The Death of Che Guevara (91 page)

The teacher, a mestizo pleased with his own intelligence, smiled at Che. He kept his hands in the pockets of a worn black jacket without buttons and wore no hat. “But what if we are not ready to die for you, Professor?”

His challenge provoked a deeper gasp than Inti’s rifle had. The others looked angrily at the young man, but I couldn’t tell if it was fear that we might punish all of them for his outrage, or because he had frustrated their curiosity. How dare he interrupt this priceless lesson?

“You know,” Che said, “that I am not asking you to die for me. I am asking you to find the courage to live as men, to fight for a world where the soldiers will not have the power of life and death over you. They can kill you any time, when you disobey them. And every one of you has heard of people to whom this has happened. I am saying that you can join us and become heroes, instead of slaves. If you join yourself to the life of the Giant you will share in his immortality and power. For now he slumbers—as the land sleeps in winter—but he always rises again, for he is immortal.

“The army says that it has killed our comrade Joaquin, and our comrade Tania, and many others in their ambushes.

“But it is a lie. They show corpses at the army laundry shed in Vallegrande. But those are just corpses that they have dug up from their own cemeteries, desecrating the graves, for nothing is sacred to them, not even their own dead. They haven’t killed guerrillas. This I can assure you, because only a couple of days ago I was in communication with Joaquin.”

This time
I
gasped. Such was my faith in Che and in the golden valor of his word that I believed him, and wondered at first why he hadn’t told us before, and which of the peasants had brought him the message. But then I realized the truth.
Che had lied
.

“You do not die,” the candid young teacher said, “because you have magic that protects you.”

“Yes,” Che said, and the world shook in front of me. “We have a power that comes from my vision of the people of Latin America. I see our people working the land together, free of the Imperialists, free of disease. Sometimes I and my men have failed because we have not been true to that vision. Sometimes we have been led by our own ambitions, and forgotten our vision, not keeping it constantly in mind. Then those whom we trusted, those who were close to us, have betrayed us. But the people have never betrayed us.

“If you want to share in my power, my power that is the power of the Giants of Latin America, of the Bolivian Nation, then you must share in my vision. And you will have the power I have, and that you have heard about.

“And it
is
a terrible and great power. Perhaps some of you know what it is like for me. Perhaps you saw me ride into your town this morning on a mule. You can see I have trouble standing, and you can hear that I have trouble speaking.”

We had found three lanterns for this meeting and placed them about the room. Che, at the front, in his torn fatigues, with his wasted body, looked indeed like the shadow of a shadow.

“You can see that I am not a strong man. It is hard for me to breathe. Like the miners of Bolivia I have very weak lungs. Do you know how weak a hand is that cannot make a fist?”

Che held up his hand. His hand terrified the townspeople, for they shrank back.

He showed his long fingers struggling to come together. “That is how hard it is for me to squeeze the air in and out of my body. But you have all heard of me. I have come far in my life, and accomplished much.”

He held up his hand again, open this time, and this was even worse for the audience. They could lean no farther back, so they shrank inside their bodies.

“I am a bloody man,” Che said. “I have a bloody hand. And I will have revenge for all the wrongs that the people of Latin America have suffered. I see that some of you have come into my presence bearing a heavy load and barefoot. I know that you do this because you think I am a king. I am not. But I am a hero, part of the Giant, and so I am someone powerful and feared by the army. If you share in my vision then you too will be heroes. The weakest of you is as strong as I am. The weakest of you has the power to rebel against what is being done to you.”

Afterward a few of the peasants gathered outside the school. It was a clear cold night with many stars. The peaks of the Andes were visible, as if they had some source of light of their own, as if they were beacons. Coco and Che and I spoke with two men about the best routes through the area, and what they had heard about the army’s positions.

Near the schoolhouse door the young boy who had spoken with Che this afternoon approached Marcos, who was staring emptily up at the stars.

“Can I join you?” he said quietly. “I want to be a Hero. I want to fight for my nation.”

Marcos shouted, “Don’t be a fool!” He hit the boy on the shoulders with both his arms, and the boy simply bowed his head and accepted it. “Don’t be crazy,” Marcos said, and began to sob. “Can’t you see that we’ve all had it? We don’t even know how to get out of here! We’re trapped! In a few days we’ll be dead. Are you a fool? Do you
want
to die?”

Everyone up and down the little road could hear Marcos. The boy looked over at Che, then down at the ground. No one said anything. Coco had the townspeople sketch out a map for us.

When Che and Coco were done, the boy still waited for us. He came up to Che, made bold by his disappointment.

“So everything you said was a lie?”

“No,” Che said. “All that I told you was true. But it is also true that we are in difficulties now. We have to run from the army even though our cause is just and my vision true and powerful, because I misinterpreted what a peasant told me. I have attacked at the wrong time. I was mistaken, though the people tried to warn me. But our cause is just and you will have another chance to fight for it. The Giant will awaken again.”

On the march out of town that night a man approached me at the rear of the center guard. “We will sacrifice many of our guinea pigs for you,” he whispered, “so you will be victorious.”

I would have been shocked, I suppose, but Che’s own speeches had
exhausted my capacity for shock. I tried to think of what Che would do.

“Thank you,” I said. “The more the better.”

9/24/67: I spoke to Che this morning. “But they misunderstood you,” I said. “You must know that they misunderstand everything you say.”

He walked beside the mule as we went up the mountainside, through some tall grass. “We must submit,” he said.

“Submit?” It was an odd word, like “chaste,” or “reign,” or “forlorn.”

But he had walked ahead of me and was half hidden by the grass.

It chilled me.

He is making shadows
. He lets them understand as they wish. This is not like him. It can only mean one thing:
He is dying. We are dying
. He looks on from beyond the grave, having surrendered his will—and for Che that can mean only one thing:
he sees himself already dead
. I am terrified. But Che seems very calm, newly calm, strangely calm, having given his “life” to them.

And ours.

[No date. It must be from around 9/24/67, though I don’t think it was one of his usual entries, but rather part of an essay on “The Hero.” The fragment remaining comes after a ripped-out page. ] …
before his time, and so his gestures are absurd—or tragic. So they must be made more absurd so that he can be borne. The hero, at first, takes a comic or exaggerated form. A bloody man with a bloody hand. (Describe the mad fellow, the one with grease all over his chest who danced his mockery at the back of the church. Someone like him must be the hero’s body for a time, someone who keeps his idea alive by mocking his heroism in mad speech, exaggerated stories, magical actions that make no sense, like thunderous farts. But it must be a mockery that mocks itself, and so points back to the hero’s truth.)

As the people gain courage the hero returns in a form that speaks more directly, without mockery. A store dummy becomes a saint who talks to them in dreams and urges them to rebellion. He will speak the language of the people he appears among, here the purest Quechua. The hero is common property, the stuff of stories. Now they make him into a story in which they can see themselves, though only a small part of themselves at this stage, like in the saint’s small mirror. But no matter how they tell the hero’s story it keeps its meaning; it travels into the heart like the fatal blood-spotted kernel of the conjurer.
It is right to rebel. Even the weak can be terrible
.

When the rebellion begins, the hero’s story becomes more real, closer to the tale, one might say, that he himself knew of his life as he lived it. (The staff Aaron threw down became a snake; and the people stood back from it in awe. That is the first stage. But now the snake becomes the image of a rifle, yet they are still afraid to pick up that rifle and join the hero.) The first hesitant actions are on the order of street demonstrations, where they chant the hero’s name. A crowd moves towards the Government Palace, across the main square in La Paz, in Lima, in Buenos Aires, chanting a name, an empty name, a mirror that any might find himself in. A small boy carries a tall pole—a sign is extended from it on a piece of cloth—the other pole held by his father. They’ve forgotten to put holes in the cloth, so the wind billows it out like a sail, and makes the boy’s hands ache. He shouts at the top of his voice, the name of the hero. The echo comes off the high stone wall of a church, the crowd’s voice almost unrecognizable in its own ears, like the rushing of water, or the high buzzing of a saw. But the hero’s power is only their own power deferred—that is what the echo tries to tell them—and in chanting his name they exalt him and mourn themselves, the death of their power, keeping it present to themselves in a kind of grief.

But when the rebellion continues, and the violence begins, then the hero’s qualities are parceled out among them—before the hero flickers out. Of the fighters, one might say of another, His lungs are weak, like Che. He has a taste for chess, like Che. One man is a poet—as Che was. Or a doctor. Or has too much pride. Or a certain coldness. Or has to wrap his feet in rags as Che once did. But as the rebellion continues, the fighters become heroes themselves, their self-hatred and cowardice overcome, and the name that was their self-loathing magnified is forgotten. They will chant their own names, or descend upon the cities, like a curse, in silence.

9/25/67: Loma Larga. We arrived by climbing a ravine that runs up the side of the mountain, all the way to Alto Seco. The ravine was clogged with thick gray bushes, and ran a long distance, maybe as far as the Rio Grande. Loma Larga, when we emerged, was a small settlement of about ten huts, on a slant so steep that I thought the houses would tip over and start rolling down the bare mountainside. We came into the village at evening, and several men came out immediately to meet us—not to shoo us away, but for greeting. We talked about army emplacements, and food. Che looked particularly unsteady and weak in the afternoon, hardly able to stand.

But he revived a bit when they gave us some potatoes and plates of stew. I bit down on a soft bitter taste that still had skin on it. “Guinea pig?” I said to Ricardo.

“Who gives a fuck?”

I saw his point, and ate greedily.

After eating Che sent the vanguard on, and he and I went over to where a group of men sat on the ground by one of the huts, talking and chewing coca. These mountains are the place where the serious coca-chewing goes on. They stuffed great wads into their mouths, and spat to the side, spat above each other’s head, spat indifferent to where the droplets might go. In black ponchos and brown caps, their shapes were rounded off, like stones. This group had been at its chewing for a long time when we came and stood behind them and listened to their stories.

If a hero is captured he is burned alive, or the dogs are set on him, the long sleek ones that rip their flesh. And once a hero’s wife was captured and her breasts and arms were hacked off. Then they sent her back with a note, “All those who rebel must see that they will eventually have to submit to the knife.”

But
(another man said)
that makes the heroes fiercer and more determined, for they see that their opponents, our oppressors, are animals, not yet human beings. So when they move in a high gorge the guerrillas trap them, rolling boulders down so that the army can’t move forward, and then the heroes roll more boulders down on top of the soldiers and crush them
.

An army general
(one man said)
was taken captive by the heroes. They took him back to their kingdom near the Nancahuazu River, and the heroes made the general drink chicha, and tied him to a post
. (And at this a chicha bottle—a Coke bottle filled with the cloudy liquid—was passed around.)
Then the heroes made sport of him, throwing fruit at him, and they made the general shave off his beard, and cut his hair. The heroes changed him from a Spaniard and a general into a poor Indian, like us
.

But
(another man said)
they weren’t done with him. The heroes had all the general’s bones taken from his body, leaving the skin intact. The heroes had made him into a drum! The shoulders formed one end of the drum
(the man touched his shoulders).
And the stomach was the other end
. (The Indian pounded on his own small belly, but it was muffled by his black poncho and made no sound.)
So when the general was stiff he was transformed into an instrument for their festivals
.

Their festivals!
(another man said, and I felt I could hear the spark of inspiration in his voice, and that he was adding to the story as he went, saying
things never heard before. Yet all he described was true for each of them, as soon as said, as if saying made it so. Can they, I wondered, make mistakes?)
At the festivals, when the llamas are sacrifìced—On the high white stone platform

—Yes, then all the dead guerrillas are brought out, each one preserved perfectly