The Death of Che Guevara (12 page)

The son of a bitch, I thought, he’s counting on my honor, his weakness to protect him. Well, I have no honor, I told myself, stepping after him. But I couldn’t. I was rooted. I wiped the spit from my face with my white oil rag, wanting to kill the runt, destroy him utterly, knock his little stumpy body into the dirt and kick it around like a soccer ball, a soccer ball with a mouth that would scream for mercy but get none from me. I contained my rage. It sank to my stomach, a painful heat.

I was shaking, my body shimmered with anger. I was indifferent to the dirt I crossed, the children watching me walk back to my house. My mother, when she heard my story, insisted on immediately scrubbing my face herself, to calm me.

“Well, what did you expect,” she said, working away roughly with a white washcloth, as though the half-man’s spit were dangerous, infectious, “that he’d be grateful? You fool! Of course not! They can’t
think
, Ernesto, can’t reason. None of them. It’s like this Peron business. They think their friends are their enemies, and their enemies are their friends. They’re deluded. You know that. When you want to be a friend, and offer your hand, they bite it. But if you treat them like dogs, the way Peron does, they lick your hand and fawn on you.” She was rubbing at my face, so worked up—as she often was when angry—that I think she’d forgotten what she was doing. I remembered that on one of her rare cooking nights I’d seen her vengefully hack a chicken to bits while insulting the Fat Man and the Self-righteous Cripple, the Allied war leaders. “Scions of wealthy families,” she said contemptuously (forgetting the origin of a certain Celia de la Serna), “who pretend to be the little fathers of the common man, so they can send common men off to die for them.” They
were stinking imperialists, who wanted to win the war so they could divide up the world! Chicken bits flew about the tiled counter till there was nothing to do with the bird but make a tasteless soup of it. I worried for my cheeks.

I was sitting in one of the wicker chairs in the kitchen. A piece of wicker had unraveled and its sharp edge was sticking into my back. I twisted my body a bit.

“Sit still, child,” she said. “Oh, it was a perfectly natural thing for him to do.” She drew out the word “natural.” “Perfectly natural, once you understand that they’re all crazy nowadays. We are the last sane people in this insane country, in my opinion. He was like those others exactly, can’t think, can’t reason.”—“Those others” were some people at a rally for Peron in our town’s central square. My mother and her sister—reunited by Peron—had gone to shout some sense into them. In return several Peronistas had tried to grab them and tear them to pieces.
If it hadn’t been for the police they would have!
she said, when she returned home (pretending to be not merely hysterical, but a little amused, incredulous).
Can you imagine that! I was going to hit a policeman with my pocketbook when I realized he was protecting me! Your mother! Reduced to being protected by the police!

“Ernesto,” she concluded, giving my red cheeks a final dab, “this whole country has gone crazy.
Complètement fou!
Out of its mind!”

“I can see the newspapers now,” I said, catching her manic mood. My mother and I rarely touched each other. Even this rough tenderness with a washcloth made us both a little uncomfortable. When we were alone together we usually put our energy into a kind of wit, a kind of caring, of playing with each other. “It’s sure to make the newspapers. Banner headlines for the Peronist press: Heroic Resistance with Spit. Subhead: Crippled Beggar Shows Upper Class Busybody a Thing or Two. Or for
La Prensa
we can have something more genteel: Beggar Hurls Spitball Without Ball at Young Soccer Captain.” I ran on for a bit in the same way, puerile stuff. It wasn’t very witty, I knew, but it was in the right style. It worked to transform the heat that still rose in waves from my stomach into a feeling more controlled. It made me feel for a moment the master of events, able, like my mother, to make epigrams—of a sort—out of them.

And yet I felt, even then, that her wit, my imitation of it, was somehow missing the point. Outside on the field I had come close to learning something. But as my mother scrubbed me, spoke with me, that revelation was obscuring itself, going into hiding again. For a moment I was irritable, about to cry. I gripped the glass edge of the table hard in my hand. Then my mother said something more; and I replied; and she laughed; and I was pleased with and
delighted in her laughter. Soon I forgot what had annoyed me. The stumpy man went back into his burrow. I was happy in our irony.

We are the last sane people in this insane country
. I believed that then and it delighted me. I was circumstance’s superior, ironic, understanding others better than they understood themselves. In school, or as I walked about the town with friends, I often had a supercilious smile. I
knew
. I had the goods on others. A doctor in a madhouse. I was sane; I understood history; and by understanding it stood outside it, though it dragged others down. By irony I was saved. My sanity was more than sanity; it was a kind of genius.

Or so I thought. I remember that in 1943 my cousin Alvarados, lacking the inoculation of irony, had succumbed to madness. He had led a series of student demonstrations in Cordoba, against the restoration of Catholic education. The crazy people put him in jail.

Alvarados, though he was two years older than I was, had always been a good amiable friend to me, the sort who retold the plots of movies in detail—agreeable at first on the long motorcycle trips we took together as teen-agers, yet the way he told them made them turn boring, a mechanical series of occurrences that rendered even tragedy into slapstick. And, like the projectionists in Cordoba, Alvarados often put the parts in any order. At the end, right before the finale, seeing how blank I looked, how anxious to get into my sleeping bag, he’d say, “Did I tell you they were on board an ocean liner? I didn’t! Well, they were on board an ocean liner. And they were leaning out a porthole. I mentioned that? I didn’t! Well, it was a very rough sea. And one of the women was his first wife, right? I didn’t say that? And Gable was on deck.…”

But now, since he had begun college, Alvarados had been transformed. He had lost his clownish air, become a leader of his class. Along with his physical grace there was a seriousness to Fernando that was more important than the irregular way he organized his discourse. That moral seriousness had in fact gathered up and transformed his oddity as well, as it sometimes will our clownish qualities, and made it a sign of his sincerity: you were constantly reminded that what he said was all that mattered to Fernando, not his own eloquence in saying it.

I got a note from Fernando in jail. He had a job for me. He wanted me to organize the high school students to demonstrate against the arrest of the university students. I went down to the jail to talk with him.

“You can do it Ernesto. I’ve seen how they listen to you. They all admire
you. As I do. All these high school students in the street to support us! Did I say I wanted you to organize them in our support?”

I nodded. I was standing in the cement corridor of the jail, talking to Fernando through the bars of his cell. There were only a few lights in the corridor, and they too had little wire cages around them. There were no lights in the cell. A guard let you in and out of the corridor. I hated it. The air was pressing in on me. I couldn’t breathe well. I wanted to get this over with and get out of there.

Alvarados had grown thin in jail. His tall frame was bony again, as when I’d first met him, my aunt’s child, a refugee. His brown eyes looked feverish in his skull. They had bruised him badly on the cheeks.
You bastard this isn’t your country
, they would say when they hit him,
this isn’t your country
, holding him, working him over, not caring whether their work showed. This isn’t your country. As if that explained it.

“They’ll know then, the colonels will know, that we’re serious. Repression won’t work. Jails won’t work. We won’t stand for this Catholic crap. We just need to stand up to them.” He was emphatic, convinced. But
he
couldn’t stand up that well. He leaned forward, holding the bars to steady himself, staring at me, as if my image would keep him from falling.

I nodded again, but my mind was on his bruises. There were big purplish swellings under his eyes. As he spoke to me I heard the voices of our kitchen, my mother’s voice, talking along with Fernando, taking his words just a few seconds after he said them, and twisting them slightly, mocking him. I spoke (
she spoke
), “Fernando, what will we do when they arrest us? Organize the primary grades? Toddlers against Fascism. No. That’s crazy, Fernando. I love you.”—That was true. I had never cared for him so much as I did at that moment when I refused him. I wanted to hug his thin body to me, to protect him. He
needed
protection, from the police, from his good heart, from his own insanity. “But this won’t work, Fernando. If we go out into the street, the same thing will happen to us. They’ll grab some of us and beat us to the ground with sticks. The rest will run away.” I was speaking with my mother’s hurried phrasing, quick, reasonable, ironic, even moving my hands in the air, suddenly, as she did. “Look at you,” I said, “blood caked over your hair like pomade.” But I didn’t feel ironic. I was horrified, near hysteria, barely controlling myself with this impassioned analytic tone. I hardly saw Fernando, leaning forward into the light. My mind was filled with images of what the police might do to me if they had power over me. They would strip off my shirt, they would beat me across the chest. Every blow would violate me. “Didn’t your blood teach you anything? We’re not going to destroy them with our moral resistance, the good-natured way we offer them our heads. If we go out in the streets
it should be serious. It should be a real fight.” I
meant
it: a real fight: for as I spoke my fear changed, showed this other face: that they would
spare
me. They would be merciful towards me because I looked weak. I wanted the fight to be real. I wanted it to be serious. I wasn’t sick, I wasn’t ugly, I wasn’t contemptible, I was not helpless, and I could not have stood to suffer their mercy. (Or so I thought: death was still only a solemn word to me.) Their mercy would make me small, insignificant. “If it’s not a real fight, Fernando, people will have contempt for us. They’ll say we’re students play-acting. If you give me a gun I’ll go out there. But if we’re not serious we shouldn’t show how damn helpless we are. Why demonstrate our powerlessness? Everybody already knows about that. If we’re going to fight I want a gun. I want to fight back. I don’t want to play games.” But my voice had gone on now too long without response. It sounded hollow in my chest. I felt hot all over, flushed. What did I know about guns? I was a pretentious impostor, a fraud. A fool. (What would my father have thought of my violent words? I felt deeply ashamed. How contemptible he would have found me!)

Alvarados moved a little, supporting his shoulders against the bars of his cell. The weakness of his body, the curve, called to me. I wanted to embrace him fraternally, be his comrade, act with him. Against the pull of irony I admired him. But his action was stupid. Or was it? Was it the stupidity I hated, or the risk, the blows across my face, being put into a rotten hole? And in someone else’s power. My penis shrank, as if something cold were touching it. But I was right! What he did
was
stupid! But if I’m right why do I feel ashamed before him? I hated looking at him. (And at the same time I wanted to stare at his face, his bruises. They transfixed me.)

Alvarados, though, simply believed my words, even if he didn’t agree with them. We argued for a little while.

“Give my love to your family,” he said, reaching out his hand through the bars. I hesitated, clasped it lightly; let it fall.

I turned and walked from his cell, calling to a guard to let me out of the corridor. I hated being enclosed in this damp stifling place.

Alvarados believed me, didn’t think me a coward. Alvarados believed me, but I no longer believed myself. He even continued to admire me. We remained the closest of friends.

My third memory:
We are playing rugby. A bleak windy day. A cold rain starts that whips against our faces and will soon turn the field to mud. But we continue our game. My
father, hands thrust into his jacket pockets, wearing his red hunting cap, watches from the sidelines with a few other men. They run back and forth a few steps, carried along by the game. I am the captain of the team (I had to be captain), and play scrum half. I carry an asthma inhaler in the top pocket of a sweater that I wear under my blue cotton jersey. But in scrimmage I am knocked down, and the inhaler falls from the pocket. There isn’t time to look for it in the muck.

Soon the air turns thick on my skin.
It’s the storm
, I think,
the humidity, a change in air pressure
. I begin to sweat too much, and gasp, but do not leave the field. My father is watching me. I continue, to my own surprise, to run about, to shout out plays. I feel as if I’m watching myself from the air, watching my body move around. My head is floating far above my legs, far above the field itself. My body is enormously elongated; I look down from a great distance. During the scrimmage I am unable to fight back; to push anyone is impossible. I fall to the wet ground, gasping, and am too weak to lift my arms, to cover my head and protect myself. The other players swarm about my body, their legs darken the air. They kick me, and I think, ever a slow student,
They don’t know I don’t have the ball. No
, I realized suddenly,
it’s because I’m down, because they can
. They repeat the lesson, their blows come hard, rapid, they pummel me, until I learn:
They do this because they hate me!
They pound me to make their hatred clear.
But it’s only a game for God’s sake
. No, they say with their blows. This is as you want it, this is not a game, not accident, or play, we want to hurt you badly now, do you damage, really smash you down. We do this because you keep yourself distant from us, think yourself our leader, our superior, better than us, because you’re arrogant. This is your pride come home; you’ve practiced making us keep our distance, compelled our admiration, and this is how we show it to you. I can do nothing against their blows but huddle up to protect my head, my balls. They pile on me, jumping at my body, hitting at my chest and legs with their knees hands cleats. My body’s twisted, my arm’s buried under me, broken, pushed down slanting into the mud. My lips and nose are struck, they tear sharply and begin to bleed.
Why doesn’t someone stop them?
Blood is running from my nose, down my throat. I taste salt blood mixed with balls of sputum and dirt, it clogs my throat, choking me.
Get them off me!
I can’t cough, the press of bodies stops my chest from moving. I can’t move my chest to breathe, I’m stifling, shaking with hatred and rage and pain and fear. I want to be, to go on being! There is a sharp ripping pain across the skin of my stomach, where my jersey has ridden up. My ribs will crack, my chest is caving in.
They’ll smother me!
The beating goes on forever and ever.
Do they want me dead? Why doesn’t someone help me?
The blood from my nostrils runs together with the rain and the sweat that
streams from me. I’m in panic, shaking with spasms, physical sensation is gone, my whole consciousness is fear that they’re going to kill me, no one will help me. My head’s tilted back against the ground. My wounds release a film of blood that covers my eyes.
Stop them, Father, for God’s sake stop them! My eyes are bleeding, my eyes are bleeding! Do you want me to die!