Loving Che (12 page)

The next morning, I retrieved Teresa's package from the back of the closet. I cut the twine and peeled away the tape. I emptied the box onto the table, letting the notes and photographs spill out. Slowly, I reread her story. In the days that followed, I sat for hours studying the handwriting, trying to place a date. I repaired a few of the photographs. I studied his mouth, his hands, I traced the curve of his eyes. All this I did with a cool remove, as if the story contained there were not my own, as if Teresa's notes held only a stranger's recollections,
some so intimate that I turned again in modesty from their telling. But before long, the cadence of her voice began to invade my dreams. Her impossible life began to seem more real to me than my own. So it was that some weeks after receiving Teresa's package, I allowed myself the little hope that my mother had sent me a love letter. And I longed, in spite of the better judgment I had shown at the start, to prove that her words were true.

The first thing I did was send a few excerpts of Teresa's story to Dr. Caraballo, a professor of Cuban history at the University of Miami from whom I had taken some classes. Afraid that she would not remember me, I sent her a long letter explaining who I was and why I needed her help. After a few days, I received a call from her secretary asking me to send more. This I did, and after a few weeks I received a short, though thoughtful letter from the professor. She began by saying she had enjoyed the letters and had even shown them to a few colleagues, who had remarked that much of the dialogue attributed to Che could, in fact, be found in his writings—albeit, she added, in a slightly different context. She had been most intrigued, Dr. Caraballo wrote, with the background that I had included in my letter. The bit of poetry that had been pinned to my sweater had come from a poem of Pablo Neruda's, “Letter on the Road.” The poem appeared in a collection that came to be known as
The Captain's Verses.
Neruda first published these poems anonymously in 1952, Dr. Caraballo wrote, but didn't acknowledge them as his own until 1963, which, if I'm correct,
was a year or two after you were born. It is possible, she wrote, that whoever sent you to the United States had somehow gotten a copy of the 1952 edition published in Naples and had no idea of the authorship, only enjoyed the poem. Another, more remote explanation exists, the professor wrote. Che Guevara was a friend of the poet's, and it is conceivable that Neruda had shared these love poems with him. From that we would have to make a series of leaps to bring us to the little lines pinned onto your sweater. But it is intriguing, she wrote. And the one detail that shakes my certainty that the story this woman has written is mostly the work of imagination.

Dr. Caraballo ended her letter by inviting me to make an appointment sometime after the semester, when she would have more time to discuss these matters with me. The writings had intrigued her, she added. And she would be delighted to see me after all these years.

I put Dr. Caraballo's letter away for some days, and, in the meantime tried to, as the Cubans say, make memory, about who my mother could be.

De la Landre was not my grandfather's name, and I could not find it in the Miami phone directory, which in itself was a bad sign. I was under the impression that every Cuban exile, no matter where they may have eventually settled in the world, retained some roots in Miami. Looking up Landre in the dictionary, I found that in addition to ‘hidden pocket,'
the word could also mean ‘swollen gland,' and I wondered if Teresa had meant this as a joke on her linguist husband. I wrote some letters to the linguistics departments at both the University of Miami and Florida International University on the remote chance that someone may have known of Calixto in Havana. I received, from FIU, a short letter telling me they could not be of help, since what I was asking was, in essence, personal information. I never got a letter from the University of Miami.

And so I tried to think back to those many trips that I had made to Havana beginning all those years before. I realized now that I should have kept a diary and taken down the name and address of everyone to whom I gave my own name and address. It was an oversight in my otherwise careful planning, and it suddenly struck me as the kind of catastrophic mistake that people who are destined for mediocrity tend to make. I cursed myself, too, because this inability to keep a diary has always vexed me. Why, I suddenly wondered, did I delight in the photographs of strangers in my travels, instead of recording my own thoughts and impressions?

Yet, for all the setbacks, the project had invested me with new vigor. I was thrilled to get up in the morning and was able for the first time in my life to work all day and into the night without tiring. It occurred to me that I was experiencing, perhaps for the first time, something like the passion that had so gripped Teresa, this unknown woman who more and more I was coming to genuinely think of as a newly discovered part of myself.

I gave myself over to the research, eventually collecting two shelves' worth of books on Che Guevara and Cuban history. I searched the Internet late into the early morning, locating first a photo of the destruction of the offices of
El Tiempo
and then several photographs of El Encanto branches all over Cuba. These last I printed out on special paper and framed. Sometimes, I like to imagine Teresa standing there, just beyond the photograph's blind edge.

Some months into my search, I made several appointments to talk to people who might have known Che Guevara well enough to give me the kinds of clues and insights that are often missing from books.

Through some old contacts from the failed photography project, I was led to Jacinto Alcazar, a onetime photographer who had fought alongside Fidel and Che and was now an old man. When I called him, he seemed eager to meet me and suggested that I go immediately to his apartment, that very afternoon. Instead, I made an appointment to see him two days
later. He sounded disappointed, but then cheered while giving me the somewhat complicated directions to his place.

He lived in a complex of apartment buildings that took up several blocks and that one could enter from various different directions. After some confusion, I succeeded in finding the entrance he had told me about, which was guarded by a mechanical arm and a tiny old woman in a white booth. I gave her my name and the name of the man I was seeing, and she dialed him. After a moment, the mechanical arm rose with a lurch, and I wasted some more minutes driving aimlessly in the vast parking lot beyond it.

When finally I found Jacinto's building (as I recall they were designated by number and letter), I was mildly exhausted. I paused for a few moments to catch my breath in the deserted lobby before riding the elevator to the fourth floor.

I found him waiting for me in the hallway, walking up and down the dim corridor. He wanted to know if I had gotten lost and seemed very anxious about the directions he had given me. I followed him inside the apartment, all the time reassuring him that I'd found him with no trouble at all. The apartment was small, and was made even smaller by the books and papers that were crammed everywhere. In contrast to some others I had seen in my searching, though, Jacinto's apartment was clean, and after a while I came to see the space as almost cheerful. Too many people my age, it occurred to me, had so streamlined their apartments that they had, in their neuroses, removed every trace of humanity from between their four walls.

Jacinto led me to a small study, also crammed with books, but with a large window that afforded an expansive view of the outside world, though most of it consisted of the parking lot. A woman that I didn't see again brought a plate of cookies and glasses of water.

Not knowing Jacinto, I had been reluctant to give him a copy of Teresa's story. Instead, after the usual pleasantries, I told him that I was doing some writings on the revolution and that a mutual acquaintance had suggested that he could tell me some good stories about that time.

He launched then into a long discussion that I could barely keep up with in my notebook. Yes, he had been at the presidential palace shortly after Echeverría was shot; no, he didn't remember pigeons in the plaza, and why would I ask about something like that? Yes, he had fought first in the cities with the Revolutionary Student Directorate and then had gone into the mountains to fight with the scraggly band of rebels after their shipwreck. Yes, he had believed that what he was doing was right and important. He talked for a long time and after a while his story began to come apart, jumping as it did from one subject to another, one time to another, one place to another according to a narrative that made sense only to him, as if the past and the present were only different countries that one might visit at will. Several times I tried to steer him back to the conversation and once or twice he told me a truly moving anecdote. He had been, he said in one of these thoughtful, calmer moments, with Fidel on the road from Santiago to Bayamo after the first days of the
triumph. All the men were walking alongside him. The crowds, Jacinto said, lined the road for miles. It was the most astonishing thing I had ever seen, he said. I was riding just behind Fidel on top of a tank and we were all waving to the crowds and as the tank proceeded slowly, almost at a walking pace, we could hear what the people were saying to us. All up and down that road, Jacinto said, the people shouted for Fidel. Fidel, you are our savior. Fidel, this is your house. Thank you, Fidel. Fidel, our redeemer. By the time we reached Bayamo I noted, for the first time, a change in Fidel. I am convinced that it was on that day he began to believe those things about himself. Before that time I believed he was sincere about democracy and the people. But after that day, I saw how much he had enjoyed this welcome, appropriate to kings and gods, and that it was inevitable that it would change him profoundly.

Jacinto sat in contemplation for a while and then he said, Do you know that poem of Lorca,
When the full moon breaks, I shall go to Santiago de Cuba, I shall go to Santiago in a coach of black waters?
I always think of that poem when I tell this story. He laughed. I always liked Lorca, even after I stopped being a communist.

I smiled. What can you tell me about the newspaper
El Tiempo?
I asked him. He thought for a moment, his face registering what I took to be the rusty workings of his memory, until he brightened and said, Masferrer's paper. Yes, he said, it was completely trashed after the revolution. Later it was said that he had filled the paper with lies and calumnies. And it's
true that many people found him disagreeable; I myself never knew him. Certainly the paper had a reputation for inciting passions.

But you know, nothing really died in the revolution, he said with a smile. Havana's pathologies and beauties came to splendor in Miami. Sometimes I think this exile has been little more than a brief passage through a mirror. And so the owner of
El Tiempo
ended up publishing another little sheet in Miami. Did you know this? I shook my head. I think, Jacinto said, that it was called
Libertad;
we moved from time to liberty and back again. Anyway, he continued, maybe you are too young to remember this: In late October of 1975,1 think it was, he wrote an editorial in favor of political bombings. A few days later, he was killed when his car blew up.

Before I left, I found the courage to ask Jacinto what he could tell me about Che, specifically any love affairs he had had. This last question seemed to cheer him immensely, and his eyebrows darted up lasciviously. Ah! So this is what this is about. He laughed for a long time and then he stood with some difficulty and disappeared into another room. He returned with a packet of typed copies of some writings in Spanish. I looked them over quickly. One seemed of particular interest, a letter that purported to be from René Ramos Latour “to Che Guevara from Santiago de Cuba 18 December of 1957.” Later, at home, I read it more closely. I reproduce part of it here only because its lines seem to mirror so closely the pleadings of a spurned lover, and reading them I always feel a pang for Teresa, as if the ghost of her betrayal
was already hovering about Che's dealings with those who were closest to him.

Che, Latour writes, I have just received in my hands the letter that you yourself have described as “difficult” and whose contents, to put it plainly, surprise me even as they in no way have the power to hurt me, for I am very far from considering myself a traitor to the Cuban Revolution and remain so deeply satisfied with my short, but pure and honorable, revolutionary life that I will never be wounded by the words of those who, as yourself, do not know me well enough to judge me.

Jacinto insisted on walking me to my car, and when I closed the door and waved to him, he tapped on the windshield to signal me to lower it. I'll tell you two things about El Che, he said into the car: The man didn't like to shower. Despite this, when he was in the Sierra, he was able to take for a lover the most delicious little mulata in the whole of Oriente.