mother of my beloved? She had a round smooth face, and a body made round and smooth and enormous by her skirts and shawls. This was what I had to look forward to as we grew old together!

That made me laugh, the idea of our growing old! Anyway the coca energy was gone from my body, from my prick.

“If you had eyes to see,” Che said to the doubter, “you would know that we are indeed heroes.”

“And so you have come to tell us what to do,” Calixto’s father said. They are all still angry, I guess, about the boy’s loss.

“The Bolivian people themselves will decide what to do. The leader of the Revolution speaks for the power of the Giant. He will come from among the Bolivian heroes. And he will be someone you recognize.”

“We know,” Calixto said. “We have heard. He will know what is in our hearts.”

A light rain began to fall. My body felt hot. I thought steam would rise from my feverish skin, taking more of my flesh. Already I am even thinner than Inti.

“Yes,” Che said. “But you will know, too, what is in his heart. You will see yourself in him. His heart will be a mirror in which you can see yourself, for he will be from among you.”

“From among us?” Calixto said. He looked around him at his twenty friends, standing uncomplaining in the rain. “From among us?”

“But we’re garbage,” the sly woman said.

“I see her point,” Ricardo said to me. He doesn’t care anymore that I am Bolivian. His huge eyes swam towards my face from behind his thick glasses.

“Fuck you,” I said.

Che told them all how they might become Heroes.

8/29/67: One of the men Che had chewed coca with before took me aside. He showed me a heap of stones behind his house that had a small crockery vase on it, a household shrine. The vase had a picture faintly outlined on it
that looked like a man in a flowing robe with a sunburst behind his head. “Look,” the man said. “His ashes.” He looked up at the sky and blew a kiss from his fingertips.

“Whose ashes?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” the man said. “But they’re very powerful.”

“Why do you blow a kiss to the sky?”

He shrugged.

“Ah,” I said.

We were getting to be pals.

“Who stole your voice?” he asked.

“I sacrificed it,” I said, “to the Revolution.” I thought to add, Now the Giant speaks for me. But my theology wasn’t clear—was it the Giant or the Heroes or the leader?—and I was afraid of blaspheming.

“Will you get it back?” he asked. “After the Day of Change?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, for once again I didn’t have the right answer. I must ask Che; or Camba.

8/30/67: We moved along the lower edge of a thick junglelike area, then back towards the Rio Grande. Humid, yet we are far from water. Benigno found some small cane which we sucked on for moisture. But Pacho and Eusebio are falling to pieces and look on the verge of collapse.

8/31/67: Two of the
macheteros
fainted today. Eusebio, forgetting all that I had said, drank his own urine from his canteen cup, with the expected results of diarrhea and cramps. He didn’t trust my word; or thought he couldn’t be certain of a truth unless he tested it on his own body.

Benigno, our scout, brought contradictory reports about Joaquin’s presence in the zone. Some of the local people say that guerrillas have been in the area, others deny it.

Monthly Summary: Until we rejoin with Joaquin our situation remains precarious. We cannot risk battle and further losses; but without battles there isn’t even the possibility of new recruits. The myth continues to spread, taking unpredictable forms.

9/1/67: Benigno went down into a canyon overgrown with thick bushes and vines and found a small stream.

9/2/67: A day scaling ridges between here and the river. We will wait in this area for Joaquin.

9/3/67: Che set up an ambush near the Rio Grande. I don’t understand his thinking. We can’t risk contact with the army if we are to remain in this area.

In the afternoon ten soldiers marched on the other side of the river as if they were about to cross. Che ordered us to wait until the column was all the way into the water, and then fire. But Marcos fired as soon as the point man came to the edge of the rocks. The other soldiers scattered.

Marcos is afraid of the army and wants to avoid a battle
.

Che was furious with him, and called him a coward. Marcos bowed his head, and Che called him other names, like someone bringing a stick down across a mare’s face, over and over.

9/5/67: We camped an hour’s march from the house of Honorato Ispaca, near the junction of the Masicuri and the Rio Grande. Che established an ambush with a good view of the hut, under El Chino.

A muleteer with a scarred face came down the dirt track near the river, and we took him prisoner. He was so surprised when I stepped out of the forest I thought the son of a bitch would shit!

I brought him back to camp for interrogation. He said that eight days ago, when he had stopped by Ispaca’s house, Ispaca hadn’t been home. Ispaca’s wife said he was seeing a doctor in Vallegrande, about a tiger bite.

“So you had a nice visit with the wife, did you?” Ricardo asked. He and I laughed.

“You two are beginning to sound alike,” Ponco said. He sounded sad.

“I saw a fire burning in the house,” I said, certain that the man was lying to us.

“Maybe he’s there now. I don’t know anything about that. I told you what I heard. Maybe the army is using the house, sir.” Ispaca’s wife had said the army had beaten her husband up, killed all the pigs, and eaten all the food in the house.

Even as we talked to the peasant we heard shots coming from the ambush. A soldier had approached the house, leading a horse. El Chino saw a figure coming, but couldn’t see it well, and shouted, “A soldier!” as if he were coming
out of a reverie, surprised at what he beheld. The soldier shot into the ambush and ran away. Ponco killed the horse.

Che was furious with Chino. He said that Chino didn’t have either the eyesight or the intelligence to be a guerrilla.

Now we had to withdraw immediately and move farther down the Rio Grande, to the northwest.

9/5/67: The reports from our scouts and the peasants add up to this: The Eighth Division is north-northeast. The Fourth Division is on the other bank of the Rio Grande, to the north.

9/6/67: The Bolivian announcer was jubilant with the news that ten guerrillas, led by a Cuban called Joaquin, real name Juan Vitalio Acuna Nunez, had been killed in the vicinity of Camiri, near the junction of the Masicuri River and the Rio Grande. Which is to say: where we were yesterday.

Che said immediately that the report was a lie. It had given no names other than Joaquin’s, and no details. He said that if there were any truth to it there would have been more details. Joaquin was, he said … then he stopped. “Joaquin is,” he said, “an experienced guerrilla. The whole group, led by an experienced man, could never have been killed all at once, unless they were attacked while they were sleeping.”

Ricardo looked over at me at this last admission. Che had made it out of that boundless honesty of his, that honesty in which we all might freeze. I looked at Ricardo, but kept my face impassive. The radio glowed green on the forest floor, Benigno hunched above it.

There have been no recruits. If Joaquin’s group is lost, we too are certainly lost.

Today there were fewer disputes in the group, the pointless constant haggling about jobs and food that has been our daily meal for the last month. We are twenty-four men.
We are all we have now, no life outside the revolution
.

9/6/67: Che says it was a lie. The news was on the Voice of America, but none of the other stations. He said that they couldn’t have been killed unless the army came upon them while they slept.

But what if the army came upon them while they slept?

9/6/67: Che said it was a lie, but there was blood on his tongue when he said it.

9/7/67: Now the Voice of the United States reports that a guerrilla named Paco was the only survivor of the clash at the Masicuri. And they speak of one dead near Vado del Yeso, in a new clash where the other group was supposedly liquidated. These contradictions make the information about Joaquin seem like a farce.

On the other hand, they give all the evidence that El Medico Negro, the Peruvian doctor, has died at Palmarito.

9/7/67: Che says that it was certainly a phony story about Joaquin’s group. If there had been a clash we would have heard something about it. The ground, he said, couldn’t have simply swallowed them up.

9/8/67: I went with Inti and two others to the adobe houses with roofs of curved red tiles, near the Rio Grande, where we were to buy some of the merchandise that makes life more bearable.

Inti stopped a farm hand making holes in the field, to ask if there was anyone in the biggest of the houses.

“No,” he said, not able to look at our faces—they were so terrifyingly bright—but staring up into the sun. “It’s empty. There aren’t any soldiers here, and the boss is away.”

But when we entered the big house a group of forty soldiers sprang up in the field outside. Inti killed one of them, shooting him in the mouth, and the other soldiers took up positions in the empty field in front of the house. The man making holes was gone. He hadn’t really been scared of us; he was a specter luring us to our death.

But Inti speaks for Che. He told us to make a loud noise and fire off our guns as quickly as we could. I aimed for the tender parts of the soldiers, where love also occurs, for Inti had shown that those parts, like their mouths, are sweet and unprotected. The noise of our shouting and firing turned the soldiers
into rabbits, and they ran away. We escaped back to the river, taking a mule on the way.

9/8/67: Inti returned from his expedition with a mule. The peasants told him that they had seen guerrillas, a group that went to Perez’s house before the carnival. But that was us.

That afternoon I felt Joaquin’s presence lingering in the area, hiding among the leaves and bushes. He was the space between the leaves.

In the evening they played a tape on the radio, a scratchy thing that they considered a great prize, recorded, they said, on the day of the battle at Vado del Yeso. It sounded like Paco’s voice.

“That was our chief,” he said, “Joaquin. And the black man is what’s left of Braulio. That one is Alejandro, a Cuban. That is Polo. That is Ernesto. That is Moises Guevara.”

“You mean Che Guevara,” a Bolivian voice said.

“No, Moises Guevara, the union leader.” (The sound of firing: high, false, like the tinny sound of pebbles against a window.)

“And that was Freddy, our doctor.”

Paco was identifying corpses.

9/9/67: Che sent eight men, under Ricardo, to establish an ambush in the forest between our camp and the river. It was possible, he said, that the army would see the footprints that Inti had left, if the cattle hadn’t wiped them out. And Inti had spilled a lot of corn by the roadside.

At twelve midnight Che sent Benigno to tell Ricardo to suspend the ambush. Benigno moved down the trail into the darkness.

A few moments later we heard shots, and a burst of automatic fire. Benigno, all legs, came running back into camp. He had clashed with a patrol that was already bringing dogs down the path through the forest, towards our camp.

Che looked desperate. There were nine of our men on the other side of the patrol, and we didn’t know exactly where they were.

The
macheteros
cut a new path to the river, and four men were sent ahead that way with some of our things. Che’s plan was to transfer the knapsacks near the river, and keep contact, if we could, with the rear guard, until they could be reincorporated into the group.

At that moment Ricardo returned leading all his men, having cut a path of his own that went around the patrol.